Author's Note: Sorry for the delay, but real life's been a pain in the neck lately, and between hospital and work, I just haven't found the time to update. Here's chapter five, after quite some time in development, though, so enjoy!

Chapter Five

The air crackled with power, even though Ranma had reined in his battle aura again. Now that Uranus had transformed, and didn't seem intent on hiding any of her power, he smirked as he got a good reading on her. Just as I thought. A lot of raw power, but almost no control over it. I wouldn't be surprised if the only way she knew how to use it was to throw around energy blasts.

"Last chance to back out," Uranus called out. Ranma merely smirked and stood casually, his hands clasped behind his back. When no reply was forthcoming, the blonde Senshi charged at him with a haymaker.

Ranma swayed to the side to avoid the hit, then ducked to avoid the follow-up kick. Decent form, but sloppy follow-through. Decent power. I think she'd be hitting about as hard as Ryoga. He continued to dodge her attacks for a minute, before deciding that he'd had enough. Haruka's magically enhanced stamina probably wouldn't exhaust itself anytime soon, despite the fact that they'd just fought a battle against youma, and he figured he had a decent grasp on her style. He smirked as he thought about it. Straightforward and aggressive. Sounds familiar. Only she does it with a lot less skill than Ryoga, and probably relies on pure strength to win.

The blonde woman was getting visibly frustrated, he could see it. Her shouts of anger were getting louder as she continued to miss him, and he decided that enough was enough. Shifting his stance, he slipped past her as she attempted a reverse punch, and struck her with an open palm strike that sent the Senshi of Uranus careening back a dozen feet.

Haruka's eyes snapped open at the force behind the blow. While it wasn't the hardest punch she'd ever received – the time a youma had smashed her a dozen feet into the Tokyo Tower came to mind – it was strong…unnaturally strong for a human, and she was a good enough martial artist to know it had been applied with as much skill as strength; otherwise the punch would have hurt, but not sent her flying this far, as well-grounded as she was. Her eyes narrowed as she rolled back to her feet. The hit had been more for show than it had been to take her down.

She sneered and decided to take the fight up a notch. The Space Sword appared in her hand, and she snapped her arm forward with a cry of "Space Sword Blaster!"

The energy beam speared towards her opponent, crossing the ten feet distance between them in a fraction of a second. Haruka didn't wait for it to hit as she charged in after her attack, hoping to find Ranma off-balance. The return energy blast that smashed through her Space Sword Blaster and into her was something she hadn't expected. The ball of condensed energy that hit her exploded upon contact with her, and for an instant she could feel the searing heat as her fuku was stripped and her skin blistered and burned before the Senshi magic kicked in and sealed up the breach in the magical armor.

Still, even with the magic working to heal her at hundreds of times the speed a normal human would, she ended up nearly doubled over, clutching her burned stomach in pain. She did have enough presence of mind, however, to to raise her sword and try to back off to give herself more time to recover. She was surprised he hadn't pressed the advantage against her as she righted herself.

Ranma was crouching low to the ground with a smirk on his face. "So, you said you didn't believe me when I told you I poked that monster and it blew up?" His grin widened when he reached out to jam his right index finger into the ground. Uranus blinked, unsure of what to make of the action, when the ground around her erupted into dirt and high-velocity shrapnel.

When the blast was over, Haruka found herself lying on her back, her fuku and body littered with countless cuts and tears as Ranma sauntered over. She glared at him as he stopped next to her, and propped herself up on her elbows. Instead of an attack, however, the pigtailed martial artist extended a hand. Haruka glared at it for a moment, then sighed and took it as he hauled her back to her feet.

"You're good," he commented finally, turning to walk back towards the shrine.

Haruka blinked in surprise. Compliments were the last thing she'd expected. In fact, she was surrpised he considered the fight over. Sure, she was hurt, and the fuku was taking its time to heal her injuries, but she'd fought on in worse condition. The fact that he wasn't even breathing hard only added insult to injury.

"But you're not good enough." Ranma's second comment caused her to bristle and stop.

"It's not over yet. I'm not done!"

Ranma turned around and shook his head. "Unless you have some more fancy tricks up your sleeve, then yes, you are."

"Tricks?" Haruka shouted.

