Date A Live Arcs

<kurumi_arc>
This summary contains how Kurumi's arc goes, you must follow this as closely as possible:

Kurumi's arc begins with a look at Tokisaki Kurumi before she ever became the Spirit known as <Nightmare>. She was born into a wealthy household and raised by loving parents without any significant hardship. Despite that comfortable life, Kurumi was deeply disturbed by how much suffering existed outside of it. War, poverty, disease, hunger, and countless other tragedies continued while ordinary people simply accepted that most of them were beyond their ability to change. Kurumi could never completely accept that helplessness. Beneath the manners of a refined young lady was a sincere desire to help people and become someone capable of making the world better.

Her closest friend during this period was Yamauchi Sawa, a normal schoolgirl with whom Kurumi spent her peaceful everyday life. Sawa owned an American Shorthair named Chestnut, which Kurumi adored despite being unable to keep a cat herself because of her mother's allergy. Kurumi and Sawa expected their ordinary days together to continue without interruption.

One evening while walking home after parting from Sawa, Kurumi suddenly finds herself inside an unnaturally silent area. There she encounters a grotesque shadow-like creature that appears ready to attack her. Before Kurumi can be killed, a beautiful girl wearing an extraordinary dress appears and destroys the creature.

The mysterious girl tells Kurumi that what she just saw was a Spirit, an existence that threatens the world. She then asks Kurumi a question perfectly designed to reach the idealism already buried inside her: does Kurumi desire power? If Kurumi accepts, she can obtain power like hers and help save the world.

Kurumi accepts.

The girl introduces herself as Takamiya Mio and calls herself an ally of justice.

The story then returns to the present, roughly a month after Mukuro was sealed. Shido arrives at Raizen High and discovers an impossible sight waiting inside Class 2-4. Tokisaki Kurumi has returned to school.

Kurumi is wearing the ordinary Raizen uniform rather than her Astral Dress and behaves as though she is simply a classmate returning after an extended absence. Tohka and Origami immediately place themselves between Kurumi and Shido, knowing perfectly well what she is capable of. Kurumi casually points out that if she genuinely intended to attack, she could have already deployed <City of Devouring Time>, flooded the school with clones, and used Shido's classmates as hostages. Instead, she claims that she only wants to enjoy school life again.

Kurumi immediately begins tormenting Shido socially instead. She loudly implies that she has been doing extremely questionable things with him during her absence, causing the rest of the class to begin spreading rumors before Shido can correct her.

Shido eventually tells Kurumi that if returning to normal school life is genuinely all she wants, he would happily welcome her back under one condition: she allows him to seal her Spirit power.

To everyone's astonishment, Kurumi agrees.

There is only one condition of her own.

Kurumi postpones explaining it until after school, leaving Shido, Tohka, and Origami unable to determine whether she is serious or merely preparing another trap.

Elsewhere, Artemisia Bell Ashcroft continues investigating Tobiichi Origami. Their confrontation during the Mukuro incident left Artemisia with the inexplicable feeling that she already knew Origami despite possessing no memories of her. DEM's records confirm Origami's history as an AST Wizard, yet provide no explanation for Artemisia's familiarity. Ellen knows Origami but refuses to explain the connection in detail. Artemisia therefore remains unable to understand why a supposed enemy feels recognizable to her.

After school, Shido meets Kurumi on the rooftop. She confirms that she has not abandoned the objective that originally brought her into his life. Shido now carries the sealed power of ten Spirits. The enormous amount of Reiryoku accumulated inside his body is exactly what Kurumi needs for her ultimate purpose.

Shido refuses to treat the situation as a simple transaction. He tells Kurumi that his goal has also changed since their first encounter. He still wants to seal her power, but merely disarming her is no longer enough. Kurumi has committed crimes and killed people, so he will not simply pretend none of that happened. At the same time, he refuses to accept that her only possible future is remaining a murderer until she dies. He wants Kurumi to atone for what she has done and then find a way to live happily afterward.

Kurumi finds the declaration almost absurdly idealistic. She cannot surrender her Reiryoku because accomplishing her own objective requires both her power and Shido's. Neither side is willing to abandon what they want.

Kurumi therefore proposes a contest.

The rules are extraordinarily simple.

The first person to genuinely fall in love with the other loses.

If Shido succeeds in making Kurumi fall for him, Kurumi will surrender and allow him to seal her Reiryoku.

If Kurumi makes Shido fall for her first, Shido must become hers. She will be free to take the enormous amount of Reiryoku stored inside his body, even though doing so would mean devouring his life.

Kurumi is completely confident. She does not intend to merely overpower Shido and eat him. She wants him to become so enamored with her that he willingly gives himself to her.

Shido accepts.

He declares that he will make Kurumi choose him over the objective she has pursued for years.

Their contest begins under circumstances more dangerous than either initially realizes. DEM has already begun targeting Shido much more aggressively. Ellen moves against him while Mana intercepts her, and DEM unveils another consequence of Westcott possessing <Beelzebub>: the <Nibelcol>.

The <Nibelcol> are identical girls created from pages of <Beelzebub> through a combination of Demon King power and DEM technology. Individual bodies can be produced repeatedly, their personalities and memories are shared across the collective, and destroying one normally accomplishes almost nothing. They provide DEM with something disturbingly similar to Kurumi's own numerical advantage through clones.

Kurumi's clones secretly interfere with the attack and assist Mana against the <Nibelcol>. Shido does not know this. Kurumi has every reason to keep him alive because she needs the Reiryoku stored inside him, but the degree of effort she is already spending on his survival is far greater than he realizes.

Back aboard <Fraxinus>, Kotori is furious that Shido accepted a game in which losing means effectively surrendering his life to Kurumi. Shido admits that it is dangerous, but there was no realistic route to Kurumi's heart without accepting the confrontation she offered.

The discussion turns toward Kurumi's objective. Mukuro asks why Kurumi would require an amount of Reiryoku as enormous as everything stored inside Shido.

Nia provides the first major clue.

Before Nia's sealing, Kurumi once approached her and demanded the use of <Rasiel>. Kurumi wanted information concerning the Spirit responsible for the enormous catastrophe thirty years earlier: the Spirit of Origin. She asked for the exact time and place of the Spirit's appearance, the nature of its powers, and most importantly, a method by which it could be killed.

That information combined with Kurumi's Angel makes the likely objective clear.

Kurumi possesses <Zafkiel>, an Angel capable of manipulating time. One of its bullets can send her into the past, but traveling decades requires a gigantic amount of Reiryoku. Shido now possesses precisely such a reservoir.

Kurumi intends to take Shido's Reiryoku, travel approximately thirty years into the past, and kill the Spirit of Origin before the subsequent history of Spirits ever begins.

What Ratatoskr still does not understand is why.

Mana arrives carrying another piece of the mystery. DEM attempted to ambush Shido while he was meeting Kurumi, yet Mana had already been positioned to interfere.

Kurumi warned her beforehand.

This makes almost no sense. DEM possesses <Beelzebub> and has deliberately concealed its plans. Kurumi somehow knew precisely enough about an attack that had not happened yet to arrange a countermeasure in advance.

Kurumi and Shido nevertheless proceed with their romantic competition.

The next morning, Kurumi appears at the Itsuka residence and accompanies Shido toward school. Both immediately begin searching for weaknesses in the other's composure.

Shido deliberately changes their route so that they pass through an alley populated by cats. He remembers Kurumi's weakness for them and hopes to finally break through her elegant facade.

The result works almost too well.

Kurumi tries to pretend the cats do not interest her, only to begin coaxing one toward herself with an embarrassingly gentle voice. When Shido catches her acting completely unlike <Nightmare>, Kurumi becomes visibly flustered. She quickly retaliates by turning the situation around and treating Shido as though he were the pet instead.

The detour has another consequence neither openly discusses.

Shido's normal route would have taken him through an intersection at a particular time.

An accident occurs there.

Because Kurumi and Shido took the cat-filled route instead, he was nowhere near it.

Elsewhere, Kurumi's clones speak among themselves with strange precision. They discuss schedules, expected incidents, losses, and the need to keep Shido alive. Their language sounds less like ordinary surveillance and more like people following a sequence of events they have already witnessed.

At lunch, Kurumi and Shido turn homemade food into another stage of their battle. Shido prepares food specifically designed to exploit Kurumi's tastes and fondness for cats. Kurumi retaliates with a carefully prepared lunch of her own. Both attempt to make the other lose composure while feeding one another, with neither willing to admit how natural the interaction is becoming.

Kurumi eventually raises the date that will decide their competition.

February 14.

Valentine's Day.

Shido deliberately refuses to let Kurumi frame it entirely on her own terms. He tells her that he is the one inviting her. He wants Tokisaki Kurumi to go on a Valentine's Day date with him.

Kurumi accepts.

The sealed Spirits immediately begin preparing Shido for what they regard as a battle against an opponent with an unfair advantage. Kurumi is considerably more experienced at controlling a romantic atmosphere than most of them, so the girls decide Shido requires resistance training against the charms of a mature woman. Their attempted training rapidly turns ridiculous, with Miku, Nia, Origami, and the others producing increasingly questionable ideas while Kotori tries to keep the exercise remotely useful.

At the same time, the Spirits begin shopping for ingredients to make Valentine's chocolate.

They unexpectedly encounter Kurumi doing the same thing.

Rather than separating, Kurumi proposes something that would once have seemed impossible: she and the other Spirits should make their chocolates together.

The group returns to the Spirits' mansion and spends the evening cooking. Kurumi fits into the scene with disturbing ease. She is capable, patient, and unexpectedly helpful toward the other girls, behaving almost like an older sister when somebody has difficulty. She still repeatedly reminds them that she intends to claim Shido, and nobody forgets that she remains <Nightmare>, but for several hours Kurumi participates in the same ordinary domestic happiness enjoyed by the Spirits Shido has already sealed.

Reine eventually leaves to return to <Fraxinus>.

Kurumi watches her go with unusual attention.

On February 14, Shido receives Valentine's chocolates from the Spirits, each reflecting their personality in some fashion. The gestures reinforce exactly what is at stake in Kurumi's plan. Shido's current life is built from relationships that did not exist a year earlier, and Kurumi intends to rewrite history on a scale capable of erasing all of it.

Shido then meets Kurumi for their decisive date.

This time he decides not to depend on Ratatoskr's normal system of multiple-choice recommendations. If Kurumi is risking her entire future on the outcome and Shido truly intends to reach her heart, he cannot simply perform whatever answer appears on <Fraxinus>' screen. He has to face her himself.

Kurumi leads them through a route that feels strangely familiar.

Eventually Shido realizes why.

The route resembles the date he once shared with a Kurumi clone created from Kurumi five years earlier. That clone had eventually developed feelings toward Shido independently enough that the original Kurumi killed her for disobedience.

Kurumi deliberately wants to experience what that version of herself experienced.

Their route even takes them to the lingerie store involved in that earlier date. Kurumi wants to know what could possibly have happened between Shido and one of her own clones for that fragment of herself to turn against the original.

Shido refuses to dismiss the previous experience as meaningless merely because the girl had technically been a clone. That Kurumi still came from Tokisaki Kurumi.

He tells the original that he has already captured Tokisaki Kurumi's heart once.

He intends to do it again.

By the end of this date, he wants Kurumi unable to think about anyone but him.

For once, Kurumi is the person forced onto the defensive.

The date continues until evening and finally reaches a park important to both of them. It is the place where Shido first witnessed the horrific side of Kurumi, where she killed humans for their time, and where he was forced to confront the fact that the beautiful classmate interested in him was also a mass murderer. It is also tied to Kurumi's own previous deaths and encounters.

There Kurumi gives Shido the chocolate she prepared.

She admits that the day may have become one of the best memories she possesses.

Shido has prepared something for her as well. His own reverse Valentine's gift is a dark chocolate flavored to suit Kurumi rather than simply something conventionally sweet.

The emotional readings aboard <Fraxinus> make the situation frustratingly clear. Kurumi genuinely enjoys being with Shido. Her affection for him is real. Yet some enormous psychological restraint remains wrapped around her heart. No matter how high her happiness rises, she will not cross the final threshold required for a complete seal.

Shido understands that trying to make the date even more romantic will not solve the problem.

Something is holding Kurumi back.

He asks the question Ratatoskr has been unable to answer since the beginning of the arc.

Why does she need to kill the Spirit of Origin?

Kurumi removes Ratatoskr from the conversation. She destroys or disables the surveillance surrounding them and brings Shido through her shadows to one of the abandoned buildings she uses as a stronghold.

There, Kurumi finally decides to show him.

She manifests <Zafkiel> and uses the Tenth Bullet, <Yud>, on Shido.

<Yud> allows its target to experience memories.

Shido is forced directly into Tokisaki Kurumi's past.

He sees the kind girl Kurumi once was.

He sees Sawa.

He sees the day Takamiya Mio appeared before Kurumi and offered her a Sephira Crystal so they could become allies of justice.

Kurumi accepted Mio's power because the offer matched exactly what she had always wanted. She became a Spirit and obtained <Zafkiel>. She hid her clock-shaped left eye under an eyepatch and continued maintaining her normal life with Sawa while secretly working beside Mio.

Mio taught Kurumi that dangerous Spirits periodically appeared throughout the world. Kurumi's role was to hunt them.

Kurumi did exactly that.

She fought and killed Spirit after Spirit, believing every battle was protecting innocent people. The girl who had once felt helpless when reading about suffering finally possessed enough power to intervene directly. She believed Mio had given her the opportunity to become the person she always wanted to be.

After one particular battle, Kurumi kills a Spirit associated with flames.

The victory should have been another successful act of justice.

Then Kurumi sees the corpse.

The girl lying dead where the Spirit had disappeared is Yamauchi Sawa.

Mio is nearby with the recovered Sephira Crystal.

Kurumi finally understands the truth.

The supposed Spirits she had been hunting were human beings.

Mio had been transforming humans with Sephira Crystals and then directing Kurumi to kill them.

The raw Sephira Crystals were initially too incompatible with human bodies. Mio needed to refine them so that future humans could safely contain their power. To accomplish that, she repeatedly used human beings as filters, implanting crystals into them and later recovering the crystals after the hosts had been killed.

Kurumi had unknowingly served as the executioner for that refinement process.

Sawa was merely the latest victim.

The revelation is so devastating that Kurumi begins to Invert.

Before the transformation can finish, she manages to use <Zafkiel>'s Fourth Bullet, <Dalet>, on herself. Reversing her own time restores her body and Sephira far enough to interrupt the Inversion.

Mio still overwhelms her.

Kurumi subsequently awakens without the memories of what happened. She remembers neither Sawa's death nor Mio's betrayal clearly, but she instinctively understands how to use <Zafkiel>.

The missing truth does not remain buried forever.

Kurumi eventually shoots herself with <Yud>.

Her own memories return.

Sawa.

Mio.

The humans Kurumi murdered while believing they were monsters.

Everything comes back.

From that point forward, Kurumi's entire existence changes.

She can no longer undo the lives she personally took. She can no longer restore Sawa through ordinary means. Killing Mio in the present would punish the culprit without changing any of the deaths already caused.

So Kurumi decides to erase the event itself.

If she can travel far enough backward through time and kill the Spirit of Origin before the chain ever begins, then Mio can never distribute the Sephira Crystals. Kurumi will never become a Spirit. Sawa will never be turned into one. Kurumi's victims will never die by her hands. The entire history created from the Spirit of Origin can be prevented.

The required journey is approximately thirty years.

<Zafkiel> can theoretically make that possible.

Kurumi does not possess enough Reiryoku.

Shido does.

The memory ends.

Back in the abandoned building, Shido finally understands the person standing before him.

Kurumi does not ask him to absolve her.

She does not claim that Mio's deception removes her responsibility for the people she killed afterward.

Kurumi has spent years consuming people's time and accumulating the enormous supply required for her objective. She is completely aware that this added countless new victims to the original tragedy. She expects punishment. She expects damnation. She does not believe she deserves a peaceful ending.

To Kurumi, that no longer matters.

If becoming a monster allows her to reach the past and prevent the history that created that monster, then she will accept being condemned by the present.

Her plan requires the enormous collection of Spirit power inside Shido. Taking it from him will kill him in the current timeline.

Kurumi argues that if she succeeds, even Shido's death will ultimately be erased. The future will be rewritten into one where she never needed to consume him in the first place.

She therefore asks Shido to trust her.

Give her his life now so that she can create a world where that death never happened.

Because the price she is demanding from him is so extreme, Kurumi says Shido can demand nearly anything else from her except abandoning her objective or surrendering the Reiryoku she needs. She pushes the contest toward its most intimate extreme, attempting to force Shido to admit that he wants her badly enough to willingly become hers.

Before the confrontation can reach its conclusion, <Nibelcol> invade the building.

Kurumi immediately switches from seduction to combat.

She stops their time with <Zafkiel>'s Seventh Bullet, <Zayin>, drags the enemies into her shadows, and uses <Dalet> to repair the damage done to the building.

Then she collapses.

The exhaustion is far beyond what Shido expects from the short battle he just witnessed.

A Kurumi clone emerges from the shadows and tells Shido that the original simply needs rest.

Another Kurumi then appears.

She wears an eyepatch and an older Gothic Lolita dress. Shido recognizes her as the Kurumi from five years in the past, reproduced as a clone through <Zafkiel>'s Eighth Bullet, <Het>.

The eyepatch Kurumi asks whether Shido is genuinely prepared to hear the truth.

Then she tells him something impossible.

Shido is already dead.

The statement refers to a history Shido no longer remembers.

The story returns to February 9, the day Kurumi originally came back to Raizen High.

In that first version of events, Shido meets Kurumi on the rooftop after school so she can explain the rules of their contest.

Before Kurumi can finish speaking, Ellen attacks.

Shido is pierced through the chest almost instantaneously.

The Spirits rush from the stairwell after having secretly watched the meeting. DEM deploys <Nibelcol> to keep them away from Shido. Kurumi releases her own clones to counter the pseudo-Spirits and tries to attack Ellen.

Artemisia intercepts Kurumi and severs one of her arms.

The entire rooftop becomes a battlefield.

Shido's healing from <Camael> cannot keep pace with the catastrophic damage.

Ellen cuts off his head.

Shido dies.

The effect on the Spirits is immediate. Tohka, Origami, Kaguya, and Yuzuru are overwhelmed by despair and begin Inverting, turning the school and surrounding area into the center of a catastrophic spiritual reaction.

Kurumi escapes the battlefield.

One of her clones retrieves Shido's corpse.

Kurumi uses <Dalet> on him. His severed head reconnects. The hole through his chest disappears. His body is physically returned to its condition before the injuries.

He remains dead.

<Dalet> can reverse the time of a body.

It cannot restore a life that has already ended.

For Kurumi, everything collapses.

Shido carried the power necessary for her journey thirty years into the past. His death has apparently destroyed years of preparation in a few seconds. Every person Kurumi consumed, every sacrifice, and every crime she justified as necessary for changing history now appears to have accomplished nothing.

But her despair contains another emotion she initially refuses to acknowledge.

She is devastated that Shido himself died.

Kurumi had planned to kill him.

She had repeatedly insisted that he was ultimately a resource required for her mission.

Yet seeing him dead because she failed to protect him fills her with grief.

Kurumi kisses Shido's corpse.

It is her second kiss with him.

The first occurred months earlier, after Shido placed himself between Kurumi and Kotori during their original battle. Before escaping, Kurumi kissed him almost as a playful expression of gratitude.

This second kiss reveals what the first actually accomplished.

The numeral VI on <Zafkiel>, which Kurumi believed had become unusable after that earlier battle, begins shining again.

Kurumi realizes that the Sixth Bullet was never destroyed.

It had been sealed inside Shido.

Even during their first confrontation, Kurumi had opened her heart toward him enough during that kiss for Shido's ability to take a portion of her power.

The bullet is <Vav>.

Unlike <Yud Bet>, which physically sends someone far into the past at an astronomical Reiryoku cost, <Vav> sends the target's consciousness backward through time into their own past body. Its range is only several days, but that is exactly what Kurumi needs.

Kurumi realizes she already lost the romantic contest long before she formally proposed it.

She had begun falling for Shido months ago.

For the moment, that realization is secondary to the possibility in front of her.

Kurumi summons her clones.

She asks them to die for Shido.

The clones accept without hesitation. Their lives are temporary reproductions of Kurumi's past selves, and they regard protecting the original's objective as their reason for existing.

Kurumi loads <Vav>, points the gun at her own head, and fires.

Her consciousness awakens on February 8.

One day before she returns to school.

The timeline has been reset.

Kurumi now knows when Ellen will attack.

She changes the arrangements. She sends clones to watch Shido. She investigates DEM's movement. She contacts Mana, the Wizard who has killed more of Kurumi's clones than almost anyone, and recruits her as an emergency ally because Mana is one of the few people capable of opposing enemies on Ellen and Artemisia's level.

She alters routes.

She intercepts assassinations.

She prepares traps.

She keeps the danger hidden from Shido so that his interactions with her proceed largely normally.

DEM changes how Shido dies.

Kurumi resets again.

DEM finds another opening.

Shido dies again.

Kurumi kisses his corpse, retrieves <Vav>, sends her consciousness backward, and begins another attempt.

Again.

Again.

Again.

<Beelzebub> makes the problem nightmarish. Even when Kurumi prevents one method of assassination, DEM discovers another vulnerability. Ellen, Artemisia, and the <Nibelcol> can attack through countless combinations.

Kurumi learns each one by watching Shido die.

The rewind creates a peculiar balance. Because <Vav> sends only Kurumi's consciousness backward, the physical resources spent after the reset point are restored. Dead clones return because they had not yet died in the new timeline, and Kurumi's consumed time returns because she has gone back to a body that had not spent it yet.

DEM receives the same benefit.

Every enemy Kurumi kills returns when she resets.

Every trap she destroys exists again.

Every victory except knowledge disappears.

Kurumi alone remembers.

She experiences those six days more than a hundred times.

Her mind begins wearing down.

She still refuses to stop.

Every time Shido dies, Kurumi touches his cold lips to retrieve the power he unknowingly sealed from her.

Every time she does, she finds herself wanting to see the living Shido again.

Eventually the number reaches 204.

Shido has died two hundred and four times.

The eyepatch Kurumi finishes explaining this to the Shido of the successful timeline.

Shido is horrified.

Then he notices something even more important.

Kurumi had more than two hundred attempts.

If Shido's Reiryoku were truly the only thing she cared about, she could have used those loops to find a moment when Ratatoskr's protection was weakest and simply eaten him herself.

She did not.

She returned to school.

She proposed the contest.

She spent time with him.

She went on the Valentine's Day date.

She revealed Sawa, Mio, her sins, and the objective she had hidden for years.

Rather than manipulating the timeline until Shido was helpless, Kurumi kept trying to make him understand her.

She asked him for his help.

The original Kurumi wakes before the clone can say much more.

She nearly shoots her own younger clone for revealing everything.

When Shido reaches out to support the exhausted Kurumi, she physically avoids his hand. Her expression does not resemble disgust.

It resembles fear.

Kurumi insists that Shido misunderstand nothing. She only protected him because losing the accumulated Reiryoku inside him would destroy her plan.

Then she leaves.

Shido no longer believes that explanation.

Tokisaki Kurumi is unquestionably a murderer.

She is also the person who endured watching him die 204 times and kept returning to save him.

The person the world knows as the Worst Spirit is also a girl who once wanted more than anything to become an ally of justice.

Shido decides that he will no longer allow Kurumi to carry the entire burden herself.

This time, he will save her.

Afterward, Kurumi confronts the eyepatch clone for exposing what happened.

The clone argues that telling Shido should only benefit them. After learning how many times Kurumi saved him, Shido will inevitably care even more about her.

Kurumi becomes visibly embarrassed.

Their contest is supposed to be decided by who falls in love first.

Allowing Shido to know that she repeatedly destroyed herself to protect him is practically equivalent to announcing that Kurumi is already attached to him.

The clone finds this reaction extremely amusing.

Kurumi does not.

A larger problem remains. In the current successful timeline, Shido is alive. Therefore <Vav> is still sealed inside him. Kurumi cannot simply use it whenever she wishes. Kissing the living Shido to retrieve it could instead complete the sealing of her remaining power.

While Kurumi is considering her options, <Phantom> appears.

The mosaic-shrouded Spirit claims that Kurumi looks troubled and offers advice.

Kurumi's attitude has completely changed.

Once, she accepted information from <Phantom>.

Now she knows enough to consider the being an enemy.

Kurumi attacks.

Her clones fill the area with gunfire and Kurumi strikes <Phantom> with <Zayin>, stopping the target's time. The attack succeeds in stripping away the visual distortion surrounding the mysterious Spirit.

A woman is revealed beneath it.

Long unkempt hair.

Permanent dark circles beneath tired eyes.

A battered stuffed bear carried in her clothing.

Kurumi recognizes her immediately.

Murasame Reine.

Shido's assistant teacher.

Ratatoskr's analysis officer.

The woman who has remained beside Shido, Kotori, and the Spirits through nearly every incident.

<Phantom> is Murasame Reine.

The revelation causes the pieces inside Kurumi's head to begin aligning.

Kurumi attacks before Reine can escape. Countless hands emerge from the shadows and seize her.

Kurumi's shadow possesses more than the region used by her clones. Deeper inside is something analogous to a stomach, a space that strips away and consumes the time of anything trapped within it. Kurumi herself cannot freely inspect that region or retrieve someone once they have been completely swallowed.

She drags Reine into it.

