Laughter, high and clear, rang through the skies of an unadministered world near Earth. Soft grass rustled in a sunny meadow, where a picnic basket sat under an old tree, filled to the brim with treats. High above it, above even the fluffy clouds that drifted across the sky like lazy barges on a gentle stream, a bright orange Frisbee cast a fleeting shadow on the white banks below as it hurtled through the air on a parabolic arc.

Its flight was abruptly broken as a pink comet soared underneath it. Flipping over to briefly face upwards as she passed beneath her target, Nanoha grabbed it as it came within reach. She followed the motion through into an upwards corkscrew, doing a passable imitation of a dolphin jumping out of the water as she allowed herself to fall backwards and plummet down again from the apex of her improvised loop-the-loop.

"Woo hoo!" she cried gleefully, and her arm whipped out as she levelled out, her downward momentum flowing into horizontal as she hurled the Frisbee out again, backed both by the force of her throw and the impressive speed she was moving at.

"Not bad," came a shout from nearby. Fate grinned, flipped over and blurred into motion, a yellow streak following the errant toy as it began to fall towards the clouds. "But not fast enough!" Nanoha grinned as she curved around to follow her friend, keeping a little way back so that she would be able to follow Fate's next shot in whichever direction she chose to send it.

The blonde never got the chance, though. As she neared the spinning disk, the air beside it rippled, wavering as an illusion fell away to reveal a huge tigress, her striped fur a mix of grey and black. Bounding forward from the position she had been hovering in, she lunged at the toy with a whooping cry.

'Super-special Vesta sneak attack! Haa!'

Scything jaws caught the Frisbee before Fate's fingers could close on it, and a toss of the cat-familiar's head sent it spinning downwards into the clouds. Fate pulled up sharply, glaring at Vesta in indignant surprise, and shot down after it as Nanoha dived past her in pursuit.

Nanoha was laughing as she plunged into the cloud, her Barrier Jacket keeping the cold and moisture away from her. This had been a good idea, coming out to play like this. Linith had insisted that they take some time off, firmly ordering Fate to do something to relax before she worked herself into the ground from stress and exhaustion. She hadn't liked it, but when Nanoha had suggested a way of combining aerial combat training with fun, she had agreed readily enough. The fact that it allowed Vesta to practice the illusion magic that she seemed to have a natural affinity for was just the icing on the cake. Arf had declined to come along with them, stating the need for someone to keep watch from the penthouse in case of any Jewel Seed activations.

Swooping down on a gentle arc to catch the tumbling disk, she examined it with a pout on her face. Vesta's jaws had done a number on the soft plastic, and the aerodynamic curves of the thing were mangled beyond repair. Nanoha sighed in exasperation as Fate dropped down to hover beside her, passing the dead Frisbee over to her friend with a mournful shake of her head.

"I think that means the game is over," she commented, looking up as Vesta emerged from the bottom of the clouds. Unlike the girls, she had no Barrier Jacket protecting her, and was therefore sodden and shivering slightly. It didn't seem to have put her off too much, though, and her tail was lashing excitedly as she flew down towards them, growling happily.

'I got it, I got it!' she crowed triumphantly. 'Throw it again, I want to practice pouncing some more! Pretty please?' The sight of a tigress who stood level with Nanoha's chest looking at her imploringly was a rather disconcerting one, and Nanoha had to cover her mouth with a hand to hold in a giggle at the strange picture it made for.

"Sorry, Vesta," she said, holding up the mangled Frisbee by way of evidence. "It's too damaged to fly now." She giggled again at the crestfallen look on her familiar's face. "Don't look like that, silly. I'll get you a new one." Throwing her arms around Vesta's neck in a hug, she enjoyed the silky feel of fur against her cheek, luxuriating in the stress-free environment and the way that she now had a cuddly familiar she could hug whenever she wanted.

The soft susurrus of rain broke her from her reverie and she looked up, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the bad weather that sounded like it was coming their way. Their game had wound up taking them a fair distance from the meadow where their picnic basket waited, into the path of an oncoming shower. As she saw the direction the front was coming from, though, she gasped.

"Oh…"

The murmur slipped out of her without conscious direction. Before her, arcing across the sky like a bridge to some nameless heaven, hung a glittering rainbow that shimmered in the rainfall that had formed it as the light shone through the clouds.

"It's beautiful," she breathed, glancing at Fate. The other girl seemed similarly impressed, deep red eyes taking in the sight with a sense of awed wonder, as if she'd never seen a rainbow before. And… actually, Nanoha realised with a sick feeling, perhaps she hadn't. She'd grown up on the Garden, after all, where there were no skies or rain. Her brief forays off it may not have ever put her in a position to notice one before. It was definitely likely she'd never seen one as vibrant and vivid as this, the colours splashed through the air like the paints of a cosmic god, streaked through the atmosphere in broad, bold stripes that faded to soft pastels at the edges.

A smile touched Nanoha's lips as she turned more fully to her friend. "You know," she said slyly. "I've heard stories that if you can fly through a rainbow, you get granted a single wish for anything you want." Her eyes sparkled excitedly. "Let's try it!"

