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Origin of Ego (Honkai Impact 3rd SI)
- Thread starter Snowfire
- Start date
- Mature
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
And then the plane manages to go Plaid, like Spaceball One did in the movie.
humblefish
Fish piloted mech suit
- Location
- Unknown/forgotten space battlefield orbiting earth
I am speechless and that is hard for me
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
I shall hope this is a good thing
humblefish
Fish piloted mech suit
- Location
- Unknown/forgotten space battlefield orbiting earth
That just reminds me of that star wars with meme
Interlude - Elysium 2
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
Siegfried met Wendy's dive with a scything strike from the slab-like blade of the Cleaver of Shamash. Red-gold fire leapt hungrily out from the parry, kindling within the energy that filled the air around Wendy. Spits of lightning lashed back at the subtle assault, snuffing them out before they could grow from sparks.
Wendy screamed, eyes blazing with wordless fury. The lightning answered her, surging out of the sky, blowing craters in the earth around them as she disengaged from the block in a blur of motion. A hand snapped out, catching a lightning bolt with no apparent effort and bending it across her fingers like a child playing with twine.. She closed her hand into a fist, snipping the bolt into six neat sections, unleashed a moment later as she slashed at the air
Siegfried dived to the side, catching several bolts deliberately on the Cleaver's blade, more fuel for Shamash's fire. The Divine Key moved effortlessly in his weathered hands, responding to his motions as if possessed of its own will. Defeating the champions of Honkai was what it had been created to do, and he knew that more fully now than ever. He hadn't always listened to Elysia's stories of the world before this one, but those about the Kaslanas? How could any self-respecting man ignore his ancestral story?
It was part of why he'd taken this fight, despite his knowledge that Wendy was far more powerful than any Herrscher should be. Something whispered, deep down in his heart even as his body twisted through the movements of battle.
Humanity shall purge the Honkai.
Shamash's flames seemed to surge in answer to the phrase, and Siegfried let it repeat in his mind, stoking the furious energies of the Key of Fire ever higher. Wendy blurred around him, so quick that sometimes it was hard to separate the girl from the echoes of strikes she left behind.
Yet for all the jokes and occasionally malicious misinformation that some spread about him, Siegfried knew what he was. He was one of Schicksal only S-Class Valkyries, a title won in victory over a gauntlet of the Overseer's own creation, to return to the woman he loved more than anything. Wendy was more dangerous than any threat Shicksal had expected to face, but that didn't deter him.
Siegfried knew what it was like to fight a battle where he was simply outclassed. This was, in essence, everything he'd never stopped training for.
Shamash's blade seemed to bend around him, matching timing to the brilliant speed of Wendy's attacks. Claws of furious lightning were met by unerring flame, hammers of wind by sweeps of the enormous sword in his hands. Here and there he even tried to strike back, though Wendy laughed at the attempts, too swift even for his trickiest plays. Yet even as she mocked them, the very fact that he still survived to attempt the strikes seemed to infuriate the young Herrscher, as if the very act of survival was somehow an insult.
He could feel himself giving ground, the strain of fighting against such an overwhelming foe impossible to ignore. But Wendy was young, even by Valkyrie standards, and he knew the training she'd been put through inside and out. It let him predict her in hundreds of tiny ways, no matter the brilliance of her technique, yet he was still being driven back. Slowly, ever so slowly, but the steps told.
He ducked under another eviscerating blow and the air itself rang like some a vast bell as he caught the follow-up on Shamash's crossguard. Blue-white light slashed across her eyes, the only warning he got, but enough to whirl to the side and dodge most of the lightning bolt Wendy had just summoned out of the skies. It blew a crater half a metre deep in the ground next to him, and that forced him back again. Another step, he was almost into double digits now.
The air was thick with the bellows of monsters, the roar of railguns and particle blasters. Light and deadly energy flew in concentrations that beggared belief, Elysium's arsenal unleashed in all its fury. Drones volleyed swarms of missiles into clouds of Honkai fliers, scattering bomblets into the path of the ground assault, their explosions coming so quickly that the crack of detonations seemed more like an enormous machine gun firing.
He took another step, this one towards his foe, brilliant flame roaring up to rend apart the lethal bore of gale winds she used to distract him. A single finger-blade of lightning caught him around the shoulder as he kept moving, the rest of the blow falling just short. It cut through the protective energies invested in his coat, and he felt blood well up from a precise, deadly cut. But only for a moment, until the fire around him found the wound and seared it shut.
The turn brought his eyes round to the furious engagement to his left. Lixue's sword was a blur of motion, and even that didn't seem enough to properly describe it. Light itself seemed to burst apart around the weapon movements, prismatic streamers billowing out across the battle around her. They glimmered across the disintegrating, pearl-white flesh of a greater Templar as Water's Edge tore it to shreds, leaving only the shield that it had entirely failed to bring into play.
All in the moment it took Siegfried to turn, bringing his guard up again. This time though, Wendy wasn't there.
Instinct screamed warning and he pulled Shamash back, turning the oversized pommel into a weapon of its own. It hit Wendy right on the line of her sternum, a burst of flame from the jewel ripping open a hole in the Herrscher's aerokinetic shell to let the counter strike home. The girl bent around the force of the blow, breath leaving her in a sudden gasp of pain, but not enough to deflect her own attack.
Air screamed as lightning ripped it apart, filling Siegfried's nose with the acrid scent of ozone, and then he was abruptly airborne. Pain tore through him, but it was a distant thing, as detached from his mind as the sudden realisation that Wendy had slashed straight through his armoured coat with two claws of her lightning-bolt claws. It hurt, but he had more important things to worry about.
Wendy flashed into existence above him, driving two claws of concentrated lightning directly towards his face. A moment later she was gone, striking at one of his hamstrings. Another flash and it was his right shoulder. She'd succeeded in exactly what she wanted to: reducing him for a handful of seconds from a lethal warrior to an object moving through space.
Siegfried did his best, but there was only so much he could do when Wendy had made his location so entirely predictable. He pulled his legs in close to his body, parrying the obvious kill-thrust to his face with a twirl of his sword. The streamers of flame around him condensed as the area they needed to cover shrunk, accelerating his movements just enough to escape the savage thrust at his shoulder.
Then Wendy was there again, slashing up across his body with another set of hand-blades. An ugly satisfaction glittered far back in her green eyes as she did it - she recognised the impossible situation she'd placed him in, and was revelling in it. This was going to hurt.
He'd known there'd be a cost to making himself a target like this, but it was all he could do. If he let her run amok, more people would die, and she'd make it to Elysium well before the valley's other defenders could make it home. If this was the price for protecting his family, then so be i-
Wendy vanished in a shriek of surprise and sudden pain as a blur the width of a modest tree crashed through her defences to send her flying back. One of the blades still made it through, however, sinking more than an inch into the flesh of Siegfried's chest. He hissed in pain, then cried out as Wendy detonated the shard of caged lightning.
Fire rushed in, containing the blast and stopping it from tearing him to pieces, but that was all it could do. The world flashed red and white, then the ground rushed up to greet him. He stared at the muddy ground for a dazed moment, then pushed himself up, using Shamash as a lever with the side benefit of drying the ground around him the instant the blade entered the soil.
He looked down at where Wendy had hit him and winced, the area a mass of flash-seared blood and cauterised tissue. If Wendy had gotten the blade any further into him he probably wouldn't be here to complain. Valkyries could survive remarkable levels of punishment, but a blown-open chest cavity was something that even Cecilia with Abyss Flower beside her would struggle with.
The sudden thought of his wife gave him a new well of strength and he came fully to his feet with a grunt of pain just as Wendy dived at him again. Shamash's point was sunk into the earth, and he lost a precious second ripping it free, enough for the girl to get inside his swing. Or it would have been.
There was a roar to his right, the sound of something truly enormous in motion, and the same blur of pearl-white that had saved him whipped across Siegfried's vision again. This time, though, the blur resolved into a huge tail of pearl-white Honkai flesh as it struck Wendy directly to the face. The winds around her softened the blow, but it was enough to push her back from her attempt to renew the attack.
A clawed foot the size of a small car sank into the earth next to Siegfried, and a vast shadow fell over the battlefield. His eyes flicked to where the animalistic bellow had come from and widened as he took in a field of shattered Honkai beasts. Some of them had been literally torn apart.
Then another foot came down a few metres to his left, razor sharp blue claws cutting apart dried earth with casual disdain. Siegfried looked up.
And up.
An angular head of dark blue and pearl loomed above him, four compressed diamonds of pale
flesh sweeping back around it like horns. Each was capped at its centre by a smaller diamond of cyan light. Similar light had gathered in the reservoir formed by the horns and the upper half of the head, where a human would expect eyes to be.
More pale blue light leaked from the dragon's mouth as it dropped open, a thunderous growl shaking the air as it glared at Wendy. A set of huge wings were curled in close to its body, tail thrashing like a cat ready to pounce. And that, together with the devastation wreaked where the third fighter of their group had been, was enough to work out who the beast was.
"Bella?" Siegfried's eyes widened again, trying to absorb the sudden shift from diminutive teenager to vast warbeast. Wendy had called her a failed Herald, and that had clearly meant something, it just was a bit more than he'd expected.
He came back to himself as terrible light gathered around Wendy's hands, her arms coming up to full extension, directing all of it at the creation of Honkai that had dared to set itself against her will.
"I am a Herrscher," she hissed, lightning crackling in the words. "You are a servant of Herrschers."
Thunder rumbled, matching Bella's nearly subsonic growl. Siegfried gathered himself into a ready position, feeding more power into Shamash. He could feel the strain of that process clearly now, the effort required to process and manipulate that much energy safely, and he didn't stop for an instant.
"You."
Brilliance speared from Wendy's hands, an awful light promising pain and death.
"Will."
Siegfried leapt, golden fire pouring from his blade.
"Bow."
Wendy screamed, eyes blazing with wordless fury. The lightning answered her, surging out of the sky, blowing craters in the earth around them as she disengaged from the block in a blur of motion. A hand snapped out, catching a lightning bolt with no apparent effort and bending it across her fingers like a child playing with twine.. She closed her hand into a fist, snipping the bolt into six neat sections, unleashed a moment later as she slashed at the air
Siegfried dived to the side, catching several bolts deliberately on the Cleaver's blade, more fuel for Shamash's fire. The Divine Key moved effortlessly in his weathered hands, responding to his motions as if possessed of its own will. Defeating the champions of Honkai was what it had been created to do, and he knew that more fully now than ever. He hadn't always listened to Elysia's stories of the world before this one, but those about the Kaslanas? How could any self-respecting man ignore his ancestral story?
It was part of why he'd taken this fight, despite his knowledge that Wendy was far more powerful than any Herrscher should be. Something whispered, deep down in his heart even as his body twisted through the movements of battle.
Humanity shall purge the Honkai.
Shamash's flames seemed to surge in answer to the phrase, and Siegfried let it repeat in his mind, stoking the furious energies of the Key of Fire ever higher. Wendy blurred around him, so quick that sometimes it was hard to separate the girl from the echoes of strikes she left behind.
Yet for all the jokes and occasionally malicious misinformation that some spread about him, Siegfried knew what he was. He was one of Schicksal only S-Class Valkyries, a title won in victory over a gauntlet of the Overseer's own creation, to return to the woman he loved more than anything. Wendy was more dangerous than any threat Shicksal had expected to face, but that didn't deter him.
Siegfried knew what it was like to fight a battle where he was simply outclassed. This was, in essence, everything he'd never stopped training for.
Shamash's blade seemed to bend around him, matching timing to the brilliant speed of Wendy's attacks. Claws of furious lightning were met by unerring flame, hammers of wind by sweeps of the enormous sword in his hands. Here and there he even tried to strike back, though Wendy laughed at the attempts, too swift even for his trickiest plays. Yet even as she mocked them, the very fact that he still survived to attempt the strikes seemed to infuriate the young Herrscher, as if the very act of survival was somehow an insult.
He could feel himself giving ground, the strain of fighting against such an overwhelming foe impossible to ignore. But Wendy was young, even by Valkyrie standards, and he knew the training she'd been put through inside and out. It let him predict her in hundreds of tiny ways, no matter the brilliance of her technique, yet he was still being driven back. Slowly, ever so slowly, but the steps told.
He ducked under another eviscerating blow and the air itself rang like some a vast bell as he caught the follow-up on Shamash's crossguard. Blue-white light slashed across her eyes, the only warning he got, but enough to whirl to the side and dodge most of the lightning bolt Wendy had just summoned out of the skies. It blew a crater half a metre deep in the ground next to him, and that forced him back again. Another step, he was almost into double digits now.
The air was thick with the bellows of monsters, the roar of railguns and particle blasters. Light and deadly energy flew in concentrations that beggared belief, Elysium's arsenal unleashed in all its fury. Drones volleyed swarms of missiles into clouds of Honkai fliers, scattering bomblets into the path of the ground assault, their explosions coming so quickly that the crack of detonations seemed more like an enormous machine gun firing.
He took another step, this one towards his foe, brilliant flame roaring up to rend apart the lethal bore of gale winds she used to distract him. A single finger-blade of lightning caught him around the shoulder as he kept moving, the rest of the blow falling just short. It cut through the protective energies invested in his coat, and he felt blood well up from a precise, deadly cut. But only for a moment, until the fire around him found the wound and seared it shut.
The turn brought his eyes round to the furious engagement to his left. Lixue's sword was a blur of motion, and even that didn't seem enough to properly describe it. Light itself seemed to burst apart around the weapon movements, prismatic streamers billowing out across the battle around her. They glimmered across the disintegrating, pearl-white flesh of a greater Templar as Water's Edge tore it to shreds, leaving only the shield that it had entirely failed to bring into play.
All in the moment it took Siegfried to turn, bringing his guard up again. This time though, Wendy wasn't there.
Instinct screamed warning and he pulled Shamash back, turning the oversized pommel into a weapon of its own. It hit Wendy right on the line of her sternum, a burst of flame from the jewel ripping open a hole in the Herrscher's aerokinetic shell to let the counter strike home. The girl bent around the force of the blow, breath leaving her in a sudden gasp of pain, but not enough to deflect her own attack.
Air screamed as lightning ripped it apart, filling Siegfried's nose with the acrid scent of ozone, and then he was abruptly airborne. Pain tore through him, but it was a distant thing, as detached from his mind as the sudden realisation that Wendy had slashed straight through his armoured coat with two claws of her lightning-bolt claws. It hurt, but he had more important things to worry about.
Wendy flashed into existence above him, driving two claws of concentrated lightning directly towards his face. A moment later she was gone, striking at one of his hamstrings. Another flash and it was his right shoulder. She'd succeeded in exactly what she wanted to: reducing him for a handful of seconds from a lethal warrior to an object moving through space.
Siegfried did his best, but there was only so much he could do when Wendy had made his location so entirely predictable. He pulled his legs in close to his body, parrying the obvious kill-thrust to his face with a twirl of his sword. The streamers of flame around him condensed as the area they needed to cover shrunk, accelerating his movements just enough to escape the savage thrust at his shoulder.
Then Wendy was there again, slashing up across his body with another set of hand-blades. An ugly satisfaction glittered far back in her green eyes as she did it - she recognised the impossible situation she'd placed him in, and was revelling in it. This was going to hurt.
He'd known there'd be a cost to making himself a target like this, but it was all he could do. If he let her run amok, more people would die, and she'd make it to Elysium well before the valley's other defenders could make it home. If this was the price for protecting his family, then so be i-
Wendy vanished in a shriek of surprise and sudden pain as a blur the width of a modest tree crashed through her defences to send her flying back. One of the blades still made it through, however, sinking more than an inch into the flesh of Siegfried's chest. He hissed in pain, then cried out as Wendy detonated the shard of caged lightning.
Fire rushed in, containing the blast and stopping it from tearing him to pieces, but that was all it could do. The world flashed red and white, then the ground rushed up to greet him. He stared at the muddy ground for a dazed moment, then pushed himself up, using Shamash as a lever with the side benefit of drying the ground around him the instant the blade entered the soil.
He looked down at where Wendy had hit him and winced, the area a mass of flash-seared blood and cauterised tissue. If Wendy had gotten the blade any further into him he probably wouldn't be here to complain. Valkyries could survive remarkable levels of punishment, but a blown-open chest cavity was something that even Cecilia with Abyss Flower beside her would struggle with.
The sudden thought of his wife gave him a new well of strength and he came fully to his feet with a grunt of pain just as Wendy dived at him again. Shamash's point was sunk into the earth, and he lost a precious second ripping it free, enough for the girl to get inside his swing. Or it would have been.
There was a roar to his right, the sound of something truly enormous in motion, and the same blur of pearl-white that had saved him whipped across Siegfried's vision again. This time, though, the blur resolved into a huge tail of pearl-white Honkai flesh as it struck Wendy directly to the face. The winds around her softened the blow, but it was enough to push her back from her attempt to renew the attack.
A clawed foot the size of a small car sank into the earth next to Siegfried, and a vast shadow fell over the battlefield. His eyes flicked to where the animalistic bellow had come from and widened as he took in a field of shattered Honkai beasts. Some of them had been literally torn apart.
