V6C4
Precept the Fourth: Friendship is NOT magic, nor has it ever been.
This is one of the hardest of my precepts for me to follow; I can count the number of true friends I have had over my life on two hands, with fingers left over. The loneliness of so many of my years changed me, and not for the better. If I had found more and better friends, I likely would not be the one to face this threat now. It is better for this world, though; two of those friends, working together, helped find the threat that caused me to write down these final few words of mine.
Thus it was when my isolation ended, when Shirotaka Nanami and Shirou Endou cleaved to me through great gain and pain, joy and sorrow, that I became something more than an organic machine made for killing. Without the two of them, and those few other true comrades I have found, that I would have well and truly gone off the deep end, started killing in a psychopathic final frenzy. I would have died many times over without the two of them, and anyone who says that they were not the key to my true success in this life is, quite frankly, full of shit.
I have also had the displeasure of having seen true magic, watched as it turned aside bullets, let man take flight. I watched the horror as Nanami was forced to attack me by a vampire, felt rage against that thing that turned my friend against me, fully against her will. I have seen men master thousands to cause wickedness to flourish in the earth, looked on in horror as ancient conspiracies summoned unthinkable things that should not exist in a sane and rational world.
Even in that, I am a hypocrite. That I continue to state that magic is mankind's greatest cheat, my team used it to equalize the odds against those who would have killed us all otherwise. Magic is not a toy, not a tool; it is a thinking, living being, and aside from a very few experiences with it, I have found it to be a malevolent and hostile thing, often destroying those who use it.
If someone is actually able to read this by dint of the fact that both I and the Great Enemy are dead, it will be the proof of this precept. Seven friends will have stood amongst the Special Forces teams of two countries to strike the killing blow against a being with incredible magical might, much of that stolen from the bodies of dangerous mages themselves. That the seven of us stood, and in standing did the impossible, saw that invisible hope for us all, proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Friendship is not magic. Friendship is so much more powerful than magic can ever hope to be.
terminate Sugou(vier): Lotus Eater
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(T Minus 7:45 to Midnight: Great Hall of The Library)
As she had been forcefully thrust into the World of Dreams when she lost consciousness, Shirou Endou spied the Vestibule of the Great Hall. The floor was inset with a mosaic of examples of the Ten Races, detailed and beautiful. When first looking at it, one might think that it showed the races not of the Exiles in conflict with one another, a retelling of the original story of ALfheim Online; with a more introspective look now that the Nymph and the Maeve had been added to the giant puzzle that was the floor, it looked more akin to the Ten Races striving together in common cause against a blood red bat. A glance up along the Greco-Roman colonnade rising in two sets from the floor to the balcony of the second floor revealed the white marble used to construct The Library in her mind; twin columns on the first floor gave way to the single columns of the second, the archway in between each set of columns perfect in their form and function. Further up still, along the walls and ceilings of the second floor, were painted massive murals showing scenes from Earth and Halkegenia alike. The best and worst of what man and Fae had done with the knowledge contained within the library were made plain for all to see. Two sets of long steps rested on either side of the vestibule, wide enough that a troll could have climbed them comfortably. The windows let in a bloody crimson light in, giving a strange feel to the entire floor, one steeped in misfortune on the way.
It was not the first time that Shirou Endou stood inside the Great Hall of The Library. She had visited that place, many nights, during her dreams. The frequency, the vividness of the dreams, had only increased with time, until now, she wondered if even the library this one was made from would seem this real.
Looking down upon her from the second floor, opposite the vestibule, was a woman made for hunting men, with auburn-colored hair, an athletic form trained for speed, and glowing red eyes. An easy mockery of a schoolgirl uniform graced that body, consisting of a white dress shirt with a cut red tie that she had tied the bottom half of into a knot, a dangerously short black skirt that threatened to ride up in the slightest breeze, red silk stockings that rode up just shy of her minskirt, and a pair of spike-tipped boots. Endou immediately thought that she looked kind of like a slut before squinting in the odd light.
With a gasp, Endou put it all together. The woman leaping off of the balcony to the lower floor was a sexualized bad-girl version of herself. As the doppelganger slammed her fist into the ground as she landed, Endou looked at her oddly. It might not have been the smartest thing to say since ever, but it slipped past the daughter of Sugou's lips too easily. "Holy fucking shit. Was I ever that much of a slut?"
Snickers erupted from the mouth of what could have been her twin, as the woman picked up some of the wrecked mosaic . "I am what you were always meant to be, weakling." With a contemptuous snap of her wrist, the stalker flicked the sharp glass at Endou, even as she charged in, fists swinging. "And soon, I'll be the only one of us that ever was. You're weak, too weak to survive, and I will ensure that only the strong survive." The twin sneered at Endou as she started to swing her fists at the real deal, screaming hatefully, "Because only the strong are fit to rule, to survive, to own the world that is coming!" A flurry of punches were blocked, parried, fended off as Endou kept looking for a weakness on the other girl's fighting style.
"Useless! You handed me the instrument of your doom when you defeated Asuna, whore!" Endou suddenly felt the wind flee from her lungs as the fake punched her harder than the one time Nanami had missed while the two were sparring. Looking carefully, the weighted gloves gave one clue to just what it was she was actually fighting.
Endou's second clue came to her as she felt a loose rib give way, rolled to bleed off some of the power of the Hung Gar strike, as she spied the purple glow coming from the doppelganger's hand. "Discout Gandlfr..." Endou choked out, before her darker twin grabbed her by the throat, lifted her into the air.
"There's nothing 'discount' about it. Think of it! All that power, all that gift, and you wasted it... You could have been like me; now you're going to be like Rika and Tomoe instead!"
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(T Minus 7:15 to Midnight: Floor 2)
It was not the size of the honor guard that Vaduva had waiting for Asada Shino as the elevator came to a rest on the second floor, where the Elder Vampire innovated the kind of discoveries that would have made the scientific community take out their own eyes in order to try to unsee the things that had been seen. Two of each race of vampirized Fae (save those of the Maeve and Cait Sith) stood at attention as the elevator lights indicated the door should have been opening.
Shirotaka Nanami's great sacrifice caused them to wonder aloud if something had happened to the two vampires and their prize, though their fear at the displeasure of their mistress abated when they saw the elevator begin to descend again.
Thus it was to their unpleasant surprise when they found the contents of the elevator. The two vampires were there, the one dismembered to the point that Luke could no longer be identified and the other with an icicle slowly beginning to melt inside her chest.
Of Asada Shino, there was no sign.
Two of the more impulsive members of the honor guard rushed the elevator, desperate for something, anything that could have mitigated the bitch fit the True Enemy was likely to throw the instant she heard the bad news. Other, cooler heads, peeled off to the sides, out of the way of the impending death they had expected from the Deadliest Schoolgirl in Japan.
The caution of those twelve undead killing machines saved them for a few more moments, as the contents of the firebomb Shino had improvised for she situation blasted outwards, turning the two stone-skinned brutes into screaming torches who ran out of the elevators, screamed, dropped, and rolled as best they were able to before finally going still.
As the remaining twelve gathered about, to raise their firearms in the direction of the elevator door, what almost looked like a metal whip lashed out from inside the flames, grabbed a harpy at random, and drew her into the flames, screaming in agony as the razor wire began to dig in. It was enough for the two former Salamanders to back away, just a little bit. It was the first sign of the change of the tide of the battle, as those immediately next to them began to have second doubts, as it expecting Sinon herself to walk through the flames, casually slaughtering them all on her way through to their boss.
Smiling from atop the elevator car, Shino might not have been able to see everything, but she could hear all the confused commands, the shouting matches, all the signs of collapse in the proper order of the chain in command. Rear Admiral Ijuin had taught her so many of the tricks of the trade, and one of his favorites when dealing with large masses of disparate forces had been a certain degree of showmanship.
'If you make yourself appear unstoppable, if it appears you can kill anyone at a moment's notice just by being spoken of, one man can alter the direction of an entire encounter.' Those words remained true. She had planned it out quickly with her sentient artifact, and when Shino quickly opened the trap door to the car of the elevator, dropping the Blue Feather into the carefully arranged pool of blood before slamming the door shut again, a wicked grin crossed her lips.
