I'd give more of an A/N to this, but I just got given a 20 min warning to get ready out of the blue. It may also need some editing. Please inform me if so?

"Sir, what shall we do with them?" the Oracle Knight asked. He had a name, but Asch had never bothered to learn it. As Special Operations god-general, he worked alone and he preferred it that way. It was foolish to let any of them get close to him. As though there was a man or woman in his unit who wasn't loyal to Van above all.

Except him, of course. "Let them go."

"Asch?" Legretta seemed taken aback. "Have you forgotten your orders? Or have you just decided to ignore them?"

"Just?" He spun around, taking the blade that had been drawn on the Necromancer (supposedly) and slicing through the middle of the man whose sword had forced Luna and Tear to stay on the ground. "I've been waiting a long time for this. Tear! If you're serious about stopping Van, then Major Legretta is your enemy!"

"Asch?" Van's little sister, who he and Legretta had both trained, both planning to use her against Van (it was lucky that Asch hadn't been foolish enough to risk allying with another god-general), didn't understand what was going on, even though she claimed to. "I understand!"

"Asch, what are you doing?" Legretta managed to break out of his reach after the third hit of fang blade.

"Oh, I don't know. Saving the world." How trite, yet true.

"You… do you seriously think you can succeed in this?" Her attempt to get away from Asch's swing brought her into Luna's reach. The necromancer had also darted forward.

They were mostly distractions. Legretta wouldn't risk killing Luna, not right now, or Tear, not as long as she thought there were other options. The longer he kept her talking, the more likely he could kill her before she alerted the others.

"Let me think. Largo's dead, and not even Van could revive him." Asch had made sure of that. "Arietta is off chasing Anise and Ion. I kill you, I kill Arietta when she brings Ion back… three down, three to go. Sync's waiting at Shurrey Hill, Dist is still en route from Choral Castle, and Van's at Kaitzur pretending to care." If he started casting fonic artes she might get the sense to run for it, so it was sword against knife, gun, and her own occasional efforts. "Tear, stay back and concentrate on keeping them active! If you run out of gels or bottles I'll throw you my item bag!" Since Luna and Tear had never been in real combat and Jade had his slots sealed they didn't have the accumulated fonic strength that added to the body's weak natural resilience and strength. All three knew a lot of fonic artes that they weren't strong enough to use yet.

Irritating. He'd hoped Van would let Luna run loose a little longer, but while Luna had taken advantage of the time he had, going across the Rugnica plains on foot to get as much experience as he could they still weren't much against Legretta. "Tear, don't hold back on items! Until you get stronger your first aid is too little too slow!"

"Yes, sir!"

The melee had brought him next to the Necromancer. "God-general Asch the Bloody, am I correct?"

"No, but that's good enough for now." When he'd faced down the inventor of fomicry just moments ago he'd seen a glimmer of suspicion. He and Luna had led very different lives and even though Asch didn't wear a mask the same face, the same voice seemed worlds apart on each of them. Still, if that clue hadn't fanned that spark into light then he was going to be very disappointed in the man. "The same as calling you Col. Curtiss is good enough for now. Of course, I wouldn't want to be associated with Dr. Balfour and his poor taste in friends either."

Legretta didn't seem to have gotten the idea yet. Good. "Asch?" Why not just declare his true identity? Then, trying to avoid Luna, she stumbled. She got to her feet quickly, but not as quick as she should have. Her eyes widened as she tried to use a panacea bottle.

"Don't bother," Asch told her, smiling. "There there some things those don't work on, and the miasma is one of them."

"The miasma?" Tear gasped as Legretta gaped.

"Why not? It's the same fate she wanted everyone else to suffer."

"How did you…" How had she gotten exposed to so much, affecting her so quickly?

"Do you know what the miasma is, Legretta?" He managed to hit her to the ground this time, although she rolled away. "No one in Yulia City does. It's anger, Legretta. Wrath. At those willing to sacrifice countless innocents to bring about the future they desired. The memories of the victims of the war Yulia won. You're not poisoned, Legretta. You're cursed. The third fonon can be used to bring wind or lightning. The seventh fonon can heal… or doom."