Then another foot came down a few metres to his left, razor sharp blue claws cutting apart dried earth with casual disdain. Siegfried looked up.
And up.
An angular head of dark blue and pearl loomed above him, four compressed diamonds of pale
flesh sweeping back around it like horns. Each was capped at its centre by a smaller diamond of cyan light. Similar light had gathered in the reservoir formed by the horns and the upper half of the head, where a human would expect eyes to be.
More pale blue light leaked from the dragon's mouth as it dropped open, a thunderous growl shaking the air as it glared at Wendy. A set of huge wings were curled in close to its body, tail thrashing like a cat ready to pounce. And that, together with the devastation wreaked where the third fighter of their group had been, was enough to work out who the beast was.
"Bella?" Siegfried's eyes widened again, trying to absorb the sudden shift from diminutive teenager to vast warbeast. Wendy had called her a failed Herald, and that had clearly meant something, it just was a bit more than he'd expected.
He came back to himself as terrible light gathered around Wendy's hands, her arms coming up to full extension, directing all of it at the creation of Honkai that had dared to set itself against her will.
"I am a Herrscher," she hissed, lightning crackling in the words. "You are a servant of Herrschers."
Thunder rumbled, matching Bella's nearly subsonic growl. Siegfried gathered himself into a ready position, feeding more power into Shamash. He could feel the strain of that process clearly now, the effort required to process and manipulate that much energy safely, and he didn't stop for an instant.
"You."
Brilliance speared from Wendy's hands, an awful light promising pain and death.
"Will."
Siegfried leapt, golden fire pouring from his blade.
"Bow."
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
I meant to post this and the next two chapters over the course of this month leading up to Christmas. I'm really, really sorry for my mind just going scatterbrained on y'all for that. So as recompense, I'll be posting the next three chapters over the next three days.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
Counterargument, Bella is a Herrschers sister.
Man, once the high wears off, Wendy will be an emotional wreck… if it wears off.
Garreon
Paldean Top Champion
- Location
- Mesagoza, Paldea
"I bow in sisterhood to only 1 Herrscher. And you, failed Monarch, are not her!"
Would you...care to place a wager on that, Wendy?
Happy holiday-of-your-choice to all!
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Bella: Not to you.
Interlude - Sirin/Einstein
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
Sound rumbled from far above, the vibrations transmitted down through earth and metal into a room decorated in gentle colours. There were several small sofas, plush chairs, and a soft carpeted floor that was almost comfortable enough to sleep on. None of that, however, was enough to get through to the small, purple haired figure hunched up on one of the sofas.
Sirin sat with both hands wrapped tightly around her knees, her eyelids flickering as she fought to escape everything she could feel beyond the bunker. Yet try as she might, she couldn't ignore what was being unleashed above her head, or the floods of Honkai energy that were powering it. She wanted her mom, Einstein, or her sister.
But Elysia had left yesterday and still wasn't back. Einstein had been able to give Sirin a hug when she got here, which had been nice. Except she'd had to go do…something with the bracelet Sirin's mom had given her. The one made of golden triangles, that made Sirin's teeth itch. And Bella…
Sirin muffled a whimper of pain as she thought about Bella. Her wonderful best friend, now older sister, had gone to try and protect her. Sirin had seen what happened the last time Bella had tried to do that. She could still feel the cold of the snow she'd been forced to move, and the awful, dead weight of her friend's corpses. She wasn't sure she could survive that agai-
"Sirin?" A bright, childish voice burst against the darkness of her thoughts. Sirin looked up to find Kiana there, the girl's blue eyes bright in the artificial lighting. The girl was only a few years younger than her, but maybe that was enough to not realise what was happening?
Or maybe, a traitorous little thought whispered, she'd never been tortured past the brink of sanity by adults who should've protected her.
Sirin shoved the thought away, but there were others there to replace it. Far more current fears that made even looking up at her maybe-friend hard. And, worst of all, Kiana saw it. The white-haired child crouched, looking up at Sirin with those brilliant blue eyes of hers, always so full of life and hope.
"Sirin?" She asked again, her young face twisting up in confusion. "What's wrong?" She rubbernecked around, looking for someone.
"She-" Sirin cut off with a gasp as a whip of phantom pain lashed across her cheek. She'd never told Bella about the link between them. She'd tried to forget about it, hoping it would never matter. In front of her, she saw Kiana look around again and call out to someone. One of the adults, probably. She still wasn't sure of them, even though mom said they were okay.
Sudden warmth surrounded her.
Her eyes snapped open, hands already moving through the motions to escape before her mind caught up with how it was Kiana hugging her. It happened in roughly the same moment as her arms tried to push against Kiana's hold, only to discover that they'd have a better chance against solid steel.
Kiana's arms were warmer, though.
"It's alright," the white-haired girl was telling her. She was so sincere it almost hurt. "It'll all be okay. My dad's out there, and our moms will be back soon, I know it. But you can't think all about it down here, that just makes you crazy."
Kiana pulled back, her blue eyes brimming with concern. "Seele's here. And Natasha, Himeko, the twins. You'll feel better if you come talk with us. I promise."
Sirin looked at her, struggling to find words. It was such a little thing to mean so much, to find herself cared for. Especially by another child. For a moment, it was almost enough. She started to gather herself, opened her mouth to speak, to say she'd come, that she'd try.
Thunder rumbled down through the earth and she couldn't stop herself from crying out this time. Molten agony seared across her belly, and she curled in on herself, her hands rushing to where her mind told her there was an injury even though she knew they'd find nothing. Kiana's eyes widened and she pulled her close again.
"It's Bella," Sirin managed to get out, the pain fading slowly. Her sister recovered incredibly quickly, but there was part of her…she shouldn't be thinking like that. "She didn't come down here, Kiana. She went out to help your dad. She's strong enough, she promised."
"You mean she's a Valkyrie?" Kiana asked. Sirin pulled back a little, and the younger girl let her. "But then why are you hurting?"
"Not exactly a Valkyrie," the young ex-Herrscher replied. "She protected me before, when I escaped some bad men. She's a lot fiercer than you'd think. But… but she's only so strong on her own. And I think I was helping before, and I don't know if I can do that this time. I can just," she hissed again, a lighter pain scorching across the top of her skull, "feel a little of it."
Kiana took a few seconds to say anything, almost long enough for Sirin to start fidgeting nervously. But the girl's reply, that surprised her.
"But you're doing everything you can, aren't you?" Kiana asked. Sirin winced, only for Kiana to try again. "Everything… everything that would be safe."
"I think so?" Sirin whispered. "But feeling it, even a little. She's my sister, Kiana. And she's fighting, she's suffering to protect us. Shouldn't I be brave enough to help her?"
Kiana considered that, her mouth dropping slightly open as she brought a finger up to pull on her bottom lip. "I think…" She cocked her head, chewing on her nail for a few seconds, before nodding. "I think you can only be as brave as you're brave enough to be, Sirin. And I don't know what you could do, but you're my friend, and I don't want to lose you. This is all scary enough."
"I thought you said you were sure our moms would get here in time?"
"I am, I am!" Kiana told her quickly. But this time, Sirin saw past the smile to the uncertainty beneath. The… it was almost fear.
Kiana's voice dropped to a near-whisper. "But it's still scary, Sirin. We never had things like this back at the floating islands. And I don't know how far away our moms went. Mama said Norway, but all I know is that there's lots of water before you get there."
"Is your friend alright?" One of the adults had finally made it over to them, a gentle looking woman with brown hair who smelled faintly of flowers. She crouched down, examining Sirin with concerned, dark red eyes. "I'm sorry, I should be asking you. Are you okay? You don't look so good."
"I'm…" Sirin stared at the woman. She looked real, she looked like she cared. But Sirin didn't know her. She looked at Kiana, trying to silently ask a question she couldn't put into words. The woman looked between them for a moment, then smiled kindly.
"It's okay," she said, her voice very gentle. As if she understood everything without a word. "Just let me know if you need anything, alright?"
"We will," Kiana promised. Why was she lying, Sirin wondered. Just for her? "Thanks, Ragna."
"You're a good girl, Kiana," the woman told her, winning a smile from the young Kaslana. "Take care of your friend." And she stepped away, moving quickly but without obvious haste to a larger group of children. Sirin recognised several of them, but there was something else she was more interested in.
"Why didn't you tell her?" She asked Kiana. She wasn't being suspicious, she wasn't! Kiana was nice, she was kind, and best of all she wasn't an adult she didn't know. But Sirin still wanted, still needed, to understand.
"'S not mine to tell," Kiana told her, reaching up to pat her on the head. "Mama said that I should treat your secrets like ours. Means not telling anyone, not unless you say it's okay. Just like it's okay for you to be afraid right now. Or to want to help your sister."
Sirin stared at the girl who'd come over to check on her, one of the handful of children she felt like she might be able to trust. And she came to a decision.
"There might be something I can do," she said slowly, stuttering a little with the words. She couldn't believe she was even considering this. She knew what she'd done, what that power had turned her into. She knew how lucky she'd been for her mom to save her the first time, and she was gone right now.
But- She hissed again in response to another lance of pain. But Bella was out there fighting. She was hurting. And there was, she swallowed, there was still more she could do! She flushed, realising Kiana was watching silently, waiting for her to go on.
"I'm not sure," she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to push back all the pain. "I don't know if I can do it on my own. Would you-"
"Of course." Her eyes flew open as Kiana answered before she could even finish the question. The young Kaslana smiled brightly, squeezing Sirin's hand. "You're my friend, and Bella is too. Of course I'll help."
Tears pricked at the corners of Sirin's vision, and she tried her best to smile back despite the painful lump in her throat. Kiana gave her another smile.
"What do you need me to do?"
There were days that Lieserl Einstein wondered what her life might have been, had she been born to a different legacy. She'd never asked to be exceptional. She'd never asked to have all the simple joys of youth sacrificed on the altar of genius. It had simply been who she was. Too smart to be a child. Not smart enough to realise what she was giving up until it was far too late.
It was foolish, really. And yet, wasn't that just human? She'd almost had something with Yang, once. Now she worked with near-frantic focus to find a tool that could protect a new, similar something she still couldn't quite believe was real.
"Any chance we missed something?" she asked the other person at the centre of the forward command post's barely-ordered chaos. There was a solid group of specialists present, each of them responsible for specific sections of the defence. Individual expressions, but all working under the same design.
Tesla's fingers were an intermittent blur, rapping out commands to the small nation's worth of drone constructs that the fiery-tempered woman had largely designed herself, injecting a steady tempo into the riot of battle around them. But a single glance at her colleague's face told her everything she needed to know.
"No," her old friend growled, metal creaking as her gauntleted hand compressed around one edge of the map table. "You found a miracle for us?"
Einstein shook her head. The golden fractals of the first Divine Key had expanded around her wrist, forming a diorama of possibilities the result of keyword searches of its vast archive of weaponry and other knowledge.
"Nothing that will be enough for this." She didn't need to raise a hand to take in the impossible fury of the conflict beyond the command post's shields.
Anti-Entropy mecha, recently upgraded to full automated functionality with technology wrested from the Archives, advanced to meet the Honkai head-on. Their steps were heavy, deliberate, and seemed to shake the very earth. Plasma cannons and railguns unleashed torrents of superheated metal and coruscating energy, sending brilliant streams of destruction into their targets.
The beasts roared in pain and fury as sections of carapace shattered, but it seemed to only drive them forward harder. Eerie, pulsating energies burned against the protections of the defence force, beams of crimson, azure and violet lashing out to intersect the searing trails of railgun shots.
Aerial drones danced through the chaos, duelling with clusters of Templars and swarms of Seraph-class beasts. Their rapid-fire weapons formed a celestial fireworks display of laser and projectile fire, the detonations of missiles like short-lived novas blazing against the darkening sky.
The air shimmered with the ethereal play of colours, the countless weapons creating an otherworldly aurora that hung ominously over the battlefield. It was too much for any one person to look at it all, inundating her senses with sensory assaults of war.
And yet, despite the awe-inspiring display of power, Lieserl couldn't help but feel a growing unease. Elysium's defences, formidable as they were, were slowly being pushed back. It wasn't happening everywhere, not yet, but it was like watching water carve through stone. Both geniuses could see it happening, could see it was inevitable, and neither of them knew how to stop it.
And, of course, that was only part of the problem. The rest of it, perhaps most of it even, was the duel at the eastern tip of Elysium's defences between a vengeful Herrscher of impossible strength and a Knight of Shichksal. If Siegfried fell, nothing would be able to save them.
The Archives could tell her so much, give her so much, but none of it was enough. It could build weapons, amazing weapons, but Einstein had already tried that. They helped, they might be able to slow things down, but none of it was enough to fight even a normal Herrscher. Let alone what Wendy had somehow become. From this close, the finely tuned sensors of Elysium could feel the beat of two cores woven together radiating out from the girl.
No single weapon of the Previous Era could face that and win. If Einstein was a fighter, and she'd had the hundreds of years that Otto Apocalypse had had to learn to wield the Divine Keys held within, then maybe she could've held the crazed Wendy back. As things actually were, it wasn't worth even thinking about.
"Einstein?" Tesla said, her words clipped. "Stop looking for weapons. Stop looking for something direct."
"And how will that help?" The bluette didn't quite snap, but it was a close thing. "We need something to change the game, Tesla."
"Then go looking for how the Previous Era actually won. It wasn't weapons born of metal or Soulium." Tesla flicked a box around a cluster of low-flying Seraphs and a flurry of missiles scorched out under the thundery sky, their warheads exploding in dazzling bursts of fiery annihilation. "It was their champions. We know that Theresa is like one, and Elysia told us that the Kaslana bloodline was founded by the strongest of them all."
The mechanist swiped the air, unleashing another flight of aerial assault drones. "See what it has to say about them!"
An enormous roar came from the direction of the ongoing duel, and Einstein felt her heart freeze again. A tap of a button brought up the drone footage of the battle, even as her other hand started swiftly tapping in new queries. And as the image cleared, she saw what she'd feared. Bella, in the dracoform that the scientist had seen her take only a handful of times since Siberia, standing protectively over Siegfried.
Wendy was screaming something into the wind, but the audio sensors couldn't get a read on the words, even as a terrifying light surged into the air around the Herrscher's hands. Wendy's eyes blazed with a wild fury, glaring hate at Sirin's freed Herald, and the light in her hands lashed out in furious chastisement.
She almost missed Siegfried's leap. Bella roared in challenge, her mouth opening wide, and spat a bolt of silver lightning back into the radiant spear of a Herrscher's fury. It didn't, it couldn't, stop the attack. But it slowed it just enough.
The Cleaver of Shamash, its blade engulfed in red-gold flames, tore through that deadly blast of power in a downward slash that put every piece of momentum and power Siegfried had into the blow. And it was enough. Perhaps only just, but enough.
Wendy blurred forward, the matter of her body transmuting to leaping energy in a way that the rational part of Liseriel's mind insisted just shouldn't be possible. The air around the sudden lightning bolt shook hard enough for her to feel the shockwave against her skin, crashing thunder audible at the command post, even through the din of battle.
The sheer volume at close range was a weapon in itself, it seemed, the sudden press of shuddering air dragging at Elysium's defenders. For her part, Wendy was a blur of flashing claws, each one the touch of a storm god's fury. She dug a long furrow down Bella's flank, parting the upper layers of the girl-Herald's armoured flesh in crackling sprays of midnight ichor, but was denied her followup by Siegfried.
How the Knight knew where to place himself to do that she'd never understand. Instinct and skill, maybe, but the scientist that was most of her existence pointed out that there had to be an element of randomness to it. Getting it right that perfectly didn't make sense, but it didn't seem to stop him from doing it.
Wendy darted away from the defensive swipe of Shamash, reforming just enough to summon a curtain of aerokinetic blades that fell upon her opponents in a hail of jagged rain. Siegfried spun Shamash up above his head, fire leaping to form a shield against the assault. Bella roared and snapped her wings out, unleashing a minor gale that blunted the weapons enough to glance harmlessly off of her chitin.
It bought them both the space to act when Wendy blurred back into reality, lightning sheeting from her steps to crash against Siegfried right as the Knight was bringing Shamash back to guard. He staggered under the torrent of electricity, but swung all the same, only for the blade to be turned aside. It should have hit her, forcing her back into an earth-shaking hammerblow from one of Bella's clawed feet.
Instead the blow bent away from the Herrscher, and Wendy stepped in closer, ducking beneath a shift in the weapon's angle that would've brained her with the pommel. And Einstein forced herself to look away, trusting that the two fighters would overcome. It was hard to do, all the more for how young Bella truly was. But watching wouldn't help.
She turned back to the results of her newest search, tossing some of the initial files aside with careless swipes of her fingers. She'd already read the files on the early ICHOR and MANTIS development that had, with some of the more complex files on MANTIS development, been needed to help her unravel the Gleipnir restrictions on Theresa. Except there was more data there, reams of it, all organised in a structure that was too idiosyncratic to be the work of anything but a genius. A genius, or possibly a madman.