One former Salamander, grown confident with the lack of appearance by their escaped prisoner, approached the elevator door. Looking for a sixteen year old girl, he instead found the rapidly growing crimson ice spike aimed for his head and coming in quickly.
He had ducked low, breathed a sigh of relief as the spike shot past him. Bent over as he was, though, he had nowhere to go when the second spike emerged at groin height.
His screams added to the cacophony that kept Shino's personal escorts confused, off guard for physics to take its hand in things. The blazing heat first melted, and then vaporized, the bloody ice, transforming it into a red fog of scalding agony.
'Once you have them on the run, keep them on the run, picking off the stragglers as you go.' Waiting until the environmental systems on the Ocean Turtle picked up on the situation (five seconds from beginning to end), Shino popped the trap door open again, dropped into the elevator, and retrieved the Blue Feather before spinning about to slice a mer-thing open at the throat. Lowering her tone as far as she could, Shino shouted out, "How does it feel to know you're about to die?"
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(T Minus 7:09 to Midnight: Floor 4)
"All right, kids, get ready to go!" More of those cursed robots had begun to show up, this time the size of a large dog. The new robots made up for what the old ones lacked in proper equipment, though their coordination was still off. That was not the worst feature of the little blighters, not at all to the thoughts of Sergeant Kuribayashi. No, the worst thing was that the acid they left behind. Their claws seeped it, the cannons in their maws spat it, and when they died, a thick green pall lazed over the area it had died.
What had surprised her had been the willingness of the remaining four to leave. When she asked Roberto, his terse reply was, "I'm not reading any of them on my display... She wouldn't have wanted us to die trying to find whatever might be left. We leave here, we burn the Ocean Turtle to ash, and we bury the hallowed remains." As he turned away from her, Roberto added, "And may God have pity on our souls for what we need to do here."
Another group of ghouls arrived, this time dropping from the ceiling as the remnants of Japan's attack force continued to force their way through. That was when the situation began to go from 'can this day get any worse?' all the way to, 'yes, yes it can.'
One of the walls between the four Faelings and one human and the stairwell exploded in a shower of metal screws, drywall, and dust as the Gleam Eyes used its Zabato as a baseball bat, caving in the wall and knocking Hana on her back. As it withdrew its blade for the killing blow, Greta leaped into the way, running the tip of her axe blade along the beast's forearms.
A loud roar erupted from the minotaur-like beast's mouth, its free hand reaching out for Sergeant Kuribayashi from behind.
As the human swung her hammer behind her, one of the beast's knuckles caught a glancing blow from the monstrous hammer. Shaking its hand back and forth, the Gleam Eyes laughed, and said, "You do not fight like prey..." A wide grin split its lips.
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(T Minus 6:54 to Midnight: Heart of The Library)
Saying that the fight was not going well for Shirou Endou would have been an understatement.
The doppelganger had gotten inventive. She grabbed at one of the longer memory crystals inset into the Heart, ran it through a series of flourishes and feints, and as she stepped away from the Heart, began to laugh in the voice of the Endou of a year ago, the furious rage driving her as she stepped down from the dais in the center of the room, eyes alighting on the real deal.
As she jumped from one of the tables that had been set up in three concentric circles around the crystalline heart of The Library, the font of Cardinal's knowledge, the teenager continued at the frantic running pace that had kept her alive throughout the fight against her doppelganger, ragged breaths struggling to keep her lungs full of life-giving air even as her legs burned to keep her blood in her body.
That, too, was not going so well. Her evil twin knew everything she did, had her Fae strength and speed, and most annoyingly, bore a cute little pair of blood red bat wings poking out of her back whenever Endou got too far ahead of her because the clone was playing around.
Leaping from one set of tables to the next, the teenager spied another of those long crystals that her pursuer was using in the same manner as a German Zweihander, somersaulted to evade the blue crystal sweeping for her kneecaps, and laid hands upon the top portion, the one that bore a strong resemblance to a hilt with ricasso, hoping beyond hope that it would pull free.
'My servant, who exists somewhere in this vast universe...' As the crystal blade came free, Endou saw/heard/tasted/smelled/touched upon the ancient power that the recording had made of the memories of the event. Head swimming, she had almost missed the sound of the doppelganger's footsteps behind her, rolled just in time to avoid being impaled as the blue crystal tore through the oaken bannister as if it had never existed. Swinging her sword back and upwards, Endou found out to her terrified surprise that her almost supernatural skill with weaponry had deserted her.
The evil clone looked at Endou contemptuously as she easily turned the slash aside, rolled with it, turned the motion in a tight arc, and brought the blade down, pinning Endou's sword against one of the tables. A swift kick followed as the combat monster turned, foot planting into the dulled ricasso of the crystal blade, ripping it from Endou's hands and pulling her arms out, right into the path of the oncoming blade.
It was by millimeters that Endou managed to keep her fingers intact, spinning into the frame of her tormentor to negate the reach advantage the other woman had held. Safely within the arc of the clone's arms, Endou came to her feet quickly, purposefully, head lowered so that when she slammed into the doppelganger's jaw, it was with the thickest section of her skull. It hurt like hell, but she had the pleasure of seeing her dark mirror's head snap back. She could hurt the bitch, she could survive...
Endou felt strong arms wrap around her, the crystal blade dropping to the ground as she felt her opposition's body pulled tight against her own by arms that might have seemed like the crushing grip of a car crusher. As she felt her feet leave the floor, the teenager's eyes widened in shock as her rival for continued existence began to laugh. "And this is how it ends, you weak, weak prey... In the jaws of a true predaHURK!!!"
This fucked up version of herself may have been much tougher than she was in real life, but the open throat in front of her provoked a certain few memories to pop into her mind, ones involved with blood and pain and death. Her teeth sank into the bare, unprotected flesh of her foe's neck, hanging on for dear life until the bear hug the clone had been holding her in simply gave way.
Dropping to the ground, Endou went limp just as Ijuin had taught her, slamming through one of the tables on her side. Looking up, she saw the doppelganger slowly gliding to the ground, saw one of the crystal blades near to her, and rolled over to try to grab it, to make one last desperate gambit.
A quick kick to her ribs broke a few more of them, launched Endou into the air briefly, before depositing her on her back again. Coughing up blood, she tried to find the clone, spying one metal-shod boot right next to her head.
The doppelganger laughed as she looked down on the original her. Standing on Endou's arms to pin her in place, she first doffed her blouse before tying it around her neck to stem the tide of blood. "Heh... That actually hurt, you little bitch. I'm going to take great pleasure in this." Reaching for the blade, she turned it about, turned the point down, and jammed the crystal through Endou's still-beating heart into the floor. "Just for, well, you know, this... Now that I'm the only one of us that will ever be, after Mother is done with this cycle, I'm going to torture the undying fuck out of your surviving friends."
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(T Minus 6:54 to Midnight: Floor 2)
Shino had planned out the beginning of her assault well; more than a third of the unfortunate souls in front of her had already been granted the gift of a final death at her hands. Continuing her chase, cat's eyes alighted on the most human-seeming of the unfortunate souls still left in front of her. With casual ease, she drew, aimed, and fired her Five-seveNs into the heads of the two former Nymphs, causing survivable pretty little head shots going in, and silver-assisted HAVoK exploding mayhem on the way through.
Firing twice more into each of the two corpses behind her, the mayhem continued, the slits in her eyes widening as Shino felt the itching at her tailbone, the slight burning sensation against her shoulderblades. She calculated the continued meandering flight of the harpy that had taken to the air, both pistols up and aiming at the head and torso of the flying bloodsucker. Precision firing was not as needed, Shino's choice of rounds would have made so-called 'flesh wounds' hilariously destructive to any vampire spawn they penetrated. Even so, the remaining four bullets slammed home into what would have been the high-score zone in a match, Shino's mind casually mapping the trajectories out.
