The rumbling thunder and gentle shower increased as Sora moved through the wet streets, finding comfort in the noise that drowned out her chaotic thoughts; she’d come a long way from the days of stuttering and ducking behind groups of people to avoid Kari.

Her former bully walked beside her, four fingers in each pocket while scanning the curtain of rain that fell around them.

Sora’s attention moved between the little bits of personality throughout the Vulpes capital; a year ago, she couldn’t have dreamed the adventure she’d undergone, yet here she was, a mother, savior of an entire world, and a solar-system-level threat.

There was comfort in reflecting on everything they’d overcome, but it was time to press forward. Holding her breath for a moment, Sora discharged it and turned to her wolf friend to give her a small smile.

“You ready to work toward the future?”

Kari slowed at the edge of her enlarged chakram to give her a side-long look. “You still haven’t told me what I’m supposed to be ready for, airhead.”

Adding a bright smile, Sora brought her tails around to point between them. “We’re going to meet our Shadows!”

“Okay.”

“Huh?”

Sora’s grin faltered; she’d expected at least some kind of resistance or questioning.

Kari smirked at her thrown-off expression. “Heh. What—did you want me to freak out and start freaking out like some new mother watching her daughter go off to the first day of school?”

“Ha-ha!” Sora huffed, knowing where that jab was aimed at. “You’re not even curious why I want us to meet our Shadows?”

“Wasting time. Haaa. I suppose it’s on point for you, though,” Kari grinned, arms crossing under her bust. “We doing it in the middle of the street or going someplace more… contained—what do you think, Mom?”

“Hehe. Surely not here.”

“Right? Sora’s too much of a worrywart.”

Sora wanted to tell her she’d done a compressed Null-Void bomb over the city a bit ago but thought better of it just before blurting it out; she wasn’t sure what she was even thinking at the time.

“Fine…” Sora looked up at the sky and smiled, pointing in the air as a flash of lightning streaked between clouds. “Let’s go up there and chill in the storm.”

She cheered inside as Kari skeptically followed her gaze. “Up there? Don’t we need a quiet and still place to be doing the Outer Body Technique?”

“Training!”

“Meh. Okay… You’ve changed a lot over the past year.”

Sora floated into the air as her chakram shrunk to allow the elements to collapse around them, sinking into their hair and clothes.

“Tell me about it!”

Alva and Kari rose after her as Sora closed her eyes to listen to the wind and rain fill her senses on their ascent into the heavens; the sounds washed away all thought, allowing a more chaotic stillness to fill her heart that felt familiar.

Vision opening upon entering the swirling clouds, Sora giggled as electricity sparked nearby, sending a shockwave through her frame; it was simple to control expected volume spikes and filter things out at this point.

Kari floated nearby with her amenable mother by her side, and Sora motioned for her to come closer.

“Alva, can you help us resonate our spirits? We haven’t done it for so long, and I haven’t brought anyone into my Core in forever.”

“Resonating, hmm?” the gray-haired wolf woman hummed, holding her knuckles against her nose. “I assume this is a method your mother spoke to you of… If my conclusion is correct, you don’t need anything special.”

“No?”

Kari shrugged as Sora looked at her. “Don’t ask me. I’ve only ever done my own Core stuff.”

Alva gestured between them with a short chuckle. “You’ve both resonated Cores before; that doesn’t go away. Draw near, hold hands, and pull into your Core; you should feel the spark to bridge the gap between you.”

“That simple, huh?” Sora sighed. “Sometimes I’m surprised how easy this stuff is.”

“On the contrary,” the woman mused, her fingers closing around their shoulders as Kari and Sora took each other’s hands. “Resonating souls is quite challenging, and it may be a tad more difficult to find your way back into that rhythm, but the connection is there.”

Kari grinned as her fingers tightened. “I don’t think we’ve done an arm wrestling contest yet.”

“Haha. Really?” Sora lifted an eyebrow while meeting her pressure; the turbulent storm began to fade to black as she pulled into herself. “We can mess around later; it’s time to get serious.”

“Uh-huh… I’d totally be down for that if I knew what we were doing.”

Drifting into a deep-blue, empty space, Sora searched for Kari to find an arc of light pulling her focus to her left; she could feel the lingering tingle of the wolf’s skin against her own, and, after a second, another streak of energy with the rolling thunder filled the background.

A bright spotlight shone overhead, illuminating Kari across from her with Alva in the middle. “Well done, girls!”

Kari crossed her arms. “I don’t feel like I did much… So, what’s up, Sora? Is this some super-secret thing we need to keep on the low or something?”