She had to narrow it down. Another search, restricting the current data to anything related to the Kaslana name. She skimmed across flaring warnings, classified headers that meant nothing with the world that had created them fifty thousand years dead. There were skill and rating assessments, developmental tests, surgical results and…
Something caught her eye. A link on one of the files, almost missed in her haste. She knew what Mantis were, the basic outline of how the Previous Era had created them, though she wasn't exactly confident about the idea of manufacturing ICHOR just yet. The link had been in a section on that process, but it wasn't an acronym she recognised.
A shadow fell across the command post in a whine of servos and Einstein's gaze snapped up, scanning for potential threats. This wasn't one. Tesla had brought up her gauntleted hand, using it to direct one of the railgun batteries near the command post. The redhead lined it up, targeting a group of Chariot-class beasts that had almost managed to win free of the first line of mecha. Reserves were en route, but they weren't going to get there in time unless something changed.
A low, resonating hum filled the air as the railgun battery came to full charge, their capacitors whirring with energy drawn relentlessly from the reactors buried deep beneath Elysium. Colossal barrels, each as wide as a tree trunk, gleamed in the flickering illumination of the battlefield as they locked into place. And then they fired.
The barrels expelled a blinding arc of electricity, each one the touch of a godly finger, and a volley of tungsten slugs spat forth. They crossed the space between target and launch point as energy states, leaving comet-like streaks in the quailing air. An eruption of white-hot plasma and molten metal tore through several unfortunate mecha and engulfed the stubbornly resilient Chariots.
Nothing remained.
Tesla muttered something under her breath as the slightly late reserves slotted into the gap, their metal feet crunching through glass and debris. That was the only pause she gave herself. A moment later she was casting more commands out across the map. Einstein left her to it, turning her focus back to the data in front of her. She touched the link and a new file opened.
"So that's what AHR stands for," she murmured, lips firming into a focused line.
She couldn't be a fighter in the same way that Tesla was, but in this she could still be a warrior in the fight to defend her home. Maybe this would be a way to tip the scales in the favour of Elysium's survival.
"Let's see what you mean."
Sirin sat with both hands wrapped tightly around her knees, her eyelids flickering as she fought to escape everything she could feel beyond the bunker. Yet try as she might, she couldn't ignore what was being unleashed above her head, or the floods of Honkai energy that were powering it. She wanted her mom, Einstein, or her sister.
But Elysia had left yesterday and still wasn't back. Einstein had been able to give Sirin a hug when she got here, which had been nice. Except she'd had to go do…something with the bracelet Sirin's mom had given her. The one made of golden triangles, that made Sirin's teeth itch. And Bella…
Sirin muffled a whimper of pain as she thought about Bella. Her wonderful best friend, now older sister, had gone to try and protect her. Sirin had seen what happened the last time Bella had tried to do that. She could still feel the cold of the snow she'd been forced to move, and the awful, dead weight of her friend's corpses. She wasn't sure she could survive that agai-
"Sirin?" A bright, childish voice burst against the darkness of her thoughts. Sirin looked up to find Kiana there, the girl's blue eyes bright in the artificial lighting. The girl was only a few years younger than her, but maybe that was enough to not realise what was happening?
Or maybe, a traitorous little thought whispered, she'd never been tortured past the brink of sanity by adults who should've protected her.
Sirin shoved the thought away, but there were others there to replace it. Far more current fears that made even looking up at her maybe-friend hard. And, worst of all, Kiana saw it. The white-haired child crouched, looking up at Sirin with those brilliant blue eyes of hers, always so full of life and hope.
"Sirin?" She asked again, her young face twisting up in confusion. "What's wrong?" She rubbernecked around, looking for someone.
"She-" Sirin cut off with a gasp as a whip of phantom pain lashed across her cheek. She'd never told Bella about the link between them. She'd tried to forget about it, hoping it would never matter. In front of her, she saw Kiana look around again and call out to someone. One of the adults, probably. She still wasn't sure of them, even though mom said they were okay.
Sudden warmth surrounded her.
Her eyes snapped open, hands already moving through the motions to escape before her mind caught up with how it was Kiana hugging her. It happened in roughly the same moment as her arms tried to push against Kiana's hold, only to discover that they'd have a better chance against solid steel.
Kiana's arms were warmer, though.
"It's alright," the white-haired girl was telling her. She was so sincere it almost hurt. "It'll all be okay. My dad's out there, and our moms will be back soon, I know it. But you can't think all about it down here, that just makes you crazy."
Kiana pulled back, her blue eyes brimming with concern. "Seele's here. And Natasha, Himeko, the twins. You'll feel better if you come talk with us. I promise."
Sirin looked at her, struggling to find words. It was such a little thing to mean so much, to find herself cared for. Especially by another child. For a moment, it was almost enough. She started to gather herself, opened her mouth to speak, to say she'd come, that she'd try.
Thunder rumbled down through the earth and she couldn't stop herself from crying out this time. Molten agony seared across her belly, and she curled in on herself, her hands rushing to where her mind told her there was an injury even though she knew they'd find nothing. Kiana's eyes widened and she pulled her close again.
"It's Bella," Sirin managed to get out, the pain fading slowly. Her sister recovered incredibly quickly, but there was part of her…she shouldn't be thinking like that. "She didn't come down here, Kiana. She went out to help your dad. She's strong enough, she promised."
"You mean she's a Valkyrie?" Kiana asked. Sirin pulled back a little, and the younger girl let her. "But then why are you hurting?"
"Not exactly a Valkyrie," the young ex-Herrscher replied. "She protected me before, when I escaped some bad men. She's a lot fiercer than you'd think. But… but she's only so strong on her own. And I think I was helping before, and I don't know if I can do that this time. I can just," she hissed again, a lighter pain scorching across the top of her skull, "feel a little of it."
Kiana took a few seconds to say anything, almost long enough for Sirin to start fidgeting nervously. But the girl's reply, that surprised her.
"But you're doing everything you can, aren't you?" Kiana asked. Sirin winced, only for Kiana to try again. "Everything… everything that would be safe."
"I think so?" Sirin whispered. "But feeling it, even a little. She's my sister, Kiana. And she's fighting, she's suffering to protect us. Shouldn't I be brave enough to help her?"
Kiana considered that, her mouth dropping slightly open as she brought a finger up to pull on her bottom lip. "I think…" She cocked her head, chewing on her nail for a few seconds, before nodding. "I think you can only be as brave as you're brave enough to be, Sirin. And I don't know what you could do, but you're my friend, and I don't want to lose you. This is all scary enough."
"I thought you said you were sure our moms would get here in time?"
"I am, I am!" Kiana told her quickly. But this time, Sirin saw past the smile to the uncertainty beneath. The… it was almost fear.
Kiana's voice dropped to a near-whisper. "But it's still scary, Sirin. We never had things like this back at the floating islands. And I don't know how far away our moms went. Mama said Norway, but all I know is that there's lots of water before you get there."
"Is your friend alright?" One of the adults had finally made it over to them, a gentle looking woman with brown hair who smelled faintly of flowers. She crouched down, examining Sirin with concerned, dark red eyes. "I'm sorry, I should be asking you. Are you okay? You don't look so good."
"I'm…" Sirin stared at the woman. She looked real, she looked like she cared. But Sirin didn't know her. She looked at Kiana, trying to silently ask a question she couldn't put into words. The woman looked between them for a moment, then smiled kindly.
"It's okay," she said, her voice very gentle. As if she understood everything without a word. "Just let me know if you need anything, alright?"
"We will," Kiana promised. Why was she lying, Sirin wondered. Just for her? "Thanks, Ragna."
"You're a good girl, Kiana," the woman told her, winning a smile from the young Kaslana. "Take care of your friend." And she stepped away, moving quickly but without obvious haste to a larger group of children. Sirin recognised several of them, but there was something else she was more interested in.
"Why didn't you tell her?" She asked Kiana. She wasn't being suspicious, she wasn't! Kiana was nice, she was kind, and best of all she wasn't an adult she didn't know. But Sirin still wanted, still needed, to understand.
"'S not mine to tell," Kiana told her, reaching up to pat her on the head. "Mama said that I should treat your secrets like ours. Means not telling anyone, not unless you say it's okay. Just like it's okay for you to be afraid right now. Or to want to help your sister."
Sirin stared at the girl who'd come over to check on her, one of the handful of children she felt like she might be able to trust. And she came to a decision.
"There might be something I can do," she said slowly, stuttering a little with the words. She couldn't believe she was even considering this. She knew what she'd done, what that power had turned her into. She knew how lucky she'd been for her mom to save her the first time, and she was gone right now.
But- She hissed again in response to another lance of pain. But Bella was out there fighting. She was hurting. And there was, she swallowed, there was still more she could do! She flushed, realising Kiana was watching silently, waiting for her to go on.
"I'm not sure," she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to push back all the pain. "I don't know if I can do it on my own. Would you-"
"Of course." Her eyes flew open as Kiana answered before she could even finish the question. The young Kaslana smiled brightly, squeezing Sirin's hand. "You're my friend, and Bella is too. Of course I'll help."
Tears pricked at the corners of Sirin's vision, and she tried her best to smile back despite the painful lump in her throat. Kiana gave her another smile.
"What do you need me to do?"
There were days that Lieserl Einstein wondered what her life might have been, had she been born to a different legacy. She'd never asked to be exceptional. She'd never asked to have all the simple joys of youth sacrificed on the altar of genius. It had simply been who she was. Too smart to be a child. Not smart enough to realise what she was giving up until it was far too late.
It was foolish, really. And yet, wasn't that just human? She'd almost had something with Yang, once. Now she worked with near-frantic focus to find a tool that could protect a new, similar something she still couldn't quite believe was real.
"Any chance we missed something?" she asked the other person at the centre of the forward command post's barely-ordered chaos. There was a solid group of specialists present, each of them responsible for specific sections of the defence. Individual expressions, but all working under the same design.
Tesla's fingers were an intermittent blur, rapping out commands to the small nation's worth of drone constructs that the fiery-tempered woman had largely designed herself, injecting a steady tempo into the riot of battle around them. But a single glance at her colleague's face told her everything she needed to know.
"No," her old friend growled, metal creaking as her gauntleted hand compressed around one edge of the map table. "You found a miracle for us?"
Einstein shook her head. The golden fractals of the first Divine Key had expanded around her wrist, forming a diorama of possibilities the result of keyword searches of its vast archive of weaponry and other knowledge.
"Nothing that will be enough for this." She didn't need to raise a hand to take in the impossible fury of the conflict beyond the command post's shields.
Anti-Entropy mecha, recently upgraded to full automated functionality with technology wrested from the Archives, advanced to meet the Honkai head-on. Their steps were heavy, deliberate, and seemed to shake the very earth. Plasma cannons and railguns unleashed torrents of superheated metal and coruscating energy, sending brilliant streams of destruction into their targets.
The beasts roared in pain and fury as sections of carapace shattered, but it seemed to only drive them forward harder. Eerie, pulsating energies burned against the protections of the defence force, beams of crimson, azure and violet lashing out to intersect the searing trails of railgun shots.
Aerial drones danced through the chaos, duelling with clusters of Templars and swarms of Seraph-class beasts. Their rapid-fire weapons formed a celestial fireworks display of laser and projectile fire, the detonations of missiles like short-lived novas blazing against the darkening sky.
The air shimmered with the ethereal play of colours, the countless weapons creating an otherworldly aurora that hung ominously over the battlefield. It was too much for any one person to look at it all, inundating her senses with sensory assaults of war.
And yet, despite the awe-inspiring display of power, Lieserl couldn't help but feel a growing unease. Elysium's defences, formidable as they were, were slowly being pushed back. It wasn't happening everywhere, not yet, but it was like watching water carve through stone. Both geniuses could see it happening, could see it was inevitable, and neither of them knew how to stop it.
And, of course, that was only part of the problem. The rest of it, perhaps most of it even, was the duel at the eastern tip of Elysium's defences between a vengeful Herrscher of impossible strength and a Knight of Shichksal. If Siegfried fell, nothing would be able to save them.
The Archives could tell her so much, give her so much, but none of it was enough. It could build weapons, amazing weapons, but Einstein had already tried that. They helped, they might be able to slow things down, but none of it was enough to fight even a normal Herrscher. Let alone what Wendy had somehow become. From this close, the finely tuned sensors of Elysium could feel the beat of two cores woven together radiating out from the girl.
No single weapon of the Previous Era could face that and win. If Einstein was a fighter, and she'd had the hundreds of years that Otto Apocalypse had had to learn to wield the Divine Keys held within, then maybe she could've held the crazed Wendy back. As things actually were, it wasn't worth even thinking about.
"Einstein?" Tesla said, her words clipped. "Stop looking for weapons. Stop looking for something direct."
"And how will that help?" The bluette didn't quite snap, but it was a close thing. "We need something to change the game, Tesla."
"Then go looking for how the Previous Era actually won. It wasn't weapons born of metal or Soulium." Tesla flicked a box around a cluster of low-flying Seraphs and a flurry of missiles scorched out under the thundery sky, their warheads exploding in dazzling bursts of fiery annihilation. "It was their champions. We know that Theresa is like one, and Elysia told us that the Kaslana bloodline was founded by the strongest of them all."
The mechanist swiped the air, unleashing another flight of aerial assault drones. "See what it has to say about them!"
An enormous roar came from the direction of the ongoing duel, and Einstein felt her heart freeze again. A tap of a button brought up the drone footage of the battle, even as her other hand started swiftly tapping in new queries. And as the image cleared, she saw what she'd feared. Bella, in the dracoform that the scientist had seen her take only a handful of times since Siberia, standing protectively over Siegfried.
Wendy was screaming something into the wind, but the audio sensors couldn't get a read on the words, even as a terrifying light surged into the air around the Herrscher's hands. Wendy's eyes blazed with a wild fury, glaring hate at Sirin's freed Herald, and the light in her hands lashed out in furious chastisement.
She almost missed Siegfried's leap. Bella roared in challenge, her mouth opening wide, and spat a bolt of silver lightning back into the radiant spear of a Herrscher's fury. It didn't, it couldn't, stop the attack. But it slowed it just enough.
The Cleaver of Shamash, its blade engulfed in red-gold flames, tore through that deadly blast of power in a downward slash that put every piece of momentum and power Siegfried had into the blow. And it was enough. Perhaps only just, but enough.
Wendy blurred forward, the matter of her body transmuting to leaping energy in a way that the rational part of Liseriel's mind insisted just shouldn't be possible. The air around the sudden lightning bolt shook hard enough for her to feel the shockwave against her skin, crashing thunder audible at the command post, even through the din of battle.
The sheer volume at close range was a weapon in itself, it seemed, the sudden press of shuddering air dragging at Elysium's defenders. For her part, Wendy was a blur of flashing claws, each one the touch of a storm god's fury. She dug a long furrow down Bella's flank, parting the upper layers of the girl-Herald's armoured flesh in crackling sprays of midnight ichor, but was denied her followup by Siegfried.
How the Knight knew where to place himself to do that she'd never understand. Instinct and skill, maybe, but the scientist that was most of her existence pointed out that there had to be an element of randomness to it. Getting it right that perfectly didn't make sense, but it didn't seem to stop him from doing it.
Wendy darted away from the defensive swipe of Shamash, reforming just enough to summon a curtain of aerokinetic blades that fell upon her opponents in a hail of jagged rain. Siegfried spun Shamash up above his head, fire leaping to form a shield against the assault. Bella roared and snapped her wings out, unleashing a minor gale that blunted the weapons enough to glance harmlessly off of her chitin.
It bought them both the space to act when Wendy blurred back into reality, lightning sheeting from her steps to crash against Siegfried right as the Knight was bringing Shamash back to guard. He staggered under the torrent of electricity, but swung all the same, only for the blade to be turned aside. It should have hit her, forcing her back into an earth-shaking hammerblow from one of Bella's clawed feet.
Instead the blow bent away from the Herrscher, and Wendy stepped in closer, ducking beneath a shift in the weapon's angle that would've brained her with the pommel. And Einstein forced herself to look away, trusting that the two fighters would overcome. It was hard to do, all the more for how young Bella truly was. But watching wouldn't help.
She turned back to the results of her newest search, tossing some of the initial files aside with careless swipes of her fingers. She'd already read the files on the early ICHOR and MANTIS development that had, with some of the more complex files on MANTIS development, been needed to help her unravel the Gleipnir restrictions on Theresa. Except there was more data there, reams of it, all organised in a structure that was too idiosyncratic to be the work of anything but a genius. A genius, or possibly a madman.
She had to narrow it down. Another search, restricting the current data to anything related to the Kaslana name. She skimmed across flaring warnings, classified headers that meant nothing with the world that had created them fifty thousand years dead. There were skill and rating assessments, developmental tests, surgical results and…
Something caught her eye. A link on one of the files, almost missed in her haste. She knew what Mantis were, the basic outline of how the Previous Era had created them, though she wasn't exactly confident about the idea of manufacturing ICHOR just yet. The link had been in a section on that process, but it wasn't an acronym she recognised.