"An offensive seventh fonic arte? Tear can use it to call on the first fonon to damage an enemy, but I've never heard of a pure application of it being used to harm." Jade was intrigued.

"What do you think the Score is? But the fonon itself doesn't like to be used for that, no. The miasma contains the desire for vengeance of all those victims. When that vengeance is appeased it will become normal seventh fonon again, and you can't do this with that unless you're Yulia."

"The miasma is… ghosts?" Tear was almost meeping.

"No. The fon belt is what contains ghosts. There's nothing like a personality left in the miasma, not even Lorelei's." Asch smirked. "Still think I'm weak for carrying around gels when a real god-general shouldn't need such crutches, Legretta?" Her guns skittered across the deck. "Those might have bought you time, but they wouldn't save you. I cast this arte right before we came down here, and you let me, thinking it was a support arte. You don't have much time left."

"Damn you!" Her frenzied assault on him was pointless, and they both knew it.

"Hell is the company you keep. Say goodbye to this world and hello to Lorelei, Legretta the Quick!" Focusing, he entered overlimit. "Rending saber!"

Shortly after he sheathed his sword Legretta started to fade away as she fell to the ground, millions of golden seventh fonons streaming downwards and then millions more up to the fon belt. It would take the deaths of around nine hundred people still to completely purify the miasma this way… but at least it was a start, and purifying it by force would take more than ten times as many and more control than he could muster. He'd used this arte on all of the people Van ordered him to kill that he could get away with, and all of his own targets. To hide its nature he'd killed them before the curse aspect took effect, but Van knew it as an arte that prevented revival and thus actually ordered Asch to use it.

Sadly, it couldn't be used on seventh fonists, much less descendants of Yulia. They were too attuned to the true nature of the fonon: it would take more than he could channel even if he killed himself doing it to doom Van.

So: Legretta was gone, and those fonons would have vastly improved the combat prowess of the others. Now, back to business. "Colonel Jade Curtiss."

"Yes, God-general Asch the Bloody? Or would you prefer an alternate mode of address?"

Asch wasn't in the mood to fill people in on what they should be perfectly capable of figuring out on their own. "Your mission is a failure. Turn around, go home, and give this to Peony." Asch handed over a scroll case. "Kimlasca will not make peace. They have been planning this war since N. D. 1999, when King Ingobert married his sister Suzanne to Duke Fabre even though her doctors said bearing a child would kill her. They would have been right… if it weren't for the child the Score predicted she would bear. 'N. D. 2000. In Kimlasca shall be born one who inherits the power of Lorelei. He will be a boy of royal blood with hair of red. He shall be called the light of the sacred flame, and he will lead Kimlasca-Lanvaldear to new prosperity.'"

Tear looked at Luna. "Are you sure about this?" Luna asked. "I mean, we both think we can trust them, but we've never trusted anyone with this before."

Luna needed more confidence: he had a tendency to always leave the final decision up to Asch. "You're the one the world knows as Luke. It's your choice."

"The Score isn't talking about me there. Or not just me." Luna took a deep breath. "N. D. 2018. The young scion of Lorelei's power shall bring his people to the miner's city. There, the youth will turn power to calamity and be as a weapon of Kimlasca, destroying himself and the city."

"That's a Score of death!" Tear gasped. Revealing one of those was forbidden, and what a Score it was!

Luna nodded. "He's the Luke fon Fabre that was born in N. D. 2000. But I'm the scion of Lorelei's power, the power of Lorelei that he inherited."

"I can't believe it took seven years to figure that out. Sure, Lorelei was trying to keep Van from figuring it out, but Van doesn't get headaches every time he reads the damn thing!" Asch complained.

"I'm sorry. They wouldn't let me anywhere near a fonstone with the Score on it, so I couldn't help."

"There wasn't anything you could have done."

"To make a long story short," Asch said aloud, to stop wheels turning behind the Necromancer's eyes (if he tried to even touch Luna to prevent the destruction Asch would kill him), "Van kidnapped me ten years ago and had Dist create Luna with fomicry so that he would die in my place. He expected me to be perfectly happy with being taken away with my home, being painfully experimented on to create a perfect isofon, and letting a child suffer my fate." How insulting!

