“We still don’t know where Tohka and Origami are?!” Kotori called out to her crew from where she sat in her captain’s chair on the bridge of the airship Fraxinus, hanging in the sky 15,000 meters above the city of Tengu.
“No, sir. There’s no sign of them in the east Tengu area!”
“And because they left their cell phones behind, we can’t use GPS!”
The crew replied as they tapped at the consoles on the lower deck, and Kotori gritted her teeth in frustration.
“Ngh!”
It had been nearly two hours since Tohka and Origami vanished from the Itsuka house. She’d been searching for them ever since, but she still had no clue as to their whereabouts.
“Where did you go?!” Kotori scowled. Naturally, if they had simply stepped out, she wouldn’t have all hands on deck looking for them. She had reasons for panicking.
First, the change in Origami. Kotori and the other Spirits had been surprised by how Origami seemed to abruptly switch personalities, but after some careful thought, she realized that she knew that Origami. That had been the Origami who lived in this world before it was changed. That personality had blended with the original world’s Origami, and she didn’t know why, but for some reason, it had surfaced.
“Ngh…” Kotori felt a stabbing pain in her head and pressed a hand to the back of her skull.
The world had been changed. Who had carried out such a gravely important task, and why? Why did she simply accept this unbelievable idea as natural and inevitable? She didn’t really know.
“Is this… Is that boy involved in this, too?” she muttered, contorting her face in anguish.
The name Origami had spoken—Shido Itsuka. A boy with the same surname as Kotori. Out of everyone there, only Origami had known the name of the boy who had appeared before all of them.
And Mukuro. The Spirit with the key Angel who’d apparently been in outer space.
Neither Kotori nor anyone else remembered anything about this boy or this Spirit. Neither did the Fraxinus crew, and when she asked the AI Maria, her response had been that she had no such data.
Just as Origami was talking about these unfamiliar people, Tohka had clutched her head and thrashed in pain. Then, similarly to Origami, she’d lifted her face to reveal a completely different Tohka.
She had looked around suspiciously before meeting Kotori’s eyes and asking her where Origami was. She had then materialized a jet-black sword, destroyed the Itsuka house, and left.
Yes. An inversion.
Kotori still didn’t know what had caused it, but Tohka’s Sefirah had abruptly changed attributes.
No alarms were ringing, but an inverted Spirit was loose. It was hard for Kotori to imagine what all of this meant. Most importantly, she needed to know what exactly had happened to Origami and Tohka.
The key to unlocking all these mysteries was most likely one of the names Origami had—
“…! Commander!” Nailknocker Shiizaki called from the lower deck of the bridge. “We’ve found their signals!”
“Really?!” Kotori leaned forward in her chair. “Can you put them on-screen?”
“Yes, sir! I’ve sent drone cameras that way, we will soon…” Before Shiizaki had finished speaking, a video popped up on the main monitor.
It appeared to be a maid café in the city. In one corner, Kotori could indeed see the very Tohka and Origami who had disappeared from her house. Actually…
“That boy… And that girl…” She frowned. The boy she’d encountered the day before and a girl she’d never seen before were there with Tohka and Origami.
An alarm blared from the speakers on the bridge.
“Wha—? Now what is it?!” Kotori cried, and the letters M-A-R-I-A popped up on the sub monitor.
“We’ve picked up on Spirit signals. We’re detecting Tohka, of course, but we are also detecting a very strong Spirit signal from the girl with her.”
“What…?” Kotori furrowed her brow as she turned her gaze on the girl shown on the monitor. Blond, golden-eyed, small-statured. For some reason, when Kotori looked at her physique—mainly her chest—she was captured by a sensation like she was remembering an unendurable humiliation from the long-distant past. Maybe it was some connection to a past life?
She didn’t have the time for that now, however. The fact that they’d detected a Spirit signal meant…
“So, she’s a Spirit…is that it?” she asked. “This can’t actually be the Mukuro that Origami was talking about?”
