[Summary: Nanako and Naoto enter Kubo's dungeon to catch up to the rest of the Investigation Team.
Content Warning: This chapter contains graphic violence.]
"Do you have your glasses?" Nanako asked when Naoto finally pulled away from the embrace.
The detective nodded and pulled them out of her pants pocket. "In my panic, I didn't remember to put them on." She did so now and noted how much better she felt already with them on. "You weren't wrong about the fog sapping one's strength."
"I'm glad you have your glasses," Nanako said, "because I'm going to need you. Mitsuo Kubo is in here. In the TV World. We need to get him out, too. I already have my friends going after him. I came for you myself because... Well, it was a good thing, wasn't it? I won't tell them that you're a woman if you don't want me to."
"Mitsuo Kubo," Naoto repeated. "Yes, he did go missing. That is what had the police so worked up today. He somehow escaped from their custody."
"And somehow ended up in a TV. Perhaps the true killer was upset with him for trying to take credit."
Naoto was hugging herself and looking through the chain-link flooring beneath them. "Nanako-san, the true killer..."
"Shirogane-san...?"
The detective shuddered. "I went home today as I normally do, at the regular time. In the past, before you were candid with me about this world, I essentially lived at the station and kept long hours there, but as it is now, I've settled into a routine. A predictable routine—perhaps the killer had been watching me. Nothing seemed amiss when I came home, but..." She lapsed into silence, and Nanako waited for her to continue. "When I checked my laptop, it reported that my apartment's door had seen activity perhaps twenty minutes before I arrived home. While I was puzzling over it, I was grabbed from behind."
"He was in your apartment, just waiting for you," Nanako breathed. "Oh, no..."
"There was nothing I could do. A cloth was over my mouth before I could scream, and though I tried not to breathe, and struggled as best I could, I couldn't hold my breath for long. In the end, I never saw my assailant. I can't even recall if he wore gloves when he handled me."
"I'm so sorry," Nanako whispered. "I thought we'd accounted for everything."
"I don't know how he broke into my apartment," Naoto said. "The windows were alarmed, and the door's lock hadn't been broken. I would have noticed that coming home. I..." She was shaking now. Nanako put a hand on her arm in support, and Naoto placed her own over it in appreciation.
"Are you... are you all right to do this now?" Nanako asked. "Learn about your Persona and fight Shadows? I could use your help in capturing Kubo, but I understand completely if..."
Naoto closed her eyes, her lips drawn tight. A long moment later, she reopened them and stared right into Nanako's eyes. "Kubo needs to be brought in. Tell me what I need to know. I feel Sukuna-Hikona with me now, and he agrees."
"Let's start by getting out of here."
"A secret base. How ridiculous," Naoto muttered from outside the dungeon. "My subconscious made this? You'd think it'd be a police station."
"Considering the time you spend there, yeah," said Nanako, "but, well, that's why it's called the subconscious. Souji-kun would love this place. He's a big fan of Featherman."
"I have the entire series," Naoto admitted. She tugged her cap low on her head in embarrassment.
"The manga? Can I borrow it?" Nanako asked. "I'm gonna run out of Loveline soon enough. I've been reading it to him before bed."
"Unfortunately, my collection is at the Shirogane estate. I'm sorry."
Nanako shrugged her shoulders. "Oh well. Anyway, Teddie led the others this way, so..."
She carefully navigated around the barbed wire fence surrounding the base, Naoto following not far behind. They were alone in the mist for about the length of a block when they heard the Junes jingle ringing out at them. Just a few steps later and Nanako was met with an unfamiliar sight.
The river was wrong. The bridge over it was wrong. The trees in the field behind it were wrong, too. None of it was real. That wasn't water in the river, those weren't leaves on the trees. They were blocks, they were...
"So the TV World can not only produce entire buildings," Naoto commented, "but render low-definition voxels as well. This is fascinating."
"He thinks this is all a game, huh?" Nanako kicked one of the blocky trees, and something fell out of the branches and onto her head. A Chewing Soul. She glared at it and then swore to come back there later, paint every tree in Kubo's likeness, and kick each and every one of them for a prize.
"That building up ahead, is that Junes?"
Nanako blinked and looked past the blocky trees. Towering far above them was a massive building with the word 'Junes' plastered on it. We did hear the jingle, she thought. "That's... Naoki-kun's Junes? Yeah, it must be."
"There's a brick wall next to it," Naoto observed.
