Standard Disclaimer:- I do not own CardCaptor Sakura, but I do own the idea from my head :) I got inspired for this story by watching Ace Combat again :D

"Ice-Tornado! Enemy plane on your six!"

Seconds meant everything. One wrong move you would be dead. One thought would easily kill you. "Pull up! Now!" Sakura pulled up on the flight stick, her modified Japanese version of the Euro-fighter Typhoon...A plane which the United States, the European union and the Japanese had created together flew up at high speed. There wasn't time to argue with anyone. This was war, plain and simple. No amount of magic would mean a thing up here. You would last a maximum of 4 minutes and that's if you knew what you were doing.

"Several bandits at 3 o'clock, break high and right!" Sakura Kinomoto did precisely what she was told. Every movement was as if her body was moving on its own. The steel plane she was in command off flew up, right, left and down. Every single maneuver you can think of was executed by her skills.

There was only 5 squadrons over the city of Tokyo and the district that was Tomoeda. Sakura Kinomoto had initially signed up as a display pilot and nothing more. Within a matter of 2 months of flying her first displays however there was an attack. Problem was, no-one knew who it was and why they were attacking Japan of all places.

"In the names of all...Shit!" Sakura snapped her attention skyward as her plane flew in between two of the enemy ones. The AWACS's plane high above them all had been slammed into by an aircraft missile. The plane started to decrease in altitude...fast.

Sakura commanded her fighter plane to fly directly down. The plane was breaching 1,500 miles per hour. She could feel the blood quickly shot to her head. There was only one option she had to prevent being knocked unconscious: Use her magic skills and force the blood to keep going to the areas it was needed to go to.

As her plane got further and further towards the ground, she pulled up the plane thereby smacking her left wing on a piece of the AWACS's wing that would have slammed into the ground and killed most of the people she cared about.

"There's far to many of them! Ice-Tornado! Squadrons Fierce Tiger and Ground Godzik, pull out of the combat zone! We cannot survive here!"

Sakura's eyes widened. "Sir! Are you saying we should just leave the people we love!?" There was a problem though...The communicator had cut itself out. The mechanics of the plane that controlled the radio system were fried. "Shit!" Sakura shouted as her plane within seconds lit up red. She knew all to well what that meant: Someone had locked onto her.

Sakura had little time to think let alone move, as her plane shot to the left she saw on one of her instruments that the missile was heat seeking. Meaning, no matter how hard she tried, if she couldn't shake this missile, she was just as good as dead.

She heard the communicator crackle and slowly turn to another frequency. She could only hear at first. "All squadrons, this is Red flight seven six zero, engage the enemy air force on sight. All Japanese fighter planes switch to communicator frequency five seven two seven two" Sakura heard a rather strong English sounding voice as she turned her attention to what appeared to be over 300 hundred other planes entering the combat area.

Her eyes widened as she saw just who they were:- They were planes from the United States! There was no argument about America's involvement any longer, they had come to push the enemy out of the combat zone...And they were going to do that with force. Remembering to switch the communicator over she pressed several more buttons. "Can anyone hear me!? My plane has been hit! I don't know how long I have in the air!"

For a few moments the communicator seemed like it was dead, yet before Sakura could do anything to it, a very familiar voice came sounded in her ears. "Don't you worry Sakura! Lightning 4 and 7, with me, all other parts of my squadron head into the city centre!" Sakura's eyes widened yet again.

That voice was almost unmistakable...It couldn't be...Yet it was. "E...E..." She heard the other voice shouting commands at his squadron, mostly due to the amount of explosions occurring that almost made it impossible to fly through this area.

"Don't say anything! I'll fly alongside you, command do you read me?" After a few moments there was another voice. "Lightning 2! We can see what's going on from up here, get moving and get your friend out of the war-zone! We can handle this from here!"

Sakura pulled up from another plane that was heading straight at her. Within moments a very sleek and adaptive fighter plane flew alongside her own. It was an F-22 Raptor. "Switch to private frequency five five seven three four! I can talk to you on the secure channel that way!" Sakura nodded and pressed the relevant numbers into her transmitter. "That's better! Sakura! I need you to follow me towards the carrier's, can you do that?"

Sakura nodded as she caught a very quick glimpse as to who she was flying in formation with. "This is going to be very hard to follow! Act like you're my shadow! Full afterburners!" Sakura's eyes widened for a moment and then she switched on her afterburners, following him through several streets which were even more worse to maneuver around, one micro-second of a wrong decision and she would end up a glass crushed mess.

Sakura knew one thing and one thing only:- She had to keep up with her long time friend if she was going to have ANY chance of surviving this battlefield alive.

She was following Eriol's plane through the streets of her once home ground.

She didn't like this battle.

She didn't really want to fight in it.

But Sakura Kinomoto knew one thing that was most important above all else:-
If she didn't fight.

She would die.