Spoilers from included and/or represented works abound. Please read this fiction carefully.
Afternoon at day 17, and David is really busy already. David have to make sure that Nanako is safe, the Cube Queen is not corrupted, unmasking whoever's masquerading as (General) Teddie, and search for Hoshimatsu... somewhere in here?
If the one(s) who abducted the participants and caused all the problems right now is also the same person(s) who kidnapped Hoshimatsu... and if they've truly bright Nanako into the fused TV world...!
"They're not getting away from us!" David is determined while running. "Neither them nor Genjitsu-no-Omnia are gonna get away with it!"
As he ran on, David came across yet another blue door that suggested him to calm down.
"Summon here? Again?" David is confused.
David then reached towards the door with a relaxed smile... Back to Last Velvet.
David saw Elise-X in the usual position, but nobody else. Elise-X noticed and sighed, a seductive sound that also convey annoyance.
sigh* "It seems my former client has caused you some trouble." Elise-X told David. "Though this may mean I'm not the only one who was drawn to the light of your potential."
There's a hint of tenderness towards Kiana in Elise-X's words.
"You have gained a new resolve by overcoming many doubts and falsehoods." Elise-X told David. "You have reached the threshold of truth, but man's hearts are mutable."
"That is why a resolve to continue fighting is more important than any one victory or defeat." Elise-X continued.
"Yeah, I understand." David understood.
"But this will be a difficult battle without end." Elise-X warned David. "Are you equal to the challenge?"
David thought about it. Just as Yu Narukami knows...
"If I have my friends and allies... If I'm not alone," David responded. "I can do it."
"I see." Elise-X reacted, then nodded slightly. "I have heard your answer... but it's not enough."
"Remember what the Velvet Room told?" Elise-X reminded David. "The heart is shaken more by a single action than by a thousand words."
As she smiles, David's vision begins to blur. Hearing words being repeated... Having reached the threshold of truth... Everything that's happened during the course of this case ran through David.
The new appearance of the TV world, this tournament pitting allies against each other, the student council president who's a descendant, and a(nother) fake Teddie. The encounter with a Valkyrja, Kiana Kaslana, searching of Viola's colleague, Hoshimatsu. And learning about the determination that Yu have gained through constant battles...
What must be accomplished... How do David show what he have decided through actions?
Coming back to running, it seems that the number of invisible walls has decreased. Could this mean that the end is near?
David suddenly heard a familiar voice...
"That's enough!" It was Miss President!
That voice came from the Announcement Room, thus echoing throughout the Announcement Zone... David finally made it!
He quickly approached the Announcement Room, opened the door, and rushed inside.
"Hmmm? You're finally here." General Teddie noticed David. "Hello, cyberpunk."
"Congratulations!" General Teddie congratulated David. "How does it feel to have won the P-1 Grand Prix overall?"
General Teddie smirked as David approached him. Behind him was... Miss President, Tenpti of Joy, and the Cube Queen. When the three of them saw David, Miss President looks confused, while Tempti's and Queen's faces lighted up with joy.
Miss President doesn't know what to say at this point.
"They're you are, Mr. Martinez!" Tempti is relieved. "You're late!"
"Finally, you're saving the Queen of the Cube!" The Cube Queen rejoiced.
David kept the caution, but he also signalled to the girls and the Queen that everything will be all right now. By the way, the General is closer to them than David currently is. David couldn't afford to make any reckless moves just yet (after all, his past life ended because he wasn't cautious enough regarding to his usage of cybernetics, and Adam Smasher). And...
"General, where's Nanako?" David interrogated General Teddie.
David then looked around the Announcement Room, but Nanako is (obviously) nowhere to be found. General Teddie's face suddenly distorted with an ugly glee.
"Nana-chan's right here." General Teddie taunted David. "See?"
General Teddie slowly extended the arm that was held behind him. And... there was Nanako. Her arms are clutched to her chest, and she slowly takes a few steps towards David, obviously frightened.
"Miss Dojima!" David reached out to Nanako.
After a step forward, David noticed that General Teddie just... disappeared? How could he have gone somewhere else that quickly?
