HER STORY
It's so long!
When Shiina was born, her parents were at the height of their happiness, deeply in love. Shunji, her father, was a decorated pilot in the Air Force, while Misono, her mother, was an esteemed surgeon. They had an eleven-year-old daughter named Mishou, Shiina's older sister.
And then, not three days after Shiina's birth, Mishou killed herself.
Shiina's parents were overwhelmed with grief. Shiina's mother blamed Mishou's suicide on Shiina and consequently tried to strangle Shiina. Shiina's father stopped the woman. Mr. and Mrs. Tamai divorced, and Shiina's dad took her to Kansai to raise her on his own.
Not having a mother figure in her life, as she grew up, Shiina tried to craft herself into the "housewife" role. She watched cooking programs and taught herself how to cook. Every day her father would come home from work to a different meal, clean clothes, and a warm bath. But Shiina was not nearly as domestic as she forced herself to be. In reality, she longed for outdoor activities, kayaking and hiking and swimming.
And what's more, Shiina was determined never to be a mother or a wife. She said she would not fall in love, she would not marry, and she would not have children. It wasn't that she didn't want to grow up, but rather she didn't want to turn into the type of "runaway mother" that her own mother was.
Worrying that Shiina was too cooped up in the house all the time, not having many friends her own age and not indulging in enough childhood activities, Shunji Tamai sent twelve year old Shiina to spend a week out of the summer with his parents on their island.
One night on the beach, Shiina discovered a star-shaped creature. It did not appear to be a starfish, as it existed outside of the sea, and it could fly and expand like rubber. Amazed by the creature, Shiina named it Hoshimaru and started taking care of it as a pet. She took it home with her, and to avoid suspicion, she sometimes had the creature pretend to be a plush toy or a star-shaped backpack.
Shiina went home to spend the rest of the summer with her father. She enrolled in a fencing class on a whim. In fencing class, Shiina met Sakura "Akira-chan," a painfully shy girl. Shiina found the girl pretty and intriguing and wouldn't give up until Akira-chan accepted her friendship, which she ultimately did. Sakura coming out of her shell and reacting so well to the kindness shown to her gave Shiina a new idea: "You can save anyone with kindness." This became the ideal that she would live with and struggle to maintain for the rest of the manga.
Shiina learned that Sakura also had a creature similar to Hoshimaru. Sakura's was named Ensof. Sakura told Shiina that ownership of the creature was supposed to mean you could link up with it, sharing thoughts and feelings with the creature, seeing through its eyes, and even controlling its movements. But, puzzlingly, Shiina could not link up with Hoshimaru at all. He moved completely independent of her no matter what she tried.
As the summer ended, Shiina and Sakura went back to school. (Sakura was a year and a grade older than Shiina.) But more and more of the star-shaped creatures started showing up in Japan. A boy going to school with Shiina and Sakura, named Komori, also had a creature...but his had evolved to take the form of a giant knife, aptly named Push Dagger.
Komori lured the girls away from school one day and told them the creatures were called "dragonets."
Then, on a whim, he tried to kill them.
Shiina/Hoshimaru tried to fight Komori/Push Dagger, but Shiina was at a disadvantage as she could not control Hoshimaru the way Komori could control Push Dagger. Ultimately it was Sakura who won the battle and saved Shiina's life by putting Ensof in the way of Push Dagger when Push Dagger nearly impaled Shiina. When Sakura started vomiting blood, Shiina realised that any pain Ensof felt, Sakura also felt. But...then, why did Shiina never feel any of Hoshimaru's pain? Why could Shiina not link with her dragonet the way others could with theirs?
Shiina and Sakura killed Komori in self-defence and used their dragonets to hide his body. They went home, deeply scared. Even worse was when Komori's "disappearance" was broadcast on the news, and Shiina fought very hard not to let her father realise that she knew something about the boy's vanishment.
At this point, Shiina also realised that Sakura was her best friend. Someone who would put herself in death's way to protect Shiina could be nothing less then that.