As Reine disappears, Kurumi tells her that she does not even deserve to go to hell.

Volume 16 ends.

Volume 17 opens by going farther back than Kurumi's history.

Long before DEM Industries existed, Elliot Baldwin Woodman, Ellen Mathers, Ellen's sister Karen, and Isaac Ray Pelham Westcott lived within a hidden community descended from magicians.

Elliot and Ellen are still children. Westcott, already called Ike by his friends, displays intelligence and maturity beyond his years.

The community exists in secrecy because ordinary humanity historically persecuted magicians.

Eventually that fear reaches them anyway.

Armed humans attack the village.

Homes burn.

People attempting to escape are shot.

Elliot, Ellen, and Karen are devastated.

Westcott watches with a reaction that already makes Elliot uneasy.

Standing above the destruction, Westcott proposes an answer.

Humanity began this conflict.

Therefore they should create a world where humanity no longer exists.

A world belonging only to magicians.

That moment becomes the ideological foundation from which DEM will eventually emerge.

Ten years pass.

Westcott, Woodman, Ellen, and Karen devote themselves to magical research. They study genuine traditions hidden beneath humanity's occultism, alchemy, theosophy, Kabbalah, and other systems.

Eventually their research produces a ritual.

The Spirit Formula.

At the center of Eurasia, Westcott, Woodman, and Ellen activate the ritual while Karen provides support remotely.

The Formula gathers mana from the world and concentrates it into a single point for the purpose of creating an entirely new life.

Westcott expects the resulting existence to possess a Voluntary Territory on a scale so enormous that it could effectively become another world and overwrite the existing one.

The ritual succeeds.

The resulting catastrophe erases an enormous portion of Eurasia.

When the devastation clears, one thing remains.

A girl.

The first Spirit has been born.

The story returns to Kurumi immediately after Volume 16.

She is physically and mentally exhausted from the accumulated strain of the loops, but believes she has finally eliminated Reine. As far as Kurumi understands, the lethal section of her shadow should make surviving impossible.

Yet killing the current weakened Reine is not her true objective.

Kurumi wants the Spirit that existed at full power thirty years earlier.

She still intends to obtain Shido's Reiryoku and travel into the past.

One of her clones raises a question Kurumi cannot answer.

If Reine and the Spirit behind the Sephira Crystals were originally overwhelmingly powerful, why deliberately divide so much of that power among other people?

Creating the Spirits made her weaker.

There must be something she values more than preserving her own strength.

Kurumi cannot determine what it is.

Meanwhile, Ratatoskr locates Shido and retrieves him aboard <Fraxinus>.

Murasame Reine is sitting at her console.

Alive.

Normal.

Exactly where she belongs.

Kotori experiences a fleeting sensation that something is wrong, but cannot identify the source. Reine answers her normally and the moment passes.

Shido asks Kotori to gather everyone.

He is finished keeping Kurumi's truth to himself.

Shido tells Tohka, Origami, Kotori, Yoshino, Kaguya, Yuzuru, Miku, Natsumi, Nia, Mukuro, Mana, Reine, and Maria everything he learned.

He explains the person Kurumi was before becoming a Spirit.

He explains Sawa.

He explains Takamiya Mio.

He explains how Kurumi was deceived into murdering transformed humans while believing she was saving the world.

He explains why she wants to erase the Spirit of Origin.

And he tells them that Kurumi has already saved his life by rewinding history 204 times.

Shido does not present this information because he believes Kurumi's crimes have vanished.

He wants everyone to understand the complete person.

Kurumi's history as <Nightmare> did not begin with a desire to inflict suffering. It began with a girl who wanted enough power to stop suffering and was manipulated precisely because of that wish.

Mana is especially unsettled by one part of the story.

Takamiya Mio.

The mysterious girl's surname is the same as Mana's.

Shido had previously spoken the name Mio while his Spirit power was out of control despite having no conscious knowledge of anyone with that name.

And the role Kurumi describes is remarkably similar to <Phantom>, the being responsible for distributing Sephira Crystals.

The possibility that Mio and <Phantom> are related, perhaps even the same Spirit, becomes difficult to ignore.

There is still no explanation for Mio's relationship to Shido or Mana.

Both siblings possess missing memories of their earliest lives.

Mukuro points out the obvious solution.

If the problem is locked memories, use a key.

<Michael> can unlock tangible and intangible things alike.

Shido now possesses enough of Mukuro's sealed power to reproduce the Angel himself.

He summons <Michael>. Following Mukuro's guidance, he uses <Tefetei> to reduce the enormous key to a manageable size.

Then Shido drives <Michael> into his own head and unlocks the sealed memories.

A scene appears.

Approximately thirty years earlier, not long after the enormous Eurasian catastrophe, another spacequake devastates part of the Kanto region.

A teenage boy is caught near the destruction.

Rather than fleeing once the devastation settles, he notices a solitary figure inside the center of the erased area and runs toward it because somebody might be injured.

He finds a naked girl.

Her beauty is so overwhelming that he momentarily forgets the disaster surrounding them.

She does not understand him.

She barely appears capable of language.

The memory ends before Shido can understand more.

He awakens in <Fraxinus>' infirmary.

The memory refuses to remain clear. It fades like a dream immediately after waking. Shido knows he saw something important but cannot reconstruct enough details to explain it.

Reine is standing beside him and comforts him.

Mana suggests using <Michael> on her next. She also possesses sealed memories and might remember Takamiya Mio.

The others refuse for the moment.

Mana's missing past does not contain only whatever happened with Shido and Mio. It also contains the period in which DEM abducted her and subjected her body to extensive magical modification. Nobody knows whether <Michael> can selectively unlock only the memories they want without forcing every buried trauma back into her mind.

Shido decides not to risk it.

Even without remembering the vision, one reaction remains.

Whenever somebody says the name Takamiya Mio, Shido's heart tightens.

At DEM, Westcott has finally solved the mystery behind Kurumi's impossible defensive success.

<Beelzebub> allows him to infer that <Nightmare> is not merely predicting attacks.

She has already experienced them.

Kurumi has been using <Zafkiel> to return through time whenever Shido dies and altering her actions on the next attempt.

For DEM, each reset means their previous actions never occurred.

For Kurumi, the experiences accumulate.

Westcott recognizes both the strength and weakness of this arrangement.

Kurumi always has the initiative because she remembers what DEM will do.

But Kurumi alone carries the psychological burden.

Even Ellen is disturbed by imagining the experience of repeatedly watching someone precious die more than a hundred times.

Westcott decides that trying another clever assassination is pointless.

Instead, DEM will create a situation no amount of foreknowledge can solve.

They will use everything.

Every available warship.

Every Wizard.

Every Bandersnatch.

Every Nibelcol.

The power of <Beelzebub>.

Ellen.

Artemisia.

If Kurumi knows exactly what will happen and still possesses no possible route to save Shido, then repeating time will accomplish nothing except forcing her to watch him die again.

Westcott's objective is now to crush Kurumi's hope itself.

The story again returns thirty years to the nameless boy and the newborn Spirit.

The boy has brought the girl home because the hospitals near the disaster are overwhelmed or destroyed.

His younger sister returns.

Takamiya Mana.

Seeing an unknown nearly naked girl in her brother's bedroom produces exactly the misunderstanding expected, until he manages to explain where he found her.

Mana remains suspicious.

The girl's abilities are impossible for an ordinary human. She can create clothing merely from observing it, copying Mana's uniform onto herself.

At the same time, sending her to ordinary authorities could simply result in the inexplicable girl becoming a research specimen.

The siblings allow her to remain with them temporarily.

Within an astonishingly short period, the girl teaches herself language by absorbing enormous quantities of information from books, television, radio, and recorded speech.

Once she can communicate properly, they discover that she knows almost nothing about herself.

She vaguely remembers three people around the time of her creation, but possesses no ordinary identity.

She does not even have a name.

The boy gives her one.

Mio.

Because they met on the thirtieth.

Mana criticizes the simplistic reasoning, but admits that the name itself sounds good.

Because the girl will be living with the Takamiya family, they give her their surname as well.

Takamiya Mio.

For the first time, Mio possesses something that belongs specifically to her.

A name.

The emotion it produces is so unfamiliar that Mio begins crying without initially understanding what tears are.

The boy sits beside her and comforts her.

In the present, Shido is kept away from school because DEM is actively hunting him. He dislikes hiding, particularly because Kurumi may still expect their contest to continue.

Then the eyepatch Kurumi appears inside the Itsuka house.

She has disobeyed the original again.

The clone provides Shido and Kotori with two pieces of information, the most important being the date.

February 20.

Four days away.

On that day DEM will devote its full military power to killing Shido.

The clone explains that the original Kurumi intends to deal with the problem herself by continuing the time loops until she finds a future where Shido survives.

That is no longer realistic.

Westcott knows about the resets.

The coming assault is specifically designed to defeat Kurumi's ability to alter events.

The eyepatch clone admits that the original Kurumi does not know she is telling Ratatoskr any of this. She decided independently that after everything Kurumi has done, it would be absurd for Shido to remain unaware that somebody is destroying herself to keep him alive.

Despite Kotori's suspicions, the clone says one thing sincerely.

Kurumi wants Shido to survive.

Shido asks the clone to pass along a message.

He thanks Kurumi for every life she saved.

Then he tells her that he will not accept remaining a helpless object she has to protect.

Ratatoskr will defeat DEM.

Afterward, Shido will come for Kurumi himself.

This time, he says, he is going to steal her lips.

The eyepatch Kurumi laughs so hard she begins crying.

She refuses to promise delivery of the message, since admitting her independent actions to the original could result in the clone being destroyed, but she is clearly delighted by what Shido said.

Ratatoskr begins preparing for war.

Escaping is not viable because <Beelzebub> can locate Shido.

Negotiating with DEM is meaningless because Westcott's objective explicitly requires Shido's death and the resulting Inversion of the Spirits.

Their only remaining option is to fight.

Kotori makes the reason personal.

Without Kurumi, they already lost.

Shido has died more than two hundred times.

Every ordinary day they are currently experiencing exists because Kurumi refused those endings.

Now DEM intends to destroy Kurumi's ability to save him as well.

Ratatoskr therefore has to seize the next future with its own hands.

Woodman joins the strategy conference remotely. His injuries from Westcott remain serious, but he is alive.

Woodman points out that DEM's absolute numerical advantage makes a simple battle of attrition unwinnable. However, the company itself revolves around two people.

Isaac Westcott provides its direction.

Ellen Mathers provides its overwhelming military execution.

If those two can be removed, the immense organization surrounding them becomes far less stable.

Maria identifies possible weaknesses in two of DEM's mass-produced forces.

The first concerns the <Bandersnatch>.

Their advanced autonomous operation depends on the new <Ashcroft β> Realizer technology. The system was developed using the brain patterns of Artemisia Ashcroft.

If Ratatoskr can capture Artemisia long enough for Maria to analyze the necessary data, there may be a way to transmit interference capable of neutralizing the Bandersnatches.

Origami and Mana already suspect that Artemisia is not voluntarily loyal to DEM in the first place. The woman they remember would never have obediently joined Westcott. Her inability to remember Origami strongly suggests that DEM altered her memories.

The second weakness concerns the <Nibelcol>.

Maria develops a theory based on their composition.

The <Nibelcol> are pseudo-lifeforms generated primarily from <Beelzebub>'s Reiryoku.

<Beelzebub> itself originated from Nia.

That may mean the emotional condition governing Shido's ability to seal them is inherited from Nia rather than from each individual <Nibelcol>.

If Maria is correct, Shido may be able to seal a <Nibelcol> without making the hostile girl personally fall in love with him first because the source Spirit's affection toward Shido already fulfills the underlying requirement.

There is an obvious problem.

Testing this requires Shido to kiss a <Nibelcol>.

The person DEM has mobilized an army to kill must therefore walk directly onto the battlefield.

Shido accepts.

It is absurdly dangerous.

It is also exactly the kind of solution Ratatoskr exists to use.

Before the meeting can expose too many details, Nia stops them.

Even weakened, <Beelzebub> remains an information-gathering Demon King. Discussing their complete strategy creates information Westcott may eventually retrieve.

Ratatoskr therefore divides the plan.

The groups responsible for particular countermeasures will develop them separately, keeping as much as possible outside a single retrievable source until the battle has already begun.

Origami and Mana visit their former AST unit in advance.

They meet Ryouko Kusakabe, Mikie Okamine, Mildred F. Fujimura, and the other Wizards with whom Origami once fought Spirits.

Origami tells them something she was never permitted to reveal while serving in the AST.

The organization protecting Spirits exists.

DEM has manipulated public understanding of Spirits.

And on February 20, DEM and Ratatoskr are likely to fight a large-scale battle in Tengu City.

Origami expects DEM to order the AST into that battle.

She asks her former comrades not to obey.

Ryouko cannot simply accept this. The AST members have spent years believing their work protects humanity from Spirits. Disobeying an official deployment order would mean throwing away their careers based on an extraordinary accusation made by a former subordinate who is now herself a Spirit.

Origami does not threaten them into compliance.

She tells them the truth and leaves the decision with them.

Before departing, she gives Ryouko one warning.

If the AST does enter the battlefield against them, stay behind the Bandersnatches.

Origami does not want to kill her former comrades.

The past continues unfolding between these preparations.

Mio rapidly learns enough about human society to leave the Takamiya home.

The boy takes her through the city and explains things she has only encountered in books.

Traffic signals.

Mailboxes.

Vending machines.

Every ordinary object fascinates Mio.

They reach a game center.

Mio becomes interested in a stuffed bear inside a crane machine.

The boy decides to win it for her.

He spends far more attempts and money than he expected, but eventually succeeds.

He hands the bear to Mio.

Mio attempts to understand why receiving the object makes her feel differently. She analyzes the concept of "liking" something almost as though reading a dictionary definition.

Then she begins associating that feeling with the boy himself.

The battered bear Reine still carries in the present originates here.

February 20 arrives.

Tengu City is evacuated under the cover of a spacequake warning.

The sky becomes a battlefield.

DEM deploys a massive aerial force around the city, including numerous warships, an enormous Wizard contingent, Bandersnatches, and Nibelcol.

Ratatoskr can field only a fraction of those numbers.

The difference is so extreme that the event is no longer comparable to the previous battles between the organizations.

It is war.

Ratatoskr has prepared the city itself as part of its defense. Concealed Realizer-supported emplacements and artillery emerge from places DEM did not expect, allowing the ground to attack the fleet above.

Kurumi enters the war with an enormous army of clones.

The battle creates an almost grotesque mirror.

Kurumi's innumerable past selves fight the mass-produced <Nibelcol> and Bandersnatches generated by DEM.

Westcott responds by committing still more forces.

He orders the remaining Bandersnatches and Wizards forward.

He requests the AST's participation.

Ellen.

Artemisia.

Nibelcol.

Everyone is ordered to fight without restraint.

Westcott calls the battle Ratatoskr's final Ragnarok.

Shido's only formal objective should be surviving.

He cannot remain behind the lines.

Maria's theory about the <Nibelcol> must be tested.

Tohka, Kaguya, and Yuzuru escort Shido through the battlefield toward a group of the pseudo-Spirits.

The <Nibelcol> are almost insulted when they discover Shido approaching them personally. They believe he has voluntarily walked into the exact place DEM wants him.

One rushes him.

Shido tells her that he loves her.

The declaration confuses the <Nibelcol> long enough for Shido to grab her.

He kisses her.

The <Nibelcol> melts away into light and disappears.

Maria was correct.

The effect is even stronger than expected.

The <Nibelcol> are simultaneously many individuals and one collective existence. The emotional and sealing effect experienced by one can propagate to others who share awareness of the kiss. Several nearby <Nibelcol> become overwhelmed by the same reaction and disappear as well.

DEM's supposedly endless pseudo-Spirit army has an absurd weakness.

Itsuka Shido kissing them.

Shido openly challenges the <Nibelcol> to begin their date.

The battlefield turns into a grotesque version of Ratatoskr's usual mission. Tohka and the Yamai sisters create openings while Shido rushes hostile pseudo-Spirits and seals them through kisses.

Elsewhere, Origami, Mana, Yoshino, and Mukuro form the team assigned to Artemisia.

Miku and Natsumi provide large-scale support, with Miku using <Gabriel> and Natsumi reproducing it through <Haniel> to strengthen their allies across the battlefield.

Origami confronts Artemisia directly.

She tells Artemisia that DEM altered her memories.

Artemisia admits that Origami feels familiar, but refuses to believe a Spirit's accusation against Westcott and Ellen.

They fight.

Even with the combination of Origami's limited Astral Dress, <Metatron>, and her <Brynhildr> CR-Unit, Artemisia possesses the advantage in direct combat.

That is acceptable.

Origami does not need to defeat her.

She needs Artemisia focused on her.

Mana, Yoshino, and Mukuro work through DEM's surrounding forces while Origami keeps Artemisia occupied.

The AST then arrives.

At first their presence appears to be exactly what DEM requested.

Ryouko has spent the preceding days struggling with Origami's warning. She and the other AST Wizards built their careers around protecting people from Spirits. Abandoning that identity is not an easy decision.

The battle gives them the final evidence they need.

Ryouko effectively dissolves their obligation before the decision can be made for them. She tells her subordinates to prepare for re-employment and, until then, do whatever they want.

The now "unemployed" AST attacks Artemisia instead of Origami.

The surprise creates the opening.

Origami strikes.

Artemisia avoids a lethal wound through extraordinary Territory control and retaliates, believing she has won the exchange.

Origami tells her otherwise.

A spatial opening appears beside Artemisia.

<Michael> emerges through it.

Mukuro turns the key.

The memories DEM locked away are opened.

Everything Artemisia forgot begins flooding back into her.

At the same time, Ellen realizes the battle around Artemisia is becoming dangerous and moves to intervene.

Woodman has anticipated that as well.

Karen knows what Elliot intends before he says it. She makes one final, half-serious plea that they should abandon everything, find a quiet house in the countryside, have children, and simply grow old together.

Woodman apologizes.

Karen tells him that his willingness to make that choice is one of the reasons she loves him.

Woodman activates an emergency equipment system.

Ellen is intercepted in the sky by a Wizard strong enough to stop her.

The man looks like Elliot Woodman in his physical prime.

For the first time in decades, Ellen is standing against the person whose absence allowed her to call herself the world's strongest Wizard.

Her hatred of Elliot's betrayal erupts immediately.

Their personal battle begins.

The conflict between them will not be resolved during Kurumi's arc.

Another piece of Mio's past surfaces.

Mana has been taken by Westcott's side.

The boy refuses to abandon her. Whatever the danger, Mana is his little sister and he intends to bring her back.

He also refuses the idea that Mio should sacrifice her own happiness simply because the magicians want her power.

His desired outcome is straightforward: rescue Mana and allow Mio to continue living happily.

Mio agrees.

Before they can accomplish it, Westcott appears with a gun.

He shoots the boy through the chest.

Mio watches him collapse.

The boy's consciousness fades while Mio desperately screams for him.

In the present war, Shido finally encounters the original Kurumi.

She saves him from another <Nibelcol> before he can even properly greet her.

Shido tells Kurumi that calling her a lifesaver is not an exaggeration.

He knows everything now.

He knows about the 204 deaths.

Kurumi attempts to dismiss the importance of it. Her mission required Shido to survive.

Shido refuses to let her hide behind that explanation.

Nobody watches somebody die two hundred and four times, repeatedly destroys their own mind trying to save them, kisses their corpse after every failure, and continues onward merely because the person is a useful resource.

Kurumi cares about him.

More importantly, Shido cares about Kurumi.

He tells her directly.

Kurumi's defenses begin to crack, but her objective remains.

Even if she acknowledges feelings toward Shido, Sawa is still dead.

The people Kurumi murdered are still dead.

The lives she consumed afterward remain stolen.

Her feelings for Shido cannot become an excuse for abandoning all of them.

Kurumi asks whether Shido expects her to simply leave Sawa dead and continue living happily in the world built upon those tragedies.

Shido says no.

He experienced Kurumi's memories himself.

He would never insult her by asking her to forget them.

At the same time, he refuses Kurumi's solution.

If Kurumi succeeds exactly as planned, killing the Spirit of Origin before the history of Spirits begins may eliminate every tragedy caused by that history.

It may also erase everything that came from it.

Their meeting.

Tohka's life with everyone.

Yoshino.

Kotori's present.

Kaguya and Yuzuru.

Miku.

Natsumi.

Nia.

Mukuro.

The bonds formed because Shido became the person capable of sealing Spirits.

Kurumi intends to save the world by making the world in which they met cease to exist.

Shido wants both.

He wants Sawa and Kurumi's victims saved.

He also wants to meet Kurumi again.

Kurumi calls the desire contradictory.

Shido agrees.

Then he proposes an absurd solution capable of satisfying both wishes.

First, Shido will seal Kurumi.

Then Shido himself will use <Zafkiel> and the enormous Reiryoku stored inside his body to travel thirty years into the past.

Kurumi assumes that merely changes which of them kills the Spirit of Origin.

Shido has another plan.

The Spirit of Origin is a Spirit.

Saving Spirits is Shido's job.

Rather than killing her, Shido will make the Spirit of Origin fall in love with him.

Then he will seal her.

If Shido can obtain the power of the existence from which the other Spirits originated, he may possess enough authority to change history without simply erasing every good thing that followed.

He wants to remove the tragedies.

Save the people who should have lived.

Reach those who needed help.

Repair what appeared irreversible.

And afterward, somehow, create a history in which he can meet Kurumi again.

Kurumi points out the obvious problem.

There is no evidence this is possible.

Shido agrees.

Nobody has tried it.

But Shido possesses one qualification Kurumi cannot deny.

Itsuka Shido is already a human who has rewritten history.

He once traveled through time during Origami's arc and changed the world.

The plan is ridiculous.

It is also not entirely fantasy.

For the first time, Kurumi allows herself to imagine a future where she does not need to erase everything she has come to care about in order to save Sawa.

The thought distracts her during battle.

A heavily armored <Nibelcol> attacks.

Kurumi is nearly killed.

The eyepatch Kurumi throws herself into the path.

The attack pierces the clone's body.

The younger Kurumi smiles at the original and points out that keeping her around was useful after all.

Kurumi uses <Dalet> to reverse the paper armor surrounding the attacker, exposing the <Nibelcol>. Shido immediately seizes the opening and kisses the pseudo-Spirit away.

The eyepatch Kurumi is dying.

Before disappearing into the shadow, she gives the original one final instruction.

Stop lying.

Honestly confront your own heart.

Kurumi tries to dismiss the death as insignificant because the eyepatch Kurumi was only a clone whose life had already technically ended years ago.

Shido can see that Kurumi does not believe her own words.

The clone represented the part of Kurumi most willing to acknowledge what the original refused to say.

Kurumi turns back toward Shido.

She asks whether everything he said is serious.

Shido tells her it came from the bottom of his heart.

The possibility becomes real enough that Kurumi can no longer dismiss it as another one of Shido's naive fantasies.

Her entire life has been organized around the belief that she must personally bear every sin, consume every necessary life, kill the Spirit of Origin, and then accept whatever damnation follows.

Shido is offering to share even that burden.

The two begin moving toward the decision that has been postponed since Kurumi first returned to school.

Before the arc can resolve, the final fragments of the past reveal what Takamiya Mio has been doing.

The boy Westcott killed was the person Mio loved.

His name was Shin.

Mio refuses to accept his death.

She intends to reconstruct him.

Simply restoring a fragile human body is insufficient. If Shin can die again, Mio could lose him again.

The amount of power necessary is too much for an ordinary human body to endure at once.

So Mio devises a process.

Divide the power.

Give it to him gradually.

First, the reconstructed boy will receive one special ability.

The ability to absorb power.

Then Mio will spread individual factors throughout the world.

The boy can eventually gather those powers one by one.

When all of them are assembled inside him, his body will possess power approaching immortality.

He will become someone who cannot easily be taken away from her again.

Then Mio and Shin can remain together forever.

Mio gently touches her abdomen while imagining the boy who will eventually be born.

She asks him to wait for her.

Shin.

The story returns to the battlefield.

Shido is beside Kurumi.

Before their confrontation can reach its conclusion, something impossible happens.

A white arm emerges directly from Kurumi's chest.

Shido initially cannot comprehend what he is seeing.

This is the original Kurumi.

There should be no clone hiding behind her.

Kurumi herself stares at the arm in confusion before the thing begins forcing itself farther out of her body.

Pain overtakes her.

Shido screams Kurumi's name.

The emergence continues.

Then a voice speaks from within her.

It thanks Tokisaki Kurumi.

It tells her that she was a wonderful friend until the very end.

Something begins pulling itself completely out of Kurumi.

Volume 17 ends there.
</kurumi_arc>

<itsuka_disaster_arc>
This summary contains how the Itsuka Disaster arc goes, you must follow this as closely as possible:

The Itsuka Disaster arc takes place approximately one month after Origami's arc, after Tobiichi Origami has been sealed and the altered world's version of Origami has merged with the memories and personality of her original self.

The arc opens by showing the end before explaining how anyone reached it.

Under a black sky stands something with the shape of a human but almost none of the qualities that make a person human. An enormous concentration of Reiryoku surrounds it. It possesses no apparent reason, self-control, or recognizable ego, only overwhelming destructive power.

Kotori stands before it knowing exactly what she is expected to do.

Years earlier, she secretly resolved that if this situation ever occurred, she would personally end it.

She must kill the monster.

Yet when the moment actually arrives, Kotori feels grief rather than determination. She cannot stop wondering whether there was some path that could have prevented this outcome.

