With a combination of carefully-timed sips and polite refusals, Reimu was able to keep herself almost sober throughout the long session with Lord Tenma. Tengu liquor was just as delicious as it was strong. She wished that she could afford to unwind and drink freely. The taste needled at her hunger, making her stomach growl throughout the morning's proceedings.
Once he'd emptied his dish a few times, Tenma began asking questions. "Please, tell me about life as a shrine maiden." "Tell me, how did such a small thing defeat the Moriya goddess?" "The spell card system, how did you come up with the idea? I've crafted several of my own." He was an active participant in the conversation, chortling with delight at even the smallest joke and always urging her to brag about her exploits.
And Reimu had no idea what he was getting out of it. There wasn't any pattern to the questions to hint that he was anything but curious. Between his jovial demeanor and the alcohol, she soon found herself talking freely. For her own part, Yukari stayed mostly silent, only speaking up to slip the occasional acerbic comment into one of Reimu's anecdotes. By the time the conversation was winding down, Reimu was actually sort of enjoying herself. She'd almost forgotten that it was anything but a social gathering.
At the tail end of chuckling at her recollection of the Spring Snow Incident, Tenma sat his drink aside and seemed to grow more serious. "Now, Miss Reimu, I'm sure that this is longer than you ever planned to spend drinking with a nosy old man like myself," he said. "But I'm sure you would not mind if I requested one small favor before you leave?"
Reimu sat her own drink aside and tried to steer her tipsy mind back toward business. "Well, that depends on the favor, doesn't it?"
"Hah! So it does. You see, I've heard many stories about how fearsome you are in battle, but I've never gotten to see it with my own eyes. If it pleases you," he said, and gestured across the room to where Aya waited by the door. "I would like to see you have a friendly duel with my Shameimaru. With spell cards, of course. There is no need for bloodshed among friends."
"This is probably why he asked you here," Yukari said, mentally speaking to Reimu even as she sipped her liquor with a neutral expression. "A demonstration of your powers, to reassure him that you don't still have the Hakurei blessings. If you don't feel well enough for it, I can step in and—"
"No," Reimu cut her off. "I've come too far to back down."
"Reimu, this isn't a..."
But Reimu was already standing up. "I accept. This is pretty small for a duel, though. Should we head outside?"
By the time that Reimu and Aya were squared off against each other in the street, half of the settlement had somehow gotten news of the fight. An uneven circle of spectators had already staked out the boundary of the battlefield. As Yukari and Tenma took up positions on opposite sides, Aya made her way to Reimu's side. "Hey, hey. Sorry about this. Boss's idea, have to go along with it, you know? Not much say in the matter."
"Yeah, I know."
"I'm under instructions to not hold back, so... give me your best shot, okay?"
"I'll try not to beat you too hard," Reimu said, probably sounding less confident than she intended. She was already second-guessing herself. The walk had left her lightheaded, and the alcohol wasn't helping matters.
"Heh, we'll see about that. Good luck!" After giving her a slap on the back, Aya hurried back to her end of the clearing.
A hush fell over the crowd. Reimu took a deep breath and stretched in place to work some blood back into her muscles. Tenma stepped forward into the circle. "Miss Yakumo. Since you are the guests here, I will allow you to set the guidelines."
"Reimu, you're the one stuck in the middle of this foolishness. Do you have any preference?"
"Let's just get it over with."
"That's probably for the best." Yukari stepped forward, herself. "Your generosity is appreciated as always, Lord Tenma," she said, somehow managing to say it without a trace of sarcasm. "Since this is a friendly match, I propose non-incident close quarters rules. No flight beyond five meters, and whoever has the least impacts at the end of two cards apiece wins. With verbal naming, since Reimu regretfully hasn't had enough time to draw up formal cards yet."
Two cards wasn't much of a duel at all. There were fairies with more than that; for most youkai, anything less than four or five was a warmup. It wouldn't give the crowd much of a show, but it was the least that they were likely to get away with. Reimu thought that she might just be able to handle it. On the other hand... that meant lasting through four spell cards, and dodging through two of them. That was a good few minutes of vigorous exercise.