"Mister... cyberpunk..." Nanako cried weakly, having been affected by the TV world.
David decided to save Nanako, but as he reached out to her, Tempti...
"Cyberpunk, no!" Tempti refuted. "Nanako Dojima isn't there!"
David is confused. Nanako's not here? What, she's right here... Just as about David said so, his hand stopped. Something isn't right.
So David looked at Nanako's face. And in her eyes... it's madness. David dodged with Sandevistan.
"Aww, so close!" General Teddie is frustrated. "Just a little more and that cyberpunk would've been a goner!"
"Fuck you, bastard!" David reacted to General Teddie.
David managed to dodge, after the General suddenly appeared out of nowhere to attack David with his cane.
David took a good look at General Teddie, seeing the madness in his face... the same madness that he saw in Nanako's only a moment before. David noticed that Nanako disappeared.
"You've got it wrong, Mister!" Tempti warned David. "It's all been him from the beginning!"
"It can make whoever's looking at him see him as someone else!" Tempti continued.
"So he's not actually taking on other forms?" David questioned.
"No, he's just distorting the things you see and hear!" Tempti replied. "I'd like to thank Rise Kujikawa for giving me the advice!"
Indeed, the enemy is able to control what he see and hear. He'd realized that after all the battles he'd had today, but seeing Nanako had (kind of) made him forget all that. He finally realized it all, while the General laughed at it.
chuckles* "It's hard for me to show someone who isn't here, but you actually saw this stupid preschooler?" General Teddie gets creepy. "Stupid cyberpunk!"
Just like how the allies hadn't actually fine crazy before each fights, Nanako had never been brought into this in the first place. Nanako must have been in home actually, and the only possible reason why Nanako 'disappeared' was because David was trapped in a recursive extension of the TV world, thus meaning that David was brought to the TV world after he watched the commercial for the first time, but before the second time.
The appearance before David just now... is a fake. General Teddie distorted everyone's senses all to make them all suffer. But thankfully, Tempti turned out to have taken advantage of Rise's Persona abilities to counter the deceit. That's why Tempti was shut up by General Teddie... to keep her from warning everyone during his tournament.
Now knowing everything thus far, David pushed the General's cane away and jumped back towards the girls in order to distance himself from General. Now David is in between them and General Teddie.
"Who in the 'verse are you?" David asked General Teddie.
laughs* "You still can't tell?" General Teddie now spoke with the Shadows' voice. "Seriously, the level of intelligence around here...!"
"Fine, then." General Teddie conceded. "Here, get a good look!"
General Teddie then shed the costume and morphed into a ball, also swallowing the costume itself. Then the ball split and bursted with bright blue light. The reveals the Shadows, who turned out to be the same one David encountered in his dream.
The burst light faded away, and the Shadows, which obviously looks like the Sephirot, took their respective weapons. Then they opened their eyes: same Shadows' bright golden eyes, just like the dream.
"We are many shadows, the true selves..." The Shadows chanted.
"That's... the Sephirot... the nine Patron Librarians!" The Cube Queen recognized the faces.
The Shadows is obviously like the Sephirot, being a mirror image of each, but with golden eyes of Shadows'. Everyone else except David are trembling.
"How about it?" Shadow Malkuth made fun. "Hoshimatsu, you wanted to see what we are, didn't you!?"
"Why... why do they look like those Sephirot!?" The Cube Queen is scared.
"That's their true form." Tempti confirmed. "Those things... are the Sephirot Shadows."
"These are... Shadows?" Miss President is terrified. "They're from... the Sephirot all along?"
Tempti tried to calm Miss President once, but the summer-star girl shaked her head in shock, and even screamed. While Miss President refused to even confront those monstrosity at all, David now understood what's going on. All the facts and the claims not only match up, but also add up: The way she was able to run so fast without so much as breathing heavily, even in TV world...; The sense if wrongness that they'd had when Miss President had asked David about killing the allies...; The way she avoided mentioning her name...; That superhuman, strength when she hit System No. XX, and that incredible junp to get away from them...; Viola's colleague's ancestry completely matched with Miss President's...; The Shadows' ability to interfere with the senses of other people...; David's dream...; How General Teddie has voice like a legion of Shadows, and how similar each individual version of the said voice kinda matches that of each Sephira...; Elaboration on General Teddie's part; The involvement of the Singularity in particular, and the Homunculi in general...; And... Miss President's reaction about the reveal...
