Sonjia sighed and hung limply from his arms. "It's sort of a shock, I guess. Somewhere deep inside, I knew this happened, but I wouldn't believe it." She looked up at him. "Why, Big Brother? What happened to you?"

Jadarin chuckled lightly. "'Big Brother' is dead, just as you thought," he said. "From his remains, a Mazoku was born. That is all."

"Then why are you doing this?" she asked. "Even if you have become a Mazoku, you should still know the consequences of using that spell!"

"Naturally!" he exclaimed. "And soon, the entire world will be shown the consequences! Let the foolish gods and Mazoku see just what all their fighting will bring them!"

Sonjia knocked on his head. "Hello in there? Are you nuts? That switch from god to Mazoku sure must've messed you up." She crossed her arms and shook her head. "So let me get this straight. You want to end the world to show everyone what it would be like if they ended the world themselves."

"That's pretty much it," said Jadarin, nodding.

Sonjia lowered her head and motioned with her hand. "Could you lower your head a little? Little more…. Okay, thanks." She then proceeded to clunk him on the noggin. "I really hope that you have some sort of secret agenda other than that. What do you hope do gain by doing this?"

"Plenty!" Jadarin proclaimed. "You remember our world, don't you? The gods and Mazoku fought until the bitter end, which was the bitter end of everything! They were too blind to see the consequences of their actions; consequences that we have to live with! Do you really want the higher beings here to make the same mistake? They need to understand what they're doing!"

Sonjia shrugged. "Why don't you just tell them?"

Jadarin angrily lowered his voice. "Do you really think they would have listened? The small group of people you traveled with didn't believe you. What makes you think the gods would? No, demonstration is much more effective than simply saying it." He clenched his fist. "And once I acquire total control of the ML, this is one demonstration that no one will miss."

"One question," said Sonjia, holding up a finger. "What exactly do I have to do with all of this?"

Jadarin's eyes widened. "You mean you haven't figured it out yet? Then what the heck did you think your ribbon was for?"

"My ribbon?" said Sonjia, pulling it out of her pocket. "It was to keep the dragons and Mazoku from finding me and hounding me for info, right? What else could it be for?"

"Well, I suppose that's part of it," said Jadarin scratching his head. "See, the Gold Dragons killed your sister so that they could get control of the spell. Thing is, when they killed her, they found that she didn't have the power anymore. She'd already given it to someone else, and hidden them away somewhere."

Sonjia took a step backwards. "You mean me, don't you?"

"But of course!" said Jadarin. "The ribbon was to keep anyone from drawing power from you. Too bad it doesn't work anymore."

Sonjia backed up a ways more. "If you're going to ask me to give the power to you, you can forget it. For one thing, I don't even know how to do it. And for another, I refuse to help you."

"Such a shame," said Jadarin, pulling out his chopstick. "Looks like I'll just have to take it by force."

A blast of dark energy collided with his back and evaporated. Jadarin whirled around and snarled at the newcomer. "Xellos…" he growled. "I have no time for this!"

"Nor do I," said Xellos. "I tire of chasing you down. Really, I have much more important and entertaining things to be doing than hunting down a rogue Mazoku."

"And I tire of you chasing me," Jadarin replied. "Shoo," he commanded, snapping his fingers and flicking a silver thread in Xellos's direction.

"No! Don't kill him with that!" yelled Sonjia, grabbing onto Jadarin's chopstick, hoping that canceling her power would cancel the spell.

"Too late, my dear," said Jadarin. "The spell has already been cast, and your power no longer controls it. You are simply the spark which lights the fire, you could say." He grabbed her by the throat. "And I would love to add a little spark to my life."

Xellos raised an eyebrow and plucked the thread out of the air as it floated towards him. "This is all you've got to throw at me? What's it supposed to…?" He couldn't finish that thought, as his entire body had gone numb.

