2018-03-31 - Shinjuku

Shinjuku
Summary: All wars end.
Who: Homura Akemi, Mami Tomoe, Eri Shimanouchi, Kyouko Sakura, Sayaka Miki, Mikoto Minagi, Kasagami Araki, Nori Ankou, Tsubasa Kazanari, Endo Naoki, Madoka Kaname
Where: Shinjuku Capital Ward }}
OOC - IC Date: 03-31-2018 - 04-07-2015

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Shinjuku Capital Ward +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
  The skyscrapers are tall, the streets crowded, the nights bright with neon
  signs. This is Shinjuku, a densely populated district of Tokyo nestled right
  in the middle of its 23 wards. It is central in other ways, as well, as it
  contains Japan Rail's Shinjuku Station, a transportation hub that has the
  noisy honor of being the busiest train station in the world. The Station is
  surrounded, as might be expected, by hotels, stores, and restaurants that
  feast on the three-million-plus passengers that pass through daily, and many
  major companies have their headquarters in the commercial district nearby.

  Finally, Shinjuku is an administrative center as well. The Tokyo
  Metropolitan Government Building, a massive, modern-styled 48-story building
  that wears two jutting towers like a crown atop its 32nd floor, hosts the
  central government of all of Tokyo, including its suburban areas and smaller
  settlements in the surrounding area. Three entire blocks are devoted to the
  building (also known as Tokyo City Hall) and the smaller structures that
  attend it. The Japanese Ministry of Defense is also headquartered in the
  area.

  There is much to do in Shinjuku for those unconcerned with government and
  business, all within walking distance of the station. There are several
  parks, the largest being the Shinjuku Gyoen (which crosses into Shibuya),
  with traditional Japanese gardens and plenty of cherry blossom trees for
  viewing around late March/early April. The Shinjuku-ni-chome area plays host
  to the highest concentration of gay bars in the world, along with other
  businesses devoted to the subculture. For the artistically inclined, the
  Golden Gai area offers a lively social scene of bars and clubs focused
  around musicians and artists of various stripes.

COMBAT: Homura Akemi transforms into Puella Magi Homura!

<Pose Tracker> Homura Akemi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Hotel Ambush - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1rOSbYbfsw

Dead reflective darkness fills the windows of the Tokyo Metropolitan building, mirrors studding concrete up forty-eight floors of skyscraping imposition.

Homura Akemi lies in wait within, her mind reflecting the same darkness in violet irises. She crouches in a pool of shadow beyond a pair of centrally-located doors on twenty-fifth floor with one handful of pale fingertips splayed against the floor, every sense bared, each low sound and shifting shadow vibrating tripwire nerves.

They come. She knows they come. She is counting on it.

Her phone buzzes, and with her unoccupied hand Homura answers Eri's call: "Here," as evenly as if responding at class attendance.

'How's it looking on your end? Do we know yet for sure?'

"I'm ready. She's not with them. They're nearly here." The barest breeze of voice elevates her reply above a whisper. She sounds sure because she is sure: the wages of spying upon the coming Chevaliers from the safety of a frozen world. The willingness of Homura Akemi to blow up an invading army of magical girls ends where Madoka Kaname's inclusion begins.

'Do it then. I'll make sure everyone is good to go.' Homura ends the call, lets that be her confirmation.

Wrapped in the universal searing orange of danger with its blinking red eye, the block of C4 just inside the door the Chevaliers are about to breach is not so hard to spot. The cord that leads from it to the next explosive brick is less immediately evident. She trades her phone for an unassuming hard plastic box, small enough to palm. The detonator has a mere half second delay. Luxurious, more than enough for Homura's purposes.

The delicate-looking girl unfolds and paces in perfect silence to the center of the hall. She rotates in place to face the doors on legs lined with diamonds, her henshin whites of a tone with the colorless smooth parchment of her skin in the dark.

The last strands of sable hair are still settling into place behind the motion when the doors admit the Golden Queen, in all her courage and honeyed resplendence -- in all her deadliness, at the head of an invading force of Chevaliers. Homura Akemi stands her ground, because it is more dangerous to give it, here and now. Because any movement she makes in front of this foe, she commits to. There are no margins when facing Mami Tomoe.

That doesn't make what is necessary, easy. There are the ghosts of old reverence to deal with, and the more recent and vivid memories of just how honed a veteran this golden-haired girl has become. Her fingers shift and tighten on hard plastic, thumb testing the edge of a trigger. That it is necessary is enough for Homura. Has to be. Always has been.

Always will be.

That implacable commitment levels every line of Homura's expression, her face as opaque as the face of the Tokyo Metropolitan building. Violet eyes flick over the eternally frustrating Sayaka behind her, to Tsubasa and her sword, then back to Mami Tomoe.

When Homura says, "Goodbye," it does not sound like 'good riddance,' though it certainly could. Instead it rings solemn, funeral bells sounding in that hard, quiet voice.

Her thumb depresses the trigger, then her hand swings to her shield. Tsubasa's sword slams down between the Chevaliers and the visible brick of C4... the first of thirty-four. Even as electricity arcs down the line, Homura's world flicks from the leached grey of an unlit room to the static-strange monochrome of time arrested.

Explosives limn the entire floor, a daisy chain of death. Meticulous care went into their placement. Homura was absolutely thorough. Overkill is certainty, or at least is the closest she can get to it.

Dead reflective darkness disappears from that floor as black burns brilliant white, then yellow, then orange. The windows bloom into the night outside, a concussive bouquet of fire lilies sparkling in a glass-shard rain. Destruction roars, and it is all the signal anyone needs.

Within...

Fire and violence claim the entire floor, exactly as in Garnet's vision.

Walls obliterate.

Desks and chairs pulp to projectile detritus.

Concrete pulverizes, turning the air to gritty dust that tastes like burning.

The twenty-fifth floor no longer exists in any recognizable form save for the very edges and most reinforced internal columns: the irretrievably mangled and hollowed-out ribcage of a structure. A majority of the now unsupported twenty-sixth above collapses downward, and it takes what feels like a very long time for everything to stop moving.

The larger chunks eventually grind to rest and settle with grating grumbles like boulders arguing. All that suspended particulate takes longer to sift clear and give way to unchoked air.

After, it is dark again, and feels even more dead.

COMBAT: Mami Tomoe transforms into Puella Mami!
COMBAT: Kyouko Sakura transforms into Puella Magi Kyouko!
COMBAT: Sayaka Miki transforms into Puella Magi Sayaka!

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

In here, in this building, the violence of Ueno echoes in Mami Tomoe's arms. But it's more than Ueno; the violence of a thousand Uenos resides in her now. Perhaps some of the Chevaliers have innocence left to lose, but that has not been true of Mami Tomoe for a long time. The Golden Queen did not assume her throne in times of ease. Her wonder for the world of magic has long held hands with the blood that ushered her into it.

Her own. Others'. But not since she was a young girl with ribbons failing to save children has she believed in anything like the ease of battle.

She is leading the others, when she spots the blinking red eye. No, it is not hard to spot. As Tsubasa has time to guard from that one, as her sword shields them from the first of the blasts going off, Mami's golden eyes dart farther. The wall of metal that is Tsubasa's great blade funnels the churning explosion around both of them, giving Mami the time she needs--even as the fire starts to billow around them, the side of Mami facing Tsubasa strangely cool by contrast thanks to the guardian there. But as it blows, there is the fuse already moving for the next--and there, she finds the next. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Where there are bombs--

By the third in the same second Mami is swinging a graceful arc with her arm, expression hardened. She says nothing. The world becomes light, and fire amidst her movements--

No. Before that, the bomb gives way to Homura Akemi's eyes, and Mami's own meet them. What is 'necessary'. Mami watches her, grim. There is no hate in her expression now--there is something deeper, colder, harder than that. Goodbye, Homura says.

The world becomes light and fire as Mami swings her arm, and she disappears into the light, but until she cannot be seen her eyes do not move from Homura Akemi's.

The sound is deafening. The clatter is awful; the black is burning, blooming, and the glass goes on, and on. The floor is claimed. It is all gone. It feels like so, so long before it clears. But when the smoke clears, when the unchoked air can be even glimpsed through to what was there... It was dark. It is dark.

But gold shines from beneath that darkness.

Beneath and within the rubble are the sweeping arcs of ribbon, lace, and bows that decorate the great egg shape large enough to hold every occupant of that floor, solid as anything, a shell of protection resting between floor and floor. The smoke is clearing and within it there is this space, a perfect encapsulation of what they are.

And

The Chevaliers--

Are nowhere to be seen.

Until the ribbons start to give way, start to peel off from within, opening up and unravelling, chunk after chunk, piece after baroque piece, to reveal the girls within, hatching in glory as Mami's hand remains outstretched.

SOUNDTRACK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCkWTpjLvWU

Mami's golden eyes are still fixed on that spot where Homura Akemi was standing, and she is a statue in motion as she lowers those fingers. "...Move," Mami says to the others, finally turning her head--towards what remains of the central pillar, pulling a small, pointed globe from a pocket and clutching it close.

A chunk of twisted metal and stone crunches, groaning audibly, and lands beside her as she begins to move. The floor is still settling. The devastation is all around them. ...For now.

<Pose Tracker> Eri Shimanouchi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Extreme Ways - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBB2bPwKWVg

I'm responsible for this.

She'd never liked Shinjuku. There were parts of it she liked, but far too little. The multi-cultural gardens of verdant Shinjuku Gyoen, some small stretches of park land. Everything else was a weed, feeding off the best aspects of humanity to strangle away what little beauty was left in this world.

The Corporate Towers where the avaricious found their opportunity to wring every last iota of wealth out of the consumers. The Red Light District where the basest aspects of human lust supped on ignorance and desperation. And yes this place too - in which the ambitious grew powerful from cultivating human apathy.

It was these places that she'd sown her seeds, in that kind of fertile soil. What bloomed from her efforts could not be said to be beautiful, but at least it appealed to the gardener in her that the weeding was done for her in time for harvest.

And I can't even apologize to any of you for it.

It was never her ideal kind of territory, her desire to take it on had been motivated out of fulfilling her most basic of needs, survival. That it's been kept by her for so long, was a desire to give significance to the hollow act of violence that gave it to her.

Not to you senpai... nor to you Mikoto... Yumi... Setsuna... Homura... Haruka... Michiru... Kasagami...

And yet she was asking all of them to put their lives on the line for that. Staring at the place where it all began, the acceptance of that made her weary. Her selfishness. She didn't need Shinjuku to survive. Any other patch of dirt would do, would be more appealing to her even. She knew that. That's why she couldn't look at any of them right now, not a single one of the girls with her.

Every drop of blood you shed for this wretched weed garden of mine, I'm responsible for it.

Instead she concentrated on the sheer panelling of the glass, looking straight at the floor she knew they'd be on. She didn't need her phone any longer to predict what was going to happen. Right on schedule, crimson dots appear like eyes twinkling out of the void. The wind picked up in that moment, snapping her short hair sideways. She already had her hands pressed to her ears, but even from here she could feel the faint shockwave of the chain of explosions released. The immense heat radiating like a bonfire on a summer night. The whooping rhythm of the fire alarms piercing even the ringing left behind.

All because I challenged her to see what I saw that day from the shattered soul of a little girl.

Uncovering them, there was still a faint tinnitus of white noise. Placing a hand to the bridge of her glasses, she took them off her face, snapping each piece back, before hooking it on the edge of her blouse. Her expression one that could chill the temperature of a room, could steal the heat from this blast. The green light that manifested in her hands didn't feel warm in the least.

Just because her senpai would rather discard what's real to reach for empty hope.

All of a sudden she felt connected by an intricate webwork of vines in an elaborate overgrown garden, each tying around her fingers that held the soul gem like bits of string. Tokyo was an elaborate trellis. Vibrant flowers and plants cast off human shadows. Each vine that was summoned braided itself with others, weaving itself into the fibers of her gloves and boots.

It would be easy to call them both delusional, but that's not it is it? They both know what I know. They both see what I see.

A rush of wind brought petals that became lace, leaves that melded into a blouse and skirt. Branches wove into a circlet. No thorn was left unused merely for its sharpness, as they accentuated the sharpness - accessorizing it with a sense of severity. Different layers were formed from different parts, nothing was wasted.

They just reject it, to strive in vain to change this cruel world. And now they've backed me into this corner.

Placing a hand to her forehead, the circlet accepts the shining gem with a flash as it's only fanfare as it becomes conjoined, the girl become Puella Magi flicking her fingers to call forth a thorned scourge of three parts, which is snapped downwards with the flick of her wrist, before she coiled it back in her hand.

It's only then that she allowed herself to look Kyouko's way. At that blazing Goddess of War. Her eagerness to lead the battle below relieved some of the tension that had snapped her taut and left her frayed all this time. As she led the Shepherds down, her lips moved into three mute syllables. She didn't have the courage to consider that this might be the last time she saw her - to act accordingly.

I'm responsible for this... but I'm not the only one at fault.

Instead as battle was joined, as mages were struck out of the air and taken to ground - as the dust of devastation began to settle, she spoke to the others, "Let's go. Hit them while they're off-balance. Don't get overconfident and assume that did our work for us." Tapping her foot on the edge of the building, a sigil of her magic appeared, before vines appeared out of the side of the building, twisting itself into a tightrope that stretched just above the wide open chasm they'd left in the building. Running across it as she was now was as easy as sprinting down an empty sidewalk after class- but she was mindful of the thoughts of shots coming after her in the dark.

In this world, if you do the right thing you get punished, and if you do the wrong thing you also get punished. Only one kind of choice matters - and you've made yours.

Leaping into the annihilated office space, the haze made it difficult to see, as thick as gunsmoke, the groan of metal from compromised integrity flooding her ears. She took one wary step forward, then another. And then slicing her arm through the air, the sudden whip crack as her vine reached its destination ahead of her split the air into a squall as it was displaced, parting the dust cloud like the sea, scattering disintegrated office equipment.

In the end it won't matter if you reject that. You'll learn it the same way I did.

... And nothing else. Frowning, her eyes snapped across from one end of the other as if expecting a trap - until she spotted a ribbon dangling, shimmering in the dark as it's presence was betrayed by flickering emergency lights. Taking a step forward in reaction to that stimulus, a hand clapped down upon her shoulder, her neck snapping to witness the head shake. The wisdom in that was undeniable and she made a similar connection, "Up! They're headed up! Don't go near the elevator shaft. We'd be sitting ducks in there."

Twisting around, she started to run for one of the fire escapes, vaulting over a crumbling section of the floor. "Take the stairs! They'll corner themselves once they hit the roof!" Her whip led the way, flashing as it traced several lines upon the door, before it fell apart the moment she barreled through it and leapt to the railing, bounding up two flights at a time.

The only choice left to me - is to make certain you do.

COMBAT: Eri Shimanouchi transforms into Puella Magi Eri!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouko Sakura [None] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8nHUqAnA1k&list=PL4974828533C1619B&index=112

Crimson light sizzles the air behind her. The percussions of battle still ring out behind her but the way is sealed by a latticed grid of her lethal temperament, but she does not rest in her fleeting moment of safety. Clutching a dark star to her chest, her crimson heart of stone and spirit expels its murk and grime, and shines bright with defiance and strength.

Kyouko will need both in abundance, now as much as they will ever be called upon.

There is dust even here on the ground from the terrible smiting exacted above, the disintegration of one floor and the collapse of another spewing particulates throughout the building's ventilation system like a vengeful spirit cursed into being by a dying nemesis. But that ghost is weak so far from its grave, and parts like mist around the valkyrie's charge.

They are here, she is certain. She must simply find where.

It's a tall building, and she cannot scale it from the outside without risking interference. There are stairs, cautious and slow..but even worse they are siloed off. They can merely take her somewhere, not tell her where to go. But there is an alternative..

Slamming the button with the heel of her fist, fortune smiles on her. The elevator is already there, upon the ground floor, and she will not need to wait. But she doesn't need that slow little box, she needs what lies beyond it. Sparks spray out like aerterial blood as she shreds the compartment's roof open in a flurry of razors. Leaping onto the top of its jagged carcass and into the elevator shaft, her momentum abruptly halts as she stands still, closing her eyes and recalibrating herself, quieting her beating heart so that she may listen.

The shaft runs from the stem to the stern, a mostly hollow tube providing passage..and sound.

She does not move, she hardly breathes. It is a bare whisper from the walls, but she hears them. Groups of people, one nearer and one further, high, high up above. Higher, it seems, than the trap and its remnants. And, most subtly..they seem to be moving higher still.