Then one day, Shiina bumped into a 19-year-old named Takeo Tsurumaru. The mysterious boy seemed to know her, though she knew nothing about him. He gave her an arrogant smile and slipped away, into the crowd. This incident was followed by Shiina receiving a note that read, "Say hello to Hoshimaru and Ensof for me. ♥"
Shiina now became convinced that the boy, Takeo, knew what she and Sakura had done. Shiina scaled the city to find him, and when she finally did, she asked for his silence. She learned that Takeo's best friend, Norio Koga, also had a dragonet--a monstrous, birdlike creature called V. Dentata. Because Takeo was not about to implicate his own friend, he was not going to implicate the girls, either. This agreement worked well enough for Shiina. But how did Takeo know what she and Sakura had done to Komori? He had not been on the scene, had he?
Late one night, frustrated that she could not link up with Hoshimaru, Shiina took Hoshimaru very far out over Tokyo Bay in an attempt to train with him. There she met Jyun Ezumi, a girl whose dragonet was shaped like a broom. Jyun took on a "big sister" role to Shiina and began helping her train with Hoshimaru. She also showed Shiina something incredible one night: a dolphin that had merged with a dragonet to become an Immortal Creature. According to Jyun, when a dragonet's owner died, the owner would merge with his/her dragonet after death to become a full-fledged "dragon." Shiina wondered, then...what had happened to Komori? Had she and Sakura left a "dragon" out there somewhere?
Jyun told Shiina about her past. The truth was that her dragonet, Broom, actually belonged to her friend Kyoji. A year ago, she and Kyoji had been in a fatal car accident. To save Jyun, Kyoji had transferred ownership of his dragonet to Jyun. So actually, Broom had kept Jyun alive by merging with her after she technically died in the car wreck. After transferring his dragonet to his friend, Kyoji fell into a coma and spent the rest of the year in an irreversible, vegetative state. Now, Kyoji was going to be taken off of life support. Kyoji would die.
To save Kyoji, Jyun transferred ownership of Broom back to him just as he was taken off of life support. Broom merged with Kyoji just as his heart stopped beating. Without the dragonet keeping her alive past her mortality, Jyun died, and Kyoji finally woke up to his family and friends. Thus Shiina lost her mentor and sister figure.
And almost immediately after that, Shiina began to receive mysterious visits from the one person who should not have been able to visit her--her dead sister, Mishou. Thinking herself insane, a terrified Shiina kept quiet about the encounters.
But in school, Shiina and Sakura befriended a classmate named Hiroko Kaizuka ("Hiro-chan"). Hiroko also had a dragonet, one named Oni. But Hiroko was bullied in school for her intelligence. Hiroko responded by taking her dragonet, Oni, to kill everyone who had ever bullied her. But during the rampage, Hiroko completely lost her grip on sanity and started harming people who hadn't provoked her. Hiroko/Oni broke into Shiina's home, and Oni tried to kill Shiina's father.
In order to stop Hiroko's endless rampage, Hoshimaru was forced to strangle her to death. Shiina screamed at Hoshimaru to stop, but the dragonet would not. Hiroko's last words, before the breath drained from her body, were, "You can't save everyone with kindness."
Haunted by the experience, and how Hiroko's last words directly contradicted Shiina's doctrine, Shiina tried to find Sakura to talk with her and vent her feelings. Mysteriously, Sakura was nowhere to be found. She had entirely disappeared. This marks the point where the rest of the story becomes devoted to Shiina's search for Sakura, and her desperation for them to be reunited.
Shiina turned thirteen years old in Autumn. She continued to be visited by Mishou, much to her confusion. She slowly got to know her big sister, but she never told her father about the meetings, worrying that she was mentally ill. In Spring, she took entrance exams for a prestigious academy called Banda. Shiina scored so high on the examination that not only did she gain entry to the school, but she gained a full scholarship as well. To mark the transition, she cut her hair from pigtails to a bob cut. She maintained a friendship with Takeo Tsurumaru and Norio Koga, who helped her several times in her search to find Sakura.
Shiina, however, earned the resentment of Satomi Oozawa, a Banda student who had failed her entrance exams the first time. Satomi owned a dragonet called Amapola. As tensions grew between Shiina and Satomi, Shiina discovered that Satomi belonged to a group of dragon-bearers who intended to destroy the entire human race, save for those who owned dragonets. Satomi planned to use Amapola to attack a military base south of Osaka. Catching wind of these plans, Shiina and Hoshimaru quickly raced after Satomi and Amapola to intervene. A battle began between the two dragonets...ending in Satomi beheading Shiina.