Fate's answering smile was puzzled, a slight frown creasing her face as she quirked an eyebrow. "Um… are you sure?" she questioned hesitantly, but Nanoha's enthusiasm was not to be denied.

"Vesta!" she ordered. "Come on! Jump in! Oh, uh… Raising Heart?"

[Alright, my master,] chimed the Device, and Nanoha's jacket shifted, flowing backwards from the nape of her neck as material folded down into a hood. It had taken a long time to program the addition into her Barrier Jacket, but she felt the result was well worth the time and effort.

Letting out a happy meow, Vesta shone white for a second, her silhouette shrinking and proportions changing as she returned to her kitten form. Nanoha felt the tug on her magic lessen proportionally, this smaller form taking far less magic to maintain. Once again the size that they had met at, Vesta mewled unhappily at the discovery that while she had shrunk, the amount of water in her coat had not. As a result, where she had been damp, she was now sodden.

'I'm all wet!' she complained, jumping onto Nanoha's arm and shaking herself off to dry out somewhat before proceeding. Running along her master's arm and pausing on her shoulder for a second to nuzzle her cheek, she hopped into the white cocoon of the hood. Wriggling around to find a position from which she could peer forward over Nanoha's shoulder or turn around to survey what was behind them with equal ease, she mewled again.

'Okay, master! Let's go!'

Nanoha was off like a shot, racing across the sky towards her goal. The clouds blurred past as she flew, and she closed her eyes, distantly hearing Fate calling her from behind as she quickly made up Nanoha's headstart. She wasn't focusing on that, though. Her attention was fixed on the glory of the wind whistling around her, the landscape far below that looked like a finely painted model and the beautiful varicoloured archway that she was shooting towards. Wreathed in sakura-blossom light, ignoring the rain as she plunged into it, she flew.

And flew.

And flew, the exhilaration draining as the beauty of the rainbow remained stubbornly distant, beyond her grasp. The further and faster she pushed herself, the more it receded away from her, tantalising and gorgeous, a dream-like image that she couldn't catch.

'Master?' Vesta wriggled, poking her head up over Nanoha's shoulder. 'What's wrong, why are we slowing down?'

Panting hard, Nanoha shook her head wordlessly, staring forward through eyes that were beginning to grow wet with tears from the wind whipping past and the frustration. Fate dropped down beside her, expression sympathetic.

"I tried to tell you," she said quietly. "But you didn't seem to hear. It's just an illusion. Beautiful to look at, but you can't ever reach it, or touch it."

An uncomfortable silence fell, as both girls realised the double meaning in the words and glanced at one another, afraid to voice it. Hovering in the sky, the soft rain pattering down around them, they looked at each other and their unreachable goal, neither wanting to be the first to put words to the horrible question.

Then Fate shook her head fiercely. "No," she declared, almost angrily. "No, it's not the same. Not this time. Some goals you can reach, some dreams you can achieve." She grabbed Nanoha's hands, squeezing them tightly and holding her gaze. "Maybe the big things, like everything ever being perfect or… or other things like that, maybe you can't ever quite get to them. But this… this is something we can do. Something we will do."

Buoyed by the determined words, Nanoha nodded, hands trembling where Fate gripped them. For a moment, they floated there in the rain, silhouetted by the rainbow and the sunlight through the clouds, joined by shared purpose.

The moment was broken by Vesta deciding that she was quite cold and wet enough as it was, and that she was not going to stand for getting any colder or wetter. Pawing the folds of the hood up over her body, she twisted up to the nearest source of warmth available, curling around Nanoha's neck like a living fur boa and dragging the hood with her as a blanket-like form of cover. Since her fur was still beaded with moisture from her trip through the clouds, this drew a shriek of protest from the girl and thoroughly shattered the awkward moment.

"Vesta! Aaaah, you're freezing! S-stop that! Get off!" She grabbed at the kitten, who stubbornly wriggled away from the clutching hands, further into the warmth and safety of Nanoha's jacket.

"Vestaaaa! Oh, I am learning a spell just for spraying water in your face if you don't s- ahh! That's cold!" Grabbing furiously at the fast-moving mass under her outer coat, Nanoha finally hauled the grey and black-striped kitten out by the scruff of the neck, glaring at her. Insofar as she was able to, Vesta looked slightly sheepish.

'Um… sorry?'

"Perhaps," interjected Fate, fighting back a smirk of amusement, "we should get down to ground level. And out of the rain." She half-shrugged, with a wry smile. "I don't think we can keep playing Frisbee anymore."



It only took the girls ten minutes or so to leave the raincloud behind and get back to their picnic spot. The warm meadow was still sunny, and Vesta returned to her larger size as she leapt from Nanoha's shoulder to the ground, shaking herself off huffily and padding around to find the warmest spot to dry off in. Eventually deciding on a particularly bright patch just beyond the shadow cast by the wide, leafy boughs of the old oak above them, she flopped down bonelessly and began to emit a low, rumbling purr.

