"Affection, mood, mental state—all looking very promising. Off to a great start... but immediately stealing the earpiece is a bit of a problem."
Nobody could figure out how it worked—the affection reading was already showing up on screen even though they still couldn't make out the person.
Hearing Kotori's assessment, Vice-Commander Kannazuki Kyouhei ventured: "Commander, the opening of our Tokisaki Kurumi route also started off very well—and she and this new Spirit are the same kind. Man-eating."
He was immediately kicked aside. "Nobody asked you."
"My deepest gratitude for the reward!"
Meanwhile, what Kotori had deemed "a great start" looked like this on the ground: Yimi holding both hands in claw formation inside the white light, making a threatening noise at Itsuka Shiori.
"Hah!"
"?" Shiori didn't entirely follow—but did have a strong urge to pinch those little fangs.
Yimi's ears flicked. She was equally at a loss.
She was attempting to frighten this woman.
This woman had laid eyes on a big cat with four ears and wasn't scared at all? Even the cat herself felt the uncanny valley kick in whenever she looked in the mirror.
"I have four. Ears." Yimi pointed at her head for clarity.
"Oh, you really do." Shiori covered her mouth in surprise.
A great mystery of the two-dimensional world had been solved—cat-girls apparently had four ears.
"Are you... the First Spirit?" Yimi asked directly.
Shiori took a moment: "The First Spirit?"
The blank look didn't seem feigned.
Yimi circled her again—left, right—while Itsuka Shiori studied her in return.
The little girl's face was the kind that left an impression at first glance. Her large, dewy eyes, which beneath the divine radiance had shifted from clear blue to deep gold threaded with glowing runes, framed pupils that were subtly vertical.
Her face hadn't quite finished growing in yet, still carrying the perfect baby softness that belonged to this age. Perhaps because she was still so young, the cat ears she'd assumed would frighten people were instead small and delicate—her arms and legs slender without being frail.
If there was any flaw, it might only be that her outfit seemed mismatched. Magical Girl stories were originally made for young children, but truly making the aesthetic work required a girl who'd actually grown into it.
Yet the pure white clothing paired with that divine luminosity created something entirely different: anyone who looked at her directly felt washed clean—a sacred baptism that left no room for stray thoughts and a strange, unbidden shame at one's own failings.
The word deity surfaced in Shiori's mind on its own. If "First Spirit" was what this girl was called, the girl in front of her fit the description far better than Shiori herself did.
Oh, right—speaking of lines...
Shiori recalled the options Ratatoskr had provided. One hand pressed to her temple, the other extended formally before her, she straightened up with the slightest backward curve at the waist and deliberately deepened her voice:
"That outfit—you must be an exceptionally pure Magical Girl. Interested in joining the Time-Space Administration Bureau?"
"She even matched the body language perfectly."
"Only Shiori could pull off something this embarrassing with a straight face..."
Those were, of course, the words Shiori imagined Ratatoskr's crew would be saying. With the earpiece currently in this child's hands, she couldn't hear their next instructions.
Yimi's ears swiveled.
The cat didn't follow what she was saying. The cat voiced her own request: "Can I bite you?"
Hungry.
"No." Shiori had seen the security footage—she knew exactly what being bitten meant. The sage-like detachment the divinity had been stirring up in her dissolved entirely.
No earpiece. She'd have to manage alone for now.
A steadying breath, then the simplest possible opening: "May I ask your name? I'm Itsuka Shiori."
"Yimi." A name exchanged with maximum economy.
"Yimi? What a pretty name." Flatter first—that was always the move.
Following the established pattern of Spirit encounters, the next step should be that.
Shiori looked up at the sky with resignation barely concealed by nerves.
Just as she'd expected—fully armored AST soldiers had appeared from nowhere with weapons trained on this location, and at the front was her close classmate: Origami Tobiichi.
Unlike past encounters, without Itsuka Shiori's unique quality to anchor things, every AST member was being blinded by the light—arms thrown over their faces.
"This is a Spirit? Are you serious? We can't even aim."
"Captain... it's so warm..."
"What are you talking about?" The captain turned to the soldier with a frown.
No—not just her. She felt it too. That damned white light was sweeping away the distracting thoughts in their hearts. So this Spirit's approach was to disarm them through purification?
From the looks of it, the "cleansing" wasn't absolute.
"A Spirit in pure white..."
The moment Origami saw Yimi, her mind hadn't yet caught up—but her palms were already slick with cold sweat.
She'd seen this before. How had she forgotten? This sense of déjà vu...
Five years ago. The day her parents died—in the roaring fire, the smoke and ash blotting out the sky until it turned that ashen grey. And in the very center of it all, outshining the flames themselves—a brilliance like the sun.
Something this important. How could she have forgotten?