As the top of her head felt like something was twitching, the catgirl holstered the now empty pistols, going for the futuristic battle rifle slung over one muscled shoulder, flicking the safety off and casually lining up her sights on the pair of heavily-armored things which had become the closest of the fleeing undead. Flipping the fire selector to Full Auto and closing her mouth, she fired into the back of the one, then the other, calculated to five rounds apiece. The silver tips painted atop the SLAP rounds might not have gotten through the armor the first go around, but with the robots present, Shino thought it wise to have something with a bit more punch in case things had turned pear-shaped.
The Dicta Ijuin popped back into her mind then. Even as the former Leprechauns stumbled, fell, and began screaming as the silvered tips began burning them from the inside, Shino said out loud, "If one bullet is good enough to put them down..." Passing the undead, she paused to unload another burst into each of their heads. "Two is better."
Yet another of the late Rear Admiral's bits of wisdom came to mind as the four survivors she was rushing turned about. 'Once the enemy knows there is no hope, the brave ones will try to stop you dead in your tracks, so that the both of you might arrive in Hell together.' The closer Banshee had quickly begun to draw in her breath. Shino had the solution at hand.
As the ghostly woman opened her mouth to sing her song of death, Shino revealed the ball-shaped item in her right hand, slamming the little silver wire-limned black ceramic ball through the former Puca's teeth, smiling by way of apology even as she pulled on the fuse. The other banshee caught the rest of the contents of the Tavor's clip, and Shino let the weapon slide back into her harness gently, even as the banshee's head exploded behind her.
Even as she pulled the pin on the last of her silver dispersion grenades and casually tossed it behind her, the Salamander in front of her charged in desperation, blazing claws arcing in towards the teenaged girl, as the last of the mer-things backed up against the wall, shivering in uncontrollable fear. Rushed by the dragon-thing in front of her, Shino shook her head, slipping inside the arc and forcing it along faster, slamming the claws through the Salamander's throat.
As she strode to the last of the spawn she had seen, her grenade went off, spraying the area the former Spriggans had been slinking towards her in lethal silver dust.
The last of Ijuin's rules about the chase was, 'When you are down to your last foe, you do not fuck around. No honor duels, no giving them a chance.' As she drew her knife one last time, Shino simply sighed as she said, "No mercy for the wicked."
As Shino wrenched the knife out of the cooling corpse of the last vampire kin of her honor guard, she heard clapping, uncomfortably close clapping. Spinning about, two pairs of cats' eyes met, as the cerulean-furred, two meter tall bipedal feline form calmly approached, the twin swords on her hips glowing even as she approached. "Oh, I had so wished that you would have stayed away from this life, my daughter, but it is good to see you again."
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(T Minus 6:33 to Midnight: Floor 4)
For the two SEALs on the floor, it had been an absolutely hellish day.
Between most of the assault force being shot down by the fucking Chinese in the skies over territorial Japan, DEVGRU troopers being devoured by the things that went bump in the night left and right, and new orders coming down from on high, Vector and Essex were pretty sure that evening would rank at least on the top ten of shittiest days for the American Special Forces Community.
On the plus side, they did not need to search too hard in order to be able to find the remnants of the Japanese team they were supposed to have been babysitting; one simply needed to follow the gunfire, the sounds of grenades cratering cement, subtle sounds of violence being inflicted with casual disregard for the area around them.
The pair of them popped the safety mirror around one last corner in time to view the gory end of the Gleam Eyes as Kuribayashi laid one hammer blow directly into the terrifying corpse's gleaming eyes. Vector simply shook his head, while Essex could only shake his head in shock. "Allied forces round the corner; calling sign/countersign of the day. The sign is, "Turtle."
One of the two darling little white haired girls, Vector believed that one was called Gretel, looked to the doorway the pair were behind. With cool aplomb, she shouted out behind her, "Today's countersign is, 'Sugou is a dick.'" As she slowly turned, Vector began cursing loudly in Swahili.
He had just seen the horns. It seemed that all of The Seven were approximately as human as he and Essex were. "I have news from on high. The order for Code Black's final sanction has been given, we have about ten minutes before the party favors arrive. And I really would like to not be here when they do." No one sane would like sharing bunk space with thermonuclear atomic weaponry, after all, no matter how far down the yield might be dialed. "Also, Bora Bora."
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(T Minus 6:34 To Midnight: Floor 2)
The Two of Swords. The Psycho of the Twin Blades. Asada Hanabusa Saeko.
"Mother."
As Shino forced herself not to stant slack-jawed as the anthropomorphic feline strode closer to her, Saeko's scent reached her nose, the teenaged assassin knew what Vaduva had done.
Rolling to the floor to evade the first stroke of the battle, Shino noted the careful arc of the blade aimed for her kneecaps, the precision stab that her mother aimed for her left elbow as she jumped forward.
Few words had passed between the two of them; the two descendants of the Black Cait had long since been educated that weapons allowed one's intentions to be given the proper emphasis better.
A leap back. The Glocks drawn. Shino aimed the weapons at her mother, hoping, praying to whatever would listen that she could take the monster down, that she could be hard enough to murder family.
As she pulled the trigger, the weapons tried to climb in her hands, but Shino clamped down on their tendency to rise like rockets when fired on full auto, keeping them on target. The bullets should have struck the beast before her, should have put the unholy monstrosity out of her misery as she emptied the clips of both pistols into her mother.
The bullets should all have been on target. It was by the older assassin's skill with the two swords, by the same rapid reactions the two shared, the ability for their minds to calculate everything that they noticed into perfect direction, that stopped all sixty bullets dead, sliced cleanly in half.
Sliding the compound bow she had been gifted from a priest at the Shimogamo Shrine after the assault on the Zhangbao Organization, the catgirl's arm twisted, sending the two swords that were darting in at her spiraling away from her shoulder blades, noting with interest that her mother had pulled up on the strike that would have gone through her chest.
More blows rained down against her, each aimed at a joint, completely without killing intent, but with the feel of what should have been final blows if they had landed, if Shino's reflexes had not allowed her to parry the strikes aside with the engraved metal face plate of the weapon.
"Why? Why are you doing this?" asked Shino, looking for any form of weakness she could in the form of the thing that was using her mother's body. "Why are you trying to take me alive?" It was as obvious as the rising sun to her; the woman in front of her had years of experience on her before settling down with her father. Combined with her now vampiric nature, if Saeko had wanted to kill her, Shino had no doubt her rapidly-cooling corpse would have already been laying on the floor.
"Because my Mistress wants you, so very desperately." replied the cat-thing striding forward with all of the inevitability of nightfall, blades striking out in a blur to human eyes.
It was too much. Shino felt the twin blades slide cleanly into her kneecaps, screamed in agony as she lost her ability to stand. The ligaments on the inside of her shoulders were next, sliced with a surgical precision that would have shocked most Fae, would have compared favorably to the work of a certain Spriggan. Even as she began to fall, the beast that was left of the mortal remains of Asada Saeko pulled her blades back, wiped them clean, sheathed them before Shino could hit the floor, sight gone black.
Shaking her head, the cat-beast picked Shino up carefully behind the shoulders and the knees. Vaduva would get her pound of flesh; her Mistress would be happy, even as her own tears began to fall.
"Oh, Shino... I had so wanted you to never taste violence... I saw what it did to my mother, to my brothers. That's why I gave it up, why I married your father. When you killed..."
The cat-thing's eyes closed tight as she approached the door leading to Vaduva's new office, what used to be the biology laboratory in the Ocean Turtle. Saeko had seen horrors during her time as a member of the Covenant, though all of those paled in comparison to what her Mistress was in the process of completing. As she paused in front of the door, she wept bitter tears.
"Damn you, Kayaba, for making your dreams the nightmare of others. Damn you, Kikouka, for being a back-biting piece of shit. Damn you, great-grandfather, for forcing both me and my daughter into this life. Damn you, Sugou, for just being yourself... But most of all, damn me, for being too weak to protect my own daughter from this cruel, beautiful world."
