The World Isn't Our Enemy Anymore | Izumi | Epilogue
When the ghosts are finally able to catch up to the living, Izumi is still frantic, bristling as she holds several charged cards including a damaged Bind card â evidently, sheâd made an attempt to stop Kanade much earlier. Sheâs prepared to continue that confrontation, angry words on her tongue, before she realizes that itâs already all over.
Celine flaunting her superiority keeps that anger fed. Oh, sure, sheâs more trustworthy than Hex is, but Izumiâs faith in any Great Witch has been low ever since she learned about the gag order forced on the last group â the order that ended up giving Kanade motive for all of this. And here comes another witch (Izumi is thinking of a slightly different word) giving orders with little regard to what the people most directly victimized by this want. Natalie brings up a good point about how this is just going to cause even more pain, and Celineâs first reaction was to get upset that she swore.
So Celine is like Nico who is like Yushin who is like Jin. All people whoâve told Izumi at one point or another that it doesnât matter what she thinks or feels, if she isnât perfectly calm in expressing it then she is nothing more than a child not worth their time.
Well fuck that. Izumi is so tired of being expected to just smile and bear her pain â last time she did that, she foolishly let Kanade get too close to the time machine. As people start to state their plans for the future, all the anger Izumiâs been hanging onto since Kanade absorbed the magic, since long before then back at the moment Izumi fell from the bridge, finally boils over.
She says: There was something she realized on the way here, ruminating on how Kanade did all of this to save her relationship, but destroyed God knows how many others in the process. Every timeline abandoned to an uncertain fate, every motive and trial and punishment that drove wedges deep between even people that were close friends. Kanadeâs lost every friendship she made in those nine prior timelines, and she stands to potentially lose even more now.
Izumiâs rant picks up in intensity as she shifts focus to the relationships in this timeline and tries to highlight all the people whoâve suffered immensely thanks to Kanade â and more than once, it becomes clear that Izumi sees it all from her very biased, very limited point-of-view. Her trauma flares raw and furious, and somehow it all goes back to those twenty-three minutes she laid on the ground dying, and how it is all she can think of whenever she sees someone hugging Nico.
Somehow it all goes back to the argument they had just before her death â it goes back to how Izumi wishes she could express her frustrations openly. But she canât, because sheâs somehow fooled most people into thinking she is a paragon to rely upon, and the rest are people like her uncle and Celine whoâd use her anger as evidence sheâs not worth their time. Izumi doesnât feel safe when sheâs angry like this, because every time she gives in she ends up hurting someone. Like when she hurt Nico by rejecting his apology, or when she hurt her ex by mocking his trauma. There have even been times when being such a brat has gotten people killed â like herself on that fateful afternoon â like her mother on that fateful night.
Those whoâve been to Izumiâs mindspace might recognize that last point indicates that the progress they made there is slipping backwards. All the work to convince Izumi that it wasnât her selfish immaturity that caused the car accident, undone in a single afternoon.
Izumi finally stops carving out the ugliness thatâs festered in her ever since her death, now left feeling hollow. She wishes there was some indulgence she could fill this void with, but ghosts canât even have a glass of water, much less anything stronger. Spent of her fury, Izumi simply falls to her knees, her intangible form not quite sinking into the mud.
âI think I need help.â
Staying around as an apprentice gets her free help, and thatâs reason alone to stay aboard. Of course, she also genuinely wants to learn magic, having grown increasingly fascinated with its potential applicability to the wider world.
The two weeks Izumi spent in the Mirror Realm has left her lagging behind half the group, and without the accelerated growth from trauma itâll be months before sheâs ready for a second element, but sheâs sunk too much to want to give up now. She becomes used to exploring liminal spaces, and she finally gets to experiment with potion-making and card-charging like sheâd theorized with her fellow apprentices. In her time off, she leaves for âhomeâ â a somewhat arbitrary place for one that technically has none. But she does make trips back to Sapporo to get back in contact with her friends and her father, though she doesnât stay long at the Meihara residence in fear of another confrontation with her uncle Jin.
Instead, she gets a new home in Manchester with Monty, Maribelle, and their housemates. Her work with Team 5MCs as a beta tester and future translator will come more naturally if sheâs physically present, and if she really is going to be a godmother then she should get to know everyone there better. Izumi still feels out of place: Even as her English lessons progress, itâll take her a long time to get used to how different life in Britain is from Japan.
At least sheâs in good company there, given Mariâs own family history. (Izumi tries not to blush too much around her. She really is hopeless, always crushing on people who she thinks are unavailable to herâŚ) It takes a while to acclimate, and Izumi bears a lot of laughter from her friends when she sometimes says âinnitâ the way sheâd usually use âdesuâ, but she does eventually find her place here, becoming the cool aunt who always has some novel candy to give to her godkids. Even if Izumi is unlikely to ever adopt children, sheâll still always have a family.