"The lady's choice," Tenma said with a nod, and gestured toward the circle. "Miss Reimu, I will give you first honors. When you are ready, of course."
Reimu nodded in response. Unable to resist, she ran a quick series of mental divinations. I have a 12% chance of winning this, and a 23% chance of not making it to the end of the match, she concluded after a few milliseconds. Well. She wasn't sure if knowing that helped or not. It wasn't like it changed much about her potential actions.
Drifting upward until she was a meter above the ground, she kept her eyes on Aya and weighed her options. With only two weeks to adjust to her new powers, she hadn't had much opportunity for constructing spell cards. The ones she did have were mostly flawed experiments, attempts to tease out the combat applications of her new abilities. Even after days of sparring with Yukari, her hands felt empty without a gohei or ofuda. But, she wasn't about to concede defeat that easily. She might not have been the shrine maiden anymore, but it was still a point of pride that she had a nearly flawless dueling record. "Ready, Aya?"
"Of course!"
Once she'd made up her mind, Reimu took a deep breath to steady herself before announcing her card. "Tenfold Spirit-Shredding Boundary!" She gestured forward, and a purple-white beam of energy blasted from her hand. It crossed the space in the blink of an eye. Grinning, Aya sidestepped it. "Ahh, too slow, too slow!" she shouted. A wave of chuckles went up through the crowd.
Barely a meter behind Aya, a gap had opened in front of the laser. Now, another gap opened to her side, and the beam continued outward. Not expecting the attack, Aya barely managed to duck around it, only for another bounce to send the beam within a centimeter of her ear. Rebound after rebound, the air filled with dozens of gaps, each with a segment of the laser extending between them. They formed an irregular, three-dimensional grid around Aya, tangling her up in a cage of energy and restricting her movements. Her free space grew smaller and smaller... until the laser looped back around to the first gap, stabilizing Aya's prison. With a thrust from her other hand, Reimu started the card's final stage. The eyes within the gaps glowed and spat out waves of crimson bullets. Aya was enveloped in a firestorm from every direction.
She'd had similar spell cards as a shrine maiden, but the experience of using it was completely different. Before, she would have simply thrown out enough ofuda that she didn't care if most of them impacted harmlessly against trees and the ground. Here, the entire thing was a concerted, mathematical dance. Her shikigami programming hummed away in the back of her mind, doing an inhuman number of calculations to keep it going. In the blink of an eye, she processed hundreds of vector transformations, allowing herself to route the laser through dozens of gaps. To prevent it from being too predictable, she adjusted everything with several pseudorandomly-determined elements. A month ago, she hadn't even known what half of those words meant. Now, it didn't even require her full attention. The hard part was applying it right. The raw math was child's play.
"A-ah, that's tricky, Reimu!" Aya shouted across the clearing. In the brief respite between when the laser stopped progressing and when the first bullets reached her, she blasted out a quick counterattack. As hurried as she was, it was little more than a wave of overlapping projectiles. Reimu held her ground until the last moment before darting through an opening.
She was too focused on her own defense to pay attention to Aya. When she heard a loud murmur run through the crowd, she wasn't even sure what had happened until Yukari relayed, "That's three to zero, your favor. You're doing well."
As the wave of bullets passed her, Reimu got her first look at Aya. True to her predictions, once she was robbed of her famous speed, Aya was a lot easier to hit. With barely a meter to move in any direction, she was having to twist her body around to avoid the bullets. It left her too busy to attempt another counterattack.
Reimu couldn't keep it up forever, though. After a few rounds of this—constraining Aya in a new cage, bombarding her in bullets, and then dodging the counterattack—even that exertion was starting to take its toll. On the fourth repetition of the attack, her attention faltered for just a moment, but it was enough. The gaps flickered, and with that momentary lapse, Aya's imprisonment was broken. She darted aside, and before the last of the bullets clattered to the cobblestones, Reimu limply waved a hand to signal the end of the card.