"Arf does that," Fate noted. "When she lies down and it's like she turns into a fluffy sack of fur. It makes her a good pillow. She can't purr properly, though. I think that's a thing that only cats can do." She cracked the lid of the picnic basket open, assessing what was inside. "Wow, Linith really went all out. We have a feast here." Her questing fingers found paper as she dug between a carefully wrapped bread roll and some fruit, and she pulled the note out.

"Fate-chan and Nanoha-chan," she read. "It's good to know you're relaxing and taking some time off. I hope you like the dinner I packed for you, I made sure to include Fate's favourites and some things I think Nanoha will like. There are some treats for Vesta and Arf as well."

'I get treats?' Vesta's head perked up, ears fluttering with interest. 'Is there any of that yummy cat-food that comes in tins? Because that's really yummy, way yummier than human food – not that I'm saying human food isn't yummy, but cat food is proper food, so it's even better! And we've almost run out of it.' She nudged Nanoha, who had sat down beside her. 'You should try some, you know. It's really tasty. And healthy, too! It has everything you need to give you good oral hygiene. It says so.'

"Don't listen to her on that score," warned Fate, "Her sense of taste is different to yours. And from experience, it doesn't work like that with dog food, so I don't see why cat food would be any different." She wrinkled her nose in disgust, remembering her own discovery of the fact, and continued digging parcels of food out of the woven basket. Pulling out a dark green blanket, she tossed it at Nanoha with a nod towards the ground next to Vesta's lounging form. "Spread that out, would you? That way we won't get grass all over us."

Nanoha nodded, shaking out the blanket and laying it down, then slumping down herself to lie on her back, hands behind her head, staring up at the blue sky and white clouds, with occasional glints of sunshine playing through the leaves to project a dappled pattern of light and shadow on her face. She sighed happily as Fate sank onto the blanket beside her and began setting out the different food containers.

"This is nice," she smiled, eyes closing most of the way as she basked in the sun. "It's a pity Arf couldn't come. I hope she's not lonely back at the penthouse all by herself."



"Hmm hmm hmmm… ramen ramen hmm… guarding the hmm… hmm hmm hmm hmm hmmm…"

A world away, soft humming echoed through the penthouse kitchen as the sole occupant waited for the kettle to boil. Adding a skip to her step as it pinged, she poured the boiling water into the cup of instant ramen waiting on the side and happily danced through into the main room with it, idly weaving another passive detection spell as she did so. Satisfied that nothing was out of the ordinary, she set her prize down by the window where she could look out at the city, and dug in gleefully.



"I'm sure she'll be fine," Fate assured her. "Besides, we can cover some of her patrols for her when we get back, as a reward."

"Yeah, okay." Nanoha nodded, her sense of fairness satisfied by the ruling. "That sounds good. So, Vesta!" She nudged the gently purring lump of grey and black beside her, who had mostly dried off in the sun by now. "How did you like flying so high?"

The purring didn't cease for a second. 'It was fun, I guess.' Vesta replied lazily. 'And the Disk-Thing-I-Can't-Remember-The-Name-Of was fun, too. Though it would be better if it was another shape. Like a bird, maybe. Especially since you can eat birds. Oh, oh, or if it was glowy!'

Fate giggled, rolling over and selecting a roll to munch on. "We'll see what we can do. What about your combat skills? How is your practice going?" Plucking a crunchy, biscuit-like snack from the hamper, she tossed towards the tigress, who caught it with a sideways snap of her jaws.

'Mmm,' she growled appreciatively. 'Tasty. And yeah, my fighting lessons have been going well. I can cover myself, and a little bit of the space around me. And Arf-senpai says that I'm a natural at close combat, so I can protect master while she shoots things.' She yawned hugely, sharp teeth glinting in the light as four-inch fangs meshed smoothly back together. 'Are we sure we'll have to fight again, though? Do we really need the Jewel Seeds?'

"Of course we do!" exclaimed Nanoha, looking up from her investigation of a plate of what appeared to be some sort of blue-ish lettuce. "We have to get them to save Alicia-chan!"

'No, I mean… we need them for power, right?' Vesta stretched out a paw and hooked a bowl of meatballs towards her, snaffling a few up as she waited for Fate's nod. 'But… there's mana all around us. At least, I think there is, right? Lots more when there's a battle, cause it leaks out from spells, but there's always a little bit. So why don't we just sort of collect that, instead?'

Fate shifted, pulling herself further into a sitting position to get away from a sunbeam in her eyes. Thoughtfully pouring herself a glass of a sparkling red cordial, and passing another to Nanoha, she nodded slowly. "It's… true that you do get ambient mana around," she affirmed, slipping into the measured voice she adopted when repeating what she had been taught, "more of it on some worlds, less of it on others. Type-3 worlds tend to have the most, Mother says, which is why you get animals that use magic on them, using some of what's in the air. But even there, the difference in the amounts we're talking about…" she paused, considering. "It would be like… if magic were water, even the worlds with a lot of magic are like those clouds we went through, yes? Lots of water, but really spread out and hard to collect."

