"Do we leave now?"
Yukari's gaze flickered past Anna to rest on the monument for an instant, "Ah, it's a special charter. You can take as long as you wish, anytime before sunset is fine."
Anna took one last look back, "There's nothing else to do here, let's go."
Yukari nodded towards a car, "Right this way then."
The Asian cadet seemed to be anticipating questions, eagerly glancing over at Anna every so often as they travelled, but Anna couldn't think of any worth asking and stayed silent.
It was not until the two were buckled into the military transport jet and mere moments from shooting down the runway…
That their journey came to a sudden halt in a ball of fire as the jet detonated around them.
Acie
Invictia
Yukari coughs and sputters inside Nue. Her entire body feels like it's been abused, particularly her head and lungs. What the hell just happened? Some kind of fuel leak? That's supposed to be impossible; vehicles don't experience fatal malfunctions during normal usage. And yet, she doesn't see how else the jet that was to take her and –
Anna.
Oh god.
Yukari whips around to face the wreckage of the plane, blasting a high-band active scan out of Nue's sensors, looking for a teenage human female in the heap of twisted metal and plastic.
Nothing.
Yukari rushes back towards the… potential grave that she's just clawed her way out of, seizing scorched pieces of fuselage and tossing them away, searching frantically for the cadet who'd been seated across from her just a minute before.
Yukari refuses to admit it in that moment, but some part of her knows that Anna is dead. Yukari is alive entirely because she'd materialized Nue. As a first-year cadet, however, Anna wouldn't have had the same protection – only third years are allowed to retain their frames outside the academy. But that is no excuse for giving up on her. Nue's scan might have… might have missed something! There's still hope!
As the previously impenetrable debris begins to thin, however, Yukari despairs. No trace is left of the tall, quiet first year. The rush of adrenaline begins to fade, and Yukari stops short of grabbing another sheet of metal. What the hell just happened? Could she have prevented it?
An insidious little voice whispers that yes, she could have, if she'd just been on her toes. Just like her flight, she could have –
She cuts the voice off. She's never allowed it to rule her, and she isn't going to start now. Maybe… um. Maybe Anna had been ejected from the plane by the explosion!
With that thought, Yukari turns her attention to the world at large… and to her headache? Why does her head still hurt, exactly? Her eardrums had, she guesses, been blown out by the explosion, but Nue should have suppressed that pain by now. Unhappy with the prospect of stressing herself via a direct connection with her core's diagnostics and unable to hear, Yukari flicks through a series of eye motions, pulling up a screen full of alerts and – is that a missile lock?
Yukari shoots off of the ground, diverting some of her thrusters to induce a horizontal spin that brings her around to face the direction the alarm is indicating. In unison with her burst of motion, she consults her passive sensors and realizes that she is screwed, because the explosion that had nearly claimed her life had not been the work of a malfunction with the plane after all.
AGs.
The lasers, obviously, hit her instantly. They aren't very powerful, and they don't break through her impeller. They don't even come close before bleeding their capacitors dry. But between them and everything else…
[Missile lock warning.], reads Nue's visor, [150+ engines. Additional unguided fire incoming.].
The airstrip is on the outskirts of the Anchorage complex. They'd caught her and Anna alone and by surprise, in an area that should have been locked down tight. They clearly hadn't known that there had been a Valkyrie in the plane when they first attacked, or they would have done more than blow it up, but now that they can see her… they aren't about to let her get away.
She materializes her entire array of weaponry and cuts loose, relying on Nue to give her the safest possible flight vector through the unguided fire that's about to drown her, focusing instead on taking out the missiles, vainly hoping that she might be able to neutralize enough of them to tank the rest and make it back to the safety of Anchorage proper. Her particle projector annihilates three of them at once at the same time as she cuts down another two with a laser from her left arm.
The laser is on a mount on a vambrace, which means Yukari doesn't need to keep her arm in any particular position for it to maintain accuracy. She'd originally integrated it for that exact reason – it gives her an extra weapon without particularly restricting her from employing her whips. Lashing out, the tiny filaments of impeller that are her trademark seek their targets and score kills by the half-dozen. Six, twelve, twenty...
The missiles just keep coming. She's accelerating towards Anchorage as fast as she can, but the missiles are faster. She's tearing them out of the sky, but for every one she downs there are three more closing in.
It isn't enough. She's never going to see her little brother again, or her various friends from third year. There will be no more inside jokes over cafeteria tables, no more bickering over which flight was better. She won't have the chance to go to that Italian place that Samantha had always insisted made the best food in the world, and the thought of that sends a spike into her heart. Sam had once tried to convince her to go by telling her that if she didn't, she might not get another chance. "Later," she'd replied. She'd never thought… Then again, Yukari supposes, perhaps she isn't thinking now, either, just being selfish. After all, Anna probably would have had some similar things to say, if she'd been given the chance.
And she should have been given that chance, says the little voice, suddenly much louder, amplified by guilt and despair. There was no reason Yukari couldn't have been alert to her surroundings, no reason she couldn't have picked up on whatever weapon had destroyed the jet. And if she could have done that, then there was no reason why she couldn't have protected Anna with her impeller. And if they'd made for Anchorage immediately…
She… she really had failed Anna.
And just like that, Yukari feels the rest her resolve disappear. She's done it again. First her flight, and now… After the funeral, she'd vowed that the sacrifices her friends had made would not end up being in vain. That the second chance they'd given her would not be wasted. And what has she done with that second chance? What has she done with Anna? She's failed to protect someone yet again, and she's gotten herself killed in the process.
With that, Yukari gives up. The missiles start their final approach, homing in on her. She doesn't try to stop them; she just closes her eyes and prepares to die.
As a result, she has to watch through Nue's sensors as brilliantly-hued lasers rain down from above in a waterfall made of lights, instantly incinerating the entire wave of missiles.
Yukari's eyes snap back open in shock and she traces the trajectory the lasers had followed back up to their point of origin. Far above, a dark shape leaves a trail of emerald light as it cuts immaculate maneuvers through a constellation of debris, explosions, and AG air units.
[ID Confirm: Ace Valkyrie Anna Sanchez. Emergency Fast Response Squadron: Pinnacle, "Trump" / UNAF OF-1.]
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Incoming fire.
What? How? She…
Anna engages her frame and shifts straight up. There's no other way out of the jet on such short notice… although, she could have punched a hole in the fuselage, she supposes.
… Why hadn't she had more warning? Had she grown lax during her time away from combat? She should… Away?
Away from combat… Rokusabe!
… Safe. Good. Dammit, she should have checked on Rokusabe first, not spent .013 seconds on questioning herself!
E-warfare detected. 4,692 instances. Filtering.
Anna crashes one of her heavy particle projectors into reality three meters to her left and uses it to annihilate a cluster of missiles a kilometer and a half to her right. She partially materializes the other three projectors, letting them poke out of storage from points on her back, and fires a precisely calculated spread of tenth-of-a-second bursts that leave a wing of AG fighter craft – and the heat-seekers they had just launched – with no way to avoid their deaths.
Combat time: .52 seconds.
De-materializing the projector that wasn't attached to Durga's frame and letting the rest slip back into storage as well, Anna sets her thrusters to maximum upward acceleration before pulling her new hypervelocity cannons into existence on her arms. A quarter-second later, below her, massive volleys of dumbfire missiles detonate the air around her former position in a quarter-kilometer-radius sphere.
E-warfare filtered. Marking targets and filtering irrelevant material. Combat time: 1.16 seconds.
Her awareness lights up as formerly opaque conglomerates of water vapor become transparent balls, as AG fighters have their stealth defeated by Durga's sensors and show up as brilliant points of enemy in her conscious, as enemy munitions are catalogued and filed and assigned threat statuses. Ports open up across Durga's entire surface as Anna engages her laser systems and begins to pick off some of the smaller units that had been angling for runs on her before she'd dodged upwards, as well as a lone smart missile that had been mixed in with the dumb volleys she'd avoided.
Material filtered. Targets marked. 26,192 distinct hostiles within 80 kilometers. Hostiles reinforcing at ~311/s. Relevant hostiles: 4,407. Relevant hostiles reinforcing at ~14/s. Combat time: 2.03 seconds.
That's… very manageable, Anna decides. Intolerable – completely intolerable, she still doesn't understand how she's allowed her vigilance to falter so greatly that enemies had gotten within mere tens of kilometers of her without her noticing – but manageable. This force will not be enough to overcome her, and she is here and not elsewhere, this time. She will be able to prevent them from reaching the…
What was she thinking about? She doesn't know. It doesn't matter, the enemy has to be her focus. Her lance materializes in her right hand, her HPPs begin to orbit inside her impeller, and Anna starts in on the tide of enemies.
