Phoe

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Silence. For once, the same as peace. Tranquility as deep as the light of a distant nebula, visible for half a night and from a single planet if one happened to be sleepless and wise enough to tilt their head toward the stars, perchance to see something they might share with company they had not intended to keep.

...Khhh. Mira hisses softly, and clicks her tongue against her teeth. As a final gift it lacked, mmmmnnnn, finesse? She'd thought the result would have been more explosive. More color. Or less. Or. Well. Different. Simply... different. This was the problem in chasing too many fish at once. An ultimate attack is not usually an art project for a reason. Too many sub-goals increases the risk of tainting the final result.

Her train flutters delicately behind her as she descends from the top of the wreckage with the careless, hopping grace of a, well, of a cat. She is unhurried and unbothered in the moment, taking the lines that seem the most fun or that create the most beautiful motions in her mind, but always and without stopping bringing her closer to the ground. Closer to Solarel.

In terms of impact she could not say she was disappointed. They would fear this spot for years. They'd study it for years after that. Picking through the pieces, sorting through the implications, and (she hoped) simply marveling at its strange beauty. Art was always more her talent than science. What she'd learned was only ever to better chase a vision. What mattered was that this couldn't be forgotten. And though it might get covered up, it wouldn't be ignored.

The Kiss of the Comet. Her fangs against the throats of Empires. Secret and yet deep enough to bleed, she thinks. No, it's not bad at all. And watching the world decide to fall apart, and then to fall un-apart was not bad for visual impact. She'd done better with dresses in the main. But still. Good. It looked good. Felt good. It was only disappointing because she could not get her choice of monuments in place.

Hop hop hop, descent, descent, descent. Mira traipses down the arm of the Aeteline as a maiden cloaked in moonlight crosses a flight of stairs. Beneath her, her ballroom. Beneath her, her destiny. Beneath her, her reward. She is close enough now to see the look on her lover's face. Her liquid eyes alight at every little tick of wonder, of happiness, and of relief. Silence. Even now, silence. Her paws make no noise on the shattered metal as she crosses the smoldering mecha down to the site of the final moment of the final battle. It was silence, the same as peace.

...In the end, optimal. Optimal outcome. Absolute and inarguable. It would not be hard at all to guess at what went on here, but the Nine Drive System had detonated before its final secrets could be made public. Without even a shred of hard evidence, investigators would be forced to conclude that this could be the result of Tail Nine coming into contact with the Aeteline's own crystal fire drive, and the confluence of those energies would be marked as the cause of this bizarre moment. And as long as that stayed plausible it would be enough. Someone would eventually make the argument just to dodge more questions about how someone like Mira of the Fisher Clan managed to walk something as dangerous as the Ninetails straight through every check and regulation all the way to the finals of the galaxy's most important peacekeeping event.

But still. If she could have chosen. She would have preferred to leave something of her Gods-Smiting Whip behind. A quiet skeleton wrapped around its quaint controls, forever still. Proof that she had flown, and how. Proof of the love that had carried her through the stars. It was not to be. The price of channeling all of that power directly was that Slate's masterpiece have disintegrated where the terrifying God of the Imperial Court had merely died. And without even that much, the Whispered Promise was no longer even a pilot.

"Ha. Do you hear that, Slate? You're fired."

Her sarcastic laughter is the first music of the scene. The first act that dares to break the silence. But this is also peace. Mira's feet touch the ground at last. She stands side by side with Solarel. And then, front to front. Together they complete her final dress again. Arms at each others backs, the warmth of their bodies seeping into one another.

They kiss as anime teaches us that all princesses should kiss: in the soft light of the dawn that represents their triumph over evil. With grace and softness that pulls their lips into one another's, and then apart, but only to taste new flavors on new horizons across each other's softness. It is the kiss that sheathes swords at last, and dares to look for a place on the mantle to hang them up until one day adventure calls and they are needed again. It is the kiss that promises to stay. It is the kiss that carries the excitement of the word 'Tomorrow'.