Yes. Shiina died.
But then she came back to life, rising from the sea outside her grandparents' island.
Huh?
Here's what happened. The head will live for approximately ten seconds after it is removed from the body. When Shiina's head was removed from her body, it was absorbed by the planet in that span of ten seconds. The planet attached her head to a new body before she could technically "die."
Emerging from the sea on her grandparents' island, Shiina soon came to realise that something very, very...very weird was going on here...
And then she experienced menarche!
Then, she passed out.
Following this, Shiina went back home. To her surprise, she found her mother in her apartment. After all these years, Misono wanted custody of Shiina. She believed that she was no longer an unstable mother, and that Shiina wasn't safe or well taken care of while living with Shunji.
Shiina hated her mother, however, not only for disappearing from their life, but also because of the name her mother had given her. Shiina's name, "Shiina," bestowed to her by Misono at her birth, literally means "An empty husk." "A lifeless shell." "A seed that shall not bear fruit."
Refusing to live with her mother, Shiina ran away to live with Takeo instead. With Takeo, she had a very long conversation about the nature of dragonets. Takeo told Shiina that dragonets came to Earth to validate the existence of the soul. He said that dragonets were "empty husks" in search of a soul to call their own; so in their search for a soul, they bond with human beings.
The description of "empty husk" gave Shiina chills. According to her mother, after all, she was the Empty Husk.
And meanwhile, how the hell had she come back to life? How did anyone survive a beheading? They didn't know. But Takeo promised to hide Shiina from the government if necessary.
The government. This gave Shiina an idea. What if the government had captured Sakura? It was not out of the question. The government was highly suspicious of dragonets and their owners, and had even taken to placing cameras around neighbourhoods with confirmed dragonets, starting as far back as Komori's "disappearance."
Determined more than ever before to find her precious friend, Shiina and Hoshimaru began breaking into government facilities, tampering with video feeds, and collecting information.
Shiina did not find Sakura. But she found an American woman named Jane Franklin who was convinced that the Japanese government was detaining her son Robert. Robert was eight years old, comatose, and dying of incurable cancer. He owned a monstrous dragonet called Tarasque; and now that he was dying, Tarasque tried to merge with him prematurely. To prevent the process, the government forcibly distanced the boy from his dragonet. The result was that the dragonet went insane and began attacking civilian areas in Japan.
Shiina and Jane teamed up to stop Tarasque and to find Robert. Finally locating him in a remote government HQ on one of Japan's smaller islands, Shiina and Hoshimaru freed Robert, and he died in his mother's arms.
Shortly after this, Tarasque merged with him, bringing him back to life.
It was at this point that Shiina realised; her older sister Mishou must have been a dragon-bearer, and had killed herself to merge with her dragonet. Mishou was now an Immortal Creature, a "dragon," just like Robert Franklin and just like Jyun's friend Kyoji. Was this the fate of humanity, to evolve past the need to procreate and die, but to live on forever?
While in the hospital for injuries she had received from Tarasque, Shiina, to her surprise, encountered Mrs. Akira, who was being kept in the hospital's psych ward. From Mrs. Akira, she learned that Sakura was in juvenile prison. Sakura had not been captured by the government. Sakura had murdered her father and been imprisoned for it.
But, then, why hadn't Sakura sent Ensof to find Shiina? Shiina couldn't figure it out.
A horrific tale of abuse unfolded before Shiina as she heard, from the deranged Mrs. Akira's lips, that Mr. Akira had been sexually abusing Sakura. That Sakura had been pregnant when she was only twelve years old. That Mrs. Akira had taken her for an abortion without ever telling her husband. That Sakura had always, always been alone.
Shiina finally broke down over this news. She knew she had to find Sakura and free her.
And finally, Takeo had a secret to tell Shiina. He could no longer keep silent about it.
Shiina couldn't link with Hoshimaru because Hoshimaru wasn't her dragonet.
He was Takeo's.
This changed the way Shiina viewed both Hoshimaru and Takeo. All along, with "Hoshimaru" aiding her, it had really been Takeo constantly at her side. This meant Takeo knew her life, and Sakura's, inside and out. This meant that her constant companion and friend was Takeo.