And so it is higher where she will search.

Dropping back into the box andplanting her feet, she raises her spear with its tips to the skies and plants its butt into the ground with a soldier's assurance, stabilizing her grip as her spear extends upward, launching into the sightless dark, a penny down a wishing well in reverse. In moments it thuds into solid berth, vibrations arcing down the spear's now tremendous span to shake at her arms. And then it starts to retract..carrying Kyouko up with it.

Faster, faster..her hair and her skirts so accustomed to billowing now cling to her form from her velocity, rising fiery and proud like the morning star climbing back up from the pits of exile and expulsion. She moves quickly, now, but not too quickly to think.

Eri stands above. Her kouhai and her friend..how beautifully she's blossomed, so far from the nervous and miserable and desperate girl she had been. There is cause for each in ample supply here, compounded by the stresses of leadership and the poison of civil war. But she stands to meet them, strong and tall.

What a miserable hell to force so much upon her shoulders.

Sayaka will be up there too, that infuriating mother to all of this ruin. In that way, this is all Kyouko's fault. Kyouko, who had taunted and teased that precocious blue haired girl, who had taken a liking and an interest in her. Who had had such a hand in first teaching her how to defend herself. At the time she hadn't thought she was encouraging her to damn herself with a contract, but she soon understood how profoundly she had erred. The days since have been a plummeting downturn of spurned friendship and affection, her every effort at peace or persuasion through any means necessary each declined without an inch concession. And look what a world she has made through her stubborn defiance..Kyouko has never before met somebody more willful than her..she cannot understand her, or perhaps more accurately she cannot understand her own feelings about that single mindedness.

What a miserable hell she has cleaved of this world.

And Mami..Mami who had taught her so much. Who had shared in so much pain and hardship with her. Who had shared in so much joy in those fleeting gaps where it can take root for such miserable creatures as the Puella Magi. Who had anchored her when she was adrift, who had given her a companion, a friend, a family of sorts after her own had died in anguish. Who looked sadly at her when their friendship first cooled, who had looked happily at her when that friendship had warmed, who had given her a proper bed and shelter up from the sewers..who had fed her with love. Who now only glares, and stares. Who that blue haired girl has poisoned with her persuasions, and who in turn gave the mad swordswoman the strength and the authority to start this war in the first place. With who even now Kyouko is desperate to make amends and to embrace once again. Who alone among the Puella Magi contracted for the right reason, and in a way is the only pure victim of their lot.

What a miserable hell to bend them to such enmity and suffering.

Kyouko is afraid for all three of them, sick with fear. She has tried, truly tried to walk this madness away from the cliff. Tonight there is no more room left to stall. They will turn back..or they will plunge. And then only the fall's judgement awaits. They will be halted by their hearts or they will be halted by the grand and unmovable expanse that awaits at the bottom.

And not just they. So many have joined their cause, so many the other. With nothing to gain in almost every case. They fight, and are at risk, from love and conviction. Again and again they have stood on the line, these Shepherds and Chevaliers, daring the devil to take them because they feel that they must, even though they have every means of retreating from the field. She will be devastated if anything falls on their heads from this great folly of squandered security and peace.

Her thoughts are halted, her journey at its end. Her skirts and hair flare up around her in tiered coronas from the stopped momentum as her spear regains its normal length at the top of the elevator shaft. She dangles for a moment, her eyes closed, her lips moving. Her words are barely vocalized, known only to her and her audience.

She is praying.

And then she sways forward, her spear shaft sprouting chained joints, her feet planting on the closed doors of the rooftop access. Pushing off from them in a rappel, she swings back..and drives forward, detonating the heavy steel forward, as if flung forward by a bomb.

Her body flies past them, a horizontal blur. Bringing her upper body up, she lands on her feet, brandishing her spear in a circular pirouette, glaring with bared teeth at the rooftop of one of the two towers. Not far off stand the Shepherds, having climbed as high as there is. On the tower opposite are the Chevaliers. Battle has not yet been joined.

Her blood rises up as the wind picks up her hair. Now her world will restitch itself, or it will end. She shall fight as she would in any other Apocalypse.

<Pose Tracker> Sayaka Miki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Nights in White Satin - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN1xsrMUbuY

Flame-tossed shadows chase each Shepherd as they turn from the elevator and make for the staircase. The night air is a feast for the small, rubble-smothered fires left behind by the explosion. With a hiss, sprayed water begins to fall from the floor above, passing through the places where the ceiling above has collapsed. The pipes meant to supply the sprinklers on this floor are ruptured, and after a few seconds of gurgling, those wounded fountains loose gentle streams down the front of the building. Freefalling through the air, each droplet is a wobbly prism. Through each passes a flash of bright yellow light.

<Blitz Rush>

Up the side of the building streaks Fate Testarossa, her hair as yellow as the energy trailing from her blazing Device. Zig-zagging between ghostly ivy, she is reflected in window after window, until, at the thirty-sixth floor, an empty office pays witness as she halts, and a metal plate on Bardiche slides back to engage a cartridge.

As Fate blasts back downward towards her opponent, a shard of a meteor falls yet faster. With a feral howl, Mikoto Minagi swings her sword Miroku through the wind, and the Device Fallen Stern slams up into its plummeting path. The front doors of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building rattle in their hinges as sword smashes up through sword. Hurled back by the impact, Mikoto lands in a deep crouch, dragging a gouge in the concrete as she halts herself. Even as Miroku grinds off the ground to be dragged behind Mikoto's charge, a stray knife sinks into the trunk of a tree she passes. A single drop of blood sinks into the bark.

Far above, her thigh marked with a graze, Lera Camry has locked blades with a King. Red-orange flame blasts against the swirling, scorching sakura petals that Kasagami Araki musters to her terrified defense. Modern-day parapets crack and shatter around them as flame overcomes, as the King's sleeve is burnt away. But as Soaring Sky draws back to skewer the nightmare-bound Kasagami, a metallic whistle cuts the air from above, and a thin metal girder rips the Device right from Lera's hands.

First the girder punctures the concrete courtyard, then, tip-first, Soaring Sky. Third, blue boots clack down as a masked Sailor Uranus lands not far from the weapon she disarmed. Finally, the whole courtyard quivers with a distant, avian shriek of anguish.

In the elevator shaft, that sound is perceived first by its vibration, which twangs cables and clatters panels as the long hollow passage shivers. Only moments later does the sound in the air catch up to the vibration in the ground, and a muted sonority travel up the tall manmade cavern. It is like a whalesong is coming from the walls, and for a moment the Chevaliers pause in their ascent, suspended from yellow ribbon.

A metal bracing in front of Sayaka Miki is rattling. Eyes large, lips parted, Sayaka reaches a white glove to touch it, hanging onto her ribbon with the other. The rusted metal falls still just before her first two fingers alight, and Sayaka's hand pauses there a moment, befre her fingers wilt down.

"Kozue," she whispers.

"You're here," Anthy finishes, Utena Tenjou's strong arm at her back, Utena Tenjou's handsome lapels filling her grateful hands. It means 'You're alive.' It means 'You came for me.'

For a few seconds, there is silence in the courtyard. It is just long enough to catch a breath, to flex sore fingers on a sword-hilt. Just long enough to fondly tug a teal bow, or carve a green incantation into the air. And, just barely, long enough for Anthy to smile a smile that knows nothing of lies.

<Pose Tracker> Sayaka Miki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

And then dark metal meets with a metallic slam. Miroku rips through Endo's guard to tear through his shoulder, and, wounded, Endo sweeps Fallen Stern right back through into Mikoto leg.

Like a pin hammer on a piano sounds the driving rain of metal. Garnet's armored body is scored and feathered with spear-shards. Even as the torrent blasts her, Garnet draws back a heavy fist, surges through, and smashes a punch through Kyouko's jaw. Yumi's severed vines briefly sprinkle this combat with green motes of magic, but before they have even faded, Kyouko has erupted into the air with a fearsome spear in her hands, body twisted to deliver a strike.

Within the building, Eri Shimanouchi rushes with reckless haste to make use of the time her senpai is buying, taking stair after stair as the Shepherds chase after.

Elsewhere, underground, a delicate girl is tied to a sturdy chair, her blue bangs hanging over her blindfold. Limp, Kozue does not hear the music still leaking from her headphones.

And atop one of the two great towers atop the Metropolitan Building, there is an elevator door. Two heavy metal panels in industrial green seal the elevator shaft from the windswept roof. With no elevator car nearby, they lie sleeping, undisturbed by electricity since late afternoon.

The seam between doors puckers out like a kiss as a long silver blade punctures through, quickly followed by a second, separate length of steel. The two swordtips worm around in the air like moles' noses for a moment, then, decisively, cross one another and split apart like scissors. By repeated outward wedging, they crank the elevator doors apart, enough to force in a shoulder. Boots catching for purchase on the frame, Sayaka and Tsubasa each shove at one door, bullying them aside with their shoulders, until something gives and the doors slither back into their frames. As the two blue swordswomen stumble into the sudden lack of resistance, Mami Tomoe and Nori Ankou stride through, lovely and unlabored.

Beside the building, Fate reaps her way with superhuman speed through a forest of bristling spectral vines, fighting her way through wound and exhaustion to the witch within.

Lera reforms from two mirror images, above a crater driven by wind and flood, and the head of Soaring Sky splits, three spinning disks of Belkan runes churning up as a white-hot beam gathers, barely restrained.

And glowing slits along the length of the black blade Miroku split wide, to burn like demon eyes in the dark.

On the rooftop, Mami Tomoe approaches the edge, flashes of light playing across her golden eyes as she looks down. A few steps behind, Sayaka hesitates, watching her for a moment. Then, she steps beside her, and together they look down at the violence below. Sayaka's fingers pluck at Mami's, and thread between.

Tsubasa is staring straight across the towers. "They're almost here," she informs the Puella Magi.

Even as a shockwave fades above, Yumi lies on cracked concrete, her broom slowly falling towards her. A thin green line of nearly-torn magic runs down her body, marking where Bardiche slashed her.

The last two steps Uranus's legs can carry her pitch her forward, into the onrushing embrace of Sailor Neptune.

Through the foundation of the building there are zoetrope flashes of Mikoto's ragdoll body flung past pillar after pillar, then an impact. Nothing further is visible. For the first time, she does not spring back at Endo.

The scraps of her princely armor lying around her like autumn leaves, a demolished Utena sleeps once more on Shinjuku pavement, her long pink hair the only sign of her doomed valor.

Perhaps some animal part of Kyouko senses she has run out of time. Spear by spear she ascends the tower. Expressionless, Garnet follows behind.

Eri and her contingent of Shepherds burst out onto into the cool night air. The green Puella Magi strides out onto a vast helicopter pad, flat and near-featureless. Its only markings are the great encircled H symbol covering the whole pad, and the bristling red antennae to guide the metal birds down. Across a dizzying drop down to the main body of the building, a second, even more barren tower hosts the Chevaliers, with nothing at all marring the blank concrete tiles.

Sayaka hears the door burst open, even across the windy void. She does not look yet. She needs a few more seconds where it is not real yet. Closing her eyes, she lets everything fade, save the sense of endless urban sky around her, and the soft hand in her glove. Her inhalation starts slow, tremulous. But it builds and builds, and her lungs fill and fill. She draws in the night, the clouds, the stars. She empties Tokyo into her body, drains it all down. She takes everything outside and brings it in.

Only when everything outside is in can she squeeze her partner's hand, and let go.

Striding to the edge of the Chevaliers' chosen tower, Sayaka stares at Eri. At this distance they can only barely look eye-to-eye. Of course it is enough. Is there a whisper so quiet it cannot convey hate?

"Fate," Sayaka says aloud. "Did you find her?" Her eyes remain on Eri, the hunter of Shinjuku. The farmer of Shinjuku.

tThere is a long pause.

<Lera is retrieving Kozue now.>

It is as if a lock snaps off of a vault inside Sayaka. A sword drops heavily into her hand, and she grips its hilt like it was Eri's throat.

The velvety sky above shows only the brightest stars. Those who have survived the battle below and can still grip their weapons are arriving to bolster both sides, one by one. At last the Chevaliers stand together in the moonlight:

Mami, musket-armed mentor in elegant beret and corset.

Sayaka and Tsubasa, earnest knight errant and seasoned champion in turn, swordswomen both.

Nori, twin of nature and darkly fey, in mournful black.

Garnet, the Chevalier's living backbone.

Endo, a battle-fresh hero in valiant purple.

On the tower opposite, the Shepherds join together:

Eri, whip-armed and as determined as any weed crawling through sidewalk that she and her friends will live.

Kasagami, savagely regal for all her wounds.

Kyouko, bursting onto the scene with the hair and mien of a Warring Kingdoms general.

Mikoto, possessed now of savagery not all her own.

Homura, bombadier and enigma.

There are many other Chevaliers, and many other Shepherds. Above Ueno station and below this very tower, many of those have risked and lost much to bring their comrades here, to this place.

It's Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0I5xE0hhjA

Sayaka takes a step onto the edge of the building, her heels on concrete, her toes hanging over empty, dizzying air. Her white cape fills with fifty stories of wind. Her sword is a sliver of moonlight.

Lifting her weapon, Sayaka extends her arm out fully. To her the edge of her blade is a near vanishing line. To Eri, it is a single point. Above the silver, blue eyes challenge green.

And with a deep crouch, Sayaka springs out into empty air, trusting that when she comes down, there will be a ribbon waiting.

A war ends tonight.

<Pose Tracker> Sayaka Miki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Ingress

• The Chevaliers entered Shinjuku by train, expecting ambush. Mysteriously, no one was there.

• The Chevaliers proceeded to the one place they knew the Shepherds would defend: the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. Fate, Endo, and Lera detected a magical signal in there, and Mami lead a group in to check it out.

• The signal was a Shepherd trap. Homura set off C4 on that whole floor, leaving the fate of Mami and her group uncertain.

• The Chevaliers lost Utena in combat. The Shepherds lost Yumi and Uranus.

• Lera peeled off to liberate Kozue. Neptune carried Uranus off. Mikoto got scary.

Shinjuku

• Eri stormed into the building to finish off anyone who survived Homu's bomb.

• It turns out Mami protected Tsubasa, Nori, and Sayaka in a ribbon egg, then evacuated them up the elevator shaft with ribbons. Frustrated, Eri and her Shep group went to climb the OTHER tower, lest they go up the elevator shaft and Mami turn it into a really long musket barrel for Tiro Finale.

• Everyone is now atop Tokyo Metropolitan Building, which is the government HQ for Tokyo.

http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/APPENDIX/IMG/appendix06_il01.gif

http:'images.skyscrapercenter.combuildingtokyo-metropolitan-government-building_lester-ali2.jpg

http://c8.alamy.com/comp/BB9JBE/microwave-transmission-dishes-near-top-of-tokyo-metropolitan-government-BB9JBE.jpg

BATTLE

• The two towers will have to be crossed by flying, bridges, jumping, etc.

• Freeform, non-csys, discuss with partner your desired result. Flip coin with +flip if you want to decide something randomly.

• Suggested combatants are:

Sayaka v. Eri

Mami v. Kyouko

Endo v. Mikoto

Tsubasa v. Kasagami

Nori v. Homura

(Garnet joins Nori, Ren joins Endo, if they show)]

Most importantly...

This is a big finale! Make this an epic battle for you and your partner.

COMBAT: Nori Ankou transforms into La Sirene de Diamant!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Nine Inch Nails - Discipline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R_I2G_mWsc

There is silence, from beyond the pillars. The sounds of battle are too loud to possibly hear a sniffling girl, where she has landed on the pavement, far away from the noise and light.

No one comes to help her, and no one will come, because everyone is occupied with their own battles. For Mikoto, who thirsts after contact and assurance, it is the worst kind of punishment for her failure. It means there's no one to distract her from her memories.

Eri's voice comes, first, the memory clearer and more defined in her mind. The way she guided her back to her bed, the way her breath hitched with some unknown pain.

'And they'll be coming for Shinjuku soon... so I'll need you. I'll need you and everyone else ready to fight. Or else I might lose those hunting grounds too. You understand? If we win it won't be hard getting Ueno back... but if we lose...'

- and Mikoto promised, promised she wouldn't let them, swore to destroy Eri's enemies as if they were her own. She'd told her she wouldn't fail her. And yet - and yet - memories come again, less defined, more difficult to focus on.