A shadow fell across the command post in a whine of servos and Einstein's gaze snapped up, scanning for potential threats. This wasn't one. Tesla had brought up her gauntleted hand, using it to direct one of the railgun batteries near the command post. The redhead lined it up, targeting a group of Chariot-class beasts that had almost managed to win free of the first line of mecha. Reserves were en route, but they weren't going to get there in time unless something changed.
A low, resonating hum filled the air as the railgun battery came to full charge, their capacitors whirring with energy drawn relentlessly from the reactors buried deep beneath Elysium. Colossal barrels, each as wide as a tree trunk, gleamed in the flickering illumination of the battlefield as they locked into place. And then they fired.
The barrels expelled a blinding arc of electricity, each one the touch of a godly finger, and a volley of tungsten slugs spat forth. They crossed the space between target and launch point as energy states, leaving comet-like streaks in the quailing air. An eruption of white-hot plasma and molten metal tore through several unfortunate mecha and engulfed the stubbornly resilient Chariots.
Nothing remained.
Tesla muttered something under her breath as the slightly late reserves slotted into the gap, their metal feet crunching through glass and debris. That was the only pause she gave herself. A moment later she was casting more commands out across the map. Einstein left her to it, turning her focus back to the data in front of her. She touched the link and a new file opened.
"So that's what AHR stands for," she murmured, lips firming into a focused line.
She couldn't be a fighter in the same way that Tesla was, but in this she could still be a warrior in the fight to defend her home. Maybe this would be a way to tip the scales in the favour of Elysium's survival.
"Let's see what you mean."
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Blade-vs-Beam clash. A classic that never gets old!
Interlude - Elysium 3
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
The air burned cold around them. Walls of air mightier than the greatest of cyclones howled a symphony of fury, ripping away even the faintest imagining of warmth. In that space, nothing should have been able to burn, let alone breathe. And yet the man who had walked out to give everything for the home he loved still stood, draped in the livery of fire.
Both hands still held the great blade of his house, the source of the flames that refused to die even when the winds should have snuffed them out. His white teeth were speckled with blood as he bared them in smiling defiance, and a fire brighter than any carmine shade reflected in the unflinching blue of his eyes.
Beside him loomed a great dragon of white, black and icy blue. Her once smooth skin was scorched in places, ripped and torn by gnawing ice and burning claws. Yet she still stood, her wings pulled in tight against her back, a hunter ready to spring into motion at a moment's notice.
And above, at the heart of the storm of gale winds, blazed a figure smaller than either of those below. She was cloaked in a brilliance so harsh that it could only be called hateful, rippling patterns of spotlight white across an endless array of green, and where her hands moved, the storm answered.
How long had it been now, the man called Siegfried Kaslana wondered, since their shared opponent had sealed away the sky? She'd expected this frigid place to be their tomb, or at least his, but clearly hadn't reckoned with the power of Shamash. The blade's fire had covered him completely in the same instant that should have frozen the water in his eyes solid, once again protecting him so that he could strike back.
The problem was, he was running out of options to do that. For all the raw power of Shamash, and his skill in wielding the ancient weapon, it was still limited. Divine Keys had limits just as their wielders did, and the Herrscher who had once been Wendy Barbatos was pushing against both.
The thoughts were buried beneath the steady focus of truly lethal battle, body moving through strikes and counters without any real conscious effort, leaving his mind free. And even with that reducing his reaction times even further, there were still moments where-
Bella surged past him, the girl-dragon taking a crackling stream of lightning on her smooth scales. Most of the burst of lethal energy splashed off of the pale armour, but it left a burn all the same. She reared up with her wings spread wide, lifting her head until it was almost level with the burning presence of their shared enemy. Another bolt of green-white flashed from the Herrscher of Storms, only for Bella to sway her head bonelessly to one side.
Pale sapphire radiance gathered between the dragon's jaws, and for a moment the world stilled as she sucked in breath and energy from all around. Siegfried lunged forward, booted feet pounding up the incline of her tail and back. More pale light gathered around the pale segments along her back, radiating patterns of energy that thrummed around his footsteps.
Bella roared, breaking the silence of the whirling cyclone with the might of vast lungs, and spat forth a bolt of flickering silver-blue.
Wendy flicked two fingers.
The bolt crashed against a pane of chained lightning, a triangular shield formed in an instant to protect the mistress of the storm. Light exploded from the meeting of energy, overpowering in its intensity, a blinding flash that outlined Bella's shadow in stark black on the ice below. A shadow that protected Siegfried from sudden blindness in the moments it took for him to crest the hill of the dragon's neck.
Fire condensed around his boots as he took the final steps of his charge, exploding into short-lived rockets as he leapt for the Herrscher of Storms. For a moment, he thought he'd hit the shield she'd summoned, but a last surge of flame carried him past it, Shamash drawn in tight against him to hide the sound of the blade cutting the air.
Wendy was still armoured behind her shield, two fingers extended negligently at the display of power from Sirin's older sister. Bella was flagging, he knew that, but he also hadn't believed her to ever have this much in her. And yet, had he ever believed he had this much in his own bones?
Not until his daughter had been in the line of fire. Bella must feel the same for her younger sister.
Blue light was starting to leak past the shield of lightning Wendy had conjured, yet he could also hear something within the roar her dragon-form had unleashed. The scream of a desperate girl, offering up everything she'd ever been to protect everything that she loved.
How could he do anything less?
He extended a hand and fire blossomed there, adjusting his motion into a spin. Shamash snapped out, and the whistle of the blade was entirely swallowed by the scream of fire unleashed.
It tore through the freezing air, flashing entire banks of ice straight to steam that was consumed by the ferocious hunger of the Key of Destruction. He hissed in pain as that hunger surged through him too, cutting deeper than ever before, and none of it mattered. Red-gold flame erupted from his shoulders, blackening his coat as they spread into vast, tattered wings, anchoring him as he swung.
He was close enough to see Wendy's eyes widen behind through the burning light of her protections. Close enough to see her free hand blur upwards, trying to catch the blow before it could fall.
No, he thought serenely, his blade erupting into something far more than matter.
I don't think so.
Shamash slashed down, burning through the shield Wendy had attempted to raise with contemptuous ease. The ancient sword almost faltered against the light of her armour, but something in the weight kept pulling, forcing the blow through. And every shred of flame around them poured down the central fuller, striking Herrscher skin full on.
The triangular shield she'd summoned against Bella's attack shattered in a scream of pain, and for a moment icy blue light and red-gold fire mixed around the Herrscher's body. The white-green of her shields had retracted to her skin in instants, splintering beneath the joined everything of a father and a herald.
Wendy screamed as those defences gave way, a primal sound of rage denied. And then she was gone from Siegfried's eyes, a blast of light sending her tumbling towards the ground she'd so scorned.
Fire trailed in her wake as she fell, and this time there was nothing to stop them spreading into the frozen water and winds that carried it. The walls of the cyclone erupted into warmth, washing away the curtains of ice they'd spread in less than seconds. They pulsed once, the gentle red and gold spinning into brilliant white.
Moments later, they burnt away. Wendy, at the centre of a personal ball of similar fire, wasn't so lucky. She hit the ground as the flames around her turned white, and they didn't dissipate. Force and fury lashed out in all directions instead, its sheer strength slamming Bella to the ground in a trail of glimmering light. Siegfried, from above, had just enough time to tuck himself into a ball before it hit.
The world spun sideways as he was launched upwards, the last vestiges of the fire around him vanishing in the wash of pressure. He felt himself flying up and slightly sideways, and then a long fall. He tried to twist his body into a better position for that, but there was only so much it could do.
Then he hit the ground and his world went red, to black, and then away for a while.
When it returned, an all-encompassing pain went with it.
"Mister Siegfried?" A girl's voice asked, painfully young to his ears. "Are you alright?"
His vision swam for a few moments as he blinked open his eyes. A silver haired girl was staring down at him, her eyes filled with exhausted terror. He forced himself to think, cudgeling his agonised brain into focus. His clothes were scorched, and the snow around him had boiled away into steam in the time since he'd been lying there.
Shamash was still in his hands, the fire of the weapon considerably faded. It was only barely maintaining its bladed form, he thought. And he felt utterly exhausted, in a way not even the brutal gauntlet Otto had laid down before him to reach Cecilia could match.
"Why…" he whispered through cracked lips. The girl's face brightened immediately.
"Oh thank goodness," she said. She scooped up some snow and offered it to him in her cupped hands. It wasn't a glass of water, but it would do. He took a bite of it, and sighed in thanks. "I'm not sure how long she'll be busy."
"Wh-" Siegfried began to ask, looking around at the broken ground around them. He came to a sudden halt as his gaze fell on the spherical shell of gentle flame in a nearby crater much like his own. Green light blazed from cracks in the shell, and he somehow knew that whatever was in there wasn't going to be kind when it got out.
And his damn brain just wasn't putting it all together. What was he missing?
"Your name," he said haltingly. "It's…Bella, right?"
"Oh no," she muttered under her breath. But she nodded quickly. "Yes. Bella. I thought you might be dead, and-"
"And we are running out of time," another voice, touched by the gentle hiss of a transmission, said. Looking towards the source revealed a hovering spherical drone in dark blue, a dark projective screen on the front.
"Short version," the woman's voice continued. "My name is Einstein. You're fighting a dual-Herrscher and just almost died trying to put her down. It only trapped her and she's breaking out. Bella was helping you, she was a dragon, now she isn't one. We need more time for Welt and Elysia to arrive, or Elysium is dead and your daughter along with it."
The drone turned to the girl next to him. "Bella, can you please withdraw now? You're clearly hurt, and your mother wouldn't want you to injure yourself further. If nothing else, you can be a final line of defence for your sister."
Bella growled something, clearly unhappy, but nodded.
"What about Mr Kaslana?"
"I have a way that might equalise things," the voice – Einstein – said. Thoughts and memories bashed together in Siegfried's head as he spoke, things coming back together. "But I don't think it'll be safe for you here. Please, go."
Bella ducked her head, tears glistening on her cheeks. "I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. Good luck."
"You too," Siegfried said absently. It was all coming back into focus. "Thank you."
She ducked her head again, then took off at a dead sprint.
"Siegfried," Einstein said through her drone. "I found something that might be able to help you, but I have to warn you, it's a coinflip if it works or kills you. And I can't say what the long-term consequences might be. I un-"
"Will it let me protect Kiana?" He asked. The last pieces of the puzzle had snapped into place.
There was a moment of silence. Then the drone spoke again, almost reluctant. "Yes."
"What do I need to do?"
"Take this." The drone, he remembered it being called Eins, extended a hypodermic from one of its clamshell arms. "And hold onto what you fight for, more than anything."
Two smiling faces flashed across his mind, a woman and a young girl, both with white hair and blue eyes. He held the memories there for a moment, engraving every piece of them, then nodded.
"I'm ready."
For my daughter, my dearest ones, I'll do anything.
He barely felt the needle.
The world changing, however, was a little hard to miss. Suddenly, he was somewhere else, a vast icy plain dominated by a great floating pillar of dark stone, dimly lit by the corona of an eclipsed star. More pillars of rock surrounded the plain, yet none of them could match the one at the centre. That one had split into a pair of smooth towers, only for the centre of it to have been pierced by another formation of jaggedly shaped stone.
It put him strangely in mind of a dagger through the heart, but he had little time to consider it, as the last part of his surroundings flowed into being and registered.
He wasn't alone.
Another man stood there on the plain, between him and the floating pillar at the heart of the space. His silver-white hair was shorter than Siegfried's, and his face looked younger too, except for dreadful age to his eyes. He wore a dark bodysuit under a long blue jacket trimmed with yellow, its long mantle of a collar raised.
Shamash's unleashed form of Judgement was held almost casually in one hand, the tip of the godkiller sunk into the ice at his feet. The flames didn't even touch him. And all of it, every piece of the image, seemed to call out to Siegfried.
The Kaslana Knight stared, and in doing so almost missed it when the man moved. The motion wasn't an aggressive one, but it somehow allowed the hauntingly familiar figure to cross the space between them in a single step. Siegfried raised a hand, to stop or welcome him he was never sure, and found his wrist seized by the stranger's free hand in a grip that was simply beyond unyielding.
"What are y-"
"You've finally found me," the figure said. Even his voice felt familiar. "My progeny."
"I, no," Siegfried shook his head. "It doesn't matter. I don't have much time. I need-"
"I know that look in your eyes," the figure said. It was like he hadn't spoken. "You have come here for a single reason; you are facing an enemy that is beyond you. So listen well, and I shall tell you the truth of our lineage."
The man raised the unleashed Shamash into a guard, his eyes boring into Siegfried's the entire time. Then he lunged forward, a single thrusting motion led by the razor-sharp blade of the weapon of all Kaslanas.
Siegfried cried out in shock and pain as the weapon sliced into and out the other side of his chest, burning with a heat he'd never been able to truly imagine. And yet…somehow it didn't hurt as it should.
"There are dormant Honkai genes within our Kaslana genome," the figure, the Kaslana, before him continued calmly. As if he hadn't just stabbed him in the chest, or wasn't pushing Shamash deeper into the wound. "That can be activated to awaken powers in every scion of our line."
Siegfried blinked as the crossguard of the cleaver vanished in a burst of flame, flowing into his chest along with, he realised, the rest of the weapon. A fire lit at the centre of his chest, burning away the world as it filled with the shadow of a great beast of ice and jagged horns.
"Those powers will make you more than human."
In the world outside his vision, a pale-faced bluette input a sequence on her tablet. A drone on the other side of a battle from her extended another hypodermic, this one full of a shimmering blue liquid, and drove it into the same vein it had used moments before.
"Even the Herrschers will be no match against you."
Blackness filled his vision, and he felt something surge into his blood, an impossible heat that grew and grew as he felt his skin shift and change around it. And the stranger's voice resounded in his ears through it all, impossibly clear.
"Do not forget our Oath, young progeny."
Siegfried felt his lips move without conscious input, reciting words.
Every Kaslana bold
Must live by their oath.
Purge the vile Honkai
And smash the False Gods.
Your sires sleep in the fields
As humanity's brave shields.
By the Judgement of Shamash
Kaslanas die and never yield.
Back in reality, blue light seared from the Kaslana scion's eyes, his mouth open in a silent scream. Eins hovered back from the shifting man, Einstein unwilling to risk her creation as she watched the shift take place. She'd read a great deal about MANTIS soldiers even before acquiring the Void Archives. Now she knew more.
Siegfried was, at her hands, beginning the first stage of an Active Honkai Reaction. His arms tore through the folds of his greatcoat, pale blue Honkai flesh having entirely replaced human skin below the elbow. His fingers had shifted into raking claws, but should still be able to hold a sword, and his body temperature had plummeted.
The formula Einstein had given him was different to the injectors and activators she'd been able to identify among the inventory from the Salt Lake Base. A more advanced one, by all accounts, refined from something mass produced into an artisanal creation keyed specifically for the Kaslana bloodline. Perhaps even the very first of them.
Now it was running wild, transforming Siegfried into an engine of war against the Honkai such that the world hadn't seen in millennia. The only question she had was simple:
Would it be enough?
A howling scream echoed across the burning valley as Wendy tore at the cage of brilliant fire around her. Flame was a terrible enemy for static energy, endlessly moving, always flowing. But she was born of conquest and desire, the two cycling endlessly within the girl's mind, pushing her ever down the self-destructive path a whisper had set her on when it burned the Overseer out of her mind.
Fingers alight with something beyond lightning tore through the final layer of the shell, back into the free air. The moment it touched her hands it bent to her will, howling into the space around her to rupture the final pieces of structure left in the hateful cage. She rose to her feet as the last vestiges of flame were snuffed out, rising past the ground in a shimmer of pale green sparks that condensed into a more solid armour this time.
Her mistake had been in extending the defence beyond her skin, a cold part of her mind considered. The rest was focused on a young girl sprinting away from the battle, silver hair stretching out behind her. All too slowly to the Herrscher. Arcs of tightly controlled lightning condensed out of the air around her right hand, forming a chimeric wreath as her fingers rose to point at the fleeing girl.
Then her sight was cut off by fire, and she spun in fury towards its source. That man. That terrible, cheating beast of a man was standing again. Her face twisted in fury, even as her new armour shed the blast of flame without complaint.
"Insect!" She hissed. She swung her arm around, and sent the bolt of lightning she'd meant for the failed, heretical Herald scorching down on him instead. That would delay him for a while, whilst she gathered the winds agai-
Siegfried roared, and met the bolt with the tip of Shamash. Yet instead of as before, where he'd parried those bolts, he followed the instincts coursing through him and met it head on. Flame licked out at the lightning, and the weapon started to pulse with light, returning from the brink of exhaustion.
Energy reserves now at thirty percent.