Vesta nodded, and Nanoha followed suit, interested in where the topic was going. Brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes and pointing Nanoha towards a bowl of cheese wedges, Fate continued. "Well, using the same sort of magic-as-water thing? A Linker Core is like… a whole swimming pool, or maybe even a big lake for people like us, all packed down tight into our body. Much more concentrated." She frowned slightly, as if reading aloud from a textbook. "It's why it's really hard to do magic on someone's insides, like forcing them to go to sleep, or reading their thoughts, or… or creating a shooting spell inside them, say." Nanoha shuddered at that, and Fate ducked her head apologetically. "Um… sorry. But yes, you can't really do that sort of thing, because the person's own magic interferes with yours. You can only do it if you have special spells for it – I can't remember any examples, but apparently a few Belkan lineages still have them – or if they're magically empty like you were after the quake… it can be a problem for medics, even, and I think they usually put magical Limiters on people who are going to undergo surgery, so that their magic doesn't make something go wrong with the healing spells."

She took another sip of her cordial, enjoying the taste and gathering her thoughts for a second. "So… yes. Background mana is like clouds. Linker Cores are like ponds, or swimming pools, or lakes. And then you have Jewel Seeds." She held out her hand, an image of one of the innocent-looking blue gemstones hovering above it. "And… Mother showed me the numbers, but I'm not sure I fully got the scale. They were really big numbers. It's… it's like Jewel Seeds are whole oceans packed down into tiny jewels. Trying to get that much water from clouds would take years – decades, even, and even if you could do it, you'd have no way of storing it. Mana cartridges can pack mana down about as well as a Linker Core, but to get as much magic as a dozen Jewel Seeds… you'd need a battery the size of the Garden of Time. Bigger, even. And there are all sorts of complicated things that make it even harder. Basically, we need the Jewel Seeds, because they're the only things that have enough energy in them for the spell to work. Without them, Alicia doesn't stand a chance."

A quiet, reflective silence fell. Fate fiddled with a curled vegetable that sort of looked a bit like a brown, hard-crusted cucumber, cracking it open to reveal a row of large white beans inside. "So," she said firmly, "we'll have to make sure that the TSAB don't manage to get any more of the Jewel Seeds, because every last one that we can get will be valuable. Okay?" Two intent nods met her, and she offered Nanoha a couple of the beans. "Right then. Now, Linith said we were meant to be relaxing, so talk about something happier." She tilted her head curiously. "Like your world. What's it like?"

Nanoha blinked, momentarily thrown. "Um… what part of it?" she asked, unsure of where to start describing an entire planet. Fate's deep red gaze fixed on her, attentive and interested.

"How about your school?" she suggested. "I saw a little bit of it, but not much. And I never really went anywhere like that, in my memories or Alicia's. You friends seemed nice, though. What's it like, learning there?"

Half-smiling wistfully at the reminder of her friends, Nanoha took a deep breath. "Well," she began, "um… Arisa, Suzuka and I met a long time ago, when we had a bit of a disagreement…"



"… so I got dragged in to see the principal, of course, but they'd been leaving me out of stuff like that since I started aiming for the TSAB, so I could honestly say that I didn't know anything, and he had to let me off – though boy, was he unhappy about it! I went down to see what was going on, but they'd already cleared the ramps away by then, and a crowd was starting to gather cause of, you know, the whole groundcar-on-the-roof thing, so I decided to get out of there before any more teachers showed up…"

Flat on her back on a padded bench, Heidi let Mei's chatter wash over her, breathing deeply and pumping the heavy barbell up and down, ignoring the sweat trickling across her forehead. Hefting the thing one last time, she hooked it onto the rack above her and sat up, wincing at the soreness in her arms and shoulders.

"Do you ever stop talking?" she asked, genuinely curious. Mei shot her a grin from where she was jogging on a moving track, short green hair bouncing with every step.

"Nope!" she said cheerfully. Despite her denial, Heidi could see that she was breathing fairly heavily – unsurprising, as she'd been jogging for more than an hour. The younger girl had taken her shirt off some twenty minutes ago, and was now only wearing a sports bra and shorts as she ran. Frowning, Heidi wrenched her eyes away, trying to convince herself that she hadn't been staring. Searching for another topic to focus her attention on, she slid round on the bench and grabbed a couple of dumbbells to work with as she glanced around.

Her gaze lit upon the third member of their little team, and a wry smile curled her lips in amusement. "Well," she murmured. "Someone's having a good time, at least."

Mei followed her gaze and stifled a giggle. Across the gym, their illustrious leader was doing pullups on the bars, arms curling as he raised his body up and down. He had also discarded his shirt at some point, and seemed oblivious to the fact that Rizu had stopped doing situps and was looking at him with rather wide eyes. The faint blush on her cheeks seemed to indicate that she liked what she saw.

Throwing Mei a conspiratorial smirk, Heidi very deliberately held out one of her dumbbells and dropped it. The thud sounded clearly over the quiet background music that was playing from the speakers in one corner, and all heads turned to her, two of them startled.

"Sorry," she apologised nonchalantly. "I guess I slipped." Tiida nodded tiredly and went back to his workout, but Rizu's eyes flicked up to Heidi's. The blonde raised an amused eyebrow and nodded at Tiida, as Mei gave her sister a grin and a thumbs up.