Lina limped along, holding herself up with a thick branch. "I should have seen it sooner than this," she muttered to herself. "He was playing with us, dropping hints all along…"

"Do you really think you should be moving so much now?" said Gourry. "I mean, you got hurt pretty bad and all."

Lina ignored him. "There's no time! We can't let anyone else gain control of that spell."

"What makes you think Sonjia-san has it?" asked Amelia.

"First of all," said Lina, "Jadarin kept on saying that she was working for him; that he couldn't have done anything without her. He was telling the truth, in a way, because he was drawing the power for the spell from Sonjia. And secondly, you said that Sonjia got that spell cast on her but it didn't do anything. It's my understanding that no matter what a spell does, it absolutely won't work on the being from which the spell is drawn."

"Oh," said Amelia, slightly understanding. She then looked around. "Where's Zelgadis-san? Isn't he coming with us?"

Lina shook her head. "He still doesn't trust Sonjia, and thinks this is just a waste of time. That's his decision. Although if we have to fight this Mazoku with weapons, it's kind of a pity we don't have him along. We'll need as much of a skill with a sword as we can get."

"Ne, Lina, I have a little question," said Gourry. "Where exactly are we going? We don't know where they went."

Amelia held up a tiny crystal ball. "Sonjia-san left a magical trail for us to follow. I think she knew that she was going to need our help in this." She looked at the crystal, then stopped. "Eeeehhh?! Lina-san! Lina-san! Her signal's gone! The Mazoku must have gotten her!"

Lina examined the crystal. After a moment, though, the signal faded back to life. She sighed in relief. "No, I think she just touched something that was Locked. Maybe to keep him from drawing power from her."

Amelia nodded as the signal disappeared again. "But even if that's the case, we can't keep track of her like this! How are we going to find her now?"

As if to answer her question, a white flare shot up and exploded about a mile ahead of them.

Sonjia had managed to wrestle one chopstick away from Jadarin. At least her contact with it would keep him from casting the spell again, but it would also prevent the others from tracking her. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed their help. There was absolutely nothing that she could do offensively against Jadarin.

Jadarin sneered and tucked the remaining chopstick into his belt. "Calling for reinforcements are you? You actually trust those humans?"

"No," she said flatly. "But we're all fighting the same thing, so it would be useful to have them around. 'Your enemy's enemy is your ally' I guess you could call it."

"Very well," said Jadarin, assuming a fighting position. "But what are you going to do until they get here?" He charged and swiped his claws across her belly. But they just passed right through without doing any damage. He looked up and noticed that Sonjia had placed her chopstick in her vest pocket, her hand hovering over it.

"You can't hurt me like that," she said. "And as soon as you start up a spell, I grab for this." She tapped it a few times. "I think I can handle you alone until backup arrives."

Jadarin tapped his chin with his chopstick in a mock thinking position. "I'd say…. No."

Sonjia was just about to wonder what he was plotting now, when she felt a sharp pain in her side. It took her a moment to realize what it was. His chopstick. He had stabbed her with his chopstick. She almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Absurd, yet effective.

"You know, I believe that you could possibly kill a Mazoku if you impaled it on a pike with this spell cast on it," he commented absently. "Don't you find that interesting? There are so many ways you could kill someone with this." He retrieved his chopstick from her vest pocket and let her fall to the ground, clutching her bleeding side; the second chopstick still impaled in it.

"I'm sorry, my dear, but I believe your 'allies' will be arriving a little too late." With that, he brought his claws down on her chest, intending to rip right though.

Well, they did go through, but there wasn't any ripping. His claws just passed through her chest as they had before. He looked and noted that the chopstick was still planted in her side. Her contact with it should be enough to make her vulnerable to physical attacks, shouldn't it?

"That hurt, you know," said Sonjia, firing up a recovery spell. She placed her hand on her injury and pulled the chopstick out without leaving a mark. "Pretty low of you to go backstabbing people like that."

