Chapter 6.3

Of course, Lisa Everest did not die when Fujiko Kazama commanded the imaginarium to kill her.

That would’ve been too easy.

It wasn’t a bad try, though.

Purple tendrils snaked from the pool at Fujiko’s feet and wrangled the bloody magic below the outer walls. Fujiko’s command extended to Lisa’s own imaginarium; glistening hands harpooned up the ramparts and seized Lisa by the neck.

“Do you remember this feeling?” Fujiko murmured. “Yes, of course you do. It’s how you tricked all of us into thinking you had been killed. I’ll do you a favor. It’ll be real this time.”

The scarlet fingers grasping Lisa’s neck clenched. Normally, this was the moment one heard the snap of bones, but Lisa’s body dissolved into paper folded in the shapes of origami birds. They fluttered and flocked to an upper watchtower and rematerialized as Lisa Everest.

“Clever girl,” she growled.

Mechanical barks howled. Spiral tracers from Mamoru’s rifle split against pale blue wards activated centimeters before Lisa’s face. Myriad flashes lit the landscape beyond the outer wall, and stationary turrets wedged into the crevices beneath the cliffs emptied cartridges of imaginarium, stitching the walls with impact craters.

“What’s this supposed to be, America?” Lisa scoffed. “You’ll have to do more–”

“Incantantation. The Great Wave.”

Rich blue water burst from beneath the cobblestone road like a geyser. A tsunami swelled above the wall, its crest curling into ivory white fingers.

“Of course it’s a Hokusai,” Lisa rolled her eyes.

Painted waves thrashed against stone and poured over the barricades. White foam, sharp as talons, clawed and pried apart the battlements brick by brick and hurled itself against Lisa’s defenses.

Unlike bullets or mortars, the waves, more like ink than water, glossed over the wards. As they receded, they left behind burgeoning bubbles and a greasy sheen that macerated through the magical field like hungry microbes.

“Trivial.”

Lisa snapped her fingers and returned painting to paper. The water’s surging form cascaded into thin, wavy strips, while the mists and foam burst into white glitter and confetti.

Reiko tossed herself over the top of the wall, her index finger straightened at Lisa. There came the sound of a rising scream, and a white flame blossomed at the tip of Reiko’s finger and swallowed the top of the wall.

She channeled more energy, more fuel, more force to the fire, and the blast blew apart the western half of the outer wall, flinging aside slabs of smoldering rock in a molten fan widening along the castle exterior.

“Quite the temper you got there, captain.”

Reiko snapped her eyes to the right, just in time for Lisa’s pen to stab through her pupil. There was no pain, just the spurt of blood and a sudden darkness.

Lisa twisted her wrist. A glow blinded her left eye, and Reiko sensed a dangerous gravity emanating from the tip of the golden nib stuck inside her head. It felt like a hand had reached inside and was pulling her mind into an intractable abyss, along with the rest of her face.

Reiko seized Lisa’s hand and tried to push it away, but the witch’s arm was stiff like a key jammed in the wrong lock. Dizziness swept in. Reiko’s head felt light, likely because much of it had been swallowed by the miniature singularity swirling at the point of the pen.

In moments like these, logic and experience became unnecessary burdens. To Reiko and her near indestructible body, the best solution was whatever proved the most destructive, and so Reiko decided to set herself on fire in an act of spontaneous combustion.

If it were someone else, Lisa might have kept her pen thrusted in the eye. Her wards remained intact. She wasn’t scared of a little heat, but Reiko burned herself from the inside out.

The thinner wards slid over Lisa’s fingers vaporized, while her fountain pen consumed the everflame that had simmered in Reiko’s body for a decade. Its sturdy body turned brittle, while the ink cartridge must have melted, because golden blood oozed out of the thin line between the nib and barrel.

Lisa yanked her hand and the pen out of Reiko’s eye, dancing backwards from the flames licking at her heels. Fresh burns ran up her arm. The dizziness in Reiko’s head abated, and she felt the weight of half her face return. Blood continued to streak down her cheek. Her body had yet to repair her destroyed eye.

“Petty tricks. You can’t beat me, captain,” Lisa said, “not while my signature’s here in The Now. No matter how you struggle, my Story only has one ending.”

“I bet the imaginarium thinks the same thing about you,” Reiko replied. “What makes you so different from us?”

“Characters can never finish their own stories. Authors can,” Lisa glowered. “It looks like incapacitating you isn’t enough. Fine. I’ll just erase you.”

“Reiko!” Fujiko blinked onto the wall. “You’re hurt!”

“No time,” Reiko barked. “Get ready, you two. Here she comes.”

“Incant,” Lisa said. “Vanishing ink.”