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(Zero Hour Plus/Minus 17 Years 9 Months/Minus 100 Years: Yggdrasil Tower, Tristain, Halkegenia)
He had won. Sugou Nobuyuki sat on the throne inside the branches of Yggdrasil, looking down upon the world about him with casual disregard. His forces had just finished the act of putting down another act of rebellion by the Child Queen of Gallia. The only thing that kept his victory from being complete was the fact that Charlotte still drew breath, but it proved that yes, Bishop could tell the future.
Turning about to one of the keys to his success, Oberon's gaze turned downward, in order to actually look at his prize, the one who would soon become the mother of his child. The moment her successor was born, the sooner Bishop would die, no doubt as a result of vampiric draining by the child.
Even so, she could still entertain him in other ways while he waited for that moment. "All right, pet. I'm in the mood for you to make another divination. Show me what the cards say of the future!"
The demure woman knelt before the ornate table Sugou had ordered to his throne room, looking down to the deck of cards. Carved from the still-screaming branches of dying Yggdrasil, they were yet one more assault on her just by their very existence. Even looking at them hurt her.
As she fell into a trance, the 78-card deck slowly rose into the air, followed by Bishop. As the cards began flying about, they trailed around her, rotating in five concentric circles, each within easy reach of her fingertips. As she closed her eyes, her right hand pointed to one card, which fell to the table face up.
XXI The World, Reversed. "Two worlds lie in the path of destruction, the cycle disrupted."
Oberon nodded faintly, expecting it. His plans were in place, his will would be done. He began to idly play with his long golden locks as a smile crossed his lips.
The King of Swords. "A tyrant and his forces strive to conquer the two worlds. His servants shall bring death and horror in equal amounts."
The smile widened as Oberon looked with a touch more care at Bishop. He had been denied his Titania this time around, but he could wait. He would never age, never die; he had a full century to arrange Asuna's servitude.
XII The Hanged Man. "A criminal shall betray humanity, seeking his thirty pieces of silver to grant the Tyrant the tools he needs to bring about the end."
The ruler of Halkegenia's eyes narrowed, and his hand slid out to the side. He would need to remember to arrange as many allies in that other world as he could on all sides of the law, playing off one against the other, to make his approaching reign that much easier to obtain.
XIII Death. "Both Mankind and the Fae stand upon the cusp of ruin, an undead queen waiting for her servants. The living tremble as she passes."
He let a giggle escape his lips. Vaduva had proven to be the causation of his success, but it seemed all she wanted was to be able to serve him in any way she could. Such lavish dedication needed to be rewarded. As he snapped his fingers, a solution came to him: She would train his firstborn.
XI Justice, Reversed. "None who are supposed to keep order in the two worlds will stop them."
It seemed history would repeat itself then. The police had been singularly helpless to even sniff him out in his home world before he had gone too long to be killed. Vaduva had been careful to guide him to victory.
As he waited, an unhealthily large-breasted, pale-skinned half elf stepped out from the shadows to fill his cup with his favored vintage, Kirigaya AB-.
0 The Fool. "But a hero shall rise, created by the Traitor's servants, to stride forth in the defense of the innocent."
The lips of that evil man loosed a huff of annoyance, even as his cupbearer wiped the edge clean. A quick glance at her bounty dispelled the dark thoughts that had been forming, replacing them with another: This one would share his bed that morning. After all, no one hero could stop-
The Ace of Wands. "The Innovator, rescued by her, shall make common cause with the Hero in defense of her friends and faith."
His glare turned back to Bishop then; since he had begun using her in this fashion, she had never steered him wrong. He would need to ensure that any kind of inventor would be working for him instead, too busy for any kind of heroing, and separate faith from science. It would be too easy to do; he had succeeded in Halkegenia, to Romalia's dismay.
XV The Devil, Reversed. "The Tyrant's own daughter, created to ensure the corruption of all that lives, shall instead turn to the Hero's path to stop him."
"WHAT!" It had been many months since he had raised his voice like that, it showed poorly upon the image he was attempting to cultivate, but the thought his heir could ever think about turning against him forced his body out of its slouch, standing up as his cup tilted, spilled, bounced onto the floor.
XIX The Sun. "The three shall come from the Land of the Rising Sun."
The servants about him fled for cover as he slowly made his way to Bishop. What she was saying could not be true; he would reign forever! Rearing back to slap her, Sugou was instead smashed back as the cards came together to protect the one reading them, even as the next card was revealed.
The Eight of Cups. "They shall choose to journey the world to find wrongs done and make them right."
Even as he rose back to his feet, he heard the distant sound of stone being crushed, of ice shattering. Indeed, he even heard the distant noise of alarms beginning to go off.
XVI The Tower, Reversed. "Dozens of dark conspiracies shall shudder and fall by their hands, the world around them changing irrevocably as they act."
"No. NO. NO!!!" His eyes flashed open widely as he looked at Bishop with the flare of hate remembered; the Mistress of the Library had opposed him at every opportunity before he had broken her by slaying the Great Tree. As the sounds of open conflict came closer, he quickly began to think. Who could have managed to slip through the castle, to get so close that he would actually hear fighting from inside his throne room without the rest of the castle being on alert before now?
XX Judgement. "As the fate of Fae and Humankind alike hang in the balance..."
What the avatar of Cardinal said at the drawing of the last card had been cut off by the splintering of the throne room door in a single blow. Coughing by reflex from all the dust thrown up, the master of Halkegenia's eyes looked into the fog to try to discern who was coming to attack him.
A lone female stood there, filled with justified wrath. The coruscating energies warping around the black blade were impressive all by itself, but it was the larger, golden blade that instantly drew the attention of everyone present. As she walked into the room, all eyes looked upon the face of Kirigaya Sachi as she sauntered forth to do battle against the man who had murdered her family.
Bishop's lips formed into a wide smile as the end of that cycle's Sugou approached its zenith. "Know this, Endou... My daughter, the best I can do now to stop this evil from continuing... I love you, no matter what."
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(T Minus 6:30 to Midnight: Heart of the Library)
Sugou Endou smiled to herself as she walked toward the raised platform the Library Heart rested. All the doppelganger needed to do was claim her prize, now that the too-weak original her had properly been dealt with. The original would be stuck in the chamber for all of time, forced to watch as the predatory part of Endou's nature ran rampant in the world.
Then she heard a sound like bone cracking. She had certainly inflicted enough broken bones on the weak her today to know the sound well enough. Her body turned, as if on a marionette's strings.
Endou, the real Endou, was rising up the blade itself. As her chest made contact with the blade's hilt, whatever was forcing the teenager up pulled her through it, breaking the entirety of the left half of her rib cage in the process and leaving blood everywhere.
The flesh left bare from where her clothing had torn was knitting itself back together on its own accord.
"This can't be happening..." The clone's eyes were open as far as they could go at that point, viewing the impossible scene in front of her. "This can not be real..."
Endou's eyes opened as her face slowly twisted away from the look of tortured shock that came from her impalement. Turning slowly towards the doppelganger, she touched a pile of papers as she walked slowly, testing her steps as she moved.
The paper took flight on its own, flying in the evil duplicate's general direction, breaking the spell that kept her standing in shock. She turned, the clone lunging toward the Heart, the source of the power of the Library.
Her left foot had touched down upon the bottom step when she felt the first cut. The storm of paper surrounded her, disorienting the vampiric self and spinning her around, slicing into her flesh the entire time. She had time enough to scream as her eyes came back to the original before she finally went down.
The look of pity on Endou's face hurt worse than all of the papercuts, than being entombed in a shell of something so easily ripped through. Before the sheets fluttered in to cut off her vision, the doppelganger watched, awestruck, as Endou held up a small placard.
II The High Priestess. "Cardinal returns to save them all."
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Shirou Endou... No, Endou Bishop shook her head as she took the steps up to the Library Heart quickly, doing her best not to laugh. 'Attempting to kill the true daughter of the Library with knowledge? What a dumbass, it's like trying to use FOOF to put out a forest fire.' It took her the work of two seconds to touch her hand to the Library Heart.
The Key had turned in the lock.
The Door to the Library was open.
The Book was there to read.
The Librarian was finally home.
