"Hey there! Yatsu! Benny! It's been a while!" Renko waved at the Tsukumo sisters as if she hadn't a care in the world.

They turned to eachother, each mouthing the other's newly-assigned nickname with surprise. Yatsuhashi was the first to recover. "Don't greet us like we're your friends and don't give us weird nicknames! You two are our tools! Where did you run off to yesterday?"

"...Nowhere. You flew off and left us behind..." I interjected.

"Shut up! Only the most useless sort of tools would fail their masters like that. You couldn't even locate anything! What good are you as a tool?"

I shrank back from Benben's harsh rebuke, but before anyone could say anything else, Mokou inserted herself into the conversation, floating into position directly between us and the two tsukumogami.

"Hey Renko," she asked over her shoulder, a confident grin on her face. "These two tsukumogami are the ones who kidnapped you yesterday, right?"

Renko nodded.

"And they happen to be tsukumogami of musical instruments, right?"

"That's right."

"And, if I recall, you happened to mention that they were two wooden musical instruments, weren't they?" As she asked this, Mokou casually threw one hand out to the side, palm upward, fingers curled as if she were holding a ball. A flame blossomed in her hand then immediately expanded, hissing hungrily as it licked high into the air.

"Whoa! Hey sister look, that human's on fire!" Yatsuhashi blurted.

"She's flying too. She must be one of those human youkai exterminators."

"Oh! Then that makes her one of the chief enemies of our youkai revolution, right?"

"Well, not as much as the powerful youkai who are on top right now, but she may as well be one of their servants. She's an obstacle to our cause!"

"Oooh! Let me fight her! Over here, human, I'll be your opponent!"

"Okay, do your best." Benben floated back, stepping away from her sister without any argument while Yatsuhashi looked toward Mokou with an evil, menacing grin.

Mokou looked surprised and lowered her flame for a moment. "A tsukumogami isn't really much of a challenge. I don't mind taking you both on at once."

"What are you saying? Don't you realize how powerful we've become? The age of humans using tools has ended. We're on top now and it's always been my dream to defeat a powerful human by myself. You're going to become the face of our new age of human subjugation!"

Mokou sighed. "Look, I don't really care about your political aims, but you threatened and abducted my friends. You realize I'm not going to go easy on you, right?"

"Like I'd want you to. Show me what you can do, human. Maybe once I've conquered you I can put you to use as a grill."

Mokou shrugged then motioned with her left hand for us to back up. Genji obediently cut our speed and drifted away, giving Mokou some space. Mokou continued to watch us for a bit to make sure we were far enough back then turned to face Yatsuhashi.

"Suit yourself" was all she said as fire raced up her arm and exploded suddenly from her back. A churning cloud of combustion swirled and formed itself into two enormous crimson wings behind her, crackling with heat and throwing off a wave of sparks. The light of her fires alone was enough to dye the sky a dim red around her. Across from her, the expression on Yatsuhashi's face had changed dramatically as she raised her hands to fend off a shower of sparks. It was very much the face of someone who was realizing they had just picked a fight they shouldn't have. Genji backed us away even further. In the distance I could see Benben backing off too, hovering just on the edge of the dense swirl of clouds, looking distinctly worried. "How about it?" Mokou roared, with a voice that was only partly her own, filled with the crackle and hiss of raging flames. "If you won't start, I will."

"Umm, just hold on a minute. Time out, okay? Time out! Benben?"

"Time's up," Mokou said. There was an explosion that became the flapping of wings, and then a jet-like roar that swallowed Yatsuhashi's scream.

-.-.-.-.-

It was a terribly one-sided battle. To her credit, Yatsuhashi fought intelligently, deftly avoiding Mokou's wide, heavy attacks and weaving through fields of danmaku while constantly retreating. She made some solid attempts to fight back as well, setting up complex barriers of glowing bullets and lasers that intertwined, arranging themselves like notes on a musical staff. It wasn't much use though. Whatever patterns and gambits she might have been planning didn't count for much when Mokou could just burn everything in her way.

"Ahh! I surrender, I surrender! Don't burn me up!" Yatsuhashi yelled after her fourth attempt to set a complex snare had vanished in sea of flames. Mokou drew to a halt and the huge phoenix-like shape of the fire surrounding her flapped its wings a final time then broke apart into a shower of sparks that washed over Yatsuhashi as Mokou slowed to a standstill.

"Big sister! You can't give up, that's so pathetic!" Benben cried from her position far off to the side of the fight.

"Then you come fight her!"

"Biwas are really sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity. I don't want to go out of tune. That's what big sisters are for, right?"