She is three again, dragging and scraping Miroku along the ground, unable to keep up. She is four again, scolded gently for flinching away. She is five again, and they have learned to form it into her defense, but still she struggles to move quickly enough. She is six again, clumsily hefting Miroku to guard against a very real katana. She is crying. She is crying, because she keeps falling down. She is crying because she can't do it. She is crying because her Lord Brother needs her, has always been kind and good to her, and she has - and she has failed him.

But her Lord Brother is there to pick her up, and hug her, and tell her that she's doing well, and she just needs to try a little harder. He's there to tell her he believes in her and he loves her.

'Everything's going to be okay now. You had a hard fight didn't you? But you did so well. You did so well. You must have been like a goddess of war, burning bright.'

They believed in her. They believed she could be better than she was.

She tries to push the memories away, but in her consummate defeat it is impossible. The feelings are too raw, too real, summoned from unfathomed years. Past overwhelms near-present, submerges her in the depths of poorly remembered history.

"No," Mikoto whispers, hands balled into fists. "No, no, no!"

Not again. No more. Please don't make her relive this! She has bled all that blood away, spilt into the altar of Minagi, feeding something dark and transcendent. Perhaps she was weak once, but now, she is strong. Isn't she? Isn't that what she's spent her whole life training for?

She is ten again, and she holds the blade aloft to match each strike. She is eleven again, and she blocks the katana and counterattacks without hesitation. She is twelve again, and her movements have become fluid, observed from the shrine's cats. She is thirteen again, and she moves with skill and purpose, leaping from tree-branch to tree-branch. She has become a little sister who could make her Lord Brother proud. She is crying. She is crying because she has - because she has - because - s h e h a s -

but she is alone in the shrine.

Her head hurts.

Miroku has landed point-down on the concrete, biting into the ground. There are red sigils active on its blade, malevolent diamond things like baleful eyes. They look down at Mikoto Minagi, who is broken, who has failed, in silent judgement. Mikoto lifts her head, with great and painful effort, and looks into her claymore through tears.

It is an old thing, Miroku, passed from mother to daughter for generations. Mikoto does not remember her mother. The Minagi family left, and left, and left, and left, until it was only her and her Lord Brother and her Grandfather. And then her Lord Brother left, and then her Grandfather... left. Always she is left alone.

... there's something strange about that thought, but Mikoto discards it out of hand, focusing on Miroku's sigils.

"No," she says, and it means, I am the weapon you have fashioned. "No," she says, and it means, I have sworn myself to your service. "No," she says, and it means, I will not fail our covenant.

That she does not say it out loud is without consequence. She and Miroku are bound together at the core, two halves of a terrible whole, and it hears her. It will help her speak.

"Help me," she says, her voice strained and hoarse, "Miroku."

They are tools for a shared purpose, Mikoto and her blade. Their hearts beat the same blood. They grew up together, spent every moment in each other's company. It is not just like family - it is more than that. There is no Mikoto without Miroku. (And yet, there was Miroku without Mikoto, and in this way it is greater than her. Certainly, her purpose is subservient to it. Until she finds her Lord Brother, she is to protect the blade. Thus is her family's decree. She would never question it.)

But there is more to this story: Mikoto is a HiME. And with HiME follows Child, one after the other, joined in monstrous kinship until the day they die. She has been trained never to call on Miroku unless it is necessary, because that is more true than anyone can possibly know.

Lying on the ground, battered and bleeding, Mikoto deems it necessary.

"Miroku," her voice grows fiercer, louder. The shrine maiden of Minagi screams, the word ripping through her maltreated vocal cords, a prayer and a promise. "MIROKU!!"

...

From beyond the pillars, there is a terrible rumbling sound, as if the earth itself were being torn asunder. There is a crash, as concrete falls to the ground.

The Child Miroku is unseen, seething underneath the earth, but its effects are manifest.

Black volcanic glass tears through the foundations of the courtyard, like a ritual knife through the skin of the earth. And there is Mikoto - physically held between several obsidian spines which pin her upright, like some lost museum display. Miroku is grasped in her hands, red sigils flaring. She is carried along, held aloft in a moving scaffold. Her leg and arm are bloody, her skirt torn.

Glowing eyes cast about the courtyard. She is searching for someone, and he is not here. So too does she leave, following the scent of him, the scent of their blood. Obsidian carves a pathway through to the street, and beyond. As she passes by, the stalagmites in her wake leave behind destroyed concrete and uneven ground; her trail, for anyone who cares to follow it, is painfully obvious. She isn't worried about anything like that, not when she has a purpose. But the trail grows cold.

Her loved ones move upwards. They will guide her to him. She follows.

The obsidian spires carve through the entrance of the building, blowing a hole clear in the side of the wall. Within, there is the terrible scream of steel and concrete warping, as something tears up through the middle of the tower. The tortured, flattened corpse of the twenty-fifth floor is only so much earth to tunnel through. Black glass lances through the rooftop like a surgeon's scalpel, in a shower of white dust, and Mikoto is thrust upwards into the battlefield.

If anyone looks through the windows at this moment, they will see something lurking, in the floors beneath the roof. It is massive and malevolent, so large it is impossible to get a clear picture of what lurks behind the office windows. Debris obscures it.

On the roof, there are only the black glass spikes. Some fade, after Mikoto's explosive entrance, which brings her in line with her fellow Shepherds. Others, like the ones which hold her stable, exist even after the dust settles. But even as the obsidian fades, the damage it left remains - upturned concrete here, an exposed and broken steel beam there.

Golden eyes shine with vengeance as she looks out upon the battlefield. She scans the horizon, and it all seems in sharp focus, even so far away.

He is here, but he is far.

All the expression on her face has emptied. Her friends have seen something like it before - but this is a deeper level of berserkergang trance than they has ever witnessed. She is limp, but for the iron grip on her blade, held up by the cruel and jagged obsidian like a puppet. Even her mouth hangs open, drawing in labored breath.

There is an ancient power within Mikoto, and it simply will not allow her to stop. She has been hollowed out, and what replaces her is horrible.

Surrounded by allies, she is alone. She is alone. She is alone!

And she alone will destroy this boy, this boy who brought her pain, this boy who made her cry.

She has to. She must. The people she cares about are depending on her.

Air rasps past bared teeth, and down into hungry lungs. The way she pants, the thin sheen of sweat on her skin, the stronger grip on one side than the other - all speak to her pain, her enervation. And yet, none of it is reflected on her face any more. None of it reaches her voice as she speaks - as she speaks!

"They are enemies," says Mikoto, flat and guileless in a way which almost seems to betray the way she used to scream. "Destroy them all." She doesn't even look at her allies as she's talking. "... it's kill or be killed. I won't let you die. I promise," she says, though it is not hers to promise.

There is a fierce certainty to her, as if there is no other option. They would always come here. This would always come to pass. It's not inconsistent with the way she's acted, over the course of this long civil war. And yet...

... there's something wrong with Mikoto.

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into Mikoto and Miroku!

<Pose Tracker> Kasagami Araki [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Kasagami's body aches. Fleeing from the site of her titantic clash with the pink-tressed Prince and Lera alike, she doesn't let go of the Sword in her hand. Her other hand has been hauling along the Rose Bride behind her at an absolutely break-neck clip. She's wounded to be sure, but the physical expression of her previous battle is nothing against what it's laid in her heart. The Sword of Dios pushes down any pain she might want to feel.

Except to remind her more keenly of the words that still haunt her ears. Kasagami reminds herself that she can't lose here. Everything ends if she can't help protect the Shepherds from these Chevaliers. She'd lose her Family, and the world would descend to even more chaos under their well-meaning touch.

Trying, and failing, to banish the sting of a promise offered on a battlefield, she finally lets go of Anthy's hand. Even the Rose Bride is simply too slow for the urgency she needs. A glance back, scornful of the Bride's weakness and power all the same.

"I need to finish this. Don't be a burden and catch up, Anthy! First..." Then, Kasagami lays a sword upon an altar, and reaches for the further flame that lay within the Rose Bride to continue her attack against their enemy. The sounds of acheing body turning backwards, and then the pure heat as the Sword of Dios is blessed a deep crimson.

Of course, all of this makes Kasagami fashionably late to the party as she leaves her Bride behind. Eri-chan has whipped her way up, but Kasagami is a bit direct. Flashing up the side of the building like a thousand different refracted flares across rainbow-cut stained glass, her image is a blurr that defies reality and pure sense. Such is the power of the Sword of Dios, ferrying Kasagami upwards across glass side without any care for the tug of gravity. And then she's a flipping shadow up into the air, landing with a flourish to her glowing Sword and a wave of multicolored light flicking off of her body. Wind tossles her freed, crimson-tipped hair. A flick of the blade as she peers out across the towers to their opponents. This is ground zero. The end of everything.

A small breath, and she grips her sword. Desperately pushing down her inner turmoil, she focuses on her friends. Her family. Eri, Kyouko, Mikoto, all here and ready to fight. The Outers, wounded but ready for their duty. Chitose, the enigmatic Mage that's supported them so often.

Mikoto's berserker fury sends a chill down her spine, and yet? Knowing that strength works with them helps soothe some of the immediate emotional aftermath. She has to win this. Sleeves ruined, uniform scraped and singed, a demon's grin comes to her face. Her eyes trace the other tower, one healed by holding the Sword. And falls upon the swordswoman Tsubasa.

"This is for the sake of our lives and our dreams! No holding back, Shepherds! I for one, am going to keep on moving forward for the sake of those I love!" She calls encouragingly to her friends.

And then a hand rises, and reality around her shimmers, flexing into panes of stained glass only to shatter. The holes created by pure Power fade away, but those crystalized shards fly into the air like heat seeking missiles. Kasagami takes one step forward, makes an imperious pose and challenging gaze to Tsubasa, and then these lancing points of glass and light crash down thunderously towards the young woman!

It seems Kasagami, too, is short on both patience and the ability to hold back right now.

COMBAT: Kasagami Araki transforms into The One Engaged!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

The Siren of Diamonds steps in, at the side of the Golden Queen. She is like a fairy of the grave here, but perhaps that isn't inappropriate. She opens her mouth to say something.

It was a good decision on her part.

The world rips apart with the force of a meteor - a true one, slamming through the crust of the earth. They are surrounded by a gold experience and if la Sirene did more than flinch she keeps it from her face.

(Behind the gothic mask a young woman is shaking. This is terrifying. Sayaka could die. Mami could die. Any of them could die. She is less afraid of her own death - an end to pain, or an interval as a ghost, perhaps; failure, but in a glorious cause. But to see them gone... That young woman is not alone, wherever she is, but she does not quite realize this yet.)

They move, then, in their strange ways, up towards the roof. Thank you, la Sirene says (with heartfelt softness) to Sayaka and Tsubasa as she steps through the doorway, onto the roof. One gloved hand rests on her hip and in her heart she can feel the ghost of a red shawl on her shoulders. The wind plucks at her hair, promising a spring to come, or a spring ill-sponsored; the scent of cherry blossoms is on the wind.

The wind whips at her, rippling at something. That light that seems to limn her intensifies. The nuance is hard to define, the edges diaphanous, like a soap bubble that barely can be seen. But no bubble were ever so subtle or so strangely flecked.

La Sirene de Diamant has no weapons; even the diamonds on the soles of her shoes and the backs of her hands are more decoration, perhaps armor, than weapon. The beacon at her waist, the Brazen Pharos, shines.

She speaks. Her voice carries, clearly audible across the gap between the towers, projecting as if it could cross Tokyo Bay.

"Is there a limit," she calls, "to how far your bombs will take you? Do you see where our determination leads?" She can see the painful form of Kasagami moving ahead. La Sirene's head tilts back just a little, so that - despite the vast remove - she can, oh so slightly, seem to look down towards Homura Akemi.

"There is no 'Goodbye,' you know. Not yet!"

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Speed the Collapse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiQ1QpNSkA

-=-

A young Mami dips her shoulders shyly, looking around the table at the family all around--the Sakuras, taking her into their home. She smiles at another word--and basks in it before she speaks up, answering in return--

-=-

Bent to enmity and suffering, indeed. Oh, Mami is the same girl who chatted companionably with Kyouko once, who found in her the friend she had waited for for so long--who found in her family, when her own had been lost. She is the same girl who again took Kyouko in despite their disagreements, who despite the memory of their battle cooling friendship had been with her a time, again. ...And who in anger had turned her back on her once again, over the teaching of that same girl, that blue-haired knight who stands at her side today.

Their history is long. And tonight, Mami Tomoe has eyes for her once-partner, for her old student, for someone she's known so long. She knows she will join them here, on the roof, as surely as the moon rises above them and that, when all this is done, the sun will rise.

She cannot say what the sunrise will see, but she knows it will see them through.

But now it is the night, with fifty stories of wind, and Mami is standing where she is, her hand still warm where it was entwined with Sayaka's, reaching out. Under Sayaka's feet a billowing bridge of ribbon cascades from one side to the other, twining into braids, rushing across golden and beautiful. Mami's eyes slide over the assembled Shepherds before them...

And just for a moment--a brief moment--honeyed eyes lock with verdant, gold to green for just long enough. It is a warning--a memory--...not an apology, but a fleeting connection.

Mami's eyes slide past from there and she takes a step back, bending at the knee--and leaping upward into the night air. She twirls in place and lands on the balls of her feet, atop a small tower extending from the roof of this place, looking to the others, to the Shepherds--looking to Kyouko. Battle is to be joined now. Kyouko's world, ready to restitch itself... Or end. Mami stares out.

"Kyouko," Mami calls, dropping formality, dropping titles, her voice echoing in the wind. She has been here before. In her eyes may be the ghost of something familiar, if the red Puella Magi looks to her onetime mentor.

"You told me once... That this isn't fate. And I've come to believe that you're right." Mami let that hang on the air, before she throws her hand out and ribbon becomes a walkway before her, hanging in the air while she does a pirouette, muskets dropping about her solemnly with each degree of movement.

"It's a choice. A choice I'm making."

-=-

There's a giggle from the older blonde as she holds up her glass. "We're going to be late!" she says to the red-haired girl across from her, looking towards a clear sky beyond. "...Okay, okay, one more."

-=-

As she returns to facing forward, Mami holds out her fingerlessly-gloved hand as if to pause--and then closes her fingers into a fist. The muskets all lock on target at once, rotating mid-air to settle on Kyouko herself.

"...It's over."

Eight rifles fire on Kyouko at once, and Mami is already conjuring more as she leaps down to the roof proper, ribbon spinning into sparkles above her and turning into more and more of them, each arcing towards Mami hand as she whirls. "Tonight. ...I'll stake myself on this fate."

<Pose Tracker> Eri Shimanouchi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> We Must Be Killers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lshmwmeU7c

There's something dreamlike about the place she finds herself in atop one of the towers of the Metropolitian building. A lucid nightmare, which she felt she could interact with. That swatch of yellow that knows must be over there even when she cannot see it - that spot of blue. The colors of some urban garden where she's come to pull up the flowerbeds.

She wasn't alone, but the waiting game still started the moment they hit the end of the stairwell that stretched unto the sky. The ones arriving only made her more quiet from the state they arrived in, the ones not coming made her deathly so. There was always the possibility that they were still fighting, still giving their all.

It would be nice if she were still innocent enough to hold such hopes. Instead she found her mind ticking off casualties, a force stronger and more inevitable than gravity pressing in upon her. The weight of so many promises made, and the strain of keeping them growing.

The momentary elation she feels when Kyouko emerges is smothered by a message seared into her mind. A vow made by another party, one she wouldn't allow to be kept.

"It won't matter." She vows to herself mutely that her senpai's presence would not result in her end - despite all that rested on Eri's shoulders, she knew full well her capabilities. She'd taken more and more on herself, because she knew she could handle it. When others had told her she'd taken on too much, she deferred in person... but did not take it to heart.

She has taken on what she has to. Done what she must. She has become what she must be.

"It's only fitting isn't it? That she's all yours." She says after inhaling, then adds, "...I'll watch your back."

A screeh marks the eruption of obsidian, and Eri whirls around as if expecting a different sort of attack. Instead she sees Mikoto, goose prickles rising as she feels what she felt that day in the bedroom - mending her. She wants above all things to tell her she doesn't have to push herself this far. That she'd take care of it.

And yet, she can't bring herself to do it.

Not when she told her that all she was good for is fighting. Even if she disagrees... she knows what would happen if she told her not to do even that.

Even as everything tells her that something is wrong. "... That's right." She confirms the wrongness, validates it. Then adds... "I knew I could count on you."

As Kasagami shouts what this is for, she finds herself grateful that there's one true believer left among them. Someone who even short on patiencedoesn't realize that they're well past this being for the sake of anything other than violence.