Kill count: 138. Combat time: 5 seconds.
Kill count: 342. Combat time: 8.5 seconds.
Kill count: 517. Combat time: 13 seconds. Warning: elites inbound. Highlighting.
… Still pretty far out? Four seconds, at least, until she has to pay attention to them. Momentarily shifting part of her focus off of massacring her foes, Anna pulses her lasers, carving apart the right missiles to create a hole in the projected effect zone of the latest dumbfire volley. With three-quarters of a second to go before the atmosphere around her will be filled with a thousand individual explosions, she jinks left of the anticipated location of the hole, then right, and then with less than a tenth of a second to go – and thirteen fewer AG fighters in the sky – she zips into the safe-sphere she's arranged for. Missiles arrive from below, from east, from west, from above and then everywhere but where she is is consumed by shockwaves and fire. Not that she's seeing any of it; Durga had been ready and so Anna, sensors completely clear, shoots forward and carves apart a blinded pack of swept-wing fightercraft with a twisting whirl of her plasma lance.
To her left, a trundling, aberrant cross between a SAM site and an airplane, little more than two oversized missile launchers, a pair of wings, and an engine. A dozen hypervelocity rounds. To her right, several score minnow-esque fliers, each with at least ten control surfaces – she's pretty sure they were supposed to be a counter to laser weaponry or something, designed to outmaneuver and swarm a target that couldn't hit a big area all at once. A single quarter-second firing of an HPP. More difficult are the much less numerous four-winged, medium-sized craft, the ones that can dodge fast enough. Two HPPs firing for a half-second each to force a wing of them into a small cone of a flightpath, and a significant fraction of a second's worth of hypervelocity fire to disable all but one of them – that one dies in a different manner, firing a missile and keeping at a sufficient pace to get caught in the missile's laser-induced detonation.
Dodge; simultaneously fire. Ignore a group of minnows, blow up several four-wingers. Intersect plasma lance emission with bombercraft as part of evasive maneuver. Protect designated friendly from missile fire. Destroy previously ignored minnows and then some. Has she… missed this rhythmic feeling, this unending fight?
Kill count: 702. Combat time: 16.8 seconds.
Elites… those. Like the ones she'd seen at the breach. Three of them.
…
Hm.
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Yukari hovers. Yukari breaths. Yukari stares.
Her senses are clearing, she doesn't know what had impaired them in the first place, but…
She shakes her head, trying to unscramble her thoughts. It's difficult; she can barely get over the fact that she's alive. Alive! She's alive! But up there…!
There is no way that that is who she'd just been sitting in a plane with. She'd been with Anna Sanchez, academy first year, expecting questions. Anna Sanchez, who she'd failed to protect and who had been killed when the jet had been blown up. Anna Sanchez, who had been her second chance.
Up there is her second chance. Up there is the person she'd been expecting questions from. Of all things, questions. From Anna Sanchez, who is apparently an Ace Valkyrie, and a member of Pinnacle. They have to be the same person, despite the impossibility. She's heard of first year aces before, but… Pinnacle? She's no fanatic, which is probably why Anna's name is completely unfamiliar to her. Perhaps Anna had been so subdued because she'd expected Yukari to recognize her? Or… she'd seemed shy, had she been afraid of the possibility? Pinnacle has posters. They're famous, she's probably looking at a cele –
No. She shakes her head again. She has to focus, she's on a battlefield right now. What is she supposed to be doing? Protocol, Yukari, she tells herself. What does protocol dictate that she do?
The first thing she has to do is check in with base… which…
[Intense jamming. Comms access is not available.]
Isn't happening. Then, she's supposed to get orders from an available superior officer if possible…
Who, apparently, is named Anna Sanchez, just saved her life, and seems to be trying to singlehandedly fight off the entire AG air force.
Caution suggests she retreat. The enemy force is far too large for her to make a difference without help, and she'll be putting herself in significant danger. Everything else – the parts of her that are drowning in gratitude, relief, and renewed hatred of the enemies of humanity – demands that she go up there and start killing AGs… besides, Anchorage is right there, reinforcements have to be coming soon, right? But… she might do nothing but weigh Anna down. She's no ace, after all…
As she's sorting out her indecision, however, something pings her sensors, far above, closing in on Anna. The signatures are… she should know what…
…
Are those type twos?
Oh nonononononono.
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The elites are much faster than the various aircraft. They… pretty much look like flying squirrels. Except, with missile pods on the membranes that stretch between the "limbs," an oversized engine in the place of a bushy tail, and a laser cannon where the head would go.
Also, some corner of Anna's mind tries to note, flying squirrels are cute. She quashes that thought. She is fighting the enemy, and has no time for cute.
Every target on the battlefield besides the elites fades into the background of her awareness. She stows her particle projectors, keeping the hypervelocities and lance extruded. The lance is… awkward, at best, when it's not fully materialized, and the hypervelocities have no place in this fight, so she might as well keep them out of storage and firing at her lesser foes.
A pod of four-wingers closing in from the left. She fires both hypervelocities at them; they evade but are forced to cancel their forward momentum.
The elites are still closing. She waits. She waits.
Energy buildup detected.
She shifts. Three brilliant beams pierce her former position, but she's not there anymore. Now behind and above her adversaries, she dives at the elites like a comet, multicolored exotic particles firing from her partially-extruded projectors. If she can close to melee range, where they won't be able to dodge, she can slaughter them.
It doesn't quite work. The elites split, their tail-engines proving to be prehensile and their membranes proving capable of turning their flight with seemingly unrestricted freedom. The missile pods prove to be turret-mounted, and as the squirrel-Antagonists quickly bank and swoop to just barely evade the HPP fire, the pods belch fat, stocky missiles that ignite boosters and maneuvering thrusters.
She remembers those missiles. They had been quite annoying to deal with. She hadn't reacted to them perfectly, and it had cost her significant time. If she'd done better, maybe she could have…
She pursues one of the elites, HPPs blazing, trying to restrict its motion, forcing it to constantly waste acceleration on dodging while she closes. She's faster than it, but the constraint here isn't whether or not she can eventually catch up, it's whether she can reach her prey before the other two elites draw on her.
Unfortunately, that won't be very long. A swarm of the stocky missiles are now catching up to her from below, east, and south. A thought turns half of her laser suite on one of the missiles, burning apart the casing and the two-dozen micromissiles that try to erupt from it – the missiles have reflective plating, though, and taking one down takes time. Time she doesn't have, since the two elites she's not after are quickly moving to bring their laser cannons to bear on her from directions opposite the incoming missiles, relying on the guided projectiles to herd her into their lines of fire.
Relegated to the back of her consciousness, Anna's hypervelocities chatter, ripping apart a flight of assorted aircraft that had been closing in. She's not going to catch up to the squirrel she's chasing in the moments left before the other two will be able to fire on her, so it's time to change tacks. She knows her former target will be angling for her immediately after she executes her plan, which is why she chooses to provide it with a distraction, materializing a rack of missiles and unloading the entire thing at it. In the same few milliseconds that that takes, she turns, swiping her lance and HPP fire at the missiles that have been chasing her to eliminate the ones she can, and then she's shifting in between the two elites that she hadn't been pursuing.
She blasts forward at one of the two, but she doesn't neglect the other, pushing the barrels of her HPPs out from her shoulder blades and using them to target the elite that's now directly behind her, a tactic intended more to buy time than to actually try for a kill. Time is all she needs, because she's caught the squirrel that she's charging at with its membranes stretched to form a plane that she's coming in perpendicular to – and she's aimed at its underside, not the top. It's the perfect angle, the perfect scenario. The way its weapons are arrayed, the elite can't do anything to protect itself besides try to run away, and because the plane of its membranes is just so, if it tries to immediately fly directly away from her, air resistance will leave it in her lap. It's going to have to spend the tiny amount of time required to shift its membranes, and that's going to let her catch up to it and flambé it.
Or, that's what she thinks until its missile pods push through hidden flaps in the membrane and unload at her. They definitely hadn't been able to do that at the breach. She's suddenly left with the choice of pulling off, tanking the missile fire on her impeller, or taking her HPPs off of the elite behind her. Experience informs her that only one of those choices is viable, and she prepares for a swipe of her lance to eliminate what missiles she can she can before she'll need to shift away – she'll have to try again for the elite she had pulled off of earlier, since it's doubtless about to have an angle to support both of its allies.
Her lance lashes up and outward, plasma blasting towards the incoming missiles, spreading out to catch just over half of them, and she –
The missiles that aren't going to fall victim to her lance are cut apart by whips charged with electricity, the micromissiles inside fried.