"Yeah, tricks." Ranma created a sphere of ki, and hovered it in his palm almost absent-mindedly. "You have a lot of power, and that transformation of yours gives you a lot of speed and strength to go along with it." He shrugged. "You still suck."

From the sidelines, Setsuna winced in sympathy. Still as blunt as ever.

"Why, you-"

"You suck because you've got all this power, all this strength and speed, and you still fight like some thug off the street." Ranma's eyes hardened, and he returned her glare with equal force. "You suck because you lack the self-control, the discipline, the focus that would make you good fighters. You've got all this power, and the best you can come up with is throwing the same kind of elementary magic attack over and over again. You've got all this speed, and you still have to stand still when you fire them. You've got all this strength, and all you do with it is try and punch your opponents. You try to work as a team, but your idea of teamwork consists of getting as many people as you can to shoot the monster at the same time. That is why you suck."

Haruka was about to open her mouth to retort when his statement sank in. Is he right? she thought. Is it true? Are we really so limited? Did we blind ourselves that, just because we won our battles, we were fighting the best we could have?

The answer that came to her a second later chilled her to the bone, distracting her enough to cause her to loose her transformation. They had limited themselves. Until now, looking back on their battles, they'd always matched power with power. They had always ended up overpowering their enemies with more magic attacks, more powerful magic attacks, but, as Ranma had said, they had always been the same kind of attacks. What he had used against her, what he had shown the rest of the Senshi during that humiliatingly short battle against her – and in the battle against the youma earlier – was that he was the exact opposite.

He had an arsenal of moves at his disposal, any of which he could alter and modify on the fly to apply to any given situation, from elemental attacks to energy blasts, to a myriad of martial arts moves that enabled him to do the unthinkable against even impossible odds. And if that wasn't enough, then he would come up with combination attacks that utilized the resources available to him to the greatest possible effect…much like using a combination of Mercury's ice-based attacks and his own heat-based energy blasts. Or using Setsuna's Chrono Typhoon to his advantage.

Or even something as simple as using her own energy blast to launch a counterattack that had completely blindsided her. Haruka faltered. That one still smarted, especially since she'd used that tactic herself quite a few times against youma that liked to throw around energy blasts. Her fists unclenched, and the angry set of her jaw slacked. "I…I understand," she whispered. To her surprise, she could feel tears leaking down her cheeks – tears of anger, at herself, for missing the obvious for so long that it had taken a normal human being, with no special magic powers whatsoever, to show them that they hadn't been protecting the people as well as they could have…as well as they had believed.

Ranma turned around and nodded. "Good. Then we can get started."

"Now," Ranma asked as he stared at the girls arrayed before him. "Who here knows how to fight?" Nine hands rose into the air, Setsuna's included. Rei had joined them after the Senshi magic, coupled with some help form Usagi and the Silver Crystal, had finished mending her injuries within the hour. The pigtailed martial artist frowned and rephrased his question. "Who here knows how to fight in some way other than just throwing the biggest magic shot you can at the enemy?"

Four hands remained. Ranma glanced into the round, then nodded. "Step up," he said, and Setsuna, Haruka, Rei, and Makoto stood and took a step forward. "Karate, second dan," Ranma told Haruka, and the blonde looked up in surprise.

"How'd you know?"

"The way you move, your form, your stance." Ranma smirked. "But you're rusty. Probably haven't had a real lesson or a real hand-to-hand fight in a long while." He snapped out a punch, which Haruka caught. "You're too used to the power from your transformation, blocking instead of dodging, strength instead of speed. I know someone who fights just like you." Ranma smirked.

"I haven't seen you two fight yet," Ranma turned his attention to Rei and Makoto. Rei was still grumpy, but had given up glaring at the pigtailed martial artist when she had been told he had saved her life.

"Kempo, first dan," Rei told him.

"Same," came Makoto's reply.

Ranma's eyes fixed on Setsuna, causing the green-haired woman to shift uncomfortably. "Setsuna-san?" he asked, wondering at the woman's odd behavior.

"I've had…extensive training," she finally said, and Ranma nodded.

"I see. I need all the help I can get with them," he waved at the other five girls. "When can we start?"

"We usually hold meetings to prepare every Tuesday and Friday, when there's no emergency," Ami replied.

