Pressure

Rosary’s first step falls loud and heavy on the tile path. The pressure is instant and overwhelming; her knee buckles, and she drops to her hands and knees, struggling to breathe.

“What is this?” she tries to ask, but all that leaves her lips is a ragged gasp. The sensation itself doesn’t shock her. Moving through the firmament is nothing new, and the strain is a natural result of forcing her physical body onto a fundamentally spiritual plane.

But this new feeling, her body’s senses can only interpret it as overwhelming pressure, which seems to push every cell in her body from every conceivable angle. Not just from the outside, but also from within, as if something is trying to tear her apart, cell by cell, in any direction she dares to move. It takes everything she has just to breathe, let alone note her surroundings: an unyielding hodgepodge of flashing lights and blaring sounds that all blur together.

Have to… keep moving, she thinks, planting her foot and trying to stand, but her leg kicks out from under her, sending her flying forward. The world spins around her, sprites, stars, and city lights flashing like strobe lights. She only realizes she’s falling when she lands. Pain shoots through her whole body like a bullet.

The feeling is paralyzing. She tries to take a moment to breathe, but every breath feels like pulling razor wire through her nose and throat, leaving her lungs feeling like they’ll pop like punctured balloons. I… have… to… move, she tells herself, trying to regain any amount of control over her body. She struggles until a new sensation overwhelms her: hands crushing her shoulders like crinkling paper and shaking her like a rag doll.

“ROSARY!” a voice screams, drilling into her ears like screws. “GET OUT OF THE FIRMAMENT!” it commands.

She doesn’t dare open her eyes, lest the foe before her see the fear welling up inside her.

No… she thinks, her brain feeling like it’s melting through her ears. Never listen… to the enemy…

With that thought, she blacks out.

“Rosary, Rosary, come on, wake up!” Mist whispers, gently tapping her comrade’s shoulders.

She has managed to drag Rosary to a secluded corner and hide them both in her fog, but she can feel the situation deteriorating. She never expected Rosary to push her aside like that. Still, the initial shock is cast aside the moment Rosary collapses after taking just a single step through the torii gate. Mist is reluctant to chase after her, but she has enough sense to know you don’t chase after a Leroy Jenkins no matter what.

Seeing Rosary flail about is too much to endure. Mist timidly sets a single toe inside the gate, just to get a feel for it. To her surprise, she feels nothing. She sticks a hand and arm through, always keeping most of her body weight outside so that if she collapses, at least it’ll be outside the gate. To her shock, she never does, finding no great strain even when her whole body is through.

“So then why is Momo reacting—”

“The firmament!” she gasps as soon as she realizes it.

She remembers Rosary explaining that, while within the firmament, a Maiden’s guardian angel has three primary duties: first, to relieve spiritual pressure like a diving suit; second, to dull her senses like horse blinders; and third, to regulate the flow of power like a surge protector. Up to now, it has felt like game trivia more than anything else, since Mist hasn’t been able to pass into the firmament at all. Getting her there before Easter was a goal, but she never saw the big deal.

The two main reasons Maidens enter the firmament are to hide themselves from ordinary people and to avoid physical injury. Mist’s ability to control fog and her combat role negated both, so it has always seemed like an optional achievement at best.

“Another point for underachieving,” she thinks, dropping all precautions and rushing to Rosary.

“Mo— Rosary!” she calls, stopping herself from using real names at the last moment. “Rosary, get out of the firmament! That’s what’s messing you—”

*Rumble*

A thunderous crash from somewhere out of sight cuts Mist’s words off at the source. She whips her head from side to side to see where it came from, but the sound seems to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

*RUMBLE*

She feels the second one more than she hears it as vibrations rattle up her legs into her ribs. Every fiber of her being screams at her to run, but she refuses to leave Rosary.

“I’m never skimping out on P.E. again!” Mist thinks, resorting to dragging Rosary after failing to lift her. The pebbly ground gives her almost no traction as stones skid away behind her.

“Why did you have to fling yourself so far?” she grunts, looking at the distance she still has to go. She isn’t sure how, but Rosary has managed to fling herself so far into the shrine that they’re closer to the divination room Queen Bee disappeared into than to the gate.

By the time she reaches the center, Mist has to stop and catch her breath, panting as if she’s just run a marathon. “Almost… there,” she pants, grasping Rosary’s arms to begin dragging again, only to feel the stone pathway sink under her feet.

“Huh!” she gasps, watching the path tiles fall before her into a sinkhole. As terrifying as the drop may be, Mist is more overcome by what comes out.

A scaly black hand, with fingers as long as her arm, erupts from the hole and grasps the edge. Mist doesn’t wait for the second, equally large hand to emerge before turning and running. With a new strength she didn’t know she had, she throws Rosary over her shoulder, vertebrae popping at the strain, and sprints behind the divination room.

“Condense, condense, condense,” she chants in her mind as she gathers all the fog she can. She doesn’t stop, even as veins pulse at her temples and blood gushes from her nose and fingernails. She pushes her powers to their absolute limit, gathering and compacting the fog until every breath feels like drowning.