– stays the course, brings her lance back down and in, cuts apart the squirrel that had stopped running in favor of getting itself ready to support the elite she was about to teleport after.
… Huh. Suddenly things are much easier.
Behind her, the one she'd been holding at bay with her projectors mismaneuvers, seemingly also having expected her to teleport, and it gets tagged once, twice by the barest tips of her shots. It's enough, she can tell – its left membrane is ever so slightly damaged. She shifts behind it, avoiding for the second time in the fight the brilliant beam of a laser cannon, this from the first elite she'd tried for. Her HPPs are suddenly poking from her forearms and the AG tries to evade as she dives at it, but injured, it's lost the sliver of agility that earlier allowed it to survive. It takes fully three-quarters of a second, long enough that she starts to worry that the other one will bring its laser to bear on her before she finishes this one off, but a sequence of hits become more and more direct until finally one intersects the engine and the entire squirrel blows apart.
Then she's reinforcing her impeller and attuning it and shifting as fast as she can – and she still gets tagged by the laser. Her impeller shrugs off the attack and she slides into existence behind the last elite. It barely puts up a fight as she annihilates it.
Kill count: 735. Combat time: 22.3 seconds.
… Faster than the other trio she'd fought at the breach.
She's starting to target the lesser enemies again when there's a… poking sensation. What is that? She pokes back.
"Um. Orders, ma'am?"
What.
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"Uh…"
The voice is unsure. Shy. It isn't really what Yukari was expecting, after watching the other girl annihilate those type twos. She strafes left slightly, out of the way of a bit of flak, and then she's targeting a dragonfly with her particle projector, taking out the missiles it's launching with her impeller whips. Her attacks are on point and her target explodes.
"What?"
Yukari pauses. Perhaps this explains Anna's enrollment at Perth, somehow? Or, on the other hand, maybe Anna is just preoccupied with the AGs. "Ma'am, you outrank me."
"… I do?"
Well then. Zero command experience, clearly. She's probably being shipped to Perth for exactly that. Aces lead, after all. She takes a moment to compose herself, her momentary image of Anna as some kind of famous, perfect Valkyrie broken. "Uh, do you have orders from command, ma'am? Anything on TACNET?"
There's no immediate reply, and while waiting, Yukari blasts another Mosquito. She's doing the best she can to stay in a 2-woman-cell wing mate position, behind, slightly above, and to the side of Anna. It's… difficult, and she has to constantly make corrections because she just can't fully keep up, but at the same time it feels exhilarating, like she's being pulled beyond her limits.
Several seconds later, Anna's response sends Yukari reeling. "TACNET?"
With that, Yukari suddenly understands that for all the combat prowess Anna is displaying, whatever her squadron designation, regardless of her rank, the Valkyrie really, truly is a first year student.
It's enough to boggle the mind… but really, it's irrelevant, Yukari decides. UN reinforcements, and a proper command structure, will be here soon, and in the meantime it's not like she can just leave Anna out here alone. That… Anna being otherwise totally disconnected from the command structure is reason enough, but regardless, after what happened those months ago…
Yukari couldn't bring herself to leave someone behind if she tried. Not… not again.
"Um. Never mind."
"… Okay?"
This whole time, they've been inside one of the biggest AG air groups Yukari has ever seen, and yet the volume of enemy fire has been incredibly low, purely because of the sheer volume of point defense Anna is constantly projecting. Yukari finds herself aimed at another pair of dragonflies, and as she's preparing for a somewhat prolonged engagement, a thought strikes her. She targets one with her projector and laser mount, the other with her whips, and completely ignores the missiles that spit from their launchers. Just as she had hoped, an array of lasers idly spear the missiles, and her weapons send the dragonflies careening out of the sky.
"Cadet Rokusabe?"
There we go. "Yes!"
"Orders from command. Stay on the principle. The enemy is trying to crack the eastern front, eggheads have no idea how they got over here but between this and whatever's going on out east, everything we've got is pulling back."
That sounds bad. In fact, that sounds terrible. Except for the orders. She's honestly kind of enjoying this. "Yes, ma'am!"
She starts picking up friendlies on her sensors. She keeps a tiny portion of her focus on them, watching as they slam into the enemy. There won't be any high yield used so far behind lines, she guesses, not unless command thinks they can't break up this… whatever this is… without further irradiating supply lines.
… For that matter, if the front is pulling back, they probably won't want to use nukes here when they could be using them there.
Anna suddenly slams into an eastward strafe, moving faster than she had been. Yukari follows suit, materializing her plasma casters and burning them to try to match Anna's acceleration. Her body objects but holds strong, and when the airspace they've just left catches fire with explosions, she tells her body to quit whining and deal.
Then a flight of Valkyries is shooting past them to the east, and the fight turns into a rout as AGs die faster and faster. Anna starts to drop groundwards, apparently deciding that whatever is left in the sky isn't worth her weaponry. Yukari chases after her.
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It's a few minutes later, the last dregs of the AG incursion being wiped out, when she starts to pick up high-band comms traffic from the east. Suddenly, she's faced with the realization that the battle really has become a rout. Just, not the right kind.
"—ird Battalion, we are pulling back, repeat we are pulling back to Anchorage. We are –"
"—vy casualties. We need reinforcements!"
"Screw reinforcements! We need STRATNET back! Fucking 18's are everywhere!"
It's the mention of STRATNET that tells Yukari that she's – somehow, some way – the first person hearing this, or at least the first person who's also in contact with Anchorage. It's the kind of situation that's well above her paygrade, and as she pulls up from an attack run on one of the few remaining groups of AGs, Anna a kilometer or so off, she has Nue patch the transmissions directly through to command, and then the response back out to the east.
The relief is palpable, but tinged with fear. "Oh thank God."
The STRATNET broadcast, however, is confusing, distressing, and the first she's heard about any of it – she must have missed something during the initial attack.
[Contact reestablished with front. Reports suggest AG incursion attempted + succeeded in disruption of comms, supply, etc. in coordination w/ largescale assault on front. All units falling back to coast in fighting retreat. All in-theatre elements of the 300 engaged w/ Type Zeroes Marduk, Herakles, Raksha at locations between the 50th and 55th parallels. UNSF contesting orbit. Third battalion reports abnormal tactics involving Type-18s and Type-16s. Reinforcement is OTW from Siberia / China / Australia.]
Marduk. Fuck. She's got at least a basic understanding of what that might mean for the UN here in America. The front is collapsing, the AGs that had almost killed her here were just a distraction –
No. She can't lose focus. She has orders. She'll focus on her orders. New orders? No new orders. Stay with Anna.
… Who is twenty kilometers east and moving fast.
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She's processing one of the EWar elites when Durga first picks up humans moving in from the east. They've made it deep inside her usual sensor range, but they haven't shown up until just now…
Her eyes widen. She understands. She'd been cognizant of the scattered Antagonists that had been holding position to the east. She'd known about them since the moment she'd reengaged Durga's frame and shifted out of the jet, but she hadn't made the connection. She should have recognized the tactic. EWar elites and whatever else positioned between groups of friendlies… They'd tried it against her, back then, dumping jamming between her and the town in hopes of severing her comms as part of an attempt at a sneak attack. She'd forgotten that the UN had units out east, and so the pattern hadn't… She shouldhave realized. Instead she'd wasted her time with cleaning up unimportant targets.
Immediately, she's moving eastward. Behind her, she feels a now-familiar signature start to follow her. Ahead, the full extent of her mistake begins to reveal itself to Durga's sensors. A battlefield that stretches further, further, ever further as she draws closer and Durga brings into her view more and more of it. Endless Antagonists being destroyed… and humans, so many humans falling, their lives the price. And she isn't there.
… She has something for this, doesn't she? That she didn't, before?
Fuel from her new fusion reactor, millions of degrees hot, sends her hurtling towards the front. Her first targets will have to be –
Hm. She isn't going to be the only one fighting, here, and the people she's trying to protect have some limited ability to defend themselves. She… needs to take out the biggest threats she can, not necessarily the closest ones.
Reprioritizing targets. Marking. Filtering. Hostiles tagged at highest priority within 80km of projected arrival zone: 155. Modeling.
She's almost there now. A bit of course adjustment puts her on track for an Antagonist that looks for all the world like an elephant, except that it has laser emitters, guns, and an impeller. The airspace before her starts to fill up slightly with unfiltered EM… which is, has to be, non-hostiles' emissions.
Emissions presenting ~.3% reduction in sensor clarity.
Why is there so much EM pollution from the UN side, anyway? She brushes the question off. The answer is unimportant compared to her task.