In the brief respite afterward, she found that her hands were trembling. Her vision had been unfocused, barely seeming to register with her conscious mind. She could remember that Yukari had updated her on the score recently, but the details hadn't quite made it to her memory. Just three more cards to go...
"Hey, not bad, Reimu, not bad!" Aya said, as she settled to the ground. The crowd was silent enough that, even at this distance, Reimu could hear the click of her geta impacting the stone. "But now it's my turn." She pulled her hauchiwa from her side and dramatically pointed it at Reimu. "Alright, I've been wanting to try this one on you anyway. Wind God's Summer Typhoon!"
It wasn't a name that she'd heard before, but Reimu supposed that it would be too much to hope for a familiar card. Aya whirled around, and slashed her fan forward with the force of her entire body. A tidal wave of green-white bullets erupted outward in a ballistic arc. When they fell to the ground, they bounced off, tumbling along and accelerating irregularly, as if they were being blown along by gusts of wind.
Reimu gritted her teeth as she watched the wall of spinning bullets close in on her. Her programming tracked them, filling the back of her head with thousands of trajectory calculations... and with each new gust, they all changed, completely throwing off her projections.
So, plan B: With a quick gesture, Reimu opened a gap beneath herself. Gravity did the rest, and she plummeted into darkness.
Even before becoming a shikigami, Reimu had traveled through gaps on a few occasions. Now, though, it was even stranger than it had been before. Now, she knew that the void around her was no place for a human. It was undifferentiated chaos, the backstage to the universe. It lacked all of the lines between here and there and then and now that gave structure to existence. She felt that, with one wrong step, she might emerge a thousand years in the past or halfway across the world. Maybe even somewhere weirder. It raised a lot of questions, but even though she felt much smarter than she'd ever been, she wasn't sure if she was prepared to discuss the subject with Yukari yet. Maybe in a few decades.
Another gap opened between her feet, and Reimu fell back into the light and warmth of the spring afternoon. She landed harder than she had been anticipating and staggered under the impact, barely staying upright. In front of her, she could see the last of the bullets clattering past the spot she'd just vacated.
An annoyed murmur ran through the audience. "Hey, hey, hold still!" Aya said, and lashed her fan out for another wave of attacks. Reimu knew that she probably couldn't get away with using another gap. It wasn't banned, but if she spent the entire fight running away, it wouldn't take long for her weakness to become obvious. She was just going to have to rely on raw dodging ability. The bullets closed in on her, and every muscle worked in perfect harmony to sidestep a cluster of them. It was like the middleman had been cut out of her reflexes, giving her direct, moment-to-moment control over her muscles. On instinct alone, she ducked and weaved through dozens of projectiles. There was no unnecessary movement, barely any conscious thought.
This, too, was shikigami programming, and she allowed it to subsume her consciousness. It was her only hope, really. By the time the last of the bullets tumbled past her, her pulse was hammering in her ears, and her vision was dark near the edges. Her limbs trembled, and only adrenaline was keeping her upright.
And already, another wave of bullets was bouncing toward her. She dimly considered surrendering, but before her muddled thoughts could even line up for long enough to give it serious thought, the attack was upon her. Every bit of evasive skill that she had screamed for her to move, but her body was no longer quite up to the task. One bullet clipped her shoulder, and she stumbled. She'd already been lightheaded, and now she was dizzy; only some normally-quiet bit of programming managed to keep her upright by gauging her position against the ground. The programming was the only thing keeping her together now, forcing exhausted muscles to keep working past their limits... but that could only take her so far. Jumping around a bullet, Reimu found that she simply had no strength left in her. When she landed, her leg folded beneath her, and she slumped to the ground. Half a dozen other bullets smacked into her, each one with a spike of dull pain, but it was a distant thing. Her consciousness felt disconnected from her body. It was like nothing so much as that night in the bamboo forest, dying in Yukari's arms.
Reimu struggled to push herself away from the ground, but there was no strength in her trembling arms. The crowd was in an uproar now, but she couldn't understand any of it. Reimu's vision blurred, and as she collapsed against the cobblestones, grew dark.