This is one of the hardest of my precepts for me to follow; I can count the number of true friends I have had over my life on two hands, with fingers left over. The loneliness of so many of my years changed me, and not for the better. If I had found more and better friends, I likely would not be the one to face this threat now. It is better for this world, though; two of those friends, working together, helped find the threat that caused me to write down these final few words of mine.
Thus it was when my isolation ended, when Shirotaka Nanami and Shirou Endou cleaved to me through great gain and pain, joy and sorrow, that I became something more than an organic machine made for killing. Without the two of them, and those few other true comrades I have found, that I would have well and truly gone off the deep end, started killing in a psychopathic final frenzy. I would have died many times over without the two of them, and anyone who says that they were not the key to my true success in this life is, quite frankly, full of shit.
I have also had the displeasure of having seen true magic, watched as it turned aside bullets, let man take flight. I watched the horror as Nanami was forced to attack me by a vampire, felt rage against that thing that turned my friend against me, fully against her will. I have seen men master thousands to cause wickedness to flourish in the earth, looked on in horror as ancient conspiracies summoned unthinkable things that should not exist in a sane and rational world.
Even in that, I am a hypocrite. That I continue to state that magic is mankind's greatest cheat, my team used it to equalize the odds against those who would have killed us all otherwise. Magic is not a toy, not a tool; it is a thinking, living being, and aside from a very few experiences with it, I have found it to be a malevolent and hostile thing, often destroying those who use it.
If someone is actually able to read this by dint of the fact that both I and the Great Enemy are dead, it will be the proof of this precept. Seven friends will have stood amongst the Special Forces teams of two countries to strike the killing blow against a being with incredible magical might, much of that stolen from the bodies of dangerous mages themselves. That the seven of us stood, and in standing did the impossible, saw that invisible hope for us all, proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Friendship is not magic. Friendship is so much more powerful than magic can ever hope to be.
From the Last Will And Testament of Asada Shino.
----------------------------------------------------------------------terminate Sugou(vier): Lotus Eater
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(T Minus 7:45 to Midnight: Great Hall of The Library)
As she had been forcefully thrust into the World of Dreams when she lost consciousness, Shirou Endou spied the Vestibule of the Great Hall. The floor was inset with a mosaic of examples of the Ten Races, detailed and beautiful. When first looking at it, one might think that it showed the races not of the Exiles in conflict with one another, a retelling of the original story of ALfheim Online; with a more introspective look now that the Nymph and the Maeve had been added to the giant puzzle that was the floor, it looked more akin to the Ten Races striving together in common cause against a blood red bat. A glance up along the Greco-Roman colonnade rising in two sets from the floor to the balcony of the second floor revealed the white marble used to construct The Library in her mind; twin columns on the first floor gave way to the single columns of the second, the archway in between each set of columns perfect in their form and function. Further up still, along the walls and ceilings of the second floor, were painted massive murals showing scenes from Earth and Halkegenia alike. The best and worst of what man and Fae had done with the knowledge contained within the library were made plain for all to see. Two sets of long steps rested on either side of the vestibule, wide enough that a troll could have climbed them comfortably. The windows let in a bloody crimson light in, giving a strange feel to the entire floor, one steeped in misfortune on the way.
It was not the first time that Shirou Endou stood inside the Great Hall of The Library. She had visited that place, many nights, during her dreams. The frequency, the vividness of the dreams, had only increased with time, until now, she wondered if even the library this one was made from would seem this real.
Looking down upon her from the second floor, opposite the vestibule, was a woman made for hunting men, with auburn-colored hair, an athletic form trained for speed, and glowing red eyes. An easy mockery of a schoolgirl uniform graced that body, consisting of a white dress shirt with a cut red tie that she had tied the bottom half of into a knot, a dangerously short black skirt that threatened to ride up in the slightest breeze, red silk stockings that rode up just shy of her minskirt, and a pair of spike-tipped boots. Endou immediately thought that she looked kind of like a slut before squinting in the odd light.
With a gasp, Endou put it all together. The woman leaping off of the balcony to the lower floor was a sexualized bad-girl version of herself. As the doppelganger slammed her fist into the ground as she landed, Endou looked at her oddly. It might not have been the smartest thing to say since ever, but it slipped past the daughter of Sugou's lips too easily. "Holy fucking shit. Was I ever that much of a slut?"
Snickers erupted from the mouth of what could have been her twin, as the woman picked up some of the wrecked mosaic . "I am what you were always meant to be, weakling." With a contemptuous snap of her wrist, the stalker flicked the sharp glass at Endou, even as she charged in, fists swinging. "And soon, I'll be the only one of us that ever was. You're weak, too weak to survive, and I will ensure that only the strong survive." The twin sneered at Endou as she started to swing her fists at the real deal, screaming hatefully, "Because only the strong are fit to rule, to survive, to own the world that is coming!" A flurry of punches were blocked, parried, fended off as Endou kept looking for a weakness on the other girl's fighting style.
"Useless! You handed me the instrument of your doom when you defeated Asuna, whore!" Endou suddenly felt the wind flee from her lungs as the fake punched her harder than the one time Nanami had missed while the two were sparring. Looking carefully, the weighted gloves gave one clue to just what it was she was actually fighting.
Endou's second clue came to her as she felt a loose rib give way, rolled to bleed off some of the power of the Hung Gar strike, as she spied the purple glow coming from the doppelganger's hand. "Discout Gandlfr..." Endou choked out, before her darker twin grabbed her by the throat, lifted her into the air.
"There's nothing 'discount' about it. Think of it! All that power, all that gift, and you wasted it... You could have been like me; now you're going to be like Rika and Tomoe instead!"
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(T Minus 7:15 to Midnight: Floor 2)
It was not the size of the honor guard that Vaduva had waiting for Asada Shino as the elevator came to a rest on the second floor, where the Elder Vampire innovated the kind of discoveries that would have made the scientific community take out their own eyes in order to try to unsee the things that had been seen. Two of each race of vampirized Fae (save those of the Maeve and Cait Sith) stood at attention as the elevator lights indicated the door should have been opening.
Shirotaka Nanami's great sacrifice caused them to wonder aloud if something had happened to the two vampires and their prize, though their fear at the displeasure of their mistress abated when they saw the elevator begin to descend again.
Thus it was to their unpleasant surprise when they found the contents of the elevator. The two vampires were there, the one dismembered to the point that Luke could no longer be identified and the other with an icicle slowly beginning to melt inside her chest.
Of Asada Shino, there was no sign.
Two of the more impulsive members of the honor guard rushed the elevator, desperate for something, anything that could have mitigated the bitch fit the True Enemy was likely to throw the instant she heard the bad news. Other, cooler heads, peeled off to the sides, out of the way of the impending death they had expected from the Deadliest Schoolgirl in Japan.
The caution of those twelve undead killing machines saved them for a few more moments, as the contents of the firebomb Shino had improvised for she situation blasted outwards, turning the two stone-skinned brutes into screaming torches who ran out of the elevators, screamed, dropped, and rolled as best they were able to before finally going still.
As the remaining twelve gathered about, to raise their firearms in the direction of the elevator door, what almost looked like a metal whip lashed out from inside the flames, grabbed a harpy at random, and drew her into the flames, screaming in agony as the razor wire began to dig in. It was enough for the two former Salamanders to back away, just a little bit. It was the first sign of the change of the tide of the battle, as those immediately next to them began to have second doubts, as it expecting Sinon herself to walk through the flames, casually slaughtering them all on her way through to their boss.
Smiling from atop the elevator car, Shino might not have been able to see everything, but she could hear all the confused commands, the shouting matches, all the signs of collapse in the proper order of the chain in command. Rear Admiral Ijuin had taught her so many of the tricks of the trade, and one of his favorites when dealing with large masses of disparate forces had been a certain degree of showmanship.
'If you make yourself appear unstoppable, if it appears you can kill anyone at a moment's notice just by being spoken of, one man can alter the direction of an entire encounter.' Those words remained true. She had planned it out quickly with her sentient artifact, and when Shino quickly opened the trap door to the car of the elevator, dropping the Blue Feather into the carefully arranged pool of blood before slamming the door shut again, a wicked grin crossed her lips.