Filtering.
Better. The Antagonists are starting to react to her, now, and the elephant is trying to bring its arsenal to bear on her. She shuts off the flow from her reactor and shoves her thrusters towards the earth, relying on the remaining velocity to bring her into a controlled arc that maintains a good deal of distance from the elephant, but also puts her just close enough for the kill. All four of her projectors materialize and she slams them together into quad-gun form, then looses a full half-second stream of colorful particles. Her attack punches through the elephant's impeller and slides through its armor, entering its gut before beginning to detonate. Torn apart from within, the elephant falls, a third of it disintegrating and the other two pieces crashing to the earth. Her momentum and acceleration, meanwhile, carry her over the UN line and into the sky.
Modeling complete. Mapping ideal path and standing by to paint targets of opportunity.
A bank of artillery units, first, then a ground-bound stealth elite that the UN hasn't even been firing on despite its rapid advance towards the line. Two dozen antiair platforms, giant grubs with laser ports across their whole bodies.
… More squirrels. She almost hesitates, almost wonders if her time wouldn't be more efficiently used if she were to go for, say, that artillery platform, but… yes, Durga has modeled this, so of course they are distracted, caught up engaging a group of Valkyries. Four shifts, four fewer squirrels in the sky.
Increased non-hostile EM traffic. Maintaining filter. "Holy shit! I thought the 300 weren't up here!"
A mobile assault platform, complete with impeller, a dizzying array of weapons up to the caliber of siege guns, and what Durga is telling her is two-meter-thick armor plating. She dives at it, hammering at its impeller with all four of her projectors. Anti-air fire quickly intensifies on her, but she stays in the dive for… there. The platform's impeller shatters and she shifts back out to long range, a storm of SAMs detonating moments too late to catch her. She again shifts her HPPs into quad-cannon form and she fires a tiny burst composed entirely of a specific type of matter. She moves on, fractionally aware of the assault platform detonating as its reactor containment fails, exotic particles passing through the armor plating to react exothermically with other materials deeper inside the AG. Her next target is a perversion of a bobsled –
Abnormal Higgs signature. Nontrivial interference.
Full stop to combat activities. Gain altitude.Active scan.
Uncategorized hostile detected. Extrapolating capabilities from signature. Reprioritizing hostiles. Hostiles tagged at highest priority within 250km: 1.
… She remembers the breach.
How best to deal with this?
Draw it out of the rest of them, bring it into a fight that it can't exit. Don't let it catch anyone with collateral… she'll dive on it, shift out, then either take it away from the battlefield or just stay where it can't target both her and the UN forces at the same time.
She reconfigures her impeller, slanting it into a sharp cone, tuning it against laser weaponry – this will be in and out, almost instantaneous, nothing else is going to be a problem.
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Above them, the sun glints off the emerald contrail of the Valkyrie that had moments ago been devastating various targets along the line. No one pays her overmuch attention: the Valkyries who are aware of her presence devote a tiny corner of their minds to being impressed but are generally too busy fighting to be overly bothered with her actions, and to the ground-pounders, there's little apparent difference from one Valkyrie to another.
Her impeller solidifies into a lance of purest night, obscuring her completely. Then, as a meteor, she blasts forwards, aiming at a seemingly arbitrary point deep inside the enemy force. A veteran pilot sees her, but pushes the thoughts of crazy suicidal what is she doing to the back of her mind – TACNET gives the orders to everyone in the field, if TACNET has told this Valkyrie to do this, so be it.
One second of dive.
Two.
Three.
A ray of particles, white as snow, exits the front of the cone, angled only slightly downwards.
[WARNING: CATEGORY D HIGGS PARTICLE REACTION. DESIGNATE TYPE ZERO CLASS D "BASTET." AWAIT STRATNET UPDATE.]
… and a horrible, awful form rises from the terrain, evading the ray, dismissing its stealthy advance in favor of striking despair into the hearts of those present on the battlefield.
The indomitable Valkyrie tears through space and reemerges high above, preparing to kill or be killed.
The one left behind pushes her entire being against her frame, suddenly worried for another.
And somewhere entirely separate, a man, otherwise unimportant, states the obvious.
"Shit, man, those reinforcements sure as hell ain't getting there in time."
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She waits. Her previous duel had been instructive. This time, she will let it make the first move.
For a moment, it merely hovers. It is a grotesque, to her, a being of pure enemy. A mockery of the image that she knows as Human. Arms, legs, a head, armor, an impeller field. It looks for all the world like a Valkyrie writ large, nine meters tall, three tails extending from its back, a sensor band where the visor should be, and a chest that is easily two meters wide and another deep. Studs disrupt the fluid curves of the armor at seemingly random points and a color scheme of black and grey with red highlights completes its features.
Whatever it may look like, it's no Valkyrie. It is nothing like her, and nothing like the other Valkyries she's encountered. It is an Antagonist. It exists to murder humans. It is anathema.
She allows her particle projectors to orbit her lazily, Durga running through combat simulations based on her previous encounter with this thing's relative.
Higgs Particle Reaction.
She shifts. A shell rockets through her previous location, emanating some kind of exotic field. A port on her foe's chest seems to smoke lightly as it closes.
They hang in the air, still mostly unmoving. Lasers begin to cascade up into the air, chasing Anna's form, coming from other Antagonists on the ground. She allows Durga to autopilot her out of the way based on prediction algorithms, her entire attention consumed evaluating, watching, waiting…
There.
Suddenly it's closing on her, and she is working to keep at a distance from it, unwilling to close the range until she's certain that she can…
Higgs Particle Reaction – Pattern of Shift.
She crushes its teleportation the moment it tries to activate it, and in that moment she knows that she has the ability to win this fight.
The question, then, is what her battleplan is.
She shifts, trying to put some extra distance between her and it. The enemy blocks her, much as she did it, but…
She dumps a tiny portion of extra Higgs into the shift, and though there's a feeling of wrong bad she emerges elsewhere. Good. She can overpower its spatial abilities at medium-long range, if perhaps not so much closer in. That means she can sit out here for an extended duration if the need arises – say, if she has to recharge her impeller after dumping it into a wave.
Higgs Particle Reaction – Pattern of Exotic Cannon.
This time, she lights off her reactor exhaust, shooting out of the way. She feels the field that the shell radiates sheer off part of her impeller as it passes her – it's an effect like nothing she's ever before experienced. As Durga works to repair the sudden gash in her defense, she knows that she can't let herself take any more than a glancing blow from that weapon.
Valkyrie and Antagonist hang in midair for a singular moment more, and then Anna is shooting upwards, trying to maintain range against her opponent. She's still taking its measure. It has yet to display any long-range capability beyond its cannon, and that can't be everything it has. Until it shows her more, she's going to stay at range.
Streams of colors leave her HPPs, pouring down at the monstrosity. It strafes and twists, evading as much of Anna's unending bombardment as it can, but always, always moving towards her. She doesn't let up. With her reactor, power constraints are no longer a concern, and her opponent can't dodge the entirety of her assault.
They rise ten kilometers, twenty, thirty, forty. She concludes that it's decided to try to push her into the endless EM interference that lurks at extremely high altitudes.
Modeling. Probability of nontrivial disadvantage at 100km: 87.2%.
Intolerable. She starts to adjust her course, a few degrees horizontal, then a few more, HPPs still blazing away at her pursuit. As she enters a lazy-seeming path that will eventually bring her velocity onto a vector pointing towards the ground and east from the battle lines, the Antagonist begins to put less effort towards dodging, trying to intercept her before she transitions fully to her desired course. Either it wants to pull something on her at medium range, or it really wants her to think its long-range capabilities are weak.
She's almost through the maneuver when it ignites a secondary set of thrusters and closes two kilometers on her before her she can adequately respond, fusion exhaust rushing from her storage to bring her to a speed similar to her opponent's. They're maybe five kilometers apart, now, and it… is slightly faster than her on the straightaway, but a bit slower on the acceleration.
Five kilometers becomes four and, facing the choice between a close-quarters engagement on her enemy's terms, giving it a free attack run, or doing the right thing, she shifts ten kilometers in the direction opposite their previous path, battling through the resistance the AG imposes on her to tear through the fabric of space. Her momentum is partially conserved, leaving her momentarily tumbling towards the enemy she has just shifted away from, but she accelerates roughly to the northwest. The beast doesn't slow down or make any attempt to turn around, rather opening the gap between them until it exits the range at which she can fully interdict its spatial abilities. Then, it shifts towards her.
An outside eye might see the battle as having gone nowhere; the AG's impeller, seemingly undamaged, still shrugging off the unceasing streams of colored particles, the two combatants still engaged in a game of cat and weapon-wielding mouse.