"That's not nearly going to be enough," Ranma glanced at Setsuna, and she nodded. "We'll figure something out tomorrow. I'll be here at two. Anyone who wants to learn, be here."

Ranma sighed as he walked down the stairs to the temple. This wasn't really what he had had in mind when he agreed to help Setsuna. At best, he'd been expecting to fight the monsters himself, or get some help from the Nerima crew to help. Teaching a group of girls to fight felt, to him,…wrong on a number of levels. And then there was Stesuna's mysterious behavior. Maybe Nabiki had been right, maybe she was hiding something.

"No need to try and sneak up behind me, Setsuna-san."

A sigh came from behind him, and the silence was broken by the click of heels on the stone steps as the Senshi of time ceased to move stealthily. "Can't hide from you, can I?"

A small grin played around Ranma's face as he glanced to his left, at his companion. "I didn't get to be the best by letting them."

"Very true."

"So, what do you want this time? Warn me of another alien attack that's going to take place in an hour?"

When Setsuna remained silent, Ranma stopped abruptly and turned to face her. "Listen," he said, for once his awkwardness with women forgotten, "you asked for my help, but you're not telling me everything. There's questions you're not answering. Now, I don't know what your reasons are, and I don't think you've got some sort of evil hidden motives, but I can't work with someone I can't trust – and even if you're not up to doin' something nasty, I can't trust you if you won't tell me the whole truth."

"I understand," Setsuna replied. "There's a few things I haven't said, that I don't think the others are ready to hear yet."

"Why?"

"Because…because they scare me, and they make me really, truly wonder if we're not just delaying the inevitable – or worse, speeding it up." Setsuna wasn't looking at him, something that told him the usually confident woman wasn't telling him something.

"The truth, Setsuna-san. What's going to happen? What did happen? Something's got you scared, and I need to know."

Setsuna turned around, before waving her hand and creating a shimmering red-tinted translucent bubble around the two of them. "This'll protect us from listeners and scrying," she explained upon his curious glance, and the shaky tone she was speaking in gave him an indication of just how afraid she was…even though he didn't know why, after all, she had warned them of an attack, it had been beaten back with no casualties, and now he had agreed to train the girls to fight. No problem – right?

"Out with it, Setsuna-san."

"The vision I had when I warned you…it didn't come true."

"What?" Ranma nearly fell over. "But-but you said that the city would be attacked, and it was-"

"But I was wrong."

"You'll have to explain that one to me, then, because I don't get it." Ranma blinked, nonplussed. "You were right, the attack came. We defeated the monsters…so what's the big deal?"

"Because the vision was wrong," Setsuna shrieked, clawing at his shoulders, a hysteric, almost manic look in her dark red eyes. "I was wrong, wrong, wrong!"

"Calm down!" Ranma reached up and took hold of her wrists before she could start shaking him, as well. "Tell me, what went wrong?" When the woman didn't show any indication of even beginning to calm down, he removed her hands from his shoulders, then cupped her face and forced her to look him straight in the eye, for once forgetting about his shyness around the opposite gender. "Setsuna-san. Look at me. Look at me."

The woman's terrified chittering subsided slowly, and she blinked, twice, the glazed look in her eyes clearing. Ranma was about to release her when she slumped in his grasp. He guided her as she sat down heavily on the steps, burying her face in her hands. Unsure of what to do, Ranma awkwardly wrapped an arm around her shoulders and waited.

It took a few long minutes, and Ranma marvelled at the fact that no one outside their bubble seemed to notice them when he realized that the outside world was standing still. So I guess Nabiki was right…she can control time. Finally, Setsuna looked up, her red eyes even redder, and her cheeks streaked with tears, but she seemed to have regained her composure.

"What's got you so scared, Setsuna-san?" Ranma asked again, worried about the answer. While he hadn't known the woman long – barely two days had passed since he'd first met her – he'd gotten the impression that she usually had a tighter hold on her emotions than this. Something that could so thoroughly shatter her composure was not something Ranma thought would be pleasant to deal with.

"I was wrong," Setsuna whispered, a grim smile playing around her lips. "I was so wrong." She shook her head. "When I warned you, I had gotten a vision of the battle to come. When I scryed the battle, I found that I could only see the beginning of it, because of some interference." She shuddered. "I couldn't see any further than that, so I thought we would be fine, because I had warned you, and I knew what was coming."