"This." says Mira in a breathy voice that radiates contentment, "This is my victory. The first of this entire tournament."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

That naive? This world created Diaofei. This world hurt her. This world had thrown a trickster at her wearing the guise of the Allfather within minutes of setting foot outside, and then proceeded to rain stones upon her head endlessly while fencing her in with castle walls and English knights. And this world still had magic enough for dragons. Whatever softness might reign in the world of rebirth, it is most certainly not naive. What a stupid thought. She should strike her own head from her shoulders for the audacity of even pondering that question.

Not that it matters. The question of trap or ambush is utterly irrelevant next to the only question that matters: is this her? Is this Actia? All she knows about her prey is that she should come when the shrine burns. The shrine is burning. She has come. Is this her?!

It is the pursuit of that truth that pulls Saber out of the flames. She is on the dragon in a second. A boot to the head rather than her blade through that command seal painted throat. Even a smaller dragon such as this one would be unlikely to die straight away from a single wound, and its materialized servant would have more than ample time to strike a counterblow while she was committed. It would simply take too long to wrench the blade free, and without a spare weapon that was an unacceptable loss.

Bait out the ambush, and then crush it. In the meantime a warrior of her stature would be laughed out of her own halls for fearing a dragon she could plausibly mount and ride under better circumstances. Let it roar, let it fight! And while it struggles against the iron of her knee pinning its shoulder against the ground, let it also answer!

"Give me your name, little wyrm. This war is not yours to win."

She presses her weight down harder into the ground, rotating her shoulder up as she sinks to get a better angle on the arc that would crush the inevitable counterattack. Shadows seep into the floor where they fleck off of her dark cloak. In the icy depths of her eyes, motes of molten gold begin to pool and glitter, as if they'd melted off her treasures and seeped into her soul.

Breathless Dead

Bella's neck cranes to take in the full effect of the skyscraper in front of her. Every gash of gleaming paint, Every trill of proud music, every twist in the precise knot of cables connecting the power of the Star Kings to this bland and unfortunate thing that passes for a city. Her face twists into a scowl that deepens with every new detail she takes in.

What pisses her off is that it's legitimately beautiful. Not a match for the great works of Tellus, but in terms of composition the backdrop was a work of artistic genius. The Portuguese understanding of materials was so underdeveloped that they didn't even have proper grays or beige tones. Walking around their civilization and eating their "food" gave off such an overwhelming sensation of fading that it was easy to lose oneself in it, until it... no.

It isn't that it felt more dead here than the palace of Hades. This is not a place of death. The problem was that too long here and Bella could easily imagine nothing ever feeling real again. Even the Anemoi's murk was at least intense. Here there's plenty of light and warmth to spare, but everything still felt like it'd been left to soak for a year or six in dingy water. Against that kind of backdrop even a tiny splash of proper red or a single note of real music exploded to life in a way that would make a master with fifty times the ability cry with envy.

That it sang with pride and the weight of history on top of that lifted this pilfered tower to a level Bella could not remember seeing in her lifetime. The idea of secret art and secret infrastructure placed out in the open for all to see, knowing that only a comparative handful could or ever would... it's romantic. Redana would have loved this. Not the perfect Princess that wound up here, but the silly girl who stayed up all night in the palace so she could pine after the stars her mother had cut off from the sky. She would be head over heels if she could see this for herself.

Bella's hands clench into fists that bite with claw against the palms of her hands. Yeah. She'd love it so much. If it wasn't a fucking indoctrination scheme. Clever, arrogant fucks. Plucking people from out of their drab little lives and giving them eyes for the first time. Revealing a layer that was "always" painted on top of their city, this first breath of real oxygen. Building lines of stratification, themselves above and these... Lifted below, climbed just high enough to detach themselves from the people they'd known their whole lives. A secret army like a secret clique that might form among a maid staff, nothing more than that but so high off their first taste of the universe that they'd suffer delusions of grandeur anyway.