But Durga's sensors pick up the surfaces of the AG's tails shifting ever so slightly. Durga's sensors pick up the massive energy influx into the tails. Durga's senses pick up the lenses, their covers sliding away, which are now being revealed on the tails.
And because Durga picks this up, Anna is prepared for the two hundred and seventy nine laser beams that pierce through the air. Processing power to stagger the mind allows precisely one hundred and ninety two of them through Anna's impeller, to dissipate their energy into a defensive system made for the express purpose. The rest are nullified by an impeller field pre-attuned to their frequency, at a cost not small but neither large. The beams cut off after 1.72 seconds, leaving the capacitors of Anna's countermeasures filled to just over fifty percent, though she's dumping that charge as quickly as she can. Her particle projectors haven't been interrupted in the slightest, still launching exotic matter at the enemy. Though they had been targeted by roughly fifteen percent of the laser fire, that fifteen percent had been entirely caught on her impeller, the increased impeller cost of covering the exit ports being used by the weapons accepted as necessity. Mistakes had been made against her previous foe, mistakes that had cost her arsenal grievously. They will not be repeated.
Analyses and data flood through her neurons, Durga evaluating energy movements inside the enemy's laser banks. The final estimate on the recharge time is… unpleasant, not that she had expected otherwise. It's significantly faster than she can dump charge out of the capacitors via her impeller. That leaves her with the options of dogfighting or shifting out of every laser attack. She's not willing to rely on her ability to attrite her enemy's impeller if she's forced to shift constantly.
The abomination has just finished canceling its remaining post-shift eastward momentum and is now moving towards her, picking up speed. Her thrusters stop her northwesterly motion and move her into a flight path that will take her within a kilometer of the oncoming Antagonist. She leaves her reactor untapped, waiting for the moment it will be needed.
That moment comes quickly, however, as her enemy corkscrews its body midflight, bringing its torso forward. A plume of fire shoots from her back as she throws herself out of the way of the shell that screams past her, part of her impeller falling victim to the weapon's exotic side-effects. Meanwhile, pieces of the fifteen-foot menace's arms and legs flake off, taking up orbit around its frame and displaying their nature as autocannons, filling the space between it and her with an endless storm of metal. Only some of it comes anywhere near her, most of it merely present to ensure that she is unable to totally avoid being hit, but… None of it has sufficient kinetic energy to so much as inconvenience her and she lets all of it straight through her impeller, the fraction of it that contacts her or her weaponry falling away from the protective coatings of her dynamos. For some reason, though, her opponent keeps firing. That's probably not a good sign, but there's not much she can do about it, she decides.
As the range closes, her enemy quickly becomes totally incapable of evading the streams from her HPPs, and moreover those streams become much more effective as less and less energy dissipates before impact. The Antagonist's impeller starts to glow brightly as it resists her assault, the first actual sign so far of it being put under stress. Four kilometers, three and a half, three and a quarter… She's almost beginning to worry that the monster's real capabilities are at close range when, two and three quarters kilometers out, its arms snap up and each split apart into four separate quarter-cylinders centered on now-empty space. Durga picks up EM signatures reminiscent of some of the weapons she'd seen the UN use, as well as Higgs-based forcefields that seem to be linking the quarter-cylinders as if forming gun barrels. It's more than enough to convince her to extrapolate trajectories from the arms and harden her impeller at likely impact sites.
A soundwave of incredible intensity washes over her and the arm-cannons begin to eject shells at utterly ridiculous muzzle speeds, far beyond what her hypervelocities achieve. The fire rate is thankfully insubstantial compared to the autocannons, but the accuracy is pinpoint. Two, four, six shells are stopped by her impeller and then the fourth pair punch through, though they are slowed enough that they more or less stop moving relative to the Earth below and fall from the sky.
By this time the two combatants are maybe a kilometer and three fifths from one another. With a flash of light the first impeller layer of the many surrounding the AG shatters, Anna's HPP streams blasting through it and starting their work on the next layer. Seemingly in retaliation, the next pair of railgun shells are aimed at two of the points where the colorful particles are exiting Anna's impeller on their journey towards her enemy. They crash through, losing only about half of their momentum, but Anna is prepared and they collide with an additional barrier of hardened impeller which neutralizes their remaining kinetic energy.
The joust is now imminent, and Anna adjusts her thrusters in final course corrections. She can't afford to collide head-on with this foe – It'll blast her with its main gun if she does – and she'd like to go over it when they pass each other so that when she makes her next move the tails will be… slightly less in the way. Her plasma lance snaps into existence in her right hand and her hypervelocity guns emerge mounted on her shoulders. She points all three weapons straight at the center of her foe's chest.
Another sound wave. Another pair of railgun shells. Another chunk out of her impeller. The Antagonist is beginning to flip itself vertically in response to her trajectory, an attempt to keep its front aligned towards her after she passes over it. Its legs fold in on themselves, the shins coming up to meet the backs of the thighs, and the kneecaps slide open to reveal shimmering coils charged to the brim with electricity.
… That's what the autocannons are for, she guesses. If she's right, this is going to be painful.
One point five kilometers.
One point two five kilometers.
One.
A million things happen at once.
The Antagonist fires its main gun, the projectile totally unavoidable at this range, but Anna triggers her lance and hypervelocity guns, sending a continuous streak of plasma straight at the center of her foe's chest with a storm of 4mm spikes weaving around that streak. The cannon shell detonates on contact with the plasma, producing all sorts of emissions that simply shouldn't exist on Humanity's Planet.
Anna cuts off the assault of her projectors for the first time in the fight, locking them back in storage, anticipating what's about to happen. She's just in time. Suddenly the hurricane of autocannon pellets is different, every piece of metal trailing a wire leading back to the Antagonist. The newly-revealed coils in her opponent's knees discharge, sending a hundred million amps careening through the wires and projectiles before subsequently jumping to her. Her impeller mitigates much of it, but not enough, and she can't let the capacitors of her dynamos absorb the entirety of the energy lest they end up fried. A wave of pain shoots through her for a moment as the electricity arcs from her to the ground far below, a fantastically bright bolt of lightning complete with thunderous wave of sound tearing through a sky bereft of rain. Despite the actions of internal countermeasures, two of her hearts shut down and the third flutters terribly, her awareness blurring as Durga rushes to stabilize her vitals. She barely registers as another pair of railgun shells pierce her impeller before slamming to a halt at the secondary layer she'd prepared.
And then she's shooting past her opponent and it's time, she has to move even though Durga is only almost done steadying the beat of her lone still-active heart. A lesser Valkyrie would have blacked out at the thought, but despite being only half-cognizant, Anna spins herself upside down in less than a moment, and her foe is barely bringing its railgun-arms to bear on her before she is zooming downwards, fusion reactor trailing nuclear fire as it easily zeroes her previous velocity and throws her into position three-quarters of a kilometer below – and, thus, directly behind – the Antagonist, where she promptly adjusts her momentum to remain more or less stationary relative her enemy.
Her projectors are reengaged and firing, all of them focused on a single point, lethally efficient at this range, and plasma rushes from her lance in accompaniment. She can't risk the wave yet, she hasn't seen its aft weapons compliment, but in a tiny sliver of time the concentrated fire of her weapons shears through not just one impeller layer but two.
She's mostly regained lucidity when it reacts, its entire backside whipping into a flurry of motion as hordes of previously covered tubes pop their caps and send a tornado of missiles flying towards her. The tips of its tails flick from near its "legs" towards its upper back, fully recharged, but instead of moving completing the motion that would bring the lenses to bear on her, the tails are slowing early, they're going to be pointing at –
There's no time to push her projectors back into storage, and as her laser systems kick in, starting to take the missiles out of the air, she tunes her impeller against the imminent enemy laser attack and pulls several extra layers into existence to protect her HPPs. The AG doesn't disappoint, and three beams of the richest purple, each a full inch wide, slam into, through her impeller and just don't stop. Thankfully, by the time they impact her weapons, they've lost enough energy that her solar dynamos gobble them down without trouble. The defense costs her forty-some percent impeller integrity, but as her sustained fire cracks another layer of impeller, she doesn't regret it at all.
Its arms are hurriedly swiveling to face her in a motion that would dislocate a human's shoulders and it's simultaneously trying to turn its entire body about, but… doesn't that mean…
If she keeps her reactor exhaust running for another 1.55 seconds, angles her body that way, flips herself sideways with her thrusters, and stabs the shell again when it shoots her…
There's still more missiles exiting its backside and they're starting to overpower her capacity for point defense, but its tails are discharged, its arm-guns are out to the sides, trying to reorient on her, which means they can't both target her at once no matter what she does, and that electrical attack needs to still be recharging or she's finished anyways, because Durga isn't done fixing her third heart. That seems to be its entire arsenal accounted for, and that…
That means that she has an opening.