She's facing down many - but the challenge comes from a levelled sword point. A glint that cannot fail to draw her attention, even split as it is. There's a difference between that sword and other Chevaliers though. While others raise their voices - the Puella Magi in blue only raises her sword.

Even over the whistling wind this high up, her voice carries like a breeze rustling through branches.

"No words? No speeches about right and wrong? That's good. We've gone too far to hide behind pretty things like that anymore. When what this is really about is your desire to slice me up into itty-bitty bits - isn't it, Sayaka-chan? So come on then - no holding back anything tonight."

If one looked on her face, they might expect a faint curve of a smile, but nothing. The edge of her lips is devoid of affection, her affect is lacking anything whatsoever resembling human feelings.

As the other girl alights on a ribbon, a cloud passes overhead at that moment veiling the light of the sphere in the sky like a funeral shroud, the rest of them in shadow, a flickering strobe of an aircraft warning light setting her in shadow and flickering silhouette. There's a sound like rustling leaves and snapping branches - the kind you might expect to hear from a midnight walk through Aokigahara rather than in some urban glade.

More shadows appear. Slender limbs, that are nevertheless thick. A pair at her shoulders, another at her lower back. Even her boots. Every thorn a wicked adornment. A hand moves up to her forehead, and the shadow of impurity vanishes from it, sending her gem flaring alight. The shadows flex and coil, as a scourge rests lax in her hand.

"Because I definitely won't. I wonder..."

One of the shadows lashes at the air experimentally, revealing the magical shimmer of the woven vines. Instantly it's back into place. Setting her back low as the other girl comes in her leaping charge, she waits to receive her with a hellish embrace that gives the impression of pikes ready for a cavalry.

In the past she'd kept her distance from that sword. She seems to have no intention of that, instead welcoming it. Not aiming to stop any advance. When Sayaka's just in range though - she acts, moving with a gymnastic twist as her feet slide out from beneath her and the palm of a single glove slaps down. Her legs are sent spinning overhead in the spinning handstand, the rest of her body following suit.

The vines attached to their mother like umbilical cords slashing through the air like helicopter rotors at the level of the girl in blue's neck, abdomen, and thighs, covering all possible approaches save perhaps overhead in a predictable but no less devastating spin.

But that's the feint. The real attack comes separate and from below, while one hand keeps her inverted balance on the roof, the other sends the blurring lash out in a snapping circle at the other girl's ankle and calf, wrapping it around in three places, the rotational force instantly driving it taut and ripping her off the ground.

The grip releases her just after she's pitched into the air right towards the edge of the roof, to make her crash heavily into the concrete boundary fencing them in just as Eri rights herself lightly, every limb becoming a coiled spring anew as she keeps every duel of this wanton brawl in her field of vision - but on two in particular. Mami has declared it's over. What she's staking with a thunderous chorus. Whatever thoughts she has on this she keeps to herself - her words are instead for Mami's kouhai.

"...will Madoka finally tell me she hates me after I feed what's left of you to the familiars?"

COMBAT: Eri Shimanouchi transforms into Eri Eri Quite Contrary!

<Pose Tracker> Tsubasa Kazanari [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

The blast of the explosion had been blocked by great blade, the Heaven's Wrath. The thick slab of metal guarded the Chevaliers from the full fury of the blast, but the floor itself could not be saved. But among the rubble, Tsubasa herself was unharmed -- if a bit dusty. Standing up, the large blade behind her remained in place, even as Tsubasa reaffirmed her grip on the blade Ame-no-Habakiri, preparing for what would come next.

Tsubasa could smell the smoke and fire in the air, she could feel the emotions running wild as everyone prepared for battle. This truly was war; Tsubasa could feel her blood running hot, her adrenaline in overdrive after the explosion. Despite that, her expression remained composed, and her grip on her blade strong.

At first, Tsubasa considers diving headlong into the whirlpool of fury she sensed, but as her eyes scan over the other tower, she notices that she has been spotted, and she realizes she will not have the privilege of picking a partner. Immediately, she has to raise her sword, knowing that if she didn't, Kasagami's attack would tear her to shreds. Ame-no-Habakiri moved swiftly, the sacred sword slicing the stained glass that flew towards her like missiles. With a cry of war, Tsubasa charges forward, her strengthened legs carrying her forward as she jumped with a sharp kick aimed towards Kasagami.

As the kick impacts, both women fly forward in a flash of blue and red, cutting through the clear night sky like the slash of blade.

Next, there's a crash. Glass shattering, walls breaking, as the two women leave the main building and crash into another. Landing on the floor, Tsubasa rolls forward, finding herself in an office in Building Number 2, in front of her enemy, the cool eyes of the blue-haired swordswoman staring right at her.

Here, Tsubasa knew, their fight would begin proper. And it would be a battle of life and death.

<Pose Tracker> Homura Akemi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Teahouse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZdfApjpYoU

It is not quite the same physical sensation, but still... Homura Akemi feels a trapped tightness in her chest as Mami Tomoe seizes her gaze and does not let go -- like ribbons wrapping hold and lashing her in place, strangling the breath out of her. The violet magi does not so much meet that look as fail to escape it, in that final shared slice of a second.

Only the stoppage of time itself allows Homura to break away as Mami's eyes go from drops of honey to dull monochrome: the newsprint mugshot version of her once-senpai. She...

Unwitnessed within the arrested violence all around them, Homura allows a hitch in the thought. Her mouth twists as she turns to go. She forces it through. The trigger is already pressed.

She hopes the C4 is enough.

Homura steps around the frozen cotton-candy bloom of that first brick on her way down a hall whose lifespan was now measured by the magic she expended to keep time stopped. They knew it might only wound some Chevaliers and slow the others down. The Shepherds planned for it. But Homura accepts, as she leaves the scene of the crime, that she is hoping for the ends of all the lives behind her. She measures desperation on a heightened scale at this stage in her existence, and has all the justification she believes she needs.

Once she's in place, the world resumes.

An empty space shaped like a girl fills, in the moments after Homura Akemi vacates it, with swells of furious flame streaked soot-black.

The girl herself steps free from a diagonal slice of black shadow in grey night while the detonations still echo back to the Shepherds from neighboring buildings, joining these magical girls she has allied with. The breeze generated by her own explosion snaps long black hair out behind Homura in the night.

She traces those allies with her eyes, the only things that move behind that cold, impassive mask Homura calls a face. She traces the curve of green thorns on the weapon in Eri Shimanouchi's hand, and then looks to where the real danger lies: green eyes gone so very cold. She takes in the martial ferocity of their general in red, so violently competent, and wonders about the look Kyouko's eyes.

In searching the aftermath, Homura takes in the evidence of Chevalier survival with a well-hidden sort of awe. Is she imagining now, in retrospect, a flash of gold, between the furious mixing of red and black, in the final moments before all went grey and still...?

She has missed the sheer mastery of Mami Tomoe in this timeline, and immediately adjust her estimation of this already highly esteemed enemy ever upwards. Has the encroaching army all escaped more or less unscathed? And was it all the doing of the Golden Queen? The trailing flash of ribbon seems to say that yes, they did, and yes, it was.

Homura spots the lunge in Eri's step toward the elevator shaft and, taking the role of ally as seriously as she takes everything else, extends a wariness borne of too much experience at the receiving end of golden muskets to the other puella magi -- her hand drops onto the other girl's shoulder. She shakes her head in mute warning. They've spent enough time in discussion ahead of this war that Homura trusts Eri to understand, and she does.

Every line of Homura's expression is level and grim as she chases up the steps after the others. They take the top of their tower, these mahou allianced through shared necessity and the conjoinment of like-minded power, and Homura Akemi notes with detached satisfaction the might assembled on their side. It feels dangerous, to recognize just how successful this timeline has been compared to those past.

Like too much is riding on things, now.

Surveying the opponents arrayed along the opposite towertop helps bring a familiar grimness to Homura's assessment of the situation. There, better. An assortment of deadly-dangerous foes to make things feel properly high-stakes and difficult. It's almost comforting.

A glimpsed gleam amongst those across the empty space between towers draws Homura in, like the shifting of an underwater dream -- a current of magic wrapping around La Sirene de Diamant, a blurring of edges that blurs the reality around her too. It generates an ache behind Homura's eyes as she tries to gain clean focus on a mystery that defies such definition.

Well. That's going to be a pain to aim at and through.

"No limit," she calls back, "that is anyone's business but mine." Homura's eyes are closer to slits, now, as her heels catch the edge of the building. She's trying to determine the extent of this distortion, is remembering the feel of light bending from fights in her current past and a series of pasts unconnected by anything but herself to the current day.

Better safe than sorry. Homura is not sure where the opposing gothic threat is, only certain La Sirene is not exactly where the dark resplendence of her visuals place her. Accuracy is not what's called for here, clearly.

To her opponent's eye Homura Akemi is, very simply and very suddenly, not where she was. It's like the world blinked. A cluster of lobbed pipe bombs, each blinking red and moments away from detonation, flock like gulls around the place where Nori Ankou seemed to be -- hanging in the air in a frightful spread.

The destruction they promise to unleash overlaps thoroughly and is absolutely imminent. Homura lands in a dainty one-two touchdown of toes to concrete twenty feet to the left of where she disappeared, along the edge of the far rooftop, her hair floating down after.

"I prefer to take care of things ahead of time. It's all in the preparation." Meaning the goodbye. As if it's simple business, as if dispatching a bunch of magical girls with explosives is simple business. Maybe it is, to Homura Akemi.

"Determination is worse than worthless when it's so misguided. But I'm tired of trying to convince you people of that. You never learn." It's an old weariness that edges Homura's quiet retort with bitterness.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouko Sakura [None] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFd8NwUfDPg&index=2&list=PLr3ad8O9Qc1tHk-H02_EdeMxKby4pH9e9

Kyouko nods to Eri, a clipped gesture, not for unfriendliness but for a focus oriented in another direction. There has never been a prospector alive more transfixed by the sight of gold...

"Fitting. Yeah. It's all so damn fitting I could puke. I'll watch your back too. Don't die."

The gang's all here. Mikoto, in particular seems...there's no one word for how she seems, but she's glad she's on this tower and not the other. But If she somehow manages to defuse this, if the fight is called off, would this diminutive demon-child be capable of staying her rage? But it's well beyond her range of attention. That resource is already strained to its limit.

She feels colder than it is, her nervous system misinterpreting environmental stimulus or perhaps defying it altogether to sing its own song. And there her old friend goes, the only person in the world who knew Kyouko before it all came apart, up and back to claim the high ground. To man her sniper's tower.

It is a matter of course that Kyouko must be close, whereas Mami can be far. The bayonet and the rifle are not symmetrical foes. If her bullets catch her, they may kill her. But first they must catch her.

That voice..no titles here. No honorifics. That's good. Call it part of her anomalous upbringing but she's never had much use for them. Others felt little need to use them for her or her family when they were starving in the concrete forest. What she says next is harder to stomach.

Tears burst from her eyes like condiment sauce popped out of a packet by the force of a closed fist. Anxiety lifts up her chest as it tightens. She had just been about to tell her that it's still all a choice..but her old friend was faster. Her face hardens, curling into a wolf's growling snarl, flickering back between that rictus and a cracklingly mournful fragility.

"I haven't hurt the girl. You can ask her yourself. I didn't want to kill her and I couldn't risk her killing."

She sees the guns. Of course she sees the guns. Eight spears of her own form around her, each aligning to a metallic iris staring her down. As her friend begins her shelling those spears scream forward, aiming straight for the gun barrels, the path of the bullets themselves. Metal shrapnel bursts like fireworks, and rains down in shimmering trails of tears. She is running, now, hurtling her arm forward like a javelin thrower, a spear of her own stretching out, thickening, digging its fang into the same slight tower above and sprouting lengths perpendicular to the main shaft like branches from a trunk. The result is a sort of diagonal plank, with sub-planks leading off on each side. A little web for the spider to maneuver, all as sound and fury glows and shreds her vicinity.

"It's not over! Not even now! Nobody's died! Stop this! For the love of God, you can still stop!"

She leaps in the air for Mami, leaps up high, her legs curling back in the air. In each hand she produces a spear, each tip angled down with her fall, a criss crossing gridwork of energy forming in front of her midriff like a crude sheaf of magical chainmail.

"I prayed for us just now! You of all people should know how much that would take!"

Cakes and sleepovers and dinners and drinks and parties and amusement parks. Mami was so happy for a friend, back then. Kyouko's parents were too, that their moody daughter had found somebody. And Kyouko really thought she had found somebody. Even now she believes that. Even when she split off on her own, she never truly, deep in her heart, felt that that was that.

Was she wrong? What does it mean if she was? She just wants to see Mami smile and laugh again, and to know that she is the cause. It's okay if she has to wait for it, even for years. She just wants to live and for her friend to live with her. For that she has howled and strained. It doesn't seem like such an impossible dream.

And yet here they are. She falls, blades first, hoping her first friend doesn't murder her before she hits the ground..but that if she does that it happens very quickly.

She doesn't want to know that she's dead.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Beyond Raging Waves - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrZhdzGaPxo

Endo stands with the Chevaliers, like he always has. In moonlit parks against treacherous foes, on battlefields suspended across placid waters, in sprawling courtyards, by the sides of friends and allies in a dozen smaller conflicts, Endo stood and stands again. There's nothing to say now, merely a

glance to each of the figures around him, a chance to remind himself of the people he's here for and the dream they share. A reminder that he can't stop, no matter how hurt or tired he is from the battle below.

He tests his injured arm, flexes his fingers as he stares across the gap of the Metropolitan Building's towers. Tears in the dark metal and billowing cloth of his barrier jacket have healed, but pain still lances through the nerves of the skin underneath. His shoulder rocks back and forth, testing how far it can move, how much motion can be afforded before he's pushed to far.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo stands with the Chevaliers, like he always has. In moonlit parks against treacherous foes, on battlefields suspended across placid waters, in sprawling courtyards, by the sides of friends and allies in a dozen smaller conflicts, Endo stood and stands again. There's nothing to say now, merely a

glance to each of the figures around him, a chance to remind himself of the people he's here for and the dream they share. A reminder that he can't stop, no matter how hurt or tired he is from the battle below.

He tests his injured arm, flexes his fingers as he stares across the gap of the Metropolitan Building's towers. Tears in the dark metal and billowing cloth of his barrier jacket have healed, but pain still lances through the nerves of the skin underneath. His shoulder rocks back and forth, testing how far it can move, how much motion can be afforded before he's pushed to far.

He intends to push too far.

He needs to. He can see that somethings changed in Mikoto, the girl who's sword he can't seem to escape. The girl with tears in her eyes, whose body now rests upon a patchwork of obsidian spikes that dot the opposite roof. There are other shapes there, each more deadly than the last-but his eyes are for Mikoto, and he knows hers are for him.

"Stern. Let's give everything."

<PREPARING---> Fallen Stern warbles in its ugly, synthesized voice. <ZERSTORUNG DRANG.>

BGM CHANGE: Unholy Combat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qUQaJ012NY

Fallen Stern rumbles, stutters to life like a machine overloaded. Power courses through the metal, vents opening not to dispatch steam, but ugly light from the core of the of its destructive engine. Violet fire lights the blade, and when it's every edge is rimmed with destructive magic-Endo moves.

He doesn't fly, but he does leap. He leaves their Chevalier's tower in a burst of color, ascending skyward. Surprisingly, he's only halfway there when he launches his first attack. The only warning is a burst of light from along his blade, signaling the launch of a dozen streaking lights. They flicker through the sky like comets, bend and arc to come crashing down across the Shepard's tower in a dozen tiny bursts of energy.

They're meant to hurt--but just as much to clear a path, to cause distraction as he comes crashing down on the opposite tower's surface. And he does soon after, sword raised, prepared to meet his fated opposition.

<Pose Tracker> Kasagami Araki [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Kasagami finds herself more and more drawn into the fight. The silent swordswoman leaps brilliantly, a cobalt streak into the air. As the woman comes for her, the One Engaged doesn't back down. She sets her legs, grips the Sword of Dios in both hands, and then that kick comes crashing down like some kind of meteor!

The flat of the Sword catches much of the kick, sending them both into a proper starfall of twin lights, red and blue circling until the thunderous smash of glass, wood, steel and drywall. Bootheels skid as she's sent back a room or two away, arresting herself with a firm slash of her weapon. Slice. That second office she'd been kicked into shudders as office furniture, diplomas, potted plants and that lovely computer slides off bisected. Kasagami's hair billows behind her, and she flicks her sword arm in the air. A grunt, and she takes two quick hops to test her body. Tsubasa crashing down on you HURTS! Glass falls from behind her, and she yanks out a sliver of it from her side. It's tossed aside as she brushes herself off.

