The heavy, cosmic pressure of the Goddess Realm vanished like snow before the sun, but that sudden peace was a complete, treacherous illusion. Nyx and Jane jolted awake with a brute, violent shock. It felt as though gravity had thrown them raw and mercilessly back into their mattresses from a kilometer high.
Their muscles immediately glowed with an intense, paralyzing soreness cutting deep into their bones. The ancient sugar adrenaline of that magical Mooncake was still rushing through their bloodstreams like a shivering, glowing current. It electrified their entire nervous system, causing their hearts to beat irregularly, pacing wildly and pounding loudly inside their chests.
My whole body is tight with stress… Jane thought, staring at the ceiling and gasping for air. It feels as if a bison ran right over me. That energy… it is eating me up from the inside out.
Stumbling, with drooping shoulders, deathly pale faces, and gaping jaws, they made it downstairs to the dining room with agonizing effort. The atmosphere in the Bastion there was dusty, oppressive, and terrifyingly silent.
“Ughhh… I am so insanely, insanely broken…” Jane groaned in a hoarse, deep voice. She dragged her feet along and collapsed so clumsily onto a wooden chair that the legs creaked dangerously and loudly beneath her weight. “It feels like my soul is still floating somewhere up there while my body down here is simply rotting away.”
Nyx held her throbbing temples with her pitch black hands. Her liquid, silver hair hung lifeless and dull over her shoulders, as if all divine luster had been sucked out of it. She let out a deep, trembling sigh that spoke volumes.
“Me too, Jane, really so intensely bad,” Nyx whispered, her voice trembling from sheer exhaustion. “My cells are literally on fire from depletion. Every fiber in my body is screaming for rest. My divine energy has dropped so low that it hurts to even breathe. And you, Lila?”
A dry, chilling silence fell. They both looked simultaneously at the empty wooden chair between them. In their tired minds, the gears immediately shot into a panicked overdrive.
The visual memory of the exploding arena flashed past in their thoughts with bright, fuchsia flashes. Wait a second… where is she? Is she still up there in that chaos? Did Abysia absorb her when the dimension collapsed? Did we lose her?
Before the paralyzing fear could completely take over the room, a bizarre, muffled, and hysterical screaming suddenly echoed from upstairs in the hallway. It was a sound that pierced through bone and marrow.
Jane and Nyx flew up in unison. Spontaneously forgetting the hellish muscle pain, they stormed up the stairs toward Lila’s bedroom with exploding, brightly colored auras. The adrenaline took over completely once again. They ran blindly toward the sound, which turned out to be coming directly from the heavy, oak wardrobe with a loud, rhythmic vibration. The entire wardrobe shook to its foundations.
“WELL I NEVER!! OPEN THIS DAMN DOOR RIGHT NOW!!” sounded Lila’s suffocated, enraged voice from behind the solid wood, immediately followed by the wild, dull thumping of her elbows against the thick panels. “I AM ALMOST CHOKING IN HERE AND THERE IS A SLIPPER IN MY NOSE!! HELP ME THEN!!”
The wardrobe door had naturally locked rock hard from the giant impact of the interdimensional launch, jammed completely tight in the frame. Jane and Nyx looked at each other for one second, envisioned the utterly absurd picture, and burst into laughter, almost choking on their own chuckles.
“Wait, wait, I will save you, oh great deity!” Jane shrieked, grabbing the heavy handle and prying the door open with a brute, hard yank.
Lila immediately stormed outside, high on emotion. With a bright red face, her hair standing statically on end in all directions, and her clothes still wrapped awkwardly half backward over her shoulders, she ran past them into the hallway like a raging fury.
“NOT A WORD ABOUT THIS!! I WILL CUT YOU BOTH IF YOU MAKE EVEN ONE STATEMENT OR ONE REMARK ABOUT THIS!!” she fumed angrily, while at that exact moment another stray, fluffy pink sock slid off her plush slipper and fell limply to the floor. “I MEAN IT, JANE! I WILL CUT YOUR TAIL IN YOUR SLEEP!!”