The monster is Shidou.

The story then returns to the beginning.

It is December 1.

Shidou walks toward Raizen High alongside Tohka during an unusually cold morning. He has underestimated the beginning of winter and is poorly dressed for the temperature. Tohka, considerably better prepared after shopping for winter clothing with the others, offers him her muffler.

When Shidou points out that giving him the muffler would simply leave Tohka cold instead, Tohka develops the obvious solution of sharing it.

Shidou immediately realizes that arriving at school wrapped in the same scarf as Tohka would make them look like an embarrassingly intimate couple.

Kaguya and Yuzuru run past and deliberately make the situation sound even more questionable before revealing that they understood perfectly well what was happening and were only teasing him.

The lighthearted morning hides the first warning.

Shidou feels unusually tired.

He assumes the cold weather is making him sick.

At school, he discovers his indoor shoes missing and his chair occupied in an extremely peculiar manner.

Origami has taken his shoes and warmed them with her own body heat. She has also been waiting against his chair to keep that warm for him.

When Shidou begins taking off his coat, Origami attempts to become a human heating system by climbing into it with him.

Tohka immediately objects.

The scene also demonstrates how the reconstructed Origami now functions.

The Origami from the previous world, with all of her extreme habits and obsession toward Shidou, now coexists with the gentler and much more easily embarrassed Origami produced by the changed history. Around Shidou, the old impulses can suddenly overwhelm the new personality's restraint.

Origami can perform something outrageous without hesitation and only afterward realize what she has done.

Away from Shidou, she becomes so embarrassed by her own behavior that she nearly collapses.

Meanwhile, Kotori is absent from school because she is investigating the information Origami provided after the previous incident.

The most important subject is <Phantom>.

<Phantom> is the mysterious existence responsible for giving Spirit power to Kotori, Miku, and Origami. In every earlier encounter, its body had been obscured by visual noise and its voice distorted.

Origami managed to attack <Phantom> five years in the past and partially destroy that concealment.

For only an instant, she saw something underneath it.

The figure appeared to be a young girl.

Origami also remembers <Phantom> saying that it possesses a goal of its own.

Kotori now has a sketch based on Origami's memories, but it is still far from enough to establish <Phantom>'s identity or purpose.

Reine enters the room while Kotori is examining the information.

She has discovered a more immediate problem.

Recent Reiha measurements show one reading increasing far beyond normal levels.

Kotori initially assumes the abnormality belongs to Origami because she was only recently sealed and had previously become an Inverse Spirit.

It does not.

The abnormal Reiha belongs to Shidou.

Back at school, Shidou's apparent illness becomes increasingly severe during physical measurements.

His entire body is hot.

His consciousness feels cloudy.

His movements become difficult to control.

Yet his physical strength has inexplicably increased far beyond anything human.

During the grip-strength test, Shidou barely feels as though he is exerting himself.

The hand dynamometer breaks in his hand.

Everyone accepts the gym teacher's explanation that the old equipment must have suffered metal fatigue.

Shidou is less convinced.

During the handball throw, the abnormality becomes impossible to ignore.

Shidou casually throws the ball.

Instead of following an ordinary arc, it rockets upward in an almost straight line, slices through the clouds, and disappears from sight.

The students eventually settle on an absurd explanation involving a powerful upward air current because accepting anything else would mean admitting that what they just witnessed makes no sense.

Then comes the fifty-meter sprint.

Shidou is already barely able to stand.

He reacts late to the start.

He still crosses the finish line in 4.38 seconds.

Then he collapses.

Shidou is carried to the infirmary.

His condition continues worsening rather than improving.

He begins connecting the impossible physical abilities to something he already carries inside himself.

Spirit power.

Although Shidou is human, sealing Spirits does not merely make their power disappear. He has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reproduce portions of their abilities and even summon their Angels under exceptional circumstances.

The difference now is that the power is emerging without his deliberate command.

Kotori arrives and decides that he needs immediate examination at a Ratatoskr facility.

While she helps him leave the school, Shidou accidentally places his hand against a window.

The glass cracks.

He tries supporting himself against a wall instead.

The wall dents beneath his palm despite him barely applying any force.

Then Shidou sneezes.

The resulting gust is powerful enough to demonstrate that his physical strength is only one part of the problem.

Something inside Shidou is beginning to overflow.

At the same time, DEM is dealing with a separate matter.

Westcott and Ellen discuss a captive designated <Material A>.

The captive came from Neryl Island and is extraordinarily important to DEM.

Their research has progressed enough that DEM believes it can use data derived from the Inversion of <Princess> to complete a new stage of its plan involving <Material A>.

Westcott refers to the possibility of creating a perfect Inverse type.

The captive herself is not yet properly introduced.

For the moment, she remains something DEM regards as a specimen.

Ratatoskr's examination finally explains what is happening to Shidou.

Whenever Shidou seals a Spirit, he does not completely remove her Reiryoku and store it as an isolated object inside himself.

A connection remains between them.

Ratatoskr describes it as a pass.

Most of the sealed Reiryoku remains within Shidou, but a small quantity continuously circulates through the connection between him and the Spirit.

This explains why sealed Spirits are still capable of temporarily recovering portions of their Astral Dresses, Angels, and abilities when their emotions become unstable. Power can flow back through the existing connection.

Something has now happened to those passes.

They have contracted.

The Reiryoku can enter Shidou but can no longer circulate normally back toward the Spirits.

Shidou has effectively become a clogged reservoir containing the sealed power of eight Spirits.

The result is an overheat.

The enormous physical strength, rising Reiha, fever, and spontaneous supernatural effects are all symptoms of Reiryoku trapped inside his body attempting to escape.

If the condition continues, the power could completely run wild.

Shidou does not merely have one Spirit's power inside him.

He contains the power sealed from Tohka, Yoshino, Kotori, Kaguya, Yuzuru, Miku, Natsumi, and Origami.

If all of that Reiryoku erupts simultaneously, the result would be catastrophic.

There is, however, an immediate treatment.

The passes were originally established at the moment Shidou sealed each Spirit.

The trigger was a kiss.

Repeating that contact should reopen the narrowed connections.

All eight Spirits have to kiss Shidou again.

This revelation produces another problem for Tohka.

She finally realizes that if kissing is necessary to seal Spirit power, Shidou must have kissed every Spirit he has saved.

Months earlier, Tohka had asked Shidou to continue saving Spirits while also telling him not to kiss other girls.

She finally understands why that request left him looking so uncomfortable.

Tohka decides the embarrassment does not matter.

Shidou saved her.

Now it is her turn to save him.

Unfortunately, before Ratatoskr can simply gather everyone around his bed and administer eight kisses, Shidou disappears from the examination room.

The worsening Reiryoku has affected more than his body.

His mental restraints have begun collapsing.

Shidou is still fundamentally Shidou, but the feverish condition has amplified impulses he would normally suppress and filled him with an almost euphoric confidence.

He feels enormously powerful.

He feels liberated.

And somewhere in his overstimulated mind, one familiar principle emerges.

If there is a girl in front of him, make her fall for him.

Shidou wanders through Tengu City behaving like a bizarre combination of himself and the accumulated influence of the Spirits whose powers he carries.

When he encounters Ai, Mai, and Mii, he aggressively flirts with them instead of becoming flustered as usual.

When circumstances demand it, supernatural abilities simply emerge from him.

Ice.

Wind.

Transformation.

Voice manipulation.

Fire.

The powers he spent months sealing are now available with frightening ease.

He eventually encounters Tamae Okamine and escalates the situation into an absurd marriage proposal.

Using transformation power resembling <Haniel>, Shidou manipulates his surroundings into something resembling an impromptu wedding.

Using the power associated with <Gabriel>, his words influence the people around him into participating.

Ordinary social inhibitions have almost disappeared.

The same phenomenon produces a far more dangerous encounter when Shidou crosses paths with Ellen.

Ellen initially treats him as a vulnerable target.

Shidou is anything but vulnerable.

Her Territory cannot restrain him normally.

He can respond to movements an ordinary human could never follow.

He repeatedly avoids her attacks with abilities that appear to draw from the Spirits sealed inside him.

Then, instead of treating the world's strongest Wizard as an enemy, Shidou begins flirting with her.

He catches Ellen.

He carries her like a princess.

He compliments her.

Ellen, who expects fear or hostility, has absolutely no framework for dealing with an overconfident Shidou calmly treating her like a woman on a date.

He nearly kisses her.

Instead, he places a kiss on her forehead and tells her she is cute.

Ellen is left furious and humiliated.

When the Spirits finally locate Shidou, Kotori tries explaining that his condition is becoming dangerous and that they need to reopen the passes immediately.

Miku, with considerably less tact, blurts out that everyone needs to kiss him.

Shidou understands.

He refuses to make it that simple.

The current Shidou is intoxicated by both his power and the unusual freedom from his normal inhibitions. He points out that his entire role until now has consisted of approaching Spirits, making them fall for him, and kissing them.

This time he wants the roles reversed.

Until midnight, the Spirits must conquer him.

Each girl has to make Shidou's heart race enough that he genuinely wants her kiss.

Only then will he accept it.

Kotori argues that this is a medical emergency, not a game.

Shidou does not care.

He already loves all of them.

What he wants is for each Spirit to find a way to make his heart pound.

Kotori finally loses patience and orders Kaguya and Yuzuru to restrain him so that they can force the kisses if necessary.

Shidou answers by transforming himself.

The boy disappears.

In his place stands Shiori, Shidou's female form.

He even modifies the transformation in ways specifically capable of incapacitating Miku.

Then he escalates further.

Using <Haniel>, Shidou transforms surrounding people until multiple identical Shioris and Mikus occupy the area.

Using the power associated with Miku's Voice, he manipulates the crowd.

Using the Yamai sisters' wind, he escapes into the sky.

Before leaving, he challenges the girls again.

Make him fall for them.

Ratatoskr has no choice but to play along.

Elsewhere, DEM's transport operation involving <Material A> continues.

Kurumi has learned that a highly important Spirit is being transported.

She attacks the operation using her clones.

Kurumi refers to the captive as the Second Spirit.

Her interest is not simply adding another Spirit to her plans.

Kurumi wants information.

The Second Spirit may possess knowledge concerning the First Spirit, the existence Kurumi ultimately intends to defeat.

The transport is protected by an extraordinarily powerful blond Wizard bearing the designation Adeptus 2.

Kurumi's attack fails to take the captive.

DEM continues moving <Material A> toward its destination.

Back at Ratatoskr, Reine explains that the arrogant and flirtatious Shidou wandering the city is not an alternate personality or possession.

It is still Shidou.

His fever, excessive Reiryoku, and altered mental condition have drastically weakened the restraints he normally places on his thoughts and behavior.

Ratatoskr also establishes a practical deadline.

Midnight.

They have only hours to make all eight Spirits successfully affect Shidou and reopen the passes.

Because the Spirits themselves are receiving very little Reiryoku through the contracted connections, they must also avoid recklessly using their supernatural power. Any power they expend now may not be replenished normally.

Ratatoskr transforms the rescue operation into the reverse of its usual dating missions.

Shidou becomes the target.

The Spirits become the ones attempting to raise his emotional response.

Ratatoskr monitors his excitement and establishes a target value of approximately ninety percent.

The first major stage takes place inside an artificial tropical environment prepared within a secret facility.

It is December outside.

Inside, Shidou walks into what looks like a summer swimming resort.

The Spirits are waiting in swimsuits.

Origami's preferred plan had been considerably less restrained.

Kotori rejected it.

Kaguya and Yuzuru go first.

Their initial idea is obvious.

They press themselves against Shidou and attempt to overwhelm him with physical closeness.

The normal Shidou would have become almost incapable of speaking.

The current Shidou remains frustratingly composed.

Rather than becoming the embarrassed party, he recognizes exactly what they are trying to accomplish and thanks them for working so hard to save him.

The praise makes Kaguya and Yuzuru more embarrassed than he is.

They move to the next strategy involving soft-serve ice cream.

What begins as another deliberate attempt at seduction gradually degenerates into the sisters embarrassing each other.

Their competitiveness and mutual teasing accidentally become far more effective than their planned performance.

Eventually their interaction with Shidou becomes suggestive enough for his monitored excitement to cross the required threshold for both sisters.

Shidou acknowledges defeat.

Kaguya and Yuzuru have successfully conquered him.

Natsumi is next.

For her, the challenge is psychologically much worse.

Natsumi already possesses a severe inferiority complex concerning her appearance and personality. Watching the Yamai sisters succeed only strengthens her belief that she will be the single person Shidou cannot possibly find attractive.

Her usual solution would be to transform into her beautiful adult form.

The contracted pass makes that difficult.

Reine and Ratatoskr instead push Natsumi toward exploiting the contrast between her naturally shy personality and an attempted confident older-sister demeanor.

Natsumi tries.

Her embarrassment nearly destroys her.

Eventually she cannot endure the situation and uses her limited remaining Spirit power anyway, transforming into her adult appearance and wearing a much more mature swimsuit.

The decision is reckless.

Her remaining power gives out.

Natsumi returns to her smaller form while still wearing clothing meant for the transformed body, producing an extremely embarrassing accident.

Shidou laughs.

For Natsumi, that is confirmation of her deepest fear.

She accuses him of deliberately making the challenge impossible because he does not genuinely consider her attractive.

Then Ratatoskr's success signal activates.

She already passed.

Shidou was affected by Natsumi herself.

He covers her and repeatedly assures her that he genuinely thinks she is cute.

The sincerity is far more devastating to Natsumi than any scripted seduction could have been.

She becomes bright red and reacts by knocking Shidou into the pool.

Yoshino takes her turn next.

With encouragement from Yoshinon, she tries a much gentler approach.

She helps apply sunscreen to Shidou.

The proximity and innocence of the situation steadily increase his response.

Before she can finish naturally, the facility is attacked.

DEM has located them.

Bandersnatches assault the artificial resort.

Falling debris threatens Yoshino.

Shidou immediately protects her.

Even in his altered state, the instinct that defined all of his encounters with the Spirits remains intact.

He will place himself in danger before allowing one of them to be hurt.

During the chaos, Yoshino's swimsuit is damaged.

Yoshinon had prepared for exactly such an emergency.

A second swimsuit is underneath.

The sudden change catches Shidou completely off guard and pushes his excitement over the required threshold.

Yoshino succeeds.

The attack proves that hiding inside the facility will no longer be enough.

Ellen is also approaching.

Reine already arranged a countermeasure for her.

Mana.

Mana intercepts Ellen and keeps the strongest Wizard occupied.

Shidou, meanwhile, demonstrates how dangerous his runaway power has become.

Rather than simply fleeing the Bandersnatches, he releases an enormous blast of raw Reiryoku and annihilates a large group of them.

The tropical facility is effectively ruined.

Ratatoskr transitions to the second stage.

The environment is converted into an elegant party hall.

The swimsuits disappear.

The Spirits change into formal dresses.

Shidou is placed in a tuxedo.

Kotori goes first in the new setting.

Her approach is a ballroom dance.

The dynamic between them has always made it easy for Shidou to treat Kotori primarily as his younger sister. She weaponizes that familiarity against him.

During the dance, Shidou is forced to recognize how much she has matured.

Kotori is still his little sister.

She is also a girl capable of carrying herself with far more composure and elegance than he usually acknowledges.

His response reaches the target.

Kotori succeeds.

Shidou then immediately regains the advantage by teasing her about the kiss they will eventually have to perform.

He suggests that since they have kissed before, perhaps the next one should be more adult.

Kotori's composure collapses.

Shidou settles for biting her ear and laughing when she nearly jumps out of her skin.

Miku follows.

She decides that elaborate tricks are unnecessary.

Miku's greatest weapon has always been her voice.

A stage is prepared.

Musicians accompany her.

Miku performs directly for Shidou.

The performance is openly romantic and targeted entirely at him rather than at a public audience.

By the end, Miku is close enough to sit against him and directly express her love.

She clears the required emotional threshold decisively.

Origami takes her turn afterward.

For Origami, the conflict created by the merger of her two selves becomes central.

One side immediately invents increasingly extreme ways to guarantee Shidou's reaction.

The other side is horrified by those ideas.

Origami considers using drugs.

Her own hands effectively begin fighting one another as the two sets of impulses compete over what she should do.

The plan backfires.

Some of the substance apparently reaches Origami herself instead.

Her usual calculating restraint disappears.

What follows is far more effective than any of her schemes.

Origami simply tells Shidou the truth.

She loves him.

She loves him so intensely that she does not know what to do with herself.

There is no strategy behind the confession.

No bizarre maneuver.

No attempt to manipulate his response.

For once, Origami's feelings reach him almost completely unfiltered.

Shidou's emotional reading passes the threshold.

Origami succeeds.

That leaves Tohka.

Throughout the others' attempts, Tohka has been experiencing an emotion she does not fully understand.

Hearing Origami sincerely say that she loves Shidou makes Tohka's chest tighten.

She cares about all of the Spirits.

She cares about Kotori.

She cares about Shidou.

Yet something about another girl saying those words toward Shidou produces a feeling that does not fit neatly into the categories she already understands.

Kotori recognizes what Tohka is struggling with.

She does not simply tell Tohka what to feel.

She tells her that the emotion matters.

Tohka decides against an elaborate seduction.

She knows what she wants to do.

Eat with Shidou.

Food has accompanied almost every stage of Tohka's human life. Sharing a meal with Shidou is ordinary, familiar, and genuinely important to her.

They sit beside each other.

Tohka feeds Shidou.

Shidou feeds her in return.

The scene is simple.

It may also be the most natural of all the dates.

Then Shidou drops the fork.

He collapses while clutching his chest.

His body erupts with Reiryoku.

The controlled game is over.

The pass contraction has progressed too far.

Shidou rises from the floor surrounded by an enormous concentration of spiritual power.

The expression in his eyes begins disappearing.

The playful, overconfident personality produced by the fever vanishes with it.

What remains is closer to the creature seen at the beginning of the volume.

A human body containing more power than it can safely control.

At nearly the same time, the aircraft transporting <Material A> begins reacting violently.

The captive Second Spirit appears to sense the enormous spiritual wave coming from Shidou.

The aircraft begins suffering abnormalities while the Spirit inside responds to him.

Mana is still fighting Ellen when the runaway Shidou arrives near them.

For a moment, something strange happens.

Shidou looks at Mana.

His voice becomes gentler.

He speaks as though remembering something that Mana herself does not remember.

He tells her that he had been worried ever since DEM kidnapped her.

Mana does not understand.

Then Shidou says a name.

Mio.

He asks whether Mio helped Mana escape.

The name causes an immediate reaction.

Mana's head fills with fragments.

A park.

A classroom.

A birthday Shidou celebrated with her.

And the back of a long-haired girl.

Mana instinctively feels that she knows this girl.

She cannot remember her face.

The memories disappear before Mana can grasp them.

Ellen attacks.

Shidou instinctively protects Mana from her.

The act reveals that even this far into the runaway condition, some fragment of his original priorities remains.

Then the spiritual power surrounding him increases again.

His ability to communicate disappears.

Shidou roars.

The person vanishes beneath the power.

The Beast of Demise from the prologue has finally appeared.

Kotori immediately understands what the alarms mean.

Ratatoskr prepared for this exact possibility years ago.

Shidou is now a mobile concentration of eight Spirits' Reiryoku.

If that energy is released catastrophically near a populated area, the number of deaths could be enormous.

Shidou begins moving toward Tengu City.

Kotori tells the other Spirits to remain behind.

She claims there is something only she can do.

Then she removes a small device she hoped never to use.

The activation key for <Dáinsleif>.

<Dáinsleif> is a satellite weapon created specifically for one target.

Itsuka Shidou.

Kotori possesses <Camael>'s regenerative power, so merely inflicting a fatal wound on Shidou might accomplish nothing if that power activates through him.

<Dáinsleif> solves the problem through absolute destruction.

The attack is intended to annihilate Shidou so completely that nothing remains for regeneration to restore.

Kotori has carried the authority to use it because Ratatoskr always knew this day was possible.

She prepares to press the button.

Origami stops her at gunpoint.

She demands to know how an organization supposedly dedicated to saving Spirits can possess a weapon designed to murder the person it ordered to seal them.

Kotori finally tells her the truth.

Ratatoskr did not create Shidou's sealing ability.

They discovered it after the process had already started.

Five years earlier, before Ratatoskr understood what he was capable of, Shidou had already sealed a Spirit.

Kotori.

By the time Woodman learned about Shidou, the first pass already existed.

Woodman was never completely comfortable with continuing to accumulate Spirit power inside a human body. He recognized that even if Shidou happened to be compatible with Ratatoskr's mission, storing increasing quantities of Reiryoku inside him could eventually become dangerous.

But simply returning a Spirit's power does not erase the connection.

The first time Kotori allowed Shidou to seal her, she unknowingly placed the beginning of this risk inside her brother.

The later seals increased it.

Ratatoskr has researched a potential permanent solution.

Shidou would have to externalize the accumulated Spirit power again in the form of a Sephira Crystal.

Doing that would require an extraordinary quantity of Reiryoku.

According to their calculations, Shidou would need to seal all of the Spirits before possessing enough power for the process.

Until then, the danger cannot be completely removed.

<Dáinsleif> exists for the scenario where they fail before reaching that point.

Kotori does not defend the weapon because she thinks killing Shidou is acceptable.

She can barely hold the trigger.

But she knows what Shidou would say if the alternative were allowing millions of innocent people to die because of him.

If there is truly no other option, Kotori believes her responsibility as Ratatoskr's commander and as the person who first placed Spirit power inside Shidou requires her to stop him.

The other Spirits have heard enough.

They refuse.

Kotori has convinced herself that she must choose between Shidou and the world because she believes she is the only person responsible for making that decision.

She is not alone.

Shidou saved every one of them.

They will save him together.

Tohka in particular refuses to accept that the story can end with Kotori murdering her own brother because everyone else failed to find another answer.

Kotori finally lowers the trigger.

Above them, the Ratatoskr Round Table is having the same argument on a much larger scale.

Several executives regard Shidou as an uncontrollable strategic threat.

Woodman refuses to abandon him while Kotori is still trying.

The spiritual readings continue rising.

Woodman deliberately stalls.

He even begins offering portions of Asgard Electronics simply to purchase more time.

One executive, Clayton, decides the debate has lasted long enough.

He possesses another <Dáinsleif> activation device.

Woodman realizes too late that somebody must have prepared an unauthorized duplicate.

Clayton activates the weapon.

The decision has been made without Kotori.

A satellite attack descends toward Shidou.

Before it can erase him, something appears.

<Phantom>.

The mysterious Spirit Ratatoskr has spent years trying to understand intervenes directly to keep Shidou alive.

Its reason is not explained.

<Phantom> merely makes it clear that Shidou dying would cause serious problems for its own objective.

The attack is prevented.

Then <Phantom> approaches Shidou.

It touches him.

The contact causes an opening to appear within the overwhelming spiritual power surrounding him.

<Phantom> does not solve the problem itself.

It creates one chance.

Then it leaves the rest to the Spirits.

The rescue begins.

Kaguya and Yuzuru force themselves into their limited Astral Dresses despite the danger of spending power they cannot easily replenish.

Using their wind and the weapons of <Raphael>, they restrain Shidou long enough to reach him.

They kiss him.

The Yamai passes reopen.

Some of Shidou's accumulated Reiryoku begins circulating properly again.

It is not enough.

Shidou breaks free and continues rampaging.

Yoshino enters next.

She summons <Zadkiel> and freezes the ground, the surroundings, and finally Shidou's movement itself.

She reaches him while the ice still holds.

Yoshino kisses Shidou.

Another connection opens.

Natsumi is with her.

Unlike the others, Natsumi cannot even produce a limited Astral Dress because she exhausted too much of her remaining power during the earlier attempt to conquer Shidou.

She is frightened.

She is clumsy.

She nearly talks herself out of acting while Shidou is breaking free.

She still goes to him.

Natsumi kisses Shidou as well.

Miku uses <Gabriel> to help restrain the rampaging power and reaches Shidou for her kiss.

Origami uses her own abilities and <Metatron> to force her way through his defenses.

She kisses him.

With every restored pass, the impossible quantity of Reiryoku inside Shidou decreases.

His movements become less overwhelming.

More of the human underneath the power begins returning.

Kotori approaches.

Shidou is still dangerous enough to attack her.

A blade from <Sandalphon> strikes Kotori.

She accepts the injury rather than retreat.

Her flames repair the damage.

Kotori reaches the brother she had been prepared to kill moments earlier.

She kisses him instead.

The pass connecting the two of them, the first connection created five years earlier, opens again.

Kotori even manages to preserve a little of their usual relationship afterward, reminding Shidou that the more embarrassing kind of kiss can wait until he is actually himself again.

Seven Spirits have reached him.

Only Tohka remains.

Tohka confronts Shidou directly.

He wields <Sandalphon>.

She manifests her own limited Astral Dress and the real <Sandalphon>.

Shidou possesses far more raw spiritual power.

Tohka possesses something his runaway body does not.

Control.

Experience.

Skill.

The instincts developed through every battle she has fought since meeting him.

Tohka manages to knock Shidou's weapon away.

She tries to reach him.

Then her remaining Reiryoku runs out.

Her limited Astral Dress disappears.

Tohka is left standing before the runaway Shidou as an ordinary girl.

The spiritual pressure throws her backward.

She is injured.

The others want to help.

Tohka refuses.

This is hers.

Shidou has spent the entire story approaching Spirits who could kill him.

