Ch. 141 – One Tiny Exception

“Sumire!”

Nura wrestled off Momo’s back like an excited child. Within seconds, the sisters were embracing. With their shared tangle of brown hair and honey-brown skin, they looked, for a moment, almost identical. Two halves of the same.

Momo didn’t expect the way it made her heart hurt.

The tableau reminded her of the few family pictures her mom would allow on the walls – the ones Dad shot on his rusty Canon Powershot. Terrible photos. He was no photographer. Blurry as all hell, off-center, and always candid. There was no “one, two, three, cheese!” in their family. Just “Momo! Stop chewing on your brother’s earlobe!” and the click of a camera shutter.

She couldn’t blame Mom for banning most of them.

But her mom had one weakness – pictures of Momo and her brother: her and Dae-hyun in dirt-covered overalls, hands full of mud, Grandma in the background looking exhausted and disappointed. Her and Dae-hyun fistfighting in the Target parking lot. Her and Dae-hyun on Halloween in their self-made, self-budgeted costumes: Momo, who went as a pencil eraser, and Dae-hyun, as the pencil.

That one was Momo’s favorite.

“You idiot,” Nura mumbled into her sister’s hair. “Big sis Holy Knight sending a necromancer to fight me out of prison. What kind of plan is that? Mom would have thrown you overboard.”

Momo frowned, the nostalgia fading. Ouch.

Sumire snorted, releasing Nura with an affectionate slap on her back.

“Oh, shut up. Mom threw me overboard for much less. Like feeding our dog wrong.”

“You deserved it. Flippers was getting fat.”

“He was a sea dog. They’re supposed to be fat. How else are they going to float?”

“Be serious. Do you even know how gravity works?”

As the two argued animatedly, buzzing around each other like a pair of reunited rottweilers, Radu decided to finally greet Momo. He strolled up casually, gave her a critical once-over, and then firmly planted his hands around the two thorns sticking out of her skull.

“Wait, these things are real?” he said, eyes widening as he tugged at them. “What did I miss?”

“Ow,” she complained, hitting his arm. “They’re still coming in. Be gentle.”

He retracted his hands and laughed.

“Just like you to get possessed by a demon while I’m not looking.”

“I’m not possessed. It’s a class evolution, the Nether Dokkaebi,” she muttered. “A goblin.”

He looked at her strangely, a mix of impressed and confused. “You don’t look like a goblin. You look like someone impaled you in the head with two black icicles. Goblins are a lot more… leathery.”

Momo huffed, remembering the one goblin she met by the pool back in Kalendale. The sweet, old one, bathing in the lava bath. He had indeed been leathery. Like a pair of shoes that required seven weeks of breaking in. She sure hoped she didn’t look like that, no offense to him.

“A Korean goblin,” she specified, which didn’t help. His look only got more incredulous. “We’re going to have a very long conversation after all this is over about where I’m from.”

“Don’t say things like that, Momo,” he shook his head. “I know you’d much rather the world end than divulge any actual personal information. Don’t jinx things.”

Momo glared at him. He grinned.

“Speaking of,” Sumire interjected, cutting Nura off on some insane tangent. She pointed towards the sky. “Momo, if you are going to use that present I gave you, I suggest you do so soon.”

“Present?” Nura said, casting a suspicious glare at her sister. “You had time to give her something, but didn’t grab me any souvenirs? I’ve been locked up for years.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” Sumire rolled her eyes. “It’s nothing special.”

Momo kept her mouth shut. She noticed Akram roll his eyes. He had been entirely silent as the two sisters reconnected, but it seemed he was finally ready to say something. He walked over, cleared his throat, then tapped Nura on the shoulder.

“If it isn’t the baby watchman herself,” he commented, cool as ice as he tugged Nura into a sideways hug. The girl squeaked, not expecting it. “I wanted to give you two some space to reconnect, but I can’t just lounge around while my baby cousin spins tales about life on the Barge.”

“Akram! Stop it – that’s too tight!”

Akram gave her one more squeeze for good measure, then released her. Sumire smirked.

Momo cleared her throat. While it was extremely endearing to watch them stand around and smile dumbly at each other, she was quite ready to move on to the task at hand. Plus, it was pretty hard to enjoy the touching family moment with the sheer amount of blood-curdling screams echoing around them.

What was left of the Holy Knight force was keeping most of the surrounding cloud grunts at bay, but that didn’t stop the ball guests from trying their best to get involved. They flung every useless object imaginable at the beasts – keychains, heels, purses, crumpled banknotes. As soon as Momo saw the money start flying, she had half a mind to go cloud-crowd surfing to pick up the change.

Not worth it, she reminded herself. Valerica’s gonna get us rich off that money-printing experience farm, anyway.

Of course, it wasn’t the grunts she was worried about. It was that face. The cloud titan. It had absorbed half the stadium seats. Completely doused the fire terrain. Sucked in grass and dirt and gravel, leaving abundant nothing in its path.

By Momo’s calculations, the football field of a beast was five minutes away at best. Its movement was sluggish, like an amorphous caterpillar, but each crawling step covered an enormous distance. Each time the head would move slightly up, then down, flopping onto the ground with a juicy flwop, flwop, flwop, like someone squeezing a sponge.

Okay, Momo thought, steeling herself. Time for the hard part.

“Akram,” she said. “I need your piece.”

The smile fell from his face immediately.