"Why didn't you just go home?" Jade asked. "After all, Luke wouldn't have had your memories. You would obviously have been the real one."

"And then what would have happened to him? They would have killed him. And then made very, very sure I died as the Score foretold. Why? Because the Score that Luna quoted went on to say that that disaster would start a war. A war that would cause Malkuth to lose territory and lead to unprecedented prosperity for Kimlasca." Asch folded his arms. "They won't listen to you if you preach peace. It would be against the Score, after all. Grand Maestro Mohs is supervising this personally, as it's the most important event of, oh, since the one who would seize glory, Vandesdelca was used to destroy Hod by the researchers there. In fact, more important, but then the Order of Lorelei has never cared about Lorelei."

"Van… destroyed Hod?" That just couldn't be true, Tear's devastated face pleaded.

Asch's eyes softened. "He was strapped into a machine that made him generate an imperfect hyperresonance that he couldn't control. You can't blame him for it, Tear. He did everything he could. You can blame your grandfather for knowing that would happen to him. You can blame Van for plotting Auldrant's demise and Eldrant's rise as the Score foretells as vengeance. But you can't blame him for Hod, Tear. It wasn't his fault." While Asch was talking a loud call had sounded. "Damn it, that's one of Arietta's pets letting us know she's almost here. Get inside, all of you!"

"Do as he says," Jade commanded, although Luna had already obeyed.

Once the door was shut they both looked at Luna. "My name is Luna, nice to meet you?" He smiled a bit sheepishly. "Um… I'm seven years old, Asch is my original and I'm his perfect isofon… oh, and we're both perfect isofons of Lorelei, so we have the power of hyperresonance and this is the first time I've ever actually told anyone this. Van thinks I don't know I'm not Luke and that Asch hates me."

"However did you pull that off?" They couldn't have been allowed to meet, so how could they arrange such a grand conspiracy, Jade wondered.

"We can talk to each other. He was giving me acting lessons before I managed to get my mouth to say words out loud. It's harder than babies make it look to learn how to talk."

"Yes… a replica's brain should be in perfect working order, but without the memories of the meanings of words or the physical training in walking or producing those words… But there was evidence there should be a child's lack of clear memory of their first few years of life."

"So there really are two masters?" Mieu had been silent this whole time. "I'm really confused. Mieu."

"The seventh fonon is the fonon of memory and stuff, so once we figured that out we both have perfect recall," Luna explained. "He's… His name means light, and Luna is the lesser manifestation of the sentience of light, and they both begin with Lu, like we look the same at first, and he's… he's important to me. He went to a lot of trouble for my sake, even though he says that if he hadn't he would have just died anyway so it's not my fault, and… Um…" Luna looked away. "This is the first time I've seen him in person, so I'm a little excited. And I fought Legretta and actually helped, even if not very much, so…" He blushed.

"That's quite fascinating, but what on earth is Van planning? If anyone should have reason to hate fomicry it would be him, and why would he go to such trouble to save the son of Duke Fabre?" It made no sense. "I suppose it's kind of Luke to give Malkuth advance notice of the war so that we can limit the destruction, but why all this?"

"Asch, not Luke. He decided that Luke is both of us." Asch was funny like that. "Van wants to bring about Eldrant. There are… Yulia had Luke be born because he could fight the Score. If the Score goes as it says, bad stuff will happen. Really, really bad stuff. So she had Lorelei create him and made sure that Van would find out about it. Van wants to use him to create Eldrant, a new world without the Score, but he wants to do it by destroying Auldrant. He hates the Score and everyone who follows it. He wants to execute the people who are responsible for Hod and everything else it does because they just blindly obey it. So… but he didn't understand a lot of things, mostly because he hates Lorelei and so can't really understand Yulia's feelings."

"Fight… the Score?" Tear stared, and Jade as well. People had to follow the Score if they wanted prosperity, yes, but the idea of actually going against it and succeeding? Inconceivable.