He repeatedly stood in front of overwhelming supernatural power without an Astral Dress or Territory protecting him.

He endured fear, injuries, and situations where one mistake would have killed him because he wanted to reach the person trapped behind that power.

Now Tohka finally experiences the other side.

She walks toward Shidou.

Every step through the violent Reiryoku hurts.

Her body has none of the defenses a Spirit normally possesses.

She keeps walking.

For perhaps the first time, Tohka fully understands what Shidou has been doing for her and the others.

He never had the luxury of being stronger than the Spirit he was trying to save.

He simply kept going.

Tohka does the same.

As she approaches him, the emotion that has troubled her throughout the arc finally becomes understandable.

She loves everyone.

But what she feels toward Shidou is different.

It is not simply gratitude because he saved her.

It is not the ordinary affection she feels toward her friends.

It is not merely the dependence she developed because Shidou introduced her to the world.

Tohka loves Shidou.

She wants him.

She becomes jealous because other girls want him.

She cannot accept a world in which he disappears.

And regardless of what the uncontrollable power surrounding him does to her, she wants the person underneath it back.

Tohka reaches Shidou.

She grabs him by his necktie.

Then she kisses him.

The final pass reopens.

The Reiryoku surrounding Shidou begins disappearing.

His breathing slows.

The blankness leaves his eyes.

The destructive presence vanishes.

When Shidou realizes Tohka is kissing him, his reaction is completely familiar.

He becomes confused and embarrassed.

The ordinary Shidou is back.

Tohka sees the person she loves looking at her again.

When he asks why she kissed him, Tohka refuses to explain.

She calls him an idiot.

Then, having finally exhausted everything she possesses, Tohka collapses into his arms.

The immediate disaster is over.

The story then moves to the aftermath of DEM's operation involving <Material A>.

A transport aircraft has crashed in a remote forest.

Kurumi emerges from the shadows and investigates the wreckage.

She had already positioned clones around likely DEM destinations because she intended to intercept the Second Spirit wherever the transport eventually landed.

Instead, the aircraft fell before reaching them.

Kurumi uses <Zafkiel>'s Tenth Bullet, <Yud>, on the wreckage.

<Yud> allows her to view the past memories connected to an object.

Through the remains of the aircraft, Kurumi learns what happened before the crash.

The Second Spirit inside the transport detected an enormous spiritual response.

That response came from Shidou.

The captive reacted violently to it.

Kurumi interprets the incident as the Second Spirit recognizing Shidou's spiritual wave and attempting to seek his help.

She suspects there may even be some relationship between that response and the strange runaway condition Shidou experienced.

Whatever the exact connection, Shidou's disaster unintentionally disrupted DEM's transport operation.

Kurumi is pleased.

Obtaining the Second Spirit is important to her own objective.

She wants information about the First Spirit.

Kurumi intends to use whatever the Second Spirit knows to help her eventually defeat that existence.

She reaches the container expecting to find the captive inside.

The container is empty.

It has been broken open from within.

The Second Spirit escaped.

At Ratatoskr, the Round Table is dealing with the consequences of the Shidou incident.

Woodman is furious that Clayton fired <Dáinsleif> without authorization.

He also recognizes that Clayton probably did not create the duplicate activation device alone.

Almsted is implicated in secretly supplying the means to bypass the chain of command.

Other executives are more interested in <Phantom>'s intervention and the enormous strategic value of a Spirit capable of turning humans into Spirits.

Woodman shuts the discussion down.

The agreement governing Ratatoskr cannot survive if its members independently decide that they may murder Shidou whenever they become frightened.

Clayton's punishment will be handled separately.

Shidou eventually awakens in Ratatoskr's medical facility.

The memories of his runaway state are still present, but they feel distorted and distant, like trying to remember a dream after waking.

The passes have stabilized.

Nearby, Tohka is still recovering from the injuries and exhaustion caused by reaching him without Spirit power.

Kotori tells Shidou plainly that Tohka is the person who ultimately brought him back.

Then Kotori tells him the secret she has carried for years.

She knew this could happen.

She knew there was a contingency weapon aimed at him.

She held the authority to activate it.

And when Shidou finally became the catastrophe everyone feared, Kotori was prepared to kill him.

The confession destroys what remains of her composure.

Kotori feels personally responsible because Shidou's first Spirit seal was hers.

Five years ago, neither of them understood what the kiss had really placed inside him.

Every later Spirit increased the burden.

Shidou does not blame her.

Even knowing everything now, he says he would make the same decision again.

If time returned to the day Kotori became a Spirit, he would still save her.

He would still seal her power.

And if the alternative during the current disaster had truly been his death or enormous numbers of innocent people dying because of him, Shidou understands why Kotori was prepared to choose him.

What hurts him more is seeing Kotori destroy herself over that choice.

He wants his little sister smiling.

To Shidou, she is still the best little sister in the world.

Kotori finally allows herself to cry.

The crisis between them ends as siblings rather than commander and target.

Tohka later wakes.

She gives Shidou an apple.

Then she asks the question left unfinished by their interrupted date.

Did she make his heart go doki?

Shidou answers yes.

There is another issue.

Tohka now knows the truth about sealing Spirits.

Shidou kissed all of them.

She admits that her previous demand that he save Spirits while never kissing anyone other than her was unreasonable because she did not understand that kissing was required.

She apologizes for that.

However, Shidou could still have told her.

He kept the kisses secret.

Tohka begins counting.

Yoshino.

Kotori.

Kaguya.

Yuzuru.

Miku.

Natsumi.

Origami.

Seven girls.

Tohka decides on compensation.

Seven kisses.

Shidou barely has time to object before Tohka climbs onto his bed and begins collecting what she believes she is owed.

Naturally, Kotori and the others enter the room during this exact moment.

The peaceful recovery immediately turns into chaos.

Tohka responds by clinging possessively to Shidou while the other Spirits protest.

Shidou can only laugh.

The arc ends with Shidou alive, the eight passes stabilized, and the immediate Reiryoku runaway stopped.

The underlying danger has not been permanently eliminated.

Ratatoskr's analysis indicates that the complete solution would require Shidou to continue sealing Spirits until he possesses enough total power to externalize the accumulated Spirit power as a Sephira Crystal.

For now, they have only prevented disaster.

At the same time, several larger mysteries have advanced.

Shidou possesses memories he cannot consciously explain involving Mana's kidnapping and someone named Mio.

Mana reacts to Mio's name with buried memories of her own.

<Phantom> personally intervened to save Shidou and made it clear that his survival matters to its unknown objective.

DEM was transporting a captive called <Material A>, identified by Kurumi as the Second Spirit.

Kurumi wants that Spirit because she believes she can provide information about the First Spirit.

And when Shidou's spiritual power went out of control, the Second Spirit sensed him from inside DEM's transport.

By the time Kurumi reaches the wreckage, the container has already been torn open from inside.

The Second Spirit is free.
</itsuka_disaster_arc>

<nia_arc>
Volume 13. This summary contains how Nia's arc goes, you must follow this as closely as possible.:

Volume 13 technically opens in medias res at three in the morning, with Shido, Origami, Kaguya, Yuzuru, and Natsumi packed into a room in the Spirits’ mansion and desperately trying to finish a manga manuscript. Everyone is exhausted, Shido has a cooling sheet on his forehead, Origami and the Yamai sisters are barely functioning, and Natsumi is so intensely focused on drawing that she barely responds when Shido speaks to her. He eventually has to put a straw into an energy drink and hold it near her mouth so she can drink without stopping her work. The narration deliberately withholds why all of these people are suddenly making manga together, establishing the deadline crisis that the rest of the volume will eventually catch up to.

The story then returns to earlier in December’s final week. Shido is still undergoing unusually frequent medical examinations because of the incident earlier that month when the spiritual pathways connecting him to the Spirits became unstable and Shido himself, rather than one of the Spirits, went out of control. He remembers very little about what he did while his consciousness was impaired. Kotori has taken the incident badly because, as Ratatoskr’s commander, she feels responsible for having been unable to prevent what happened to him. Shido deliberately provokes her back into her normal personality by acting like an embarrassingly clingy older brother until she finally chops him on the head, which reassures him that she has stopped brooding quite so visibly. Reine then confirms that Shido’s Reiryoku values and his routes to the sealed Spirits have returned to normal, meaning the unusually intensive examinations can finally end and return to the ordinary schedule. Fraxinus itself is still being repaired, however, so Ratatoskr is temporarily operating from its underground facility.

The aftermath of Shido’s rampage has produced much less supernatural problems as well. Ratatoskr still has to fabricate explanations for the physically impossible athletic records he produced at school, and Reine reminds him that his altered behavior toward Ai, Mai, Mii, and their teacher Tamae Okamine created social disasters of its own. Most humiliatingly, the wedding reservation Shido apparently made with Okamine while out of control has been cancelled, but she still expects Shido himself to explain that what happened was a mistake. Even after surviving another spiritual crisis, Shido therefore has ordinary human embarrassment waiting for him during winter vacation.

Before leaving the facility, Shido also runs into Mana. Kotori and Reine are trying to force Mana to undergo a detailed examination because Mana recklessly fought during Shido’s earlier crisis despite the damage DEM’s modifications and Realizer use have already done to her body. Mana insists that she feels perfectly healthy and tries to escape. Kotori initially thanks her sincerely for helping Shido, only to turn terrifying the moment she begins listing everything Mana did wrong: recklessly using her Realizer, disappearing afterward, failing to contact Kotori, and communicating with Reine behind her back. Mana actually calls for Shido to save her from the examination, but Shido refuses to help her flee. The scene is mostly comedic, but it reinforces the continuing consequences of both siblings treating their own bodies as expendable whenever someone else is in danger.

On his way home, Shido encounters Nakatsugawa and Shiizaki returning with supplies. Nakatsugawa excitedly shows him the latest issue of Weekly Shōnen Blast: SILVER BULLET, a manga Shido remembers from childhood, has unexpectedly resumed serialization after disappearing for years. Its creator, Honjou Souji, was officially said to have suspended the series because of illness. Shido is nostalgic but thinks little more about it before leaving the facility and going shopping for dinner.

After buying ingredients, Shido finds a young woman lying face-down in the street. He initially worries that she has been injured and hesitates to move her, only for her to weakly raise her head and reveal the real emergency: she is starving. Her stomach audibly confirms the diagnosis. She says she is not sick and refuses the hospital because it would waste too much time, but she is too weak to walk, leaving Shido carrying her home on his back. Even while nearly incapacitated from hunger, she immediately begins teasing him and asks him to stop speaking so formally.

Her home turns out to be an expensive high-rise apartment, completely at odds with the image created by her sandals, room clothes, exhaustion, and general lack of self-care. Her approach to security is even stranger. When Shido offers to close his eyes so she can privately enter the building code, she casually tells a boy she has supposedly just met both her room number and the PIN 1234. When he protests that giving a stranger unrestricted access to her building is obviously dangerous, she responds by wondering whether Shido intends to take advantage of her. At her apartment door she continues the same routine, telling him that the key is in her back pocket and teasing him about where he might put his hand while retrieving it. The entire exchange establishes Nia’s basic outward personality before Shido even knows her name: shameless, relentlessly playful, almost impossible to embarrass, and capable of turning practically anything Shido says into a dirty joke.

The inside of the apartment is dominated by manga. Books cover the walls, pile around the rooms, and nearly bury the bed. Shido notices a professional drawing station and an unfinished manuscript. When he recognizes the artwork as SILVER BULLET, the woman casually confirms that she is its creator. Honjou Souji is a male pen name; her actual name is Honjou Nia. That answer creates a second mystery. SILVER BULLET existed when Shido was in elementary school, Nia says she debuted roughly ten years earlier, yet she physically appears to be only around eighteen or nineteen. She insists there has been no generational succession or impersonation: the Honjou Souji publishing manga then and the Nia standing in front of him are the same person.

Nia is about to explain the secret when her stomach interrupts again. Shido goes into her kitchen and discovers that its cleanliness is misleading: it is clean because Nia barely uses it. Convenience-store garbage is scattered nearby, her refrigerator is effectively stocked with alcohol instead of food, and she appears to survive largely on prepared meals while working. Shido uses ingredients originally meant for his own household to make her a simple bowl of zousui. Nia reacts to the warm meal with near-religious relief and admits that it has been approximately a week since she last ate something warm. Shido tells her that whatever else she does, she needs to begin eating properly.

Instead of letting him leave, Nia recruits Shido as an emergency manga assistant. She claims she only needs him to erase pencil marks, then immediately adds black filling work once he agrees. Shido accidentally reveals that he knows manga-production terminology such as gomu-kake and beta-nuri. Nia seizes on the mistake and begins describing his embarrassing history with drawing manga: the original characters he created when younger, his attempt to use professional pens, his shock at the price of screentone, and his later discovery that digital equipment was also expensive. Shido is horrified that a woman he has only just met somehow knows his private adolescent artistic history, but Nia refuses to explain immediately and simply puts him to work.

Shido proves competent enough to help without ruining the manuscript. When he finishes, Nia changes into an extremely revealing maid outfit that she claims she owns for artistic reference and jokes that the costume is his “extra salary.” She then produces an actual envelope of money and tries to lodge it between her breasts for him to retrieve, only for it to fall straight through the costume, reducing Nia to despair over her chest size. Shido decides that the situation has become too ridiculous and prepares to leave. He refuses payment, tells Nia to spend the money on actual food, and warns her not to collapse in the street again. Rather than letting the encounter end, Nia asks whether he is free on Saturday and invites him on a date in Akihabara, initially making it sound as though she simply wants someone to carry everything she plans to buy. When Shido suggests that she ask one of her friends instead, her expression briefly darkens and she admits that she has none. Then she drops the façade completely and addresses him by his full name, asking whether he is really going to walk away when his “job” is making Spirits fall for him.

The next chapter briefly shifts to DEM. Two injured pilots, Knox and Burton, are summoned before Isaac Westcott and Ellen because the Spirit they were transporting from DEM’s Neryl Island facility—designated Material A—escaped when their aircraft was attacked. They expect punishment or worse. Westcott instead praises their judgment, tells them to receive medical treatment, and reveals something neither pilot expected: he had intended to release Material A anyway. Their failure saved him the trouble of “setting the stage.” The implication is deliberately ominous. Nia’s escape is already part of something Westcott wants, even though neither Shido nor Nia knows that.

Back at Nia’s apartment, she reveals her real nature by calling <Heavenly Raiment – Yod> and manifesting a translucent, nun-like Astral Dress. Shido finally understands the reason for her impossible youth and knowledge: Nia is a Spirit. She continues joking even after the transformation, drawing Shido’s attention to the Astral Dress’s transparent material and exposed thigh rather than allowing the moment to become solemn. When Shido demands to know how she knows about Ratatoskr and his sealing ability, she summons her Angel, <Tome of Revelation – Rasiel>, a massive scripture-like book.

Rasiel is effectively an omniscient information system. Nia can ask for information about events, people, and things in the world and receive the answer. That is how she knew Shido would pass the street where she collapsed. Their first meeting was staged: she deliberately placed herself where she knew he would find and help her. The request for manga assistance, amusingly, was genuine rather than part of some elaborate plan. Nia explains that information from Rasiel can tell her about Shido, but knowing someone through a book is still different from seeing the person herself. That distinction—perfect information versus direct human experience—becomes central to her entire arc.

Nia then explains why she wanted to meet him personally. During Shido’s power overload at the beginning of the month, he heard an unknown voice and attacked an aircraft. The voice was Nia’s. She had been imprisoned aboard a DEM transport plane, and Shido’s attack created the chance for her to escape. Nia tells him that DEM captured her approximately five years earlier, specifically naming Ellen as the person who defeated her. Yet her memories of those five years are extremely vague. She remembers being attached to machines and being imprisoned, but the thing she complains about most strongly is that DEM prevented her from drawing manga and forced her serialization into hiatus. Shido finds the apparent mildness of her memories strangely inconsistent with everything he knows about DEM.

Nia also clarifies that Rasiel does not constantly pour all knowledge in existence into her mind. She only receives information she actively wants to know. It does not automatically warn her about a danger she has never thought to investigate, which is why it failed to prevent Ellen’s ambush. Nia compares the Angel to an absurdly powerful search engine rather than permanent omniscience.

Its second ability is far more frightening. Nia removes a pen-like ornament from her Astral Dress and draws a short manga sequence directly into Rasiel. After several minutes, Shido’s body begins moving without his consent, forcing him to perform the actions Nia drew, including giving her a massage. Nia identifies the ability as Future Describing: what is newly written into Rasiel becomes true. In principle, Nia can author future events. The practical limitation is that creating even a few seconds of sufficiently detailed material takes time, and Nia jokingly says that if she has enough free time to draw elaborate future events she would rather use it on her professional manga.

To demonstrate the less cosmic but much more personally horrifying side of Rasiel, Nia then searches Shido’s past and begins reading out details about his childhood original attacks and characters, including Instant Lightning Blast and the Black-Clothed Fighter Lieven. She even begins professionally critiquing his juvenile character design and advising his younger self on creating a better heroine. Shido is devastated by the exposure of memories he had hoped no one would ever see. For Nia, the demonstration proves that her Angel can invade not just governments or military databases but the most embarrassing parts of an individual person’s life.

Nia knows Ratatoskr will want to seal her. She is not opposed. Having already been captured once, she understands the risk of remaining unprotected, and she is grateful enough to Shido to give him a chance. She insists that the date take place in Akihabara because five years without new manga, anime, games, or doujinshi have given her severe “2D withdrawal.” She also mentions that she has unexpectedly obtained a space at the upcoming Comic Colosseum, or Comico, and still possesses a doujin manuscript she created before DEM captured her. She tells Shido to make her “dere” if he can and promises not to use Rasiel to spy on Ratatoskr’s strategy meeting because she hates spoilers. She immediately proves that even this restraint is voluntary by casually looking up Kotori’s age and position anyway.

When Shido reports everything to Kotori, Ratatoskr recognizes how dangerous Rasiel is. Its information-gathering ability could invalidate practically every conventional security system, expose national secrets, or provide military information capable of starting wars. At the same time, the Angel could theoretically answer questions Ratatoskr desperately wants resolved, particularly the identity of Phantom and the missing history shared by Shido and Mana. Kotori explicitly stops those possibilities from becoming their primary motive. They are not sealing Nia so that they can exploit her Angel; their first responsibility is protecting a Spirit who has already spent five years in DEM’s hands.

Two days later, Shido meets Nia at Akihabara Station. She arrives dressed for function rather than attractiveness, with a giant rucksack, rolling suitcase, and additional cart because she intends to compensate for five years of missed releases in a single shopping expedition. Ratatoskr’s temporary command center immediately begins its usual dating-simulation voting system. The very first recommended line has Shido make a suggestive comment about Nia’s clothes; Nia responds by asking whether sealing her requires something beyond kissing and whether she should change her panties first. Shido panics before discovering that she is deliberately tormenting him. A moment later Nia identifies that he is communicating with Ratatoskr and openly waves at Kotori’s hidden surveillance camera. The entire operation is uniquely awkward because the “target” understands precisely how the dating mission works and is actively cooperating with it for amusement.

When Shido takes her suitcase, Nia casually suggests holding hands, then embarrasses him by pretending to reject him when he repeats the suggestion himself. Eventually they do hold hands. Upon reaching Akihabara proper, Nia joyfully announces her return after five years. Shido asks why she is surprised by the changes when Rasiel could already have told her everything. Nia explains that she deliberately avoids using Rasiel unnecessarily. Partly she hates spoilers, but more importantly, simply possessing information is not equivalent to seeing and hearing something herself. She wants the direct experience.

Before indulging her own shopping, Nia decides that because the date is supposedly a reward to Shido she should give him something enjoyable first. Her interpretation is taking him to a cosplay shop and asking him to choose an outfit for her. Shido selects a nurse costume. Nia proceeds to call him over while she is still changing, briefly opening the curtain while only partially dressed because she has discovered that a half-worn stocking looks unexpectedly erotic. Shido immediately closes the curtain and orders her to finish dressing properly. Nia regards successfully flustering him as having met her quota and moves on to the bookstores.

Once surrounded by manga, Nia becomes almost impossible to stop. She knows the differences between the major Akihabara stores, including their bonuses and specialty sections, and reacts emotionally to how many series have advanced during the five years she lost. She discovers new volumes, new works by creators she followed, and entire series she intends to buy from the beginning rather than merely purchasing the latest volume. She identifies CHRONICLE as the manga that changed her life and inspired her to become a mangaka, declaring its character Tokiya her “waifu” despite him being male.

Nia’s tastes are extremely broad. She cheerfully buys shōnen, shōjo, hard-boiled material, boys’ love works, novels, and practically anything in which she feels the creator’s passion. She starts trying to classify Shido according to boys’ love archetypes and later takes him to an adult PC-game section, offering to buy him an eroge before being reminded that he is still a high-school student. The accumulated shopping eventually fills the rucksack, suitcase, and attached cart with manga, light novels, reference books, Blu-rays, figures, and hobby products. Despite Ratatoskr supposedly controlling the date, Shido spends much of it simply being dragged through Nia’s natural habitat and genuinely enjoying himself.

That genuine enjoyment makes the eventual problem stranger. Every conventional interaction has gone well. Nia laughs constantly, gets along with Shido, appreciates his help, and has no episodes of hostility. Yet Ratatoskr discovers that her romantic affection has effectively not moved at all. What has increased is only friendship. Nia already knows what the problem is and apologizes because she genuinely wants her power sealed. She does not dislike Shido. She enjoyed the entire day. The obstacle is entirely internal: she has never fallen in love with anything except 2D characters.

Ratatoskr immediately tries the most literal possible solution. Nakatsugawa remembers that Nia’s favorite is Tokiya from CHRONICLE, so Shido disappears into the restroom and returns dressed as an extremely accurate Tokiya cosplay. Nia’s internal perspective makes clear that she already feels guilty about the failed date. She had intentionally sought out the boy capable of sealing Spirits because she actually wanted him to succeed and had hoped that perhaps Shido would be the real human being she could finally open herself to. It did not happen. Then she sees “Tokiya” standing in front of her.

The strategy initially works astonishingly well. Shido copies Tokiya’s cold mannerisms, addresses Nia dismissively, and repeatedly tells her not to bother him. Instead of becoming offended, Nia grows increasingly excited. Ratatoskr watches her affection rise into the sealing range. Shido therefore commits to the role and moves in for the kiss.

Nia stops him at the last possible moment.

Her objection is not that she has realized he is Shido. The problem is that Tokiya would never do that. Nia knows Tokiya’s characterization, relationships, motivations, and emotional development intimately. Having “Tokiya” suddenly seduce an unrelated woman is a violation of the character she loves. She launches into an impassioned explanation of his story and preferred pairings and declares that she does not even want to insert herself into that fictional world. She is content being an observer—or, as she dramatically puts it, a wall. If Shido wants to make her fall for him, he should become genuinely 2D rather than corrupting her favorite character. She kicks him out of the restaurant, and the plan ends catastrophically.

Back at Ratatoskr, Reine notices one useful result. Nia’s attraction did not vanish merely because Tokiya was physically represented in three dimensions. A fictional character can appear before her as a “real” person without destroying the affection, provided the character remains authentic. Shido’s difficulty is that he cannot perfectly impersonate someone else forever, and any seal established through a false personality could collapse when Nia realizes the difference. Ratatoskr therefore needs a fictional character whom Shido can portray without ever breaking character.

Meanwhile, Nia sits alone at home and regrets the way she treated him. She recognizes that Shido was sincerely trying to help her rather than mock her interests and wonders whether she should simply have allowed the kiss. She rejects that shortcut herself. If she cannot actually open her heart to him, the seal will not work properly. She jokingly asks “Rasielmon” what she should do, but omniscience cannot solve the problem for her. She even considers using Rasiel to check what Shido is doing before deliberately stopping herself.

A package then arrives containing a special unreleased otome game, Love Me My Little Shido Girl’s Side. Nia begins playing and discovers a romance character named Itsuki Shidou, who looks suspiciously like the real Shido. The game appears technologically extraordinary. It pronounces Nia’s custom-entered name naturally and responds coherently when she types arbitrary date requests rather than selecting preset choices. She becomes fascinated and increasingly attached to Itsuki.

The trick is that the game is not actually generating those responses. Ratatoskr is watching Nia’s screen remotely, and the real Shido is speaking Itsuki’s dialogue in real time. Because Itsuki’s personality is modeled directly on Shido, there is no fictional role for him to break. Kotori’s strategy is essentially to make Nia develop affection for a 2D Shido, then introduce the same person physically once her feelings are high enough.

The operation falls apart through an oversight that should have been obvious. Nia wonders when the commercial version of the game will release and who developed it, so she summons Rasiel. The Angel instantly exposes Ratatoskr’s involvement. Nia looks directly toward their hidden camera and angrily tells them that after violating Tokiya’s characterization they have now played around with her “otome heart.” She understands why they are doing it, but considers the deception over the line. She tells Ratatoskr not to try something like that again and specifically orders them to remove the camera from her room because she wants privacy.

Kotori consequently gathers not just the Fraxinus crew but all of the sealed Spirits to discuss Nia. Miku mentions knowing an idol who publicly claims a fictional character as her first love, although in that case it is partly fan-oriented presentation and the idol actually has a boyfriend. Kaguya reveals that she knows Honjou Souji’s manga, only for Yuzuru to expose Kaguya’s habit of hiding ecchi manga between more respectable purchases; Kaguya retaliates by attacking Yuzuru’s shōjo-manga preferences. The argument is comic, but the broader point is that Nia’s interest in fiction itself is not unusual enough to explain why she has completely rejected real relationships.

