Story:

"AI!! MAI!! MURASAME!!"

Shiro's shriek tore out of her and she bolted for the temple door, robes flying, no plan, no formation, no thought at all but the image of her nieces naked to the enemy at the point of rupture—

"HALT."

The word struck Shiro's heart like a thunderstrike. Chitose's hand had clamped tight around her arm—not painfully, but immovably, fingers like the roots of the mountain itself—and her single chanted syllable had stopped Shiro's momentum so completely that she stumbled against the doorframe, gasping, torn between grief and obedience.

"Look at me," Chitose commanded. "Look at me, Shiro. Panic running through those doors delivers your nieces nothing but a fourth corpse. You are a shrine miko of Yamato. Act like an immovable mountain in any threat—whatever comes, whatever you love stands in its path, the mountain does not run toward the storm and it does not crumble before it. You hold. You anchor. You think."

Shiro stood trembling, tears standing in her eyes—and then, breath by breath, she planted her feet and forced the panic down into the floor like a strike of roots. "...Yes, Chitose-sama."

"Good." Chitose released her arm. "Then hold with me."

The Shrine Master swept out into the main court, Shiro at her side, and before them the shrine was rising to war—

Mikos flowing down from every hall in trained ranks, purification bows strung, talisman walls unfurling, the barrier stones igniting one after another around the compound's rim, ward-light climbing the cedar trees like dawn come early.

Chitose's voice carried over it all, calm and carrying, placing every unit, sealing every gate, ordering the sacred tools drawn from vaults unopened in a generation.

Because Kannagi Chitose, alone on this mountain, knew exactly what was coming—knew which lords of the Ninth Hell would walk through a broken gate, and knew, above all else, what the Yamato Shrine Mikos had been founded to protect, standing between evil and the mountain's holy heart for hundreds years.