Light and shadow swirled around in a chaotic, confusing jumble. The floor beneath them, at least, felt painfully solid. As Junko attempted to right herself after the tumble she rolled Gekko away rather callously. Her bulk absorbed most of the fall so the kid definitely was fine- he was just being a drama queen as usual and taking his sweet time to stand. Aching pulses of soreness rippled through her skin but at this point Junko was so battered and bruised anyway that the burn from the slide down scarcely registered.

As her vision returned to normal an immediate sense of nausea assulted her. The room, the colors, the lights, everything spun around at a dizzying pace. At first Junko thought the ground beneath them was rotating, but again this was revealed to merely be a trick of the light. The two landed on a large central stone platform, not unlike the elevator Gekko and Motonubu disappeared on what felt like a lifetime ago. That stonework underfoot remained stationary, but the surrounding walls rotated smoothly like a giant windmill, churning around in nauseating circles. The chamber they plopped into expanded outwards quite a distance in a manner almost resembling a fishbowl. The glass walls ballooned out and in to form a bubble-like enclosure. Opposite their side of the glass packed together tightly in the liquid on the other side floated an enormous number of the glowing jellyfish. Even in the bowels of the death machine itself, the Jinchi must have relied on animals for illumination. What a crazy bunch of people!

Not only did jellyfish churn in those spinning waters, though. Dark chunks of something also rotated rapidly in that soup as well. The red-tinted light around those chunks confirmed her suspicion. Those were the hunks of spent animals powering the machine, having drifted down from the level above. Living and dead, mixing together in one nasty soup. It was almost like a painting of some fever dream, the bizarre spinning chamber, the enthralled animals swimming in a current they couldn't control, the ancient Jinchi architecture spoiled by these brazen newcomers...and that wasn't all.

Something else dotted the inside surface of the glass, on the dry side. While Gekko coughed and struggled to stand again Junko walked to the edge of the central platform to get a better look. What looked like stone carvings lay embedded within the rotating glass wall. The rotating outer wall wasn’t reachable from the end of the stone platform, so Junko resigned herself to just looking. Even so she could make out their details in the soft light. Skulls. Hundreds of them. Of different sizes and shapes, some with one eye, some with many. They lay scattered across the interior of the glass wall, spaced out not at random but in regular intervals, like pieces on a chessboard. Junko tried to connect the dots but Gekko beat her to it.

“They’re the same as that other skull.” He groaned, finally getting himself upright and taking in the same horror show Junko saw. “It’s a simple Bossa command. ‘Forward’. Printed over and over, on each skull, screaming into the mind of anyone who can listen. Oh, my goodness, there’s more on the ceiling too!”

“Forward?” Having now caught her breath Junko managed to measure the tone in her voice to hide any sense of unease. “Forward to where, exactly?”

“Forward to here.” Gekko spun a finger around to illustrate. “All directions are forward on the surface of a sphere, right? It didn’t make sense to me before but now that I see it...” He stopped, his head craned upwards as he continued to trace the carvings in the glass. “It’s winding up. Like a toy.”

Junko swallowed, and rubbed her forehead. “Cool. So we can smash this up and the tower will stop? Finally something I’m equipped to deal with.”

“I mean, uh.” Gekko squinted and stood up as he tried to get a better view. “It’s already wound up. Now it’s just spinning its wheels. I think...” He stumbled forward then looked down and his eyes widened. “Oh my- look at the floor! Look at all this!”

Junko glanced down and saw nothing but familiar looking stonework. It was indiscernible from any other paved cobblestone road that could be found anywhere on earth. Gekko, though, after all his struggles to stand, at once fell to his knees. “It’s fuel! It’s waiting for fuel!”

Already Junko had drawn Sahori and turned away from Gekko. The dork was nerding out on ancient ruins again. She already had her answer- smash the fishbowl, destroy the engine, and the tower couldn’t do...whatever it is Motonubu had died thinking it was going to do. It would have been really nice to have some kind of Agent with an explosive jutsu here but of course when push came to shove those awful soldiers always protected their own butts first. Finally recognizing what Junko was about to do Gekko shouted out right as she swung. “That’s not going to help! Don’t bother-”

Leaping off from the platform so she could reach the far wall, Junko put all her force into one strong overhead lunge. Swords weren’t exactly the best for breaking glass but if she put her all into it then surely she could do some damage! Sahori slammed into the glass wall and let out a horrific screech as the steel scraped up against the glass. For a moment Junko felt certain it was going to give.

Right at the full force of her thrust the studded skulls nearby began to glow orange all at once. Junko’s well trained ‘oh no’ instinct kicked in as soon as it happened. Her feet hit the side of the glass and she only had a split second to push back off it, bouncing herself back right as the surrounding ‘decorative’ skulls flared up with unknown power. She just barely forced her body back onto the platform as the area she had just been standing in erupted into a sickly sun-like flame, emerging out of nowhere as if by divine intervention.