Yoshino proposes the most straightforward solution: stop scheming and simply become Nia’s friend over time. If Nia sees Shido’s genuine kindness long enough, she may eventually open her heart naturally. Kotori admits that this is probably the morally proper method and the one she would prefer, but they cannot safely assume they have months or years. DEM has already captured Nia once, knows what she is, and may locate her again at any time. They need some way to reach her sooner. Tohka then asks the question beneath all the tactics: why can Nia only love 2D in the first place? Kotori decides to investigate Nia’s human-life records for clues.

Natsumi jokingly proposes using Haniel to turn Shido into a manga book. Origami unexpectedly says the basic idea is correct—not transforming Shido into paper, but making a manga with Shido himself as the protagonist. The Yamai sisters refine it: instead of inventing an idealized Shido, they can draw things he genuinely did. The Spirits around him are living source material. Yoshino, with unusual firmness, argues that if they simply show what Shido has actually done for them, Nia will like him too. Everyone votes in favor, including an extremely reluctant Shido.

Nia then calls Ratatoskr’s supposedly secure underground facility directly. After their first two schemes she has been using Rasiel defensively to keep them from springing another surprise on her. She points out a fatal flaw in the manga plan: even if they create it, why would she waste her limited free time reading an amateur book specifically designed to manipulate her? Kotori turns that objection into a challenge. If Ratatoskr can produce a manga that surpasses professional mangaka Honjou Souji by one objective measure—sales—Nia must read it. Nia finds the idea ridiculous enough to be entertaining and accepts.

Nia’s following internal monologue finally explains what “I only love 2D” actually means. It is not simply exaggerated otaku preference. At some earlier point, after already possessing Rasiel, Nia became curious about one question: how was she born? She used Rasiel and learned or remembered something about herself that horrified her so badly that she felt physically sick. Volume 13 deliberately does not state the complete answer at this point, but it establishes that this discovery was the beginning of her distrust.

The existence of Rasiel then poisoned that distrust further. Nia began investigating people around her—friends, acquaintances, even shopkeepers. Every time she looked deeper, she found hidden ugliness: hypocrisy, cruelty, resentment, selfishness, or some other darkness behind apparently pleasant behavior. She gradually became unable to tolerate humanity. Because she still had to function socially, she developed a cheerful surface personality and began treating real people almost like NPCs: interact with them normally, but do not emotionally invest in them.

Fiction was different. A fictional person has no concealed private self waiting for Rasiel to uncover. Everything that exists about Tokiya is contained within the story Nia can already see. He cannot secretly contradict himself behind her back. He cannot betray her in some unseen inner life. Nia therefore withdrew into manga and anime until she eventually chose a career that allowed her to create such worlds herself. Her actual condition is not that she is biologically incapable of loving three-dimensional people. She cannot bring herself to trust a real human being enough to love them. Even while thinking about whether Shido is lying to her, she resists the impulse to use Rasiel on him because experience has taught her that searching for reassurance usually ends with her finding a new reason to distrust someone.

That is when Kurumi appears from Nia’s shadow. Nia immediately uses Rasiel and identifies her as Tokisaki Kurumi, learns the nature of Zafkiel’s clone ability, and also discovers something important about her own escape: Kurumi was responsible for the attack that left her DEM transport vulnerable. Nia is wary because Rasiel tells her enough about Kurumi to understand how dangerous she is, while Kurumi is fascinated by finally seeing the omniscient Angel she has been searching for.

Kurumi asks Nia for information on the First Spirit: the cause of its appearance thirty years earlier, its exact time and coordinates of arrival, its powers, and a method of killing it. Nia initially warns that despite possessing Rasiel she is a pacifist and will not casually provide information that could start a war or hurt innocent people. Kurumi insists that the request concerns her personal objective.

The next chapter confirms that Nia supplied the information. Kurumi has finally located the Second Spirit she had been searching for and obtained what she wanted concerning the First Spirit. The answer is not encouraging: even if Kurumi accumulates enough Reiryoku to use Yud Bet and travel thirty years into the past, she concludes that she cannot defeat the First Spirit directly. She immediately develops a different solution. If the First Spirit did not exist before thirty years ago, Kurumi can travel to a point before its appearance and eliminate the cause that brought it into the world. The crucial information Nia provides identifies three names at the center of that event: Isaac Ray Pelham Westcott, Ellen Mira Mathers, and Elliot Woodman. Kurumi considers them the three great sinners responsible for what happened.

Ratatoskr meanwhile converts part of the Spirits’ residence into an emergency manga studio. Their target is December 31, Comico’s final day. They intend to place Circle Ratatoskr directly beside Nia’s Honjou-dou, print the same number of copies, and sell out first. Ratatoskr can handle backgrounds, finishing, scanning, and printing, but Kotori insists that the story and principal drawings must genuinely come from Shido and the Spirits or the project itself becomes another deception. They have approximately two days.

Everyone is tested by drawing Shido. Tohka and Yoshino produce adorable but childlike pictures. Kotori and Miku are somewhat better, although Miku predictably turns Shido into a long-haired girl in a skirt. Kaguya and Yuzuru prove genuinely competent, with Kaguya naturally rendering him like a hot-blooded shōnen protagonist and Yuzuru drawing an elegant shōjo-style Shido. Shido himself has enough old experience to be useful.

Origami is technically excellent but produces an explicit illustration of herself and Shido naked together, then calmly argues that adult material would help sales. Kotori has to remind her that their booth is registered in the all-ages section.

The surprise is Natsumi. She tries desperately to keep anyone from seeing her picture and begins making excuses before they even judge it, but her drawing is essentially professional quality. Her ability makes sense once Shido remembers what kind of Spirit she is. Haniel is built around imitation, and even without using the Angel directly, Natsumi possesses extraordinary observational and mimetic ability. She once became interested in drawing and “mimicked” a manga artist’s technique. Kotori immediately names her the main artist, with Kaguya, Yuzuru, Shido, and Origami supporting her. Shido takes Natsumi’s hand and personally asks her to help them save Nia. Embarrassed but pleased to be needed, Natsumi agrees.

Tohka, Yoshino, Miku, and Kotori are assigned a separate “special” task whose purpose the drawing team is not told. The manga itself must fit into roughly fifty-nine usable story pages once the cover and publication information are excluded. The group designs it around Shido’s actual history with the Spirits rather than inventing a fantasy version of him. Kotori formally names the operation Project Doujin Shidou and gives them the nearly absurd schedule of completing the storyboard immediately and the finished artwork the following day.

The production process is miserable. Natsumi creates the drafts and cover while the others learn how to ink, erase, scan, and pass pages to Ratatoskr’s digital-assistance team. Their early efforts produce spilled ink, crooked lines, and other amateur mistakes. They work through the night in shifts, but Natsumi refuses even that much rest. She has to maintain artistic consistency across the entire book and takes on more work than anyone else.

In the middle of production, Kotori temporarily pulls Shido away because Ratatoskr has located Hiroki Takajou, another manga artist who knew Nia. The name initially leads Shido to expect a man, only for Takajou to be a woman who, like Nia, publishes under a masculine pen name. Kotori improvises a cover story that Nia is a distant relative they have lost contact with, convincing Takajou to speak with them.

Takajou describes Nia as naturally friendly and easy to talk to but strangely evasive about her life before becoming a manga artist, particularly earlier relationships. She and Nia became genuine friends at a publisher’s party around eight or nine years earlier. Then Nia abruptly became distant and cold. Takajou has spent years believing she accidentally did something to offend her. Kotori suspects the obvious answer: Nia probably used Rasiel, investigated Takajou, found something ugly, and withdrew. Shido is not fully convinced, because Nia normally seems capable of maintaining a surface relationship even with someone she dislikes. Something about Takajou’s case does not fit.

Shido returns to the manga work. By one in the morning on December 31, everyone looks almost physically wrecked. Shido has barely left his seat except to eat, use the bathroom, or sleep for moments at a time. Kaguya and Yuzuru are similarly exhausted, Origami periodically seems to shut down like a machine, and Natsumi is in far worse condition than any of them. Her eyes are red, her hands are trembling, and she has not slept at all. Even after everyone else finishes, she refuses to stop before completing the remaining pages.

When Shido tries to make her rest, Natsumi explains why she will not. She expects that at the actual convention she may be the least useful member of the group; drawing is the one thing she can do that everybody genuinely needs. She remembers how Shido and the others saved her and how happy that made her. Now another Spirit needs saving, and Natsumi wants to use her own power alongside everyone else’s. She wants Nia to understand the thing she herself once could not believe: friendship is beautiful. Natsumi draws the final line and immediately collapses asleep into Shido’s arms.

By the time Comico begins, almost everyone is running on minimal sleep. The morning after the manuscript is finished even produces another round of chaos: Shido wakes to find Origami attached to him, while Miku has Yoshino and Kotori trapped in her arms. Origami and Miku both insist these were innocent sleeping positions, which nobody believes. Nevertheless, the finished manga exists, and Circle Ratatoskr takes its place beside Honjou-dou at Tengu Square.

Nia has several paid employees working with her. When Shido and Kotori notice the contrast with their own large group of friends, Nia openly says that employment relationships are convenient because they are simple: pay someone, receive the agreed work, and no deeper trust is necessary. The comment hits differently after what Shido learned from Takajou.

Ratatoskr reveals ten boxes of five hundred books each, matching Nia’s five thousand copies exactly. Shido and Nia formally exchange books as neighboring circles customarily do. Nia accepts Ratatoskr’s copy but says she will only read it if the contest gives her a reason to. She also warns that five thousand copies is already a conservative print run for Honjou Souji and that a nameless circle with a rushed amateur book has essentially no chance.

An unexpected advantage emerges when other exhibitors recognize Nakatsugawa. His supposedly ordinary Ratatoskr identity hides an extraordinary otaku history. He was once associated with the legendary circle Mai Mai Kaburi and is recognized under MUNECHIKA, a name carrying bizarre but very real influence among Comico veterans. Nakatsugawa refuses to discuss the old history in detail, which only makes him seem more mysterious. His presence helps turn Circle Ratatoskr into an object of curiosity before sales even begin.

Nia still has the enormous advantage of an existing professional audience. Even before the public opening, other circle participants begin lining up for her books. Nia explains that even though her emergency participation kept her out of the printed catalogue, she announced the event on her blog and longtime readers came specifically for Honjou Souji. Equal stock does not mean equal demand.

That is when the “special team” reveals what it spent the previous night preparing. Kotori, Tohka, Yoshino, Miku, and eventually the others appear as bunny-girl sales staff designed to attract attention to the unknown circle. Nia notices Miku but does not recognize her because she was imprisoned during Miku’s rise as an idol. Miku nearly collapses from the insult until Shido reminds her that Nia has been absent from normal society for five years.

When the doors open, the hall is flooded by general attendees. Nia and her employees immediately sell with practiced professional efficiency. Ratatoskr counters by putting the Spirits in front. Tohka, for example, cheerfully talks a hesitant passerby into buying the book largely because he cannot say no to her smile. Nakatsugawa argues that this is a legitimate part of a sales battle: no matter how good a work is, presentation and publicity matter if nobody knows it exists.

Kotori also mobilizes Ratatoskr personnel and tells everyone to invite acquaintances. Ai, Mai, and Mii arrive because Tohka contacted them, immediately warning everyone that Shido is a dangerous womanizer because their impressions from his earlier power-overload episode still have not been properly corrected. Kotori efficiently interrupts the argument by selling them three books.

Origami’s former AST comrades Ryouko Kusakabe, Mikie, and Mildred also appear. Mikie laments Origami’s retirement and asks why she left so suddenly. Origami answers by attaching herself to Shido’s arm and saying simply, “Because of him.” Ryouko also thinks several of the girls at the booth look suspiciously familiar, only for Origami to repeatedly insist that she is imagining things until Ryouko gives up.

The initial artificial boost produces genuine attention. People coming for Honjou-dou notice the strange neighboring circle. Rumors that MUNECHIKA is involved create additional interest, and Ratatoskr’s superior staffing allows it to process customers much faster than Nia’s smaller team. For a time, they nearly erase Nia’s head start.

Nia remains unconcerned because she knows the difference between a temporary attraction and sustainable demand. Eventually Ratatoskr exhausts the customers drawn by novelty, acquaintances, cosplay, and curiosity. Its line shrinks while Honjou-dou’s continues steadily. Nia points out that professional reputation and experience cannot be eliminated in one day. At the end, the thing readers actually want is an interesting book. Ratatoskr still has hundreds of copies while Nia keeps selling.

Miku then plays the strongest card Ratatoskr had not planned in advance. She posts to social media under her own name that she is helping her friend’s circle, gives the booth location, promises to hand buyers the books personally, and even permits photographs. Her fanbase immediately begins converging on the hall. Miku explains that after seeing Shido, Natsumi, and everyone else work themselves nearly unconscious, she could not simply stand around doing nothing. Like Natsumi, she wants to contribute the thing she uniquely possesses.

The resulting crowd floods Circle Ratatoskr. Miku even forces herself to smile and personally deal with male fans despite her lingering discomfort around men because helping the group matters more at that moment. Nia does not accuse them of cheating. She accepts the tactic as part of the contest and keeps selling. Shido explicitly tells her that they are doing this not merely to win but for her sake as well.

Then Takajou appears at Honjou-dou.

Nia’s entire demeanor changes. Takajou asks directly whether she did something wrong years earlier and apologizes in case she unknowingly hurt Nia. Nia immediately insists that she did nothing. Takajou accepts the answer without demanding an explanation, buys a copy of Nia’s book, and tells her that even if Nia hates her, she will continue enjoying Honjou-sensei’s work. Nia is visibly unable to respond properly.

Watching the interaction gives Shido the missing answer. Kotori assumed Nia investigated Takajou and disliked what she found. Shido realizes the opposite is more likely. Nia genuinely liked Takajou as a friend. Precisely because the friendship mattered, Nia became afraid that one day her curiosity would win, she would use Rasiel, discover something ugly, and destroy a relationship she valued. So she created distance before Rasiel could ruin it. Nia refuses to admit it while continuing to sell, but Shido refuses to drop the subject.

Their argument continues while both of them are simultaneously serving customers. Nia finally explodes. Yes, she wants friends. The problem is that she possesses the equivalent of an observation system capable of watching anyone at any time and exposing virtually their entire history. She asks Shido whether he could sincerely befriend someone who could watch him in the bathroom or bath and inspect his past whenever she wished. She is not only afraid of what other people hide; she is ashamed of the power imbalance created by Rasiel and afraid that her own curiosity will eventually violate anyone she becomes close to.

Shido’s response is so inappropriate that Nia initially cannot understand it: he laughs. His experience with people such as Origami has already destroyed most conventional standards of privacy. More seriously, he tells Nia that if she wants to investigate him, she can. She can use Rasiel and look at whatever she wants. He still will not hate her. Nia immediately retaliates that Shido has misunderstood the danger—it may be her who hates him after discovering everything. Even so, Shido has finally answered her fear in a way information cannot. He cannot guarantee that she will like everything she discovers. He can only make a choice about what he will do afterward.

The contest concludes at virtually the same instant. Both Honjou-dou and Ratatoskr sell their final copies together. Nobody wins. After recovering her breath, Nia decides that simply forcing a professional circle to an exact tie is enough to earn the reward and agrees to read their manga.

The group moves to a park behind Tengu Square so Nia can read without exposing Spirit matters to her employees. She insists on reading alone because being stared at ruins the experience. When she opens the book, she is professionally impressed by what the group managed in two days. The story begins with Itsuka Shido encountering a Spirit rejected because of her extraordinary power and follows his repeated encounters with other Spirits who gradually open their hearts to him.

Nia’s initial verdict is still negative. The artwork is impressively competent, but the protagonist is unbelievable. The manga depicts Shido repeatedly risking himself for people carrying enormous emotional problems, continuing to reach for them even when they reject him, attack him, or reveal terrible parts of themselves. To Nia, that is obviously romanticized fiction created because the authors want her to like Shido. Even if she fell for this fictional “Shido,” she expects reality to disappoint her.

Curiosity then defeats her.

Rather than investigating Shido, Nia initially asks Rasiel to show her how the manga was made because she wants to know how amateurs produced something so polished so quickly. Rasiel shows her the production process—and Natsumi’s declaration that she wants stubborn Nia to understand that friendship is beautiful. That thought makes Nia unconsciously want to know why Natsumi believes such a naïve thing. Rasiel follows the desire.

Nia sees Natsumi’s history. Then Origami’s. Miku’s. Kaguya and Yuzuru’s. Kotori’s. Yoshino’s. Tohka’s. She sees girls who had been frightened, hostile, traumatized, suspicious, or emotionally closed and the actual way Shido treated them. The manga was not idealizing him.

If anything, it had insufficient pages to show everything.

The apparently unrealistic protagonist really did keep getting hurt, getting back up, and reaching toward people whose hidden darkness he had every opportunity to reject. Nia’s omniscient Angel—the very thing that taught her never to trust a human being’s pleasant surface—is now giving her undeniable evidence that Shido’s surface was not a lie. She realizes that everything he said to her was genuine and begins crying onto Rasiel’s pages.

When she returns to everyone, Nia hides the emotional impact and insists that one manga still was not enough to make her fall for him. Shido and the Spirits visibly deflate.

Then Nia, blushing, adds that she will give him one more date.

The entire group erupts in celebration. Miku and Origami immediately begin using the confusion as an excuse to molest Shido, Tohka tries to stop them, and the scene degenerates into the kind of ridiculous physical chaos Nia has spent years believing cannot represent a meaningful human relationship. Watching them, Nia starts laughing. She admits that she envies them. Then she looks at Shido and begins to say that perhaps, if it is him—

—and suddenly collapses screaming as dark Reiryoku erupts from her body. Kotori receives the readings and gives the diagnosis: Nia is Inverting.

Only then does the volume reveal the full purpose of Westcott’s “stage.”

Nia was DEM’s captive <Sister>, captured by Ellen five years earlier. During those five years DEM subjected her to relentless physical and psychological torture in an attempt to force a complete Inversion. Westcott later explains that they repeatedly broke her mind and inflicted extreme mutilation and experiments on her, but none of it produced the result he wanted.

DEM therefore implanted a microscopic Realizer in Nia’s brain that suppressed her memories of the entire five-year ordeal. That is why Nia could remember being captured, being attached to machines, and losing five years of manga work while somehow failing to remember the actual horror of her imprisonment. The suppression was partly necessary because her mind had been broken repeatedly and could no longer function while consciously carrying everything DEM had done to her.

But memory suppression had another purpose.

Westcott learned from Tohka’s Inversion that merely torturing a Spirit is less effective than giving her something precious and then destroying it. Shido’s bonds with the Spirits create exactly the emotional height from which they can fall. Five years earlier Nia had already lost faith in humanity because of Rasiel. Westcott deliberately allowed her back into society and waited for Itsuka Shido to do what he always does: show a Spirit kindness, create a bond, and restore hope.

At the moment Nia finally begins believing that perhaps humanity is not completely worthless and that perhaps Shido can be trusted, Westcott remotely activates the Realizer and releases all five years of torture memories at once. He describes the logic with a simple metaphor: if you want a glass to break, dropping it from a greater height works better.

Nia’s body begins manifesting wounds corresponding to what she remembers. Blood pours from injuries that appear without any physical attacker present, dark Reiryoku spreads across the ground, and her nun-like Astral Dress twists into its ominous Inverse form. Rasiel becomes the Demon King <Tome of Divine Corruption – Beelzebub>. Its pages scatter around her and produce grotesque creatures made of darkness.

Shido has an immediate problem beyond the monsters themselves. When he restored Inverse Tohka, he already shared a profound bond with her. Origami’s Inversion also involved an already-established relationship. Nia and Shido have only just reached the point where she is willing to give him another date. He does not know whether a kiss will reach her consciousness at all. Kotori cannot promise that it will. Their only available strategy is to trust that what they built during these few days is real enough.

Ellen arrives before they can act and openly describes Nia as DEM property. Tohka blocks her first attack. Kotori divides the Spirits into two groups: Tohka, Kaguya, Yuzuru, and Miku hold Ellen back, while Yoshino, Natsumi, and Origami clear Beelzebub’s monsters so Shido can reach Nia. Even partially sealed, the Spirits can create an opening if they cooperate.

Beelzebub then demonstrates the inverted version of Future Describing. Origami suddenly points Metatron at herself and fires. Yoshino becomes trapped by her own ice. Haniel’s effect rebounds onto Natsumi and transforms her. Shido and Kotori simply lose the ability to move their bodies. Nia’s normal Rasiel needed time to carefully draw a future event; Beelzebub writes outcomes at terrifying speed, making the experience feel to Shido like fighting a god who is literally writing their future faster than they can act.

Shido eventually breaks the command because Future Describing is trying to control a human body that contains the Reiryoku of eight Spirits. Yamai’s wind erupts from him and tears through the restriction. That shock also reconnects him with something he learned unconsciously when his powers went berserk earlier in the month: he can invoke the powers and even the Angels of the Spirits sealed inside him.

He uses Zadkiel to freeze the monsters’ movement and Sandalphon to cut through them. His body pays for it immediately. Shido is still physically human; wielding an Angel causes muscles to tear and bones to crack. Kotori’s healing flames simultaneously repair the damage. He then draws on Gabriel, turning its soothing qualities inward through his own voice to dull enough of the pain that he can continue moving. The fight becomes a concentrated demonstration of what the sealed Spirits have actually given him: not an effortless collection of superpowers, but powers his body can only survive because other Spirit abilities are continually compensating for the damage.

When he reaches Nia, he finds that screaming her name normally does nothing. He therefore channels Gabriel through his voice and calls to her with its supernatural effect. The pain clouding Nia’s consciousness weakens just enough for her to respond. She recognizes Shido and weakly says his name. Shido reaches toward her, believing he may finally be breaking through the Inversion.

Before he can touch her, another Wizard appears and drives a double-edged laser sword directly through Nia’s abdomen.

Origami recognizes the girl: Artemisia Ashcroft.

Artemisia’s Territory is strong enough to stop Shido’s Sandalphon and blow him away, appearing comparable in quality to Ellen’s. She does not explain why she is working with DEM and shows almost no emotional reaction to Origami. Instead, she removes her sword from the already critically wounded Nia and uses her Territory to draw a black crystal out of Nia’s chest.

Isaac Westcott walks onto the battlefield and identifies the object as an Inverse Sephira Crystal—a Qlipha. He thanks Artemisia, tells Ratatoskr that their actions helped him move closer to his ultimate wish, and then does something Shido does not believe should be possible: Westcott presses the Qlipha into his own chest.

The crystal is absorbed.

Westcott begins radiating Reiryoku and physically resembles a Spirit. He calls forth Nia’s Demon King, Beelzebub, and almost immediately understands how to use it. He produces the same black creatures and marvels at the ability to turn written events into reality. Shido recognizes the parallel between himself and Westcott in the most disturbing possible form: Shido carries the power of Spirits because they opened their hearts to him and allowed themselves to be sealed; Westcott has violently torn an Inverse crystal out of Nia and inserted it into himself.

Westcott makes clear that acquiring one Demon King is only the first step toward his “dearest wish.” Nevertheless, he decides not to continue fighting. With Ellen, Artemisia, Beelzebub, and its monsters on his side, he possesses an overwhelming advantage, but obtaining the Demon King was his primary objective for the day. He prefers leaving future pleasures for later. He withdraws with Ellen and Artemisia after warning the Spirits to enjoy what remains of their peaceful lives.

Ratatoskr cannot chase them because Nia is dying.

Artemisia’s sword wound has caused catastrophic blood loss, and Westcott has removed nearly all of Nia’s spiritual core. Fraxinus is still unusable, preventing emergency teleportation. Natsumi uses Haniel as immediate first aid and transforms Nia’s visibly mutilated body into one without open wounds, but she explicitly warns that this is not true healing. Haniel cannot restore the blood Nia has already lost or guarantee that her internal injuries are repaired. Nia continues becoming colder and weaker.

Tohka then notices a faint trace of Reiryoku still inside her.

Kotori realizes why. Immediately before Artemisia arrived, Shido’s Gabriel-enhanced call temporarily restored part of Nia’s consciousness. Her Inversion had already begun weakening. Consequently, the Qlipha Artemisia extracted and Westcott absorbed was incomplete. A fragment of Nia’s original spiritual existence remains behind.

Shido gambles everything on that fragment. The established sealed Spirits are connected to him by routes through which Reiryoku can circulate. If Nia still possesses enough of a Sephira fragment for Shido to seal, establishing a route to her might allow power from Shido and the others to flow back into her and sustain her life.

Nobody knows whether Nia actually likes Shido enough for sealing to work.

There is no time to find out.

Shido tells Nia to accept him and says that he does not care even if she takes all the power he possesses. He kisses her while she is barely conscious. He immediately feels the familiar warmth of a seal forming. The connection succeeds. Nia’s fingers begin moving again. When Shido and all of the Spirits start calling her name, she weakly tells them that they do not need to shout because she can hear them. Then she loses consciousness again, but not before silently moving her lips to spell THANK.

The outcome is therefore very different from Miku’s sealing. Nia does not calmly decide at the climax to relinquish a complete Angel. DEM has already ripped most of her inverted Sephira away. Shido seals the surviving portion as an emergency act to keep her alive. What makes that emergency seal possible is everything that happened before the Inversion: Nia enjoying being with Shido despite claiming she cannot trust humans, Shido recognizing why she fled from Takajou, his willingness to let her investigate him rather than demanding blind trust, the Spirits creating the manga together, Natsumi’s determination to reach another isolated Spirit, and Rasiel itself showing Nia that Shido’s kindness survives exposure to the hidden truth she normally expects to destroy people.