In a blur of motion she stows her entire complement of weaponry bar her lance before launching herself up and around the beast's right flank, her impeller rapidly condensing and churning. The right arm's gun fires. Although her impeller is preoccupied, the early stages of the wave force deflect it slightly, away from its path towards her center of mass. It connects with her left foot, ripping off half her leg and forcing her to flare her thrusters to cancel the momentum it transfers to her. She doesn't feel the pain, though, and matter rapidly flows down towards the injury, working to redistribute her mass evenly. The foot is almost entirely irrelevant; as the Antagonist fires its primary cannon at her and she again intercepts the shell with her plasma lance, she knows that she's found her first chance of the fight.
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Yukari races down the front, looking for Anna. She'd been left in the dust when Anna had suddenly gone and broken mach 8, and now… now Yukari is worried for her and totally unable to find her. STRATNET is broadcasting reports of a new Type Zero along the front, and sectors are alternately being given orders to run like hell or to maintain cohesive retreat until further notice. Meanwhile, somewhere out there is Anna Sanchez, who doesn't even know what TACNET is, and so probably can't hear any of it, let alone the part about the Type Zero.
Yukari has to find her, has to warn her.
But how? There's no indication of where she's gone.
A mushroom cloud erupts to her southeast, followed by a half-dozen more. A wing of UN fightercraft slash by her, missiles screeching off of racks and cannons blazing. Beams of light lance from the other side of the battlefield and half of the wing disappears in a series of violent explosions.
An alarm screams at her from Nue's passive sensor suite and she cracks her whips straight up, intercepting a shell twice her size that had been on course for a pillbox. The detonation flings her downwards and suddenly she's in front of a –
That's an AG stealth bomber. A whole thirty-meter-wingspan stealth bomber. And it's coming right at her.
Her plasma casters flare as she throws herself out of the way, and the neon-green superheated ejecta tears into the bomber's underside. The payload aboard the flier cooks off and the blast slams into her impeller, almost breaking through, tossing her through the air again.
She's barely managed to right herself when a series of lasers start ripping at her impeller, forcing to drop to the ground below in search of cover. There's plenty of that, thankfully – they're somewhere in the Rockies and the entire front is a maze of mountains, valleys, and rock formations that had been mountains. A main battle tank fires off a 210mm shell, momentarily drowning out the incessant chatter of small-arms fire that otherwise dominates this low altitude, and Yukari, momentarily in cover and secure, takes a moment to run another high band scan. The results are the same as the last seven times: still no sign of Anna.
Well, she can't stop looking now. She'd started looking for Anna thirty kilometers south of where Anna's flight path would have taken her, and she's been working her way north ever since in a pattern that she hopes will cover every cubic inch of space Anna might be in. Her next stop is at least five kilometers away, so whatever it was that just sent her running for cover needs to die, or she'll be stuck weaving through the labyrinthine canyons at ground level. Calculating a probable source point for the lasers than had sent her running for cover, Yukari shoots back into the sky, and fires a salvo of missiles. She's quickly rewarded with an explosion off in the distance, hopefully some kind of AA platform dying.
For several seconds she's home free, moving as fast as she can towards a heavily fortified peak in the distance that's absolutely bristling with UN fixed-position weapons.
Then the mountain she's flying over lights up in enemy signatures and there's AGs everywhere. She spots a type-18 at the center of it all, it's probably teleported the rest in. She throws herself towards the ground again, seeking shelter, and she ducks into a canyon that runs northwest-southeast about three kilometers distant at its closest point from the pillar of stone she's trying to reach.
For a moment she thinks she's safe – and then she realizes that the canyon isn't quite empty. In fact, she's actually staring at the back of an antagonist.
For what it's worth, as it turns around, she gets the feeling that the Type-7 is just as surprised as she is.
It looks like a pig, sort-of. A snout ending in a dozen gun ports, four fat thruster-legs, a tail with a laser cannon on it, and two really, really big artillery pieces protruding from its back. Type-7s are strong, but they're not Type-2s. She knows she might have a really big problem if its friends come in, but Nue quickly allays that fear, informing her that the UN is rapidly strangling the rest of the force that had teleported in.
She rushes it. It flies backwards, trying to keep its distance. Plasma and hyperaccelerated particles wash off its impeller; bullets and the laser wash off hers. She's faster, and quickly closes the gap to several hundred meters.
Then she hits it with four whips and its impeller wavers. The next four carve through. It's still firing at her, and her own impeller is starting to falter, but the subsequent four whips slash deep gouges into its belly. She hits it one last time, discharging several hundred amps into it.
The Type drops to the canyon floor, and she dumps a pair of missiles into it for good measure. There's nothing particularly left of it after that, and she rises back into the sky, resuming her course. She picks up another wave of UN long-range missiles screaming in and a million separate engagements taking place up and down the mountain chain as the UN forces fall back ever further.
She'll be at the fortified peak in just another –
White everything is white she can't see she can't hear she can't feel what is this her head hurts oh god is she dying???
Her senses start to come back. An analysis, courtesy of Nue, gradually finds its way into her head and she can vaguely make out ridiculous levels of exotic radiation that probably explain what just happened. Pretty soon she's able to make out sensor feeds and it strikes her, eventually, to wonder why the battle seems to be…
…
Everything had felt that. The battle is stopped because human and drone and AG, every single combatant has been rendered sensor-blind.
[STRATNET: sensor feeds indicate exotic radiation consistent with pattern of "Wave Force" north of 60th parallel in vicinity of Type Zero Bastet. All ground units including those previously ordered to abandon engagement are to resume and/or cover fighting retreat. Await further communications.]
… Wave force? What?
Her commlink bursts to life. "Cadet Rokusabe! Situation!"
"Ah, ma'am, roughly ten minutes ago I lost track of Miss Sanchez when she outpaced me on a straightaway headed east from Anchorage. I'm a few kilometers behind the front line right now, I'm still looking for her."
The intake of breath on the other end of the line is fully audible and there's a sudden surge of background noise before the communication abruptly ends. Yukari hangs in the air for several moments, having been expecting something… well, more.
Finally, STRATNET cuts in again.
[A. Sanchez / TZSS Last Word, "Coroner" / EFRS Pinnacle, "Trump" presumed to be dueling Class D Type Zero Bastet in vicinity of 60.5742 N / 118.2009 W / 35.61 km. All in-sector combat-capable units not required for survival of ground force, reinforce. Elimination of Type Zero Bastet is priority one.]
Something catches in Yukari's throat. Anna is engaged with the Type Zero.
… Anna needs help.
She knows that this goes far, far past her mission, not to mention her capabilities. She'd set out to warn Anna about the Type Zero, not to… She may be a third year cadet, an elite, but… a Type Zero is…
But she owes Anna her life.
And… more than that…
This is it, Yukari realizes.
This is her third chance.
She failed her flight. She failed Anna, even if they'd both survived it.
… This time will be different.
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As the wave subsides, Anna shifts away from her foe. It doesn't make any attempt to impede her, doubtless reeling in the aftermath of the cataclysmic attack; the other one was the same way. She initiates an active, full-power scan, pushing through the residual radiation, trying to get an accurate picture of the wounds she's inflicted – of how many layers of its impeller she still has to smash through. Durga takes a moment, then paints a picture in her mind. It's… not what she had expected.
Somehow, it's missing its right arm and rightmost tail, there's a small gash carved into its torso, and the entire complement of autocannons which had formerly orbited it so densely is missing, calling into question its ability to discharge its electrical weapon.
Weak.
Models flash through her mind as Durga flicks through them, and she quickly understands that she's won, that the battle is over. Only four or five layers of its impeller victims of her basic weaponry, and yet the wave had penetrated the entire remaining shell.
Her mindset shifts dramatically. The outcome no longer in question, her foremost priority becomes speed. Even this far up, Durga provides crystal-clear vision of the battle below. In a split-second, an AG bomber drops a high-yield warhead on a tank battalion, an infantry unit is murdered by the secondary particle weapons of a siege platform, and a UN bunker explodes, its magazine cooked off by artillery fire. Every moment that she expends here has a cost in human lives, and she knows it. She knows it so very well.
For the time being, however, she hovers, ten kilometers distant from her opponent, and despite her desire for haste, she waits. The fastest way to put down her opponent is to use the wave a second time, and that means that until she's back up to forty percent impeller capacity, moving in is pointless. Putting herself in range prematurely, after all, would just force her to waste integrity blocking attacks.