She was unharmed physically, of course. Mentally, though, was a bit less unscathed. “What the hell was that!” Junko turned towards Gekko with a mix of fury and shock in her voice. “How about a bloody warning next time?”

“The skulls store the fuel, dumbass!” Gekko crawled towards the edge of the platform to get a better look. “These are the same as when Motonubu lit those fish on fire before. The rotation must be, like, winding a giant spring. When there’s enough fuel it’ll trigger and blast it all sky high and...I don’t know, do something horrible, I guess.”

“That was the Jinchi solution to stopping a god? Vomit a bunch of fire into the air?”

“No- it’s not fire.” Gekko reached out himself as if to touch the now clearly unsafe skulls. Junko almost stopped him but figured the kid knew something she didn’t. “The fire is just the fuel igniting. It’s not- it’s not like wood, or gasoline, or anything.” Gekko turned towards Junko with a strained expression as if he was having trouble finding the words. “It’s...lifeforce. I can’t think of a better word. It’s burning life. All that ash- that was the weapon waking up. The whole structure can just directly incinerate living organisms for energy. We’re its fuel.”

There wasn’t much to do with that information but to try and stomach it. Sahori stood steady in Junko’s hand as she spun her head around to look out at the rotating glass sphere. All this nonsense the boy was spouting...could it even be trusted? Did he have reason to lie to her at this point? “Okay, so, we’re surrounded by a giant ancient life sucking machine. Cool. How do we stop it?”

“We could lower the population in its range-”

“Like Annitou was doing with the evacs.” Junko turned her eyes back up at the hole in the ceiling where they had unceremoniously fallen from. “Was that a coincidence? Did you jerks know this thing was here the whole time?”

“Of course not!” Gekko sounded almost insulted by Junko’s suspicion. “Annitou is full of maniacs but there’s no way they would have ordered the colonization of this island if they knew it was a giant genocidal weapon.”

“Whatever. We can’t reduce the population anyway. You saw how many fish were crowding in around the tower when we came in.” Junko looked down at the still crawling Gekko. “What can I smack to fix this? There’s gotta be a weak link in the chain somewhere.”

“There’s- I don’t see anything here that explains how the tower works.” Gekko gave a heaving sigh. “It’s all like, directions. ‘Channel fuel here’, ‘insert skull facing this way’, ‘keep area free of debris before activating’...the only information here is directions. It’s like the instruction manual for a toaster.”

“Annitou has toasters?”

“In the city- we’re not all country bumpkins, okay.” Gekko finally got himself upright. “The point is, you can’t disable this thing by hitting it. You’re just putting more energy into it. It’s like trying to destroy the inside of a furnace by lighting it on fire. There’s nothing we can do.”

The two stood in silence for a bit as the last statement settled. Around them the swirling lights put on an impressive show, which might have been enjoyable were it not for the impending threat of being remotely immolated by an ancient god-slaying weapon.

“I have one idea though.” Gekko fidgeted a bit. Junko recognized the behavior immediately.

“You’re planning something stupid again, I can tell.” She almost started walking towards him but was really past trying to protect the boy from his antics at this point. “Just tell me up front. We’re not exactly in any shape to be keeping secrets now.”

“I, uh,” Gekko gave a very apologetic shrug. “I figured this might happen. You’re- I’m- neither of us are really...uh,” he gestured weakly with his good arm. “We’re just people, you know. Nothing special about us.”

“Just spit it out.” Junko almost considered resheathing her sword, but something told her to keep it ready. “We’re alone in the belly of an apocalyptic beast. There’s nothing you could say at this point that would offend me.”

With the air of a child revealing a broken toy, Gekko pulled something out from within his ragged clothes. It was a long, jagged, ugly looking object. It took Junko a few seconds to recognize it. “The dagger?”

Gekko held it up just a bit so the light could cast off its uneven edges. “It’s not- it looks like a dagger, but it’s more like...security. It’s hard to explain.”

“We don’t exactly have a lot of time, kid.”

Nervously Gekko shuffled around, holding the dagger out at different angles as if expecting something to happen. “It’s like a key, but it protects itself from being in the wrong hands. Like, you know, how some bugs emit pheromones to warn of predators and stuff?”

“Are we about to get attacked by bees?”

“It’s- kind of worse than that.” Gekko came to a stop and looked up, and without knowing why Junko did the same. “You could say it’s like, broadcasting to anyone who will listen, ‘come kill the person who holds this’...”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Yeah well, you already have to be in the mindset-” Gekko turned his head back down to look at Junko but didn’t get to finish his sentence. From the void above, shooting straight out of the chute like a meteor from the gods, fell several hundred pounds of righteous judgment. A massive plume of choking black smoke poured out of the opening overhead as well and immediately engulfed the surrounding air, blocking all vision.

The aura in the air changed as well. Junko felt the pressure shift and weigh down heavy on her shoulders. It was the same sensation she felt facing Daisuke. A General had just arrived.