Dwarfed by the Junes, it was hard to notice. Nanako wasn't at the detective's level when it came to observation, apparently, because she hadn't seen it at all. The brick wall was yellow, and there was a door within it. Above the door was written 'Void Quest.' It had the same blocky appearance as Kubo's other creations, including a blocky animal skull ornamenting the door.
When they approached the door, a menu popped up in front of them, straight from an old-school RPG.
New Game
Continue
Options
The 'New Game' option was grayed out, and the cursor was on 'Continue.' Perhaps it represented how the rest of her friends had already entered the place.
"If Naoki-kun's dungeon is so close to Kubo's," Nanako remarked, "then they must've been thrown into TVs that are very near each other."
Naoto took out a notebook and prepared to write. "Knowing the location of my dungeon, where would you say this is in the real world?"
Naoto's dungeon would correspond to her apartment. Naoki's dungeon was south of Junes in the real world. Just a short ride south in Adachi's police car...
"The police station," she answered.
She felt dizzy all of a sudden and leaned against the blocky tree for support. That the true killer could be a cop... It was always a tragedy when someone representing the law turned against it. What if her dad had been working on the case? He could just as easily been thrown into the TV as Naoto had been.
"A policeman calling upon me wouldn't have been unusual," Naoto said. "With his authority, it wouldn't have been difficult for him to be granted access to my apartment, either. It's something I'll have to look into once we're out of this place."
"If he got in that way once," Nanako murmured, "what's to stop him from getting in that way again?"
"I know." Naoto's voice was so hushed that it was hard to hear over the Junes song. She passed her hand over her eyes. "We'll... we'll have to find out for certain how he made it inside. I may need to move to an entirely new place, but it wouldn't be difficult for someone to track such a move..."
"Stay with someone," Nanako suggested. "You can stay with me, even. I have a couch, and I already know your secret, and you already know Souji-kun! It's perfect."
"I might just take you up on that," Naoto said, rubbing her temple. "The very idea of returning to that apartment after this makes me nauseous."
"I can't imagine how it must feel. To not feel safe in your own home..." She hadn't considered it before. Did Yukiko now hesitate when a delivery came for her at the inn? She imagined Kanji not letting his mother answer the delivery door at the textiles shop. The wounds inflicted on them would run deep.
"Please, let's focus on the task at hand for now," the detective said with a resigned sigh. "Your friends are in this... dungeon, correct? Is there a way to contact them?"
Nanako nodded and entered Kubo's dungeon. It was primarily a long hallway with gray stone walls and gray stone floor in the same blocky style as the trees outside. A few feet in there was a metal gate with a lock, but it was simply painted onto the wall as a part of its design. 'Void Quest,' huh? It wasn't difficult to figure out what video game series it was based on. Maybe she'd get lucky and they'd run into a Metal Slime.
Was it because he thought it was all a game? Or did Kubo just like video games a lot? Maybe he wished his life was one. Under ordinary circumstances, Nanako could sympathize with that. Real life sucked. But did it suck enough to kill someone for it...?
She called out for Teddie, but there was no response, and she didn't sense his connection in her mind. "We never did bother testing the range of his abilities," she told Naoto, "so... I know he couldn't help us from outside the bathhouse when we were within it. It could be we have to be on the same floor."
"Then let us proceed. There is a path here going up."
The next floor already? Nanako was puzzled for a moment, and then realized the dungeon had made this path for them. It probably led to the last floor her friends had visited. A shortcut! They'd reach everyone in no time with this.
At the top of the stairs, she tried contacting Teddie once again, but there was still no response. She became worried then. Had her friends managed to finish the dungeon? If so, then Kubo had been secured.
But they couldn't have, because the shortcut hadn't brought them to the very top. The passage ahead of them went off in four different directions. If it was the final floor, it would have led them to the final room. And if Teddie was out of the dungeon, he would've sensed Nanako when they were outside and made contact. No, her friends were still in here, perhaps still on this floor.
She chose a direction at random and marked it on the wall in case they came down this path again in their attempt to find the next floor.
"All right, Shirogane-san," she murmured, drawing her naginata up. "There's your first Shadow up ahead. We'll try fighting it and see what your Persona can do!"
Naoto took her gun out of its holster with some hesitation. "I've only fired this at the practice range. I don't carry much ammunition with me for it."
"Make every shot count."
"I intend to."
The Shadow crawled futilely against the wall as they watched.
"Mindless things, really," Nanako muttered.
"It's not amorphous," Naoto observed. "It appears to be the upper half of a torso, with arms and a head. Locomotion is by the forelimbs..."