The faint blush quickly deepening to a mortified crimson at having been caught staring, Rizu hastily returned to doing situps. Heidi was fairly sure that she caught a slight, shy smile on her teammate's face, though, and nodded to herself in satisfaction. Breaking the quiet girl out of her shell had been a side project of hers since they'd first met. It was nice to see that it seemed to finally be working.

Tiida pushed them hard for another couple of hours. The arrival of the elite unit onboard seemed to have spurred him into setting a more aggressive schedule for improvement, though Heidi had to admit that it felt like it was working. They wouldn't get a chance to test that theory for a while, of course, but she was intending to do her best to pay the Testarossa girl back in spades for that point-blank blast on the rooftop. Finally finishing her last set, she put the weights back on their stands and rose to her feet as Tiida turned the music off.

"Alright," he said, "let's hit the showers, then you can have some downtime."

The team set the ship's gym back to the pristine condition they had found it in, ready for anyone else who wanted to use it, and then proceeded towards the showers. A thought striking her, Heidi nudged Mei, who was dragging her feet slightly after several hours of non-stop running.

"Hey," she queried, "how did you even get accepted by the TSAB with that kind of disciplinary record? Groundcars on the school roof? Not to mention that food fight you were talking about."

"O-oh, no," Rizu cut in, looking up. "T-trust me, Heidi. She's improved a lot over the last two years. Mama was getting very worried about how she was turning out, and, y-you know, had her going to psychologists and things, but she turned herself around a-all on her own, about when I joined the TSAB. She said she d-didn't want to leave me all alone, and that she wanted to m-make a difference l-like… um…" her head dropped and she stared at her feet, glancing worriedly at Mei out of the corner of her eye. Mei didn't seem upset, though, and shrugged philosophically.

"Like my dad," she finished, and there was a slight tinge of pain in her nonchalant tone. "He was in the Navy, and… well… he was with the Estia, back in 'fifty four." She stared off into the distance for a few seconds contemplatively. "I was four."

Tiida regarded her gravely. "I'm sorry," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder.

She shrugged. "Eh, I didn't really know him very well. Can't remember much about him, either. But yeah, when Rizu joined the Bureau, it was kind of a shock to the system, you know? Sort of… either I could keep screwing around and pulling pranks, or actually make something of myself. So… I started putting some effort in. Just about scraped through, though I think it was a close thing once or twice. Mum was really worried about me, so that helped. I didn't want to disappoint her."

Going with the change in topic, Heidi rolled her eyes. "Oh, I know all about being a problem for your parents. I was involved in Representativist groups, which would have been a real problem for my mother if it had got out. It's the reason she let me go offworld for this, on the exchange programme and then… well, it's much easier for her if she has my older sister being nice and conformist and okay with the illegitimate oligarchy of entrenched interests in the…" Heidi trailed off at the familiar looks of confusion she was getting, and shrugged dismissively. "Oh, internal political things. There's a reason the Powers-That-Be want us to stay an Aligned World, rather than make the jump to Administered. If we were Administered, they'd have to hold proper elections, and… well, Mother is one of those Powers-That-Be. I got so yelled at when she had to bail me when I was 11 for being at an illegal rally, and she had real problems keeping that off the books."

Tiida sighed dramatically, flashing a dry smile. "So my training squad wound up with one juvenile delinquent, one pre-pubescent political activist, and one normal girl. You know, sometimes I wonder who picks these combinations out, and what I've ever done to annoy them."

Rizu giggled, and Heidi let slip a chuckle. Mei patted him on the arm in faux sympathy. "Hey, look at is this way," she offered, "if you can make a working team out of us, you can make one out of anybody."

"Well, I suppose that's true… though…"

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a thundering crash from one of the rooms they were passing that made all four of them jump. Peering around the door, their eyes went wide and Mei gave a low, impressed whistle.

Breathing deeply and clad in a stripped-down training jacket, her heavily muscled arms flexing with the weight, Quint Nakajima hefted a kettlebell that must have weighed at least at least half as much as she did up over her head in a single fluid movement. Her metal-clad hands shifted grip fluidly on the cannonball's handle as she brought it back down again. Despite her lowering it as gently as possible, it still gave a ringing crash as it hit the floor again. Her back to the door, she didn't appear to notice the backup squad, or give any sign she was aware of their presence.

"Okay," whispered Mei in a small voice as they backed away from the heavy weights room and continued towards the showers, "now I see why they're an elite team. Remind me not to annoy her."

"I don't think even you'll need reminding on that score," replied Heidi, somewhat shaken by the sight. She'd known the three elite mages were powerful, but hadn't realised just what that meant in terms of raw force. Now with some idea of what they were capable of, she was almost afraid to see them in actual combat.



Steam billowed in the shower stalls as hot water battered down, soothing sore muscles and drumming a blissful rhythm over the skin of the exhausted girls. Heidi was almost completely gone, occasionally moaning happily as she worked the shampoo into her hair and massaged her aching head. Mei, however, was a little more talkative.

"Sooo…" she grinned, glancing in the direction of Rizu's stall as if she could see through the partition between them. "Tiida's kind of a hunk, huh?"