The victory is also incomplete in a much more dangerous sense. Westcott successfully possesses Beelzebub. Back at DEM, he discovers that the Demon King does not contain its full original power because Shido restored part of Nia before the extraction. Westcott concludes that Shido will probably inherit access to the missing portion through the seal and simply plans to obtain the rest later.

Even the incomplete Beelzebub is transformational for DEM. Westcott uses it and discovers that the current world has experienced a rewritten history: Shido previously used Kurumi’s power to travel into the past and alter Origami’s history. He transfers that knowledge to Ellen through physical contact. Because Realizer technology converts a Wizard’s mental image into reality, Ellen’s newly restored awareness of a severe wound she received in the previous timeline causes that wound to physically appear on her body in the present. Westcott is fascinated rather than disturbed by the implication.

At Ratatoskr, meanwhile, every Spirit stays awake outside Nia’s treatment room despite the manga deadline, Comico, and the DEM battle leaving them completely exhausted. Kotori eventually reports that Nia has survived the critical period. Natsumi’s emergency intervention and the Reiryoku flowing through the newly established route both contributed to keeping her alive. When Nia wakes, everyone immediately crowds around her. She falls back on her usual personality and jokes about how popular she has suddenly become and whether they all want autographs.

Nia starts apologizing to Shido for allowing DEM to catch her again. Shido stops the apology by holding her hand and simply thanking her for being alive. The direct emotional atmosphere is exactly the kind of thing Nia normally handles poorly, and she immediately tries to laugh it off, but she accepts the concern rather than withdrawing from it.

Shido then asks Reine for permission to take Nia outside briefly. She is still unable to walk, so he pushes her wheelchair onto the roof along with the other Spirits. Dawn is approaching. It is now January 1.

Shido deliberately brought Nia there to see the first sunrise of the new year.

He calls it appropriate for her new start. Nia mocks him for being theatrical, but she watches the light rise between the buildings and eventually thanks him seriously for everything. More importantly, she says that when her body recovers, she intends to meet Takajou again. The friend she abandoned because she was afraid of eventually learning too much is the first relationship she chooses to revisit.

Nia also admits that losing most of Rasiel is not entirely unpleasant. She has possessed it for almost three decades, and although having DEM steal her power obviously infuriates her, some part of her feels relieved to be free of the Angel that made it nearly impossible for her to leave another person’s unknown side alone. She specifies that she has been a Spirit for approximately twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight years. Kotori reasons that Nia’s Reiryoku probably suppressed her physical aging and warns that, now that most of her power is sealed or gone, ordinary aging may resume.

That conversation causes Nia to ask when everyone else became a Spirit. Kotori explains that she became one five years earlier, Miku approximately a year earlier, Origami only recently, while several of the others are supposedly pure Spirits rather than former humans.

Nia stares at her in genuine confusion.

Then she asks the question that ends the volume:

“Pure Spirits…? But, weren’t all Spirits once human?”

Everyone freezes.

The line carries enormous weight because it is coming from Nia. She is not guessing based on folklore. She has been a Spirit for nearly twenty-eight years, possessed the omniscient Rasiel, and previously used that Angel specifically to investigate the question of how she herself came into existence. Ratatoskr’s assumption that Tohka, Yoshino, the Yamai sisters, Natsumi, and others are naturally occurring “pure Spirits” therefore collides directly with what Nia believes to be basic fact.

The arc consequently closes on two interconnected resolutions. Personally, Nia begins recovering from a life defined by knowing too much: instead of demanding perfect certainty about another person before trusting them, she accepts relationships in which people remain partly unknowable and can still choose whether to stay. At the larger story level, the Spirit with the greatest access to objective information casually reveals that Ratatoskr’s entire classification of Spirits may be fundamentally wrong.
</nia_arc>

<tohka_world_arc>
This summary contains how the Tohka World arc goes, you must follow this as closely as possible:

The Tohka World arc begins by revealing something that occurred long before Shido ever met Tohka. During the period in which Takamiya Mio was creating Sephira Crystals, Mio attempted to create one that would already be safe for a human host rather than requiring repeated human sacrifices to purify it. She separated the harmful elements of the crystal as carefully as possible and infused it with one of the strongest emotions inside herself: love.

The experiment produces an outcome Mio never expected.

Instead of remaining a crystal, the Sephira suddenly develops a body and consciousness of its own.

A young girl with long dark hair appears before Mio wearing a bluish-purple Astral Dress. She immediately demonstrates independent thought and reacts aggressively when she senses Mio considering what to do with her. The newborn girl manifests <Nahemah>, a gigantic black sword associated with a throne, and attacks Mio.

Mio overwhelms her with <Ain Soph> and returns the girl to the form of a Sephira Crystal.

Mio considers destroying the crystal. The existence that emerged from it is an irregularity that could interfere with her plans. Despite this, Mio cannot bring herself to erase her. Unlike the humans transformed through Sephira Crystals, this girl had been born directly from one. She is therefore something extraordinarily close to Mio herself: a pure Spirit.

Mio keeps the crystal.

That decision eventually results in the birth of Yatogami Tohka.

Throughout the arc, fragmented passages follow another consciousness existing inside the same Sephira. This consciousness experiences Tohka's life indirectly. At first she has no clear identity and barely understands what she is. She can sense Tohka's fear, suffering, happiness, and eventually her connection to Shido. As Tohka's life changes, this second consciousness gradually develops alongside her.

The present story begins roughly one month after the final battle against Mio and Westcott.

Everything appears to have ended almost impossibly well.

The Spirits are alive. DEM is no longer attacking them. The major conflicts that defined their lives have disappeared. Even several problems that should have been impossible to fix seem to have conveniently resolved themselves.

Mana's body, which had been severely damaged by DEM's magical treatment, is completely healthy.

Maria possesses a physical body and lives alongside everyone as though her materialization had become permanent.

Most strikingly, Yamauchi Sawa is alive again and spends time with Kurumi as though the tragedy that defined Kurumi's entire life never occurred.

The Spirits can also manifest complete Astral Dresses and Angels despite the battle against Mio having supposedly ended.

Shido enjoys the peaceful life around him, but the situation increasingly feels wrong. Events have arranged themselves too perfectly. Problems which should require explanations simply have convenient solutions, and everyone accepts those solutions as though they had always been true.

Kurumi is the first person to seriously investigate the inconsistency.

She approaches Shido, Kotori, and Mana and points toward Mana's healed body as something that should be impossible. Using the information available through <Rasiel>, Kurumi determines that the world they currently inhabit is not the original world.

She then has Shido examine his own altered memories using <Zafkiel>.

Shido sees the moment immediately following Mio's disappearance.

In the original sequence of events, Mio's remaining Sephira Crystal should have vanished.

Instead, a hand reaches out and takes it.

The person responsible is Tohka.

Kurumi explains that the current world was produced through the power remaining inside Mio's Sephira Crystal. It is an idealized version of reality in which problems have been resolved according to an almost childishly benevolent logic. Mana is healthy. Sawa is alive. The Spirits can freely use their powers. Circumstances that caused suffering have simply been corrected.

At this point, Kurumi and the others believe Tohka herself created the world.

There is a far more serious problem.

The world cannot survive.

Mio's Sephira Crystal was already collapsing when it was taken. The artificial world is being sustained by that dying power, and Tohka's own existence is connected to it. Once the remaining power disappears, the world and Tohka will disappear with it.

Shido decides that the remaining power must be sealed before that happens.

That creates a familiar problem with much higher stakes. Shido needs Tohka to open her heart enough for him to seal the Reiryoku through a kiss.

He therefore prepares to take Tohka on a date.

The situation changes when another personality appears through Tohka.

This girl resembles Tohka but carries herself completely differently. She is cold, arrogant, suspicious of Shido, and fiercely protective of Tohka. She is also the consciousness that had existed inside the Sephira alongside Tohka.

She wields <Nahemah>, the Demon King corresponding to Tohka's <Sandalphon>.

Shido eventually gives this second girl a name.

Tenka.

Unlike their previous encounters with Tohka's Inversion, Tenka now remains present long enough to interact with Shido as a distinct individual, and Mio's remaining power eventually allows her to exist in a separate body from Tohka.

Tohka insists that Tenka join her date with Shido.

Tenka initially considers the idea unnecessary. Her only concern appears to be ensuring that Tohka enjoys whatever time remains. Tohka refuses to leave her behind. This may be their only opportunity to exist separately and spend time together, and Tohka wants Tenka to experience the same world that she has come to love.

The date becomes a date between Shido, Tohka, and Tenka.

Tohka takes Tenka through places associated with her memories of Shido and the other Spirits. Tenka repeatedly acts suspicious of ordinary food, activities, and human customs, forcing Shido or Tohka to demonstrate things before she will participate.

Despite the attitude, Tenka gradually becomes involved.

One of the most important destinations is a road covered in blooming cherry trees.

Tohka has experienced school, the ocean, autumn leaves, winter, festivals, and countless other sights with Shido, but she had never seen cherry blossoms with him. By the time Shido first sealed her, the blossoms that year had already fallen.

Shido therefore wants to show them to her before the world ends.

Tohka and Tenka are amazed by the sight.

Tohka eventually tells Tenka that a date does not require an extraordinary destination. Being together with somebody and enjoying that time is enough to make something a date.

Tenka slowly begins to understand why Tohka treasures Shido so much.

While Shido is occupied with the date, Kurumi develops a method for buying him more time.

Because the entire artificial world is being maintained as a spiritual domain, Reiryoku released inside it becomes part of the energy sustaining it. The former Spirits are currently capable of manifesting their full powers, giving them an enormous supply of Reiryoku that can be deliberately exhausted into the world.

Kurumi therefore proposes something excessive even by the group's standards.

The Spirits should fight each other.

A large nature park is cleared so civilians cannot enter. The Spirits are permitted to use their complete Astral Dresses and Angels. A contestant is eliminated once she has exhausted enough Reiryoku that she can no longer maintain her Angel or Astral Dress. Attacking somebody after she has been rendered defenseless is forbidden.

The last Spirit capable of continuing wins.

The actual purpose is to force all of them to expend enormous quantities of Reiryoku and thereby extend the lifespan of Tohka's world.

Kurumi adds another prize to ensure everybody takes the battle seriously.

The winner receives the right to be the first among them to properly confess her love to Shido.

The atmosphere changes immediately.

The battle begins.

Origami uses <Metatron>. Kotori uses <Camael> without the destructive impulses that previously restricted her. Mukuro uses <Michael>. Miku, Natsumi, Nia, the Yamai sisters, Yoshino, and Kurumi all use their abilities at full strength.

The nature park is rapidly destroyed by a battle between ten Spirits.

The competition also demonstrates how much several of the girls have changed since their introductions. Alliances form and collapse, deceptive tactics become as important as raw power, and even girls normally considered weaker in direct combat exploit the battle royal format.

Yoshino becomes the unexpected standout.

She fights far more aggressively and intelligently than the timid girl Shido originally encountered. She uses <Zadkiel> and <Siryon>, takes advantage of opponents underestimating her, feigns vulnerability when useful, and continues fighting through severe exhaustion.

Eventually, the battle ends.

Yoshino is the winner.

Kurumi explicitly acknowledges Yoshino's victory. She deliberately exploited the wording of the rules so that she could lose while retaining enough Reiryoku for one final task, but she does not attempt to claim the victory for herself.

That final task concerns Mana.

When Tohka's artificial world ends, its convenient alterations will disappear. Mana's healed body would therefore return to the condition produced by years of DEM's magical treatment.

Kurumi refuses to allow that.

She uses the Fourth Bullet <Dalet> with the remaining power available to her and rewinds Mana's body to a state before DEM's damaging treatment. Mana temporarily experiences the effect as though Kurumi has attacked her, but Kurumi has actually permanently removed the damage.

With that use of <Dalet>, Kurumi exhausts the remaining power sustaining her own Astral Dress and Angel.

Her old conflict with Mana also effectively ends. Kurumi admits that although many of her clones were killed by Mana, Mana had been manipulated by DEM, and Kurumi does not actually dislike somebody who tried so desperately to behave like an ally of justice.

Meanwhile, Shido becomes increasingly suspicious of Tenka.

The artificial world does not fit the personality Tenka presents to him. She claims indifference, yet everything in the world exists to make other people happy. Sawa was restored for Kurumi. Mana was healed. Problems were removed without demanding anything from the people benefiting from them.

Shido eventually confronts Tenka about the contradiction.

Tenka responds by manifesting <Nahemah> and attacking him.

Shido manifests <Sandalphon> and fights her.

During the exchange, Shido swings <Sandalphon> toward Tenka.

Tenka suddenly drops <Nahemah> and prepares to accept the attack.

Shido attempts to redirect the sword, but Tohka throws herself into him before the blow can land.

Tohka finally tells Shido the truth.

Tenka created this world for Tohka.

The other Spirits were originally human beings who received Sephira Crystals. Their human bodies remained the foundations of their existences. Once Mio and the Sephira system disappeared, they could continue living as humans.

Tohka is different.

Tohka never possessed a human body.

She was born directly from the Sephira itself.

She is a pure Spirit.

This had already produced a unique result during the previous timeline in which Mio killed the Spirits and reclaimed their Sephira Crystals. The human Spirits left corpses after their Sephira were removed. Tohka disappeared completely, yet her consciousness was eventually able to awaken inside Mio because Tohka's existence had always belonged to the Sephira itself.

Tenka helped Tohka awaken during that crisis.

After Mio finally died in the restored timeline, the consequence became unavoidable.

Mio's remaining Sephira Crystal was disappearing.

Once it vanished, Tohka would vanish with it.

There were only minutes remaining.

Tenka refused to accept Tohka disappearing almost immediately after the battle ended.

She took Mio's Sephira Crystal and used its remaining power to create the artificial world.

The world is therefore less an ordinary rewritten timeline and more a spiritual boundary in which the passage of time has been massively stretched. Approximately one month can pass inside while only a few minutes pass in the original world.

Tenka created it to give Tohka one final month.

One final period at school.

One final chance to eat with everyone.

One final opportunity to laugh with the people she loves.

And one final date with Shido.

Tohka, in return, used Mio's power to give Tenka a separate body so that the person who had silently existed beside her for so long could experience that final day too.

Shido finally understands why Tenka had constantly attempted to push him toward Tohka.

Tenka never intended to steal Tohka's final moments.

She simply wanted Tohka to be happy.

Tenka eventually admits that spending the day with Shido was enjoyable for her as well. She liked feeling how brightly Tohka's heart reacted whenever Shido was nearby. She even admits that, just a little, she had wanted to meet him herself before everything ended.

She wonders what might have happened if she had met him earlier.

Tenka then gives Tohka her body back.

The artificial world begins collapsing.

The remaining power of Mio reacts violently and forms an enormous core resembling Mio. This entity carries Mio's appearance and Reiryoku, but it is no longer Mio herself. It is the uncontrolled remnant of the power maintaining the world.

Shido and Tohka confront it.

Tohka can now access both sides of her existence.

She manifests <Sandalphon> and <Nahemah> together.

The throne of <Sandalphon> becomes <Halvanhelev>. The throne of <Nahemah> becomes <Paverschlev>. Tohka combines the two enormous swords into a single weapon.

<Yezelhlev>, the Sword of Genesis.

Through the memories inherited from Mio's Sephira, Tohka remembers her own creation.

She sees Mio creating the irregular pure Spirit, defeating her, and then deciding against destroying her. Mio could not bring herself to mercilessly erase another existence so similar to herself.

Tohka also remembers Shido once suggesting that perhaps some unconscious part of Mio created Tohka because Mio herself desired an existence capable of finally killing her.

Tohka does not know whether that interpretation is correct.

She nevertheless thanks Mio for allowing her to exist.

Tohka swings <Yezelhlev>.

The remaining Mio-shaped core is cut apart.

The world can no longer be maintained.

Tenka briefly appears one final time and tells Shido that sealing Tohka is enough. Tohka and Tenka are fundamentally connected, so the remaining Reiryoku can be sealed through Tohka.

Tenka also tells Shido that the date was not bad.

Then she returns to Tohka permanently.

Shido and Tohka spend the last moments of the artificial world together as everything around them begins disappearing.

The other Spirits gather with them.

Tohka thanks the people who changed her life. She thanks Kotori, Origami, Yoshino and Yoshinon, the Yamai sisters, Miku, Natsumi, Nia, Mukuro, Kurumi, and the others who became her family. She asks them to extend that gratitude to Mana, the <Fraxinus> crew, their classmates, and the countless people who made her ordinary life possible.

Everyone understands what is happening.

Tohka prepares to say goodbye.

Shido tries to remain composed because he does not want Tohka's final memory of him to be one of grief.

Tohka similarly attempts to smile.

Before Shido can finish sealing her, Yoshino intervenes.

Yoshino reminds everyone that she won the Spirit battle.

The reward was the right to confess to Shido before anybody else.

Yoshino removes Yoshinon from her hand and speaks as herself.

She tells Shido that she loves him.

Her feelings are romantic, genuine, and strong enough that she refuses to dismiss them simply because Tohka is about to disappear.

The confession has another effect.

Tohka had spent the final day trying to accept her own death peacefully. Yoshino's confession forces Tohka to confront the feelings she had avoided naming.

Tohka realizes that her love for Shido is different from the affection she feels for everyone else.

She loves him romantically.

She becomes jealous at the thought of another girl taking him.

She wants to remain beside him.

She does not want to disappear.

Tohka finally cries.

She tells Shido that she loves him and wants more time with him.

Shido's own attempt to remain composed collapses.

He tells Tohka that he loves her too.

He does not want to lose her.

He wants to continue living beside her.

The artificial sky collapses around them as the boundary reaches its limit.

Shido and Tohka call each other's names and share one final kiss.

The artificial world disappears.

The original world returns.

Only a few minutes have passed since Mio's death. The battlefield, wreckage, shoreline, and everyone standing there are almost exactly as they had been before Tenka took the Sephira Crystal.

The month they experienced together remains in their memories.

There is one difference.

Tohka is no longer in Shido's arms.

Mio's Sephira Crystal has disappeared.

With no human body to return to, Yatogami Tohka disappears with it.
</tohka_world_arc>

<tohka_arc>
This summary contains how Tohka's arc goes, you must follow this as closely as possible:

Tohka's arc begins on April 10, the first school day after spring break. Itsuka Shido wakes to find his younger sister Kotori dancing on top of him while trying to wake him up, immediately establishing their ordinary sibling relationship before anything supernatural enters his life. Their parents are away on business, as they frequently are, so Shido handles most of the cooking at home. While preparing breakfast, he and Kotori watch a report about another spacequake, one of the mysterious disasters humanity has lived with for thirty years. The first and largest appeared in Eurasia and killed approximately 150 million people, smaller spacequakes occurred across the world afterward, and then the phenomenon mysteriously stopped before beginning again five years ago, particularly around Japan and Tengu City. Underground shelters, warning systems, evacuation drills, and specialized reconstruction technology have therefore become normal parts of everyday society even though nobody in Shido's ordinary life knows what actually causes the disasters.

Because both Shido and Kotori have opening ceremonies that day, Shido asks what Kotori wants for lunch afterward. She requests the deluxe children's plate from a nearby family restaurant, so they agree to meet there after school. Kotori makes him promise that he will come even if an earthquake, fire, spacequake, or terrorist attack happens, and Shido jokingly agrees to most of those conditions. At Raizen High, Shido begins his second year alongside his friend Tonomachi Hiroto and his quiet classmate Tobiichi Origami, an exceptionally talented and beautiful girl with whom Shido has spoken before but does not consider himself particularly close. Origami sees him differently. Unknown to Shido, she recognizes him from a meeting in the past and has tried various ways of getting closer to him since entering high school, although Shido remembers none of it.

After the opening ceremony, a spacequake alarm suddenly sounds. The students begin evacuating toward the underground shelter, but Shido notices Origami running in the opposite direction. When he warns her that she is going the wrong way, Origami simply tells him that she will be fine and continues toward the exit. Shido then remembers Kotori and attempts to call her, but she does not answer. The location information from her phone appears to place her near the family restaurant where they promised to meet, and Shido imagines Kotori faithfully waiting there because of that promise. Despite Tonomachi's attempts to stop him, he leaves the evacuation route and runs into the city to find her.

The spacequake occurs before he reaches the restaurant. An enormous section of the city disappears, leaving a massive crater, and at its center Shido sees a girl with extremely long black hair, an extraordinary armor-like dress, and a gigantic sword. Her beauty is enough to temporarily overwhelm his fear of the destruction around them, but the girl's expression is exhausted and deeply melancholy. Shido asks her name. She tells him that she has no such thing. Almost immediately, girls equipped with mechanical armor descend from the sky and attack her, and Shido is stunned to recognize Origami among them.

The flying soldiers belong to the AST, although Shido does not yet know that. Their weapons and mobility are far beyond anything he thought ordinary humans possessed, yet they are still overwhelmingly weaker than the nameless girl. She deflects their attacks and answers with sword swings powerful enough to tear through the surrounding terrain. When she notices Shido, she assumes he has come to kill her too. Shido desperately tells her that he has not, and the immediate certainty with which she expected hostility leaves a stronger impression on him than the battle itself. Before their conversation can continue, Origami resumes the attack and clashes with the girl at close range, producing a shockwave powerful enough to throw Shido around. He eventually loses consciousness and is secretly recovered by another organization.

Origami returns to the JGSDF Tengu base after the battle and is shown to be Master Sergeant Tobiichi of the Anti-Spirit Team. The equipment she uses is a Combat Realizer Unit, or CR-Unit, technology derived from Realizers that allows a Wizard to establish a Territory where calculations and imagination can influence reality. CR-Units allow humans to fly, strengthen their bodies, manipulate weapons that would normally be impossible to handle, and survive forces no ordinary soldier could withstand. Even with that technology, the difference between the AST and the Spirit remains enormous. Captain Kusakabe Ryouko praises Origami for her performance but warns that she was recklessly risking her life. Ryouko views Spirits less like ordinary enemies and more like intelligent natural disasters whose damage the AST can at best suppress, while Origami insists that defeating Spirits is the AST's actual duty.

When Shido wakes, he is aboard the enormous aerial vessel <Fraxinus>. He first meets Murasame Reine, an analysis officer with severe dark circles beneath her eyes, a permanently exhausted manner, and a battered stuffed bear she carries with her. Reine looks as though she needs medical attention more than Shido does and casually claims she cannot remember when she last properly slept. She brings him to the bridge, where he meets Vice Commander Kannazuki Kyouhei and then receives a much greater shock when the commander's chair turns around. The commander of <Fraxinus> is Kotori.

Kotori is wearing black ribbons instead of the white ribbons Shido normally sees her wear at home, and her behavior is almost completely different. Rather than the affectionate little sister who calls him Onii-chan, she becomes domineering, sarcastic, sharp-tongued, and entirely comfortable commanding the bizarre people aboard the ship. She explains that the black-haired girl Shido encountered is a Spirit, a being that does not normally exist in this world. The process of a Spirit appearing can distort space, and the resulting phenomenon is what humanity calls a spacequake. The destruction produced by that arrival does not necessarily reflect the Spirit's intentions, but a Spirit still possesses enough power that later battles can cause further devastation regardless of who starts them.

Kotori then explains the AST. Their answer to the Spirit problem is extermination. Shido immediately objects because he remembers the girl's expression when she assumed he had come to kill her. Kotori points out that sympathy does not make Spirits harmless: even involuntary appearances can destroy cities, and nobody can guarantee that a future arrival will not produce another catastrophe on the scale of the Eurasia disaster. Shido nevertheless cannot accept killing the girl without anyone even trying to understand her. He argues that they should at least talk to Spirits before deciding that death is the only possible answer.

That is exactly what Kotori wanted him to say. She reveals that <Ratatoskr>, the organization operating <Fraxinus>, exists to resolve the Spirit problem without killing them. The two general approaches are the AST's method of overpowering and exterminating Spirits and Ratatoskr's method of communicating with them. More strangely, Kotori tells Shido that Ratatoskr as it currently exists was created around his role as a negotiator and would not exist in the same form without him. When he demands to know why, she only tells him that he is "special" and that he will understand eventually.

Shido asks what Ratatoskr's peaceful negotiation method actually requires. Kotori gives him the answer that will define his life from that point onward: make the Spirit fall in love. He is expected to become friends with her, talk to her, flirt with her, take her on dates, and raise her affection toward him until she genuinely opens her heart. Shido is horrified that an organization operating a giant airborne command vessel is treating the survival of a city like a dating simulation, but Kotori reminds him that he rejected the AST's solution while possessing no alternative of his own. If he wants to save the Spirit rather than kill her, Ratatoskr is giving him the means to try. Shido reluctantly accepts.

The next day, Origami drags Shido somewhere private at school because she knows he saw her using AST equipment. Shido asks whether the Spirit really deserves to be treated as an enemy, and Origami reveals why the subject is personal to her. Her parents were killed by a Spirit five years earlier. She does not want anyone else to experience what she did, which is why she intends to defeat Spirits regardless of the danger to herself. The revelation unsettles Shido because Origami's hatred is not abstract cruelty. He still believes killing the nameless girl is wrong, but he can no longer pretend the consequences of Spirit appearances are merely theoretical. Origami asks him to keep the AST secret, and Shido promises.