“Not enough, have to—”

“Gah!” she yips as the physical and spiritual strain hit her all at once. She collapses against the wall of the divination room, panting, her nose still bleeding.

The fog is now so thick that not even she can see her feet in front of her, forced to rely instead on the mental picture the fog gives her. The density reduces her field of view to only a few meters. She knows there is fog beyond that, but it’s impossible to see anything useful from it. As she tries to focus harder to get a better picture, she instead feels a new sensation: small bits of fog vibrating nearby, giving off two distinct patterns she can almost hear.

“Is that… No, it can’t be…” she thinks, squashing the thought as soon as it appears. “There’s no way I could be hearing their words through the fog.”

But the more the idea creeps into her mind, the more enticing it feels. Even as she concentrates on probing further into the fog in hopes of detecting whatever is clawing its way out of the ground, she’s too enticed by the thought of Queen Bee’s unfiltered words to ignore them. She leans her ear against the wooden wall, hoping to listen, even a little, as the fog gives her greater insight.

Even with the two channels of intel, she can only make out a few words: romantic, age, Valentine’s, charm, success, white, mutual, before Rosary stirs.

“Rosary!” Mist gasps, all sense of the fog dispersing from her mind as Rosary wakes up.

“Mhm,” Rosary moans, scrunching her face and rubbing her head. “What’s going on, Kasu—”

“Hey, we’re on a mission. Codenames only!” Mist says, placing her palm over Rosary’s mouth. “And don’t traverse the firmament! Without angelic buffs, it’s just a hindrance.” Rosary takes another moment to rub her head and eyes before giving Mist a nod to remove her hand.

“What’s the situation?”

“We’re at the back of the shrine,” Mist reports. “Something erupted out of the center, so I dragged you here and gave us all the cover I could.” She punctuates her words by wiping the blood oozing from her nose.

“Is it the arch-devil?” Rosary asks.

“Don’t know,” Mist replies, wiping more blood as it pours from her nose. “Whatever it is, it’s probably standing guard at the torii gate, so if we jump the back fence we could—”

“NO!” Rosary yells, eyes going wide. “Don’t you remember? You can only exit a lair the same way you entered. Otherwise, you’ll just stretch the boundary and increase their territory.”

“Ugh, that’s right. Dammit!” Mist says, slamming a fist into the ground.

“Language,” Rosary chides, seeming to forget her own swear only minutes earlier.

“You’re right. I’m just stressed,” Mist says, scrounging up just enough self-control to avoid pointing that out.

“I’m sure that can’t be helping either,” Rosary says, handing Mist a handkerchief. With one mighty blow of her nose, Mist turns the pure white cloth scarlet red. “You can keep that one,” Rosary says, looking at the blood-soaked cloth.

“Yeah, no,” Mist thinks, discreetly dropping the blood-soaked cloth. She turns back to Rosary, who’s peeking around the corner.

“Now, what about the reason we came here?” Rosary asks. “Is she—”

“There’s no time to worry about anyone but ourselves!” Mist interrupts, knowing precisely what Rosary is going to say.

“There’s always time for that,” Rosary counters, leaning her head against the wood to peer around the corner. “Do we know where she is?”

“In this building here, but—” Mist doesn’t have time to finish before Rosary is already peeking in through the window above them. In a mad dash, Mist tackles Rosary before she can press her face against the glass.

“We aren’t in the firmament. That means she can see us!” she warns.

“Oh, right,” Rosary says, lifting a hand to perform the traversing ritual, only for Mist to grab her wrist.

“Stop! Stepping through is what messed you up before—”

Her words stop as a door on the opposite side swings open, jolting the fog sharply.

“What’s wrong?” Rosary asks.

“They’re leaving,” Mist says, feeling the pair move through the fog. “This is our chance. Since we’re on this side of the firmament, the arch-devil shouldn’t be able to attack us without alerting Queen Bee. That’ll give us time to disappear in the fog.”

“What if the diviner cast a ritual on her or gave her a charm?” Rosary asks.

“That’s a side quest,” Mist says. “Right now, we don’t need to 100% speedrun this; we need to survive.”

Mist looks into Rosary’s bloodshot eyes. Though she can’t see Rosary’s mouth, she knows her lips are curling, trying to form an argument, anything to say they have to save Queen Bee. Mist also knows Rosary is smart enough to come up with a reason if she has long enough to think. With that in mind, she grabs Rosary’s hand, pulling her along as they follow behind Queen Bee and the diviner.

The Maidens give them a wide berth, skulking near the bushes instead of on the tile path to muffle their footsteps. Mist keeps the fog dense enough to hide them and dampen every sound.

Everything goes according to plan until they reach the gate. The diviner stops at the boundary, waving Queen Bee off as the girl disappears into the fog. Mist feels Queen Bee’s slow, tentative steps as she moves away and waits for the diviner to walk back into the shrine, but she doesn’t.

Mist waits for a moment, her body growing colder with each passing second, until the diviner turns to look directly at them. Mist freezes altogether.