“Not really,” Sora returned, floating near her. “I just thought it would be easier when we were in our Cores to figure things out. Umm… so, here’s what my mom said…”

Briefly going over the conversation about the layers of a Shadow and how they needed to stabilize their essence, Kari listened carefully as Alva added a few details. Once finished, the Fenris Wolf ran her fingers through her locks to scratch her head.

“Uh… I kind of think I was doing that pruning thing already?”

Sora’s ears drew back while quickly running through everything because she must have missed something. “Eh… You have? I thought you just let your Shadow free and duked it out to see who would win… How is that balancing things out?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Kari huffed, glancing at her mother. “Didn’t I do that with the whole discipline training?”

Alva shook her head. “Not exactly, dear. What Sora is describing is careful pruning of one’s self. On the other hand, you started a war zone. Both will create fertile areas to be developed, yet one is about balance while the other is setting a fire to burn everything away without controlling the sacrifices.”

“Huh. The same result, though?”

Sora puffed out a long breath. “C’mon, Kari…”

“What? I like how things turned out—even if it was dangerous—results are results.”

“Haaa. I’m not trying to harp on you.”

Alva brought their attention to her by holding up her hands to show them a barren field and a weed-filled field. “Both require work, but how one tends to them will be different.”

Kari’s eyes lit up at the visual example. “Oh! Okay. So, I’m building up my balance again while Sora is going to each little weed and plucking them out… Sounds exhausting.”

Throwing her copper hair back, Sora stretched out. “Heh. Like battling non-stop against yourself for weeks without rest? Sure.”

“That’s fun, at least,” Kari countered, glaring at the weedy field.

“Wait!” she exclaimed before pausing, working through her thoughts, then pointing between the two visual fields her mother had made. “Mom, you said the best way to change things in our Oltera Nexus was to visualize it as a functional thing we can understand, right?”

Sora stayed quiet, not knowing where she was taking this conversation; she knew the Oltera Nexus was basically the workshop of the soul, housing the power source and all the functional basics that made someone who they were.

She’d been warned not to mess with it by her aunt, and it was only by Seiōbo’s guidance—who was given instructions by her sisters—that Emilia had facilitated the change in Wendy and Mofupsi inside the place.

The gray-furred wolf’s face beamed with pride. “You’ve been listening!”

“Mhm. So… does that mean all Sora needs to do is visualize a way to balance her father and mother’s side to generate a way to do it?”

Deciding it couldn’t hurt to try, Sora attempted it; she frowned when their environment changed to an endless plain of dirt. Wheat began to sprout with the brilliant sun overhead; a distant storm brought water as a warm wind pushed it along.

“Wow… This is my Oltera Nexus?”

Kari snickered. “Didn’t take you as a farmer. I’ll have to ask Emi to make you some suspenders and cowboy boots.”

“Hehe. It could be fun!” Sora hummed, watching the sprouts bud at various areas of the field, but her light heart soon diminished as the horizon to her right flared white. “What’s that?”

Alva floated closer, her wolf ears tilting a little back. “I see… so, this is what your mother was concerned about?”

Kari squinted as the shimmering fog drew closer, overshadowing the pristine, golden wheat. “Are those… bugs?”

Sora recognized them instantly from a mummy movie she’d seen in the past. “Locust?”

A swarm of glittering, alabaster insects swept by them as if ghosts, yet when the wave passed, only dry, arid desert remained for a new cycle to follow; rain clouds formed overhead, wetting the ground as the wind brought new water and life, causing the wheat to grow once more, yet the swarm always returned to devour it just as it ripened.

“What am I looking at?” she mumbled.

Kari’s laughter drew her attention.

“What?”

She pointed at the chakram around her tails and hair. “You’re an insect! Haha. Sora, the Null-Void Locust!”

“No…” Sora’s mouth tightened as she examined the rapid growth and desolation circle that continued on loop. “I can’t use my mom’s side because… I’m eating all of the energy that side of me produces?”

Dropping down to the sand, she reached down to scoop some up and let it fall into the wind; the storm brought such vibrant life to the area, healing the ground and bringing nourishment, only for the ravenous locust swarms to devour every last drop.

Her mother’s words drew Sora’s eyebrows together. “How… can I balance a feeding frenzy locust army and a field of wheat?”

“Exterminate the locust?” Kari shrugged.

Sora gave her a dry look. “You would suggest the nuclear option… That locust swarm is me! It’s half of my genetics. If I destroyed it—if I even could—that would be the end of my Null-Void use.”

“Huh.” Kari sat down in the air to rest her head against an invisible armrest as the insects continued their pillage across the landscape of Sora’s soul. “You can’t slow them down?”

“I don’t know!” Sora huffed, trying to will it to happen to no avail. “I can see what’s happening, but I don’t think I can just snap my fingers and change… eh, my instinct, I guess? Alva—thoughts?”

