Chapter Eight: Explosive Final Blow

Ren, then Miyu, then Haruto leaped at the grounded beast. The vanguard bashed the tengu terror over the head with their blunt weapons, while Haruto sliced and diced with his twin swords.

As haughty as the tengu had been while it was zipping around in the air, it was entirely helpless now that its wings were clipped.

“Oh, what a world! What a world!” the tengu cried. “You may have bested me, but you’ll never defeat the sinister machinations of the Umbral Cour—squawk!!!”

Ren had imagined that the squad would strike a decisive blow against the beast, pose dramatically, then hold the pose as the tengu collapsed and burst into a pyre of sparks. Not so, as the tengu proved quite resilient to dying.

Feathers flew as Ren and Miyu wailed upon this tengu with their blunt weapons.

“Maybe if...” Miyu smashed her tonfa over the tengu’s beak, eliciting a pained squak. “… my cousin were here… we’d be able to take him down with more of a synchronized attack!”

“Less talking, he’s trying to get up,” Haruto added, slicing at the ball of feathers.

Their Smalt Ranger, Yuto, had been warped back to headquarters after the tengu had torn through his Power Outfit. Honestly, the more Ren thought, the less useful a spear and shield would be for synchronized group attacks. He’d hoped it would be a good defensive option, but simpler, blunt, or slicing weapons would work better for team combat. They’d have to retrieve another backup weapon from the Power Training Hall.

Sakura ran in, knives out, to join in the waylaying of their foe. A talon made token efforts to block early on, but that had ceased rather quickly. Still, the monster made horrible screeching squawks that indicated that it was, indeed, still alive.

As the sentai squad continued to beat upon this beast, their helmets blared with an automated message. It was flatter and less emotive than their spectral castellan.

“Emergency Warp. Emergency warp.”

Ren got one last swing in with his bat. Then, his vision warped into a million reddish bands as he was whisked away from the mountaintop shrine and back to their command center.

Again, he caught strange mental flashes of the Tori no su Shrine as he was flung through this teleportation non-space. The sprawling shrine was reduced to a single tori gate amid the sprawling yet compact mid-rises that marked modern Japanese urbanism. A train ran along the cliffside that now formed an idyllic social media vista.

What did it mean? What was Ren’s family doing in this ‘original’ universe he didn’t remember and had never truly experienced?

There was little time to dwell on this, as the kaleidoscope of light soon gave way to the dark yet reflective metal corridors of the Temporal Fortress.

“Did we get it?” Haruto asked as soon as they remolecularized.

The castellan came waddling over from a console. “Congratulations, Mahourangers! You’ve defeated your first outrider of the Schattenritter.”

The big command center monitor warped to display a wide shot of the shrine. A hulking crater sat in the middle of the field where they’d taken down the tengu. The tori gate remained, though the pristine landscape now had a crag running through it.

“Leyline totems explode upon defeat,” the castellan said as if this was common knowledge. “Emergency warp was initiated to bring you home before the minion of the Umbral Court literally blew up in your faces.”

The squad breathed a collective sigh of relief. Miyu and Sakura took off their helmets.

“So that thing was a living bomb?” Sakura frowned, looking sad. “Poor thing.”

“It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would stop and be willing to negotiate.” Haruto took his helmet off as well.

“Negative. It’s a being of pure chaos.” The castellan bobbed his head. “Its mere existence would corrupt the leylines.”

“You keep talking about leylines,” Ren said. “What is a leyline?”

The display monitor’s shot of the shrine was wiped away. A 3-D image of the globe took its place, centered on the Pacific with Japan on the far left of the screen. A topographical view was replaced with a crisscross array of threadlike lines. It didn’t take much for Ren to surmise that these were the leylines of which their mascot spoke.

“Hey.” Miyu pointed at a confluence of lines hovering along Japan’s western coast, just over Tenshigurobu. “That’s us.”

“Indeed, indeed!” said the castellan. “You’ll note that leyline confluxes often group near major population centers.”

Sure enough, Tenshigurobu was just one conflux on this island. Tokyo was covered in a far larger conflux, as was Osaka. All three were interconnected to each other and even to other clusters overseas. One went from coastal Japan to Mongolia, for some reason. Threads stretched thin over the ocean only to converge along other far-off coasts.

“This is a map of your world before recent leyline damage.” The monitor shimmered, and the leyline conflux around Tenshigurobu was greatly reduced. “Behold the damage done already.”

Where before the actual shoreline and outlines of mountains were hardly visible beneath the confluence, now five leylines met just north of Tenshigurobu’s town center. Even Tokyo and Osaka’s clusters had been greatly reduced. Looking at it here, Ren could believe that the damage described could indeed risk far more damage to the world than just their sleepy little city.

“Ay, if the tengu had lasted until morning, three of these five remaining leylines would be at threat!” The castellan motioned to where three of the Tokyo-bound lines hovered right over the mountaintop shrine.

Ren imagined those lines being snipped and falling away. What damage would be done if that were to happen?

The castellan seemed to read his mind. “Ay, your settlement would have lost even more of its historical importance. Fewer than one thousand people would have lived on this shore.”

The group weighed the gravity of what this meant. What would have happened to their family? What would have happened to the school? To them? If the old Tenshigurobu was a sprawling city of world-class scope, while their current town was a sleepy small-scale city, would the buildings just warp out of existence? Furthermore, how did nobody remember any of this? Miyu in particular scrunched her face up, deep in thought.

“As Mahourangers, your existence is secure,” the castellan assured them. “But with repeated failures, one would imagine some of your classmates could just blink out of existence overnight!”

Ren’s mouth turned dry all at once. The implications were making his head spin, and judging by the looks of his comrades, it wasn’t just him. Finally, Miyu let out a gasp.

“My cousin. Where’s Yuto-kun?”