Bothered by this news, and unsure how to think about Takeo, Shiina left him (and Hoshimaru) and went back home to her father. Her mother still was not giving up the custody battle.
And, meanwhile, her father went to work one day, and a dragonet named Hainuwele, owned by a boy named Bungo Takano, attacked the Air Force. Shiina's father, during drills, was killed in the attack.
A delirious Shiina was approached by a mysterious girl named Mamiko Kuri, a girl with the ability to wield all dragons, even ones that were not her own. This insightful girl told Shiina that soon, Shiina would "return to Sheol."
What did this mean? Shiina couldn't find the time to puzzle it out. Especially because, at this time, Japan now made it illegal to own a dragonet and began capturing (and killing, unbeknownst to Shiina) dragon-bearers. What's more, a boy named Naozumi Sudou, who owned a dragonet named Trickster (he was a part of the same group Komori, Satomi, and Bungo had all belonged to) attacked so many military bases that he forced them to retaliate with nuclear weapons, thus inciting a nuclear winter. He wanted everyone to die, stating, "The one I hate the most is me."
Shiina went to live with Takeo again, still haunted over her father's death, but able to let go of the revelation that Hoshimaru was Takeo. However, Takeo died of radiation poisoning from nuclear fallout shortly after they became friends again.
Shiina finally found the prison where Sakura was being held. However, she arrived just in time to watch Sakura throw herself out a window. Shiina ran to the dying Sakura's side. Sakura had been unable to link with Ensof because juvenile prison had put her under emotional strain. In a moment of delirium, Sakura had thrown herself out the window, thinking she would fly away. As she lay dying, she told Shiina, "I couldn't fly. Not even once." She also told Shiina that she and her own mother had never got along, and she wanted Shiina to do better.
Akira-chan died in Shiina's arms.
This was the final straw. Shiina snapped.
And finally, Shiina realised why she didn't have a dragon.
She was a dragon. She was an "empty husk." She was the dragon that belonged to planet Earth itself.
Utterly broken by Sakura's death, having nothing left that she wanted to protect, Shiina subconsciously induced the destruction of all life on Earth and merged with the dead planet.
And Narutaru comes to an end.
When Shiina was born, her parents were at the height of their happiness, deeply in love. Shunji, her father, was a decorated pilot in the Air Force, while Misono, her mother, was an esteemed surgeon. They had an eleven-year-old daughter named Mishou, Shiina's older sister.
And then, not three days after Shiina's birth, Mishou killed herself.
Shiina's parents were overwhelmed with grief. Shiina's mother blamed Mishou's suicide on Shiina and consequently tried to strangle Shiina. Shiina's father stopped the woman. Mr. and Mrs. Tamai divorced, and Shiina's dad took her to Kansai to raise her on his own.
Not having a mother figure in her life, as she grew up, Shiina tried to craft herself into the "housewife" role. She watched cooking programs and taught herself how to cook. Every day her father would come home from work to a different meal, clean clothes, and a warm bath. But Shiina was not nearly as domestic as she forced herself to be. In reality, she longed for outdoor activities, kayaking and hiking and swimming.
And what's more, Shiina was determined never to be a mother or a wife. She said she would not fall in love, she would not marry, and she would not have children. It wasn't that she didn't want to grow up, but rather she didn't want to turn into the type of "runaway mother" that her own mother was.
Worrying that Shiina was too cooped up in the house all the time, not having many friends her own age and not indulging in enough childhood activities, Shunji Tamai sent twelve year old Shiina to spend a week out of the summer with his parents on their island.
One night on the beach, Shiina discovered a star-shaped creature. It did not appear to be a starfish, as it existed outside of the sea, and it could fly and expand like rubber. Amazed by the creature, Shiina named it Hoshimaru and started taking care of it as a pet. She took it home with her, and to avoid suspicion, she sometimes had the creature pretend to be a plush toy or a star-shaped backpack.
Shiina went home to spend the rest of the summer with her father. She enrolled in a fencing class on a whim. In fencing class, Shiina met Sakura "Akira-chan," a painfully shy girl. Shiina found the girl pretty and intriguing and wouldn't give up until Akira-chan accepted her friendship, which she ultimately did. Sakura coming out of her shell and reacting so well to the kindness shown to her gave Shiina a new idea: "You can save anyone with kindness." This became the ideal that she would live with and struggle to maintain for the rest of the manga.