These fucking plunderers. They're no better than the Azura biomancer. At least she could lie to herself about her arrogance being painted with altruism. The Star Kings were building a weapon. Nothing more. Worse than that, the name of that weapon was a concept so horrible she hadn't even known to hate it until she felt the tension in her spine.

"Sub-Servitors..." she hisses.

Her body burns hot enough that her feet have started melting grooves into the fragile "pavement" in the streets. Her muscles tense, and her tail lashes with enough force that it might crack the foundations of several major buildings in the area, if only she managed to touch them. The urge to scream, to rush forward, to tear down this entire absurd installation herself with her bare hands is almost more than she can handle. But she bites it back down. A hard swallow and a deep breath after. She wrenches her head away before it can surge back up her heart and into the city.

Fucking sucks relying on others. She's never trusted them in her life. But there are questions that dragged her down here. Questions she can't answer if she gets herself stuck in a fight.

"Ember," says Bella as she turns her back on the building, "Crush them. I don't care how you do it, but make it hurt. And tell the girls that Engine is our prize today. No matter how you settle this, we're not leaving here without it."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"For this?! For this you would--"

Red light glows against her skin. Tattoos burn their way through her armor, patterns of jagged compass markings suddenly making themselves known through the glow as Saber grits her teeth in obvious pain. The look in her eyes is absolute betrayal. A moment later, they grow dull.

Baleful light fades away, turning to smoke that rises from her body and sinks into her hair. Slowly at first, but then with increasing rapidity as it travels from the roots, her braid fades in color from striking straw to a dull, featureless gray. Not as a mark of age or veneration, but the kind of bland dust that all things turn to when their passion and vitality is forcibly pulled out of them and pointed somewhere it doesn't belong.

The molotov bottle falls from her fingers and rolls along the ground until it rests under the front wheel of the Kun shrine. A shadow falls across her face as she rises once more to her full, towering height. It does not clear, even when she turns to behold the shrine again, knuckles gripped so tight around the hilt of her sword that they begin to whiten.

"...Destroying this will bring her here?" she asks.

Her back is turned to Diaofei. A cloak of shadows unfurls across her back, disguising the motion of her drawn weapon. Something halfway between a chuckle and a snarl escapes her throat that doesn't even resemble the voice of the king from just minutes ago and more closely calls to mind a wounded animal.

Pain. Pain. Twisted pain and betrayal stacked high enough to climb the path between worlds.

"Then it burns."

She leaps into the air, leaving her Master behind to watch. No discussion, no planning, no strategy; her blade flashes like a torch against the queer lighting of Actia's hideout and then she falls as lightning, through the nest of cables, through the masks, and through the floor. Power crackles where she passes, sparks to start a fire. Her promise catches soon after, rising from the crater as she does.

Tiny, licking flames to start with. They'll build into an inferno before long, hot enough to melt even the outer plating of the steel giant watching over them. Saber stands and waits in the middle of it all, wrapped in gentle shadows that do not suffer a single wisp to touch her.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

There are limits to imagination, you know. Mira has been gifted a perfect position. Solarel has put a golden blade in her hands, as good a gift as her very own heart. Mm. Correction. That is more or less what she is holding, in actual fact. But still. But still? But still. What is she to do with these gifts? For all her bluster she is not and has never been a huntress. She has never stood astride one of the Great Beasts, and for all she has tried to imagine this moment that is not the same as being able to picture it.

The core is exposed. What does that mean? If she pierces it she will expose her arm to raw crystal fire. Possibly worse? She does not want to die. She does not want to lose and need to replace it. She does not want to lose it and find out it cannot be replaced because of the strange curse of a god. She wants to lose her partner because of her own hesitation even less. Nonetheless, for a moment she cannot picture it. So all she does is shift her feet and hold the sword.

"Solarel?"

The sound of her voice dies before it reaches her ears. But in this place of melting possibilities and confused air currents, it carries down below and all around her into a hundred different cameras. She is certain she is heard. She can see herself being heard. This is speech that is solely for other ears, other hearts to listen to. Just as well.