Lisa twirled the fountain pen in her charred hand and hefted her wooden staff in her unharmed other. Ink bled from the uncapped nib.

She stamped one foot forward and disappeared.

Instinct told Reiko Lisa would approach from her left. Fujiko stood there next to her. It would be difficult from that angle to defend the both of them. But a subtle shift in the wind had dashed the last drop of ink in the opposite direction, and Reiko remembered that her right eye had still not recovered.

Reiko tossed her body to her right and was greeted by Lisa’s wooden staff smashing her forearm. Lisa lunged with her pen. The fallen droplets from earlier jumped into the air and formed a cursive string flowing behind the nib.

Reiko shoved Fujiko out of the way to give the girl time to blink out of range. Reiko sidestepped as the ink lashed out. As it whipped close to her, Reiko ignited herself and vaporized it, but a single droplet grazed the edge of her blazer, and the outfit disappeared without a trace.

Lisa pressed forward, slashing with her pen and its ink stained appendage like a whip in calculated arcs, meant to drive Reiko into undodgeable corridors. Reiko scrambled backward in the narrow space above the eastern wall.

Each time the ink got too close, Reiko repelled it with a release of her infernal aura. Loose droplets winked away brick and wooden beams. The ground shuffled beneath their feet. Reiko snuck a look behind her and spotted a watchtower that blocked her escape at the far end of the wall.

This couldn’t go on for much longer.

“Disappear.”

Fujiko reappeared at the top of the watchtower. Imaginarium streamed down the pillar and collided with the ink like a breaking wave. The ink and imaginarium performed two vanishing acts; they negated each other and disappeared before everyone’s eyes.

It wasn’t much of an opening, but Reiko took it. Before Lisa could inscribe another strip of vanishing ink, Reiko dived at the witch. She knocked Lisa off kilter with a punch to the cheek and wrenched the fountain pen from the witch’s hands. Now, at point blank range, it was impossible to miss. She pressed a palm against Lisa’s chest.

Reiko inhaled.

In the end, all paper can do is burn. After all, it shares the same ancestor as the stake.

An orange spark flickered beneath her palm. Reiko’s fingers trembled and curled as the air buckled into a blurry, compressed space, where the only certainty was the certainty of a screeching, inextinguishable fire.

Reiko exhaled, and the spark erupted into a blistering beam.

It slammed into Lisa’s chest and punched her clean through the second outer wall and into the third. The pillar of fire persisted, screaming like metal on glass as it tunneled a molten core through the fourth and fifth outer wall and carved Lisa Everest into the plains beyond the cathedral.

The width of the blazing spire tightened. Its color transformed from orange to red to white and then finally, to blue, a cruel, bottomless azure as if Reiko had set all the oceans in this world and beyond ablaze and stolen their cerulean majesty for herself.

“Crush her.” Fujiko echoed.

The foundations beneath the turrets atop the farthest wall split apart. Wooden beams splintered. Ancient masonry failed, and two limestone towers collapsed onto the plains in a heap of rubble.

Reiko fetched her radio.

“Mamoru!” she roared. “Light her up!”

It was only now that everyone noticed that Castle Gramarye was tilted southward. The cobblestone road had been swallowed by the iron tracks of a last century railway.

Atop it, a steel leviathan laid on the tracks, its old wheels clutching the rails, its cradle flaunting a half kilometer barrel staring down the castle’s already broken walls.

 “This is for Miyuki, Gustav,” Mamoru braced the nearby handlebar. “Fire.”

Thunder rattled the grounds. The metal barrel snapped back into the recuperator and released a tide of condensed imaginarium drawn from the skies beneath the moon. The blast traveled through the breaches of each wall and engulfed the plains. A stray shot glanced to the right and speared through the cathedral.

Fire, gravel, and raw imaginarium plumed into the sky.

Reiko closed her palm and blinked to the final outer wall overseeing the blast zone. The jump exhausted her. It had been some time that she had felt so spent. She hardly felt any imaginarium left inside. For the first time in recent memory, her heart beat at a mellow rate.

She heaved a deep breath then turned her gaze back to the watchtower.

Fujiko stood frozen, her eyes twitching at Reiko in shock. Further beyond, Mamoru lay joined to the handrail. Reiko realized that she too could suddenly hardly move.

Her eyes snapped back to the plains where they had buried Lisa Everest. An unblemished cocoon filled with imaginarium rose over the wreckage. A complex arrangement of defensive wards, many of which Reiko could hardly decipher, shimmered across its pale surface.

The cocoon shed its skin, and Lisa Everest emerged unscathed. Even the burns on her arm had healed. What remained of the imaginarium thundered from above in a rapturous chorus and descended towards the witch.

“Like I said,” the Egregore smiled. “What’s the point of struggling? There’s no other way for this Story to end.”