Cough, hack, another wave to get drywall dust out of her system. And then she stares at Tsubasa. And laughs. There's something pure, if not innocent, in that belting and loud gesture of joy. Not amusement, not even condescention, but pure thoughtless joy at finding a truly strong opponent.

"I swear, you Chevaliers always know just how to find people that either dig under my skin, or make my heart sing with joy! I don't think we've been introduced yet, and I am not one to forget a very pretty face!" Wink! Then, she pauses, and offers Tsubasa a bow that's oddly formal. Her grin, and the spark in her eye of simply enjoying fighting, doesn't fade as she flourishes.

"Kasagami Araki. It's a pleasure! You're so very strong! Oh, I have so many questions I want to ask you! Unfortunately, I have to beat you now so I can go and help my Family. A shame you sided with those foolish faux-knights. Now show me...if you're worthy of consideration in the Court of a King!"

She shifts her weight to the front of her boots. Once again, the power of the Sword ferries her forward, her body only needing to give the lightest of pushes to exert terrifying power. And without the pain running through her arm and her other eye working, she can see and react so much faster!

All around the office room, Kasagami Araki is light projected onto itself in a rainbow blurr. She steps lightly as a ninja, yet as firmly as a warrior. Like a thousand different mirrors, she moves up, down, left, right, such that the entire office room seems to light up around Tsubasa. The only consistent shade is burning dark crimson, equally seeming to be everywhere all at once. Then, there's a single shuddering pause of those many, many after images.

They all clash to a single point. Many are wiped away as the illusions they are, of speed, of footwork and Dios-enhanced movements on top of an amazingly skilled swordswoman. Tsubasa might pick it up.

This girl has been training with a sword for most of her life. The Sword of Dios flashes in four different directions. A falling cut, a slice towards the abdomen, and two more aimed for legs. These are utterly real. Reality bends in the stained glass lightshow, the One Engaged offering disabling blow to her opponent. Better to take her out quickly, than linger.

Yet the power behind them is real. Tsubasa has already shown she's a powerful fighter, and Kasagami is ready to slash through concrete and steel in order to take her out. Eagerness is in her eyes. And right now, she doesn't have to think about long tresses, pink or dark green that so haunt her mind.

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> The Archer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sailp3-UJ9o

First, they must catch her. That always was part of the difficulty.

There are no tears in Mami's eyes, nothing clouding her vision now as she looks for Kyouko ahead. She is aware of the rest of the battlefield... but her trust is in the Chevaliers, in Sayaka now. Kyouko's hardened expression, fragile, flickering...

"I appreciate that," Mami answers simply about that girl. "It was far from a sure thing. ...But she isn't the only reason I'm here."

Tears. They are a surprise, but they do not stay Mami's hands. Or her guns. The spears each align to the iris of each barrel, the weapons meeting mid-air in explosions of brilliant golden light, of riotous color as the fireworks continue. Still more and more guns rain down, bullets crashing into place, dogging Kyouko's every step as she stays steps ahead each time. That spear stretches out--a plank. A web.

"It is," Mami replies to whether it's over, and looks to Kyouko, leaping up, crashing towards her. The tips angled down, the gridwork of energy--none are as bright to Mami as those red eyes, talking of prayer. She knows. Oh, Mami knows how much that takes, how important is it, has strange it is, how it touches on deep, deep wounds.

Mami had been so happy, then. All her life, she'd been waiting, it felt like. And she'd found her. And yet...

Mami does not smile and laugh now. Mami whirls backward, a curtain of gold erupting in braids between them, the roof alight with ribbons sweeping up like a crashing wave while Mami herself handsprings backward, twirling mid-air and sweeping her arm such that the ribbons come to try to catch Kyouko from all sides, hard and bludgeoning and entangling, sprouting more flourish, more loveliness, more beauty in their terrible forms by the moment.

"I know," Mami calls, mid-air. "...But have you prayed for those who died so that you had the power for this battle, Kyouko? Have you prayed for the people dying to your Witches?"

"People have died. And I've stopped for too long. You didn't hurt her... this time."

In the midst of Mami's attacks, it would be easy to miss her hand so close to her stomach, suddenly holding a pistol--which she fires through the center of all of it.

"I prayed, too."

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Fuuka Taisen - Black Mikoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoSpytj-1AY

Love drives Mikoto Minagi, even now. Eri validates her, praises her, and Mikoto looks to her and smiles. It is a distant, fragile thing, as if viewed through warped glass. "Eri doesn't have to worry no more. Miroku is here now."

It seems like such a strange statement, when her sword Miroku has never left her side. The sigils on its blade burn with a sick and terrible red glow. It is here, now. But what does that mean?

Endo crashes through, attacking her, and people who attack her are enemies. "I must... defeat the enemy," Mikoto says, to everyone and no one, as she watches him sail down. She is so unnervingly calm, even in the face of the lights which announce his presence. She looks up at him with empty eyes.

And then the comet-lights crash down. The black glass jerks, moving quickly - too quickly - to pull back, away from the storm. Mikoto is pulled with the spikes, borne safely away from the magic which impacts the upturned concrete where she used to be. She's so much faster, now, as if she is drawing on a far deeper power.

As Endo crashes down, Mikoto fixes her glare upon him. As obsidian spires bear her away from the crushing might of Fallen Stern, sword carving through trailing black glass instead of flesh, she speaks.

"Fallen Stern's wielder," she calls, the volume returning to her voice piece by piece, "I can't let you go on! I know what you'll do to my friends - what Fallen Stern's wielder did to me!" She thinks of Yumi, weak of body and strong of spirit. She thinks of Kasagami, who declared them as her family when her blood-bonds ran too thin. She thinks of Setsuna, absent now, tall and poised with an awful weight upon her soul. And she thinks of Eri... dear, precious Eri, who has always stood by her, even when they were too vicious for the world. She thinks of those Shepherds, and so many others besides, all struggling to defend each other. "I love them! I won't let you hurt them! I'll keep coming and coming UNTIL YOU FALL!"

It's a strange miracle, to hear words forcing themselves from her lungs unbidden. And yet there is a madness to her, as sure as her howling rage, which suggests she is no more reasonable for it. Perhaps she is even less. Her lips part, her grip tightens, and a command is torn from her throat:

"MIROKU!" Fearsome yellow eyes focus on Endo, and the stalagmites erupt towards him, around him, surrounding the both of them in a loose circle of towering spikes. She has created her own arena, trapped him inside with her, so that he can do no harm to anyone else. Perhaps it is the only way to avoid so much collateral damage.

... Endo may know it as the name of her blade, but it seems the name 'Miroku' can evoke much more than that.

Again, Mikoto barks, sword clutched tight. "Miroku!" And this time, the ground beneath Endo cracks and gives way to obsidian, long, thin needles which lance towards him with dreadful purpose. The spines are not immediately deadly - instead they seek to exhaust, to harass, to make counterattack difficult. They devastate any flat surfaces around them, concrete left in raised piles, difficult to traverse. Any one of them would only be a hindrance, to someone with Endo and Fallen Stern's grim purpose - but there are many, and they just keep coming.

Impossibly far away, Kyouko cries that it's not too late to stop.

She's wrong, of course. It's way too late to STOP!

<Pose Tracker> Sayaka Miki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Sayaka Miki* - Rasen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE6pGNjghJA

Sayaka and Mami have worked together so long now. Not only does Sayaka know a ribbon awaits her, she knows its texture, and about the width Mami will use. It is wise of Eri not to rush out onto the ribbon to meet her. She would be at a disadvantage, Sayaka knows. The unknown tension would betray her feet. For her it would be like fighting on a slackline. She has not worked with Mami so long as Sayaka.

Yes, she thinks. Eri was never half the kouhai to Mami as Sayaka is.

The shadow over the moon darkens Sayaka sword from silver to cold iron, but Mami's ribbon is never less than brilliantly yellow, self-lit by the faintest magic. Sayaka clears the last yards of it with a carefully technical long-jump. Even now, Sayaka comes off as more athlete than warrior most of the time, even as she pedals her legs a little as she rides out the end of a leap no normal human could match. Her eyes narrow as the full extent of Eri's strange new powers become evident close-up, but she does not, cannot halt her momentum. Cape a white streak behind, she rotates her wrist to flourish her sword as she comes down atop Eri--only for the floral acrobat to evade at the last moment

Eri's feint is nothing of the sort today, the deceit unnecessary. Almost every lash of vine strikes clean and true; even upside down and backwards Eri can feel how solidly they strike, can hear the meaty smacks. The helicopter motion of the attacks brings them all in in the same direction, which means that as they whip into Sayaka, across shoulder, stomach, leg, and even neck, the combined effect wrenches her, twisting her out of her intended direction. Even as Sayaka turns her head in midair to keep tracking Eri visually, she's lost any ability to control her motion. The vine-whip wraps her calf deeply, all three tongues biting in. Right when Sayaka hits the ground, she's ripped off it again and sent hurtling across the roof, to slam into solid concrete. She loses grip on her sword, which sails over the edge silently.

Has Eri surpassed Sayaka so thoroughly? This fight may not last long. But lying on the ground, Sayaka is grinning.

"I really am reacting slow now, huh?" she laughs. "Well, that was never what I was good at." She isn't just shrugging off the open red welts. She doesn't seem aware they are there. "Uph-hup!" Leaning back onto her shoulderblades, she kicks out onto her feet lightly, despite the fact that one of her boots looks like a giant venus fly trap chewed it. Spinning on her heel, she tosses a sword from her cape end-over-end and catches it like a juggler might, completing her rotation to point it at Eri again, just as she had from the other roof.

"Someone like you lost the right to say her name a long time ago," she growls herself directly out of a light smile, like a roll of thunder on a clear day.

Setting off at a sprint, Sayaka sinks sword after sword into the ground as she goes, like so many breadcrumbs. She litters the area with them as she takes an elliptical path towards Eri; her reflexes are slower but she's still a fearsomely quick runner. "You want a speech, Shimanouchi? Here's one: you're going to lose."

Unexpectedly, Sayaka slings the next sword she draws from her cape at Eri, forcing her to dodge even as Sayaka is getting closer, denying her the ability to prepare the way she did last time.

"We're going to save these people, and Hotaru, and everyone else you want to hurt."

Sayaka launches herself up in the air right before she reaches Eri, and chambers her sword at her shoulder, dropping down blade-first.

"And the only thing we'll do to hurt you, is make you live knowing that not one of the people you killed had to die."

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

La Sirene de Diamant's reply is, at first, "Hmf." Her lips purse and her eyes close for a moment, as if in acknowledgement.

A moment later she is interrupted again. When she looks up again, there is a sudden storm of complete consternation on her pale face, her almost-colorless eyes widened in astonishment as she sees the sparkling red lights of the pipe bombs. Her head turns to look towards the others -- perhaps to see a route to escape, to figure out an angle by which to repel these charges.

And she only sees more of them. "?!"

La Sirene de Diamant stares ahead as a feeling like water freezing runs up her spine. She can hear the words of Homura Akemi with painful clarity even at this remove. They are like an executioner's sentence being read out.

The rest of the cosmos seems to fall away. One gains a certain clarity of thought on the night before one's dawntide execution; this is a similar phenomenon, but there is no time for her to think.

Nori Ankou screams in panic internally. There's too many of these. This maniac woman's surrounded her with bombs! Desperate flailing despairing thoughts echo through her mind: maybe she's using them up on me - maybe i can stop some of them - save the building -i - i - i - i

The interior dialogue fades out: her eyes well up as Homura keeps speaking. The tears on her eyelashes sparkle with the ten thousand colors thrown in passion. It is not the only tear to be shed here, but there is a great surging swelling of some kind of impotent pressure inside of her. She's drowning.

Nori Ankou reaches out into the air imploringly with the hand of a Siren as Homura speaks of determination. I'm trapped, she thinks. Mami, Madoka, Tsuru, Batiste, Sayaka, Endo, Lera, Utena, Kozue, all of them flicker through her mind. She wants to apologize.

I can't survive this, thinks Nori Ankou. A moment later the bombs go off all around her in a world-rending chorus. The pressure surrounds her, like the priming charge of an atomic bomb, and when the hellish light and smoke begins to fade, there is no trace of her standing there.

From Homura's perspective - that of the Shepherds, and perhaps veiled by the Chevaliers - there has been a freakish moment of luck, for la Sirene was not wholly discorporated by this. Her suit remains, the forlorn uniform of some marching band or paramilitary in a far-off realm, but she is contorted and apparently limp, hair dirtied and disheveled, skin smeared with smoke. The detonation is hurling her back towards Homura. Some shards of glass trail behind her - perhaps another injury, a final one, to the lantern she bears.

She'd grown, it seems, but not enough.

Until...

<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4tVJASr_54

... the head of the hurled Siren tilts back...

And her eyes open, staring right dead ahead! Her lips split into a mirthless grin and the light around her flickers back like a balky neon tube.

"Is that so?" la Sirene de Diamant says, lips black with soot. The inside of her mouth is a shadowed glimpse of red in the whirlwind light around her. "Is that so?" she repeats.

Inside of that long slim body, Nori Ankou, in a sense, is in a swoon. But Nori Ankou is a person with many roles and she has spent the frustrated hours of a confined life in strange ways, and so her mind is here now, awake, alert, and perhaps liberated. Her voice is shaking but it is also exultant, almost. Perhaps this is the part of her she always drew back from; the inevitable pinnacle that comes after being pressed down so long and in other ways. (Perhaps it's Nao's fault, thus.)

"Far be it from me to disappoint you, then, O Mistress of Explosions," la Sirene says, her arm sweeping out as if she intends to do the breast-stroke backwards through the air. It is to some extent necessary; the energy around her pours, spilling like gelid ink out to grip the edge of the helipad, the link between it and la Sirene herself quiveringly taut.

"Tell me when you're surprised--"

And does she pull herself up by her own sorcerous bootstrap? No: la Sirene's magic snaps her forwards, accelerating her with elastic force. She turns round, aiming to catch Homura Akemi in the scoop of her long arm -- and keep going -- over the back of the building?!

When close, la Sirene says something. It crystallizes between the instant between when contact becomes inevitable and when it actually happens.

"I know little about you," la Sirene says. "But I must ask, Homura Akemi."

"Do you dream of another world?"

<Pose Tracker> Kyouko Sakura [None] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhMukHbUYJ0

Like chitinous limbs, like the bony wings of a skeletal angel spears sprout from Kyouko's back, rhyming with the ribbons, spearing at the golden noodles like so many fork tines. No more tears. Only dusky sandstone remains in her features, red granite. Slapped, she turned the other cheek, and received another blow for her trouble. She will not give up a third strike. It will have to be taken.

"Have you? You wouldn't have a seed to your name but for people dying. Every day somebody's dead of hunger or cold. Did I kill them because I didn't feed them? Clothe them? Do I deserve to die because I'm not Jesus risen? You could be saving people from Witches right now, could've been this whole time. But you'd rather come after me and let them feed instead. You think the two of you will kill as many witches as the four of us could before you ripped the world in two? It's okay when you don't hunt every hour of the day, but when I don't I'm a monster?"

She snarls at that. This time. She has much to feel angry about, much hurt to bear. But that truly offends her. "Didn't hurt her this time? Why the hell would I change my mind? I only do what I feel I need to and you know it. That witch of an apprentice has scrambled your brain and convinced me I'm not who you know me to be! I take her prisoner in a war I didn't want so I don't have to hurt her and you think that makes me somebody more likely to torture? To maim? You're delusional!"

She does miss it, in the flurry of articulated limbs all grappling and tangling about. In the heat of her anger and her disappointment. In the pain of being scorned. But she doesn't miss it for long.

The bullet's coming at a bullet's speed. Too late to dodge..her subconscious processes rally to her cause, joining with whip-fast muscular control to attempt something she's never even thought to do before. Her hand flashes out, fingers stretched and curled at their knuckles, and a tiny portcullis of gleaming crimson magic forms in a cat's cradle net. The bullet slams into the jumble..her magic stops it, but strains under pressure, and the heat of Mami's fury burns a sphere into her palm, hissing anger from her lips.

"Like you're so bloodless! Like you haven't killed so that you could live! You think killing me is gonna cleanse you of your own bloody past, to distract your insane kouhai from ever wondering too hard about how you lived before she stumbled in! If you wanna die chasing every familiar in town then go fucking do it! Attack my witches and starve me out! You don't have to kill me, you just want to and it's sickening! I've never killed when I didn't have to! You're so blinded by your bullshit halo that you haven't noticed your horns!"