“Piece of what?” he joked, but it was obvious he knew.

“If you have an alternate solution for dealing with the level sixty-five world ender over there, be my guest,” Momo said, pointing casually to the cloudy behemoth. “But even if we beat that thing, somehow, probably while losing several limbs, another calamity will just come and replace it.”

“You don’t know that,” he said icily.

“I do. I actually do. I didn’t sit through a personal therapy session with Morgana for nothing,” Momo said, frowning. “Let me tell you, it is a whole different level of depressing when God herself has given up on the universe.”

Akram inhaled slowly, his expression growing grim. His hand hovered by his waist belt, where his sword sat. The whole time they had known each other, Momo had never seen him reach for it. He rarely used more than his own muscle, and that was only if his wits didn’t do.

“By the codes of Nerida, I must –”

Within the blink of an eye, Sumire had appeared in front of him, her hand laying over the sheath of his sword. He froze. So did Momo – a chill creeping up her spine. She had seen this film before, and she didn’t like the ending.

“Oh, Akram, won’t you give it a rest?” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “What exactly do you think Nerida is going to be the goddess of if this world implodes in on itself? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think there are many oceans in the cold, dark void of space.”

He stilled, his lip twitching.

“Don’t disgrace her name like that.”

“I’ll do what I please,” she said, venomous, but then she softened. “Fine. You won’t listen to reason. I’ll just have to do it your way, then. Quoting the codes. Boring, but it’ll have to do.”

She turned to Nura, who looked properly terrified. Momo was suddenly grateful she didn’t grow up in their family dynamic. Healthy wasn’t the first word that came to mind.

“Nura, please remind me, what covenant do you make with Nerida when you first become a Sea Scavenger?” Sumire asked, hands on her hips.

The younger girl brightened. “Oh, well, it depends which season you were born in, and what species of fish you caught that day, and whose boat got raided most recently –”

“For the sake of the universe,” Sumire said, gritting her teeth and jutting a thumb towards the encroaching beast. “Let’s skip past a few details.”

Nura scowled. “That’s not how the codes work, Sum –”

“Nura,” she growled. “I will steal some jackass’s sailboat and walk you off the plank personally if you don’t hurry this up.”

“Sailboats don’t have planks, dummy.”

“Nura.”

Momo and Radu shared a look. Akram had gone from angry to dumbfounded.

“Alright, fine,” the younger pirate grumbled. “Going by the assumption that you were born on the sixtieth day of Spring, the fish were guppies, and your boat hadn’t been burglarized recently, the first covenant of Nerida is simple – protect the water, and everything that resides within.”

“Thank you,” Sumire near-shouted, turning on her heel to face Akram.

“Yes?” he said. “And? Was that your grand, persuasive plan?”

“Um, yes?” she said, looking like she might pull out her hair. “For someone who is so emphatic about the word of the Goddess, you’re a pretty bad listener. The covenants are spoken in order of importance. And what is the first one? Above all, protect the water, and what resides within. All the fish, all the reefs, even the goddamn jellyfish. What happens to them if this place goes up in flames?”

A shadow of doubt flickered across his face. Momo imagined Sumire might have a promising career as a lawyer if she ever chose to get reverse-transmigrated to Harvard Law.

“You’re misusing the covenants,” he grumbled. “Yes, they are in order of importance, but that does not mean you can disregard one due to your false interpretation of another. We are bound to protect the Ending Stone and the ocean. I will stand by both.”

“Oh yeah? What are you gonna do, stand guard at the beach?” she said, getting in his face. He didn’t recoil, simply staring at her as she continued berating him. “Thwack a God-sized cloud with a sunbrella? Boop it on the nose as it gobbles down the Barium Sea? To quote my annoying sister, be serious.”

Momo had never seen Sumire so indignant, so enraged. Her whole body moved with her as she talked, almost shoving him backwards with her gestures. Momo could tell this was bigger than just the universe – as all familial problems are. She got the sense that this argument had started many years ago, first a childhood squabble, then a teenage back-and-forth, and now, here it was once again: fully-formed and boiling over.

“Stop,” he said. And there it was in his face – that same anger. Like he was a little boy again, and Sumire had stolen his favorite toy. “Stop disgracing her name.”

As the two grew closer and closer, so did the titan. Momo sensed the danger in her fingertips; the air was buzzing with Nether. It was singing again, like a Death Metal concert. Shrieking and bellowing and warning, as if to say – you’re out of time, you’re out of time.

“Oh, Gods, if that isn’t your favorite line,” Sumire jeered, pushing at Akram’s chest. “She’s not your mom, Akram. You have free will, you know. You’re an adult man who’s making the choice to let the world die instead of performing a little bit of critical thinking. Make your own decisions for once.”

“And if I make the decision to take you out of the picture, what then?” Akram growled. “What will you say to her when you meet her in the Seas Below? How will you beg for her forgiveness?”

“I should be asking you the same thing.”

“Guys,” Nura pleaded, her body trembling. “Guys, please stop fighting.”

The two ignored her, each of them moving a hand towards their weapon.

Momo breathed in, then out, fighting all of her natural instincts.

Much like Nerida’s covenants, Momo’s household had its own strict doctrines. Above all, there was the most infamous rule of all: never butt into another family’s drama.

Momo’s eyes moved from the two siblings to the titan – its mouth wide open, ready to consume them.

Momo hoped her mom would approve of her making this one, tiny exception.