"It'll turn into something else when we attack. Which will be... now!" Nanako leaped forward and brought down her naginata on its back. The Shadow writhed and then grew into a military tank with scarlet ceremonial decorations.
"A tank?" Naoto said. "It doesn't quite fit the theme of this place. Perhaps it—oh, it's moving on its own!"
Fire erupted from the tank's turret, catching Nanako and making her scream as searing pain engulfed her. The flames faded as quick as they came, and Nanako struggled to pull herself back to her feet and change her Persona at the same time. Jack Frost wasn't cutting it anymore; she really needed to visit the Velvet Room the next chance she got.
The tank, still aimed at her, began to power up, and Nanako hadn't yet managed to get up, the memory of the pain too intense. But as she watched, a sigil of light appeared on the floor under the tank. The sigil glowed, and then the Shadow was destroyed.
"Are you all right?" Naoto called.
"Light skills? They almost never work," Nanako remarked. "Well, I'm glad it made an exception today."
"My Persona specializes in both light and dark," Naoto told her. "I used what seemed appropriate."
"Sounds good to me. I trust your instincts. You kind of saved my butt there, and it was your first fight!"
The detective offered a hand, and Nanako accepted it and rose to her feet.
"You... you're really all right?" Naoto asked again, observing her closely. "That fire... it was rather intense. It's hard to believe that your clothes aren't singed, at the very least. You told me about this, but witnessing it firsthand is an entirely different matter."
"Yeah, this world doesn't make any sense. But that fire was doubly painful because this little guy," – she summoned her Jack Frost for demonstration – "happens to be weak against fire, which makes me weak against it."
"Perhaps it's not the world that makes the elements behave differently," Naoto said, "but the Persona we wield. The Persona lends us its strength and abilities. My senses feel heightened here. At first I felt it was the world, but I believe it's Sukuna-Hikona." She took out her gun and sighted at the torch on the wall. "Yes, he'll help me take my shots."
"It would explain the whole weaknesses deal," Nanako agreed. She summoned Izanami to sing the healing melody, and any aches remaining from the fire were washed away. "Let's get going. If there was a Shadow this way, then they didn't come this way. We'll go back and try another path."
She was starting to worry. There was one other reason that could result in Teddie failing to notice her, especially if they were on the same floor, and that was that the worst had befallen her comrades.
Alternatively, it could be that the squad had found the next floor just as Naoto and Nanako entered it. Or that Teddie's range wasn't even an entire floor. She wished she'd given them some instruction on marking the path for her. Hell, even the string method they'd used in Yukiko's Castle would've been great.
"Nanako-san, there is something I wanted to bring up," Naoto said while they were continuing down an empty hallway. "When you interceded with my Shadow, you mentioned that you're going after Kubo, and I quote, 'for revenge.'"
"Plain and simple," Nanako asserted, slowing down to look Naoto in the eyes. "I wanted him to suffer."
Naoto slowed too, and she saw how Nanako's fingers had curled into a fist. "You were intent on discovering his identity from the start," she noted. "I didn't realize that intent was personal."
"I wanted to strangle him with my own two hands!" Nanako declared, stopping entirely.
The detective blinked at her. She rested a hand on her hip. "So you planned to kill Kubo yourself. I never saw that coming. I will have you know that murder is a grave federal offense, Nanako-san."
"Even the murder of a murderer?"
"Yes. That is only acceptable in self-defense, and even that must be decided by the court. You should know this."
"I do." Nanako held her fist up, trembling.
"If you pursued that goal, had I the authority, I would be interested in bringing you in myself."
Nanako glanced at her sideways. "I might have liked that."
Naoto snickered—it sounded like a suppressed cough—and Nanako laughed too, though she sensed Naoto would bring this up again at a later date. It was too serious to ignore. Nanako wasn't a murderous psychopath, but...
But...
They found no Shadows down this path, and after a sharp turn and through a door, there was a staircase going up. Nanako nodded at Naoto, and they headed up.
A large door greeted them. This was the final floor, then. Muffled noise came from the other side—were her friends fighting Kubo's Shadow now?
She told Naoto to get ready and began to open the door, only for it to be slammed off its hinges and towards the corridor, nearly taking Nanako with it. She could have sworn she saw something flying with the door, but there was no time to check. The scene before her was chaos enough.