Shiina learned that Sakura also had a creature similar to Hoshimaru. Sakura's was named Ensof. Sakura told Shiina that ownership of the creature was supposed to mean you could link up with it, sharing thoughts and feelings with the creature, seeing through its eyes, and even controlling its movements. But, puzzlingly, Shiina could not link up with Hoshimaru at all. He moved completely independent of her no matter what she tried.
As the summer ended, Shiina and Sakura went back to school. (Sakura was a year and a grade older than Shiina.) But more and more of the star-shaped creatures started showing up in Japan. A boy going to school with Shiina and Sakura, named Komori, also had a creature...but his had evolved to take the form of a giant knife, aptly named Push Dagger.
Komori lured the girls away from school one day and told them the creatures were called "dragonets."
Then, on a whim, he tried to kill them.
Shiina/Hoshimaru tried to fight Komori/Push Dagger, but Shiina was at a disadvantage as she could not control Hoshimaru the way Komori could control Push Dagger. Ultimately it was Sakura who won the battle and saved Shiina's life by putting Ensof in the way of Push Dagger when Push Dagger nearly impaled Shiina. When Sakura started vomiting blood, Shiina realised that any pain Ensof felt, Sakura also felt. But...then, why did Shiina never feel any of Hoshimaru's pain? Why could Shiina not link with her dragonet the way others could with theirs?
Shiina and Sakura killed Komori in self-defence and used their dragonets to hide his body. They went home, deeply scared. Even worse was when Komori's "disappearance" was broadcast on the news, and Shiina fought very hard not to let her father realise that she knew something about the boy's vanishment.
At this point, Shiina also realised that Sakura was her best friend. Someone who would put herself in death's way to protect Shiina could be nothing less then that.
Then one day, Shiina bumped into a 19-year-old named Takeo Tsurumaru. The mysterious boy seemed to know her, though she knew nothing about him. He gave her an arrogant smile and slipped away, into the crowd. This incident was followed by Shiina receiving a note that read, "Say hello to Hoshimaru and Ensof for me. ♥"
Shiina now became convinced that the boy, Takeo, knew what she and Sakura had done. Shiina scaled the city to find him, and when she finally did, she asked for his silence. She learned that Takeo's best friend, Norio Koga, also had a dragonet--a monstrous, birdlike creature called V. Dentata. Because Takeo was not about to implicate his own friend, he was not going to implicate the girls, either. This agreement worked well enough for Shiina. But how did Takeo know what she and Sakura had done to Komori? He had not been on the scene, had he?
Late one night, frustrated that she could not link up with Hoshimaru, Shiina took Hoshimaru very far out over Tokyo Bay in an attempt to train with him. There she met Jyun Ezumi, a girl whose dragonet was shaped like a broom. Jyun took on a "big sister" role to Shiina and began helping her train with Hoshimaru. She also showed Shiina something incredible one night: a dolphin that had merged with a dragonet to become an Immortal Creature. According to Jyun, when a dragonet's owner died, the owner would merge with his/her dragonet after death to become a full-fledged "dragon." Shiina wondered, then...what had happened to Komori? Had she and Sakura left a "dragon" out there somewhere?
Jyun told Shiina about her past. The truth was that her dragonet, Broom, actually belonged to her friend Kyoji. A year ago, she and Kyoji had been in a fatal car accident. To save Jyun, Kyoji had transferred ownership of his dragonet to Jyun. So actually, Broom had kept Jyun alive by merging with her after she technically died in the car wreck. After transferring his dragonet to his friend, Kyoji fell into a coma and spent the rest of the year in an irreversible, vegetative state. Now, Kyoji was going to be taken off of life support. Kyoji would die.
To save Kyoji, Jyun transferred ownership of Broom back to him just as he was taken off of life support. Broom merged with Kyoji just as his heart stopped beating. Without the dragonet keeping her alive past her mortality, Jyun died, and Kyoji finally woke up to his family and friends. Thus Shiina lost her mentor and sister figure.
And almost immediately after that, Shiina began to receive mysterious visits from the one person who should not have been able to visit her--her dead sister, Mishou. Thinking herself insane, a terrified Shiina kept quiet about the encounters.