"Origami, what are you doing?!" The captain saw it immediately.
She couldn't wait.
Origami raised her weapon and—throwing all caution aside—floored her flight unit to maximum thrust and charged. If it came to it, she was prepared to take herself and her target out together.
Yimi, her back to Origami, let the ears atop her head swivel. She maintained her floating posture and slowly turned around.
"Origami! Danger!" Four words spoken apart—the second two a warning to both of them.
Years of pent-up hatred smothered the forced cleansing. The white-haired girl squeezed superhuman output from standard-issue equipment—or perhaps simply gave everything she had with nothing held back. Given her momentum, a Spirit not built for combat, like Yoshino, might genuinely fail to react in time. That was Shiori's fear.
From Shiori's angle, she could see the missile about to punch straight through the small girl. The child—now facing her—showed none of the defensive responses other Spirits used, made no move to dodge.
And took no damage whatsoever.
The complete Holy Corpse blazed its divine presence: routing all misfortune toward others, drawing all luck to itself.
Just as Valentine had once said—in the eyes of a god, luck and misfortune are balanced numbers that sum to zero. So long as the world's total maintains that equilibrium, no matter how either side fluctuates, the ledger remains fair.
And what Famine truly represented was the unfair trade—which was also the truth of Yimi's ability to absorb the Holy Corpse and make it her own.
Stand: Third Stage — Love Train.
No longer manifesting as cracks in space. The effect was now visible to everyone—Shiori, blocked from direct view, and Origami who had just launched the attack both saw it: somewhere far to the west, a man who'd broken into a home and was in an unstable mental state suddenly lunged at a police officer with a knife—and was met with an emptied magazine.
Why were they seeing this?
"Cover her!" The rest of the AST weren't decorations. Though Origami's charge had broken their formation, they quickly reorganized under the captain's direction.
Charging in blind at close range like Origami was suicidal—the captain risked herself pulling Origami out, then ordered her subordinates into a suppression barrage.
The Spirit neither defended nor evaded—yet missiles fired from a distance and blades swung up close alike seemed to curve away, deflected by something invisible. Perhaps this was a Spirit with dominion over space.
That assumption held until the captain noticed what the white radiance was illuminating at its edges—a poacher whose gun jammed while a bear took half his skull, a delinquent livestreamer who pulled a knife in a road rage incident and was killed in lawful self-defense, a paparazzo who'd been stalking a celebrity and was beaten to death by bodyguards...
"Stand down—ceasefire! This Spirit is redirecting her misfortune onto other people!"
Not just Asia—she could see Northern Europe in the visions. The range potentially covered all of humanity.
What a monstrous ability. What a monstrous Spirit—wrapped in that righteous, saintly exterior, a hypocrite to the core.
If it had been an impenetrable shield or overwhelming speed, they might have gritted their teeth and kept fighting for the hazard pay and the hatred. But they could not accept their own bullets being routed through the enemy's hands to strike down innocent people across the world.
Click. The sound of teeth grinding—simultaneous from both Origami and the captain.
"Retreat!" The captain gave the order through a clenched jaw.
Clearly Origami had no intention of obeying. These years of waiting had all led to this moment—but at this juncture, breaking ranks meant her teammates wouldn't cover for her again. Even so, the captain plus two more combined might not even have beaten her.
"You're not leaving." Yimi had not forgotten what System had taught her about the consequences of not finishing an enemy off.
Hit the cat and think you can just walk away? The world wasn't that generous.
Dozens of floating turrets materialized behind her and locked on. In truth, she had barely a sliver of Reiryoku left to work with.
"Wait!" Seeing this child's aggression surpass even Tokisaki Kurumi's, Shiori hurriedly spread her arms in front of her.
"What are you doing, nice-smelling person?" Yimi didn't understand—why was someone always blocking her right when she was about to finish the job?
"Nice-smelling person?" Shiori blinked.
Was that what she was being called? Even after she'd just introduced herself...
What was the right response here?
Shiori felt the weight of it settling on her. Only now was she reading the pure, unsettling innocence in the child in front of her—a sincerity that had no concept of moral good or evil.
"Oh—pudding. How about I take you to get pudding?"
"Pudding?"
"It's a really delicious snack..." Same type as Tohka—zero social awareness?
"Does it taste as good as you?"
"...You can't eat me, all right? I'm literally about to treat you to food—that would be pretty awful of you if you still wanted to bite me after all that."
In the back of her mind, Shiori updated her classification: Tohka edition Kurumi.
Yimi didn't quite understand. This person hadn't even patted her head—so why offer to bring her along to eat?
It had to be a fair exchange. That was the only way the cat could eat in peace.
She floated down slowly, tilted her face up, and quietly shared an earth-shattering secret with Shiori:
"I'll tell you something—the world is actually round..."
"?"