For starters, her friends were out. Chie lay against a crater on the wall; Yukiko on the ground close to her, her left arm in a very unnatural position; Kanji clutching his chair for support, face full of blood; Yosuke heavens knew where. Nanako felt as though her chest would burst. Kubo. Kubo did this. Kubo hurt her friends. "Izanami!" she shouted, her broken voice somewhere between ordering and begging, and the goddess set out to heal Kanji, who was closest.
Crack.
Nanako clutched her head in pain as Izanami's form shattered before her. She swayed to the side as the ground seemed to give in under her feet. She feared it would end right there, before she even saw the bastard with her own eyes—but she was not alone. Naoto helped her, stopped her from falling, and so they raised their heads to stare at the enemy, together.
Not Kubo.
An eye within a void gazed upon her so deeply that her mind no longer seemed safe. The eye was so large, she could be staring at the sky, and indeed, something about the blue and purple ringlets surrounding the pure black pupils made her think of the red and black vortex that covered the TV World.
Crack.
Though the sound was the same as before, her Personas were safe, and there was no pain in her head. Something else was crumbling. Something tangible, spread over the ground like broken glass. Nanako looked up. A second eye was revealed. She took a step back, outside the room, and finally the true form of the enemy was clear to her.
Battered blue fur, claws the size of cars, a cracked face, mouth fixed into a smile. Teddie, turned into a monster.
"T-Teddie?" she stuttered as the creature continued to gaze upon her.
"This is Teddie?" Naoto asked, gun in hand, sights set on a target that couldn't possibly be a friend.
"Ah..." the creature exclaimed, a deep, booming voice that echoed through the chamber and maybe even the dungeon itself. "You have arrived, Boss."
The creature raised its claw, previously burrowed deeply on the ground, and pointed to something.
"I have a gift for you."
Nanako held her breath before looking.
There was a lump of flesh on the corner, colored blocks scattered all around it. Nanako didn't know what it was, only that she didn't want to. But the creature... Teddie... went a step further, and stabbed the lump, raising it above for her to see.
A baby. No, a fetus.
Too large to be real, and yet... Nanako knew that it was not dead. Despite the wounds, despite the blood, the fetus kept struggling. When it managed to open its eyes, they looked directly at Nanako.
Emptiness.
Desperation.
Purpose?
No...
Void.
Void quest.
Crack.
Nanako heard a voice that was not her own, a voice she would not be able to remember.
"Mitsuo attacks! Thou hast done well in killing Morooka.
Mitsuo hath been promoted to the next level. Thy attention increases by 16. Thy fame increased by 17. Thy coolness increases by 3."
She felt tears streaming down her face, and promptly ended them.
She stared back into the fetus' lifeless yellow eyes.
I want to end him!
I want to make him suffer!
I want... I want...
Death... Or the Hierophant...
"I want the truth!"
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Teddie flicked his claw, sending the fetus crashing into a nearby wall.
"The truth is unattainable..." it said, and she recoiled. "Though you reach through the murk and the gloom to grasp something, you have no means to know it is the truth... In which case, why? Close your eyes."
"...Never."
Shatter.
Time was brought to a halt around her. Naoto was frozen with her sights set on the monstrosity, and her friends were safe, if but briefly, but Teddie was unaffected, and continued to stare at her.
Igor's voice echoed in her mind. "The fool represents the start of a journey..."
Of course... Her Fool arcana, growing stronger.
Wasting no time, she leaped towards Teddie, twirling her naginata faster than she knew she could. Teddie humorously swiped a gigantic claw over her, and she dodged, ducked, raised her weapon, pierced his fur. Black sludge leaked from the wound, and she jumped back as time resumed its course.
Teddie only laughed.
"Who are you?" Nanako demanded.
"Have you forgotten me entirely, Boss?"
"Don't give me that crap. You're nothing like Teddie!"
"Nothing? Hmhmhm... You might have stumbled upon an inkling of the truth you so eagerly seek with such a remark."
"Answer me, damn it!"
The fake diverted its eyes from Nanako.
"I have wondered, from the moment you arrived in this world, about the truth behind my existence," it eventually said. "Questions such as 'who am I?' and 'what am I?' plagued my mind, hindering my senses. I had thought that, through supporting your incursions into this world, I would eventually find the answer I sought. At your side, 'Teddie' would find his truth.
However... I only ever saw your back. You walked ahead and through the fog, and I could not follow. The only thing this 'companionship' provided was loneliness."
Nanako felt her stomach turn. Before she could even think back on her actions towards Teddie, her own voice began playing in her mind.
'Oh, yeah. Kanji-kun, this is Teddie. He lives in the TV World. He's literally a walking, talking bear costume. I dunno, I don't get it either. I think it's best not to ask.'