“Hmm. I am by no means an expert in Null-Void, nor this unusual combative essence phenomena. Although… I suppose Eric had a similar struggle with his own mixed heritage. His, however, was slowly killing him.”

Kari scowled at her older brother’s mention, but Sora was happy to get any kind of insight into this mess.

“Why doesn’t my Vulpes side fight back?”

“Uh…” Kari gestured at the raining sky. “I think it is—in its own way?”

“Indeed.” Alva lowered herself to the ground to brush her fingers across the growing stocks before the insects came to ravage them. “There… is so much more happening than meets the eye.”

Straightening, the wolf drew their attention to the field, rain, and soil. “Your mother’s magic is developing a sort of… poison to combat the Null-Void that’s continuing to attack it. An understandable method for a Vulpes that is weakening your father’s side over time.”

Sora’s fur bristled at the news. “I’m actually trying to kill myself?!”

Kari worked around her jaw while following the locust swarms that passed through them again. “I wouldn’t say that… You’re plenty strong as it is, but maybe it’s just trying to become more dominant? You don’t act like you’re being poisoned.”

Looking back over the field, Sora knelt down on the moist earth to dig her fingers into the cultivating mud as the land was healed; she could feel tingles run up her arms as the energy within bit at her Null-Void body that constituted what side currently had control.

Alva and Kari were right; her Vulpes magic generated barbs, smaller than she could see, that jabbed into the alien structure of her Null-Void physiology, injecting some kind of disrupting wave that scrambled the congruency of her body.

Fingers beginning to shake from the seeping poison, Sora removed her hand in surprise. Thinking back, only two methods had managed to affect her Null-Void: overpowering it with more matter than she could ingest at a time and whatever Eyia did when she caused a temporary paralysis in her movement and landed a solid blow against her defenseless time-lapse.

A new method of affecting the alien substance had been found through her Vulpes’ side, constantly seeking a way to overpower the all-consuming force.

“It’s… injecting my chakram with poison to slow me down?”

Alva created a visual image to illustrate what she was feeling. “A central nervous system depressant… Since you are both Null-Void and of Existence, and a creating force in Existence, that subconscious desire has created a paradoxical reality in your own body.

“One is a hot-blooded rage that seeks to consume everything, including the parts of you that are not in line with its function, while the other plays the slow game, probing for weaknesses and discovering hard-to-digest weaves of Existence that it can then mass produce to inhibit that frenzied desire to feed.”

Sora recalled how she’d first felt after unlocking her father’s side, and she’d certainly been more hot-blooded; her temperament had eased over time, and it was because of her mother’s side introducing this poison to her Oltera Nexus that relaxed and soothed the chaotic drive of Null-Void.

“I’m weakening myself!” she balked while looking up at the storm clouds delivering more poisonous liquid to be soaked up by the soil, woven into the grain, and delivered to the locusts. “My system is totally out of whack!”

“Heh-hehehe,” Kari doubled over as she pointed at the insects. “I just, heh, can’t get over this image of you being a gigantic locust! Oh, man… Sora, the Bug Queen of the Void!”

“Kari!”

“I can’t help myself; you’re an insect in fox clothing!”

“Help me be a fox again… or at least stop poisoning myself! Help! Please!” she cried, now seeing the sinister nature of the cycle. “Wendy and Mofupsi must be going through the same thing, too… Emilia will go through it when she unlocks my dad’s side. I need a solution.”

“Okay! Heh. Locust Queen. I think it’s a pretty simple fix.”

Alva nodded, causing Sora to growl at being the only one left in the dark.

“Go on…”

Kari seemed to be enjoying herself as she played with pictures of her turning into a big insect in the sky. “Well… What do you really want, Locust Queen?”

“Huu-haaa. To eat?”

“Mhm. The wolf will always go after the easiest target,” she laughed. “What’s the easiest target?”

“Me… So, I need to get my Null-Void to want to eat something else besides my Vulpes half?”

A gleam lit in Kari’s amber irises as she waved away her teasing images in the sky to look at her. “Hehe. No, I think you should keep poisoning yourself.”

Sora’s ears pulled to the side as she tried to think of the reason the wolf would suggest that before they perked up as she discovered the answer. “I can cultivate my own Null-Void counters.”

“Bingo!” Kari huffed, bushy black tail swaying left and right. “I want to find my own counters to that annoying force, but your body is naturally developing them. So, you don’t want to get rid of all of it, but redirect enough to allow you to utilize your Vulpes side again. See? Simple.”

“Uh-huh… and, O Wolf of Wisdom, how would you go about planning to execute that brilliant solution?”