"I think you told me that we had a good three weeks before trouble would start."

"I thought we did…" Setsuna took a deep breath, before looking back up at him. "When I told you I was from the future, I was telling the truth. I lived through a year of war, a year of bloodshed. Most of it was from innocents. I've seen kingdoms rise and fall in my time, but nothing…nothing comes close to the devastation this war will bring." Another deep breath to steady her. "And then it ended. You and your friends ended the fighting…the hard way. I thought, maybe if I went back in time, with the knowledge I had, knowing what and when things would happen, I could prevent them."

"So you came back, and you told me we had three weeks…but you just told me yesterday. What's going on?"

Setsuna's face lost all expression as she replied. "I don't know. In my timeline, the first attack happened on February 9th. The enemy shouldn't have been moving this fast, shouldn't have been able to move this fast."

Things fell in place, and Ranma froze. Her surprise at the suddenness of the vision, her surprise at seeing multiple creatures in the battle, and her fear of what had happened…and what was to come. She had thought she could predict their enemy's movements to prevent history from repeating itself, but all she succeeded in was to apparently speed up the bloody war that was going to be fought.

"Things didn't go as you planned – as you remembered them."

Setsuna nodded. "Yes. The first attack came three weeks early. But what was worse…in my vision of the first battle, I only saw the Senshi and you fighting one of the youma. There were four of them."

"Could your vision have been wrong?" Ranma asked, worry beginning to creep into his tone. The situation wasn't getting any prettier as she was telling him all the things that had gone wrong.

"My visions are always accurate." Setsuna gave a wry smile. "The only possibility is that during the hour between my warning and the actually battle, the enemy must have changed plans. He knew I was preparing extra measures to combat him, somehow."

Ranma shuddered. If an enemy controlling an unknown number of forces on that kind of schedule, then they were in deep trouble – especially if he could anticipate and react to anything Setsuna was anticipating and reacting to. Still, there was more to it. "There's something else, isn't there?"

Setsuna nodded. "Those…parasites."

"The little critters on my leg." Ranma grimaced. He hated bugs, and Setsuna's worry about them only intensified his dislike for them. "Your little blast surprised me. Ya could've warned me, y'know."

Setsuna managed a weak chuckle at his mock-glare. "Sorry about that, but I had to act fast. You weren't going to get them off in time the way you were trying to counter them. Still, we missed two of them. That's going to cause a lot of problems."

"I guess there's a story to that, huh?" Ranma shifted where he was sitting next to her.

Setsuna nodded, and drew her legs to her chin. "In my timeline, they appeared a month after the initial attack. We didn't think they were much of a threat, at first, because they were small, and didn't seem to have any combat potential whatsoever…but we were wrong."

"You seem to have screwed up quite a bit in your time," Ranma snorted, though Setsuna was surprised to hear no trace of recrimination or disgust in his tone. He was merely stating a fact, maybe even a bit amused by it.

"We have," she confirmed. "We were all over-confident back then, and when reality hit us – and hit us hard – we overreacted. These parasites turned out to be a greater danger than the other youma, because once they attached themselves to a host, they could not be removed by any means, magic, ki, or otherwise. They would then take possession of the host, and use it to fight the war. They used them as Trojan Horses." The Senshi of time ran the back of her hand across her tired eyes. "By the time we realized it, it was too late. A lot of the people infected by them had been killed, and the war had gone on for too long for us to even want to spend the effort to find a cure, to find a way to remove them. That's how your mother died."

Ranma fell silent. "Mom…Mom was infected by one of these things?" he finally whispered. "And two of them got away?" Setsuna merely nodded.

"You said there was no way to remove them. You somehow blasted them off of me and your friends." Ranma's voice startled Setsuna after a few minutes of silence.

"The others weren't interested in finding a cure…I tried, and I succeeded, but unfortunately, it was too late. By the time I realized what I could do, the war was over. You and your friends had put an end to it."

"How's it work?"