'I'll be honest, I haven't really bothered to ask him too many questions. After the fifth 'I dunno' you kind of lose hope.'
'Teddie? Please. No, I can do this on my own.'
As though sensing her thoughts—or perhaps having prompted them in the first place—the monstrosity's broken smirk widened slightly, cracking his face further.
"And so, I came to realize what I had known all along: that there was no answer, no truth, only certain inevitabilities. One is the fact that I hail from the fog, and thus shall one day return to it. Another...
...Your death."
Unexpectedly, the fake Teddie gripped the ground with both claws and raised his body from the ground. There was only a gigantic, crumbling plastic torso, and nothing underneath but his eyes, or so Nanako had thought. The darkness within his body, the same black sludge that had seeped from his wound, started to pour out, leaving the empty shell behind. The sludge formed an amorphous mass, not unlike the Shadows lurking in that very dungeon before taking on their battle forms. However, rather than assuming another shape, the sludge spread throughout the room, covering everything. For a brief, terrifying moment, Nanako was standing in pure darkness, unable to see even Naoto, who had been directly at her side. But she would wish to return to that darkness, when not a second later countless eyes opened on every surface, even beneath her feet and the empty carcass the monster had been inhabiting up until then.
The fake Teddie's voice echoed across the room:
"I am a Shadow, the true self..."
Nanako hesitated. What was that? What was that? That was a Shadow? That thing, that monster, was a Shadow? How would they hurt it? How would they even—
"Nanako-san, watch out!"
When Nanako snapped out of her thoughts and looked around for what Naoto might have been trying to warn her against, it was too late. The eye on the ground directly in front of her was glowing, and above it was a sphere of dark, powerful energy. Nanako didn't need anyone to tell her that it was about to explode. She hefted her naginata in a weak attempt at defense, and her reward was being blown directly into the remaining door, which, too, was slammed off its hinges. Something resembling lava gathered at the epicenter, but the Shadow did not seem hurt in the slightest.
"Nanako-san!" Naoto yelled, having found cover beneath some rubble from the battle her friends must have waged.
Nanako, though relatively unhurt, gasped.
"Yosuke!"
She turned around and her fears were confirmed. The shape she thought she'd seen... Yosuke was knocked out underneath the first door, lying in his own blood. She then remembered Kanji had seemed to be awake when she'd arrived, and turned around to look for him too, only to find that he had passed out. When, she did not know. She had not bothered to notice. She...
She was a terrible friend.
The black sludge was starting to spread outside the room like tendrils, tiny eyes opening whenever possible and then converging into larger eyes as more of the corridor was covered. Nanako wondered whether the Shadow was spreading itself thin, and her instincts told her no. It was growing more powerful.
"We have to defeat it here," she said, unable to hide the desperation in her voice. "If it covers the whole dungeon, we won't stand a chance."
In response, Naoto aimed at one of the eyes and shot.
Jackpot. If she wasn't so scared, she might have been impressed. Nanako had tried some shooting once, under her father's supervision, and it was not that easy. The bullet hit an eye on the other side of the room dead in the middle.
But...
The eye twitched once, twice, and then the bullet was spit out and rolled uselessly along the ground.
"No effect, huh?" Naoto said dryly, then sighed. "I had a feeling guns would be less useful in this world."
"Yeah..." Nanako said, not at all confident in her naginata either. "Wait, look!"
The eye that had generated the first explosion was now glowing orange. In video games, that usually meant a weak spot, right? Nanako dashed as multiple eyes around her began to charge the dark energy, hoping to hell and back that Naoto was good at nonverbal communication because she sure didn't have breath to speak right now. As she stepped back into the room, she realized just how strange it was to be walking through black sludge and monstrous eyes—they moved under her feet, as though breathing, and seeped into her shoes with each step. She stared at the empty Teddie shell ahead, now part of a much larger abomination, and shuddered at the thought that the same could happen to her own body.
"Here goes nothing!" Nanako yelled as she dug her naginata into the faintly glowing eye. What a disgusting sound, she thought, like something being squeezed. The very next moment, a high-pitched scream filled the room, so loud that she felt her ears would burst, a feeling that was multiplied tenfold when she felt something liquid running down the side of her face.
"Izanami!" she cried, and as the goddess held back the pain, Nanako looked down to see whether the attack had worked. The eye had disappeared entirely, exposing the floor underneath. That was good, but already the black tendrils moved in to cover the wounded spot...
