Honkai Impact 3: Noah's Ark

24:《Rescue》

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Rain dripped down from the leaves of the great tree—spring had long since passed and the pink of the cherry blossoms had long since been replaced by green leaves. There was once a time when the villagers used to spread a rumor among the neighboring settlements that the Great Sakura Tree standing by the village's northern bridge bloomed all year-round. Sometimes, it was even believed by the people themselves, like so many other lies that they told to make each other feel safe and happy and good.

She could still remember when they made her and her mother perform dances in front of the tree, hoping that the mysteriously pink hair of the Yae family would make the flowers bud sooner and bloom longer. Then when they made her dance alone, her sister being too ill to do such exhaustive exercises. Their faces were smug yet inscrutable as if watching if an experiment will be a success while they watched her sweat in the heavy miko outfit while waving a wand covered in paper charms. When the rain stopped and the drought came, their smug expressions were replaced with desperation and madness, and with it, the life of her sister.

On she went in a dark cloak, towards the castle. In the time that she was alive, the building was something that was built when she was a child with the recent expansion of the village and the coming of a new daimyo. In fact, it could have been called a town, but the hard-stuck ways of the people prevented that. 'Yae no Machi doesn't have the same feel as Yae-mura,' they said. Still, the castle was built and they gained better connections with the capital. Yet still, the village remained stubborn, isolated, and pagan. Sakura could only find it fitting that the castle that they had been so proud of was now broken down and occupied by the very nature they had been trying so hard to appease. She did not know what caused the village's end, and neither did she care.

Getting to the top was not an issue. She was a witch, an individual far stronger and faster than an ordinary person, what Kiana and Noah likely would have called a Valkyrie in modern times. Jumping from branch to branch even with gaps twenty feet apart was something simple and used frequently back when she did patrols as the village's guardian. Gingerly, she stepped on the floor that would have been the daimyo's audience chamber and looked up to the decoration at the far end of the room, her expression relaxing in nostalgia.

She took off her cloak and mildly admired how such light cloth could stave off the rain. Underneath she wore her old miko outfit, or at least an approximation of it. Whatever had been left of her old clothes from five hundred years ago had now become as brittle as sand. She had remade her outfit by hand once she came back; it took her a while to figure out where to find Evil—no, Honkai—resisting fabric and even longer before she could figure out how to navigate the modern-day market. The little girl who gave her clothes and taught her how the modern Yen looked like, despite being a strange fox-eared woman running around in stolen laundry, would always be in her heart.

She put her old katana down—the one that had come with her through Stigmata space even though her clothes did not. As if knowing that its job was done, the old blade faded to dust on the floor, sheathe and all. Sakura stepped over the remains and went up to the display and took the black-sheathed sword from its pedestal.

"I'm back, Higokumaru," she whispered.

Dark flames erupted from where she held the sword and spread across her garment, transforming it and dying golden embroidery of flames over the originally-blank fabric. Overlapping plates of bright vermillion covered her left arm and right side, and a pair of sheathes appeared on her hip. As she sheathed the black blade, a small pink-haired figure erupted into existence in the air in front of her, the bells on its shoulders ringing and its many tails wagging like flickering flames.