As it finally stabilizes itself, however, the Antagonist proves unwilling to let her wait, and it lights off its entire complement of thrusters, charging at her. Its central cannon booms; she shifts away from the shell's trajectory, positioning herself seven kilometers out and angled at the blind spot on the crippled monstrosity's right flank. Immediately accelerating towards her opponent, she holds off on reengaging the boost from her fusion reactor, saving it – and thus the minor drain it places on her impeller – for rapid maneuvers.
The antagonist is instantly rotating both its torso and its remaining arm while discharging missiles from its backside that rapidly curve towards her. She shoves power into her lasers, starting to burn missiles out of the sky even though she's still six kilometers distant. Her particle projectors rematerialize on her left and lock together into their combined form, pointing at the cannon on her foe's torso. She has no intention of wasting time by shifting out of the way of that weapon now that she's on approach. She's going to annihilate this creature and move on.
The left arm draws a bead on her before the midsection is finished turning, and the familiar sound wave expands from its gun, far outpaced by the projectile it launches. The shot rams into her impeller and disintegrates on impact, the point of collision hardened far beyond what she was able to achieve when she had to deal with two of the guns at once. The second shot achieves nothing more than the first. A quarter-second later, her opponent aligns and fires its central cannon, but a stream of energized particles lances from her interconnected projectors and meets the cannon's shell halfway.
The missiles are the only real threat to her left in the sky. However, with the antagonist seemingly producing more than its own volume in guided explosives, the hellstorm that is forming is beginning to overwhelm her laser systems, and that's… not optimal.
So she turns the weight of her reality manipulation capabilities on the river of missiles, and begins to shear them apart with incomplete shifts. The individuals not destroyed by her lasers fall out of the sky in pieces separated by dozens of meters as she forces their atoms through the fabric of space, ripping apart molecular bonds with impunity.
The railgun and torso cannon continue to discharge at her, and she in turn continues to fly straight through the shots of the former while detonating the shells from the latter. She's closing in, only three kilometers distant now, and her opponent is giving up on its primary weapon, maneuvering to present its left flank and railgun to her, trying to prevent her from taking advantage of the blind spot on its right.
Anna just keeps flying straight towards it.
Two and a half kilometers; another railgun shot disintegrates on her impeller. Two kilometers. One and a half. One and a quarter.
The antagonist stands its ground, firing at her without pause. She doesn't even blink as she takes shot after shot on her impeller and shrugs them all off.
At half a kilometer, Anna triggers her fusion exhaust and sends herself blasting forwards and down. Before her enemy can react meaningfully she's shooting under it, then flipping her entire acceleration skyward to send herself into the blindspot it had tried to hide from her.
It's now that she tears her projectors from their combined form, pulls her lance into reality, and starts pounding at her foe. Durga's predictive models have converged, and the battle is at its end. The abomination can't outmaneuver her, can't shift away from her, can't even run away from her, really. She'll hover in its blind spot, rip apart its impeller, and wipe it from existence with the Wave Force. Even as that knowledge fills her mind an impeller layer shimmers and then shatters, the streams of her particle projectors and the plasma of her lance closing in on her opponent's ravaged right flank.
The aberration thrashes and writhes, trying desperately to compromise Anna's position. It succeeds in inducing a margin of error in her location relative to the center of its blind spot. It utterly fails to achieve anything meaningful. Missiles continue to pour from its back in an unlimited cascade, but she's long since stymied their advance and cuts them down as fast as they can launch. Her weaponry gouges through layer after layer of impeller, until plasma is sliding off a shell only a couple dozen meters from the surface of the antagonist's armor.
Close enough, Anna decides, and her weapons disappear into storage as space rapidly begins to fold in on itself in front of her. The first stages of the Wave Force start to coalesce, her impeller integrity collapsing into the attack.
It's at that moment that everything goes wrong.
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Yukari stares at the two duelists, locked in combat far above the clouds. She's… really not certain what she can do. Anna – Lieutenant Sanchez, she tells herself – seems to be winning. The Type Zero is missing body parts, and it seems to be struggling to do so much as get a weapon in position to retaliate against Sanchez's assault. It's… incredible. It flies in the face of everything she's ever been told about the greatest threats to mankind, and it leaves her in awe.
Yukari had come to this fight, this clash in the sky, because she'd wanted to try to do something to help Anna. She hadn't been too sure of what that would amount to, but the Ace had saved her life – after Yukari had failed her. But now that she's here, now that she sees just how strong Anna is…
What is there for Yukari to do, here? She could only get in the way.
But she can't just leave, either. She wars with her own thoughts. Part of her says that she could be saving lives on the ground far below, that she hadn't even really failed Anna, for how could a mere mortal fail such a being? But part of her sees Anna the academy freshman, who doesn't even know what TACNET is. Part of her…
Part of her refuses to leave Anna alone against a Type Zero, no matter how the situation looks.
And so she watches. Above, the Antagonist's impeller is rapidly falling apart. As one of the final layers shatters, Anna pulls back slightly and starts to transmute her impeller into something that has Nue's sensors trying to say wrong wrong wrong. The "wave force" from the STRATNET broadcast? Whatever it is, Anna's dumping everything she has into it.
Something about the whole thing makes Yukari think that Anna is about to put an end to the fight.
But then… then, just when Anna's impeller has melted away completely, absorbed into a singularity hovering in front of her, the Type Zero's entire body splits in half, front and back separating from each other. There's a light-blue globe left in the center, floating between the two halves, glowing brighter than anything Yukari has ever seen and pulsating violently. Wires trail from the globe, connecting it to the rest of the body, and Nue screams at her that its existence is far, far more unnatural than whatever Anna has been doing.
The globe is a weapon, based on matter and energy not meant to exist on Earth. It is the primary weapon of a Type Zero.
And Anna is wide open.
[Exotic high-energy reaction. Type Zero attack imminent.]
Time stops for Yukari.
Decisions and consequences flash before her eyes.
She's failed twice. Both times she… probably had at least a ghost of a chance of succeeding without forfeiting her life. Here? She's not sure. Success here…
She weighs that. Calculations and comparisons flash through her head. Thoughts of Koujirou, of her friends at Perth… all the same things that had crossed her mind not so much earlier.
But on the other hand, the weight of her debts and failures. Her flightmates, the jet back at Anchorage blowing up and (or so she'd thought) taking Anna with it, Anna saving her life… Could she afford to not risk the ultimate sacrifice, here? Could she stand to look back on this moment if she didn't?
…
…
She…
She really couldn't, could she?
…
Well, she might even live through it. There's a chance, right?
There's only one way to do this. Anna and the Type Zero are too far for anything else to work, not when she's got maybe a second to act. She's never managed it over such a distance, but…
Yukari forces her impeller to grasp the fabric of space, and rips her way through it.
Then there's a light brighter than the combined glow of a thousand suns, followed by darkness.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The wave is taking too long to form. She's been caught off guard, caught in a trap. Models flood through her head, possibilities, ideas, she can destabilize the wave, it'll kill both of them… Her entire focus occupied, Anna doesn't register the signature of the shift in time. Before she can act to block it, there's a form between her and the antagonist. A form with an impeller, arms, legs, a head, armor… A form that Durga's sensors have encountered before.
Rokusabe.
Rokusabe is going to take the hit.
Living. Breathing.
Dying.
Rokusabe. Not Anna. Rokusabe is going to save Anna's worthless life.
Dying dead she's failed AGAIN.
Something in Anna tears in half. She screams, her voice filled with panic and terror. She's powerless.
Powerless to watch someone give their life to protect her.
Powerless to protect them.
Powerless to watch as her own eternal damnation plays out once more, this time right before her eyes.
She should be the sacrifice. But she never is, because she always fails.
She throws her very being at her impeller, willing it to act faster, to finish forming the wave or to do something help her save worthless this person just this person useless let her save one person let her failure just once please –
The infinite brightness of the Antagonist monster's attack hits Rokusabe moments before her impeller can finish warping the fabric of reality into the form of the coherent wave. It doesn't stop Anna from continuing on, still screaming, hoping against hope that maybe if she can just do it fast enough she can save…
The light fades.
Rokusabe's charred corpse begins to fall.
The Antagonist hangs, motionless, taunting her with her failure.
Anna, her screams cracking under the weight of rage and despair, unleashes her attack. The wave crashes into her helpless, exposed enemy, left wide open by its failed why why did it have to fail why couldn't it have been me trap. The murderer is washed from existence by an endless beam of white.