"Do you remember my words at the fashion show? I asked you to watch me. I told you. Told you I would show you. Show you my dreams. And I... have. But I spoke of something else, as well. In another voice, and to other people. I... only just understood my own riddle. I think."

It had not been her intention, when she conceived her final dress. The battle was meant to be over by now. But still. But still? But still. All of a sudden she sees it, as clearly as if she'd written it into the schematics herself. A Huntress? A Mercenary? A Knight? No. All of these, and more. Why did the Children of Hybrasil carry so many names, if not to use them all? This. This is how she hunts. This is how she walks the mountain.

"When! You are brave enough to put the body ahead of your own sense of cleverness? You can do... THIS."

Her dress was made to be the melding of the three great cultures. Part of that meant that it was composed of nanomachines. Mira had no claim to mastery of these mysteries. Irrelevant. She had two things to replace it. First: a desire to express love that overrode the need to maintain her own sense of aesthetic purity. And second: a device she has worn as a pendant ever since the moment she first became aware of it. Back when it had almost killed her. The container for the Geist that Solarel had infected the Gods-Smiting Whip with.

Her perfect dress is dissipating. Flowing up her body, lace turned to liquid silver that flows into the shining golden sword and fades into immaterial nothingness. Every thread that disappears from her body returns in the shape of the tip of a longer and longer blade. It does not gain mass, does not change shape into something more suited for wielding its new size. It simply becomes longer. Longer and longer and longer, thin and delicate and deadly. A needle worthy of a god. And flowing through it, poison.

There is nothing left of her dress except for the veil and the train, which drape across her body like the whispers of an old song. All of her spots, all of her beauty, and all of her imperfections are bared to the open sky and the scars of the Nine Drive System. But she has no name for this last technique. It would be laughable to call it a technique in the first place. All she does is drop her gift, and watch it pierce the core of a God.

It stabs all the way through to the ground beneath it, where its length unravels. A masterpiece fit for a bride pools at Solarel's feet.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"You know what I think?"

Saber does not release Diaofei. She doesn't even suggest the possibility. Her arm squeezes, and this is possession. Her fingers caress the top of the monk's head to feel the fine hairs that rise up in defiance of her vows, and this is adoration. Her free hand plucks the molotov off the dashboard and seemingly moves to drink it before simply turning it in the light instead, and this is tenderness.

She leans closer, and her heavy straw-and-iron braid falls carelessly down Diaofei's shoulder and into her lap.

"I think that you are a blade. That you have been sharpened, and sharpened, and sharpened until it has made you too brittle for use even as a kitchen utensil. I think you feel this in your soul, and you quiver because of it. You must plunge into something, else why should you have endured all that painful scraping and grinding? But you know that it will be your unmaking and you cannot find it in yourself to endure that final thrust and snap."

Saber's arm slinks around her Master some more. She takes Diaofei's chin in her hand and tilts her head up, up, up. Away from the shrine, away from the mad nest of cables and toward the steel colossus that shades and powers it. Above even that to the skies that stretch over everything, and the stars that twinkle beyond the scope of what is possible to grasp. Even in the sick glow of the shrine and the fierce headlights of the Kun Temple, they twinkle on.

Those fingers tilt Diaofei's head down again, gripping her cheeks firmly but without pain, to gaze upon another giant instead. Saber herself. She leans close, close enough for their breath to mingle. For their noses to touch. She smiles her shark's smile, but makes no motion to close the final gap and consummate the gesture. Perhaps that is beneath the dignity of a king? Or perhaps she simply refuses to be the board that snaps the knife in two.

"I suppose you believe this is fate. Destiny or, whatever. That is why you ignore me when I talk about making you well again. You do not believe it can happen. Pathetic. Unacceptable. Why accept it? You called to me! Your heart is filled with desires! What point in dreaming if you do not reach with your own hand to seize what is owed you? If you want destruction, have the courage to say so! If you want her back, say that too! If you want her dead..."