What is this? she thought, eyes wide, trying to stop her hands from shaking. This is Teddie? This was inside Teddie? It was a Shadow, that much was clear, but Shadows were supposed to represent parts of you that you didn't want to acknowledge, secrets that you didn't want let out. Nanako pictured the cheerful bear, making his awful puns and always ready to help, and compared it to the monstrosity she was facing... They were irreconcilable. Worst of all, she hadn't seen the real Teddie anywhere in the room.
If this is what he's been hiding inside, then maybe he was never cheerful at all.
When the scream finally died down, Nanako looked around the room for Naoto. The detective was on the defensive, never shooting, only running to dodge the explosions, except it turned out the eyes could only charge a limited number at a time, and seemed to prefer charging as close to their target as possible. Nanako watched the trail of energy following Naoto, only sometimes blowing up, always out of reach. Naoto herself looked tired, but otherwise unscathed. Nanako was surprised, but, come to think of it... When she'd blocked that surprise attack earlier, she wasn't too battered up either, was she? In fact, her only injuries were from slamming into the door. Certainly her poor blocking skills hadn't been responsible for that.
If they could be blocked so easily, then they must have some kind of different effect. That was video game logic, but they were in a video game dungeon.
"Sukuna-Hikona!" Naoto shouted suddenly. The tiny moth boy raised his sword and disappeared in a flash, leaving only a trail of white behind. Nanako followed this trail, and saw that the Persona was hitting each glowing eye in the path Naoto had walked. From her vantage point, she could see the sludge dispersing, leaving more and more of the floor exposed.
Awesome! Doing one at a time would be impossible because the Shadow healed too fast, but when there's a trail...
Naoto wouldn't be able to keep up her brilliant strategy for much longer, however. For all her smarts, she was really quite the opposite of athletic. Her face had gone red just from running around the room once. Nanako smirked. Finally something she could do.
Nanako closed her eyes and summoned Vetala to the forefront of her mind. Then, she bolted towards Naoto.
"Nanako-san," Naoto said through heavy breathing. Nanako sort of didn't hear her clearly; her ears were ringing. "I don't feel any heat from these explosions."
"Yeah," Nanako agreed, "They aren't fire, just... Pressure, I guess."
"As long as we block, at any rate."
"Oh, you figured it out too?"
Naoto nodded.
"We need to hit them all at once somehow," Nanako continued. "I don't have that kind of firepower, but I can make them line up for you!"
"I may have a way to hit them all," Naoto said, staring intently at her gun.
"I thought so, what with how your moth boy just owned me!"
They chuckled together, but when their eyes met, it was with determination.
"I don't have many bullets left," Naoto admitted. "This may be our only chance."
"We can do it. We've come this far, right?"
"I admire your confidence, Nanako-san," Naoto said, tipping her cap.
In response, Nanako gave her a hug.
"Girls can be princes too," she said. "Let's show this Shadow who's boss."
Nanako raised her naginata and went with the age old strategy:
"Hey, oil bomb, come and get me!"
Unsurprisingly, it did not work. I guess he's not that dumb...
Naoto seemed to be getting ready to do whatever she was going to do in the meantime, and Nanako decided not to interrupt her to ask for ideas on how to bait the monster.
Well, she could just move down the list of dumb ones.
"Omoikane!" she called. The poor nerdy brain thing was absurdly unfit for that battle, much like most of her Personas. Nanako had felt strongly about it at the time, and was kinda proud of how well she'd done on her own, but her reason for not visiting the Velvet Room seemed so petty now. Yeah, so maybe bitchface arcana punched her, but what was a punch compared to the lives of her friends? The very lives she had put in danger with that suicidal solo mission...
Nanako shook her head, trying to get back to the matter at hand.
"Mazio!" she commanded, and the Persona sent thunderbolts flying in every direction; predictably, they didn't do much, but every eldritch eye in the room turned to her anyway. Success? To be honest, she'd kinda winged it when she was talking to Naoto, so apart from running around as the detective had done, she was not at all sure what to do next. Hopefully a good plan would present itself to her while she ran for her life.
It started. The eyes around Nanako began to charge their dark energy, which she took as her cue for bolting the heck away. When she did, she noticed right away that something was wrong. Rather than stopping the charge when she got far enough, the eyes morphed into mouths and ate them. Gross, and more than a little disturbing, but harmless... at first.
"I will show you truth!" the Shadow declared suddenly, and several eyes converged into a larger, multicolored one right beneath Nanako. Though it was big, she was fast enough to run outside its blast radius.