He saw the eyes of his foe, the enemy he must purge for the world, widen in disbelief or fear as Shamash drank of her power. The growling fury in his chest hoped it was fear. Then he was moving forward, Shamash drinking from the Honkai energy all around them, channelling through his body in a way that seemed impossibly easy. He'd been at his limit just moments ago, and now he was simply…not.
Golden fire surged from his weapon's edges, the flames of Shamash unleashed into the world a second time this day. They struck wind and shattered through it, slowing only slightly. But this time, Wendy didn't just expect her defences to work. She danced aside from the strike, spiking his side with lances of searing light that…should have hurt.
Instead, they scattered on his skin like they had from Bella's scales, and he swung towards her, more fire billowing from Shamash. Again the wind rose, lightning sheeting through it this time, and again the blade was undeterred until the girl before him blurred aside on wings of the storm. He was ready this time, and reversed the blow, a wave of golden flame engulfing his enemy.
Reserves at forty percent.
Then he lunged, blindingly fast, the air itself screaming as Shamash judged it unworthy to restrain its motion. He felt it hit something, but there was no scream like he'd expected. Instead lightning answered, led by blades of air so sharp that they cut even his enhanced skin, opening him to the scouring energy.
A lazy motion angled Shamash into line with the lion's share of the tiny bolts, and the fire blazed higher in reply. An enhanced kick sent him flying back, no blood to sate his hungry blade this time, but that only drove him back to his feet faster.
Wendy hissed in anger as the insect flew back from her kick. He was glutting himself on her power, like a foul mosquito. She yearned to rise and strike him down from above, but that had been a lesson well learned. And this new monster he'd become, Honkai flesh replacing skin, that called for something else.
So she set herself on a simple impossibility of a solution. Fire, like wind, flowed. And part of her remembered something Otto had said, that her power, the first power he had tried to steal for her, was born of a dominion over all that flowed. All she had to do was master it.
Reserves now at sixty percent.
Perhaps that would be worth a risk.
Siegfried launched himself forward, searching for his target, energy still rippling into the weapon in his hands. This time, Wendy went to meet him. Lightning and air wove shimmering gauntlets of green and silver around her hands, and she caught the Key of Destruction in them where her shield had fallen before.
She met the eyes of man before her, seeing through him, seeing the beast driving him. Hate, resolution…was there something more? She didn't care. She tore at the fire around his weapon, forcing her will upon it, feeling it seethe and fight against her rightful demands. How dare it!
Herrscher core energy detected. Initiate ambient charging…
Maybe it was a matter of fire away from the weapon? Divine Keys were born of the corpses of her kind, dead to a civilisation that had dared to think they could win, and retained a measure of their mastery. But they lacked the same perfection as her own cores, of that she was certain. That was her edge.
Energy reserves now at one hundred percent.
She focused on the fire dripping from the blade instead, calling at it through the wind. It was a struggle, especially distracted as she was right now. But the strength of her will wove energy from the air to the fire successfully, untouched by the mastery of the Key of Destruction. Some of it burnt away, misjudged for the new medium. But it worked.
Charging overdrive reserves…
Siegfried's lip curled to show a predator's canines as Shamash started to shift, the blade lengthening and tapering into a slender point. A double-level hilt extended to cover his hands, protecting them from the fire engulfing everything above it.
One hundred fifty percent.
The flames ripped out, forcing Wendy back from the sword, but some of them went with her this time. He never saw it, the same display of energy that she'd begun and tapped hiding the defection from his eyes. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the weapon transform, and lightning crackled behind them.
Power limits removed.
Siegfried set his feet as the rippling fire cleared, bringing the weapon to a straight salute as it finished changing. Behind his eyes, two faces shone from the depths of memory, the very same ones that he'd committed there before Einstein had injected him.
"Judgement of Shamash, unleash your full fury!"
The blade that had sundered dozens of his bloodline, leaving nothing but charred corpses behind, took shape. And he welcomed it. This was the anything he'd sworn to do, to shield the weak. And protect his dearest ones.
Judgement of Shamash is ready.
The words in a language he'd never known burned across his thoughts, their emotionless tone the completion of a forgotten legacy. He felt the weight settle over him, the knowledge his next swing might well be his last, understood at a level beyond words. A memory seared through time and tradition, of all that a Kaslana would sacrifice for.
Behind him, Elysium burned, but it also held. Science and sacrifice would win the day, so long as Wendy couldn't join the battle. His daughter would live, and he trusted in his wife to survive to protect her. If this was his sacrifice, it was a good one.
He raised the weapon he instinctively recognised as the Might of An-Utu. He couldn't access the weapon's full power, he wasn't far enough down the path of his bloodline for that. But he could come close enough, for this moment. Fire without limit erupted from the weapon bane to Honkai, a slayer of gods and monsters.
Siegfried eyes burned gold as he held up his weapon, a beacon of defiant power against a Herrscher's will. The air around him literally steamed as the cold of his skin was converted to moisture that instantly boiled away in the heat of his gathering blow.
Then he swung.
The world bleached to white, air quivering in anticipation of cataclysm, a strike that would sunder the clouds and cast down the false goddess.
Except…that wasn't quite what happened.
Beyond the firestorm, Wendy reached out a hand to the pillar of radiant flame climbing towards the heavens. It was a beckoning gesture, but also an imperious one; a Queen's demand for her subject to come to heel. Wind gathered there eagerly, quick to answer her summons. Lightning followed, a rippling coruscation of flickering colours, though most present among them was her own deep green.
Fire…fire was trickier. And this fire was even more so. Born of a dead shard of power to her own, given fully to the work of destruction, it could use even the energy of the Honkai as tinder when roused as it was now.
Yet to set anything new aflame, the fire would have to reach it, moving through space as fire did through air and matter. It would have to, well, flow. And that, that was her domain. The fire that had scoured cities in past ages surged towards the air, curling and eager to remake its memories of ancient devastation. All it needed was the touch of air, to unleash its fury.
But none was there to greet it. Wendy shuddered in place, sweat beading her brow as she forced the space around the fire to be empty of anything that it could touch. The fire raged and rushed outwards in search of fuel, sinking hungry claws into the webworks of energy she'd extended to sweep away the air. Right into the trap she'd set for it.
The energy extended to exert her power was still that - her power. If the flames of Shamash were going to make it burn, they had to flow into its patterns. And those patterns that had been built to control what they touched. It wasn't quite correct, but it wasn't wrong either. It gave her enough to work with, and work she did.
The pillar of ruin shuddered, splitting apart at the forefront into endless lines, filling in an invisible, slender webwork of energy that led back to Wendy's extended hand. Siegfried didn't see that, but the man felt something in the feel of his swing shift as it happened. Something was wrong. The strike wasn't detonating.
Impossible heat scorched Wendy's skin as the first tendrils of fire reached her through the webwork. Her hand bubbled horribly as the out layers of her changed flesh struggled to absorb the energy, and her palm started to blacken. Neither that, nor the pain of it, could hold back the mad smile stretching across her face.
Sections of the webwork tore apart as the fire overcame their fragile walls, roaring back into the air in places. But they were only fractions of the column's full strength, the rest pouring rapidly into the web she'd laid all around it. She screamed into the pain, her blackening hand contorted into a grasping claw, but it wasn't without purpose. Somewhere in the depths of the web she'd woven, the fire answered.
And that was all she'd needed.
Almost all of her experience since becoming something more than a Valkyrie had involved her power over air as a medium which flowed. Otto had told her about the potential she held, the mastery she could wield in the future. Never pushing, of course, but preparing her. And she'd needed every shred of control that painful, humiliating experience had given her to get this far.
But that wasn't the only power she held now. There was Wind, Desire, the mastery of flows, as there had been for almost a month now. And now too, there was Lightning. Conquest.
Neither of her Cores on their own could have done this. Even both together would have been struck down by the original wielder of Shamash. But Siegfried Kaslana was not his ancestor. Not as he had been then, at the end of the Previous Era, and even less than the ancient Flamechaser was now.
In another future, Siegfried would have struck down the overloading Core of the Void in a single blow. The same blow, in fact, that he'd gathered here and now.
That blow, however, would have been levelled against a target incapable of defending itself. And had only overcome a single Core. Now it faced two, under the control of a mind that had been trained for battle for years. And who understood at least a little of what the weapon facing her could do.
That, all together, proved enough.
Wendy Barbatos, Herrscher of Storms, ripped the fire that had been unleashed to end her away from Siegfried's control, twisting it down into the flickering orb of lightning and air that she'd called to her hand. She wasn't unmarred by the effort, however.
The armour around her entire right arm had boiled away to nothing, and the arm itself was a warped, blackened thing barely capable of motion. Her lips were drawn back around bloody teeth, breath heaving from her body as the strain of what she'd done settled over her. Even after years of training to become a Valkyrie, limits remained, and this display had drained her reserves to almost nothing.
Her arm, too, was not something she could immediately fix. But it would heal in time, and the last of the settlement's true defenders had fallen.
Below her, Siegfried Kaslana had fallen to his knees, the flames drained entirely from the weapon he'd raised against her one last time. He was, shockingly, still breathing, something that took him rather by surprise. Not that he expected it to last for long.
His enemy, the monster once a girl who had descended to destroy his home and family, still lived. He couldn't understand how she'd done it, but the blow that his blood screamed should have brought only extermination to those of Honkai had failed to kill her. She was hurt, that was certain, but not enough. And she knew it.
And he…well he was done. Each breath was an effort, and his entire body burned with the strain of Honkai use far beyond the limits of any human. There was nothing left, and she'd sucked away any ambient energy that he might have used to reignite Shamash. But maybe….maybe he'd done enough. After all, all he'd gone here to do was-
If he'd obeyed his exhausted body and let his heavy eyelids fall, he'd have missed it.
Far, far above, a point of violet light appeared. The clouds were gone, leaving only the clear sky, and something tugged at his mind as he saw the new source of light. It flashed there for a moment, then erupted outwards, wavering gold and violet framing a flowering detonation.
Wendy's gaze snapped up to the sudden explosion, and the look on her face would've told him everything he'd needed to know. Shock, fury, and something that this time he was certain was fear.
But he didn't need any of that. His head dropped back, mouth open in a madcap smile, and he laughed.
The debris of the shuttle fell towards the earth, ripped apart by the tunnel of spacetime torn through reality by a girl who only wanted her mother to come home. And, once more, the world seemed to still. For at the heart of the explosion, light gathered, a myriad of colours fusing into a singular whole.
The brilliant radiance swept out over the battle below.
And a rose star descended.
Both hands still held the great blade of his house, the source of the flames that refused to die even when the winds should have snuffed them out. His white teeth were speckled with blood as he bared them in smiling defiance, and a fire brighter than any carmine shade reflected in the unflinching blue of his eyes.
Beside him loomed a great dragon of white, black and icy blue. Her once smooth skin was scorched in places, ripped and torn by gnawing ice and burning claws. Yet she still stood, her wings pulled in tight against her back, a hunter ready to spring into motion at a moment's notice.
And above, at the heart of the storm of gale winds, blazed a figure smaller than either of those below. She was cloaked in a brilliance so harsh that it could only be called hateful, rippling patterns of spotlight white across an endless array of green, and where her hands moved, the storm answered.
How long had it been now, the man called Siegfried Kaslana wondered, since their shared opponent had sealed away the sky? She'd expected this frigid place to be their tomb, or at least his, but clearly hadn't reckoned with the power of Shamash. The blade's fire had covered him completely in the same instant that should have frozen the water in his eyes solid, once again protecting him so that he could strike back.
The problem was, he was running out of options to do that. For all the raw power of Shamash, and his skill in wielding the ancient weapon, it was still limited. Divine Keys had limits just as their wielders did, and the Herrscher who had once been Wendy Barbatos was pushing against both.
The thoughts were buried beneath the steady focus of truly lethal battle, body moving through strikes and counters without any real conscious effort, leaving his mind free. And even with that reducing his reaction times even further, there were still moments where-
Bella surged past him, the girl-dragon taking a crackling stream of lightning on her smooth scales. Most of the burst of lethal energy splashed off of the pale armour, but it left a burn all the same. She reared up with her wings spread wide, lifting her head until it was almost level with the burning presence of their shared enemy. Another bolt of green-white flashed from the Herrscher of Storms, only for Bella to sway her head bonelessly to one side.
Pale sapphire radiance gathered between the dragon's jaws, and for a moment the world stilled as she sucked in breath and energy from all around. Siegfried lunged forward, booted feet pounding up the incline of her tail and back. More pale light gathered around the pale segments along her back, radiating patterns of energy that thrummed around his footsteps.
Bella roared, breaking the silence of the whirling cyclone with the might of vast lungs, and spat forth a bolt of flickering silver-blue.
Wendy flicked two fingers.
The bolt crashed against a pane of chained lightning, a triangular shield formed in an instant to protect the mistress of the storm. Light exploded from the meeting of energy, overpowering in its intensity, a blinding flash that outlined Bella's shadow in stark black on the ice below. A shadow that protected Siegfried from sudden blindness in the moments it took for him to crest the hill of the dragon's neck.
Fire condensed around his boots as he took the final steps of his charge, exploding into short-lived rockets as he leapt for the Herrscher of Storms. For a moment, he thought he'd hit the shield she'd summoned, but a last surge of flame carried him past it, Shamash drawn in tight against him to hide the sound of the blade cutting the air.
Wendy was still armoured behind her shield, two fingers extended negligently at the display of power from Sirin's older sister. Bella was flagging, he knew that, but he also hadn't believed her to ever have this much in her. And yet, had he ever believed he had this much in his own bones?
Not until his daughter had been in the line of fire. Bella must feel the same for her younger sister.
Blue light was starting to leak past the shield of lightning Wendy had conjured, yet he could also hear something within the roar her dragon-form had unleashed. The scream of a desperate girl, offering up everything she'd ever been to protect everything that she loved.
How could he do anything less?
He extended a hand and fire blossomed there, adjusting his motion into a spin. Shamash snapped out, and the whistle of the blade was entirely swallowed by the scream of fire unleashed.
It tore through the freezing air, flashing entire banks of ice straight to steam that was consumed by the ferocious hunger of the Key of Destruction. He hissed in pain as that hunger surged through him too, cutting deeper than ever before, and none of it mattered. Red-gold flame erupted from his shoulders, blackening his coat as they spread into vast, tattered wings, anchoring him as he swung.
He was close enough to see Wendy's eyes widen behind through the burning light of her protections. Close enough to see her free hand blur upwards, trying to catch the blow before it could fall.
No, he thought serenely, his blade erupting into something far more than matter.
I don't think so.
Shamash slashed down, burning through the shield Wendy had attempted to raise with contemptuous ease. The ancient sword almost faltered against the light of her armour, but something in the weight kept pulling, forcing the blow through. And every shred of flame around them poured down the central fuller, striking Herrscher skin full on.
The triangular shield she'd summoned against Bella's attack shattered in a scream of pain, and for a moment icy blue light and red-gold fire mixed around the Herrscher's body. The white-green of her shields had retracted to her skin in instants, splintering beneath the joined everything of a father and a herald.
Wendy screamed as those defences gave way, a primal sound of rage denied. And then she was gone from Siegfried's eyes, a blast of light sending her tumbling towards the ground she'd so scorned.
Fire trailed in her wake as she fell, and this time there was nothing to stop them spreading into the frozen water and winds that carried it. The walls of the cyclone erupted into warmth, washing away the curtains of ice they'd spread in less than seconds. They pulsed once, the gentle red and gold spinning into brilliant white.
Moments later, they burnt away. Wendy, at the centre of a personal ball of similar fire, wasn't so lucky. She hit the ground as the flames around her turned white, and they didn't dissipate. Force and fury lashed out in all directions instead, its sheer strength slamming Bella to the ground in a trail of glimmering light. Siegfried, from above, had just enough time to tuck himself into a ball before it hit.
The world spun sideways as he was launched upwards, the last vestiges of the fire around him vanishing in the wash of pressure. He felt himself flying up and slightly sideways, and then a long fall. He tried to twist his body into a better position for that, but there was only so much it could do.
Then he hit the ground and his world went red, to black, and then away for a while.
When it returned, an all-encompassing pain went with it.
"Mister Siegfried?" A girl's voice asked, painfully young to his ears. "Are you alright?"
His vision swam for a few moments as he blinked open his eyes. A silver haired girl was staring down at him, her eyes filled with exhausted terror. He forced himself to think, cudgeling his agonised brain into focus. His clothes were scorched, and the snow around him had boiled away into steam in the time since he'd been lying there.
Shamash was still in his hands, the fire of the weapon considerably faded. It was only barely maintaining its bladed form, he thought. And he felt utterly exhausted, in a way not even the brutal gauntlet Otto had laid down before him to reach Cecilia could match.
"Why…" he whispered through cracked lips. The girl's face brightened immediately.
"Oh thank goodness," she said. She scooped up some snow and offered it to him in her cupped hands. It wasn't a glass of water, but it would do. He took a bite of it, and sighed in thanks. "I'm not sure how long she'll be busy."
"Wh-" Siegfried began to ask, looking around at the broken ground around them. He came to a sudden halt as his gaze fell on the spherical shell of gentle flame in a nearby crater much like his own. Green light blazed from cracks in the shell, and he somehow knew that whatever was in there wasn't going to be kind when it got out.