Kari’s tail stopped. “Huh… I hadn’t thought that far.”

Sora fell back onto the budding stocks as they overshadowed the blue heavens. “Well… I have somewhere to start, at least. Maybe Wendy and Mofupsi can try to tackle it from their side too, and we can compare notes.”

Silence ensued for several minutes before she hopped up with a grin; it was a start. “Now that we’ve made progress on my side, let’s meet the Shadow layer that is holding your father’s side and see what she’s like!”

Kari floated down to stop beside her mother and Sora, still staring up at the sky in thought. “So, this won’t be like the last Shadow I met?”

Sora held up her fingers as the field and cycle vanished to be replaced by a long, infinite line of Kari clones. “Nope. Our Shadows are in an infinite layer of deep-seated desires, yet—as I understand it—one of those is the dominant one that can most manifest itself because it’s most aligned with you as Balance and your Persona.”

“Oh!” Kari slowly straightened to stare at a mirror of herself. “Sweet. Does that mean it would be the closest one skilled in sports to me?”

Sora’s eyes dulled. “Give it to you to take some deep psychological phenomena and turn it into a way to play sports.”

“I can’t help it! Heh. I need someone challenging since you suck at most.”

Jaw snapping shut as Sora gave her friend a dirty look, Kari gave a helpless shrug.

“You’re good at some stuff—sports… just isn’t one of them!”

“I think I’m getting better at tennis,” Sora defended.

Kari looked like she was trying to suppress a laugh. “Last time… didn’t…”

“A fluke! Emi only won because you were distracting me!”

“Your 12-year-old daughter smoked you… talk about embarrassing.”

Sora’s cheeks burned while remembering how difficult moving as a human was; she was so used to floating around that she had tripped more times than she cared to admit.

“She had Rayla and Luna on her team.”

“You had Wendy. Two 17-year-olds versus 8-year-olds and a 12-year-old… Oof,” she winced at the memory.

Alva giggled at their branching topic.

Not having fun reliving the memory, Sora crossed her arms and looked back at the clones. “Ahem… In any case, your Shadow.”

“Basketball partner.”

“Sure… Your ‘basketball partner’ should be the one that’s holding the broken collar. Luckily, when you threw it back on your Shadow, it wasn’t the mass of chaos that snatched it up but a layer that you basically helped claim the Throne of Shadows.”

“Cool title,” Kari flashed her teeth while looking down at the floor before making Sora jump—still floating—as she yelled below. “Yo! Get up here already. See the ladder? Mom, I can make a ladder, right?”

A spotlight flashed on the yellow metal as a ladder flew into the abyss below before Kari groaned and waved it away. “Naa, that’d take forever. Aye! I’m sending down an elevator—come up to throw down!”

“What are you doing?!” Sora hissed, following the newly created elevator’s descent. “Our souls are resonating, which means—ugh…”

The elevator dropped down and rose way faster than she anticipated, and the doors slid open to reveal two thrones.

One was white and decorated with flavorful designs and copper framing—her Shadow’s smirking, reflected irises lingered on Sora’s forced smile as the crowning layer addressed her. “Hello! I don’t think we’ve been acquainted. Perhaps you could finally give me a name? Wouldn’t that be a treat?”

Great… My Shadow is a real diva. Way to go, Sora… that’s you.

The second was a billowing shroud of shadowy, glistening rods that were stitched together like fabric and a vaporous form of Kari sitting cross-legged in wait.

“My, isn’t it wonderful to be seen in the light?”

Sora’s Shadow used her scepter to purposefully tilt her crown a tad off-center before flashing her teeth. “It is! We’ve been through quite the power struggle over the past year. Congratulations on your big win.”

“Thank you.”

It was a little strange to see Kari’s Shadow show a more sophisticated cheer in conversing with Sora’s Shadow, yet Sora got the distinctive vibe that there was a hidden, controlled monster behind both that was the stuff of nightmares.

Her Shadow’s sparkling white irises—more congruent with her Null-Void form—flashed between them. “Why don’t we have a nice discussion? Coming to a mutual agreement without the messy disaster can make for quite an advantageous outcome for us both, Balance… Would it not?”

Mentally preparing herself as Alva excused herself from the discussion, sitting between them to silently listen, Sora created a chair across from the thrones their Shadows used, which was ironic, considering it was really them that were in control.

Kari didn’t hesitate, jumping into her seat to cross her legs. “So, can you play any sports?”

Her Shadow showed a toothy smirk. “Anything you can do… I can do better.”

“Ho-ho! I like her already,” Kari laughed. “Want to test that?”

Sora wasn’t sure how to take this turn of events; she’d never invited her Shadow to the surface. What have you gotten us into, Kari?