Setsuna blinked, then realized she probably shouldn't have been surprised at the question, knowing who she was talking to. "The Chrono Burst is a variant of my main attack. Basically, it's a blast of condensed temporal flux…a-a sphere of time, if you will. What happens when my usual attack hits is that it will generate a magically accelerated timeflow at the target, which causes it to travel either forward or backward in time."

"Huh?"

The green-haired woman had to laugh at the confused look on Ranma's face, despite the situation. "Basically, it makes it so that either the target hasn't existed yet, or makes it age so fast it dissolves."

Understanding shone in Ranma's eyes, and Setsuna allowed herself a satisfied smirk. "So basically you make time go faster around it until it falls apart."

"Right." Setsuna nodded. "What the Chrono Burst does is create a very localized field that is in phase with the parasites, which will cause them to effectively cease to exist. The hard part," she explained, "was getting the attack in perfect phase with them."

"I see." Ranma frowned for a moment, before shrugging. "Actually, not really, no, but it doesn't really matter if it works." He smiled grimly. "You better keep that spell of yours handy, then, because we're going to find those two critters that got away."

Setsuna laughed again. Ranma seemed to make it easy to laugh, and she found herself infected by his humor and naïve optimism. "Well, I'm certianly glad you think so."

When Ranma didn't laugh with her, Setsuna stared at him, wondering what he was thinking. The pigtailed martial artist finally shrugged and stood. "Look, Setsuna-san, I really don't know what's going to happen…and I can't really know for sure how you must feel, with things changing and not going to plan as they are, but I know one thing. My future self seems to have trusted you with the task of going back and stopping all of this before it gets out of hand, and if he – I – oh, hell, my head hurts just thinking about it!" Ranma groaned in annoyance as the thought of temporal mechanics confused his mind. "Anyway, if my future self trusted you, then I do, too. He trusted you to do this, Setsuna-san, and so do I, and so do your friends, I think. And if so many people think you can do it, then they can't be wrong."

Ranma turned to look at her as Setsuna's jaw hung open. "Just because a few things aren't going to plan doesn't mean we have lost the war. You asked me to help you, and if you've really fought me in the future, you should know one thing: 'Saotome Ranma never looses.'" With a small smile, his battle-aura flared to life around him as he dissipated her time-bubble. "I'll see you tomorrow, and then we'll get started teaching them how to fight."

Ranma started walking down the stairs of the shrine when a sudden and short downpour caused him to change into a she…and Setsuna to collapse into a fit of giggles as Ranma muttered to herself.

"Seriously, every time."

The park's night air was cool on her skin, but she wasn't freezing. In fact, the cool air felt rather soothing, and Setsuna took a deep breath as she stood at the edge of a small pond. After Ranma had left, she had sought refuge here, unable to go back and face her fellow Senshi yet, not so soon after loosing control of herself.

Her enemy from the future's words rang clearly in her mind, and Setsuna stopped that train of thought dead in its tracks. No, not enemy anymore. She had to stop thinking of him as such…Ranma was no longer her enemy, never had been in this time and, if things went to plan, he never would be. Instead, he would be a friend, an ally, something the Senshi – and especially Setsuna – now desperately needed.

A small smile tugged on the corners of her mouth as she recalled his parting words. Despite the fact that he spoke from a naivete he hadn't yet lost, he had been right in his determination. That was something that had carried him this far in his life, and it was something that would carry him much further, if he survived this war. Again Setsuna shook her head. No, there was no way Ranma wouldn't not survive this.

Setsuna knew full well that Nabiki didn't trust her. In fact, she knew that even most of her comrades didn't really trust her, and it pained her to admit that she had had a large hand in that by her own actions in the past. Setsuna couldn't really fault Haruka or Rei for being wary of her warnings; the way she had acted the past two days had been so unlike her previous behavior that her old self probably wouldn't have trusted her, either.

But that had been before she had lived through a year of hell. Before all her hopes and dreams for the future had been viciously shattered and she had watched herself and her friends become self-serving soldiers of fortune who more often than not preferred to take the easy way out just to ensure their own victory, no matter what the cost to others. There had been too much death, too much destruction caused by her own actions and, in some cases, inaction, in her past that a sedate pace such as the kind she had set with earlier threats was no longer an option. No, simply warning the Senshi and then sitting back and letting them deal with the threats would no longer work.