Anna turns her entire attention to Rokusabe, diving straight at the body that is even now falling ever faster towards the ground, gently arresting the momentum of the corpse with her impeller.
Ba-bump-ba-da-da-da.
Ba-bump-ba-ba.
Ba-bump-ba-da.
…
Not a corpse.
Alive.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Yukari's eyes flicker open. She can't –
Oh. There's her hands. She flexes her fingers and they respond nicely.
Now, where's her –
"Ah, miss, you're awake."
A woman in a white coat with a clipboard stands over her.
"We've been keeping you comatose while you recovered. It was… quite bad. I'd say more, but… you've got a rather insistent visitor, and I've been, ah, informed that I'm to let them in immediately upon your waking. Do you need anything?"
Yukari stares at the woman, thoughts still slightly foggy but rapidly clearing. The air smells of anesthetic and the walls are – well, she's in a hospital. Does she need anything…
"Why can't I feel my legs?"
"Oh, that'll go away. It's just the drugs. You're fine, physically."
That's… good. Yukari nods at the… she supposes the woman is a doctor.
"Thank you."
"Just my job. If you need anything, use the orange button."
The doctor walks out of the room, stops just outside the door, turns to the side, nods to somebody and says something that Yukari can't hear.
And then Anna walks through the door.
She comes to a halt less than a foot past the doorframe, just staring at the bed Yukari is laying on, and Yukari has no idea what to make of her expression. She stays that way for long enough that an awkward silence develops. Yukari tries to think of something to say, but doesn't manage to before Anna finally speaks.
"You're okay?"
Yukari tries to nod, then realizes that the motion is awkward when her head is on a pillow. She decides to just smile, instead. "The doctor said I was fine, so, I think so. I… what happened? Did you kill the Type Zero?"
Anna's features display relief, then become downcast as Yukari finishes speaking. There's a pause, and then two words come. "I'm sorry."
Damn. "It got away, then?"
"What? No…"
Yukari blinks. "Then what are you sorry for?"
Anna pauses again. "You don't remember?"
At this point, Yukari is well and truly confused. "The last thing I remember is teleporting and blocking the attack from the Type Zero. Was there something else?"
Anna furrows her eyebrows, then shakes her head. "I… you could have died."
Yukari sits up. It takes some effort, but given the direction the conversation seems to be taking, she feels that it's necessary. "Anna… can I call you Anna, Lieutenant Sanchez?"
"Uh. Of course?" Comes the reply.
"Anna… I didn't have a choice. If I had just watched as that thing killed you? I –"
Anna cuts her off, face placid, voice completely calm. "You should have."
What.
"I… what? Anna, you –"
"I could have destabilized the intermediate stages of the wave. It would have released in excess of five hundred petajoules of energy in an uncontrolled explosion. The… Type Zero… would not have survived. However, at your distance and with your impeller integrity, you would have been unharmed. You would have been safe."
Yukari stares. Nue processes the number and converts it to a unit Yukari is more familiar with, roughly one hundred and twenty five megatons of energy.
Anna's impeller had been totally depleted. She would have been adjacent to the epicenter of the event.
Anna would have been killed.
"Anna… you would have died."
"… Yes?"
The response is delivered in a questioning but matter-of-fact tone that leaves Yukari at a loss for words. Anna would have given her life so willingly? For someone she… Yukari hadn't even talked with her for more than a minute in total beforehand!
The two are still for almost a minute and a half, Yukari staring, stunned, at Anna, Anna flicking her gaze from Yukari down to the floor and back.
Eventually, Anna speaks again. "Um. I wanted to apologize. For not preventing you from completing the shift. I'm sorry. It's my fault you almost died."
Shift… teleport. She – oh. Oh. She can't mean… Disbelief to dwarf anything Yukari has experienced before floods her, and she sputters. "You – but, but… No! Anna, no! I… How can you apologize for that?"
Somehow, that's the wrong thing to say.
It's almost like watching a flower wilt. Anna seems to shrink in on herself as her posture collapses. The calm expression that has dominated Anna's visage for most of the conversation is swallowed up by something that just goes down, and down, and down.
Despair, says the face, in the moment that it is present. The next, it's washed away, and the only things left on a featureless expanse are two dead eyes, their gaze locked on the sterile white tile at the feet of their owner.
Anna turns away. She speaks, so quietly that Yukari can barely hear it, so quiet that she can only think that what's said isn't meant for her ears.
"I'm…a failure."
Then, with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, Anna walks out of the room.
A second passes. Then another.
Yukari throws off the bedsheet.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Anna walks down the hall. She… doesn't really know where she's going.
There's somebody running towards her, approaching her from behind. It's Rokusabe, Durga tells her. Why…? Memories ripple in her mind, reminding her of the people she'd tried to just ignore, of the reactions they'd sometimes had. Anna turns, raising her arms to defend herself.
The look on Rokusabe's face stops her. Concern, plain as day, is stretched across the third year cadet's features.
"Anna! Oh thank god."
Confusion ripples through Anna as Rokusabe slides to a halt in front of her. Hadn't this girl condemned her just a minute ago? If Rokusabe isn't here to attack her, then what –
"Anna. Anna, how can you call yourself a failure?"
…
Confusion is replaced with disgust. The concern is a facade. Everyone from Anchorage knows what happened, which means this is just another… "Go away," she says, as her lip curls and she makes to leave, catching only a glimpse of Rokusabe looking like she's been slapped.
"Anna!" comes the call from behind her. Determinedly, she ignores it.
But the shout that follows stops her in her tracks and sends her reeling.
"Anna! You didn't fail me!"
She turns. What is this, some incredibly elaborate scheme? If it is, it's working, because the tears that have appeared on the other girl's face are convincing her to continue the conversation, if only out of a sense of obligation. "Rokusabe. What are you saying? My actions almost cost you your life."
Black hair swishes back and forth as a head shakes rapidly. "No! Anna, you saved my life! How can you say that you failed me?"
What is she… images of the battle flick through Anna's mind. Squirrels. Four-wingers. AGs, AGs, AGs – Protect designated friendly from missile fire. Lasers tearing munitions from the sky. A figure, far below, no longer being run down.
"I… did?"
Furious nodding is punctuated with sniffles. "Yes! I – after the jet, and, ah, well, I'm here, so, I, you probably got me back here, right?"
The conversation is beginning to feel almost surreal. She had expected… anything but this. What is this? This conversation is crazy. She's been blamed, praised... what… has she misinterpreted something? She shakes her head a little, looking to clear her thoughts. She's been asked a question, so she has to produce a reply. "Um. Yes?"
"Then that's twice! You saved my life twice! How is that failing me?"
… That's easier to respond to than the rest of this has been. "You should have never been in danger. If I had been properly alert, the Antagonists would not have reached missile range of the jet. If I had been more cautious while fighting the Type Zero, you –"
Rokusabe heatedly cuts her off. "What does that matter!? I – nobody is perfect, Anna, we all make mistakes! We all fail, sometimes! But whatever you could or should have done, none of that makes you a failure! Because of you, I'm still alive! Because of you, a Type Zero is dead! How can you call that failure!?"
Still… alive. The words tumble through Anna, disorienting, unnatural, and dissonant against the cadence of dead that so often frequents her thoughts. It's enough to prevent her from formulating a response before Rokusabe continues. It's enough to make her listen. But what she hears is…
"And… and if that's a failure, then I'm below that! Then I'm responsible for the deaths of my entire flight! Hariko, Samantha, Sakura, Nina! They died, and if I'd been stronger, faster, more, then maybe I could have saved them! But that doesn't make me a failure, Anna! I failed them, but that doesn't mean that I can't succeed in the future, that I don't have value!"
... blood on my hands…
Rokusabe is still speaking, but… she's distant. The words fall away. The world falls away.
All my fault. Dead, dead, too late, too weak, I failed them, I failed them, they're blood everywhere graves its all my fault, I… I… Man gives blood innumerable prayers death to Heaven, no no no no Heaven replies –
…
Something on her shoulder? A… a hand? In front of her, a face engulfed by… worry?
"Anna? I… are you…"
The words trail off. Rokusabe… almost looks like she's searching for something? Then… determination?
The hand leaves her shoulder, and then there's arms wrapped around her waist, drawing her in. It's a motion that seems… familiar? Maybe? But there's something… missing…
A voice, tinged with embarrassment. "Anna. I, um. Can you turn off your impeller for a second? This… doesn't really work with it on."
… maybe…?
For the first time in years, Anna's impeller falls.
…
…
…
…
Warmthsafetysecuritypeacelovecomforthappinessjoywarmthlove
Fin.
Acie Invictia – Battlefield of the Invincible