Immediately afterward, Shido discovers that Ratatoskr has infiltrated his ordinary life even further. Reine has become a physics teacher and assistant homeroom teacher for Class 2-4, although her first attempt at building trust with Shido includes forgetting his name and calling him Shintarou before settling on the nickname Shin. Kotori also visits Raizen while wearing her white ribbons and behaving like Shido's normal younger sister in public. The two bring him into the physics preparation room and begin the training required to turn an ordinary high-school boy into someone capable of seducing a supernatural disaster.

Ratatoskr's first training method is a dating simulation called <Make Love, My Little Shido>. Reine explains that even if Fraxinus can suggest where Shido should go and what he should say, none of that will matter if he becomes too nervous around girls to function. Kotori immediately proves the point by shoving his face into Reine's chest and mocking how quickly he panics. The game then forces Shido through timed romantic choices while Kotori ridicules nearly every mistake. To give the exercise consequences, Ratatoskr has recovered embarrassing material from Shido's past, including a melodramatic poem he wrote during middle school titled "Etude, Tribute to the Corroding World," and threatens to publicly distribute it whenever he fails badly enough. Reine attempts to make the punishment "fair" by proposing that she remove clothing whenever Shido chooses incorrectly, which only makes the training more unbearable.

After approximately ten days of this, Shido finally reaches the dating game's happy ending. Kotori and Reine immediately decide that success with fictional girls is insufficient and move him on to real women. Shido receives a concealed communicator while a tiny flying camera allows them to observe him. His first practice target is his homeroom teacher, Okamine Tamae, because he assumes an adult teacher will safely reject anything too extreme. Following Reine's instructions, Shido eventually declares that he seriously wants to marry her. Instead of rejecting him, the twenty-nine-year-old Tamae becomes frighteningly enthusiastic and immediately begins discussing their age difference, meeting their parents, living together after graduation, and even making a blood pact. Reine calmly concludes that the word "marriage" was considerably more effective than expected while Shido escapes.

Shido then collides with Origami in the hallway, and Kotori decides she is an even better practice target because she is the same age as Shido and an important member of the AST. Ratatoskr feeds Shido increasingly absurd lines. He tells Origami that he watches her constantly during class, only for her to reply that she watches him too. He claims he stays after school to smell her gym clothes, and Origami responds that she does the same. Finally he asks her to go out with him and immediately realizes the conversation has gone completely out of control. To his astonishment, Origami accepts and makes clear that she understood "go out" to mean dating. Before Shido can repair the situation, a spacequake alarm interrupts them. A Spirit is predicted to appear directly at Raizen High.

Shido, Kotori, and Reine return to <Fraxinus>. The Spirit has appeared inside the already damaged school while the AST surrounds the area, but the building itself gives Shido an opportunity. CR-Units are poorly suited to cramped indoor combat, so the AST waits for the Spirit to emerge instead of charging through the halls. Kotori sends Shido inside with his communicator while Fraxinus follows him using the miniature camera. For the first time, all the ridiculous dating-game training becomes directly relevant because Reine's Realizer analysis converts the Spirit's emotional state into numerical values while Fraxinus's systems transcribe the conversation and present possible responses almost exactly like a galge.

Shido finds the nameless girl inside Class 2-4. She remembers him but still distrusts him enough that the conversation nearly ends with him being blasted apart. Ratatoskr's crew votes on what he should say, and some of their supposedly optimal answers prove just as disastrous as the ones from training. Gradually Shido stops relying entirely on the scripted approach and begins speaking to her more naturally. The girl is intensely curious about the classroom, students, and ordinary human life because almost every encounter she has ever had in this world has immediately turned into a battle.

The issue of names returns. Shido has one, while the Spirit does not. After realizing that names make communication easier, she unexpectedly asks Shido to give her one. Fraxinus's crew hurriedly sends suggestions, none of which are particularly useful. Kotori eventually suggests the old-fashioned name Tome, which Shido repeats and immediately watches the Spirit's affection plummet. Desperate for something better, he remembers that their first meeting occurred on April 10 and chooses Tohka from the tenth day of the month.

The girl accepts. Shido writes the characters 十香 on the blackboard, and Tohka imitates him by tracing them directly into the board with her finger, physically carving the characters into its surface. She proudly tells Shido that Tohka is now her name and repeatedly prompts him to say it aloud. When he does, she smiles. It is the first genuine smile Shido has seen from her, and the moment matters far beyond simply giving Ratatoskr something convenient to call its target. Until then, the girl had possessed almost no personal connection to the human world beyond people attacking her. Shido has given her something that belongs specifically to her.

Their conversation continues even after the AST grows tired of waiting and begins bombarding the school from outside. The attack is intended to destroy the building and force Tohka into the open, but her power prevents the bullets and debris from reaching either of them. Tohka tells Shido to escape before his fellow humans kill him by accident. Shido refuses to leave. Instead, he sits back down in front of her and tells her that if she wants to understand the world, she can keep asking him questions and he will answer as many as he can.

Tohka eventually admits that she does not even know what kind of being she is. Her memories are vague, and as far as she can remember she simply became aware somewhere only to find the "mecha-mecha group" already flying around and attacking her. Ratatoskr's readings show her mood rising dramatically as the conversation continues, so Kotori urges Shido to make the next move and invite her on a date. Shido finally does. Tohka's response is to ask what a date is because she has never heard the word before.

Before he can explain, Origami sees Shido inside the classroom beside the Spirit. Her concern for him immediately overrides orders to remain in formation. She charges into the school at maximum speed with the close-range anti-Spirit weapon <No Pain>. Tohka recognizes the white-haired Wizard who repeatedly attacks her, and the fragile calm disappears. She summons her Angel, <Sandalphon>, the King of Slaughter, in the form of an enormous throne from which she draws a gigantic sword. The pressure from their battle tears through the already ruined school, and one of Tohka's swings sends Shido flying outside, where Fraxinus retrieves him before he can fall.

The following day, Shido goes to Raizen out of habit before remembering that the school has been reduced to rubble and is obviously closed. While walking near the damaged area, he unexpectedly hears Tohka calling him. She has appeared again, but this time no spacequake alarm sounded and neither Ratatoskr nor the AST detected any precursor. Tohka explains that when she normally disappears from the world, she enters something like a sleeping state in a dark neighboring space. She cannot choose when to return; something ordinarily drags her into this world without her consent, almost like being forcibly awakened. The explanation confirms Shido's suspicion that the spacequakes produced by her arrivals are closer to accidents than deliberate attacks.

Shido notices that Tohka speaks about being unable to choose her appearances in the past tense and asks whether this time was different. Tohka becomes embarrassed, refuses to answer, and rapidly changes the subject back to the date Shido promised her. Whatever caused her unusual arrival, she remembered his invitation and came expecting him to keep it. Shido explains that a date is basically a boy and girl going somewhere together and having fun. Tohka's expression immediately brightens, and she agrees.

There is an obvious problem with walking through Tengu City while Tohka is wearing her Astral Dress. Shido points toward a passing Raizen student and says clothing like that would be more appropriate. Tohka's first solution is to create an energy attack and prepare to stun the girl so she can strip off her uniform, forcing Shido to stop her and explain that she cannot attack people merely because she wants something they have. Tohka reluctantly accepts the lesson and then reveals she never needed to steal anything in the first place. She dissolves her Astral Dress and reconstructs her clothing into an imitation of the Raizen uniform simply by remembering what she saw. Shido can only wonder why she did not do that immediately.

For the first part of the date, Ratatoskr does not even know what is happening. Shido has no communicator, no flying camera, no affection meter, and no Kotori or Reine feeding him lines. Tohka remains deeply suspicious of ordinary civilians because all of her previous human contact taught her that being noticed leads to an attack. When strangers look at her, she asks Shido whether they are enemies and whether she should kill them before they become a problem. Shido repeatedly explains that most humans are not part of the AST and have no intention of hurting her.

Then Tohka discovers ordinary food. A bakery attracts her attention, and she becomes particularly obsessed with mushroom bread, treating its flavor as though humanity has created a potentially civilization-destroying addictive substance. Shido keeps paying for whatever she wants to try until his wallet begins approaching disaster. Unknown to them, Origami happens to see Shido walking with an unfamiliar female student. After having accepted what she believes was his confession the previous day, she immediately begins following them. The situation becomes much more serious when she recognizes Shido's companion as the Spirit. Because no spacequake was detected and Origami received no deployment order, she briefly questions whether the girl could merely be a look-alike, then rejects the possibility and secretly requests AST observation equipment.

At the same time, Kotori and Reine happen to be spending time in a café because their own schools were also affected by the recent destruction. Reine uses the opportunity to ask why Kotori chose Shido as Ratatoskr's Spirit negotiator. Kotori reveals that she and Shido are not biologically related. Shido was abandoned by his biological mother when he was very young and later taken in by the Itsuka family, and according to Kotori the abandonment affected him badly enough that there was a period where he seemed capable of killing himself. Although he recovered, the experience left him unusually sensitive to despair in other people. When Shido sees someone convinced that the entire world rejects them and that nobody will ever love them, he instinctively tries to help because he recognizes something of his younger self in that condition. Kotori therefore believed that if anyone could look at Tohka's lonely expression and refuse to abandon her, it would be Shido.

Reine accepts the emotional explanation but makes clear that she is asking something else as well. Her analysis has already shown that Shido is not a normal human, and she asks Kotori what he actually is. Kotori admits that she expected Reine to notice but does not fully explain the secret yet. Their conversation is interrupted when Kotori happens to look behind Reine and sees Shido eating with Tohka. She spits out her drink. Reine turns, recognizes the Spirit, and is startled enough to spit her own drink back at Kotori. Ratatoskr has somehow failed to detect Tohka's arrival, yet the supposedly dangerous Spirit is sitting in a restaurant arguing with Shido because she wants more mushroom bread.

Kotori immediately switches from her white ribbons to black and activates Strategy Code F-08, Operation <Tenguu's Holiday>. Ratatoskr prepared the operation for exactly the possibility that a Spirit might meet Shido outside normal surveillance. Instead of giving him instructions through an earpiece, Fraxinus's crew will infiltrate the city and manipulate the environment around the date. Reine changes into a restaurant employee uniform and appears at the register when Shido pays, nearly causing him to expose her through sheer surprise. She gives him a receipt carrying a hidden message telling him that Ratatoskr knows what is happening and that he should continue naturally, then hands him a shopping-district raffle ticket and very strongly encourages him to use it.

The raffle is entirely rigged by Fraxinus personnel. Tohka spins the wheel and technically receives the consolation result, but the crew member operating the booth immediately declares that she won first prize and alters the prize display accordingly. The reward is a pair of tickets to "Dreamland," which Tohka excitedly assumes is another interesting human attraction. Shido eventually discovers that Ratatoskr's proposed destination is actually a love hotel and refuses to enter despite Tohka's complete innocence about what the building is for. Kotori, watching from Fraxinus, considers the failed attempt merely one route and immediately begins preparing another.

Ratatoskr next starts an absurd citywide campaign to push Shido and Tohka into physical contact. Someone hands Shido tissues decorated with a message claiming happy couples should hold hands. Television sets in an electronics shop suddenly show familiar Fraxinus crew members discussing how anyone who fails to hold hands on a first date is doing it wrong. Suspiciously numerous couples appear around them while loudly praising hand-holding. Shido realizes exactly what Kotori is doing but, embarrassed anyway, asks Tohka whether she wants to hold hands. Tohka asks why. Shido cannot produce a convincing explanation and starts withdrawing his hand, only for Tohka to take it herself. After walking like that for a while, she smiles, decides that holding hands is actually pleasant, and tightens her grip.

Fraxinus then manipulates their route with fake construction zones and conveniently blocked roads until only one path remains open. Shido recognizes several of the supposed workers as members of the crew and realizes Kotori is guiding them somewhere specific. Tohka notices none of the manipulation and simply enjoys walking beside him. The path eventually leads toward a small park overlooking Tengu City at sunset.

While the date is continuing, the AST confirms with a 98.5 percent match that the girl beside Shido is the Spirit. The situation creates a serious dilemma because Tohka appeared without a spacequake and no civilians evacuated. Attacking her could turn a peaceful situation into a disaster in the middle of a populated city, but her lack of an Astral Dress also creates an opportunity the AST may never receive again. Ryouko and nine other members deploy around the area while the higher authorities debate whether to authorize an attack. Origami carries the special anti-Spirit rifle <Cry Cry Cry>, a weapon powerful enough that its recoil would break an ordinary person's body without a Territory. Permission eventually arrives. Ryouko orders Origami to take the shot and makes clear that she must kill Tohka in one hit before the Spirit can respond.

At the park, Tohka stares over Tengu City and tells Shido that the date was genuinely fun. Everything she experienced has contradicted what she believed about humanity. She met people who did not attack her, ate food created simply because humans enjoy making and eating it, walked through stores and streets, held someone's hand, and saw a city filled with lives that had nothing to do with hunting Spirits. Tohka admits that she can hardly believe so many humans exist who do not reject her. Part of her still finds it easier to imagine that they are all secretly AST agents and that Shido is only pretending to be kind because someone has threatened him.

The date also causes Tohka to understand something painful. Every time she appears, part of this beautiful world may be destroyed. Whether she controls the spacequake does not matter to the people whose homes and lives disappear. For the first time, she understands why the AST might believe killing her is necessary. Her conclusion is that perhaps it would be better if she simply did not exist.

Shido refuses to accept that. Tohka appeared that day without causing a spacequake, which proves that something can change. If the problem is being randomly transported between worlds, Shido suggests that she simply stop returning to the other side and live here. Tohka points out that she knows almost nothing about human life, needs somewhere to sleep, needs food, and cannot predict what other problems might occur. Shido answers each objection the same way: he will teach her, he will figure something out, and if an unexpected problem occurs they will deal with it when it happens.

Tohka finally asks the question underneath everything else. Is it really acceptable for her to live? Is she actually allowed to exist in this world? Shido says yes. Tohka argues that Shido is probably the only human who would say that; the AST rejects her, and ordinary people would likely do the same if they understood what she was. Shido tells her he does not care. If everyone else rejects Tohka, then he will accept her strongly enough to outweigh all of them. He extends his hand toward her, asking her simply to shake it for now.

Tohka slowly reaches toward him. The instant their hands touch, Shido experiences a sudden, inexplicable chill running through his body. He does not know what he sensed, but instinctively shoves Tohka away as hard as he can. An instant later Origami fires <Cry Cry Cry>. The bullet had been perfectly aimed at Tohka. Because Shido moved her, it strikes him instead and tears a massive hole through his torso.

Origami freezes after realizing what she has done. The finger that pulled the trigger begins trembling, but Ryouko orders her to save the regret for later because the AST now has a much greater problem. Tohka crawls toward Shido, repeatedly calls his name, and gets no response. She sees the wound, touches his face, and slowly closes his eyes. She removes the jacket of the uniform she created and places it over his body.

Only moments earlier, Tohka had started believing Shido might be right. Maybe she really could live in this world. It would be difficult and inconvenient, but if Shido remained beside her, she had begun to imagine that it might work. The world answers that hope by apparently killing the first person who ever accepted her.

Tohka's grief turns into rage. Her full Astral Dress, <Adonai Melek>, manifests around her, and she summons the throne containing <Sandalphon>. Then she takes the Angel beyond the form Shido previously saw. The throne itself breaks apart and attaches to the sword, enlarging it into <Halvanhelev>, the Last Sword. A single strike tears through the surrounding construction area. The AST's defensive Territories are almost meaningless against the amount of power Tohka is releasing.

Tohka barely acknowledges most of the AST because her attention is fixed on Origami. The white-haired Wizard killed Shido, whom Tohka now calls her friend and best friend, and Tohka intends to kill her in return. Origami continues fighting despite the overwhelming difference in strength, while Ryouko and the remaining Wizards attempt to keep her alive. The battle rapidly stops resembling an extermination mission and becomes a desperate attempt to survive an enraged Spirit.

Meanwhile, something impossible happens beneath the jacket covering Shido. Flames appear around the fatal wound. Rather than burning his body, they reconstruct it. Flesh that should have been destroyed restores itself until the hole through his torso disappears completely. Shido wakes alive despite having suffered an injury no normal human could survive. The Fraxinus crew is stunned, while Kotori reacts as someone who already knew this ability existed.

Shido is recovered again and sees what Tohka has become after believing him dead. Kotori tells him that nobody else can stop her. Ratatoskr's entire method depends on the connection Shido created with the Spirit, so whether the operation succeeds is no longer a question of superior weapons. Fraxinus moves close to the battlefield and sends Shido back toward Tohka.

The AST is already being overwhelmed when Shido calls Tohka's name from above. She looks up and sees the person she watched die descending toward her. The effect is immediate. Her rage breaks apart into disbelief, and she repeatedly calls Shido's name as though she needs to confirm that he is real. Shido reaches her before she can finish Origami and refuses to allow Tohka to kill someone for his sake.

Stopping the attack creates another problem. <Halvanhelev> has accumulated an enormous amount of power that Tohka can no longer safely dismiss. The energy needs to be released, and Origami is lying directly beneath them. Shido remembers Kotori's final hint about the method available to him. Ratatoskr's plan was never merely to convince a Spirit to like him. Once her heart is sufficiently open, Shido possesses the ability to take her power into himself.

He tells Tohka to kiss him. Tohka has no idea what a kiss is. Shido begins explaining that it means putting their lips together, and Tohka immediately does exactly that before he can even finish the sentence. The result is instantaneous. Cracks spread across the enormous sword, <Halvanhelev> and <Sandalphon> begin dissolving, and Tohka's Astral Dress breaks apart into particles of light. Shido feels something warm flowing into his body as her Spirit power is absorbed and sealed inside him.

Without the power supporting her, Tohka falls with Shido toward the ground. He catches and holds her while their kiss continues through the descent, and they eventually land safely. Shido immediately begins apologizing despite Tohka technically being the one who kissed him, only for both of them to realize another consequence of her Astral Dress disappearing: Tohka has been left barely clothed. She becomes embarrassed and orders him not to look. After deciding that even his attempt to keep his eyes closed is suspicious, she eventually presses herself against him so that his body physically blocks his view of her.

Once the immediate embarrassment passes, Tohka quietly asks whether Shido will take her on another date. Shido tells her that he will take her whenever she wants.

The epilogue first returns to Kotori. In a special communications room aboard Fraxinus, she reports the operation to Ratatoskr's higher authorities through speakers arranged around a table, with Kotori amusing herself by placing stuffed animals in front of the speakers as stand-ins for the unseen participants. The operation has confirmed that Shido possesses both the ability to revive from otherwise fatal injuries and the ability to absorb a Spirit's power. Ratatoskr has spent approximately five years preparing observation systems, building Fraxinus, and gathering personnel around those abilities, although the true nature of Shido's power remains under investigation.

Tohka's condition after the sealing is extremely stable. Ratatoskr detects no dangerous distortions in space-time around her, and she no longer possesses enough active power for her mere presence in the world to threaten a spacequake. Shido also shows no immediate abnormalities despite having absorbed an enormous amount of Spirit power. One of Ratatoskr's authorities openly questions what Shido actually is, noting that his abilities make him sound almost like a Spirit himself. Kotori does not provide a complete answer. She confirms only that his revival ability was already known and that Ratatoskr is still investigating the power-absorption phenomenon.

After the weekend, Shido returns to a Raizen High that has already been rebuilt by the Restoration Forces. He has not been allowed to see Tohka since the sealing because Ratatoskr has kept her under examination, leaving the return to ordinary school life unexpectedly empty. Origami arrives heavily bandaged despite the AST's advanced medical technology, showing how serious the injuries from her fight with Tohka were. She walks directly to Shido and gives him a deep apology for shooting him, acknowledging that a simple apology cannot truly resolve what she did. Shido forgives her and asks her to raise her head.

Origami immediately grabs his necktie, pulls him close, and tells him not to cheat. Shido has barely begun processing what she means when Tamae starts homeroom and announces a new transfer student. The door opens and Tohka enters wearing a Raizen High uniform, now introducing herself as Yatogami Tohka. Reine supplied the surname, while the first name remains the one Shido gave her.

Tohka happily rushes toward Shido and explains in a lowered voice that the examinations showed more than ninety-nine percent of her power had disappeared. She can now remain in the human world without making "the world cry" simply by existing, and Kotori arranged the rest of her new life. Unfortunately, Tohka is much less subtle when she begins asking whether Shido was lonely without her and referring to their previous experiences in ways that make the entire class assume something romantic or sexual happened between them.

Origami reacts by throwing a pen. Tohka and Origami immediately recognize one another and begin glaring, but neither is currently in a position to restart their supernatural battle: Tohka has lost nearly all of her Spirit power, while Origami is injured and does not have her CR-Unit. Tamae desperately prevents the argument from escalating. When she tries to decide where the transfer student should sit, Tohka simply intimidates the girl sitting on the opposite side of Shido from Origami until the student gives up the seat, placing Shido directly between the two girls.

Volume 1 therefore ends with the first Spirit operation technically succeeding beyond anything Ratatoskr had previously proven possible. Tohka is no longer merely the nameless Spirit humanity knows as a calamity. Shido gave her a name, introduced her to ordinary human life, convinced her that she had the right to exist, and ultimately sealed enough of her power that she can remain in the world without automatically causing disaster. At the same time, the volume establishes mysteries that remain unresolved: why Tohka was able to appear without a spacequake when she came to meet Shido, why Shido can survive fatal wounds, why he can absorb Spirit power, why Ratatoskr spent five years preparing around him, and what happened between Shido and Origami in the past that Shido himself cannot remember.

The status quo that defines the rest of the story is now in place. Ratatoskr will attempt to save Spirits through communication instead of extermination, Shido will serve as the person capable of sealing their powers, Kotori and Fraxinus will support him from the background, and Origami remains both personally attached to Shido and committed to destroying Spirits because of what happened to her family. Most importantly, Tohka has gained something she never possessed before meeting Shido: an ordinary life in the human world and a place beside the first person who chose to accept her rather than kill her.
</tohka_arc>

<miku_arc>
This summary contains how Miku's arc goes, you must follow this as closely as possible.:

Miku Izayoi’s arc begins during preparations for the Tenou Festival, a joint cultural festival involving ten schools in Tengu City. A spatial-quake alert leads Shido to an empty stage where he encounters the Spirit designated Diva, who is calmly singing rather than behaving like a newly manifested Spirit. Ratatoskr soon identifies her as Miku Izayoi, an enormously popular idol attending Rindouji Girls’ Academy who has already established an ordinary human life. That itself is unusual, since most Spirits Shido has encountered were outsiders to ordinary society. The major complication is that Miku intensely despises men, making Shido’s normal approach nearly impossible. Kotori therefore disguises him as his fictitious female cousin, Shiori Itsuka. Miku becomes immediately receptive to Shiori, treating “her” far more warmly and flirtatiously than she ever would Shido.

During a private visit to Miku’s home, Shido discovers that her voice is more than simply beautiful. Miku can imbue speech and song with supernatural power and command people who hear her. She casually demonstrates this ability on others and then attempts to control Shiori, only for the command to fail because Shido’s body contains the powers of Spirits he has previously sealed. The failure immediately makes Miku suspicious. Shido eventually reveals that he is connected to Ratatoskr and that his objective is to seal her Spirit power. More importantly, he openly objects to the way she treats other people as interchangeable servants whose free will is irrelevant. Miku sees little wrong with using her ability to create people who will never disobey or betray her, while Shido refuses to pretend that this is acceptable merely because disagreeing with her harms his chances of winning her affection. Their ideological conflict ends with Miku proposing that they settle matters through the Tenou Festival. If Raizen takes first place overall on Day 1, Miku will allow Shido to seal her Spirit power; if Rindouji wins instead, Shiori and the five Spirits whose powers Shido has already sealed will belong to Miku. Miku specifically chooses Day 1 because its stage competition heavily favors music, and she intends to perform personally.

The confrontation becomes much harsher when Shido questions Miku about the spatial quake that led to their first encounter. Miku admits that she caused it deliberately: she happened to pass Tengu Arena, realized she had never sung there, and simply felt like performing on its stage. When Shido points out that someone could have failed to evacuate and died, Miku considers that unavoidable because she wanted to sing. Asked how she would react if one of the girls who adored her had died there, Miku’s first concern is how troublesome it would be to find another girl who suited her tastes. That finally makes Shido lose his temper. He tells Miku outright that he hates her arrogance and the way she treats human lives, declaring that even if everyone else loves and obeys her, he will reject what she is doing. Rather than driving Miku away, the rejection only increases her fascination with Shiori, one of the few people she cannot simply force to adore her.

Preparations for the competition unfold alongside the growing DEM threat. Origami learns that Jessica Bailey and DEM personnel are preparing an operation involving Shido and Tohka. Her loyalty to AST authority is already deteriorating, and Ryouko effectively gives her room to intervene independently. Origami ultimately takes White Licorice, an extremely powerful CR unit whose mental and physical burden is dangerous even for her, and enters the coming battle without authorization. At the festival itself, Shido continues posing as Shiori, works at Raizen’s maid café, and spends time with Miku around the festival grounds. Meanwhile, Origami has proven to be an unexpectedly excellent singer and is supposed to serve as the vocalist for Raizen’s musical group, but she disappears to intervene against DEM. Separately, Ai, Mai, and Mii, who are also essential to the planned performance, have been controlled by Miku and refuse to participate. Tohka, Kaguya, and Yuzuru therefore step in so that Raizen can perform at all.