In her timeline, Saotome Ranma had been a fearsome enemy, someone who relentlessly, tirelessly, pursued victory and justice, sometimes with a reckless abandon that sometimes had her wondering if the young man really still cared whether he lived or died. He had taken some ludicrous risks in her time, but somehow, he had always managed to beat the odds time and again. He had somehow managed to match the Senshi's superhuman magic abilities with training and dedication to the martial arts, had somehow managed to outwit Ami's battle plans, outfight Haruka, Rei, Makoto, and Minako in their most powerful Senshi forms at the same time, and then gone toe-to-toe with Usagi and the power of the Silver Crystal.

And, it appeared that this same penchant for coming through in times of crisis had saved the day for the Senshi in this particular battle. Setsuna knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Ranma's aid had been vital during the skirmish with the vanguard youma, and she didn't doubt that without his help, the battle would have had a much different outcome. Despite the fact that the youma had been powerful enough to take on the Senshi, Ranma had shown remarkable ability in taking them out – the same kind of adaptability and tactical genius that had been the bane of her existence in her timeline.

Not to mention the fact that he somehow managed to dispel my Garnet Ball, Setsuna mused. No, Ranma is as dangerous as ever, and underestimating him could be costly. That Ranma somehow had managed to breach and dispel her shield spell was something Setsuna knew he could do – they had duelled multiple times in her timeline, and the one thing she had found out very quickly was that no technique worked on him more than once or twice. By their second fight, Ranma had already managed to pierce through her defensive magic, and by the fifth time they battled, Ranma had found a way to counter the time-dilation effects of her temporal magic.

No, what surprised her was that he had done it now. It had been a clear message – he was on top of his game, and he was keeping her on her toes to be prepared for anything, because they couldn't afford anything less when it came to battle the full-scale invasion. But a year of fear and constant struggle wasn't so easily left behind, and Setsuna found herself left with not a small amount of respect and awe at his abilities. In her timeline, Ranma had learned to counter her Garnet Ball spell out of necessity, because she was his enemy, and she had always known that he worked best in combat. But now he had merely sat around for a quarter hour, talking to her…and he had already figured out what his counterpart in her timeline took a week between fights to do.

She couldn't really help it. Six times, she thought. Six times I've fought him, and every time he so thoroughly defeated me it's a miracle I'm still alive. The Senshi of time suppressed a shudder. While she knew that the Ranma she had just talked to hours ago was nothing like her nemesis from the future, she couldn't help but feel anxious about being anywhere near him. The feeling of fighting him for her life, or watching him kill her friends one by one was still too fresh, too recent in her mind for her to be entirely comfortable around him without her subconscious reacting to any minuscule movement he made and anticipating him to jump at her to continue the battles they had begun.

But there was something about him that also raised her spirits – she wondered if this wasn't part of what had made him such a particularly difficult enemy to make, because there was an inherent naivete, an innate goodness within him that made it appear as though all he ever wanted to do was please those around him and keep his friends and family safe. It made it hard for her to remember that he had been a lethal adversary in her future, on occasion, and she was glad for it, because Ranma hadn't deserved to be treated as such, not when nothing had happened yet.

Then there was also his little speech, and for the second time that day Setsuna fought for the self-control she had established over the course of millennia. The fact that he trusted her, only on the condition of her word, was not something Setsuna had gotten overly used to. People obeyed her, listened to her advice because they knew she could see the future, but very few people actually listened to her because they trusted her unconditionally.

A splash and a ripple in the water from the other side of the pond jolted her out of her reverie. Letting her curiousity get the better of her, Setsuna wandered over, along the pond's edge, until she could see someone sitting on a rock close to the water in the dim moonlight. Another splash announced the rock the person had thrown into the water, and Setsuna blinked in surprise as the clouds parted, letting the light reveal Haruka's face for a second.

Might as well start mending bridges now, Setsuna mused. We can't afford to tear each other to pieces, not if we don't want to be overrun. Silently, she moved next to her fellow Senshi, then sat down. The crunch of pebbles underneath her heels had to have alerted Haruka, but the blonde showed no indication of acknowledging Setsuna's presence.