And his damn brain just wasn't putting it all together. What was he missing?
"Your name," he said haltingly. "It's…Bella, right?"
"Oh no," she muttered under her breath. But she nodded quickly. "Yes. Bella. I thought you might be dead, and-"
"And we are running out of time," another voice, touched by the gentle hiss of a transmission, said. Looking towards the source revealed a hovering spherical drone in dark blue, a dark projective screen on the front.
"Short version," the woman's voice continued. "My name is Einstein. You're fighting a dual-Herrscher and just almost died trying to put her down. It only trapped her and she's breaking out. Bella was helping you, she was a dragon, now she isn't one. We need more time for Welt and Elysia to arrive, or Elysium is dead and your daughter along with it."
The drone turned to the girl next to him. "Bella, can you please withdraw now? You're clearly hurt, and your mother wouldn't want you to injure yourself further. If nothing else, you can be a final line of defence for your sister."
Bella growled something, clearly unhappy, but nodded.
"What about Mr Kaslana?"
"I have a way that might equalise things," the voice – Einstein – said. Thoughts and memories bashed together in Siegfried's head as he spoke, things coming back together. "But I don't think it'll be safe for you here. Please, go."
Bella ducked her head, tears glistening on her cheeks. "I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. Good luck."
"You too," Siegfried said absently. It was all coming back into focus. "Thank you."
She ducked her head again, then took off at a dead sprint.
"Siegfried," Einstein said through her drone. "I found something that might be able to help you, but I have to warn you, it's a coinflip if it works or kills you. And I can't say what the long-term consequences might be. I un-"
"Will it let me protect Kiana?" He asked. The last pieces of the puzzle had snapped into place.
There was a moment of silence. Then the drone spoke again, almost reluctant. "Yes."
"What do I need to do?"
"Take this." The drone, he remembered it being called Eins, extended a hypodermic from one of its clamshell arms. "And hold onto what you fight for, more than anything."
Two smiling faces flashed across his mind, a woman and a young girl, both with white hair and blue eyes. He held the memories there for a moment, engraving every piece of them, then nodded.
"I'm ready."
For my daughter, my dearest ones, I'll do anything.
He barely felt the needle.
The world changing, however, was a little hard to miss. Suddenly, he was somewhere else, a vast icy plain dominated by a great floating pillar of dark stone, dimly lit by the corona of an eclipsed star. More pillars of rock surrounded the plain, yet none of them could match the one at the centre. That one had split into a pair of smooth towers, only for the centre of it to have been pierced by another formation of jaggedly shaped stone.
It put him strangely in mind of a dagger through the heart, but he had little time to consider it, as the last part of his surroundings flowed into being and registered.
He wasn't alone.
Another man stood there on the plain, between him and the floating pillar at the heart of the space. His silver-white hair was shorter than Siegfried's, and his face looked younger too, except for dreadful age to his eyes. He wore a dark bodysuit under a long blue jacket trimmed with yellow, its long mantle of a collar raised.
Shamash's unleashed form of Judgement was held almost casually in one hand, the tip of the godkiller sunk into the ice at his feet. The flames didn't even touch him. And all of it, every piece of the image, seemed to call out to Siegfried.
The Kaslana Knight stared, and in doing so almost missed it when the man moved. The motion wasn't an aggressive one, but it somehow allowed the hauntingly familiar figure to cross the space between them in a single step. Siegfried raised a hand, to stop or welcome him he was never sure, and found his wrist seized by the stranger's free hand in a grip that was simply beyond unyielding.
"What are y-"
"You've finally found me," the figure said. Even his voice felt familiar. "My progeny."
"I, no," Siegfried shook his head. "It doesn't matter. I don't have much time. I need-"
"I know that look in your eyes," the figure said. It was like he hadn't spoken. "You have come here for a single reason; you are facing an enemy that is beyond you. So listen well, and I shall tell you the truth of our lineage."
The man raised the unleashed Shamash into a guard, his eyes boring into Siegfried's the entire time. Then he lunged forward, a single thrusting motion led by the razor-sharp blade of the weapon of all Kaslanas.
Siegfried cried out in shock and pain as the weapon sliced into and out the other side of his chest, burning with a heat he'd never been able to truly imagine. And yet…somehow it didn't hurt as it should.
"There are dormant Honkai genes within our Kaslana genome," the figure, the Kaslana, before him continued calmly. As if he hadn't just stabbed him in the chest, or wasn't pushing Shamash deeper into the wound. "That can be activated to awaken powers in every scion of our line."
Siegfried blinked as the crossguard of the cleaver vanished in a burst of flame, flowing into his chest along with, he realised, the rest of the weapon. A fire lit at the centre of his chest, burning away the world as it filled with the shadow of a great beast of ice and jagged horns.
"Those powers will make you more than human."
In the world outside his vision, a pale-faced bluette input a sequence on her tablet. A drone on the other side of a battle from her extended another hypodermic, this one full of a shimmering blue liquid, and drove it into the same vein it had used moments before.
"Even the Herrschers will be no match against you."
Blackness filled his vision, and he felt something surge into his blood, an impossible heat that grew and grew as he felt his skin shift and change around it. And the stranger's voice resounded in his ears through it all, impossibly clear.
"Do not forget our Oath, young progeny."
Siegfried felt his lips move without conscious input, reciting words.
Every Kaslana bold
Must live by their oath.
Purge the vile Honkai
And smash the False Gods.
Your sires sleep in the fields
As humanity's brave shields.
By the Judgement of Shamash
Kaslanas die and never yield.
Back in reality, blue light seared from the Kaslana scion's eyes, his mouth open in a silent scream. Eins hovered back from the shifting man, Einstein unwilling to risk her creation as she watched the shift take place. She'd read a great deal about MANTIS soldiers even before acquiring the Void Archives. Now she knew more.
Siegfried was, at her hands, beginning the first stage of an Active Honkai Reaction. His arms tore through the folds of his greatcoat, pale blue Honkai flesh having entirely replaced human skin below the elbow. His fingers had shifted into raking claws, but should still be able to hold a sword, and his body temperature had plummeted.
The formula Einstein had given him was different to the injectors and activators she'd been able to identify among the inventory from the Salt Lake Base. A more advanced one, by all accounts, refined from something mass produced into an artisanal creation keyed specifically for the Kaslana bloodline. Perhaps even the very first of them.
Now it was running wild, transforming Siegfried into an engine of war against the Honkai such that the world hadn't seen in millennia. The only question she had was simple:
Would it be enough?
A howling scream echoed across the burning valley as Wendy tore at the cage of brilliant fire around her. Flame was a terrible enemy for static energy, endlessly moving, always flowing. But she was born of conquest and desire, the two cycling endlessly within the girl's mind, pushing her ever down the self-destructive path a whisper had set her on when it burned the Overseer out of her mind.
Fingers alight with something beyond lightning tore through the final layer of the shell, back into the free air. The moment it touched her hands it bent to her will, howling into the space around her to rupture the final pieces of structure left in the hateful cage. She rose to her feet as the last vestiges of flame were snuffed out, rising past the ground in a shimmer of pale green sparks that condensed into a more solid armour this time.
Her mistake had been in extending the defence beyond her skin, a cold part of her mind considered. The rest was focused on a young girl sprinting away from the battle, silver hair stretching out behind her. All too slowly to the Herrscher. Arcs of tightly controlled lightning condensed out of the air around her right hand, forming a chimeric wreath as her fingers rose to point at the fleeing girl.
Then her sight was cut off by fire, and she spun in fury towards its source. That man. That terrible, cheating beast of a man was standing again. Her face twisted in fury, even as her new armour shed the blast of flame without complaint.
"Insect!" She hissed. She swung her arm around, and sent the bolt of lightning she'd meant for the failed, heretical Herald scorching down on him instead. That would delay him for a while, whilst she gathered the winds agai-
Siegfried roared, and met the bolt with the tip of Shamash. Yet instead of as before, where he'd parried those bolts, he followed the instincts coursing through him and met it head on. Flame licked out at the lightning, and the weapon started to pulse with light, returning from the brink of exhaustion.
Energy reserves now at thirty percent.
He saw the eyes of his foe, the enemy he must purge for the world, widen in disbelief or fear as Shamash drank of her power. The growling fury in his chest hoped it was fear. Then he was moving forward, Shamash drinking from the Honkai energy all around them, channelling through his body in a way that seemed impossibly easy. He'd been at his limit just moments ago, and now he was simply…not.
Golden fire surged from his weapon's edges, the flames of Shamash unleashed into the world a second time this day. They struck wind and shattered through it, slowing only slightly. But this time, Wendy didn't just expect her defences to work. She danced aside from the strike, spiking his side with lances of searing light that…should have hurt.
Instead, they scattered on his skin like they had from Bella's scales, and he swung towards her, more fire billowing from Shamash. Again the wind rose, lightning sheeting through it this time, and again the blade was undeterred until the girl before him blurred aside on wings of the storm. He was ready this time, and reversed the blow, a wave of golden flame engulfing his enemy.
Reserves at forty percent.
Then he lunged, blindingly fast, the air itself screaming as Shamash judged it unworthy to restrain its motion. He felt it hit something, but there was no scream like he'd expected. Instead lightning answered, led by blades of air so sharp that they cut even his enhanced skin, opening him to the scouring energy.
A lazy motion angled Shamash into line with the lion's share of the tiny bolts, and the fire blazed higher in reply. An enhanced kick sent him flying back, no blood to sate his hungry blade this time, but that only drove him back to his feet faster.
Wendy hissed in anger as the insect flew back from her kick. He was glutting himself on her power, like a foul mosquito. She yearned to rise and strike him down from above, but that had been a lesson well learned. And this new monster he'd become, Honkai flesh replacing skin, that called for something else.
So she set herself on a simple impossibility of a solution. Fire, like wind, flowed. And part of her remembered something Otto had said, that her power, the first power he had tried to steal for her, was born of a dominion over all that flowed. All she had to do was master it.
Reserves now at sixty percent.
Perhaps that would be worth a risk.
Siegfried launched himself forward, searching for his target, energy still rippling into the weapon in his hands. This time, Wendy went to meet him. Lightning and air wove shimmering gauntlets of green and silver around her hands, and she caught the Key of Destruction in them where her shield had fallen before.
She met the eyes of man before her, seeing through him, seeing the beast driving him. Hate, resolution…was there something more? She didn't care. She tore at the fire around his weapon, forcing her will upon it, feeling it seethe and fight against her rightful demands. How dare it!
Herrscher core energy detected. Initiate ambient charging…
Maybe it was a matter of fire away from the weapon? Divine Keys were born of the corpses of her kind, dead to a civilisation that had dared to think they could win, and retained a measure of their mastery. But they lacked the same perfection as her own cores, of that she was certain. That was her edge.
Energy reserves now at one hundred percent.
She focused on the fire dripping from the blade instead, calling at it through the wind. It was a struggle, especially distracted as she was right now. But the strength of her will wove energy from the air to the fire successfully, untouched by the mastery of the Key of Destruction. Some of it burnt away, misjudged for the new medium. But it worked.
Charging overdrive reserves…
Siegfried's lip curled to show a predator's canines as Shamash started to shift, the blade lengthening and tapering into a slender point. A double-level hilt extended to cover his hands, protecting them from the fire engulfing everything above it.
One hundred fifty percent.
The flames ripped out, forcing Wendy back from the sword, but some of them went with her this time. He never saw it, the same display of energy that she'd begun and tapped hiding the defection from his eyes. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the weapon transform, and lightning crackled behind them.
Power limits removed.
Siegfried set his feet as the rippling fire cleared, bringing the weapon to a straight salute as it finished changing. Behind his eyes, two faces shone from the depths of memory, the very same ones that he'd committed there before Einstein had injected him.
"Judgement of Shamash, unleash your full fury!"
The blade that had sundered dozens of his bloodline, leaving nothing but charred corpses behind, took shape. And he welcomed it. This was the anything he'd sworn to do, to shield the weak. And protect his dearest ones.
Judgement of Shamash is ready.
The words in a language he'd never known burned across his thoughts, their emotionless tone the completion of a forgotten legacy. He felt the weight settle over him, the knowledge his next swing might well be his last, understood at a level beyond words. A memory seared through time and tradition, of all that a Kaslana would sacrifice for.
Behind him, Elysium burned, but it also held. Science and sacrifice would win the day, so long as Wendy couldn't join the battle. His daughter would live, and he trusted in his wife to survive to protect her. If this was his sacrifice, it was a good one.
He raised the weapon he instinctively recognised as the Might of An-Utu. He couldn't access the weapon's full power, he wasn't far enough down the path of his bloodline for that. But he could come close enough, for this moment. Fire without limit erupted from the weapon bane to Honkai, a slayer of gods and monsters.
Siegfried eyes burned gold as he held up his weapon, a beacon of defiant power against a Herrscher's will. The air around him literally steamed as the cold of his skin was converted to moisture that instantly boiled away in the heat of his gathering blow.
Then he swung.
The world bleached to white, air quivering in anticipation of cataclysm, a strike that would sunder the clouds and cast down the false goddess.
Except…that wasn't quite what happened.
Beyond the firestorm, Wendy reached out a hand to the pillar of radiant flame climbing towards the heavens. It was a beckoning gesture, but also an imperious one; a Queen's demand for her subject to come to heel. Wind gathered there eagerly, quick to answer her summons. Lightning followed, a rippling coruscation of flickering colours, though most present among them was her own deep green.
Fire…fire was trickier. And this fire was even more so. Born of a dead shard of power to her own, given fully to the work of destruction, it could use even the energy of the Honkai as tinder when roused as it was now.
Yet to set anything new aflame, the fire would have to reach it, moving through space as fire did through air and matter. It would have to, well, flow. And that, that was her domain. The fire that had scoured cities in past ages surged towards the air, curling and eager to remake its memories of ancient devastation. All it needed was the touch of air, to unleash its fury.
But none was there to greet it. Wendy shuddered in place, sweat beading her brow as she forced the space around the fire to be empty of anything that it could touch. The fire raged and rushed outwards in search of fuel, sinking hungry claws into the webworks of energy she'd extended to sweep away the air. Right into the trap she'd set for it.
The energy extended to exert her power was still that - her power. If the flames of Shamash were going to make it burn, they had to flow into its patterns. And those patterns that had been built to control what they touched. It wasn't quite correct, but it wasn't wrong either. It gave her enough to work with, and work she did.
The pillar of ruin shuddered, splitting apart at the forefront into endless lines, filling in an invisible, slender webwork of energy that led back to Wendy's extended hand. Siegfried didn't see that, but the man felt something in the feel of his swing shift as it happened. Something was wrong. The strike wasn't detonating.
Impossible heat scorched Wendy's skin as the first tendrils of fire reached her through the webwork. Her hand bubbled horribly as the out layers of her changed flesh struggled to absorb the energy, and her palm started to blacken. Neither that, nor the pain of it, could hold back the mad smile stretching across her face.
Sections of the webwork tore apart as the fire overcame their fragile walls, roaring back into the air in places. But they were only fractions of the column's full strength, the rest pouring rapidly into the web she'd laid all around it. She screamed into the pain, her blackening hand contorted into a grasping claw, but it wasn't without purpose. Somewhere in the depths of the web she'd woven, the fire answered.
And that was all she'd needed.
Almost all of her experience since becoming something more than a Valkyrie had involved her power over air as a medium which flowed. Otto had told her about the potential she held, the mastery she could wield in the future. Never pushing, of course, but preparing her. And she'd needed every shred of control that painful, humiliating experience had given her to get this far.
But that wasn't the only power she held now. There was Wind, Desire, the mastery of flows, as there had been for almost a month now. And now too, there was Lightning. Conquest.
Neither of her Cores on their own could have done this. Even both together would have been struck down by the original wielder of Shamash. But Siegfried Kaslana was not his ancestor. Not as he had been then, at the end of the Previous Era, and even less than the ancient Flamechaser was now.
In another future, Siegfried would have struck down the overloading Core of the Void in a single blow. The same blow, in fact, that he'd gathered here and now.
That blow, however, would have been levelled against a target incapable of defending itself. And had only overcome a single Core. Now it faced two, under the control of a mind that had been trained for battle for years. And who understood at least a little of what the weapon facing her could do.
That, all together, proved enough.
Wendy Barbatos, Herrscher of Storms, ripped the fire that had been unleashed to end her away from Siegfried's control, twisting it down into the flickering orb of lightning and air that she'd called to her hand. She wasn't unmarred by the effort, however.
The armour around her entire right arm had boiled away to nothing, and the arm itself was a warped, blackened thing barely capable of motion. Her lips were drawn back around bloody teeth, breath heaving from her body as the strain of what she'd done settled over her. Even after years of training to become a Valkyrie, limits remained, and this display had drained her reserves to almost nothing.
Her arm, too, was not something she could immediately fix. But it would heal in time, and the last of the settlement's true defenders had fallen.