A wordless squeak was her only answer, and her grin grew larger. "I mean, you could totally check out his abs as he was doing those pull-ups. Heck, even I have to admit he's a bit of a hottie. What do you think, sis?"

"I… um… Lanster-san looks… um… n-nice, I think?"

Mischief sparkled in blue eyes, one darker than the other. "So…" she teased, dragging the word out, "when are you going ask him out?"

There was a squeak and a clatter from the neighbouring stall, and a bar of soap bounced under the partition, coming to rest against Mei's feet. Giggling, she kicked it back, washing the last of the shampoo out of her hair and starting to rinse herself off.

"Okay, okay," she apologised, finishing up and nudging the door of the shower door open with her foot. Screwing her eyes shut to avoid getting water in them, she groped around for a towel for a few seconds before her questing fingers found the soft material. Drying herself off, she looked up as a blushing Rizu exited her own shower stall, gaze fixed on her feet.

"I'll stop teasing, if you really want me to," she continued, and reached over to give her sister a light punch to the shoulder as she passed a second towel over. "But seriously, girl, you gotta start being more assertive! If you like him, try it out and see if it goes somewhere! What's the worst that could happen?"

"Well," cut in a new voice, "actually quite a lot."

Both girls jumped, and the door to Heidi's stall banged open as she leaned out quickly. Leaning against the door, the woman they had seen weightlifting only a quarter of an hour previously grinned at them humourlessly. Somehow, she had managed to get all the way into the room without any of them noticing her. Out of the corner of her eye, Mei noticed Heidi shiver slightly, and the ash-blonde retreated back into her shower cubicle.

"It rarely ends in prettiness, getting romantically attached to someone in your direct command chain," Quint advised, pushing herself off the wall and strolling over. Mei tried not to stare, and failed miserably. The woman was built like a tank, corded muscles clearly evident under the blocky lines of her body. While she retained a certain sleekness to her frame that the veritable mountain that was her team leader lacked, she still looked as though she had been carved out of solid metal. Mei was put in mind of the larger kinds of big cat she'd seen on Type-1 worlds. Not the sleek, agile ones that flowed like water as they stalked their prey; but the ones that out-massed humans by a factor of three and moved with the casual, unstoppable force of a natural disaster.

Tapping something on the back of her right gauntlet, Quint's training jacket shimmered and disappeared, leaving her in a simple shirt and shorts. Slipping the gauntlets off and stowing them in one of the lockers, she began to strip, rolling her head as she did so to the accompaniment of a series of cracking noises that made Rizu wince.

"Now, that said," she carried on, glancing at the healer, "it's not a completely bad idea. You just have to wait a little while until this mission blows over and you get assigned to a different team. Once he's not one of your direct superiors, the whole chain-of-command thing is less of a problem. And for what it's worth, I'll wish you good luck with it. He seems like an okay sort, though you may need to clobber him a couple of times before he gets the message that you like him."

She winked, grinning. "I know I had to bash it into Genya's skull that I had a thing for him, oblivious as he was. Seems to be a common theme in guys that age. Though…" she chuckled, "I suppose the girls aren't much better, either. Might just be the idiocy of youth, I guess."

Mei found herself warming to this woman. Despite her formidable appearance, she seemed friendly enough, and if she was cracking jokes, she couldn't be all bad. Besides, she was supporting Mei's personal project, which was always a plus.

"So you agree that they should get together?" she asked. Quint shook her head, holding her hands up in denial.

"Whoa there, hold it. I'm fine on giving advice and warnings, but I'm not getting involved in this personally. That's more Megane's thing, and then only when she likes the people involved." She paused, thoughtfully. "Yeah, uh… I should probably apologise for her being a bit… caustic. She's lovely to her friends, but she tends to turn on the 'ice-queen Belkan-era noble' thing around strangers. Don't worry about it, it's nothing personal. The Admiral just pushed a few of her buttons, that's all." She turned to Rizu, who appeared to be trying to hide behind her towel. "You, kid? I'd wait until all of this Jewel Seed mayhem is over, and then maybe sit your beau down for a talk, or something. And be careful about regulations if you both decide to go ahead with it. Like I said, good luck if you do. I've seen it work before."

"… Belkan noble?" Heidi slid out of her stall, catching the towel that Mei tossed to her and wrapping it round herself. "I didn't realise Investigator Alpine was from a noble line."

Quint shrugged. "Yeah, it's not something that she brags about. The lands are just some crummy little wasteland on a Type-5 that take more money to maintain than she gets from them, and the title doesn't really mean much anymore. The summoning is about the only halfway decent thing she got from it. I get the impression she's glad to be away from the place." Chucking her bra into the locker, she swept a wave of lavender hair that had fallen forward back over her shoulder and out of her face.

"I suppose that would explain a few things…" Heidi mused as Quint stood. The older woman shrugged again.