Luna nodded. "Oh, Asch says we need to stay in here. Arietta brought reinforcements. He said that he'll tell them we escaped, Largo and Legretta are chasing us, and the Tartarus is staying here until we're found and they're done with Ion so they spread out to look for us and don't come in here. Arietta… will be dead by midnight. She'll be asleep, so… We can escape then."

"So you can speak to each other? I thought perfect isofons might have some sort of connection, but actual two-way instant communication?"

"It might be because we're us."

"All of this is…" rather unbelievable. Yet, from the evidence… Jade opened the scroll case to reveal a very long and tightly wound scroll, with the sort of security precautions Peony's message to Kimlasca had. "Very disconcerting." He'd banned fomicry, and after Hod… Did no one… He would have preferred to not find all this out at once, but better to find out how bad it was now so he could start coping.

"Tear, are you okay?"

"I… I came to the outer lands to kill him because I knew he was doing something terrible. I haven't changed my mind. I'll help you, Luke, I mean Luna, and Captain Asch." Even though Major Legretta had just vanished before her eyes. Van had to be stopped. "Is this why you trusted me even though I was trying to kill your teacher?"

"I'm sorry I got on your case about that. Asch had no idea you were going to do this, and I was pretending to be Luke and 'Luke' trusts 'Master Van,' so I had to be a brat who thought you were an enemy. I actually like you a lot, Tear. You're my third friend ever."

"Who is the other one?"

"Other one? There's Guy, who was there when you showed up, cousin Natalia, and Ion."

"…What about Asch?" She'd thought Luke, no, Luna's friends were her, Asch, and someone else.

Luna shook his head. "Asch isn't my friend, he's… Asch." Calling him just a friend? "We used to be one person."

"That's an interesting way to describe replica data extraction." Jade rolled the scroll closed for the moment. He needed to think about what he'd read before moving on. "Or that the fonons that formed you used to be a part of him, that would be a less poetic way of putting it. In non-isofon replicas the fonons were distorted during the process, but they still tend to see each other as family, even in the more vicious monster species. One could theorize that perfect isofons would have a tighter bond. There's also the fact that from your description he was the only person you were able to communicate with for quite awhile, and you would have been his only solace in enemy territory while he was pretending to serve his kidnapper." Under those circumstances, they could be far more emotionally dependant on each other than he had been to the only person who understood him. Losing Professor Nebilim had led to this.

"Nothing's anywhere near as important to me as Asch, and he needs me. You're right, he couldn't trust anyone, and I had to lie too. Otherwise we both would have died, me right away and Asch along with an entire city of innocent people. So… I'm not used to telling other people the truth. Not even Guy, and he's my best friend. But I'd never lie to Asch."

Jade made a mental note of that. It appeared that like his name sake, that changed its aspect between light and dark, Luna also was two-faced. A habitual deceiver who had been able to fool Jade, in fact. He'd thought he was just a brat, but, in fact, how he treated Ion hadn't meshed with that. Ion had picked it up from the beginning. Jade had just thought Ion was giving 'Luke' too much credit.

The 'real' Luna seemed a lot like Ion, actually.

"What are you going to do?" Tear asked. "No, what are we going to do?"

"Well, our main enemies are Van, Mohs, Cantabile, Legretta, Sync, Largo, Arietta, and Dist."

"Cantabile?"

"The god-general of division six. No one's heard of her. Asch is special ops, but there are some things Van doesn't want him to have rubbed in his face. Cantabile is… Um, yeah. Asch has only even seen her a few times. But she won't be a problem. She had her replica data extracted at Hod, and now… She might even be dead already."

Jade didn't wince.

"But she's been on the enemy list since forever, so I said her with the rest of them. Largo is dead. Legretta is dead. Arietta won't last the night. Mohs is pretty weak, so unless he's got people to fight for him he's not a problem. Dist uses fontech to fight for him, and without it he's pretty weak, plus people who think they're smart always overlook things." Jade wondered if Luna included him in that. He would be right to. "Take away Sync's talisman and if he tried to fight me or Asch he wouldn't last long even without a curse. It's because he's a replica of Fon Master Ion. Fon Masters are sensitive to Lorelei, so it's really, really hard to make a replica with the potential not disappear into the fon belt right away. That's why my friend Ion gets so sick when he uses Daathic Fonic Artes."