One former Salamander, grown confident with the lack of appearance by their escaped prisoner, approached the elevator door. Looking for a sixteen year old girl, he instead found the rapidly growing crimson ice spike aimed for his head and coming in quickly.
He had ducked low, breathed a sigh of relief as the spike shot past him. Bent over as he was, though, he had nowhere to go when the second spike emerged at groin height.
His screams added to the cacophony that kept Shino's personal escorts confused, off guard for physics to take its hand in things. The blazing heat first melted, and then vaporized, the bloody ice, transforming it into a red fog of scalding agony.
'Once you have them on the run, keep them on the run, picking off the stragglers as you go.' Waiting until the environmental systems on the Ocean Turtle picked up on the situation (five seconds from beginning to end), Shino popped the trap door open again, dropped into the elevator, and retrieved the Blue Feather before spinning about to slice a mer-thing open at the throat. Lowering her tone as far as she could, Shino shouted out, "How does it feel to know you're about to die?"
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(T Minus 7:09 to Midnight: Floor 4)
"All right, kids, get ready to go!" More of those cursed robots had begun to show up, this time the size of a large dog. The new robots made up for what the old ones lacked in proper equipment, though their coordination was still off. That was not the worst feature of the little blighters, not at all to the thoughts of Sergeant Kuribayashi. No, the worst thing was that the acid they left behind. Their claws seeped it, the cannons in their maws spat it, and when they died, a thick green pall lazed over the area it had died.
What had surprised her had been the willingness of the remaining four to leave. When she asked Roberto, his terse reply was, "I'm not reading any of them on my display... She wouldn't have wanted us to die trying to find whatever might be left. We leave here, we burn the Ocean Turtle to ash, and we bury the hallowed remains." As he turned away from her, Roberto added, "And may God have pity on our souls for what we need to do here."
Another group of ghouls arrived, this time dropping from the ceiling as the remnants of Japan's attack force continued to force their way through. That was when the situation began to go from 'can this day get any worse?' all the way to, 'yes, yes it can.'
One of the walls between the four Faelings and one human and the stairwell exploded in a shower of metal screws, drywall, and dust as the Gleam Eyes used its Zabato as a baseball bat, caving in the wall and knocking Hana on her back. As it withdrew its blade for the killing blow, Greta leaped into the way, running the tip of her axe blade along the beast's forearms.
A loud roar erupted from the minotaur-like beast's mouth, its free hand reaching out for Sergeant Kuribayashi from behind.
As the human swung her hammer behind her, one of the beast's knuckles caught a glancing blow from the monstrous hammer. Shaking its hand back and forth, the Gleam Eyes laughed, and said, "You do not fight like prey..." A wide grin split its lips.
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(T Minus 6:54 to Midnight: Heart of The Library)
Saying that the fight was not going well for Shirou Endou would have been an understatement.
The doppelganger had gotten inventive. She grabbed at one of the longer memory crystals inset into the Heart, ran it through a series of flourishes and feints, and as she stepped away from the Heart, began to laugh in the voice of the Endou of a year ago, the furious rage driving her as she stepped down from the dais in the center of the room, eyes alighting on the real deal.
As she jumped from one of the tables that had been set up in three concentric circles around the crystalline heart of The Library, the font of Cardinal's knowledge, the teenager continued at the frantic running pace that had kept her alive throughout the fight against her doppelganger, ragged breaths struggling to keep her lungs full of life-giving air even as her legs burned to keep her blood in her body.
That, too, was not going so well. Her evil twin knew everything she did, had her Fae strength and speed, and most annoyingly, bore a cute little pair of blood red bat wings poking out of her back whenever Endou got too far ahead of her because the clone was playing around.
Leaping from one set of tables to the next, the teenager spied another of those long crystals that her pursuer was using in the same manner as a German Zweihander, somersaulted to evade the blue crystal sweeping for her kneecaps, and laid hands upon the top portion, the one that bore a strong resemblance to a hilt with ricasso, hoping beyond hope that it would pull free.
'My servant, who exists somewhere in this vast universe...' As the crystal blade came free, Endou saw/heard/tasted/smelled/touched upon the ancient power that the recording had made of the memories of the event. Head swimming, she had almost missed the sound of the doppelganger's footsteps behind her, rolled just in time to avoid being impaled as the blue crystal tore through the oaken bannister as if it had never existed. Swinging her sword back and upwards, Endou found out to her terrified surprise that her almost supernatural skill with weaponry had deserted her.
The evil clone looked at Endou contemptuously as she easily turned the slash aside, rolled with it, turned the motion in a tight arc, and brought the blade down, pinning Endou's sword against one of the tables. A swift kick followed as the combat monster turned, foot planting into the dulled ricasso of the crystal blade, ripping it from Endou's hands and pulling her arms out, right into the path of the oncoming blade.
It was by millimeters that Endou managed to keep her fingers intact, spinning into the frame of her tormentor to negate the reach advantage the other woman had held. Safely within the arc of the clone's arms, Endou came to her feet quickly, purposefully, head lowered so that when she slammed into the doppelganger's jaw, it was with the thickest section of her skull. It hurt like hell, but she had the pleasure of seeing her dark mirror's head snap back. She could hurt the bitch, she could survive...
Endou felt strong arms wrap around her, the crystal blade dropping to the ground as she felt her opposition's body pulled tight against her own by arms that might have seemed like the crushing grip of a car crusher. As she felt her feet leave the floor, the teenager's eyes widened in shock as her rival for continued existence began to laugh. "And this is how it ends, you weak, weak prey... In the jaws of a true predaHURK!!!"
This fucked up version of herself may have been much tougher than she was in real life, but the open throat in front of her provoked a certain few memories to pop into her mind, ones involved with blood and pain and death. Her teeth sank into the bare, unprotected flesh of her foe's neck, hanging on for dear life until the bear hug the clone had been holding her in simply gave way.
Dropping to the ground, Endou went limp just as Ijuin had taught her, slamming through one of the tables on her side. Looking up, she saw the doppelganger slowly gliding to the ground, saw one of the crystal blades near to her, and rolled over to try to grab it, to make one last desperate gambit.
A quick kick to her ribs broke a few more of them, launched Endou into the air briefly, before depositing her on her back again. Coughing up blood, she tried to find the clone, spying one metal-shod boot right next to her head.
The doppelganger laughed as she looked down on the original her. Standing on Endou's arms to pin her in place, she first doffed her blouse before tying it around her neck to stem the tide of blood. "Heh... That actually hurt, you little bitch. I'm going to take great pleasure in this." Reaching for the blade, she turned it about, turned the point down, and jammed the crystal through Endou's still-beating heart into the floor. "Just for, well, you know, this... Now that I'm the only one of us that will ever be, after Mother is done with this cycle, I'm going to torture the undying fuck out of your surviving friends."
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(T Minus 6:54 to Midnight: Floor 2)
Shino had planned out the beginning of her assault well; more than a third of the unfortunate souls in front of her had already been granted the gift of a final death at her hands. Continuing her chase, cat's eyes alighted on the most human-seeming of the unfortunate souls still left in front of her. With casual ease, she drew, aimed, and fired her Five-seveNs into the heads of the two former Nymphs, causing survivable pretty little head shots going in, and silver-assisted HAVoK exploding mayhem on the way through.
Firing twice more into each of the two corpses behind her, the mayhem continued, the slits in her eyes widening as Shino felt the itching at her tailbone, the slight burning sensation against her shoulderblades. She calculated the continued meandering flight of the harpy that had taken to the air, both pistols up and aiming at the head and torso of the flying bloodsucker. Precision firing was not as needed, Shino's choice of rounds would have made so-called 'flesh wounds' hilariously destructive to any vampire spawn they penetrated. Even so, the remaining four bullets slammed home into what would have been the high-score zone in a match, Shino's mind casually mapping the trajectories out.