"You're a terrible little sister!"

"Well you're the big sister so that's your fault. You should have taught me better."

"Enough," Mokou growled, intimidating them both into silence. "What are you both doing here anyway?"

"We're tsukumogami! We're here to overthrow humanity and begin a new era where the weak rule over the strong!"

"I know that much already, but I mean why are you here right now? What's inside that cloud behind you?"

The two sisters looked at each other for a moment before replying. "We don't know, but we think it's the source of our power. We haven't been able to get close to it though. You can't see in there, and if you try to fly in you just come right back out of the cloud somewhere else."

Benben pointed into the heart of the swirling storm of barriers as she said that. I suppose it would just look like an ordinary cloud to anyone else, but to me hearing that they had been buffeted around by the swirling vortex wasn't at all surprising. If a human had gone in there, I wouldn't have been surprised if the force of the currents was enough to tear them apart.

"There's some sort of storm going on in there," I said, loud enough that everyone would be able to hear me. It's not a normal storm, but it would probably push anyone away if they could be affected by it." It was a little hard to believe even as I said it. The cloud in question was large, but it was light and fluffy. There was no sound of wind, nor any rain or lightning. Only I could see the cyclone swirling within it.

"So the problem is that cloud then? Why don't you do something about it?" Yatsuhashi asked.

"Me? What do you expect me to do about a magical storm cloud?"

Neither Benben nor Yatsuhashi had an answer to that, but after a moment Yatsuhashi scoffed. "Tch. You really are a completely useless tool, human."

"Can you do something about it with an explosion?" Benben asked, turning to Mokou.

"Oh yeah! If you can blow up that cloud then I'll allow you the privilege of going to see what's inside first."

"You're in no position to dictate anything. I can probably destroy that cloud, but I can't guarantee anything inside would survive. What do you think, Merry?"

"...Whatever is causing this Incident is in there, I'm pretty sure. I think we might as well try."

Mokou nodded. "Alright. I'm going to go all out then. You'd better stand back."

Genji turned around and began flying away without having to be asked. I craned around to look behind me. "Mokou, are you okay with this?" I asked as we retreated.

"Yeah. Brute force is my specialty." The flames exploded from her back again as she turned toward the cloud. Her voice crackled with the flames once more as shouted at the Tsukumos. "Get clear if you don't want to burn!"

As we continued to retreat both Renko and I couldn't help but twist around to look back. I don't think Mokou was specifically trying to be flashy, but she wasn't above a bit of drama and we had only seen her really get serious once before and at that time we had been watching from a much greater distance. Despite that, we had seen enough then to know her technique was likely to be rather spectacular. The flames whirling around her had ceased to look anything like a pair of wings extending from her back and had extended much further, to the degree that the figure of Mokou herself was nearly lost in the vast, burning form of an enormous firebird, its wings slowly expanding and stretching as they unfolded. Mokou was somewhere in the center of the bird's chest, but the light of the flames was so bright and the heat was so intense that I couldn't look directly at her. The wings of burning avian form drew back and arched splendidly over the bird's head.

Mokou's battle cry resounded like a clap of thunder. "[South Wind, Clear Sky -Fujiyama Volcano]!"

The whole of the immense fiery shape was drawn forward as if by a vacuum, sucked into a compact ball that raced toward the cloud before exploding with a deafening boom. That was just Mokou's opening salvo however. As the blast detonated she threw her arms forward and a roaring torrent of swirling flames leapt to follow the explosion. There might have been even more to her Spell Card but if there was I didn't see it, for it was at that moment that the first blast wave hit us, hot and forceful like a desert wind. Renko had to clamp her hat onto her head and we both had to close our eyes to resist the sting of intense heat and bone-rattling force booming outward.

When the last of the many, many flashes and booms that followed finally subsided we opened our eyes to see Mokou floating with her back to us, wiping sweat from her forehead. A red afterglow still clung to the air around her and wisps of cloud and smoke were torn into streaks littering the sky, tiny, riven remnants of what had once been the storm. Beyond Mokou though, in the center of what had once been a towering cloudbank something else was now visible. An impossible, nonsensical vision hung in the air, as undeniably real as it was fantastically unbelievable.

From the heart of the storm the keep of a traditional Japanese-style castle had emerged, floating in the sky. It didn't look to have been damaged by Mokou's assault, but it was floating completely upside down, with its multi-layered and gracefully arched rooves pointed down toward the earth. Held up by nothing at all, the huge tower loomed, its shadow painted over much of the Forest of Magic.