"Impossible!" said Jadarin. "That spell should work on you indirectly! It has before!"

Sonjia held up the stick. "It would work on me if the spell was still on this thing. It came off again, just like with my ribbon." She looked it over. "But I was always under the impression that nothing could counter this spell. Yet this is the second time I've seen it come off."

Her train of thought was interrupted by a fireball to the face. Without any protection from a shield, it actually stung a little.

"Even if the spell is ineffective against you, there's more than one way to skin a cat," Jadarin said, forming another fireball. "Taking you out should be easy, considering your specialty is healing, rather than shields or attacks."

"Well, your attacks aren't anything to get excited about either," Sonjia retorted. "The ML is the only spell you have that really makes you a threat to anything."

"True," Jadarin admitted. "But you see, my dear, unlike most other Mazoku, I can draw energy from sources other than myself. Meaning I am not limited to using my own spells. In fact, let's try out a personal favorite of mine."

Sonjia smacked herself on the head for not realizing this. So that's why all the higher beings were after her sister's power and not just information on the spell itself. Mazoku and gods existed on the level of emotion and thought, so doubting their own abilities would weaken them. Because of this, a single Mazoku could only cast spells that drew power from himself, unless he had some sort of talisman that allowed otherwise. The gods and Mazoku needed control of the ML itself to be able to use it.

"…. Buried in the flow of time. In thy great name, I pledge myself to darkness…" Sonjia snapped out of her thought process. Why did that incantation seem so familiar?

"Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed…" Jadarin continued.

Sonjia pounded her fist into her palm. "Oh, now I know what spell that is! …. Oh crud!" No ribbon, no chopstick, no nothing to protect her this time. And she highly doubted that she was powerful enough to withstand a Dragon Slave at nearly point blank range. So, she did the only logical thing she could think of. She ran like hell.

"…By the power you and I possess! Dragon Slave!" Jadarin shouted. He saw Sonjia retreating. Oh, there was no running from this one. He let loose the giant stream of energy at his target.

Sonjia knew she wasn't going to make it anywhere safe. She could feel the air heating up behind her as the Dragon Slave bore down upon her. If only there was…

Thud. Perfect timing. She tripped. Looking behind her, she noticed that she had tripped over Xellos, who was lying on the ground and emitting a silver aura from his full dose of Magic Lock. Without even thinking, Sonjia grabbed him by the shirt collar and crouched behind him, using Xellos as a human(?) shield.

"Don't mind me," she muttered as the spell impacted. The Dragon Slave seemed to split and stream around them as soon as it hit the Locked Xellos. However, the ground around them was unaffected by the ML, so the Dragon Slave had no trouble ripping it apart. The ground heaved, throwing Sonjia and Xellos backwards. She hit the ground on her back, and was bombarded with flying debris. Even though the spell itself couldn't hurt her, the flying rocks sure hurt like heck.

She peeked over Xellos's shoulder to try and look through the dust, fire, and glowing aftermath of the spell. Sonjia couldn't look very long, though, as a rather large and sharp rock hit her in the forehead, knocking her back.

"So, what do you think?" she asked Xellos's prone form. "We should probably get out of here, right?" Xellos, obviously, didn't say anything, but she suspected that if he could, his answer would probably be an affirmative.

Sonjia slung one of Xellos's arms over her shoulder. "Even I'm not bad enough to just leave you here," she explained to him. With that, she attempted to stand up.

And promptly fell over. She hadn't realized until now just how injured she was from the flying debris. So, running away was out of the question. So was teleporting, since her magic was disabled from touching Xellos. Which also meant she couldn't Raywing away. But she still had one more option. "Hang on a sec," she said, letting go of Xellos for a moment and taking off her vest, but leaving her blouse on. Now that she was momentarily affected by magic, the area felt quite hot as the result of the Dragon Slave. And the smoke and dust was beginning to clear. Not much time to escape now.