Below her, Siegfried Kaslana had fallen to his knees, the flames drained entirely from the weapon he'd raised against her one last time. He was, shockingly, still breathing, something that took him rather by surprise. Not that he expected it to last for long.
His enemy, the monster once a girl who had descended to destroy his home and family, still lived. He couldn't understand how she'd done it, but the blow that his blood screamed should have brought only extermination to those of Honkai had failed to kill her. She was hurt, that was certain, but not enough. And she knew it.
And he…well he was done. Each breath was an effort, and his entire body burned with the strain of Honkai use far beyond the limits of any human. There was nothing left, and she'd sucked away any ambient energy that he might have used to reignite Shamash. But maybe….maybe he'd done enough. After all, all he'd gone here to do was-
If he'd obeyed his exhausted body and let his heavy eyelids fall, he'd have missed it.
Far, far above, a point of violet light appeared. The clouds were gone, leaving only the clear sky, and something tugged at his mind as he saw the new source of light. It flashed there for a moment, then erupted outwards, wavering gold and violet framing a flowering detonation.
Wendy's gaze snapped up to the sudden explosion, and the look on her face would've told him everything he'd needed to know. Shock, fury, and something that this time he was certain was fear.
But he didn't need any of that. His head dropped back, mouth open in a madcap smile, and he laughed.
The debris of the shuttle fell towards the earth, ripped apart by the tunnel of spacetime torn through reality by a girl who only wanted her mother to come home. And, once more, the world seemed to still. For at the heart of the explosion, light gathered, a myriad of colours fusing into a singular whole.
The brilliant radiance swept out over the battle below.
And a rose star descended.
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Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
And we are through my backlog. I'm aware that there might be some conflicting opinions on what Wendy just did to Shamash, but it's just how the scene unfolded, and I think it makes sense.
Hope you've enjoyed these interludes. Next chapter shall involve a return to your much-missed and (allegedly) most beloved elf!
Hope you've enjoyed these interludes. Next chapter shall involve a return to your much-missed and (allegedly) most beloved elf!
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
Pink Elf Space Jesus has arrived. Prepare to be spanked Hersherr of Storms.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
Curiously non-specific commentary.
They seem to have posted a bunch of relatively content-free/short messages in threads recently, maybe as a way to watch them, but it is kinda weird.
Chapter 23
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
I could bore you with the details of our trip. With how my daughter had reached through the fabric of reality in search of me, tearful and trying so hard to hide her pain. I could even tell you how Welt had managed to use his own power to amplify Sirin's dimensional link to fit us through, detonating the shuttle in the process.
None of it would matter.
I took in the sight below me in a single perfect instant. There was Siegfried, Shamash in hand but utterly exhausted, kneeling below Wendy's storm-sheathed form. The crash of battle roared behind him, Anti-Entropy Mecha battling the tide of Honkai that Wendy had drawn from beyond the world to her side. Railgun fire lancing out from enormous static batteries, clouds of missiles volleying destruction into the tide of chittering claws and flashing fangs.
Off to the side of where Siegfried's battle had taken place, Lixue held a slowly flattening point of defiance against the Honkai incursion. Her blade flashed in the late-morning sun, and clear water lashed from the strikes into the pale flesh of the Honkai beasts all around her. Next to me, I heard Hua let out a breath that I wasn't sure she knew she'd been holding. Mine didn't ease for another moment. Until I saw Bella, presumably returned to her human form. She was running from the battle, but the girl's body moved too stiffly for her to be uninjured.
My breath came out in a hiss as I saw that, as I remembered Sirin's voice. The desperate plea that she'd been so shocked to hear answered, for her mother to come home and save her. A slender bow of white edges and a dark purple centre replaced the familiar Sonnet, a Flawless Return to save all I loved. And the world fell away, swallowed by amaranthine flame.
My long coat of black and purple had already vanished, swept away in bursts of magenta light as I fell to be replaced by streamers of pure white. Now the rest of my clothing met the same fate. The tube-top blouse shifted into a full bodice, engravings of pearl and gold wrapping brilliant gems of pink light. Ribbons of more white fabric sprang from around my waist, each one adding to the shape of the dress that curled about my legs.
Flawless Return shifted, the bow only present for a moment, a touchstone to unlock the fullness of Elysia's strength. White faded into the steady rose-tinted wood of the Staff of Origin, the crystal at its tip blazing like a tiny star, this time but an echo of my own light. Patterns of pink and purple surrounded me, forming a gently spinning ring of colour. And power unlike anything I'd ever felt flooded into my veins. I'd learn only later that my eyes had gone completely pink, pupils expanded into diamonds of a brighter shade.
Welt, Hua and Theresa had all darted away to their own objectives as my transformation took hold. We'd had time to plan as Welt had sent us hurtling across the northern skies, and they followed the contingency we'd prepared in those rushed minutes for if Seigfried had fallen. In some ways, I was almost glad. Shamash was impossibly powerful in the right hands, but the Key of Destruction's power was one that didn't discriminate between friend or foe.
And I still wanted to try and save Wendy. What she'd become, that was at least partly my fault. I'd pushed Otto into a corner, I should have seen what he'd do as a result. And now an innocent girl was paying the price. I owed her, I owed Theresa, a better future than that. The crystal at the tip of the Staff of Origin pulsed brighter at that thought, and ancient instincts reached into the air around me, slowing my descent. I couldn't have explained how I did it if I'd tried. I just knew that in this form, in our full incarnation, flight was not beyond me. That could be important in the battle to come.
Wendy was staring up at me, the girl's bloody lips drawn back in a snarl of hatred as she recognised what I was becoming. Or, perhaps not her, but the intelligence behind her power. The whispers of the Will, walking her down steps once prepared for my daughter.
"You." Her voice was a thing of crackling power and furious energy, clipped from the air with terribly certainty. I caught myself curtseying in the air, an elegant dip of my head acknowledging my true enemy here.
"It's a terrible thing you've done to a cute girl," I said in a gentle sing-song. In the corner of my eye I saw Welt pulling Siegfried to his feet, moving the defenceless Knight out of the danger zone. I wasn't going to leave Kiana's father stuck here as potential collateral damage.
"You laid the stage." Hateful eyes dripped green sparks as they stared up at me.
"And I'm sorry for the part I played in it." Red-gold light washed over churned snow from somewhere on my right, where Lixue had been fighting. Hua, seeing to the safety of her own daughter. "But I won't let you do this to my home. Or to that girl."
"I chose!" A girl's voice now, Wendy's, lashed at my ears. Her words carried tangible force, shaking the air and sending snowflakes flying into the wind. "And if it wasn't for that man, that cheater, I would have taken everything from you all!"
I had to force back the tears that pricked at my eyes, they would only make this worse. Wendy didn't want pity right now, she wanted revenge. And, at some level, she had a right to those feelings. What had been done to her was horrific, and she might never be able to escape it all.
"Perhaps you would have," I admitted, nodding sadly. Pink hair fluttered across my vision, pulled by the rushing wind. "But the future where you could have done so isn't this one."
I didn't have to be a social genius to know exactly where those words would lead the furious girl. Or the power pushing her thoughts, driving her berserk. I saw it in the sudden tension in her wrist, the way her eyes darted towards Elysium, narrowing as something far more than human calculated behind her eyes.
"Isn't it?" Two voices hissed. Wendy's unharmed arm blurred, snatching the amalgamation of Shamash's strike and the vastness of her own power out of the air. I felt it shift there, in her grip, condensing the flames back into a weapon of devastating fury. Then her arm snapped out to full extension, hurling a blast of power that would pierce the very earth and tear down the paradise of my creation.
I didn't move as she did it. I didn't react, simply staring down at my enemy and the one who I wished to save. Her eyes tracked up to mine in the instant before impact, smug hatred twisting at her lips, the beginnings of a mocking smile.
"I'm sorry, Wendy," I said calmly. "For everything. But this has to end."
I saw her eyes widen in response to my tone, then again as the expected detonation failed to appear. She spun, the storm screaming to her call, the world rippling as she flung herself around, desperate to understand. If her mind hadn't been so compromised by the pain of her arm, or by the hate of the Will surging through her like poison, then I think she might have realised.
It didn't make me feel any less sick when I hit her, though. Despite everything that she'd done, she was still a child, and I hated the idea of hurting her. But it was necessary. I needed to buy time, distract her enough to stop her from doing whatever she'd done to steal Shamash's power.
The crystal head of the Staff of Origin glowed incandescent as I slammed it into Wendy's side, catching her in the instant when all of her focus was fixed on trying to understand her plan's failure. The weapon hit with bone-crushing force, our experience at Norway had made it very clear that none of us could afford to hold back beyond the bare minimum to keep her alive.
I heard a high scream of pure agony behind me, but I couldn't spare the time to look. I had to believe that Theresa had accurately judged the capacity of her appetite. My role was to stop Wendy from interfering. The blow to her side had sent the Herrscher of Storms hurtling down into a snowdrift, but she arrested the unplanned motion in a thunder of gale winds. Arcs of emerald lightning ripped apart the snow before her feet could touch it, and she turned back to me.
The smile had vanished, replaced by only snarling rage. And yet I could only see the child's face that was twisted into that expression as I raised the Staff of Origin to point down at her. I felt the sky shift far above as I did so, glimmering with tiny points of light.
Wendy leapt for me, wind and lightning gathering in one outstretched palm. And I whispered three words.
"Waltz, oh stars."
A column of violet starlight sheeted down from the heavens, intercepting Wendy at a point roughly halfway between us. The girl moved impossibly quick, somehow having sensed the descending attack in the moments before it hit, flinging up her hand and reshaping the power around it into a shield.
The beam of radiant power drove her to the ground in a crackling blaze of opposing forces, and though her shield buckled, it didn't break. We were, after all, roughly equally matched in tests of pure power. She just didn't have our experience. Or, more critically, any allies.
Hua entered the equation as Wendy rose to her feet again, her entire body enfolded in a veil of sharp orange light as she drove a stiff-arm strike into Wendy's sternum. She'd pulled the blow, something in me could tell, but only just. It still rocked the girl back on her heels, still recovering as she was from the effort of holding back my attack.
The ancient warrior ducked inside an abortive strike from the Herrscher, pure instinct overcoming her opponent's speed. One of her hands caught the girl's extended wrist, her legs flickered in a subtle twisting motion, and suddenly Wendy was airborne again. Horizontally this time, for the handful of moments it took Hua to pivot and deliver a brutally efficient axe-kick to her abdomen.
The girl slammed down onto the frozen ground, crying out in shock and pain. I managed not to wince at the young sound, but Hua just kept after her, not even flinching. Wendy had learned from her first experience with her, however, and a howl of air flung my friend back before she could deliver another blow. Lightning lashed down to strike the MANTIS as Wendy regained her feet in a swirl of wind, her eyes blazing with viridian light. Hua took the hits without flinching, her resistances absorbing them effortlessly, but it bought Wendy time. We couldn't let her escape again.
I whispered out to the stars and they answered, crushing her down a second time. This time she didn't even try to block it, summoning power directly into her armour to withstand the starlit assault. She pushed up through the storm of crushing light, raising one foot to take to the sky. Only for the world to bend around her as the third of our party rejoined the fray. Sweat beaded the Herrscher of Reason's forehead as he brought the Star of Eden's power to bear, lashing her to the earth and refusing her the freedom of the sky.
She screamed then, a sound of fury and fear in equal measure and I felt my heart wrench in reply. The feeling of being trapped, being contained, it would be torture to her after all she'd endured. Tears brushed my cheeks as lightning and thunder roared above us in answer to their Mistress's call. Yet the storm was weaker by far than it had been on her awakening. And the skill she'd begun to master in ripping away the fire of Shamash was only that: begun.
Enough to defeat Seigfreid, but to match two Herrschers and a warrior moulded over eight millennia to defeat them would've taken so much more. It was why the Will had driven her to act in vengeance against Elysium, to take some measure of victory from us even in defeat. But that nature had allowed us to predict it. Now, the results of our planning came to her feet between the Herrscher and our home.
Theresa's face had shifted into one hauntingly familiar, the very image of the woman Otto had tried to resurrect in creating her. But for the half-crown of alabaster horns that held her hair behind her face as it fell all the way to the line of her knees, she could've been Kallen Kaslana reborn.
The earth around her was burnt black, contained by a smouldering ring of flash-fried plant matter, and there were scorch marks around her hands where she had caught and absorbed the strike that had been intended to end the hope of Elysium. Delicate chains of gold floated lazily in the air around her, retracted from the ground where Judah had helped anchor her, clinking softly as she stepped out of the blackened circle.
Golden foxfire danced across skin and cloth as she came, the last echoes of Shamash's fury draining steadily into the unseen chasm of the unleashed Vishnu's endless appetite. Wendy's eyes widened in terror as she recognised the presence of the perfected MANTIS, her teacher and mentor.
"That fate for me," she sighed. And though there was terror in her eyes, there was only scorn in her twinned voice. "Too cowardly to kill, even with all I've done."
Theresa shook her head, not slowing her approach. I could feel the hungry whirlpool of her presence now, sucking away the energy around us. It was a delicate balancing, not least for how it affected the bindings responsible for this conversation being possible. Wendy still had enough power to flee again if we were careless, and we might never find her in time again if she did. And yet, all of us had agreed. We had to try.
"What, then?" Wendy asked, her words dripping with contempt. "You think you can rip away my power and force me back into who I was before? So nostalgic for the girl you abandoned that you'd kill this one to get her back? Use the Ancient to do it, perhaps?"
"No, Wendy," Theresa said gently. Wendy flinched back from the compassion in her voice, and from how close she'd come, stepping into the field of gravity holding the greenette down.
I saw something flicker in the girl's eyes, and one hand reached up, brushing at the tears flowing down her face. She stared down at her hand for a moment, confusion fighting up through the anger and loss that had driven her into the arms of hatred.
"I abandoned you once. Maybe that means I'm not a worthy teacher anymore." Theresa said. She sank to her knees across from Wendy, and the girl shuddered as her teacher caught her hand in a gentle grip. "But I'm going to try my best to be."
"Easy to say with me chained-"
"Welt." The single word cut the rallying scorn short, and it scattered completely as the Herrscher of Reason lowered the Star of Eden. The field of gravity holding the Herrscher of Storms vanished. Above us, the storm faltered.
"If you still want to run, I'm not sure any of us could stop you," Theresa continued. "But I'm here, Windy. I can't apologise enough for leaving you, and you can hate me if you like. But I still think you want to protect humanity.
"And this," she gestured around at them at the burning fields of mecha. They were starting to push back the Honkai horde now. "This isn't how you do that."
"I…" Wendy shuddered in place, hiccuping around tears that were falling faster now. She tried to blink quickly to clear her eyes, but it just wasn't enough, and I could feel the cracks widening. Wendy had been unforgivably violated, but so too had Sirin. And the Will hadn't been able to make my daughter forget how much she'd just wanted a loving home and family.
Wendy was fighting the same battle now, jittering in place as the Will tried to surge Honkai energy into her thoughts only for Theresa's presence to rip it away. The winds had dropped to almost nothing, but the storm's tension remained, thick enough about us all to be cut with a knife.
"Tell me what you want, Wendy," Theresa said. "Your true feelings."
Wendy raised eyes dripping tears and viridian sparks into the packed snow to face the gentle blue of her teacher's.
"Help me," she whispered. Her voice was that of a girl once more, in terrible pain. "Please."
And suddenly I was beside her. I couldn't tell you how I crossed the distance so quickly, nor how I did so without disturbing so much as a single hair on either of Teri or Wendy's heads. I just knew that I moved in the instant that I felt the Will's hold on Wendy give way. She jerked back from the motion in instinctive fear, but Theresa's grip on her hand didn't let her go to far.
"It's alright," the older woman said soothingly. "She just wants to help, I promise."
Wendy glanced at me, the distrust in her eyes clear. Me as I'd been before, I would've struggled after seeing Bella's limping run. But that had been before. I looked back at the emotionally flailing girl and let the gentle sun of Elysia's love burn through those feelings. I'd pay the price of them later, after she was safe.
"I promise," I said, answering the unsaid question in her green eyes. "I'd never wish hate on a beautiful girl like you." Maybe…a bit too much love.
"Wendy, this might be a bit painful," Theresa said. Her teeth had shifted, incisors extending into sharply pointed fangs. Wendy stared at them for a moment, then nodded wordlessly, making a small, scared sound of assent.
Origin's power surged into life below my breast the moment she did so, an impossibly intense concentration of energy roused in answer to a wish for a second chance. And Theresa, in that instant, surprised me.
Instead of sinking fangs into Wendy's wrist or neck, as I'd expected, she leant forward and pressed her lips to the girl's forehead. It was a gentle gesture, like a benediction, but no less powerful for it. Honkai energy poured out of the girl in a tide, the crackling, hateful power reduced to simple food by Theresa's heritage.
She still screamed, I wasn't sure there was any way to stop that. But at least she wouldn't bear wounds as a result.