But in school, Shiina and Sakura befriended a classmate named Hiroko Kaizuka ("Hiro-chan"). Hiroko also had a dragonet, one named Oni. But Hiroko was bullied in school for her intelligence. Hiroko responded by taking her dragonet, Oni, to kill everyone who had ever bullied her. But during the rampage, Hiroko completely lost her grip on sanity and started harming people who hadn't provoked her. Hiroko/Oni broke into Shiina's home, and Oni tried to kill Shiina's father.
In order to stop Hiroko's endless rampage, Hoshimaru was forced to strangle her to death. Shiina screamed at Hoshimaru to stop, but the dragonet would not. Hiroko's last words, before the breath drained from her body, were, "You can't save everyone with kindness."
Haunted by the experience, and how Hiroko's last words directly contradicted Shiina's doctrine, Shiina tried to find Sakura to talk with her and vent her feelings. Mysteriously, Sakura was nowhere to be found. She had entirely disappeared. This marks the point where the rest of the story becomes devoted to Shiina's search for Sakura, and her desperation for them to be reunited.
Shiina turned thirteen years old in Autumn. She continued to be visited by Mishou, much to her confusion. She slowly got to know her big sister, but she never told her father about the meetings, worrying that she was mentally ill. In Spring, she took entrance exams for a prestigious academy called Banda. Shiina scored so high on the examination that not only did she gain entry to the school, but she gained a full scholarship as well. To mark the transition, she cut her hair from pigtails to a bob cut. She maintained a friendship with Takeo Tsurumaru and Norio Koga, who helped her several times in her search to find Sakura.
Shiina, however, earned the resentment of Satomi Oozawa, a Banda student who had failed her entrance exams the first time. Satomi owned a dragonet called Amapola. As tensions grew between Shiina and Satomi, Shiina discovered that Satomi belonged to a group of dragon-bearers who intended to destroy the entire human race, save for those who owned dragonets. Satomi planned to use Amapola to attack a military base south of Osaka. Catching wind of these plans, Shiina and Hoshimaru quickly raced after Satomi and Amapola to intervene. A battle began between the two dragonets...ending in Satomi beheading Shiina.
Yes. Shiina died.
But then she came back to life, rising from the sea outside her grandparents' island.
Huh?
Here's what happened. The head will live for approximately ten seconds after it is removed from the body. When Shiina's head was removed from her body, it was absorbed by the planet in that span of ten seconds. The planet attached her head to a new body before she could technically "die."
Emerging from the sea on her grandparents' island, Shiina soon came to realise that something very, very...very weird was going on here...
And then she experienced menarche!
Then, she passed out.
Following this, Shiina went back home. To her surprise, she found her mother in her apartment. After all these years, Misono wanted custody of Shiina. She believed that she was no longer an unstable mother, and that Shiina wasn't safe or well taken care of while living with Shunji.
Shiina hated her mother, however, not only for disappearing from their life, but also because of the name her mother had given her. Shiina's name, "Shiina," bestowed to her by Misono at her birth, literally means "An empty husk." "A lifeless shell." "A seed that shall not bear fruit."
Refusing to live with her mother, Shiina ran away to live with Takeo instead. With Takeo, she had a very long conversation about the nature of dragonets. Takeo told Shiina that dragonets came to Earth to validate the existence of the soul. He said that dragonets were "empty husks" in search of a soul to call their own; so in their search for a soul, they bond with human beings.
The description of "empty husk" gave Shiina chills. According to her mother, after all, she was the Empty Husk.
And meanwhile, how the hell had she come back to life? How did anyone survive a beheading? They didn't know. But Takeo promised to hide Shiina from the government if necessary.
The government. This gave Shiina an idea. What if the government had captured Sakura? It was not out of the question. The government was highly suspicious of dragonets and their owners, and had even taken to placing cameras around neighbourhoods with confirmed dragonets, starting as far back as Komori's "disappearance."
Determined more than ever before to find her precious friend, Shiina and Hoshimaru began breaking into government facilities, tampering with video feeds, and collecting information.