"Let's just hope that a form that hasn't seen use in a few thousand years still works," she hoped, crossing her arms and concentrating. There was a moment of silence as she probed around the power inside her, trying to pull her goddess form out of hiding. She couldn't find it. She'd been in human form so long, it was locked away somewhere that she had trouble reaching. And she only had about a minute of cover left before Jadarin would spot her. Sonjia concentrated all her energy on finding…

There it is.

She almost gasped as a large pair of black, feathered wings ripped through the back of her blouse and protruded from her back, as she was unused to having them there. The rest of her body followed the color change, until her skin was coal black, nearly the color of her hair.

Without even stopping to get used to her appearance again, she scooped Xellos up and spread her wings. Since her wings hadn't been present when she was barraged by rocks, they were undamaged. But hopefully she could still remember how to use them to fly.

Sonjia lifted unsteadily off the ground, just as the smoke and dust began to clear. Too late, Jadarin had spotted her. But at least she already had a running start.

"Cheater!" Jadarin shouted up to her as she made her escape. He followed her suit and took to the air, but with the use of a Raywing spell rather than his wings, allowing him to fly much faster.

Sonjia, on the other hand, was not faring very well. She hurt all over and was bleeding from various injuries. And since she was unused to flying, she wasn't going very fast. And Jadarin was about to overtake her. "A little help right now would be nice," she said to herself.

"Elmekia Lance!" came a shout from the ground. How's that for help? Sonjia looked down to see Amelia shoot a lance of white energy that hit Jadarin right in the chest. And since he was using magic to fly, his shield wasn't up, so he went crashing to the ground. Score one for the Lina team.

Sonjia sighed in relief and sailed to the ground. However, instead of landing, she rather ungracefully crashed into a tree. She hung upside-down, her legs tangled in the branches. "Uhh, I guess I need to get back into practice with this flying thing," she admitted, dropping Xellos to the ground a short ways below.

"Xellos-san!" Amelia shouted, running to him and putting her hand to his neck. "Oh no! Lina-san! He doesn't have a pulse!"

Lina limped over to have a look. "Well, that doesn't say much. Xellos is literally a heartless Mazoku, so he wouldn't have a pulse no matter what. Still," said Lina, examining him, "he's got a silver tint. Hmm, that Jadarin used Magic Lock on him, didn't he, Son….. Yaaaaaahh!" Lina fell over, not expecting to see Sonjia in her true form. Sonjia was, in the simplest description, a black, winged, humanoid cat.

"Who's the cat?" Gourry asked.

"It's Sonjia-san, I think," said Amelia, looking at her hanging upside-down from the tree. She then looked back down at Xellos. "Sonjia-san, is Xellos….?"

Sonjia finally managed to untangle her feet and fell to the ground on her head with a thud. She sat up, rubbing her head, and sighed. "Actually, I don't know what's up with this one," she said. "Mazoku don't even exist in this plane of reality, really. So, if he was dead, I would have expected him to disappear or something. Unless being Locked prevents his body from doing that. Although it doesn't really matter one way or the other, since there's no way to remove the spell."

"But it came off your ribbon," Amelia reasoned.

"Doesn't really help much if I don't know why it happened," said Sonjia, wiping her face off with the end of Xellos's cape. "It came off one of Jadarin's chopsticks, too."

Amelia grabbed Xellos's cape away from Sonjia. "Don't you have any respect for the dead?"

"Not really," she replied flatly.

"I could try a Flow Break to break the spell," said Amelia, charging up a ball of white energy.

Sonjia put her hand to her forehead and shook her head. "Oh, Amelia, haven't you learned anything? There's no way to break the ML because it absorbs all spells, regardless of what the spell does." Amelia tried the spell anyway, and, predictably, it fizzled out as soon as she put her hand near Xellos's body.

Sonjia had started healing her own various injuries. "See?" she said, matter-of-factly, not looking up from her work.