The closeness ends all at once. Saber kicks open the cab door behind her and slides outside. In the same, lazy motion she grabs for the top of the door and vaults up and over to the other side. Her feet touch the ground before she's seen to finish clearing it, and when she opens the driver's side door to stare at Diofei again, she drops smoothly to one knee, holding the molotov in a parody of one of the English knight's little sword ceremonies. But there is no smile on her face, only steel in her eyes.

"I will ask of you one last time: are you my Master? And what do you desire, Diaofei the brittle knife?"

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The perfection of the moment doesn't last long enough for the quip to rise up all the way past her tongue. Improperly phrases, halted at the third gate. Access denied. Time stands still. Time shifts all the same. The energy of the moment changes, and the capstone to perfection falls broken beneath a pair of electrum colored wings.

Time. Has shifted. To a place beyond her vision. Time. has shifted. Past the far edges of her plans. A whole tournament. Countless lives gathered up and dangled on strings. All for. This?

Mira presses her cheek tight against Solarel's, and rubs it possessively against her. Her fingers dig in underneath the wings; if she did not keep her claws so fastidiously clipped she would be drawing blood right now. Instead there is only the application of pressure without release. Like being teased by an acupuncturist in some strange game of foreplay. Tighter, tighter, tighter, building and then... nothing. Her tail swats with performative heaviness against Solarel's thigh.

"This is what you sounded like by the way," Mira sighs and peppers that gorgeous neck with kisses, "Such a far cry from who you were when we met. Or the woman who brought the Bezorel to this tournament, for that matter. When I saw you, I..."

Hesitation. A war of conversations plays out in the waterfalls of her eyes. One where she says too much, and all at once. One where she says too little, and never at all. One where--

"No. I will not apologize. We wound up here. I am content. Nevertheless I. I regret. Regret that. That I could not. That I did not. See a path. Conceive a plan that asked less of you. That hurt you less. There are. Limitations to my power. How shameful."

Her whiskers twitch. Her eyes stare without quite piercing, much like her claws. Her ears pivot atop her head, but not to bend to the sounds of the mummified husk of a creature she'd sought to destroy rising up out of the dust in search of revenge, but solely to catch every creak of muscle and the sounds of wind through those perfect blade-wings, to hear truth in breath and heartbeat and the parting of lips before words begin. There is 'speak not to the outsider' and there is 'speak not'. And those are very different commandments indeed.

But what words gift her ears it does not change reality. It does not change tactics. Time has shifted. It has shifted, and the world demands recognition. To lose herself in the moment she'd tried to freeze meant dropping all the rest of them into the dirty piles of dead nanobots. A testament to her own foolishness mixed in with the folly of Empire.

How dare it. How dare it. That worthless trash heap! These insufferable ghosts! How dare it survive even as scrap when her Gods-Smiting Whip had not?! How dare they pick the memory of stupid, tasteless power over her beautiful Selin's masterpiece?!

"Darling," she chirps through sudden bared teeth, "Lover. Starlight. So. La. Rel~"

Finally, release. Her claws are sharp enough to pierce after all. Her teeth are sharper still. Lover's marks, lover's fury, lover's faith. Her tongue is rough, and sweeter than honey.

"Fly us closer, if you please. If it is not too much trouble. I. Desire. To walk the mountain. With you."

Breathless Dead

"What is this place?"

Bella's face has been tensed since landing, as if she were in a permanent state of readiness to wrinkle her nose at some indescribable foulness. But she's smelled foulness before, and this isn't it. She's seen horror in her time. She's felt sweltering heat and humidity crawl down her neck on the Eater of Worlds, she's listened to the desperate songs of the forever-dying machines of Baradissar, seen the fruits of passion and artistry hidden inside the Yakanov, tasted the impossible, obsessive mastery of the bakeries on Salib, smelled the siren song of blood wafting up through the torrential rains on Sahar. This is nothing like any of that.

It isn't even the proper muteness of the Anemoi, or the stifling aura of Death and Majesty that covered the Tunguska. Everything is at once too loud and too quiet. There are abundant smells in the air but none of them are full. Bella sniffs as deep as she dares without giving herself away but it's all like trying to pick flowers out of a dried bouquet in another room. The grave goods of ancient humanity were impossibly bright, almost gaudy (if such a thing were possible from such magnificent creatures), and though their foods were wispy and insubstantial from a point of nutrition they were astonishingly complex in flavor.