"Yeah, well. Don't bug her about it, it annoys her. Just keep it in mind when she turns on the haughtiness. And be careful." She fixed them all with a serious look. "Not just in the budding romance, either. Keep your mind on the job until this is over and done with. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting in half an hour, so I need to get showered and changed." With a last parting nod, she slid into one of the stalls and closed the door behind her. The water started up a few seconds later, along with the sound of cheerful, if slightly off-key, whistling.



"But master! I'm tired! And it's way too bulky!"

Vesta was, to her credit, vaguely aware that whining about the situation she found herself in was not likely to change her human's mind. Nevertheless, she was not one to back down in the face of fierce opposition or impossible odds, and gave it as good an attempt as she was able to.

Unfortunately, even adopting the pleading expression that instinct told her had always been successful in the past did not appear to have any significant impact on the brown-haired girl. Maybe it was because she was in her human form? She gave brief thought to the possibility of changing back, but was cut off by Nanoha's eyes narrowing.

"Don't you dare change while you're wearing that, Vesta," she ordered. "You're huge in your cat form! You'll rip it to shreds!"

'It' was the latest in a long sequence of Jackets that her esteemed master had seen fit to try out on her. Which technically meant that it probably wouldn't rip if she changed form, but pointing that out wasn't likely to help. Vesta sighed gustily. While her master was undoubtedly the most wonderful and brilliant human ever to walk the earth, she was forced to admit that when it came to clothing and style, she was…

"Oh, oh! I know! Hang on, let me look up how to make scarves. I know I saw them in here somewhere…"

… lacking.

"Um. Master?" she queried, desperate to avoid yet another scaled-up variant of her master's school uniform. "Aren't there… other sources you could be using?"

"Mmm?" Nanoha was preoccupied with searching through the template pack on Raising Heart, and didn't really respond. Vesta gulped, imagining a loosely knit scarf settling around her shoulders in eye-searing pink, and went for broke.

"Like… on the internet! Those online book-thingies that stores do! And… and I bet that there are, like, some that load of pictures of clothes... like, lots of them, and descriptions of them, and… you could use those for inspiration!" She held her breath, hoping against hope, as Nanoha tilted her head in thought.

"… yeah, okay then!" the girl decided, and her familiar breathed a silent sigh of profound relief. "So, where can we find them? Hmm… Raising Heart? Can you search for something like that?"

[Alright, my master. Connecting to the internet and running a search.] A holographic window bloomed into visibility above the red gem, and flickered briefly as the Intelligent Device searched for something that matched its master's wishes. After a few seconds, the display stabilised into a plain white background beset by pictures.

"Ahhh!" Nanoha leaned forward to examine them, and Vesta craned around her to see as well. While still not quite the height of elegance, she decided, they were at least better than the fashion choices of a nine-year old.

"Hey, you would look good in that one!" she pointed out, motioning to a pale yellow sundress. Nanoha threw her a suspicious look. "No, really!" Vesta protested. "You would!"

"Hmm," Nanoha responded sceptically, a smile playing about her lips. "I think you just want to copy it from me when you're in your little-girl form."

"Well… yes, I'd look good in it too," Vesta admitted. "Which is why you should use it! We could match!" She turned hopeful eyes on her master, who giggled.

"Maybe later, Vesta-chan. For now, we're trying to find clothes for your adult form."

The cat-familiar sighed gustily. "Can we at least not have any more… anything else like what Arf-senpai wears?" Nanoha blushed faintly at the reminder. Some of the basic templates that had been on Raising Heart were modelled off Fate and Arf's favoured clothing, which… while fine on them, was a little bit less than Nanoha herself was used to wearing. Those had gone back into storage very quickly after being tried on. And were being kept there.

"Y-yes, of course," she mumbled. "Um… Raising Heart? Can you look for designs which are like my Barrier Jacket?"

The Device chimed, and the pictures on the screen reloaded, replacing the lighter outfits with more durable-looking attire. Vesta watched her master as she scrolled through the new selection, occasionally asking Raising Heart to convert the image of one of the hopefuls into a 3D hologram to get a better a look at it. The girl was smiling faintly, her face animated as she worked. She threw the occasional comment at Vesta, which she made the appropriate 'mmm' noises to, but seemed otherwise focused on finding her something to wear. She was so determined that it be perfect, wonderful.

Following a sudden urge, Vesta stood up abruptly, moving over to Nanoha.

"Vesta-chan? What is it?"

She didn't answer, instead picking Nanoha bodily up out of the chair she sat in and taking it for herself. Plonking her master down on her lap, she undid the ribbons holding the girl's hair in the twin-ponytail style she favoured, and began combing it with her fingers, keeping Nanoha from moving away with a hand on her shoulder.

"Vesta! What are you- ah! Oh. That… heh… actually, that feels kind of nice." Relaxing slightly, Nanoha leant back into Vesta's half-embrace, letting the cat-familiar play with her hair as she saw fit. A thought struck her, and she giggled quietly.

"You're grooming me, aren't you? Like a mother cat does to her kittens." Her eyes fluttered half-closed as the gentle, repetitive motions soothed her, and a small smile played across her lips. "Silly. I'm not one of your kittens. You're not even old enough to have kittens."