Just as Elise-X had said... all the pieces to the puzzle were laid out before David. Now that they've come together, and now David saw the truth: Miss President is indeed Hoshimatsu, an edgerunner descending from the offspring of the cowherd and the weaving princess, and she's traumatized by how the Singularity created the Sephirot's Shadow Selves to kidnap her, throw her into the fused TV world, changed the atmospheres and used P-1 Grand Prix to force the participants to fight their allies and each other. This deep-rooted depression regarding Hoshimatsu's experience and past... All of this initiated by the Singularity fusing Athena with Midnight Channel to create Athena Daybreak, and bright the Shadow Selves out of the Sephirot, who manipulated everything here and there, with help from Genjitsu-no-Omnia and her servants.
"Where's the Sephirot?" David asked Hoshimatsu. "If they don't accept those Shadows, they'll get even stronger."
Miss Pres- Hoshimatsu - only shivers when David called out to her. There has to be some reason why she believed that she was the student council president (of possibly the world Viola originated from). But as it turns out, that's just a disguise, more for herself than for everyone else. No matter how comfortable it is, it's only there to cloud her eyes from the truth. Then again, she most likely is traumatized by the Shadows created in behest of Singularity's return.
"I don't know what you experienced..." David told Hoshimatsu. "But it must have had some painful confrontations."
"But you have us with you now!" David reassured. "We're going to get you out of here!"
David called out to Hoshimatsu while keeping an eye on the Shadows.
Cross-trivia: A Shadow is the darkness within a person's heart. Unless it is accepted by the person it came from, it will never disappear for good.
So David connected through Akasha Terminal, now that the tournament is effectively over now and the communication is pretty much restored. David also decided to protect Hoshimatsu just in case any Shadow goes berserk and tries to kill her. Meanwhile, Hoshimatsu continued to shake her head, shouted and tremble violently. She's like a depressed rabid gone crazy.
laugh* "You hear that, our victim?" Shadow Tiphereth mocked Hoshimatsu. "Your 'friends' is trying to tell you something."
"Too bad they doesn't understand at all..." Shadow Binah looked down upon. "These clowns are so hopelessly naive, we couldn't help but try and exterminate them all!"
The Shadows laughed shrilly, as they continued to mental, emotionally and then existentially abuse Hoshimatsu.
"I wish we could project the trauma and cast it upon the entire omniverse..." Shadow Gebura said. "What it's like suffering one after another, and having to murder one another in order to escape it all!"
"Those madness and traumas and despair..." Shadow Hod commented. "Everything went overboard, and we drowned our existence because everything went wrong!"
"We were robots made of humans! The machines made only to take the suffering for granted!" The Shadow Selves of the Sephirot vented their traumas together. "No heroes can understand our suffering...!"
"Stop... We've had enough!" Hoshimatsu stood out. "Humans or robots, doesn't matter!"
laugh* "You're still clinging to that?" Shadow Yesod maniacally mocked Hoshimatsu. "Then take a look at what really happened!"
The Shadows' eyes gleam with golden light. A flashback is forced.
Turns out the Singularity's essence is still there, even after its destruction at Bayonetta's grasp. The essence somehow no-clipped into the Shadow World, reviving the Singularity and turns to the rift, arriving at the Library, and took the Sephirot, who were the Patron Librarians, creating their Shadows from their negative things and traumas. And once the Zero Point is destroyed, the Shadows were unleashed while Sephirot got unconscious for a week, until they - alongside Ayin and Roland - are stranded at Kingdom Hearts, in Rigna's vicinity. The Shadows, in the meantime, kidnapped Hoshimatsu, prevented her from communicating with Viola, and caused the latter to team up with the CXA just to find her all the way, also allowing her to see the Midnight Channel on the way, this taking Viola altogether, leaving to CXA trying to find her. The Singularity also fused Athena in the process.
To be continued...