But back to the most important thing: The mandated therapy. Izumi wouldâve asked anyway after that outburst of hers, but accessibility turns it into reality. Even so, Izumi doesnât have an easy time unpacking everything going on with her. The stigma against seeking treatment was particularly strong in the Meihara family and it was expected for every one of them to simply endure their pain and grow from it. Fine for those of them whose bad coping mechanisms made them appear stoic, pious, or hardworking. Less so for people like Izumi and her parents, whoâd all expressed their trauma by lashing out in frustration.
Sometimes therapy feels like two steps forward and one backwards. Izumi doesnât follow all the advice to the letter, and that unlocks a whole detour on her troubles with academia. Her family is frequent subject, interlinking with her present-day beliefs about death, anger, and authority. Her treatment plans are adjusted to better suit her mannerisms, and Izumi finds herself using liminal space as therapy, able to break setpieces and yell at constructs in relative safety. She is eventually granted her second element and picks Dream, and while sheâs mortified when her uncontrolled magic causes her dreams to bleed into other peopleâs, at least it forces her to have conversations about the issues that plague her. Which sort of counts as progress.
Izumi gets to a point where sheâs finally able to discuss her grievances with people without immediately falling apart, and where she can accept both that her trauma is not her own fault and that it does not override the trauma of other people. On her next visit to the Meihara residence she doesnât run away this time when she calls her uncle out on how heâs treated her, and it ends on a bittersweet note: Jin stubbornly insists he was only trying to make Izumi a responsible person, and she decides to minimize contact with him from now on. But at least sheâs able to convince her father to move out on his own and seek help for his own unresolved grief.
Itâs just one of many great hurdles Izumi has to overcome during those months in the swamp. Later, she goes to someone else whoâs hurt her deeply: Nico. Izumi still finds it difficult to forgive him, but she tries. Sheâs finally starting to accept that while sheâs right to resent what happened to her, Nico was as much a victim of the killing game as she was. And while Izumiâs frustration in the aftermath was valid, what wasnât acceptable was guilting people for still talking to him.
Even back in high school sheâd pushed people away because she tried to make them choose between her and her ex-boyfriend â and she shouldnât do that again to the friends sheâd made here. And besides, isnât Izumi a hypocrite for standing by Mao and Monty after all the harm they caused? In another timeline, maybe it was Nico who she stood by in tough times. She admits she did like him at first this go around, too. In a way, itâs yet another friendship lost.
Izumi doesnât know if sheâll ever be able to fully forgive Nico. But she tries, and it marks another milestone in both of them finding peace. The wound finally stops eating away at her, giving way to healing.
Eventually, Hexâs temporary apprentices move on to greener, less swampy pastures. Izumiâs home in the magical community is with Beacon, and sheâs grateful that the old woman is patient with her and does not seem to pressure her to go anything grand. Her trust in the Great Witches still hasnât fully recovered, but Izumi learns to trust in Beacon in spite of that.
It helps that she doesnât have to rely on just one person to support her. Even if she somehow lost both her magic and her new family, Izumi has a place to stay in California, thanks to Star giving her a set of keys and an invitation to crash at her house even when sheâs away on business. And if she lost that, Izumiâs still got other friends in the US that can help her. For the first time in years Izumiâs life has stabilized both economically and socially.
And she makes the most of this, finding time between her work to travel. There are people who are dear to her that she wants to see as much as she can: Tomi and Mao, whom sheâs started to think of as her little siblings, and their respective partners. Fran and Wolfgang, whoâve become part of their own found family too. Star and Natalie and Haven, a trio that feels like theyâve always been there for each other and for Izumi.
She vacations in the US often, fascinated both by the urban landscape of California and the sprawling forests of Georgia. Sometimes Izumi goes to Russia too, to celebrate music and dance with the Dupuis family. Many times she goes back to Japan to meet with her father and with friends both new and old. Her former coworker Shion has moved on with her life too, having left Hokkaido after graduating university. Izumi offers to get back at Yushin, thinking that maybe thereâs a crime he can be dinged on, but⌠at Shionâs request, she doesnât follow through. If there is a legal case against him, itâll center on what he posted specifically about Shion, and she doesnât want to relive that. She isnât recognized where she lives now, and sheâd rather continue living in peace.
(This does not stop Izumi from utilizing her connections to raise some hell in his life. Whatâs Yushin gonna do about magic-users breaking into his apartment when heâs away? She finally gets back every item she and Shion had to leave behind, plus some extra when Haven steals Yushinâs TV by yeeting it into a mirror. Izumi makes sure to leave a hidden, temporary trinket of Dream magic, just enough to give Yushin a few nightmares about women laughing at his cowardice.)