That only made it worse for Jane and Nyx. The situation was far too visual. Holding their bellies, gasping for air, they nearly rolled over the wooden floor from pure, uncontrollable laughter.
However, as Lila walked furiously and stomping ahead toward the central staircase, reality hit the other two with an ice-cold, terrifying strike. Their laughter died immediately in their throats.
Lila, your disguise! Your aura is still wide open!
It was already too late. Down at the bottom of the stairs, Beat, Apollo, Ren, and Miki stood in a small circle. Their eyes opened visually wide, their pupils trembling as they looked up the steps and saw that bright, purple royal glow shining. The recognition struck like a sonic, deafening thud in the room.
Ren and Miki heard the recognizable voice, locked their eyes tightly onto the purple glow, and sprinted up the wooden steps at an insane, dust kicking speed.
“BIG SIS LILA!!”
Nicola and Lyn had just walked around the corner from the central hall at that exact moment. They held their legendary weapons at the ready due to the sudden commotion. They stopped abruptly and looked in complete amazement at the escalation on the stairs.
“Wait a second, what on earth is going on here?” Nicola asked with a sharply raised eyebrow, closing her arms defensively and tightly across her chest. “Who is that and why is she glowing like she is a walking power source?”
Meanwhile, Miki and Ren were jumping around Lila completely hyped, possessed, and screaming. They scrambled wildly against the wooden stair railing as if they had just swallowed an entire battery of energy catalysts.
“THIS IS LILA, OUR BIG SISTER! WE HAVE KNOWN HER FOR MUCH LONGER THAN YOU HAVE KNOWN HER, SO THERE!!” Ren shouted with a triumphant look toward Nicola, sticking his tongue out.
Lila let out a deep, intensely tormented sigh. She realized that her carefully constructed cover had been completely blown to bits within a single second. She placed a hand on her forehead and then turned slowly, with royal dignity, toward Nicola and Lyn.
“Okay, listen up everyone. It is complicated, it is bizarre, and I am going to explain it to you crystal clear and very quickly just once, so brace yourselves because you are not going to believe this.”
While Lila claimed the full, absolute attention of the group and immediately burst into her super fast explanation, Nyx and Jane tried to sneak toward the deep shadow of the kitchen in the background with extremely cautious, millimeter steps. They wanted to dodge this dance and the difficult questions at all costs. They held their breath, their bodies stiff with tension.
CRACK!
A loud, completely dry, and excruciatingly hard crack echoed through the entire lower floor of the Bastion. Jane, in her sleepy, brainless, and reckless clumsiness, had stepped full force with her heavy heel on a wooden spoon that was still lying on the floor from last night’s hectic cooking session.
Everyone stopped talking acutely. The dynamics in the room froze completely. All heads turned in unison, like mechanical, wooden dolls, with eerie precision toward the kitchen door.
Miki and Ren, who were just sitting on the floor listening to Lila, sprang right up with glistening, excited, and hyperactive eyes.
“LOOK WHO ELSE IS VISITING!!”
They sprinted straight at Jane and Nyx with drawn tracks and flashing sparks. Nyx immediately fired a deadly, silver-black flashing angry glare at Jane because of that damn wooden spoon. Their jaws were set tight. They bickered very quickly in a fraction of a split second under their breath, their teeth bared.
“This is your fault, you brainless donkey,” Nyx hissed between her teeth.
“I did not see that thing, okay?! My eyes are not working yet!” Jane hissed back in panic.
However, as soon as Ren and Miki grabbed them forcefully by the hands to drag them toward the circle, they were forced to switch gears. There was no turning back. They decided on the spot to play along full on retarded with the situation to keep up appearances for goodness sake.
“WOAH! WHO WOULD HAVE EXPECTED THIS?!” Jane suddenly called out in an extremely fake, exaggerated theatrical voice, throwing her arms wildly and stiffly into the air like a third-rate actress.