"Fon Master Ion is a replica?" Both of them were startled.

Luna nodded. "He's only two years old. They programmed him with how to walk and talk. I think he might have guessed that either Asch or me is a replica, but he hasn't said anything. Asch has to pretend to hate replicas, so he stays away from him. Ion's… It's a bit like how Van is and you are, Tear. Although you're Yulia's descendants so even though you're less… connected to Lorelei than he is we're still… Even Asch doesn't hate Van, not really. I don't know if we can."

"Why not? If my brother did all that to you, how could you even stand being around him?"

"Because you're Yulia's descendants. Yulia was a very important person to Lorelei, and so… And Van's suffered so much because of the Score. We can't talk with Lorelei the way we do each other because he's bound, but we are still his isofons. So we share a lot of his feelings. Me more than Asch, I think. It would make sense if it's that way."

Make sense? Why the replica of the light of the sacred flame instead of the original? Replica. "Because you're made of pure seventh fonons. Seventh fonons that are isofonic with Lorelei, the manifestation of the mass consciousness of the seventh fonon."

Luna nodded.

"A replica of a human would not be that human, isofon or not. But Lorelei is what you just described."

"That's what Asch figured out. But the fonon sentiences should be sort of… mass minds? You could say that I'm 'a' Lorelei as opposed to 'the' Lorelei. The one in the core is… I'm glad I'm not him."

"The exact same person would become very different in two different environments. Seven years old as opposed to several thousand would be a huge difference." Luna was more than two-faced, then. Luna was a vessel of the consciousness composed of the memories of everyone who had ever lived or would ever live on Auldrant, for one thing.

"I'm me, though. I'm not a replacement for Asch, no one could be, and I'm not just a random cluster of fonons anymore than you are." Luna was right, Jade knew. What were humans but fonons and memories? "I might be Lorelei, but that doesn't mean I'm not me."

"Hurt his feelings and you will pay for it in blood." Asch stalked in. "Very clever, Necromancer, disabling the landship like that."

"Hmm? I haven't activated my method for disabling the Tartarus yet."

"Oh, but you have." Asch commandeered one of the bridge crew chairs. "Or so they think. No one will disturb me when I'm in one of my infamous rages, so we should be safe." Only he seemed anything but upset.

Their coordination was too perfect for it to not have been planned, although to the others it seemed surprising that Asch's arms would open right when Luna came to them, that Luna would sit in his lap exactly as Asch lifted his chin so Luna could tuck his head under it. No words were exchanged, no signal detectable to anyone but them. Their eyes closed as Asch stroked Luna's hair and Luna nosed at Asch's.

They were so… cute… (Must not squee in front of Captain Asch, must not squee must not squee must not squee!)

The moment was ruined when Mieu popped out of the item bag. "Hello, Master Asch!"

There was a fluffy thing that felt it had the right to climb on his Luna and interrupt their reunion. If looks could cast, Mieu would have been burnt to a crisp.

"Are you jealous?"

"Yes!"

"Uh, Thing, stay in the item bag for now, okay?" Luna stuffed him in and closed the clasp. Then they returned to snuggling.

Two people whose lives had revolved around each other for so long (all his life, in Luna's case) were now meeting for the very first time. Had they ever wondered if it was all a dream? Something too good to be true, a fantasy of someone who cared in a way Jade personally doubted people ever would care for each other in real life? 'Luke' had so many problems because of his amnesia: basic knowledge, being sheltered and spoiled. Asch had been forced to kill for the man who kidnapped him.

And now the person who they had endured that for was here. Was real, and in their arms.

Even Jade had enough compassion not to interrupt, saccharine as it was.

Asch's eyes opened. "One of you keep an eye on the clock. Shift change is at midnight." Then his eyes closed again, returning to the communion necessity had drawn him out of.

"Yes sir!" Tear replied, but clearly hadn't been paying any attention at all, just given the automatic response. Jade decided to take a seat. Someone had to keep watch.