She is walking out of the fifth identical restaurant now, with a round sandwich stuffed with meats and vegetables that somehow all manage to smell like the same kind of grease and nothing else. Even the bread is made from the same material as the filling for all that her gods-gifted nose could make of it. She takes a bite and frowns. Water. She is eating water that somebody waved a cut of steak over at some point. The potato wedges at the previous place were the same. Somehow. And the little hand pie in the one before that, the exact same sensation and flavor. The shake in the one before that managed to be both lumpy and watery, but it also tasted like this same vague memory of flavor. Just. What the fuck? How?

Everywhere she looks is too much and too little at the same time. The bricks and stones are featureless, shoddy slabs with paint that's too bright to have been ancient but too dull to be interesting. There are no frescoes or crumbling monuments or acts of artistry and intention, at least that she can recognize for these things. Everything, every building and every road and every outfit on every person looks and smells and feels (though she is too afraid to do more than brush her fingers across the corner of one restaurant on her way out, for fear of shattering it) like it was spit out of the same factory that made the sandwich in her hands.

Omn was right about one thing, at least. She couldn't possibly pass as someone from this place for more than a minute or two. And even that only because of the exhausted malaise that seems to have settled on all the people walking down the streets. Dead eyes, listless faces, all turned in every direction except in front of them, looking past the day and into the doom or salvation they must imagine are lurking in the skies above. Or maybe just to the end of the day and collapsing into their equally tired square beds. Not that she can blame them if that's the case.

None of it is their fault. They're trying their best. But fuck. She thought at least the struggle to live a life free of the prison of Biomancy would have yielded some kind of beauty for her to marvel at. But it hasn't. This place is a shithole. Fuck, this place is the shithole. There's never been a bad thing she's had to say about any of the places beyond the wonders of Tellus that she'd even be comfortable applying here for fear of insulting all the deathtraps and trash heaps she's stepped over on the way here.

...You know, this would have been the ideal vacation spot to take Dany. Get that wanderlust out of her system in a nice, safe way. Then they'd have rushed home to watch movies and eat toast. Nothing could have worked its way up to being dangerous to her here. Suddenly Bella has to hide her face in the crook of her elbow, because a grin has taken over her visage and its wholly inappropriate to the moment. She chokes with laughter she refuses to let build enough momentum to break into a full giggle. But gods. Gods. Gods! If she'd only known!

"Think they've got a museum at least?" she asks with a helpless shrug toward Dyssia, "A theater? A garden? A... gift shop? I dunno. I'd settle for a factory tour. I've seen some weird shit but I don't even understand... this."

She waves the half-eaten sandwich in her hand. Her nose manages to wrinkle after all. Hera help her, why does she have to finish it?

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"There could not have been a Ragnarok without giants to fight a war. I see. What a fascinating world."

It takes Saber a very long time to pry her eyes from the colossus meditating under the waterfall and behold the shrine it guards with its massive, overgrown body. There is a kind of elven beauty to the construct that makes her mouth fall open. Which forges in the secret places of the world had been involved in its creation? Were they many in number or scant few? Whom had they fought for and how? No small wonder that the side that built these things had believed it possible to triumph over Twilight.

And in the end...

Her fingers caress her sword as she might a lover's neck. A sigh of longing and lament draws out her breath. If only. If only she'd been allowed to fight against this creature. In contest or in war, it didn't make a difference. To have been outmatched so utterly and still been given leave to test her sword and her mind against it. Hers had truly been a failed kingship. Odin would never have cursed her to wait this long in any other case.

She shrugs and lets it all go. Sleeping ruins hold little interest for long against the present realities of her renewed war with the English and the tangled nest of cables and the spiteful glow of her new Master's wife's home. She tilts her head with curiosity, all previous fatigue forgotten. At long last, she grins.