They remained that way, in silence, for a few long minutes, and Setsuna just stared out at the water, trying to find the words she needed to say. It was hard, especially considering that Haruka had been one of the people whom Setsuna blamed most for the path she had taken in her timeline. Out of all the Senshi, Haruka and Rei had been the most likely to overreact and resort to drastic measures to end a fight, which had ultimately led to their own demise. Much as with Ranma, thinking of her friends as the people they had been before the invasion was difficult at best.

"I'm sorry," Setsuna finally said.

"For calling me names, or for keeping things from us?" The blonde finally replied after a long pause.

Setsuna sighed. "I'm not sorry for what I said, but I owe you an apology for how I said it. I…the matter was highly urgent, and no one was giving it any serious thought when I told you that you weren't ready. It was the only way I believed at the time would make you listen."

"Good enough, I guess." Haruka sighed and stared down at the hands clasped in her lap. "What happened, Setsuna? We've never seen you so…so frantic."

"I've…seen the future, and it isn't pretty. I've told you that before. I've seen how much destruction will be caused if we're not ready for it, and I've seen you, every single one of you, die, because we didn't prepare in time, because we thought of this threat like any other." Setsuna placed a hand on her fellow Senshi's shoulder. "But this battle must've shown you, this enemy isn't like anything we've faced before. This enemy doesn't care for collecting heart crystals, it can't be fought the way we've fought Galaxia, or Metallia."

Haruka snorted. "I see why you wanted us to be ready, those were pretty nasty youma, but I still think-"

"No, Haruka. Don't even start with that." Setsuna's grip tightened. "Against one of them, you would have won, eventually. But there wasn't one, Haruka. Given the time it would have taken Ami to figure out how to defeat them, all four of them would have ripped us apart. And even if there had been only one, if Ranma hadn't come to help us, Rei would be dead."

"Rei…"

"You weren't there in time to see it," Setsuna explained, "but he saved her life."

"She ended up sliced open almost from throat to navel," Haruka noted skeptically.

The Senshi of time nodded. "And if he hadn't interfered, she would have been dead. As it is, given a day, she'll be fully recovered."

Haruka shuddered, something Setsuna could see even in the dim light…and the Senshi of time had the distinct feeling that it had nothing to do with the chilly night air. "Well, what do you want us to do?"

"Train. Prepare. Take this threat – and Ranma's advice seriously," Setsuna told her grimly.

"What's so special about that kid, anyway? Why are you so hell-bent on having him help us?"

"Why are you so opposed to him helping us?" Setsuna countered.

"Because this is our job!" Haruka exploded suddenly. "This is our duty, our responsibility. We're supposed to be guarding this planet, and we're not supposed to be needing any help, we're not supposed to be risking someone else's lives to do our jobs!"

"Ranma feels the same. 'It's a martial artist's duty to protect those who cannot protect themselves,' I think he would say," Setsuna explained. "I have seen the extent of what he can do, and he still amazes me. He can easily keep up with any of us, and more than likely is skilled and powerful enough to outfight any three or four of us at any given time."

Haruka grunted noncommittally, unsure of how to reply. Then she asked, "How do you know so much about him? I mean, sure, he's supposed to be some kind of super-martial artist, and Makoto couldn't stop talking about it for a while, but seriously, he can't be able to punch through concrete and create energy blasts out of thin air."

"Just like there can't be a group of magical girls who defend Earth against extradimensional demons and minions on a regular basis?" Setsuna paused for a moment to let that statement sink in. "Ranma is an example of what 'mere humans' can achieve when they truly try and work at it. Just because Ami and her computer can't figure out how he's generating all that power doesn't mean it isn't there."

"You really think the kid's gonna make a difference? I mean, we know what we're up against now, and we can act accordingly. We won't be caught off-guard again."

Setsuna shook her head. "No, Haruka. What we've seen is only the tip of the iceberg. What is going to follow is going to be much, much worse, and we need all the help we can get to deal with it. Ranma can…bring in new ideas, a new perspective, something we really need right now."

"And you're fine with it if he dies? It'll be your fault for dragging him into this, the question is whether you can live with it, Setsuna."

The green-haired woman remained silent at that for a few long minutes. "I know," she finally said. "But that's a risk I'm willing to take. More importantly," she added, "it's a risk I know Ranma is willing to take without a moment's hesitation."