Nyx immediately latched onto it sharply, put a giant, forced grin on her face that distorted her entire expression, and shouted: “YES JANE, WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT!! WHAT A MIRACLE THAT WE ARE HERE TOO AND RUN INTO YOU HERE!!”
However, Jane, operating with zero percent usable brain capacity due to the intense muscle pain and the early morning, looked at the emotionally reunited family. She lost all filter between her brain and her mouth and blurted out ice-cold: “Woah, really super great that your family is still alive, Lila!”
An icy, suffocating, and heavy dead silence fell over the room immediately. The temperature in the Bastion seemed to drop ten full degrees. Nyx and Lila froze in their motion. They looked at Jane with pitch black glares that could drill her through the solid floor right on the spot. Jane had just stepped full force on their most sensitive, most secret tail.
Lila slowly thrust her chin forward. The thick veins on her temples began to swell dangerously and rhythmically. She looked at Jane and muttered angrily, under her breath and trembling through her teeth: “BRAINLESS IDIOT, I AM NOT EVEN AT THAT PART OF MY STORY YET!!!”
To immediately cover the giant, potentially fatal blunder for the rest of the group, Lila acutely began to speedrun her own monologue in a hyper-fast, comical manner. Talking like a possessed, runaway machine gun, she raged in one giant breath through the most crucial, secret details and cut off the whole complicated part about the survivors so violently fast that she tried to mask Jane’s fatal comment as a weird, misplaced inside joke.
“So yeah listen they are still alive haha bizarre right well I knew that for a long time of course and Jane knows that too because we talked about it yesterday when you guys were sleeping and she always makes those weird dry comments as if it is news because she really has the brain capacity of a goldfish so do not mind her well that was it so the whole story about my origin and the family and everything is now told done finished cover gone but we keep moving!”
Lila concluded her breathless speedrun with a forced quote of Jane “Woah, really super great that your family is still alive, Lila!” while randomly shaking her hands around to break the immense tension.
Again an absolute, icy silence fell over the room. Nobody moved a muscle. Everyone stared at them open-mouthed.
In the background, deep in a dark corner behind the large wardrobe, a lonely, stray cricket suddenly began to chirp loudly.
Chirp… chirp… chirp…
Everyone’s head turned very slowly, with shivering pupils and wooden movements, toward that specific corner of the room.
PING!
Beat fired a sharp, crackling lightning bolt from his fingertip without even thinking about it. The bright flash of light illuminated the room for a fraction of a second and shot the cricket completely to ash and ruin. A small cloud of smoke rose from the corner.
Everyone locked their eyes directly back razor-sharp onto Jane, Lila, and Nyx. The tension was thick enough to cut and hung by a thread… until Apollo and Nicola suddenly burst into loud laughter in unison.
The pure, absurd chaos of this entire visual moment completely broke their seriousness. They found Jane’s utterly idiotic, misplaced action and Lila’s insane speedrun so unbelievably hilarious that they began repeating her remark loudly and screeching.
“Really super great that your family is still alive, Lila! Hahaha! My god, Jane, you are really not normal!” Apollo roared, slapping his knees from laughter.
The rest of the group quickly followed, and the entire room was roaring with laughter within a second. The tension flew out of the room. Jane, Nyx, and Lila looked at one another, their breathing still trembling from the shock, locking their eyes in a triple look of pure, intense relief.
Phew, SAFE. That ended just right, barely made it.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The loud laughter died down abruptly in a single fraction of a second. The atmosphere in the room visually shifted immediately to a terrifying, suffocating, and heavy tone.
A heavy, unimaginably hard thudding and brute, shivering strikes suddenly pounded with immense destructive power against the solid, armored door of the Bastion. The thick walls of the building began to creak audibly and terrifyingly under the impact. A thick layer of dust and grit drifted down in large streamers from the ceiling, right over their faces. The entire Bastion trembled to its foundations.