"Is that so? Then let me ask you this, Master: what does that make you want to do?"

Saber takes one long, rough finger and presses it against Diaofei's wrist. Slowly, with just enough pressure to tease and scrape, she pulls it up her arm and to her shoulder, before wrapping her entire arm around the monk's neck and pulling her closer across the cab of the shrine-truck. She chuckles at the familiar sound of a soft face creasing her chain shirt, but makes no other comment on the matter.

"Does this change your drive? You could still destroy it. Or you could clean it and return it to the state you found it in when you were in love. Perhaps this shrine reflects your wife's heart? She might return to you if she is healed. Or perhaps we should steal it for ourselves, huh? There is an energy about this place that is truly wicked, plucked from whatever dark depths that burned the world to ash before it grew anew.

"But still. There is power here, as well. Enough to fix our problems if we but understand how to use it. I find this very intriguing. Do you, my little treasure? I will ask again. What does seeing this place make you want to do? Depending on your answer, I might even change my mind about helping you do it."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Hm. Unexpected complication. The sacrifice of the Gods-Smiting Whip for the sake of final victory was always part of her plan. First consequence of the Nine Drive System. Necessary in the end, to drag the things she needed into the realm of the physical and create the only future in which she could be happy. There was simply no other way. She'd known it from the very beginning. Before the beginning, in fact. Within her first three months of captivity she'd known that another chance would end like this, or else in failure.

But then. Why? Mira turns her head to the sky and watches the last vestiges of her Nine-Tails disintegrate in the coruscating True Rainbow of destructive power she herself had unleashed upon the arena. Why? Why why why why why? Why do her eyes sting with tears? Why is this goodbye so painful when none of the rest have ever been? What made it so special?

Overcome.

Mira turns her attention back toward Solarel. She watches her through crystal patterns now, the blurry vision of her overtreated eyes when she does not bother to stem the flow of tears. She is even more beautiful than before. Another unexpected complication. This one pulls an unintended smile from her lips. Damn it. Damn it! Why does nothing ever go according to calculations when this woman is involved? What makes her so special?!

"I love you!"

The sound is forced out of her. By the fall. Or by the spirits hanging like cameras in the air about her. Something beautiful against the achingly gorgeous, haunting backdrop of death, rebirth, and death again painted across the ground beneath them. It's even more of a sight than she anticipated. More spectacular, more fantastic, more... ah. What is that word?

Awesome.

Her steel-silk dress flutters in the winds she makes by answering gravity's call. There are tears in her eyes and a smile on her face and I love you on her lips and a three section staff in her hands. Click! She pulls it together. Thhhhhrrrsh! She swings it as hard as she can. Clang! It impacts one of Solarel's blade hilts and forces her guard open. Clink! It separates and wraps around her back.

"There is no one else I would have done this for! No one else I could have done this for!"

She flies in close, but does not connect with a kiss. No, this moment is punctuated by a headbutt. Her vision briefly turns to stars but the training she's used to fake normal piloting credentials had a secret second purpose and it is exactly this moment: Mira is in excellent shape. She cannot pilot any mecha that now exists in the galaxy (thanks to her), but she can pilot her own body.

And that is how she fights. Even now. Elbow punishes elbow. Knee locks around knee. In the opening of a guard she throws both arms around Solarel's neck and buries her cheek against the kinetic transfer induced warmth of her collarbone. Her legs lock around her prey's waist and her fingers lock together like iron behind her around the sections of her staff.

"I love you," she mumbles it this time, "Always. Forever. My missing piece."

There is no parachute hidden in the trailing sleeves and skirts of her magnificent dress. There is only the whispering caress of the at once soft and rigid fabric against the most beautiful and perfect scales any Zaldarian could hope to have. There is only the warmth of fur and the tickling of whiskers against an iron neck as she nuzzles and purrs like a love-drunk kitten.

"So save me. My princess."

And she drags her tongue along your jaw, Solarel. No victory to be stolen here. Your love was priced into her stupid plan from the very beginning. Life would not have been worth living without it.