As the top of her head felt like something was twitching, the catgirl holstered the now empty pistols, going for the futuristic battle rifle slung over one muscled shoulder, flicking the safety off and casually lining up her sights on the pair of heavily-armored things which had become the closest of the fleeing undead. Flipping the fire selector to Full Auto and closing her mouth, she fired into the back of the one, then the other, calculated to five rounds apiece. The silver tips painted atop the SLAP rounds might not have gotten through the armor the first go around, but with the robots present, Shino thought it wise to have something with a bit more punch in case things had turned pear-shaped.
The Dicta Ijuin popped back into her mind then. Even as the former Leprechauns stumbled, fell, and began screaming as the silvered tips began burning them from the inside, Shino said out loud, "If one bullet is good enough to put them down..." Passing the undead, she paused to unload another burst into each of their heads. "Two is better."
Yet another of the late Rear Admiral's bits of wisdom came to mind as the four survivors she was rushing turned about. 'Once the enemy knows there is no hope, the brave ones will try to stop you dead in your tracks, so that the both of you might arrive in Hell together.' The closer Banshee had quickly begun to draw in her breath. Shino had the solution at hand.
As the ghostly woman opened her mouth to sing her song of death, Shino revealed the ball-shaped item in her right hand, slamming the little silver wire-limned black ceramic ball through the former Puca's teeth, smiling by way of apology even as she pulled on the fuse. The other banshee caught the rest of the contents of the Tavor's clip, and Shino let the weapon slide back into her harness gently, even as the banshee's head exploded behind her.
Even as she pulled the pin on the last of her silver dispersion grenades and casually tossed it behind her, the Salamander in front of her charged in desperation, blazing claws arcing in towards the teenaged girl, as the last of the mer-things backed up against the wall, shivering in uncontrollable fear. Rushed by the dragon-thing in front of her, Shino shook her head, slipping inside the arc and forcing it along faster, slamming the claws through the Salamander's throat.
As she strode to the last of the spawn she had seen, her grenade went off, spraying the area the former Spriggans had been slinking towards her in lethal silver dust.
The last of Ijuin's rules about the chase was, 'When you are down to your last foe, you do not fuck around. No honor duels, no giving them a chance.' As she drew her knife one last time, Shino simply sighed as she said, "No mercy for the wicked."
As Shino wrenched the knife out of the cooling corpse of the last vampire kin of her honor guard, she heard clapping, uncomfortably close clapping. Spinning about, two pairs of cats' eyes met, as the cerulean-furred, two meter tall bipedal feline form calmly approached, the twin swords on her hips glowing even as she approached. "Oh, I had so wished that you would have stayed away from this life, my daughter, but it is good to see you again."
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(T Minus 6:33 to Midnight: Floor 4)
For the two SEALs on the floor, it had been an absolutely hellish day.
Between most of the assault force being shot down by the fucking Chinese in the skies over territorial Japan, DEVGRU troopers being devoured by the things that went bump in the night left and right, and new orders coming down from on high, Vector and Essex were pretty sure that evening would rank at least on the top ten of shittiest days for the American Special Forces Community.
On the plus side, they did not need to search too hard in order to be able to find the remnants of the Japanese team they were supposed to have been babysitting; one simply needed to follow the gunfire, the sounds of grenades cratering cement, subtle sounds of violence being inflicted with casual disregard for the area around them.
The pair of them popped the safety mirror around one last corner in time to view the gory end of the Gleam Eyes as Kuribayashi laid one hammer blow directly into the terrifying corpse's gleaming eyes. Vector simply shook his head, while Essex could only shake his head in shock. "Allied forces round the corner; calling sign/countersign of the day. The sign is, "Turtle."
One of the two darling little white haired girls, Vector believed that one was called Gretel, looked to the doorway the pair were behind. With cool aplomb, she shouted out behind her, "Today's countersign is, 'Sugou is a dick.'" As she slowly turned, Vector began cursing loudly in Swahili.
He had just seen the horns. It seemed that all of The Seven were approximately as human as he and Essex were. "I have news from on high. The order for Code Black's final sanction has been given, we have about ten minutes before the party favors arrive. And I really would like to not be here when they do." No one sane would like sharing bunk space with thermonuclear atomic weaponry, after all, no matter how far down the yield might be dialed. "Also, Bora Bora."
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(T Minus 6:34 To Midnight: Floor 2)
The Two of Swords. The Psycho of the Twin Blades. Asada Hanabusa Saeko.
"Mother."
As Shino forced herself not to stant slack-jawed as the anthropomorphic feline strode closer to her, Saeko's scent reached her nose, the teenaged assassin knew what Vaduva had done.
Rolling to the floor to evade the first stroke of the battle, Shino noted the careful arc of the blade aimed for her kneecaps, the precision stab that her mother aimed for her left elbow as she jumped forward.
Few words had passed between the two of them; the two descendants of the Black Cait had long since been educated that weapons allowed one's intentions to be given the proper emphasis better.
A leap back. The Glocks drawn. Shino aimed the weapons at her mother, hoping, praying to whatever would listen that she could take the monster down, that she could be hard enough to murder family.
As she pulled the trigger, the weapons tried to climb in her hands, but Shino clamped down on their tendency to rise like rockets when fired on full auto, keeping them on target. The bullets should have struck the beast before her, should have put the unholy monstrosity out of her misery as she emptied the clips of both pistols into her mother.
The bullets should all have been on target. It was by the older assassin's skill with the two swords, by the same rapid reactions the two shared, the ability for their minds to calculate everything that they noticed into perfect direction, that stopped all sixty bullets dead, sliced cleanly in half.
Sliding the compound bow she had been gifted from a priest at the Shimogamo Shrine after the assault on the Zhangbao Organization, the catgirl's arm twisted, sending the two swords that were darting in at her spiraling away from her shoulder blades, noting with interest that her mother had pulled up on the strike that would have gone through her chest.
More blows rained down against her, each aimed at a joint, completely without killing intent, but with the feel of what should have been final blows if they had landed, if Shino's reflexes had not allowed her to parry the strikes aside with the engraved metal face plate of the weapon.
"Why? Why are you doing this?" asked Shino, looking for any form of weakness she could in the form of the thing that was using her mother's body. "Why are you trying to take me alive?" It was as obvious as the rising sun to her; the woman in front of her had years of experience on her before settling down with her father. Combined with her now vampiric nature, if Saeko had wanted to kill her, Shino had no doubt her rapidly-cooling corpse would have already been laying on the floor.
"Because my Mistress wants you, so very desperately." replied the cat-thing striding forward with all of the inevitability of nightfall, blades striking out in a blur to human eyes.
It was too much. Shino felt the twin blades slide cleanly into her kneecaps, screamed in agony as she lost her ability to stand. The ligaments on the inside of her shoulders were next, sliced with a surgical precision that would have shocked most Fae, would have compared favorably to the work of a certain Spriggan. Even as she began to fall, the beast that was left of the mortal remains of Asada Saeko pulled her blades back, wiped them clean, sheathed them before Shino could hit the floor, sight gone black.
Shaking her head, the cat-beast picked Shino up carefully behind the shoulders and the knees. Vaduva would get her pound of flesh; her Mistress would be happy, even as her own tears began to fall.
"Oh, Shino... I had so wanted you to never taste violence... I saw what it did to my mother, to my brothers. That's why I gave it up, why I married your father. When you killed..."
The cat-thing's eyes closed tight as she approached the door leading to Vaduva's new office, what used to be the biology laboratory in the Ocean Turtle. Saeko had seen horrors during her time as a member of the Covenant, though all of those paled in comparison to what her Mistress was in the process of completing. As she paused in front of the door, she wept bitter tears.
"Damn you, Kayaba, for making your dreams the nightmare of others. Damn you, Kikouka, for being a back-biting piece of shit. Damn you, great-grandfather, for forcing both me and my daughter into this life. Damn you, Sugou, for just being yourself... But most of all, damn me, for being too weak to protect my own daughter from this cruel, beautiful world."
