Free Digital Devil Story: Reincarnation of the Goddess by Aya Nishitani Page B

closer to instinct. It was a powerful emotion, as if the boy named Nakajima Akemi was literally a part of her, and if he was lost there would be no meaning to her continued existence. Without any idea how to save him, she stood up and clenched her teeth, and the voice sounded again.
    For a moment, I am going to enter your body so you can use my power--the power to burn anything you stare at with conviction. I pray that your body can take the strain of it.
    From the dimensional rift, a blinding flash pulsed, and a pure power Yumiko had never felt the likes of before rushed through her body.

    "GYAAH!"
    A bizarre cry snapped Nakajima Akemi back to consciousness.
    Opening his eyes, he saw that Loki's tentacle was spasming over his head, smoking and giving off the stench of cooked meat. Enduring the headsplitting pain, Nakajima sat up. Pillars of flame burst out of various spots on Loki's body, and his charred tentacles flailed through air like waves, all giving off the same smoke with the cooked meat smell.
    Furthermore, Yumiko--who he thought was dead--was facing off against him; gouts of flame shot out of everywhere she stared at. In medieval Europe, when magic use was at its height, the ability was called spontaneous combustion.
    What the heck is going on...? Nakajima stared dumbfoundedly at Yumiko, wielding a power he could never have imagined her controlling. But soon, Nakajima noticed that her face was unusually pale, and that her entire body was shuddering. Just with the force of her will, Yumiko was channeling the immense power of Izanami, and her body was getting close to the limit of what it could stand.
    Meanwhile, under intense attack from the flame, Loki ejected Ohara from inside his body and started to chant a spell in an eerie rythm. The pink protoplasm started to condense, changing back into the form of the bronze-skinned youth that Loki had first appeared as.
    Yumiko desperately channeled her will and attempted to incinerate Loki with the power of Izanami, but the flames simply dispersed harmlessly off of the bronze skin, showing no effect at all. However, Loki did not budge and inch and simply stood still as if waiting for her to expend all her energy. A wave of intense exhaustion swept over Yumiko's body, and her vision started to waver. Right as she felt like she was going to drop to her knees, no longer able to withstand the effort, the voice sounded once more.
    Hurry, get Nakajima and escape!
    Her courage restored by the voice, Yumiko ran over to Nakajima, but slipped and stumbled. However, determined not to show any weakness, she immediately looked up and glared at Loki. Looking at her determined expression, something awoke in Nakajima's despair-filled soul. Ever since he was beaten up over a foolish misunderstanding and made the decision to summon a demon, Nakajima sealed off his emotions, but in that instant they came back, and he felt a kind of love that he had never experienced before.
    For her sake, I can't die!
    Nakajima's dizziness dissipated. He quickly looked around the room. At some point, the still-naked Ohara had gone over to a terminal's keyboard, and was looking up at the screen while typing in commands. She was not as nearly as skilled as Nakajima, but she was clearly used to operating a computer. As Nakajima realized that Ohara was saving the changes in the data that had occured when Loki materialized, he immediately understood his unusual actions.
    The reason that Loki was staying close to the terminal was almost undoubtedly because he was not completely confident in his own materialization. There was a very good chance that his protoplasmic blob-form was a result of a coincidental bug in the transfer of the data. Loki must have been practicing transforming into that form. He probably did not know what would happen if he tried to leave the magnetic field generated by the computer in his true form. It may have very well been that he had gained his freedom by escaping the limitations of