One smaller incident during Shiori and Miku’s time around the festival grounds makes their disagreement over free will especially clear. Miku attempts a ring-toss game because she wants a cat doll, fails to win it normally, and then simply uses her Voice to make the girl running the booth hand her the prize. Shido objects and insists that if she failed according to the rules, she has to accept losing rather than compel someone to make an exception. Miku genuinely struggles to understand why this matters, since the controlled attendant appears perfectly happy to give her what she wants. The exchange exposes the central flaw in Miku’s understanding of relationships: she judges them by whether people behave affectionately and willingly toward her, while Shido insists that such behavior means something only if the other person remained genuinely free to refuse.

The concert becomes the clearest expression of the difference between Shido and Miku. Shido’s side is held together by people voluntarily helping one another after the original plan collapses. During the performance, Shido even begins to stop thinking solely in terms of defeating Miku and simply enjoys playing music with Tohka and the others. Ratatoskr retaliates against Miku’s sabotage by interfering with her stage equipment and backing audio. Instead of being stopped, however, Miku manifests her Astral Dress and her Angel, Gabriel, an enormous pipe-organ-like instrument capable of magnifying the supernatural properties of her voice. She turns the attempted sabotage into a spectacular live performance and legitimately wins the stage-performance division. Raizen nevertheless takes first place overall for Day 1 because the maid café and its other attractions give it enough combined points to overcome Rindouji’s advantage onstage. Shido regards the result as proof that collective, voluntary cooperation can achieve something Miku’s domination cannot. Miku regards it as an intolerable technicality and refuses to accept the result.

Inside the central-stage concert hall at Tengu Square, Miku abandons the rules completely. She manifests Gabriel again and floods the hall with its amplified sound, bringing roughly a thousand spectators and performers under her influence. The same concert audio is being monitored aboard Fraxinus, causing Kotori and most of the bridge crew to fall under Miku’s control as well. Miku casually demonstrates how fragile she considers the “bonds” Shido praised, ordering the enthralled audience with only a few movements of Gabriel’s keyboard. She has Shiori restrained and begins claiming Shiori and the sealed Spirits as her possessions, only to discover while physically examining “her” that Shiori is actually male. Horrified, Miku realizes that the girl she had become genuinely attracted to was Shido in disguise. The revelation turns her existing hatred of men into intensely personal fury, and she orders the entire hall to seize him.

Shido tries to break through to Miku directly, but Yoshino intercepts him with an ice wall. Kaguya and Yuzuru then appear alongside her, all three having been affected by Gabriel. Importantly, Miku’s control has not erased who they are. Yoshino and the Yamai sisters still recognize Shido and Tohka, retain their normal personalities and reasoning, and can decide how to act on their own; what Gabriel has changed is their hierarchy of values, placing Miku’s wishes and safety above everything else. From their perspective, Shido and Tohka are now the ones behaving cruelly toward their beloved “Onee-sama.”
Tohka initially appears to have been affected as well, only to suddenly rescue Shido from the combined attack and carry him to the catwalk above the stage. She explains the accident that saved her: she had kept both in-ear monitors from the band performance plugged into her ears, preventing her from properly hearing Gabriel’s controlling sound. Below them, Miku redirects the enthralled audience toward the backstage stairs and catwalk while Yoshino, Kaguya, and Yuzuru remain directly between Tohka and Miku. With four hostile Spirits and a hall full of controlled civilians surrounding them, Shido concludes that retreat aboard Fraxinus is their only realistic option.

When Shido contacts Fraxinus, however, Kotori responds by insulting him for defying Miku. Reine and Hinako Shiizaki are the only bridge personnel known to have avoided Gabriel’s influence because neither had been exposed to the relevant audio. Kannazuki also appears to remain sane, but instead of restraining Kotori he willingly indulges her behavior. The controlled crew restrain Reine and Shiizaki when they attempt to interfere, while Kotori orders Fraxinus’s convergence cannon, Mystletainn, prepared to fire directly on the central stage and vaporize everyone who deceived Miku. Before she can fire, Mana Takamiya arrives on the bridge, punches Kotori unconscious, knocks Kannazuki out, and then incapacitates the remaining controlled crew at Reine’s request. Reine identifies Miku’s ability as a sound-based form of control, and Mana realizes Shido is still trapped inside the venue.
Mana then enters the separate aerial battle taking place around the festival. Origami has been fighting Jessica and DEM forces with White Licorice, but the CR unit’s enormous strain is pushing her toward physical and neurological collapse. Mana intervenes and destroys several Bandersnatch before confronting Jessica directly. When Jessica demands to know why DEM’s Adeptus 2 is attacking her own organization, Mana explicitly announces that she is leaving DEM. She defeats Jessica and gives the remaining Wizards a chance to retreat, formally severing her allegiance to the organization that modified and used her.

Back inside the concert hall, Tohka continues trying to break through Yoshino and the Yamai sisters to reach Miku. She launches herself from the catwalk with Sandalphon, but Yoshino blocks her slash with ice and Kaguya and Yuzuru strike her with concentrated wind from both sides, blasting Tohka completely through the wall of the building. Instead of remaining outside, Tohka circles around the structure, reaches the roof, cuts through the ceiling directly above Miku, and dives down toward Gabriel with Sandalphon. She succeeds in slicing into one of Gabriel’s metal pipes before Miku reacts. Miku unleashes an enormous point-blank burst of sound, blasting Tohka across the hall and into the wall near Shido. Tohka painfully forces herself back onto her feet while more controlled audience members begin emerging from the backstage stairway toward them.
At that moment Ellen Mira Mathers descends through the hole Tohka cut into the ceiling. She briefly notes that Jessica and the others have failed but treats this as within expectations. Ellen’s sensors identify Yatogami Tohka and, beside her, a female-looking student producing Itsuka Shido’s readings. Shido is therefore still visibly dressed as Shiori when Ellen enters. Ellen largely ignores Miku, Gabriel, Yoshino, the Yamai sisters, and the controlled audience; she is there for DEM’s own objective and advances directly toward Shido and Tohka. Tohka immediately realizes what is happening and tells Shido to run. When he cannot see any possible escape, she takes the decision away from him, grabs him, and physically throws him through the hole in the wall created during the earlier fight.

With Shido removed from the hall, Ellen briefly assesses the extraordinary scene around her: approximately a thousand controlled spectators, Diva standing onstage with Gabriel, Hermit and Berserk serving her, and Princess alone against them. Although both Shido and Tohka were originally capture targets, Ellen deliberately decides against becoming greedy and attempting to seize everyone present. She chooses Tohka as the immediate objective. Ellen praises Tohka’s quick decision to save Shido, tells her that she is the one Ellen has business with, and announces that Tohka will be coming with her. Tohka attacks with Sandalphon, but Ellen effortlessly disperses her sword pressure with Caledfwlch and remarks that Tohka’s attack is weaker than it was on Arubi Island because most of her Spirit power remains sealed inside Shido. Ellen then moves to finish the confrontation immediately.

Shido loses consciousness after crashing through the trees outside the building. By the time he wakes several minutes later, the actual conclusion of Ellen’s fight with Tohka has already occurred beyond his view. Looking toward the venue, he sees Ellen emerge through the roof carrying Tohka’s limp, unconscious body. Ellen surveys the area and then flies away with her. Shido can do nothing except scream Tohka’s name as she disappears. Before he can even process the kidnapping, the front entrance of Tengu Square opens and another group of Miku-controlled people begins searching for him.
Shido escapes the Miku-controlled people hunting him. Before Kurumi appears, he changes out of the Shiori disguise and returns completely to his normal appearance as Shido. Tohka has been captured, Yoshino and the Yamai twins are hostile, Fraxinus has only just begun recovering from being compromised, and he has no practical means of breaking into DEM alone. At this point Kurumi Tokisaki emerges and offers her assistance. On seeing that Shido has already changed back, Kurumi is disappointed that she missed the opportunity to see him properly dressed as Shiori, much to Shido’s irritation.

Kurumi knows that Tohka has been captured and proposes a temporary alliance. Her help is not altruistic. She has her own reason for wanting access to DEM and intends to exploit the rescue operation for her own investigation. At this point, however, Kurumi tells Shido only that she is trying to find “someone” and refuses to identify that person when he asks. Her larger objective is revealed separately: she is searching for the second Spirit ever recorded, whom she believes may possess information about the First or primeval Spirit. Shido has every reason to distrust Kurumi after their previous encounters, but he has no better means of locating and reaching Tohka, so he accepts.

Kurumi does not take him directly to DEM. Miku still controls much of the city and can continue sending people and Spirits after Shido, so they first investigate Miku herself. Shido and Kurumi enter Miku’s empty mansion and search her room. Kurumi quickly turns the search into an excuse to torment him, finding one of Miku’s bras, holding it against her own chest, and then offering it to Shido before teasingly correcting herself and addressing him as “Shiori-san.” She explains that although she saw Shiori onstage, she never got to see the disguise properly in person; Shido adamantly refuses to transform again, protesting that it would cost him both time and dignity. Kurumi continues advancing on him until she trips on the carpet, sending both of them crashing into a cupboard and leaving a small cut on Shido’s cheek. When Shido dismisses the injury by saying saliva would be enough, Kurumi takes him literally, pins him beneath her, and licks the wound while he panics before finally letting him up. The impact on the cupboard inadvertently dislodges a rectangular tin, and this accident rather than a deliberate search is what leads them to the important material hidden inside.

Inside are old CDs whose covers do not use the name Miku Izayoi but instead identify the singer as Tsukino Yoimachi. Shido plays one and immediately recognizes Miku’s voice, yet something feels fundamentally different: it lacks the almost intoxicating supernatural quality of her present singing and instead sounds like an ordinary but genuinely talented young idol. He then discovers an old photograph whose existence makes him reconsider a possibility Ratatoskr had previously dismissed—if the girl in these materials truly is Miku, then she may once have been human rather than a Spirit who simply adapted unusually well to society. Kurumi, intrigued by the same inconsistency, takes both the photograph and CD to investigate them herself.

Kurumi uses Zafkiel’s Tenth Bullet, Yodh, to investigate the objects. She places the old material against herself and fires Yodh through the CD and photograph and into her own head, causing Shido to panic until he realizes neither Kurumi nor the objects have actually been physically damaged. Kurumi explains that Yodh is a “recollection” bullet: rather than destroying what it strikes, it sends memories from the target’s past into her mind. The memories are fragmentary, but they are enough for Kurumi to say that she finally understands the strange inconsistency surrounding Miku. Shido urgently asks what she discovered, but before Kurumi can finish saying what Miku apparently was, Gabriel’s music begins reverberating through the streets outside. They realize that Miku is broadcasting her Voice through the city’s public-announcement system or similar mechanical means, proving again that Gabriel’s control remains effective even after being electronically transmitted and allowing her to create still more followers to search for Shido. Kurumi tells him there is no longer time to remain there: she will “prepare the stage,” but Shido himself will have to make the decisive move and talk to Miku.

Shido and Kurumi head back toward Tengu Square while Miku’s newly controlled followers converge around the area. Kurumi carries Shido from the roof of a tall building and simply jumps, using her shadow to absorb the landing; Shido’s involuntary scream immediately gives away their position. Thousands of people surround them, and Miku addresses Shido through the plaza loudspeakers, mocking his confidence in returning to her “castle” and ordering everyone to capture him—while adding that they should not hurt him too badly, because she wants the privilege of making him suffer herself. When the crowd charges, Kurumi activates City of Devouring Time, spreading her shadow through the plaza and draining enough of the controlled civilians’ “Time” to collapse them. Shido protests that using such an ability on ordinary people is dangerous, but Kurumi dryly asks whether he would prefer being captured and assures him that, because the effect is distributed across such a huge crowd, she does not intend to take a dangerous amount from any one person. Shido reluctantly asks her to be merciful and follows her across the field of unconscious followers toward the central stage.

When they enter the central-stage hall, the audience has also collapsed under Kurumi’s shadow, leaving Miku standing beside Gabriel with Yoshino, Kaguya, and Yuzuru. Shido calls her name, but Miku responds with an extended insult, telling him that his voice is filthy enough to pollute her and the Spirits’ ears and calling him a “walking piece of trash.” Shido ignores the abuse and tries to explain that Tohka was abducted and that he has to rescue her, only for Miku to scream at him to shut up and activate Gabriel’s March, an invigorating song that forces the collapsed audience back onto their feet even while City of Devouring Time remains active. Kurumi is genuinely surprised that ordinary humans can still move inside her shadow, while Miku proudly explains that Gabriel can do far more than merely make people adore her and orders the thousand girls to execute Shido.

Kurumi responds by escalating the confrontation. Her numerous selves and shadow abilities keep the controlled audience occupied while Yoshino, Kaguya, and Yuzuru defend Miku directly. Zadkiel and Raphael turn the interior of the concert venue into a Spirit battlefield as Kurumi’s clones engage them and search for an opening. Before committing to the maneuver, Kurumi quietly tells Shido what she actually expects from him: she intends to get him alone with Miku, where he should try to change her mind; if he cannot do that, he should at minimum persuade her not to interfere until Tohka has been rescued. Kurumi then uses Aleph to accelerate a clone carrying Shido through the Yamai sisters’ defenses while her other selves distract them, bringing him close enough to Miku that the confrontation can stop being a fight against an entire controlled population.

Kurumi then pulls Shido and Miku into her shadow, temporarily isolating them from the audience and controlled Spirits. This finally gives Shido the opportunity to speak with Miku without Gabriel immediately turning everyone around them against him. Shido first explains why he needs her to stop interfering: Tohka, the girl Miku saw fighting earlier, is also a Spirit and has been abducted by DEM, and he intends to rescue her because she is “extremely important” to him. Miku immediately interprets that statement through her hatred of men, mockingly concluding that Tohka is simply the target of Shido’s sexual desire and arguing that this cannot justify risking his life. When she asks directly whether he is actually claiming Tohka’s life is more important than his own, Shido answers “Of course” without even hesitating, visibly unsettling her. He tells Miku that regardless of the danger he will rescue Tohka, return afterward, and face Miku again by himself, asking only that she stop expanding her control in the meantime. Miku mocks the promise as impossible, pointing out that DEM’s Wizards may kill him before he can ever return, which inadvertently reminds Shido of another promise that has already come due.

Shido brings up the Tenou Festival bargain and confronts her refusal to honor it. Miku first declares the agreement invalid because he deceived her about being a girl; Shido apologizes for hiding that he was male but asks what his sex has to do with the terms they actually agreed upon. Miku then insists that Rindouji won the performance division, and Shido agrees before reminding her that their wager concerned the Day 1 overall result, which Raizen won. Cornered by the wording of her own bargain, Miku simply screams that she refuses to let him seal her powers.

Crucially, Shido does not demand that she immediately surrender her Spirit power or kiss him. Instead, he gives away the leverage he supposedly fought to obtain. He proposes replacing the sealing condition with a different promise: come with him and help rescue Tohka. Miku is so surprised that her hostility briefly disappears and she asks whether that is really all he wants, then points out that his entire purpose was supposed to be sealing her power. Shido simply repeats that Tohka is that important to him and that, with Miku’s assistance added to Kurumi’s, their chances of reaching her would improve dramatically.

Miku cannot understand the proposal. From her perspective, Shido endured all of this in order to gain something from her, yet he is willingly trading that advantage away to save someone else. She ultimately refuses, angrily insisting that humans who claim another person is “extremely important” are selfish creatures with ulterior motives and that such declarations are always lies. Shido begins challenging why she rejects humanity so completely, but Kurumi’s shadow reaches its time limit before he can pursue the subject further, forcing both of them back onto the stage. Kurumi withdraws with Shido after explaining that maintaining the isolated space while simultaneously fighting three Spirits has consumed too much of her finite Time; afterward, she judges that the conversation was still useful, since Miku is now unlikely to recklessly interfere while Kurumi remains beside him.

After Shido leaves, the question continues bothering Miku enough that she asks Yoshino, Kaguya, and Yuzuru what Shido would actually do if saving Tohka meant risking his own life. Yoshino says that Shido would almost certainly try to save her even if doing so could kill him. Kaguya agrees, pointing out that the same reckless willingness to save others is why she and Yuzuru survived their own crisis, while Yuzuru bluntly describes Shido as nearly insane in how readily he will disregard his own safety to rescue Tohka. Their unanimous answers visibly disturb Miku. She has been insisting that Shido’s declaration must be another selfish lie, yet even the people currently devoted to her describe exactly the same person he described himself as being. She still claims that she wants Shido found so she can punish him, but her certainty about him has begun to break down.

Meanwhile, Westcott has begun deliberately manipulating Tohka in captivity. His purpose is not merely interrogation. He is interested in what happens to a Spirit under extreme despair, and Tohka’s attachment to Shido gives him the obvious means of producing it.

Kurumi’s clones eventually determine where Tohka is being held. False spatial-quake alarms are used to evacuate civilians around the DEM facility before the rescue operation begins. Kurumi launches a large-scale assault with numerous copies of herself against DEM’s Wizards and Bandersnatch units, simultaneously creating an opening for Shido and pursuing her own objective inside the organization.

Mana rejoins Shido during this stage. By then Ratatoskr has also begun recovering from Miku’s takeover, and Shido is able to communicate with Kotori again. Kotori apologizes for what occurred while she was under Gabriel’s influence and reluctantly agrees to support Shido’s attempt to rescue Tohka.

Jessica reappears equipped with Scarlet Licorice and confronts Mana. DEM’s enhancement technology and Jessica’s fixation on surpassing Mana have pushed her into an increasingly unstable physical and psychological condition. Mana stays behind to fight her, allowing Shido to continue into the DEM facility alone.

Inside, Shido is repeatedly blocked by DEM personnel. His determination to reach Tohka causes him to manifest Sandalphon despite Tohka herself being held elsewhere. This demonstrates that the powers of sealed Spirits remain within Shido and can sometimes be accessed directly under extreme circumstances.

The power comes at a severe cost. Shido remains physically human and cannot safely wield an Angel at its proper level. Sandalphon damages his body as he uses it, while Kotori’s sealed power manifests as healing flames that continually repair him. His progress through DEM therefore becomes a cycle of injury and regeneration rather than effortless empowerment.

Miku ultimately appears and joins him. She continues disguising her change in attitude behind ostensibly selfish motives, claiming that she merely intends to add Tohka to her collection, but the significance of her choice is clear: after previously refusing Shido, she has voluntarily followed him into DEM. Yoshino, Kaguya, and Yuzuru also become involved in the larger battle while Miku accompanies Shido deeper into the facility.

The truth uncovered through the Tsukino Yoimachi material eventually explains Miku’s worldview. Before becoming a Spirit, Miku had been a human idol performing under that name. Singing was the center of her identity. A television producer took an interest in her, and her manager made it clear that cooperating with the producer’s implied sexual demands could secure better career opportunities. Miku refused.

Soon afterward, fabricated scandal material destroyed her public image. Her agency abandoned her, and people who had once called themselves devoted fans turned against her almost immediately. The collapse devastated her ability to trust other people. She developed psychogenic dysphonia and lost the voice around which she had built her entire sense of worth. Eventually she fell into suicidal despair.

At that point a mysterious being she regarded as “God” appeared and offered her power. The encounter transformed her into a Spirit and restored her voice in supernatural form. Shido’s side recognizes the similarity to Phantom, the same mysterious figure connected to other human-to-Spirit transformations.

Shido does not dismiss what happened to her. He accepts that the producer, agency, media, and fans treated her horribly. What he rejects is the conclusion she built from that experience: that everyone is fundamentally untrustworthy and that the only way to make relationships safe is to remove other people’s ability to choose.

He also identifies the contradiction in Miku’s behavior. If human recognition truly meant nothing to her anymore, she would never have returned to public performance under the name Miku Izayoi. Some part of her still wants people to genuinely hear and accept her. The old Tsukino Yoimachi recording reinforces this point because Shido can appreciate the voice she possessed before Gabriel ever existed.

Their argument eventually reaches the fear underneath Miku’s resistance to being sealed. Miku believes that if Gabriel and her supernatural Voice disappear, she will return to the period when she could not sing and therefore, in her own mind, had no value. Shido tells her that he has already heard her old voice on the Tsukino Yoimachi recording and actually prefers the earnest singing she possessed before receiving Spirit power. When Miku demands to know who would possibly listen to her without her supernatural Voice, Shido promises that she will have at least one fan no matter what happens: him. Miku refuses to believe such a convenient promise and challenges him further, asking whether he would actually risk his life to save her if she were in danger just as he is doing for Tohka. Shido answers “of course” without hesitation. Miku continues calling him a liar, but from that point forward she has a specific promise by which she can judge whether his words are genuine.

Miku does not immediately change because of a single conversation. She continues doubting Shido and watching for the moment when his actions finally expose the selfishness she assumes everyone possesses. Instead, she sees him repeatedly act against that expectation: he gave up his leverage over her, entered DEM after she refused him, endured Sandalphon destroying his body, and continued trying to save Tohka without knowing whether he would survive.

Shido and Miku eventually reach Tohka, only for Westcott and Ellen to confront them. Ellen catastrophically wounds Shido in front of Tohka, making it appear that the person Tohka loves most has been killed. Westcott then makes his intention explicit. He tells Tohka that he is going to have Ellen kill Shido and that she is free to stop it, urging her to call upon her Astral Dress and Angel and, if those are insufficient, to “extend her hands further.” Tohka desperately attempts to reach Shido but cannot overcome her sealed condition and confinement. Westcott is deliberately pushing her toward whatever lies beyond her ordinary Spirit state.

The apparent loss of Shido destroys the emotional foundation Tohka has built since meeting him. Her despair causes her Spirit state to reverse. Her Astral Dress becomes dark, her normal emotional orientation collapses, and Sandalphon is replaced by its dark counterpart, Nahemah. Westcott is delighted because the transformation is precisely the phenomenon he wanted to provoke: the emergence of a Demon King from an inverted Spirit.

Westcott eventually withdraws, but before doing so he addresses Shido as “Takamiya” and then corrects himself to “Itsuka.” Shido recognizes Takamiya as Mana’s surname but has no idea why Westcott would associate the name with him, planting a major clue about his lost history.

Inverse Tohka becomes the immediate danger. When she attacks Miku, Shido protects Miku despite everything she has done to him. He has no tactical reason to do so and gains nothing from taking the risk. For Miku, this becomes direct evidence that his concern for other people is not simply another manipulation strategy.

The circumstances make that proof even more personal than Miku expected. While using Gabriel to restrain Inverse Tohka so that Shido can approach her, Miku pushes herself until her exhausted throat stops producing any meaningful voice. For Miku, this recreates her deepest fear almost perfectly: she is once again the Miku who cannot sing, the version of herself she believes has no value and whom nobody would choose to protect. When Tohka turns Nahemah on her, Miku cannot defend herself. Shido immediately abandons his approach toward Tohka and moves between them simply because he does not want Miku to die, manifesting Yoshino’s power to survive the attack. Miku remembers asking whether he would risk his life to save her and realizes that he has now done exactly that. He protected Miku after her Voice was gone, when according to her own worldview there was no longer anything about her worth protecting. It is the first time one of the promises she expected a human to abandon once it became costly has instead been decisively kept.

Having seen Shido keep that promise, Miku now insists that he also follow through on what he claimed about Tohka. He promised to save her even if doing so became dangerous. Miku, whose worldview rests on the belief that people abandon promises as soon as honoring them becomes painful, wants him to prove that his words retain meaning all the way to the end.

With the other Spirits eventually able to assist him, Shido continues trying to reach Tohka instead of treating her Inverse form as an enemy that simply needs to be destroyed. He closes the distance and kisses her, restoring Tohka to normal and ending the immediate Inversion crisis.

Kurumi does not forget the reason she entered the conflict. While the others deal with Tohka and Miku, her numerous selves search DEM’s facilities for the captive second Spirit she believes may know about the First Spirit. She fails to find the target and eventually leaves, leaving the mystery unresolved.

After the crisis, Miku privately summons Shido and now calls him “darling.” She has watched him refuse to exploit the festival bargain, risk himself for Tohka, acknowledge her trauma without accepting her cruelty, protect Miku herself despite everything she did to him, and keep his promises when doing so could have killed him.

Miku therefore chooses to trust him. Before doing so, she directly returns to the promise Shido made inside DEM: if she lost her supernatural Voice and everyone else stopped wanting her, he would still remain her fan. Shido confirms that he meant it. Miku tells him that because he has kept his promises, he is someone she can finally trust; even if nobody else ever came to hear her again, she could sing for him alone. Knowing what Shido’s sealing ability requires and what the kiss will do to her Spirit power, she kisses him voluntarily and allows herself to be sealed. The choice is significant because it is the opposite of the relationships she created through Gabriel: rather than guaranteeing another person’s obedience through supernatural control, she willingly places trust in someone whose choices remain his own.

The arc concludes with Miku returning to the stage and singing again before an audience whose reactions are not being forced by Gabriel. She specifically chooses a song important to her from the Tsukino Yoimachi period, the song associated with the time when her aphonia had taken away her ability to perform. Her supernatural captivating quality is now gone, and the audience initially notices that her “Voice” sounds different. They nevertheless become just as enthusiastic as the song continues and greet its conclusion with genuine applause and cheers. Miku is moved to tears because, for the first time since losing everything as Tsukino Yoimachi, she has direct proof that people can still choose to listen to her without being compelled. Her performance reconnects her with the part of herself that existed before losing her career and voice, allowing her to sing while finally accepting that the people listening are free to respond however they choose.
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