Or she would be, if it hadn't opened into a gaping mouth before she could even lift her feet.
"Shit!"
Nanako tried everything as she fell into the darkness. She tried gripping the pointy teeth on the slimy walls, but managed only to lacerate her hands. She tried to slow her fall with her naginata, and though, to its credit, it didn't break, turns out you kinda have to be super strong to pull that off. Finally, she tried a wind spell. That's when she saw the energy being charged below her.
"No fire," she muttered, "just pressure."
She aimed her wind spell there, assumed the best blocking stance she could in mid-air and with injured hands, and hoped for the best.
If the explosion was fire, she would have been immediately burned to a crisp. The pressure alone would be enough to tear her eyelids off, and it was, to the one she couldn't close fast enough. Her blocking stance was lost in the pain as she raised one hand to cover the exposed eye. The very next thing she felt was her back hitting a hard surface. The air went out of her all at once, along with some blood.
The plan, she thought hazily as a voice called her from far away, but she couldn't move, not completely; her hand grasped for a naginata that wasn't there. She must have dropped it... Her grip had been weak anyway.
The voice called her again. Why was it so distant? If only she could move.
When she dared open her uninjured eye, she realized she was upside down, high above the ground. With her eye bleeding, her ears ringing, her back pulsing in pain and most likely embedded to a pixelated ceiling and her only weapon not anywhere near her, adrenaline must have been the only thing keeping her lucid, but she was beginning to doubt even that, what with how the whole room seemed to be glowing.
"...san..."
There it was again.
"...ako-san..."
Naoto?
"Nanako-san!"
"Naoto..." she said weakly. Then she snapped awake, and everything came together in her head. "Naoto! Forget about me. Do it now!"
Naoto, standing amidst the glowing eyes, seemed to hesitate for second, before nodding firmly and pointing her gun ahead. Nanako saw that Sukuna-Hikona hovered behind the detective.
Naoto fired.
The glow immediately started to subside as the bullet hit one, two, three eyes, and one more and then again. Nanako couldn't believe what she was seeing. A single bullet, ricocheting around the room. And what was that light following it closely behind? A trail? The bullet was leaving a trail?
Nanako's vision began to darken, the ringing in her ears increasing in intensity, but she heard Naoto one last time:
"Megidolaon!"
When she came to, Nanako was staring into the ominous but also somewhat comforting black and red vortex that was the sky in the TV World. She watched it move for a while, detached from her surroundings as her senses slowly returned, numb even to the intense pain she knew she must be feeling.
With that thought, she raised her right hand.
"...ma..."
It was not a pretty sight. Though the blood was gone, so was the skin from some areas, and it was badly swollen. ...Also every few seconds, her hand would glow faintly. Nanako blinked, wondering when her skin acquired such magical properties, but then she got distracted by the fact that she actually could blink now, and with both eyes, too.
"...a... ma..."
Maybe someone was trying to heal her? Didn't seem to be working for the hands, though. Where was she, anyway? She wasn't upside down anymore, so probably not the ceiling. The fact that she was staring at the sky should have clued her in on that, she realized a few seconds too late for comfort. Anyway, the dungeon didn't have any windows that she could remember, so she was probably outside.
Yes, that seemed a safe bet.
"...aram..."
The silence was starting to break, as it often happens whenever we're enjoying it. There was a voice again, somewhere to her left. Nanako was made aware of an intense headache, and wished whoever was screaming stopped. It was rather painful to move, but she did wanted to tell them to shut up, so she turned left.
Pixelated rubble greeted her.
"...arama!"
No one? Where is this voice coming from?
"Diarama!"
Yosuke.
"Come on, wake up!"
"She has a pulse and is breathing steadily... Perhaps this is simply exhaustion."
Naoto.
"Well, whose fault is that anyway!?"
Chie.
"If only I could summon my Persona... But my head is pounding."
Yukiko.
"Don't blame yourself, senpai."
Kanji.
Despite their voices coming from the left, there was only rubble there, so... Nanako turned to her right.
Yosuke was kneeling beside her, head turned to the ground, summoning Jiraiya over and over again. Naoto and Chie, both up, were looking at him with a worried expression, while Kanji was helping Yukiko stay up by steadying her. Their clothes were battered and they were covered in dust and dry blood...
"Hey guys," Nanako said, her voice quite hoarse, "try looking at the patient while you perform surgery next time."
"Nanako!" Yosuke was practically in tears, but after a few seconds, he switched expressions to... Nanako tried to make sense of it. Was that a frown? Oh, was Yosuke glaring at her? She chucked weakly. Yosuke couldn't give a decent glare if his discount depended on it.