Amelia's lower lip trembled, until she started spouting a large flow of tears. "Waaaahhh!! Poor Xellos-san got killed by the Mazoku, and there's nothing we could do!" With that, she sniffed and blew her nose into Xellos's cape, which she was still holding.

Sonjia looked up and raised an eyebrow. "Who has no respect for the dead here?" She finished healing herself and got up to stretch.

Gourry finally spoke up. "Hey, Sonjia, since you're a goddess and have healing magic and everything, maybe you could heal Lina up a bit more. She got attacked by that Mazoku, too."

"Whatever," said Sonjia, beginning to wander away. "I'm not in the service of humanity, you know. It really bugs me how people say things like, 'Oh, you are a goddess, so you should be kind and heal some total invalid out of the goodness of you heart' and other such rubbish. I'm not going to follow people around and fix up every scrape and bruise just because I can. I've had enough of my abilities being exploited."

"But Lina's hurt really bad," Gourry retorted. "And she needs to be all healed up so she can fight that Mazoku so he can't hurt anyone else. Isn't that a good enough cause?"

"Why do you need her to do it? Why can't you just go and fight yourself?" Sonjia asked.

Lina rose unsteadily and slowly began walking towards Sonjia. Gourry tried to protest, but she silenced him. "There's strength in numbers," Lina explained. "Even though I'm confident in those two's abilities, I want to put the odds as much in our favor as possible." She put a hand on Sonjia's shoulder. "We're not telling you to help us because you should. We're asking you to help us because you can."

Sonjia looked down and put her nose about an inch from Lina's and squinted at her. Lina fidgeted a little under the cat-like stare, but stood firm. Sonjia then unceremoniously brought her hand up and tapped Lina on the nose.

"There. You're healed. Now leave me alone." Lina fell over. "Don't go falling over like that, or you'll hurt yourself again."

Lina got up and rubbed her head. "You mean that's it?!" She flexed her arm, realizing that her body was indeed fully healed and functional again. "Then what was the big deal about it if that's all there was to it?"

Sonjia shook a finger. "It's the principle, silly. I healed you, so you are now obligated to shower me with praise and gifts."

"Why you!" shouted Lina, grabbing Sonjia by her blouse collar. "Why are you so mad, Lina?" asked Gourry. "That's what you would have said if you were the one who healed someone like that."

Lina was about to yell at him about not asking for his opinion when Amelia interjected, "Sonjia-san! You healed Xellos-san!"

Lina let go of Sonjia's collar, and both she and Sonjia looked over to Amelia. "Uh, no I didn't…"

"Well, someone did something," said Amelia. "I just realized that while I was casting that Flow Break, I was still holding Xellos-san's cape. And didn't you say that if you were touching something that had that Magic Lock spell on it, you can't use magic?" Amelia cowered at the surprised looks she got. "Or did I mess that up again?"

Sonjia knelt down to have a look. "No, actually, you're right." She examined Xellos's cape and ran her hand along it. "Only this one corner is unaffected," she observed, pointing out the part that was rather soiled from its use as a makeshift handkerchief. "But that doesn't make any sense. The spell should directly affect whatever is in the area in which it is used."

"Maybe it's weak against dirt," said Gourry.

Lina was about to say something, but was interrupted by the ground blowing up.

"Well, looks like ol' bro' is back," said Sonjia, rolling her eyes. She looked up at Lina. "I healed you on the condition that you'd beat that jerk into the ground. Don't disappoint me, now."

Lina crossed her arms. "So what are you going to do, o great goddess?"

"First of all, I'm going to get to the bottom of why the spell keeps coming off." Sonjia motioned back to Xellos. "Xel here can be my guinea pig. He won't mind. That useful enough for you?"

"You know… you sicken me sometimes," said Lina, shaking her head. "If you figure out anything useful, don't be afraid to help out a little!" she called as she ran off to get the battle underway.

Sonjia poked at Xellos with a stick. "Sure, whatever…"