Izumi eventually visits someone she hasnât seen in a very long time: Her ex-boyfriend, now a university graduate, professional caterer, and husband. Just as it was in liminal space, their conversation is awkward, but it brings closure to them both. Both Izumi and Kenichi were products of their trauma, but that doesnât mean they are defined by that alone. Theyâre able to finally discuss the contradictory desires that made up their relationship and reach understanding, parting as distant friends. Izumi offers Kenichi advice on child-rearing (he and his husband plan to adopt, and heâs stunned to learn Izumi gained a form of parenthood before him) and Kenichi offers Izumi one last bento meal, just like he used to make for her back in school.
She takes it with her when she arranges for a trip into the feywilds.
There, she finds a Kanade who has also made her own steps towards recovery. Izumi doesnât think itâs enough to atone, and she doesnât know if there will ever be a way to atone, not to all the timelines whose fates are unclear to her even now. But Izumi is finally well enough that she can talk to Kanade without wanting to scream or cry (not too much at least, the urge is still there but Izumiâs gotten better at quelling it). She talks about her studies in magic, her travels from country to country, her pride in how her godchildren are growing (even if she wonât say their names or show pictures, just in case any fey are eavesdropping). Izumi talks about this bright future of hers, never explicitly pointing out that it was a future she almost didnât get to have.
She asks Kanade questions about the other Izumis, how their magic developed and what fates they met or were heading towards. She asks Kanade if she genuinely thought of Izumi and the rest as friends â and, when sheâs told yes, Izumi admits that she genuinely believed Kanade was her friend, too. Someone she could confide her secrets to, and could have Kanade could do the same.
But itâs the past now. Izumi wishes well and says her goodbyes, rarely visiting the feywilds again. It will be enough for her to know that Kanade is not dead. It means she gets to have her own future, too, and itâs the best that Izumi can ask for her.
The downside of having Beacon as a mentor is that magical growth is slower than is it under other Great Witches. Between this and Izumi setting a relaxed pace for her studies to avoid burnout, it takes years before sheâs cleared to have a third element. But the moment she is, Izumi already knows what she wants to specialize in next: Death. She approaches it the only way a former ghost hunter can, as a mystery to solve. The Great Witches have addressed the peculiarities of death publicly before, but itâs still not well-understood by mundane society.
When Izumi can finally stop hallucinating the sight of corpses she saw during the murder game (itâs rough, but sheâs prepared for it this time and has enough people to help her calm down), she sees the world with new clarity â mostly, the clarity to realize that many supposed âghost-huntingâ tools are little more than meters that read changes in atmosphere. But she knows very, very well that ghosts do exist, and now she can identify which sĂŠance techniques are the real deal.
And thatâs just scratching the surface of the mysteries. There are some things even Great Witches know little about: What constitutes a soul? And what happens to the soul when a ghost stops haunting this mortal realm, or if it never becomes a ghost in the first place?
She doesnât know what answer sheâs going to find, but sheâd be a fool not to take advantage of this. Camera in hand, Izumi returns to social media under the new moniker c4ndyZoom, a partial complement to her brotherâs gamertag.
Izumi might not have the production value or raw starpower to draw in crowds, but there are plenty of people who want to see any apprentice of a Great Witch stream, even if her content is directionless. Some days she travels out to different locales to verify if they live up to their haunted reputation. Other days she stays right at home and streams her clumsy attempts at some new hobby thatâs holding her passionate but temporary interest.
During lulls in her streams, she tries to promote her dear friendsâ causes, be it the technology theyâre inventing or the social and ecological reform theyâre petitioning for. Today, on her way to the countryside, Izumi talks about how the spirits that supposedly haunt her destination are of people who, regardless of if they ever had magical connections or not, are nowadays thought to be victims of socio-political machinations. And with that, she segues into promoting petitions calling for explicit protection of the rights of supernatural entities â while many of them understandably donât feel safe being in public even with these efforts, itâs better to keep working on this now than to wait for a tragedy to happen.
Izumi knows she isnât the brightest student, nor the most dedicated worker. Her friends are all more skilled at that than she is, and theyâre out there accomplishing great things. What Izumi is good at is using that charming persona of hers, once used to cultivate regular customers at a diner, to bolster such important matters. And sheâs happy being able to give this much back to the people who supported her through her lowest moments. After years of healing, Izumi has finally found a healthy balance between her conflicting wants. In this way, she can be kind without overextending
When sheâs on her way back to Manchester the next day, she texts Monty to ask if heâs up for a family trip to Beaconâs orchard this weekend; Amaguri is happiest any time sheâs with Izumi, but being out on the farm is better than trying to force her to stay indoors at their house. Maybe afterwards they all can stop by that new roller rink that recently opened up in town, too?
Itâll be the kidsâ first time on skates, but Izumi will make sure to hold their hands tightly and keep them safe. She promises.