"Nanako-san..." Naoto said, her face displaying such relief that Nanako regretted ever worrying her.
The others said things too, but she... she couldn't hear them. She could see their mouths moving, but no voice. Maybe they were whispering, or maybe they weren't saying anything.
Nanako was too tired to think about it, so she stared at Naoto instead. "Did the plan work?" she asked.
"What plan?" Naoto said with a slight smirk. "I only remember a pair of teenagers clearly in over their heads."
Nanako smiled in response.
"Yes, the plan did work. In fact, it might have worked too well... If such hyperboles are allowed, my head is going to explode any second now."
"Megidolaon, huh?" Nanako said. "Yukiko got a cool bonus for accepting her Shadow without fighting it too, so don't think you're special or anything."
Nanako looked around her. Rubble. Pixelated rubble, and the sky... She was still inside the dungeon, still in the boss room.
"Looks like you opened a secret passage," she joked. "How did I survive that, anyway?"
"Well, you got me," Naoto said, dusting off her cap. "By all accounts, it doesn't make sense."
"Wait, really?"
"No." The detective chuckled, but she was clearly torn. "You survived thanks to your friends' excellent sense of dramatic timing."
"I nabbed you when you were falling," Kanji summarized. "You were pretty beat up, though."
"I still am," Nanako admitted. "Everything hurts so much, I don't even know where to start describing it."
"Our spells seem to have a limit to their effectiveness," Yukiko said. She was carefully holding her own limp left arm up by the sleeve.
My fault...
"Nanako," Chie butted in, "not to interrupt or anything, but, he still wants to talk to you."
"Who?" she asked, and her answer was the sound of some very familiar footsteps. Nanako raised her head in spite of the pain, her frown turning into a smile as she saw Teddie approaching.
"Boss," said the deep, distorted, unmistakable voice of a Shadow.
"You..."
A pair of bright yellow eyes, surrounded by void. An uncharacteristic blank expression. Everything else was the same as Teddie, but that was not him.
"Where is Teddie?" she demanded.
"You said you would never close your eyes," the Shadow said, ignoring her question. "Where does such resolve come from? What makes your relentless pursuit worth the pain it brings?"
Nanako answered with a question of her own, resolved to play twenty questions until the conversation was going the way she wanted it to. "You said you came from the fog and would one day return to it... What did you mean?"
"The fog is but a tool," the Shadow explained, "and no truths come from within."
"What, are you a lie, then?"
"In a sense. I fooled myself into thinking that there was something for me beyond the fog, but there is no such thing for a mere Shadow."
What?
"What are you saying?"
"I ask you once again," the Shadow went on, "what is so compelling about the truth, that you would seek it so strongly?"
Nanako hesitated. Why did she want the truth, anyway? She had the sense she was never really searching for it until the Shadow asked her not to. Was she just being contrary?
"Truth and justice..." she whispered weakly. Yes, that was why, or it would have been, before Mr. Morooka died. "I suppose you're right. The truth doesn't seem that great, and most of the time isn't even worth the trouble to find."
"Then why?" the Shadow pressed. There was a desperate quality to its... no, his voice.
"I guess because, in every truth there's a promise of something better. You don't always find it, but if you stop looking, then what do you have left?"
"And should you find it, and see that there is nothing left? What then?"
"There's more than one truth, Teddie. If you find one and it isn't what you expected, you can just move on to the next."
"Ah..." The Shadow smiled, yet his expression was far from content; in fact, looking at him made Nanako want to cry for some reason. "In that case, I shall leave you with one truth, so that you may move on to the next."
The Shadow then faded, leaving behind a cracked yellow mask. Naoto took it and gazed at it briefly before handing it to Nanako.
Yellow? No, more like a dull gold. It looked kinda like a ballroom mask, with a single horn protruding from the forehead and spreading into five points, like a star... And engraved at the center, the roman numerals XVII.
An arcana that she could have been linked to, but never bothered.
[AN: Three cheers to the co-author, herrDoktorat, who took the helm here and wrote the entire Shadow Teddie battle and its aftermath for me. You can thank him for your nightmares, ahaha...
Some explanation: The first crack was Nanako's Persona "breaking."
The second was an actual crack, the sound of Shadow Teddie's crumbling body.
And the three sequential ones are Nanako's perception of Kubo breaking, which in turn leveled her Fool Arcana.
Next Chapter: What Comes Next]