Shiina did not find Sakura. But she found an American woman named Jane Franklin who was convinced that the Japanese government was detaining her son Robert. Robert was eight years old, comatose, and dying of incurable cancer. He owned a monstrous dragonet called Tarasque; and now that he was dying, Tarasque tried to merge with him prematurely. To prevent the process, the government forcibly distanced the boy from his dragonet. The result was that the dragonet went insane and began attacking civilian areas in Japan.
Shiina and Jane teamed up to stop Tarasque and to find Robert. Finally locating him in a remote government HQ on one of Japan's smaller islands, Shiina and Hoshimaru freed Robert, and he died in his mother's arms.
Shortly after this, Tarasque merged with him, bringing him back to life.
It was at this point that Shiina realised; her older sister Mishou must have been a dragon-bearer, and had killed herself to merge with her dragonet. Mishou was now an Immortal Creature, a "dragon," just like Robert Franklin and just like Jyun's friend Kyoji. Was this the fate of humanity, to evolve past the need to procreate and die, but to live on forever?
While in the hospital for injuries she had received from Tarasque, Shiina, to her surprise, encountered Mrs. Akira, who was being kept in the hospital's psych ward. From Mrs. Akira, she learned that Sakura was in juvenile prison. Sakura had not been captured by the government. Sakura had murdered her father and been imprisoned for it.
But, then, why hadn't Sakura sent Ensof to find Shiina? Shiina couldn't figure it out.
A horrific tale of abuse unfolded before Shiina as she heard, from the deranged Mrs. Akira's lips, that Mr. Akira had been sexually abusing Sakura. That Sakura had been pregnant when she was only twelve years old. That Mrs. Akira had taken her for an abortion without ever telling her husband. That Sakura had always, always been alone.
Shiina finally broke down over this news. She knew she had to find Sakura and free her.
And finally, Takeo had a secret to tell Shiina. He could no longer keep silent about it.
Shiina couldn't link with Hoshimaru because Hoshimaru wasn't her dragonet.
He was Takeo's.
This changed the way Shiina viewed both Hoshimaru and Takeo. All along, with "Hoshimaru" aiding her, it had really been Takeo constantly at her side. This meant Takeo knew her life, and Sakura's, inside and out. This meant that her constant companion and friend was Takeo.
Bothered by this news, and unsure how to think about Takeo, Shiina left him (and Hoshimaru) and went back home to her father. Her mother still was not giving up the custody battle.
And, meanwhile, her father went to work one day, and a dragonet named Hainuwele, owned by a boy named Bungo Takano, attacked the Air Force. Shiina's father, during drills, was killed in the attack.
A delirious Shiina was approached by a mysterious girl named Mamiko Kuri, a girl with the ability to wield all dragons, even ones that were not her own. This insightful girl told Shiina that soon, Shiina would "return to Sheol."
What did this mean? Shiina couldn't find the time to puzzle it out. Especially because, at this time, Japan now made it illegal to own a dragonet and began capturing (and killing, unbeknownst to Shiina) dragon-bearers. What's more, a boy named Naozumi Sudou, who owned a dragonet named Trickster (he was a part of the same group Komori, Satomi, and Bungo had all belonged to) attacked so many military bases that he forced them to retaliate with nuclear weapons, thus inciting a nuclear winter. He wanted everyone to die, stating, "The one I hate the most is me."
Shiina went to live with Takeo again, still haunted over her father's death, but able to let go of the revelation that Hoshimaru was Takeo. However, Takeo died of radiation poisoning from nuclear fallout shortly after they became friends again.
Shiina finally found the prison where Sakura was being held. However, she arrived just in time to watch Sakura throw herself out a window. Shiina ran to the dying Sakura's side. Sakura had been unable to link with Ensof because juvenile prison had put her under emotional strain. In a moment of delirium, Sakura had thrown herself out the window, thinking she would fly away. As she lay dying, she told Shiina, "I couldn't fly. Not even once." She also told Shiina that she and her own mother had never got along, and she wanted Shiina to do better.
Akira-chan died in Shiina's arms.
This was the final straw. Shiina snapped.
And finally, Shiina realised why she didn't have a dragon.
She was a dragon. She was an "empty husk." She was the dragon that belonged to planet Earth itself.
Utterly broken by Sakura's death, having nothing left that she wanted to protect, Shiina subconsciously induced the destruction of all life on Earth and merged with the dead planet.
And Narutaru comes to an end.