"Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams. A wall at the world's end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this."
― Catherine Fisher, Incarceron
Mikuni Oriko ran for her life. She had been running for a long time now from the Dress-Up Witch, whose pastel labyrinth warped the passage of time into an adrenaline-fueled blur. Familiar replaced familiar, narrow escape replaced narrow escape, one dead-end vision swapped for another, and always, just on the edges of her awareness, lurked those two: the final form of that poor, oblivious Tomoe Mami-san, and her. The purple magical girl — Akemi Homura, her talent told her. The time traveler.
Her mind cast back to Tomoe-san's death, when she and Kirika had pushed the girl to the limits of her power, intending to kill her... But everything that followed had happened too fast.
Even before they had begun the assault, Oriko had known Akemi-san would arrive to kill them, and had prepared accordingly — there was no chance of Tomoe-san making it out of this alive, of course, but that was the least of Oriko's worries right now.
Every future she had seen up until this point had ended in Akemi-san killing the both of them without so much as batting an eyelid, making it evident she knew exactly how to counter both their abilities. The timeline unfolding now was merely the most drawn-out of these, in the hopes that repeated changes to the timeline as new futures became apparent would be enough to save them both. This was a desperate tactic, one which Oriko hadn't been forced to use since before she met Kirika.
Kirika…
That dreaded sound, the sound of shattering glass, returned to her mind unbidden.
Keep your focus. You can't afford to slip up. The fate of your world is in the balance.
Oriko's heart pounded in her ears to the beat of her boots on the bloodstained floor, her white-clad body speeding through the twisted maze faster than the mundane eye could follow. Yet more familiars were shredded by her silver projectiles, their insubstantial forms decaying into grief even before they turned to see her. And her eyes, always looking off somewhere in the distance, were glassy and unfocused, caught somewhere between the future and the past.
It was too much. Oriko knew to exactly what lengths the time traveler was willing to go to protect her friend — she'd seen it in too many visions to count. Akemi-san's strategy was always similar, in these: She would overwhelm the precognitive with a hundred dead-end visions of traps and ambush-teleports, rendering her clairvoyance useless, before appearing from the air like a phantom, to strike her girlfriend dead. As was the way with magical girls, in all these visions, Akemi Homura never missed a shot.
"Kirika!" Oriko screamed aloud in each, without fail.
The fact she'd already seen this happen a thousand times today didn't soften the blow one bit. She fled down the path her precognition told her would lead her away from Akemi-san, adding precious minutes to the timeline— time she could use to find an escape from this mess of ruined futures, and make the world right again. It was a future that now rested entirely on her shoulders. A future Kirika would never see.
Oriko wrested her focus back from her memory to the present. Her tears mixed with the pools of blood strewn across the labyrinth. Darkness gathered in her soul gem, like a negative image of the night sky.
You can't let her win. You're stronger than her. If she kills you now, what will Komaki-san's death have been for? What will Chitose-chan's contract have been for? What did Kirika die for?! You aren't like her. You wouldn't throw away an entire world to satisfy some high-school crush! You wouldn't repeat the past to do that. You're better than that.
The mantra was becoming too familiar for her liking, but at this point, it was either that or witch-hood. She had accepted this burden a long time ago. Now if only she could find a way to beat Akemi-san—!
Oriko had let herself become distracted. She suddenly found herself hanging by her legs from the ceiling, arms bound to her side by the teacup-sized abomination that now stood a couple of metres below her. A vision came to her then, as if by instinct, of a soul gem shattering in the next few seconds, and she responded rapidly in kind.
Near-preternatural magical girl reflexes engaged, Oriko tore apart her bonds with a series of precision impacts as a magic-aided swing took her out of the path of the Dress-Up Witch's gunfire. The momentum carried her spinning through the cavernous chamber, and let her land with grace that only a magical girl could manage, just as another sphere sent the witch screaming into a nearby wall. Oriko made quick work of the nearby familiars, and prepared for her second assault, before a sudden vision interrupted her train of thought.
The Desert Eagle's muzzle flashed deadly bright as that cursed magical girl sprang into existence before her, and shards of black-flecked crystal went spiraling through the air from—
Oriko let out a scream as she returned to the present, and by the time she'd summoned her swarm of protective spheres, she had already fled the chamber. Tears stung her face as the air resisted her unnaturally fast passage. She was a failure. A failure! So close to failure, again.
She had to find the way out. She had to find the way out of the labyrinth. She had to find a way out of this damnable maze. Pale green eyes unfocused from the present, again, as all her power was focused into the future.
There was no escape from the labyrinth. Not without killing either the time traveler or the witch—
There was no way to kill Akemi Homura. Her magic was nearly at its limit—
There was no escape from her fate. The Pattern Witch waited just beyond the eternal veil, as ever—
There was no way to protect the world from the witches. There was no hope for magical girls—
There was no escape from her own despair. She couldn't protect the world from her own actions, her own failure, that hated monster—
Oriko gasped as she found herself collapsed in a pool of the labyrinth's blood, hand clasped wonderfully sickeningly hard around her soul gem. Bitterly, the memory of her wish, and the utter failure it had now resulted in, floated to the surface of her mind: A reason to live? They had won. The Dress-Up Witch, and Akemi Homura. There was no way out.
The last of the three would be here soon. She could see her now, clear as a starry winter sky: Her failure, in the form of an eldritch terror, stretched out like fine clockwork over an empty shell of a city, repeating itself again and again and again into the infinite void of the future.
Mikuni Oriko would not let that happen. She would never let anyone make her into this. Every ounce of her will, every fibre of her being railed against it. And she knew, then, what she would have to do to prevent that future.
If I can have just one victory, let it be this.
As Oriko's fist closed around the rapidly-darkening gem, she remarked on the future one final time.
I don't know what happens after my death
And her soul exploded into a thousand fragments, with the sound of shattering glass.