“It would be a reasonable assumption,” Maria agreed. “And while it is on a strange wavelength, we are also measuring a Spirit signal from the boy as well.”
“Wha—?!” Kotori gasped. “Hold up just one second there. You’re saying the boy is a Spirit?!”
“I cannot say with certainty,” Maria replied, coolly but with deep interest. “The signal is slightly different from the usual Spirit signal.”
“What on earth…? What is going on here…?” A hint of tension bleeding into her expression, she turned her eyes back to the monitor. On it, the boy—Shido—was on all fours with Tohka sitting on him, while the mystery girl—Mukuro—appeared to be trying to feed him cake with her mouth.
“…No, seriously, what is going on here…?” she said, bewildered, and put a hand to her forehead.
The air between Tohka and Mukuro turned violent, and the situation became explosive. Origami intervened while Shido soothed and placated the other two girls. Then they all moved from the café to a new location.
“I—I don’t understand it, but we can’t just leave them out there. Follow them!” Kotori commanded. “We’re on full alert here! Make sure we’re ready to move at a moment’s notice!”
“Roger!” the crew cried out.
✦ ✦ ✦
“…Hmm.” Mukuro sighed unhappily as they walked down the road. She could not contain the irritation in her heart.
This was perfectly natural. After all, these two girls were supposed to have their memories locked so she could be alone with Shido, yet here they were.
What had happened? Michael’s power was absolute. Tohka and Origami shouldn’t have remembered Shido.
Yet Tohka and Origami had remembered him and were now interrupting their rendezvous. She gnashed her teeth. This situation was simply unbearable.
After they left the coffee shop, Origami led them around to a variety of date spots in the city. The movie theater, the arcade, the shopping mall… At all of them, though, Tohka had interfered in the sacred kiss between Mukuro and Shido and kept them from being alone together.
What was even more vexing was that these were all places that would have been pure heaven if she and Shido had visited them alone.
Tohka and Origami. Their presence chipped away at Mukuro and Shido’s precious time together. This was the ultimate stressor for her.
Shido belonged to Mukuro alone. He was the person who would love Mukuro and no one else. He was the person Mukuro alone would love. She could not forgive anyone who came between them—she didn’t care who it was.
She’d managed to make a show of not being bothered in her dealings with them because she couldn’t bear the thought of Tohka and Origami looking down on her. But she wasn’t sure how long she could keep that up. She was seething, her stomach roiling like a stew simmering violently.
Her time with Shido shrank with every second she had to spend with them.
Shido talking to, responding to, smiling at someone other than Mukuro. The voice, the words, the smile that should have been hers were being stolen by someone else.
Just the thought made her want to tear off her own skin.
“…What to do?” she murmured, her voice too quiet for anyone to hear, as she bit the nail of her thumb.
Normally, she would have immediately thrust Michael into both of their heads and locked their memories. But because Origami and especially Tohka were on their guard, she doubted it would be all that simple. And she still didn’t know how they had freed themselves from Michael’s lock to start with. Without knowing that, even if she did lock their memories again, it was possible that they would saunter up to Shido and Mukuro again with their smug little smiles.
Perhaps there was another Angel that could copy the power of Michael like Shido had done in space. In which case, it would make sense that the two of them were able to remember him.
She had to wonder, then, why the memories of the other girls remained locked. What if they, too, had gotten their memories back, and this was all part of a grand strategy to steal Shido from her…?
“Uh. Um,” Origami said, interrupting Mukuro’s thoughts. She stopped and waved a hand. “This is the place.”
They had apparently arrived at the next date spot (or battlefield) where Mukuro and Tohka would wrestle over Shido.
Mukuro frowned, annoyed, and turned her eyes in the direction Origami was pointing.
“…!”
She gasped.
Thmp. Her heart shrank, and her breathing grew rough. She herself didn’t understand why, but the instant she saw the thing rising up there, a large building in the shape of a steeple, her heart began to race.