And Kyouko falls..suspended in the air only by the mutual reinforcement of magical limbs wrestling magical limbs, she suddenly detonates every one of her spears, shredding the ribbons and tumbling back down to the roof before Mami can replace her net. Leaping back up as quickly as possible, she flings spears at Mami with wild abandon, more toothy tentacles sprouting from her back, surging forward to slice and stab at the air, slavering like a wolf pack.

<Pose Tracker> Tsubasa Kazanari [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.

At first, it was merely glass and stone that two women crashed through. Soon, it was wood, paper, pencils; all manners of office supplies flying up in the air as the two swordwomen crashed through the building, redecorating some poor government agency's floor through their landing alone.

At first, Tsubasa landed on her heels, sliding across the floor like she was skating on it. The friction was so intense that the rails she left on the ground almost caught fire, but instead the grinding of Tsubasa's heels against the floor 'merely' left red, heated tracks. Ultimately, their speed reached a level where she could no longer stay on her feet, leading to her stumbling forward, rolling three times on the ground before crashing into a desk, where she finally regained her footing.

The power of the Symphogear reinforced her body; the crash had left nothing worse than scrapes and dirt on her body. It was painful, but it was manageable. Standing up in the wreckage of the desk, she faced the laughing Kasagami. It was a disturbing reaction; one that prompted Tsubasa to swiftly raise her guard once more, standing with her sword at the ready as the other woman laughed. Tsubasa scowled, clearly not finding this the slightest bit amusing.

"Are you mad?" She asked, cutting swiftly to the point. Who but a madwoman would laugh so genuinely in the middle of combat?

... Taking the time to flirt in a situation like this also seemed like the clear signs of a madwoman. "... Is that so?" Tsubasa asked, not really knowing what she was even asking. It was an expression of her confusion more than anything else. Kasagami winked, she bowed, all while Tsubasa kept her scowl - sure, the winking made her flinch for a moment, but her guard remained solid. "... Tsubasa Kazanari. And I have no more questions to ask!" Her yell signaled that she was ready for whatever Kasagami would throw at her, if not physically, then at least mentally.

After all, keeping up with the swift movement proved difficult. Here, there, anywhere; the swordswoman assumed one of them was the real Kasagami and the others were reflections, but even so, it was hard to keep track. Tsubasa needed the one moment, the instant where they all congealed to a single attack! Until then, her only option was to minimize the damage she was receiving!

She felt the sword cut her abdomen, slicing both the ceiling above her and the floor below her as it cut her skin. Another swing was aimed at her leg, her blood flying from the Sword of Dios and splattering over a wrecked desk, like it was a wooden canvas and Tsubasa was supplying the red paint. With her swift footwork, she managed to avoid deeper injuries from the blows, but if she continued to let Kasagami slice at her like this, then it'd be a death of a thousand cuts! She needed the one moment...! But the more Kasagami attacked her, the more Tsubasa grew used to her rhythm. The third blow only glanced at her leg, even as the punctured the floor behind her, and at long last...

... There! She could see it! Kasagami, coming towards her. Time seemed to slow down for Tsubasa, and she knew she only had one opportunity. This was literally do or die, so she raised her sword in the air to deliver an overhead slash...

Clash! A loud, metallic sound rang out as Tsubasa successfully parried the decisive blow! Ame-no-Habakiri and the Sword of Dios locked in a clash, both women putting all their strength into it! Tsubasa felt her hands and blade trembling from the tension of their locked blades, and she could feel her heels drive into the ground, leaving deep holes even through the building's concrete floor. Gritting her teeth, she leaned forward - through the swords, she could see Kasagami. They were staring right at eachother in a deadly stand-off, where a single moment of weakness would result in a fatal slash from the other.

<Pose Tracker> Eri Shimanouchi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Here Come the Ravens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYdxC6AEKz4

Kyouko's not the only one who sees the guns. The glinting flecks of shrapnel raining down upon her senpai. And as she hears what her senpai says- her jaw sets. Not out of derision, but a fear that runs both deep and cold throughout her. That her senpai has prayed doesn't surprise her.

When I first saw what you did it was like a ghost walked straight through me, I couldn't shut the door. I saw my family again. I maybe saw God too, again. I didn't realize how much I needed it until you gave it to me. It made me feel like I wasn't alone, and that maybe they're...that maybe they're not screaming in the void.

Eri has no hope of beholding such a small miracle herself. None of mercy, nor peace. Not even sanity - she hears her plea for such when facing down the barrel of a gun.

Ueno's done. Tell your senpai I'm coming for her.

She hadn't told her, refused to deliver the message. She couldn't take that away from her. And now because she couldn't - those fears felt closer than ever. A girl who goes to confession believes forgiveness will come no matter what sins she commits tonight - doesn't she?

The languor of Sayaka's reaction as every lash strikes true is startling to some analytical part of her deep down. And yet her expression doesn't change at that. There's a faint tilt of her head, the light of her soul gem casting a glint over the hard edge in her eyes. It's as if she's wondering why she's recovering so quickly. Even though she heals fast, she should be in more pain than that.

"The only thing you're good at is not dying."

Up and over in the rotation - Sayaka catches the blade and comes at her, those movements janky. Sayaka sprints around and Eri watches her litter the rooftop with those glinting blades of hers. Eri's head turns fractionally as she follows that movement out of her eyes. "I'm sorry." She says with no hint of apology whatsoever, "Did I upset you by bringing her up?"

A shining missile is slung at her. Unexpectedly one of her vines snakes out - not at Sayaka but something out of the girl's field of vision as a lashing blur. None of her limbs are held up as a shield offered to the first blade. No resistance seems to be offered whatsoever. But then all of a sudden Eri's movement becomes a blur.

Because one of her limbs just grabbed Mami Tomoe's conjured ribbons, even from this distance. And it's pulling her out of the way with the speed of a whiplash.

The first missile was aimed true, mere centimeters from her face when it started to move. Instead it clips one of the green highlights in her hair.

Pulling away from her by limb of foliage, it suffers for it's audacity, the edge of the ribbon has begun to slice it apart, as it drips with green ichor. And yet it keeps her just ahead of Sayaka's advance, one step ahead of the crusader's shining, charge. Her other limbs start to move only then, striking at the flat of Sayaka's blade like forceful palm slaps, in repeated blows to throw her movements just off - just a little more. She can't understand why she's moving this way.

But she can use it to her advantage.

The limb abruptly is sliced off, and what's pulling her falls slack. A shimmer of green glitters as it fades, and then there's that rustling sound as she regrows it.

The Puella Magi's heels stab down on the concrete, as she picks up where it left off, but now even with her efforts, slashes are appearing on her armor. A cut here, a cut there. Part of it loses itself.

And then all of her limbs move at once. Each one could slice through steel and concrete as easily as a knife could flense off whale blubber. And right now she's lashing her repeatedly, grinding her in endless lashes by the thorned foliage as she switches from defense to offense. All the while she keeps moving in a circle, as if she's baiting her to a certain point.

"Oh Sayaka-chan. I thought we were being honest with each other. I thought I'd underestimated you. Instead you've disappointed me."

And once she's led her to the corner of the building, the two lashes at her thighs pushing off the ground backwards sending her vaulting in an unpredictable spring over her head, tucking in her legs to try to avoid any high slashes. Two descend in a blinding X of flashing silhouettes which are ominously silent as they leave their marks upon the concrete.

"It's not about them anymore. You're too petty a girl for that to hold up for long. Stop lying to yourself about how personal this is to you."

Eri's heels tap tap down. And then comes the terrible groan of metal as the foothold Sayaka's on starts to lurch and slide.

A huge triangular corner of the Metropolitian rooftop starts to slide down as it's revealed the Green Puella Magi cut through it all cleanly.

"If you had the strength you'd have already opened my throat and smashed my gem. But you don't - so tonight you're going to find out that being good at not dying only amounts to me getting to take my time making you suffer."

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

An angel--fair enough. Kyouko's expression hardens, but Mami was already there. She shakes her head, at that statement, that set of statements. Kyouko speaks, and Mami watches. Mami continues throwing her ribbons, and answers, "That's right. I'm a Puella Magi because of people dying. But you knew that."

The offense doesn't seem to dissuade Mami more than anything else did. "Do you hear yourself? The Kyouko I know wouldn't be trying to justify herself to me. Not with these tired statements."

Kyouko's magic is good enough to catch that bullet--Mami watches the new maneuver, and banks to the side, flipping in preparation for what she knows is coming. There is so much to be said here. And yet...

"You don't understand me at all," Mami answers. "You've lost yourself. You think she doesn't know what I've done? You think she isn't aware that I've killed before? That's the nature of this life. We do awful things, and we justify them to ourselves. Over, and over."

Mami touches down on the ground, and each of those spears detonates--each of those spears is flung at her, and Mami starts whirling, dancing on the roof as spear after spear crashes towards her. The first devastates the ground behind her, another landing just close--but more do hit. More do crash to slice, to stab, to tear blood from the Queen as surely as slicing through the fabric of her attire, of her ribbons, cutting and slashing.

"If you only didn't hunt familiars, would it really be my business? Once, I wouldn't have called it that. ...But it's more than that, and you know it. You don't simply let them starve, let them freeze to death in the winters--I'm not asking you to be your brother's keeper, Kyouko."

Mami whirls--and this time, moves her hands, conjuring ribbons to grab hold of one of those spears and whirl with it, slamming it to the ground and using it to vault upward, firing another shot, another shot, another, each launching her higher into the sky.

"You grow them! You bring more Witches, you feed people to them, you plant them where you know people will be! All so you can feel safe! What about their safety? What about the families you've destroyed as surely as your father!?"

Mami, finally lined by moonlight, launches a battery of rifles, a brace, and starts running across their stairway, higher and higher, ribbon trailing at her sides, from both hands, whirling in mid-air, starting to make a shape.

"If you told me it was necessary to let them run free, we could talk. But you go farther than that. You perpetuate them. You think Sayaka's the one who's directing me?"

Mami's ribbons are starting to become a falling pattern, braiding over a section of the battlefield, as she conjures two rifles in her hands while she starts to fall, firing one and moving to fire the other, spinning as shot after shot after shot, her Soul Gem blazing with the power of it.

"I think of those who died because of me every day. I remember every face. ...And the only reason I could let myself ignore what you've done is that I didn't have to see any of those faces myself."

<Pose Tracker> Kasagami Araki [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"Mad!? I am insulted! Can't you hear my allies and yours putting their all into this fight!? I am not mad! I just simply know what it is to seperate out a fight from a war. None of this would be necessary if you Chevaliers hadn't failed to realize the inherant flaws in being a Puella Magi." A shrug. Kasagami doesn't explain herself there.

"No, I'd say that the Chevaliers are the madmen and women. Clinging to the ideals of a golden-haired murderer and a bluenette psychopath. This is a war you all started."

And then she's grinning, as adrenaline and pure love for battle fills her. She doesn't have to think about fire, or pink, or green, or the many colored roses that surround her in the Student Council. About two scorched bodies, or her own. This is the face of a young woman wielding absurd power given to her all so that she could forget.

"You really should learn to love what you do, Tsubasa-chan! How can you ever find someone to cherish you if you don't at least put a smile on your face sometimes! And there is no brighter, more pleasant smile than one given during a battle for one's dreams!" Snarls Kasagami, as the two close in on each other.

Her blade slashes, painting the office red. But Tsubasa is a terrifying opponent. Finally the two lock blades, pushing back Tsubasa in the process. Both eyes, one steel, one white narrow. Through the power of the Sword, she can truly appreciate her opponent.

Sparks fly as the two girls clash, and the building shudders from the dueling powers of Ame-no-Habakiri and the Sword of Dios! Even as they press, the warring powers and pure fury from the pair grinding blades has more and more of the office tearing apart. The scent of roses fill the room, and stained glass litters the area as if on instinct. Untouched walls bend in from the force of the two powerful magical girls clashing. Kasagami looks around with a glance.

Then she leans in harder against Tsubasa. "No one becomes strong without dreaming about something. Tsubasa. If you really do believe in this war...then tell me what dream has led you here to oppose those I love!" That flirtatiousness drops like a boulder, and then she pushes off, flashing away in an easy steppage that leaves more of those after images. The Sword of Dios is held to her side, almost as if sheathing it. She's knelt slighly, knees bent, and she lets out a sigh. Smirk.

"Show me the power of your dreams and your blade or be cut aside! FALLING PETALS CUT THE SOUL!"

And then, in a single motion, the One Engaged makes an iaido strike that would make a grandmaster faint in it's elegance even without a sheath to lay that blade home in. The Rose Bride is nearly forgotten, after all.

Crimson, the same shade as her own rose petals, blossoms into a wave of pure power that seeks to smash right into Tsubasa and her powerful weapon. Kasagami Araki revels in how her hand trembles, her body shakes at using and directing so much nearly-divine strength. With a howl of war and delight, she lets loose with the power granted to her.

The building quails, and a second floor-ruining explosion of crimson light engulfs where the pair have chosen as their battlefield. No matter what fate awaits the pair of swordswomen, glass, steel, and concrete explodes outwards as the power in this section of the building gutters out from the clash of magical strength.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouko Sakura [None] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=numSROD-gZY

Kyouko smirks to the taunt of tired statements, of losing herself. But she leaves it off, for now. There are so many more dishes to dine on at this feast. "I think she thinks you shit gold, and I think it makes you feel good, even if you're smart enough not to believe it."

She tastes some blood now. If it were anybody else then she'd be licking her lips..but by the moment her heart weeps a little less and less. Mami's clearly made her resolution. It will be enmity to the end, and she's just trying to help her old student accept that.

What a good teacher.

Mami plucks one of her spears as deftly as if she's nabbing a dumpling with a pair of chopsticks. Kyouko knocks one bullet aside with her spear in a wide swing, but the second, so quick in succession, slams into her shoulder, sending her whipping back in an eighth-circle with the force and leaking blood in a gurgling furrow.

"The hell with that! I keep track of them! I wait until they can give a seed and I kill them, right then and there before they get stronger, and I only wait because without those seeds I couldn't kill any more of them, and if you think it's bad now wait until there's nothing stopping them! I hate what it is but you can blame God or the world for the food chain! You keep going like this and burn out and chase out or kill the others and there won't be any Puella Magi left in Tokyo and then it's gonna be a massacre! What about the families I've saved by all the witches I've stopped from growing into their full strength, the families I've saved by knowing where those monsters are instead of having to wander around looking for them while they're gorging! What about your life, Mami? What about Sayaka's? Both of you have been at death's door, saved by seeds I've had to spare that you lacked!"

Mami runs..and Kyouko gives pursuit. Instead of following along the same route, which could be disincorporated beneath her at a moment's notice, spears sprout around her like roots, a parallel ramp up to that same starkly framing moon.

"It is necessary, dammit! You think I would if it wasn't? I would've given real thought to stopping and just hunting the way you do if you'd asked me to one of the five or six times I came to you to try to negotiate a peace, if that would've knocked this off! We could talk? Then let's talk. I told you it's still not too late. I just don't believe you want to." As Mami's golden birdcage settles around the sky, Kyouko's red nettles lace and thread around them. As Mami falls, Kyouko hesitates, slinging a few spears down before diving headfirst in pursuit, spinning her spear in a rapid fanning circle in front of her to try to eat up enemy fire.

"I think of them too. I see my face and yours and every other face of every person I've ever cared about reflected in those poor people. It devours me every day and I wish I could've told told you so any of those times I so desperately wanted to talk, those times where you two wanted to walk away instead. But you just want my blood. Don't worry, I haven't lost myself, and the Kyouko you know is still here. She was just a fool enough to thought you ever had any love in your heart for me. Just a fool enough to have love in her heart for you. But if you keep pushing me I bet you can get past that. I'm not gonna be your sacrifice."

Landing near Mami, she throws the heel of her hand forward, spraying flechette in a mist.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo has no time to survey the battlefield, to find allies or give aid to anyone else. He hardly has time to see what's even beside him before a wall of obsidian closes in around him, walls rising and caging off the knight from his allies. Leaving him with Mikoto, wreathed in spikes and radiating anger and anguish. It is, perhaps, where he aimed to be regardless

And she speaks now, in words that are more jarring than any anguished howl she's put forth before. She accuses him, and in her voice he hears the echoes of others past and present-

I have to make my wish come true.