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(Zero Hour Plus/Minus 17 Years 9 Months/Minus 100 Years: Yggdrasil Tower, Tristain, Halkegenia)
He had won. Sugou Nobuyuki sat on the throne inside the branches of Yggdrasil, looking down upon the world about him with casual disregard. His forces had just finished the act of putting down another act of rebellion by the Child Queen of Gallia. The only thing that kept his victory from being complete was the fact that Charlotte still drew breath, but it proved that yes, Bishop could tell the future.
Turning about to one of the keys to his success, Oberon's gaze turned downward, in order to actually look at his prize, the one who would soon become the mother of his child. The moment her successor was born, the sooner Bishop would die, no doubt as a result of vampiric draining by the child.
Even so, she could still entertain him in other ways while he waited for that moment. "All right, pet. I'm in the mood for you to make another divination. Show me what the cards say of the future!"
The demure woman knelt before the ornate table Sugou had ordered to his throne room, looking down to the deck of cards. Carved from the still-screaming branches of dying Yggdrasil, they were yet one more assault on her just by their very existence. Even looking at them hurt her.
As she fell into a trance, the 78-card deck slowly rose into the air, followed by Bishop. As the cards began flying about, they trailed around her, rotating in five concentric circles, each within easy reach of her fingertips. As she closed her eyes, her right hand pointed to one card, which fell to the table face up.
XXI The World, Reversed. "Two worlds lie in the path of destruction, the cycle disrupted."
Oberon nodded faintly, expecting it. His plans were in place, his will would be done. He began to idly play with his long golden locks as a smile crossed his lips.
The King of Swords. "A tyrant and his forces strive to conquer the two worlds. His servants shall bring death and horror in equal amounts."
The smile widened as Oberon looked with a touch more care at Bishop. He had been denied his Titania this time around, but he could wait. He would never age, never die; he had a full century to arrange Asuna's servitude.
XII The Hanged Man. "A criminal shall betray humanity, seeking his thirty pieces of silver to grant the Tyrant the tools he needs to bring about the end."
The ruler of Halkegenia's eyes narrowed, and his hand slid out to the side. He would need to remember to arrange as many allies in that other world as he could on all sides of the law, playing off one against the other, to make his approaching reign that much easier to obtain.
XIII Death. "Both Mankind and the Fae stand upon the cusp of ruin, an undead queen waiting for her servants. The living tremble as she passes."
He let a giggle escape his lips. Vaduva had proven to be the causation of his success, but it seemed all she wanted was to be able to serve him in any way she could. Such lavish dedication needed to be rewarded. As he snapped his fingers, a solution came to him: She would train his firstborn.
XI Justice, Reversed. "None who are supposed to keep order in the two worlds will stop them."
It seemed history would repeat itself then. The police had been singularly helpless to even sniff him out in his home world before he had gone too long to be killed. Vaduva had been careful to guide him to victory.
As he waited, an unhealthily large-breasted, pale-skinned half elf stepped out from the shadows to fill his cup with his favored vintage, Kirigaya AB-.
0 The Fool. "But a hero shall rise, created by the Traitor's servants, to stride forth in the defense of the innocent."
The lips of that evil man loosed a huff of annoyance, even as his cupbearer wiped the edge clean. A quick glance at her bounty dispelled the dark thoughts that had been forming, replacing them with another: This one would share his bed that morning. After all, no one hero could stop-
The Ace of Wands. "The Innovator, rescued by her, shall make common cause with the Hero in defense of her friends and faith."
His glare turned back to Bishop then; since he had begun using her in this fashion, she had never steered him wrong. He would need to ensure that any kind of inventor would be working for him instead, too busy for any kind of heroing, and separate faith from science. It would be too easy to do; he had succeeded in Halkegenia, to Romalia's dismay.
XV The Devil, Reversed. "The Tyrant's own daughter, created to ensure the corruption of all that lives, shall instead turn to the Hero's path to stop him."
"WHAT!" It had been many months since he had raised his voice like that, it showed poorly upon the image he was attempting to cultivate, but the thought his heir could ever think about turning against him forced his body out of its slouch, standing up as his cup tilted, spilled, bounced onto the floor.
XIX The Sun. "The three shall come from the Land of the Rising Sun."
The servants about him fled for cover as he slowly made his way to Bishop. What she was saying could not be true; he would reign forever! Rearing back to slap her, Sugou was instead smashed back as the cards came together to protect the one reading them, even as the next card was revealed.
The Eight of Cups. "They shall choose to journey the world to find wrongs done and make them right."
Even as he rose back to his feet, he heard the distant sound of stone being crushed, of ice shattering. Indeed, he even heard the distant noise of alarms beginning to go off.
XVI The Tower, Reversed. "Dozens of dark conspiracies shall shudder and fall by their hands, the world around them changing irrevocably as they act."
"No. NO. NO!!!" His eyes flashed open widely as he looked at Bishop with the flare of hate remembered; the Mistress of the Library had opposed him at every opportunity before he had broken her by slaying the Great Tree. As the sounds of open conflict came closer, he quickly began to think. Who could have managed to slip through the castle, to get so close that he would actually hear fighting from inside his throne room without the rest of the castle being on alert before now?
XX Judgement. "As the fate of Fae and Humankind alike hang in the balance..."
What the avatar of Cardinal said at the drawing of the last card had been cut off by the splintering of the throne room door in a single blow. Coughing by reflex from all the dust thrown up, the master of Halkegenia's eyes looked into the fog to try to discern who was coming to attack him.
A lone female stood there, filled with justified wrath. The coruscating energies warping around the black blade were impressive all by itself, but it was the larger, golden blade that instantly drew the attention of everyone present. As she walked into the room, all eyes looked upon the face of Kirigaya Sachi as she sauntered forth to do battle against the man who had murdered her family.
Bishop's lips formed into a wide smile as the end of that cycle's Sugou approached its zenith. "Know this, Endou... My daughter, the best I can do now to stop this evil from continuing... I love you, no matter what."
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(T Minus 6:30 to Midnight: Heart of the Library)
Sugou Endou smiled to herself as she walked toward the raised platform the Library Heart rested. All the doppelganger needed to do was claim her prize, now that the too-weak original her had properly been dealt with. The original would be stuck in the chamber for all of time, forced to watch as the predatory part of Endou's nature ran rampant in the world.
Then she heard a sound like bone cracking. She had certainly inflicted enough broken bones on the weak her today to know the sound well enough. Her body turned, as if on a marionette's strings.
Endou, the real Endou, was rising up the blade itself. As her chest made contact with the blade's hilt, whatever was forcing the teenager up pulled her through it, breaking the entirety of the left half of her rib cage in the process and leaving blood everywhere.
The flesh left bare from where her clothing had torn was knitting itself back together on its own accord.
"This can't be happening..." The clone's eyes were open as far as they could go at that point, viewing the impossible scene in front of her. "This can not be real..."
Endou's eyes opened as her face slowly twisted away from the look of tortured shock that came from her impalement. Turning slowly towards the doppelganger, she touched a pile of papers as she walked slowly, testing her steps as she moved.
The paper took flight on its own, flying in the evil duplicate's general direction, breaking the spell that kept her standing in shock. She turned, the clone lunging toward the Heart, the source of the power of the Library.
Her left foot had touched down upon the bottom step when she felt the first cut. The storm of paper surrounded her, disorienting the vampiric self and spinning her around, slicing into her flesh the entire time. She had time enough to scream as her eyes came back to the original before she finally went down.
The look of pity on Endou's face hurt worse than all of the papercuts, than being entombed in a shell of something so easily ripped through. Before the sheets fluttered in to cut off her vision, the doppelganger watched, awestruck, as Endou held up a small placard.
II The High Priestess. "Cardinal returns to save them all."
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Shirou Endou... No, Endou Bishop shook her head as she took the steps up to the Library Heart quickly, doing her best not to laugh. 'Attempting to kill the true daughter of the Library with knowledge? What a dumbass, it's like trying to use FOOF to put out a forest fire.' It took her the work of two seconds to touch her hand to the Library Heart.
The Key had turned in the lock.
The Door to the Library was open.
The Book was there to read.
The Librarian was finally home.
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