I felt the energy in the girl reach its nadir, the moment where any faded influence would be weakest. Origin's power had only grown stronger, even here so close to a Vishnu, waiting for its moment. I didn't want to stop it, and I don't think I could have had I tried. So I let go, let the power erupt from my skin, from my eyes, leaping out across the space between me and the girl I'd caused so much pain.
For a moment the world vanished, consumed utterly in the light of Origin's power, until even Wendy's scream was lost. And when my vision finally cleared, she was half-collapsed forward into Theresa's arms, sobbing like the child she was.
Hua had vanished, gone to help end the battle around us, and Welt tossed me a salute as he turned to attend to his own side of the battlefield. I simply sat there, blinking my eyes as the effort of channelling so much energy slowly faded away. Theresa mouthed words to me as I sat there, I think it was a thank you, but would ask later.
The Battle of Elysium was won.
Everything else could wait.
None of it would matter.
I took in the sight below me in a single perfect instant. There was Siegfried, Shamash in hand but utterly exhausted, kneeling below Wendy's storm-sheathed form. The crash of battle roared behind him, Anti-Entropy Mecha battling the tide of Honkai that Wendy had drawn from beyond the world to her side. Railgun fire lancing out from enormous static batteries, clouds of missiles volleying destruction into the tide of chittering claws and flashing fangs.
Off to the side of where Siegfried's battle had taken place, Lixue held a slowly flattening point of defiance against the Honkai incursion. Her blade flashed in the late-morning sun, and clear water lashed from the strikes into the pale flesh of the Honkai beasts all around her. Next to me, I heard Hua let out a breath that I wasn't sure she knew she'd been holding. Mine didn't ease for another moment. Until I saw Bella, presumably returned to her human form. She was running from the battle, but the girl's body moved too stiffly for her to be uninjured.
My breath came out in a hiss as I saw that, as I remembered Sirin's voice. The desperate plea that she'd been so shocked to hear answered, for her mother to come home and save her. A slender bow of white edges and a dark purple centre replaced the familiar Sonnet, a Flawless Return to save all I loved. And the world fell away, swallowed by amaranthine flame.
My long coat of black and purple had already vanished, swept away in bursts of magenta light as I fell to be replaced by streamers of pure white. Now the rest of my clothing met the same fate. The tube-top blouse shifted into a full bodice, engravings of pearl and gold wrapping brilliant gems of pink light. Ribbons of more white fabric sprang from around my waist, each one adding to the shape of the dress that curled about my legs.
Flawless Return shifted, the bow only present for a moment, a touchstone to unlock the fullness of Elysia's strength. White faded into the steady rose-tinted wood of the Staff of Origin, the crystal at its tip blazing like a tiny star, this time but an echo of my own light. Patterns of pink and purple surrounded me, forming a gently spinning ring of colour. And power unlike anything I'd ever felt flooded into my veins. I'd learn only later that my eyes had gone completely pink, pupils expanded into diamonds of a brighter shade.
Welt, Hua and Theresa had all darted away to their own objectives as my transformation took hold. We'd had time to plan as Welt had sent us hurtling across the northern skies, and they followed the contingency we'd prepared in those rushed minutes for if Seigfried had fallen. In some ways, I was almost glad. Shamash was impossibly powerful in the right hands, but the Key of Destruction's power was one that didn't discriminate between friend or foe.
And I still wanted to try and save Wendy. What she'd become, that was at least partly my fault. I'd pushed Otto into a corner, I should have seen what he'd do as a result. And now an innocent girl was paying the price. I owed her, I owed Theresa, a better future than that. The crystal at the tip of the Staff of Origin pulsed brighter at that thought, and ancient instincts reached into the air around me, slowing my descent. I couldn't have explained how I did it if I'd tried. I just knew that in this form, in our full incarnation, flight was not beyond me. That could be important in the battle to come.
Wendy was staring up at me, the girl's bloody lips drawn back in a snarl of hatred as she recognised what I was becoming. Or, perhaps not her, but the intelligence behind her power. The whispers of the Will, walking her down steps once prepared for my daughter.
"You." Her voice was a thing of crackling power and furious energy, clipped from the air with terribly certainty. I caught myself curtseying in the air, an elegant dip of my head acknowledging my true enemy here.
"It's a terrible thing you've done to a cute girl," I said in a gentle sing-song. In the corner of my eye I saw Welt pulling Siegfried to his feet, moving the defenceless Knight out of the danger zone. I wasn't going to leave Kiana's father stuck here as potential collateral damage.
"You laid the stage." Hateful eyes dripped green sparks as they stared up at me.
"And I'm sorry for the part I played in it." Red-gold light washed over churned snow from somewhere on my right, where Lixue had been fighting. Hua, seeing to the safety of her own daughter. "But I won't let you do this to my home. Or to that girl."
"I chose!" A girl's voice now, Wendy's, lashed at my ears. Her words carried tangible force, shaking the air and sending snowflakes flying into the wind. "And if it wasn't for that man, that cheater, I would have taken everything from you all!"
I had to force back the tears that pricked at my eyes, they would only make this worse. Wendy didn't want pity right now, she wanted revenge. And, at some level, she had a right to those feelings. What had been done to her was horrific, and she might never be able to escape it all.
"Perhaps you would have," I admitted, nodding sadly. Pink hair fluttered across my vision, pulled by the rushing wind. "But the future where you could have done so isn't this one."
I didn't have to be a social genius to know exactly where those words would lead the furious girl. Or the power pushing her thoughts, driving her berserk. I saw it in the sudden tension in her wrist, the way her eyes darted towards Elysium, narrowing as something far more than human calculated behind her eyes.
"Isn't it?" Two voices hissed. Wendy's unharmed arm blurred, snatching the amalgamation of Shamash's strike and the vastness of her own power out of the air. I felt it shift there, in her grip, condensing the flames back into a weapon of devastating fury. Then her arm snapped out to full extension, hurling a blast of power that would pierce the very earth and tear down the paradise of my creation.
I didn't move as she did it. I didn't react, simply staring down at my enemy and the one who I wished to save. Her eyes tracked up to mine in the instant before impact, smug hatred twisting at her lips, the beginnings of a mocking smile.
"I'm sorry, Wendy," I said calmly. "For everything. But this has to end."
I saw her eyes widen in response to my tone, then again as the expected detonation failed to appear. She spun, the storm screaming to her call, the world rippling as she flung herself around, desperate to understand. If her mind hadn't been so compromised by the pain of her arm, or by the hate of the Will surging through her like poison, then I think she might have realised.
It didn't make me feel any less sick when I hit her, though. Despite everything that she'd done, she was still a child, and I hated the idea of hurting her. But it was necessary. I needed to buy time, distract her enough to stop her from doing whatever she'd done to steal Shamash's power.
The crystal head of the Staff of Origin glowed incandescent as I slammed it into Wendy's side, catching her in the instant when all of her focus was fixed on trying to understand her plan's failure. The weapon hit with bone-crushing force, our experience at Norway had made it very clear that none of us could afford to hold back beyond the bare minimum to keep her alive.
I heard a high scream of pure agony behind me, but I couldn't spare the time to look. I had to believe that Theresa had accurately judged the capacity of her appetite. My role was to stop Wendy from interfering. The blow to her side had sent the Herrscher of Storms hurtling down into a snowdrift, but she arrested the unplanned motion in a thunder of gale winds. Arcs of emerald lightning ripped apart the snow before her feet could touch it, and she turned back to me.
The smile had vanished, replaced by only snarling rage. And yet I could only see the child's face that was twisted into that expression as I raised the Staff of Origin to point down at her. I felt the sky shift far above as I did so, glimmering with tiny points of light.
Wendy leapt for me, wind and lightning gathering in one outstretched palm. And I whispered three words.
"Waltz, oh stars."
A column of violet starlight sheeted down from the heavens, intercepting Wendy at a point roughly halfway between us. The girl moved impossibly quick, somehow having sensed the descending attack in the moments before it hit, flinging up her hand and reshaping the power around it into a shield.
The beam of radiant power drove her to the ground in a crackling blaze of opposing forces, and though her shield buckled, it didn't break. We were, after all, roughly equally matched in tests of pure power. She just didn't have our experience. Or, more critically, any allies.
Hua entered the equation as Wendy rose to her feet again, her entire body enfolded in a veil of sharp orange light as she drove a stiff-arm strike into Wendy's sternum. She'd pulled the blow, something in me could tell, but only just. It still rocked the girl back on her heels, still recovering as she was from the effort of holding back my attack.
The ancient warrior ducked inside an abortive strike from the Herrscher, pure instinct overcoming her opponent's speed. One of her hands caught the girl's extended wrist, her legs flickered in a subtle twisting motion, and suddenly Wendy was airborne again. Horizontally this time, for the handful of moments it took Hua to pivot and deliver a brutally efficient axe-kick to her abdomen.
The girl slammed down onto the frozen ground, crying out in shock and pain. I managed not to wince at the young sound, but Hua just kept after her, not even flinching. Wendy had learned from her first experience with her, however, and a howl of air flung my friend back before she could deliver another blow. Lightning lashed down to strike the MANTIS as Wendy regained her feet in a swirl of wind, her eyes blazing with viridian light. Hua took the hits without flinching, her resistances absorbing them effortlessly, but it bought Wendy time. We couldn't let her escape again.
I whispered out to the stars and they answered, crushing her down a second time. This time she didn't even try to block it, summoning power directly into her armour to withstand the starlit assault. She pushed up through the storm of crushing light, raising one foot to take to the sky. Only for the world to bend around her as the third of our party rejoined the fray. Sweat beaded the Herrscher of Reason's forehead as he brought the Star of Eden's power to bear, lashing her to the earth and refusing her the freedom of the sky.
She screamed then, a sound of fury and fear in equal measure and I felt my heart wrench in reply. The feeling of being trapped, being contained, it would be torture to her after all she'd endured. Tears brushed my cheeks as lightning and thunder roared above us in answer to their Mistress's call. Yet the storm was weaker by far than it had been on her awakening. And the skill she'd begun to master in ripping away the fire of Shamash was only that: begun.
Enough to defeat Seigfreid, but to match two Herrschers and a warrior moulded over eight millennia to defeat them would've taken so much more. It was why the Will had driven her to act in vengeance against Elysium, to take some measure of victory from us even in defeat. But that nature had allowed us to predict it. Now, the results of our planning came to her feet between the Herrscher and our home.
Theresa's face had shifted into one hauntingly familiar, the very image of the woman Otto had tried to resurrect in creating her. But for the half-crown of alabaster horns that held her hair behind her face as it fell all the way to the line of her knees, she could've been Kallen Kaslana reborn.
The earth around her was burnt black, contained by a smouldering ring of flash-fried plant matter, and there were scorch marks around her hands where she had caught and absorbed the strike that had been intended to end the hope of Elysium. Delicate chains of gold floated lazily in the air around her, retracted from the ground where Judah had helped anchor her, clinking softly as she stepped out of the blackened circle.
Golden foxfire danced across skin and cloth as she came, the last echoes of Shamash's fury draining steadily into the unseen chasm of the unleashed Vishnu's endless appetite. Wendy's eyes widened in terror as she recognised the presence of the perfected MANTIS, her teacher and mentor.
"That fate for me," she sighed. And though there was terror in her eyes, there was only scorn in her twinned voice. "Too cowardly to kill, even with all I've done."
Theresa shook her head, not slowing her approach. I could feel the hungry whirlpool of her presence now, sucking away the energy around us. It was a delicate balancing, not least for how it affected the bindings responsible for this conversation being possible. Wendy still had enough power to flee again if we were careless, and we might never find her in time again if she did. And yet, all of us had agreed. We had to try.
"What, then?" Wendy asked, her words dripping with contempt. "You think you can rip away my power and force me back into who I was before? So nostalgic for the girl you abandoned that you'd kill this one to get her back? Use the Ancient to do it, perhaps?"
"No, Wendy," Theresa said gently. Wendy flinched back from the compassion in her voice, and from how close she'd come, stepping into the field of gravity holding the greenette down.
I saw something flicker in the girl's eyes, and one hand reached up, brushing at the tears flowing down her face. She stared down at her hand for a moment, confusion fighting up through the anger and loss that had driven her into the arms of hatred.
"I abandoned you once. Maybe that means I'm not a worthy teacher anymore." Theresa said. She sank to her knees across from Wendy, and the girl shuddered as her teacher caught her hand in a gentle grip. "But I'm going to try my best to be."
"Easy to say with me chained-"
"Welt." The single word cut the rallying scorn short, and it scattered completely as the Herrscher of Reason lowered the Star of Eden. The field of gravity holding the Herrscher of Storms vanished. Above us, the storm faltered.
"If you still want to run, I'm not sure any of us could stop you," Theresa continued. "But I'm here, Windy. I can't apologise enough for leaving you, and you can hate me if you like. But I still think you want to protect humanity.
"And this," she gestured around at them at the burning fields of mecha. They were starting to push back the Honkai horde now. "This isn't how you do that."
"I…" Wendy shuddered in place, hiccuping around tears that were falling faster now. She tried to blink quickly to clear her eyes, but it just wasn't enough, and I could feel the cracks widening. Wendy had been unforgivably violated, but so too had Sirin. And the Will hadn't been able to make my daughter forget how much she'd just wanted a loving home and family.
Wendy was fighting the same battle now, jittering in place as the Will tried to surge Honkai energy into her thoughts only for Theresa's presence to rip it away. The winds had dropped to almost nothing, but the storm's tension remained, thick enough about us all to be cut with a knife.
"Tell me what you want, Wendy," Theresa said. "Your true feelings."
Wendy raised eyes dripping tears and viridian sparks into the packed snow to face the gentle blue of her teacher's.
"Help me," she whispered. Her voice was that of a girl once more, in terrible pain. "Please."
And suddenly I was beside her. I couldn't tell you how I crossed the distance so quickly, nor how I did so without disturbing so much as a single hair on either of Teri or Wendy's heads. I just knew that I moved in the instant that I felt the Will's hold on Wendy give way. She jerked back from the motion in instinctive fear, but Theresa's grip on her hand didn't let her go to far.
"It's alright," the older woman said soothingly. "She just wants to help, I promise."
Wendy glanced at me, the distrust in her eyes clear. Me as I'd been before, I would've struggled after seeing Bella's limping run. But that had been before. I looked back at the emotionally flailing girl and let the gentle sun of Elysia's love burn through those feelings. I'd pay the price of them later, after she was safe.
"I promise," I said, answering the unsaid question in her green eyes. "I'd never wish hate on a beautiful girl like you." Maybe…a bit too much love.
"Wendy, this might be a bit painful," Theresa said. Her teeth had shifted, incisors extending into sharply pointed fangs. Wendy stared at them for a moment, then nodded wordlessly, making a small, scared sound of assent.
Origin's power surged into life below my breast the moment she did so, an impossibly intense concentration of energy roused in answer to a wish for a second chance. And Theresa, in that instant, surprised me.
Instead of sinking fangs into Wendy's wrist or neck, as I'd expected, she leant forward and pressed her lips to the girl's forehead. It was a gentle gesture, like a benediction, but no less powerful for it. Honkai energy poured out of the girl in a tide, the crackling, hateful power reduced to simple food by Theresa's heritage.
She still screamed, I wasn't sure there was any way to stop that. But at least she wouldn't bear wounds as a result.
I felt the energy in the girl reach its nadir, the moment where any faded influence would be weakest. Origin's power had only grown stronger, even here so close to a Vishnu, waiting for its moment. I didn't want to stop it, and I don't think I could have had I tried. So I let go, let the power erupt from my skin, from my eyes, leaping out across the space between me and the girl I'd caused so much pain.
For a moment the world vanished, consumed utterly in the light of Origin's power, until even Wendy's scream was lost. And when my vision finally cleared, she was half-collapsed forward into Theresa's arms, sobbing like the child she was.
Hua had vanished, gone to help end the battle around us, and Welt tossed me a salute as he turned to attend to his own side of the battlefield. I simply sat there, blinking my eyes as the effort of channelling so much energy slowly faded away. Theresa mouthed words to me as I sat there, I think it was a thank you, but would ask later.
The Battle of Elysium was won.
Everything else could wait.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
This chapter just...I don't even know. This was not the chapter I had in my head at all when I sat down to write it a few days ago. The idea I had then for this chapter was...it was like the interludes in some ways. Climactic and full of epic displays of power and...just totally rejected by all of my characters when I started putting words to the page. So instead...you get this. I really, really hope it works.
Thanks to my betas for checking things, though be aware that this was skim-read vs line-checked so if there are errors please do forgive that. No art, @Baughn was busy. Maybe some later if he feels inspired.
My outline now has two more chapters in it, so we're almost at the finish line. Hope you'll stay with me as I bring this story home.
Thanks to my betas for checking things, though be aware that this was skim-read vs line-checked so if there are errors please do forgive that. No art, @Baughn was busy. Maybe some later if he feels inspired.
My outline now has two more chapters in it, so we're almost at the finish line. Hope you'll stay with me as I bring this story home.
Great update, Snowfire. Look forward to what happens after.
Very poetic!
Very poetic!