Master will die if I don't.

I love them. I won't let you hurt them.

-- And obsidian shards crash against his armor, enveloping the world around him. The ground gives and he falters, leaps and attempts to rebalance as more shards rip through the space around him. For a moment, he falters.

And then purple fire explodes outward, Fallen Stern whirled in a circle to clear enough room to breathe.

"I'm sorry." It's the best he can offer. Acknowledgement of her pain, of the symmetry in their desires and obligations to the people they love. "But you're wrong! You're friends want to sacrifice other people for themselves! If that's what you really want-then just keep coming!"

Triangular symbols form around his feet, burn to life as they launch him forward at double-speed. Mikoto's seen this before, just as fast, but different now. His blade comes at a horizontal arc, chasing after her, and fire comes with it. Energy bleeds from the blade, extends its edge to chase after her if she tries to avoid it. Burning hot and fast, with no regard for the energy expended.

<Pose Tracker> Sayaka Miki [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Stabbing Westward - Lost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdhfLQPexfc

Mami's ribbon digs into Eri's vine, slowly slicing it. Of course. It is not for her.

Sayaka is hot in pursuit, clinging tight to her sword as Eri's unnatural limbs batter at the blade. The moment Eri drops free onto the ground, Sayaka is upon her, chasing her lithe movements with steel, opening shallow rents in green cloth. Her reflexes, however, remain slower than Eri's ever seen them. When Eri strikes back, again the assault is satisfyingly effective. A parry here and there scarcely stems the striking vines, and thorns catch and snag not only on Sayaka's armor but on Sayaka. Even this most durable of Puella Magi should be howling right now. Sayaka's lip barely twitches.

"As if I care--about disappointing--you!" she grunts. Repeated impacts are impeding her ability to have her lungs form words.

Reliable as Eri's strikes have been, most are not direct hits, as Sayaka's offense keeps Eri busy despite a lack of defense. This changes as a thorny vine sinks into Sayaka's shoulder with a thump, driving her back. Sayaka's eyes are white and wide as she rolls with the blow and out of it, catching on the ground. Cape concealing most of her body as she kneels on the corner of the building, Sayaka tosses her head up to fix a ghostly glare on Eri.

Then the entire corner slides down.

Concrete dust erupts upwards as Sayaka sprints. Friction is scarcely an impediment to something so heavy and neatly severed, and she can't keep up with the near-freefall speed. Reaching the severed tiles at the end, she takes a wild leap, catching onto the remaining edge of the building with gloved hands. Dangling, helpless, she gazes up at Eri blankly, half her face hidden by bloodsticky bangs. Eri's final threat is the first that actually seems to cut through and awaken some fear. Every thorn is as sharp as a garden shear.

"I would have believed you, once. E-easy... to wonder, when all you're good at is not dying." Sayaka pretends to be watching Eri's face, but she is blind to it. All of her attention is on the corner of her eye--on Eri's feet. Judging distance. "But I know now. I'm better than that." She waits until Eri is close.

OST - 2:30 into the above

"Because Mami-senpai..." May that name still have enough power over Eri to make her want to hear the rest. She lets Eri take one more step, then, suddenly, releases her grip, falling straight down into the opened corner of the building. But before Eri can even retreat or rush forward, Sayaka erupts upward into the moonlight, far faster than she fell, her cape snapping and rippling in the air, her teeth bared savagely. Down inside the hollow left by the shorn building corner, a slowly rotating ring of musical staff fades away, its purpose served. A hard knee closes Eri's teeth into each other so violently that the clack is heard across the roof, and Sayaka falls down atop her rival, with a handful of her collar in one hand and the hard hilt of her sword drawn back for a punch in the other.

"IS PROUD OF ME!" she shouts as she swings, the deep follow-through of her shoulder merciless to Eri, and even more merciless to the open wound in the shoulder itself. She drags the hilt of the sword up for another blow. Still Eri sees only one, frighteningly distant eye in Sayaka's half-shadowed face.

<Pose Tracker> Homura Akemi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

It's the second series of explosions Homura Akemi has set off so far tonight, and she has no intentions of stopping there. When the unfair luck of the Chevaliers wins through once more in the yet-corporeal corpus of La Sirene, the frustration of it all glints in Homura's glaring assessment. Why aren't bombs enough with these people?

She launches into rapidfire calculations in the shattered fragments of time after detonation, watching the balletic form of the girl get flung across the space between towers upon a series of shockwaves. Each of Nori Ankou's long clean limbs is still dismayingly attached.

One hand slides beneath and behind the other forearm, behind her shield, even as the puella magi mentally flips through her arsenal. Which gun is best for target-shooting an arcing Sirene out of the sky? Such tactical considerations don't find their conclusion.

A mid-air redirection of gaze and wicked grin through the smudged soot of survived pipe bombs interrupts, arresting Homura Akemi's attention -- along with the rest of her -- at a critical moment.

She catches that strange flicker around la Sirene and it reminds her. Homura remembers, previous timelines, previous displays, remembers the sheer eldritch potence that repeated history has proven can pour forth from this foe...

And oh, it pours: it propels la Sirene on a torrent of power, it closes the distance between the two girls at easily a third of the time Homura Akemi's calculations allowed for -- the slingshot speed and the sudden close quarters fostering a special kind of frantic fear in the slight puella. She does not like being grappled.

There's a defiant refusal to admit to her surprise in Homura's return glare and the sideways pull of pressed lips. She has her pride. But then there's that question that hangs in the moment before the targeted collision...

Scooped by that impressive Siren wingspan, Homura is a frail bird in hand, and a resentful one. They sail across and over the edge of the Metropolitan Building together, and even as they fly together, she twists against that arm -- with a huff in for breath forcefully expelled -- and curls to a ball, knees up between them, dark heels raised.

In the weirdling privacy of their midair tumble she begins her reply, voice strained by the proximity. It is full of meaning as layered as the timelines this pale shadow of a girl has discarded, in search of...

"Another world. No, not exactly." She grunts and finally finishes the movement begun before impact, drawing free a chrome brick of a handgun from the shield on her arm. The Desert Eagle perfectly fills the gap between the two girls' torsos, lined up between Homura's knees. She offers La Sirene the deadly promise of the barrel's bottomless eye, as flush and point-blank to center mass as is possible in such cramped quarters.

La Sirene is welcome to push away of her own accord, or to allow the recoil and impact from the handcannon's firing to force their separation. Before Homura squeezes the trigger she finishes the thought. "I stopped chasing daydreams a long time ago."

There's a defiance there, still, but it hints at somewhat else. It says that this is a girl who once believed in such things. When did she stop, and why? Homura seems disinclined to share more than bullets at the moment. "Don't you have more important things to worry about?" Like the suggestion is itself an irritant -- like she wants to find some other topic. "Survival, for instance. You Chevaliers are bad at priorities."

The report barks out with enough force to burst eardrums, the muzzle near to a flashbang in such close quarters.

<Pose Tracker> Tsubasa Kazanari [Infinity Institute (12)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hMJaJqCTF0

Their blades locked together, sparks flying from the grinding of metal on metal. Tsubasa's grip was firm on the handle, but she coud feel her entire body trembling from the force being generated both from herself and from Kasagami as they put everything on the line for this one clash. Tsubasa was clenching her teeth, focusing all that she had in this one moment. Her heels were digging into the ground, but so too were Kasagami's; at this rate, they'd end up drilling a hole straight through the floor!

"What I loved is long gone!" Kasagami's words had lingered with Tsubasa, and even though they were locked in this moment, Tsubasa couldn't let the comments remain unanswered. Kasagami frustrated her, and it wasn't just because of the bleeding from her stomach and legs. "And in this world without love, I don't need to smile...!" Tsubasa continued applying pressure to the Sword of Dios, even as it generated more and more sparks. Ame-no-Habakiri was unbreakable as long as her relic remained intact, but... Tsubasa herself was not. She could feel her arms ache, her legs tremble, the blood pushed out of the open words. The damage meant that she couldn't muster her full strength...!

"And I don't need dreams! I'm nothing but a weapon!" Though she claimed to not need emotions, Tsubasa howled with rage. Her wounded legs meant she couldn't keep her balance properly; when Kasagami stepped back, Tsubasa almost fell forward, having relied on the mutual pressure to remain standing! With that stumble, there was no time to dodge!

The sound of Kasagami's swing was loud, but then, there was nothing but silence. The entire building seemed to be still... But as the building started to collapse around her, floors and walls crumbling, Tsubasa realized that it hadn't gotten silent. The blow Kasagami had delivered had cut her deep, and now Tsubasa was falling through the open floors, down the building. The windows on every floor they fell down to was blown out from the sheer force, the entire interior crumbling, yet Tsubasa heard nothing, feeling only her warm wound.

Was this it? Even if she survived, there was no getting up from this wound. In a way, the thought was comforting. She had fought for so long... A rest didn't seem too bad.

In a way, this was what she had waited for ever since that day.

But as she fell, resigned to whatever fate awaited her as each moment felt like an eternity, she heard it... A voice, calling her. Tsubasa didn't know what inspired her to listen to it, even as her body crashed against the ground, rubble surrounding her and Kasagami as they had fell three floors down, having taken a dozen or so windows with them.

Though she moved slow, her body aching, Tsubasa stood out. Her hearing had returned, even though blood ran down her suit. Standing, she could barely hold her sword, but the red gem at her chest - her relic - shone with defiance. Tsubasa's bloody hand took a harder grip of her sword, and instead of speaking, she sang.

It was a sad song, in an ancient, forgotten language. As Tsubasa sang the song, her wounds opened wider, and blood ran from her mouth and nose.

This was her ultimate, final resort. The Swan Song would bring her body to its very limit - by destroying it. A final blaze of glory, reserved only for the wielder of a Symphogear. Battered, beaten and bleeding, Tsubasa stood up, her body reinforced by the song. She could feel her body falling apart already, but no matter what: she refused to lose!

Taking a firm stance - far firmer than her wounded body should allow, were it not coursing with symphonic energy, Tsubasa made a strong leap right at Kasagami, sword at the ready to deliver a sharp blow! r

"This sharpened weapon, Tsubasa Kazanari, will show you the power of her determination!"

<Pose Tracker> Mami Tomoe [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Credens Justitiam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqQ3hP_q7Ns

"But in order for them to get strong enough to give Seeds in the first place people have to die!" Mami shouts back. "You can fool your Shepherds, but I know how Witches work, Kyouko! I know what you've done, I know what you do every day! I know how Ueno opened up in the first place, how that girl died and what you had to do with it! I know that you seeded that Witch!"

Mami has a resolution, that much is true. As she moves, she keeps track of what slides home to Kyouko, what doesn't. Blood leaks from both of them now, but it shows more on Mami's white-and-black, on her yellows, and as Kyouko speaks up... "Sure, she makes me feel good. But I've told her. She knows I've taken down Puella Magi before."

"You've saved families, sure. But you make Witches grow where they wouldn't otherwise, plant them anew, cultivate, and don't try to pretend to me that you don't. That doesn't make it better! It's not a zero sum game, where it's fine that you murder people just because you might use some of that added power to spare some others!"

Mami runs--Mami knows, Kyouko has saved both of them before. Eri has. Just as she saved Eri, once. And yet--

"When will you stop lying to yourself?" Mami asks. "When we had this out before, you didn't pretend it was necessary. You didn't have any of this. You do it because you think you have the right. Now you, of all people, pretend to be moral? Pretend to be heroic, somehow? When I bled to try to keep you off of this path!?"

Mami hits the ground, and Mami gets spears flung towards her, taking a gouge down her shoulder, then worse at her arm from the rush of flechettes, turning fabric to ribbon of a different kind indeed. Mami pauses right where she is, a rifle in her hand pointed straight for Kyouko's chest. The cage of her ribbons finally settles down around them, all around--thin vilaments, crashing about them, inches away from either, on all sides. ...The ribbons themselves are razor-sharp, set to draw blood if Kyouko moves into them. But Mami holds her fire--she does not bring out another, letting their battle pause on the edge of a heartbeat, the edge of a spear for a moment.

"...If that's true," Mami says softly, "Then you'll put down your weapon, now. Call off the others. I'm not heartless, Kyouko. If you mean what you say, then stop this, now. You say I won't listen? Here's your chance. No negotiation, no tricks. ...Just promise you'll stop feeding people to Witches, and ask Eri to do the same."

<Pose Tracker> Eri Shimanouchi [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Invidia - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL7kYY_q9g4

Mami clings to hope. She clings to ideals. She argues their wrong-doing. It's what Eri Shimanouchi thinks at least - and expected. A battery or rifles drives home Mami's point in a terrible fusillade. She turns her head just in time to see the gunsmoke clearing. She thinks she can understand the atonement Mami hopes to find - but Eri believes there's no absolution to be had in this violence between saints and sinners. That saints and sinners is a false division as things are now, and perhaps it has been from the start.

That her senpai is arguing with her - part of her is glad for the fire, the ardor. But her heart is still sinking rapidly - and the dueling spiked flechette sent back to Mami in answer does little to allay it's descent.

And yet as she looks down upon Sayaka dangling, she takes a step forward. Then another. It's like her toes are about to make contact with those fingers, to crack bones. To force her to fall. And yet she doesn't quite yet. She's just looking down at her - listening to what she has to say.

And then the foot raises for that final step. She hesitates upon hearing 'Mami-senpai.'

And then Sayaka falls. Blinking in disbelief, Eri lurches forward then slides back in alarm. Her tendrils lash wildly in the air. "You little-"

Several are severed just as Sayaka slams past her guard, knocking a knee into her teeth. It brings her heels up off the ground. Then slams her down so hard that her mouth cries out in silent alarm.

With blood smeared across her mouth, the girl panting. Then she actually smiles at her, with red painted across the whites of her teeth. "It t-took her that long? You gave an arm for her and you're the anchor of her..." It looks like her lips are shaking with silent laughter.

The hilt makes contact once with a sickening crack to her collarbone as her face twists in pain. And as it raises for another blow -

Two tendrils wrap around her hilt and the hands. Thorns rake the back of her hands as the prehensile appendages maintain their grip, halting it from descending. It's then that a third blindingly fast creeps up from behind, grasping around her throat in a strangling grip. "... my senpai saw God again because of me. She saw her family again. If you truly loved your 'Mami-senpai'..."

They raise Sayaka off her gradually, she might take more kicks, more blows. But with preternatural strength they're suspending her overhead in mid-air, the ones around her arm sliding down like a macabre carress to try to pin her arms. "... you would have aimed for my gem when you had the chance."

Pushing up with a hand, she grasps her injured collarbone, takes a seed, and pushes it to her forehead, with all of its warped black from fast draining magic. "If you truly loved her you wouldn't come within my reach. Because now she gets to watch me do this to you."

With blinding speed the limb crashes down Sayaka's cheek to the concrete rooftop and rakes her across it, pulverizing it as it goes with her body, inflicting her with road rash far worse than setting down any motorcycle aground. When it reaches the end of it's momentum, before moving upwards like the sine curve of a whip lash as if Eri had flicked her wrist with the strength of some colossus and smashes her down.

Again and again. And again, on different portions of the rooftop as she tugs her along like she's trawling for greater prey, never releasing the strangling grip on her neck. "Congratulations moron." She says coldly, her voice still a touch pained, "She's going to be so proud that you failed her."

Yet despite that seeming confidence she doesn't stop. She doesn't. Because she's witnessed just how much Sayaka could get up from - a fear reaching her of what might happen if she keeps managing this feat.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Here is the truth about glass, even poured from the crucible of a volcano's heart: it is not a solid like earth, or stone, or crystal.

Glass is amorphous. Glass melts.

Fallen Stern's wicked flame carves a circle through the obsidian, black glass melting onto the concrete. It flows through the cracks in the ground, drip-dripping onto steel structural beams. The molten edges fade into nothingness.

I'm sorry, says Endo, and Mikoto stares at him with a baleful gaze. He cannot know what he is apologising for.

"LIAR! You always say that," Mikoto snaps in return. "But you're starving Eri! It's not Eri's fault she has to eat!" There's anger in her voice, but there is a distance there which never existed before. As she continues speaking, that anger is layered on with distress, like the words wound her as they leave her throat. "Does Fallen Stern's wielder think - I like letting them die? That, I wouldn't involve them if I could?"

Emotion flits across her face, only to be consumed by the depths. For a moment, her eyes reflect terrible sorrow. "Does Fallen Stern's wielder think... I'm a monster?"

