Vita could feel the…the madness, rolling in over her link to the other Wolkenritter. They were a chorus, each reinforcing the others, feeding back to them. The rage rolled through her, over her, around her, killing rage. She knew it well. For centuries, millenia, rage was all she had. Rage to comfort her, rage to protect her, rage to help her. No other emotion had offered any benefit to a servant of the Book of Darkness.

That was the only reason she kept her head. Killing rage was so familiar to her she could just ignore it. Vita had been with another Bureau mage, an Enforcer officer, at the time it first came over the link. She had left them now; with the other Wolkenritter wandering the base killing any cyborg they found, the Enforcer was in little danger of getting attacked by several, and Vita was sure they could handle any single stray. Besides, she was needed elsewhere urgently. She had to shut this off at the source before it got worse. Or the others might not stop.

And Hayate would never forgive them.

Hayate might even be blamed.

Vita had to stop them. She flew at reckless speeds down corridors that tried to display some truly horrific holograms, some of them things she recognized from Signum's past. Vita shut them out of her consciousness and flew faster, homing in on Signum via the link the Wolkenritter shared. There she was, and the insane Doctor himself. Scaligetti was looking rather worse for the wear, and his mouth was working, but he wasn't actually speaking.

"Signum!" Vita screamed. Not for the first time she wished her voice sounded older and more authoritative. Signum could bark orders and trigger instinctive obedience; so could Zafira. Not her, though. Signum's head twitched, but her blade drew back as well. Vita swore. They couldn't kill Scaligetti. That would just start the stupid mousehunt all over again. "Eisen!"

Several things happened simultaneously. Signum swung, Vita placed a shield between Signum's blade and Scaligetti, and Graf Eisen intoned "Raketenform!" The junior knight was off, aiming her blow in a way she'd never actually tried before. For Vita, it was usually enough to get up in their face and hammer them until they stopped moving or begged for mercy. Finesse was unnecessary. But she knew how to aim, how to dodge an opponent's blows, how to work through their defenses. She applied those skills to a different purpose now.

Signum made surprisingly little noise for just having every bone in her hand shattered. Just a sort of grunt. That frightened Vita, for the first time in her life provoking the junior knight to genuine terror. Was Signum that far gone, that she wouldn't even feel pain? How could she possibly stop Signum then? You didn't knock Wolkenritter unconcious. You could wear them down, make them pass out from exhaustion, but you didn't knock them out. They didn't work in quite that human a fashion.

Signum couldn't hold onto Levantine and dropped it. Scaligetti, being Scaligetti, made a dive for the blade and met up with one of Signum's feet instead. Vita batted the blade into a far corner, finding a practical use for all that croquet. Levantine apparently made its own decision at that point as well, and reverted to its storage form. The blade would not fight another Wolkenritter, and it would certainly not fight its own master.

Signum faced off with Vita from just out of Vita's reach. Weaponless, she could still channel considerable magic or attack with her fists and feet as a well as any of the cyborgs might. "Signum, this isn't what Hayate would want!" Vita pleaded. It wasn't in her nature to plead, and she didn't think she was doing it very well. Vita was also acutely concious that even with Eisen, Signum still had a parity of reach with those long legs.

Vita watched Signum tense up braced…but it never came. Instead the senior knight suddenly clutched at her hand and her eyes misted over. Signum gasped for breath, as if she had just surfaced from a long stretch underwater.