The words hurt, but they are so easy to say. Endo's magic propels him forward, and Mikoto swears she could hear sound snap at the speed of it. Obsidian spires crash out of the ceiling to meet his blade -

The first stalagmite melts. The second melts, too. Third, fourth, fifth - they melt together, as the war machine Fallen Stern generates the terrible temperatures required to create the obsidian flows. Each slows his arc, just slightly. Sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth -

They are two unstoppable forces, Fallen Stern and Miroku. Obsidian meets blade, again and again, and each time the blade cuts through and keeps coming. Endo's desperate push would be something to be feared, for any normal girl. But Mikoto doesn't know fear at all.

Eleventh. Twelfth. Thirteenth...

Fallen Stern's sword is halted, just an inch from her head. The blazing energy threatens to burn her cheek as she defiantly struggles to pull her face away.

"Miroku," she says, and her voice is not touched by pain, though she sweats from the heat of it.

The obsidian spires launch from underneath the rooftop once more, destroying Endo's footing again. These glass spikes are thicker - there's simply too much of them to melt for them to be neutralised so easily. They shoot upwards, towards the sky, seeking to impale Endo in a single stroke.

Mikoto watches, empty-eyed.

"... if it's for people I love, I'll be a monster."

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FcCfkS22Hw

It is well for the interior balance of la Sirene de Diamant that she cannot, right now, see Sayaka's peril, hear Mami's words. Instead she hurtles into the pastel abyss of the Tokyo night with her captive, the tendril-wings of inverse light huddling round them as she grins.

This close there are strange things about la Sirene other than her damnable not-being-dead, which is probably annoyance enough. There is a strange smell of distant seas that aren't that distant at all, although it has a febrile tang to it. La Sirene herself is cold to the touch. But then, who wouldn't be, right now?

Because...

In this moment, in this pitched battle, in this boil's head of war for heart and soul and blood, la Sirene has seen an opportunity. And if it should so happen to save her most precious and beloved friends by happenstance? All the better.

Of course, even in this shiny moment of a chivalrous dream, there are problems. Like the gun. La Sirene's eyes turn down towards the weighty iron that Homura points at her.

La Sirene de Diamant rests a fingertip atop that yawning chasm. Her light fills the weapon's barrel, even as she says to Homura, "Stop that."

Homura, of course, does not. "It's not a dream!" la Sirene insists, sweeping that hand away from the gun and finding herself once again interrupted by that hellacious BANG of the discharge of the weapon. "Unh!!" she cries out, the burst, the recoil, enough to send her haring away from Homura like a sabot round's casing. She pivots, she kicks - in the end, she ends up smashed against a satellite dish, clinging to it with pallid fingers and dangling.

The dish comes loose, but it takes a while. La Sirene's abdomen screams at her and she struggles for breath. The shards of the leaden round, eroded by a thousand tides in the moment of la Sirene's touch, fall away, most of them; as Homura descends she may notice that the cartridge casing is firmly stuck in place and has become a sea of corroded green verdigris.

Either way: Falling down. As the dish falls, la Sirene thrashes her way into it, lets it scrape mystic gibberish against the side of the building as she does. It is a stuttering, staccato descent. La Sirene is happy to lay on the skin, a transmission from a far-off star. She looks to Homura, raising her voice: she is gasping for breath even now, for diamond may not break but certainly seems to bruise. But she is audible, at least. There's that.

"You must have seen it - the living sea! The tombs of Luxor! The forests of pine and sugar-cane! The gulls and the parrots in their aerial races..."

There is a hissing, gurgling noise, and then la Sirene seems eased. She sits up, grasping onto the passing strutwork of another dish, letting herself dangle, pulling herself up to stand with poise and grace once more. If there is a red thread gripping her heart: let it grip, she resolves.

"Stop chasing daydreams, you say. Focus on priorities, you say! All you have to do is put down your bag of guns, Homura Akemi, because I tell you that there is a place for you. I can feel it in you, I know naught else but I can feel an aquifer of tears lives inside of your heart! I can smell it! It reeks on your breath, it echoes in every flat note from your mouth!"

She spreads her arms out in soliloquy. "Do you mistrust me? Ask Mami Tomoe - ask her for the name of the bakery! Ask Madoka Kaname how the cake tasted! Ask Sailor Moon! Bah! You ask if I have more important things to worry about?"

La Sirene's pale gaze turns down. "I owe you an apology," she says.

"I ought to have seen from the first, but your guns make an awful racket! I could not focus, but now I can do nothing else! Forgive me that I did not see your tears --"

Her hand snaps forwards. Index and pinky fingers up. Right arm upraised. "-- but you can't blame me for protecting my loved ones. LES MYSTERES!" la Sirene cries out.

The shapes come. The light, the illumination. Against the backdrop of the building the veves are immense, sliding things, or are they animals of an alien sea? Is the difference profound in a place like the Sea of Tears? What is far more concrete is the down-stroke of the right arm, the shout of "COME!" and the shrieking burst of black-and-silver light, bursting out and trailing inklike threads as it wends its way down to engulf Homura.

Is it possible to shoot through that thing? One wonders.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouko Sakura [None] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcTuYBGH2Nw

"Damn right! People die so witches can live, and witches die so that we can live, and there are always more of them than us! If things aren't sustainable, if the Puella Magi over hunt and die, then the witch population explodes! How come I dropped out of school years ago and I still know this better than you? This is basic biology and as awful as it is for people to get involved it doesn't change the fact of it! The only thing stopping a feeding frenzy is for us to live on to hunt. You're damn right, I'm letting people die today so that a hundred times more don't die tomorrow! And yes, that means I get to live too! I want to live, Mami. You ever seen a Puella Magi in her thirties? In her twenties? Because I never have. We don't have room to just feel our way through everything! We have to use our heads! The Shepherds understand that. Go to hell for calling me a liar."

She shrugs, her lip curling in an angry snarl. "I helped plan it so that a grief seed that was on the verge of hatching into a familiar would draw her in. That girl was a cold blooded killer, as vicious as me but a whole lot more thoughtless, too. But of course the second Evil Eri and Kyouko the Killer get involved, the second that murderous little savage isn't around to inconvenience your morality play any more, she gets turned into a martyred saint. We set a trap because she was too dangerous to take head on and we could've nipped that familiar in the bud before it killed a soul and taken out one of the most rabid dogs in the city at the same time no problem if you two hadn't blundered in and made chaos of everything."

She spits, her saliva clouded pink, and shakes her head. It's true, Mami looks bloodier between the two. But that's the thing about the color red..it doesn't conceal many stains but those under its purview it manages magnificently. A grief seed had taken much of the edge off, but the fight with Garnet below had still drained her. She hopes Mami doesn't realize that things are far more even keeled than they might seem.

"You think she's thought about it? Really thought about it? Or you think she's nodded her head and shoved it off to the side and made excuses for how even that's part of how you're a saint on earth? You confessing it and all, it being in the past and all."

"To hell with might! You're acting like I'm some Yakuza pig. The longer I live the stronger I get the better I can kill witches the more people live. Puella live a couple of years if that after contracting. Can you imagine what we could do if we grew into our powers? What we could figure out? Whether witch or familiar you need living Puella to put them down. How many people will live another day because you'll save them, because I saved you with a seed I only had to spare because I'm treating this like the ecosystem it is? How many people will die if you kill one of the best hunters in Tokyo and get so overwhelmed with picking up the slack that you croak in a half a year, tops? It's ugly shit and I'd never ask you to take part in it. But if you think I'm an unfeeling unthinking monster lying through her teeth then you don't know a damn thing about me. I think about this every day. You think up a better way then I'd love to hear it because you sure as shit haven't said it so far."

She spits again. It's that much bloodier this time, and her body tenses like a runner preparing for a sprint. "You're projecting. I really did think you knew me. You don't even know me right now. There's nothing heroic about any of this. It's stark bloody math, as unromantic as it gets. But you bleeding doesn't make you right."

But whatever she was readying to do...doesn't happen. She knows all too well what a rifle pointed at her chest means..how, in an instance, they find themselves in a quick draw stand off. It wasn't that long ago that Mami and Kyouko alike were blissfully unaware of their Achillean weakness. Between the pair, the gunner is better suited to pluck out hearts than the spear fighter. Mami's sluggish descent of golden streamers is set in earnest..and Kyouko for her measure drags down her own nest of branched blades to pursue and to mitigate it. In practice, a lethal dragnet is doubled in scope..but beyond that mental exertion she does not physically stir.

She stares for a long moment, her chest rising and falling, her eyes unblinking. Her heart flooded past the levies.

"...you're asking me to surrender. No. If I drop my spear then you'll shoot my soul gem. You've tried it before and damn you for it. If you're for real then we'll both drop our weapons, not just me. The hunting of familiars has to be a separate thing. But beyond that I'm open to it. I'm game."

"Well?"

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Too many shards. Too many blackened barriers, three and four more for each one that Endo's blade burns through. He drives forward still, though one, then another, and another still. Fallen Stern vibrates in his hands, shakes with energy, rattles and aggravates every slash and tear that Miroku and it's wielder have inflicted on him.

"That's the wrong choice." Another spike burns, and another, shorn by metal and purple-black flame. Endo doesn't speak again after, grits his teeth tight with focus on the only task at hand. There is no reconciliation to be made here, not any borne by words. One side will yield through force, and force alone. The only way is forward, and forward he goes.

But not far enough.

He stops short. Too short. The fire still burns, but only for a moment more-and then it gutters, flickers as the weight of this battle and the last come crashing down. Steam hisses from Fallen Stern's vents, expelling heat as the blade darkens once more.

Endo is on the defensive once again, against a foe he's entirely unused to. One that he's ill-suited to fighting, requiring more movement than he's used to. Mikoto's blades are overwhelming, swarming, too fast and too numerous to be struck down by Fallen Stern's ponderous blows, by Endo's exhausted hands and fading power. Glass shards smash into his barrier jacket, piercing, breaking magical protections and digging in deep. First one, and then a second, third, fourth.

One tears through is uninjured shoulder. Another, a leg. Somewhere on his back, elbow, hand. His fingers are clasped against his weapon, but it too is mired in spikes, bound tight in walls of blackened glass.

And though he struggles, his eyes remain focused on his foe. On Mikoto, the last thing he may ever see. On a monster made of love and obsidian blades.

<Pose Tracker> Madoka Kaname [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

TWENTY MINUTES AGO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY1hdYiJUCQ

<< Madoka! You need to hurry! >>

Cold night air, made colder by speed, chills Madoka's nose to a cherry and her ears to match her ribbons, which stream out behind her, twintails too. She's not wearing her helmet, and with her skinny frame bowed over her also-beribboned handlebars, for all the world she looks like a gnarled sakura tree, or maybe just a single petal in flight.

Two petals falling together, a pink one and a white one -- because Kyuubey's second, longer pair of ears are also being swept back by the velocity of the bicycle like the ends of a scarf, from his primo seat in the silvery wicker basket basket where the headlight would be on a motorcycle. Their tips skitter across Madoka's chest and occasionally bonk lightly against her chin.

Her jaw is set, teeth clenched unwisely against the struggle of this moment, and she tastes her own smell. Every frantic breath in through her nostrils stings her side with another stitch. Every exhalation, a tiny, huffing whimper escapes her lips.

How can she be so cold and so sweaty at the same time? The white rubber tires eat up the Tokyo streets. Every block is a blur, punctuated only occasionally by an awareness of stoplights. When she sees red, she sees Kyouko's hair and stains on Sayaka's cape, and pedals faster. When she sees green, she sees Eri's eyes and her own face in the bathroom mirror at three in the morning, and pedals faster. When she sees yellow...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHWRuVLnYg&t=5

Spinning silver spokes. Kyuubey a tumbled heap of fluff a meter away; Madoka herself staring at the tiny pinpricks of blood welling up on on her palms.

They both swerved. No one was hit. Hyperventilating fades to sniffles -- and then, grimly, Madoka gets back on the bike. Kyuubey's warnings echo between her ears but the whirr of the rubber meeting the road is louder, and the sound of her own heartbeat loudest of all.

---

AN HOUR AGO

"Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa~do~ka~chan," slurs Junko as she giggles her way through the front door. Her eyes widen as she takes in the tableau in the kitchen, and her gaze struggles to focus on the streamers; the burned down candles; her fine china, set for a cocoa service instead of a tea. "What're -- whurr -- whass all dis?"

When her daughter doesn't leap up to help her in the door -- doesn't even look up from a fixed point on the family's best tablecloth, the Egyptian Cotton one, which is wrinkled from where her bone-white hands have been clenching it harder and harder and harder for an hour -- her brow wrinkles, and she staggers to one of the many empty chairs, falling in heavily enough to rattle the place settings.

There are a lot of empty chairs. More than their dining set allows; the various profoundly different desk chairs from Tomohisa and Madoka's bedrooms, plus Junko's home office, are intermingled with the more appropriate upholstered wooden seats. Madoka is in one of the latter and now Junko is too.

The shadow of tears on Madoka's face is more effective than any hair of the dog to return her mother to sobriety, but it can't happen quickly or all at once. It is possible, in between, to be serious and slurred at the same time.

"Looksh like-a party," she murmurs, reaching over to lay her hand over one of Madoka's. They are almost identical, one the miniature of the other; same curvature, same polish, neither coincidence. Junko's nails are longer, better cared for. In fact, some of her daughter's look freshly chewed. "And nobody came?"

Madoka nods in silent misery... then changes her mind and starts shaking her head instead. Her twintails droop across both cheeks.

"It wasn't a party," she corrects, small-voiced. "It was... we were all gonna go out together. Mami-senpai... she asked me to... to... to just, give everyone a hot drink first. Before we went out. In the cold. B-but..."

Her lower lip trembles, and she doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't have to.

"Your friends ditched you, huh?" After giving her kid's hand a squeeze, Junko pours herself a cold teacup of cocoa from the central silver pitcher, the pitcher with the pretty etchings on it that Tomohisa knew she would like but let Madoka give her for Christmas when she was three. The cocoa itself is slow, sludgy. "Screw 'em. Party with Mama instead, eh kiddo?"

She starts to lift her teacup in a toast... then lowers it. Madoka's still shaking her head, the back-and-forth momentum forcing more tears down to the pretty tablecloth. Her voice hitches in her throat.

"It's because they're in trouble," she whimpers. "And because I'd juh-just be in the way." Jamming little fists in her eye sockets, she rubs, and mumbles something that starts unintelligably and ends rhyming with 'night'.

Junko pauses, then completes her toast, gulping down the cooled drink in long, hearty swallows.

"Well, fuck that," replies the world's best role model. "Kiddo, whatever's going on... Mama trusts you, and Mama knows you best of all, so you need to believe Mama when she says that you aren't the problem."

She walks to the door on steadier legs and retrieves Madoka's coat from the hanger, giving it a vigorous shake to restore it to maximum puffiness.

"You are part of the solution."

Junko is gratified by the sight of her daughter's pretty pink eyes finally lifting.

Behind her, sitting on the shelf next to the door where the Kanames put their keys, hats, umbrellas, and anything else they don't want to forget for their next outing, a white plushy looks back.

---

NINETY SECONDS AGO

Brakes squeal as Madoka pulls up in front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building...'s rubble. Wisely, Kyuubey leaps out of the basket and onto her shoulder, locking himself on by winding his tail around her neck, because a moment later she's dumped the bike at the base of debris-strewn steps and is running-falling-scrabbling her way into the courtyard.

Her jaw drops at what she sees there, but nothing passes between her parted lips save hoarse, desperate little wheezes.

She does not stop, plunging into the nearest tower in a straight line that takes her through a conveniently pre-shattered window.

---

NOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amNvDULdNk8

The elevator on the Chevalier-side tower chimes open.

<< Hurry, Madoka!! >>

Madoka stumbles out duck-footed, grayfaced. If she were Sayaka she would have thought to bring a water bottle. If she were Sayaka she wouldn't have had to.

Battle rages all around her -- bullets and swords and spears and vines, none of these are needed on floor fifty to explain what happens next. The atmosphere alone would be enough to tug a twintail sharply left, to drag the ruffles of her skirt to and fro.

But it isn't a natural wind that buoys her one moment; nor the one that nearly flattens her against the rooftop, the next.

If it were just the wind, it wouldn't matter. If it were just the wind, she wouldn't be here.

Natural or not, though, the wind can fill her lungs.

She heaves in air lost to her long ride and short sprint. The concrete in her palms grinds into her socks at the knee.

And then -- when she can -- she looks up. She looks upon all of it.

Even veiled by her bangs, Madoka's eyes are the brightest thing on either rooftop.

And the dampest.