"No," replied Vesta, her voice lower than normal, half words and half purr. "You're not my kitten. You're my master, which is a billion times better and more important." She fell silent for a second, working free a tangle in the girl's hair, before continuing. "You can keep looking through clothes, if you want. But I'm your familiar, so it's my job to take care of you and make you look good."

Nanoha smiled fondly. "Alright. As long as you don't do this in public. People would look at us all funny." Behind her, she felt the familiar shrug, but the tender nuzzle to the back of her head seemed to indicate acquiescence. Flicking through a few more pages, her eyes alighted on one outfit in particular.

"Oh! This one is perfect! Okay, stand up and let me try it on you!"

Rolling her eyes good-naturedly, Vesta stood, spreading her arms out and waiting for Nanoha to call up the necessary templates and adjust them to her satisfaction. It only took a minute or so, and Nanoha stood eagerly and activated the outfit.

The feel of weight settling around her shoulders was by now familiar, though this particular ensemble seemed a little heavier than most. Eyebrows quirking, Vesta waved her hand, summoning an illusionary mirror to take in what she was wearing. And promptly almost choked.

There were ruffles. And poofy sleeves. And pink. And… was that a little cartoon cat pattern on her shoulder? No. Her acceptance of her mistress's whims only went so far, and this? This could not be tolerated. She wasn't a dog. Trying not to gag, Vesta glared at the brown-haired girl, stomping over to the catalogue.

"On second thoughts," she suggested, "how about I choose my outfit? This is…" she tried to think of a way to phrase her objections without hurting Nanoha's feelings, "… a little bit, um, bright."

The girl pouted. "Well I like it," she defended, and was met with a quick grin.

"Then you can wear it," retorted Vesta, tapping one of the selections on offer and flicking through colours before going back to browsing. Another two potentials met with her approval, and a fourth was subjected to considerable scrutiny before being added to the shortlist. Deeming her choices to be enough for now, she turned it to her mistress.

"One of those, then." Her tone, while light, brooked no disagreement. She would follow her human loyally in important things, sure, but she was still fundamentally a cat. And when it came to clothes? No, she would be the one to pick her fur. Or… well, clothes were a kind of fur, so it still worked. Sort of.

"Hmm…" Nanoha mused, flipping through the images. She smiled, cocking her head. "They're a bit… monochrome, aren't they? All greys and blacks." She looked up, blue eyes sparkling as they fixed on Vesta's own. "You should add some blue in, to go with your eyes. They're pretty." She cocked her head, thinking. "Then again, blue is the best colour for eyes," she added, with an amused twinkle in her own.

Despite herself, Vesta felt a blush colour her cheeks.

"Hmm… okay, this one, then." Nanoha brought the template up, and stepped back to watch as it spun itself into reality around Vesta's form. As it settled, her eyes widened slightly, and her mouth hung open in surprise.

"Wow…" she whispered, and her face lit up. "Vesta! You look good!"

And she did. Calling up another mirror-illusion, Vesta spun, admiring herself. It looked even better in reality than it had on the screen. Her hair fell in coarse bangs down to her eyebrows, spiking out at the back in a short cut that kept it from going past her shoulders or getting in the way. The Jacket was an adult woman's frock coat, falling to her knees in crisp pleats that swished and turned as she moved, with a body that hugged her curves closely to devastating effect. Three buttons adorned the front – which Nanoha noted with slight amusement appeared to be straining slightly to contain her familiar's bust – and the whole thing was a dark charcoal colour, striped with thin lines of lighter grey. A black silk scarf caressed her neck, tucked under the neck of the coat. Vivid blue eyes glinted as her skirts swished, made all the more vibrant by the lack of any other colour to detract from them.

"You look… grown-up." Nanoha's expression as she took in the look was one of wonder and excitement, and Vesta preened under the attention, allowed her coat and the black skirt she wore under it to swirl fluidly as she turned and strutted down the length of the room, her tail raising a slight bump in the back. Turning to look at it with annoyance, she concentrated briefly, making a small but important alteration to the template.

A moment later, her tail freed, she slashed it happily as she span, grinning toothily, and bounced back down the room to envelop Nanoha in a hug.

"I know! Don't I?" She spun around again, beaming at the swirl of the pleated hem and edging a foot out to examine her boots – black, unsurprisingly, with armoured steel toecaps that resembled those worn by Fate Similar metal gloves encased her hands, and she grinned toothily as she flexed them, bringing long tiger-like claws of deep red magic into being before dismissing them. But preoccupied as she was, her ears still perked as she heard Nanoha's despondent sigh.

"I just wish mama could see you too."

The triumphant excitement drained from the cat-familiar, and she sat down, enfolding Nanoha in another hug and pulling her onto her lap again.

"She will, someday," she whispered, stroking Nanoha's unbound hair again, running her fingers through the brown locks. "I promise. She will."



"Hey, Kyouya!" Miyuki rapped on her brother's door, waiting for the sound of movement inside before continuing. "I'm going down to the dojo to practice. Wanna do some sparring?"

There was a short pause, before the door swung open to reveal a rumpled looking Kyouya. He yawned shortly, glancing back inside at the schoolwork on his desk, and shrugged. "Sure," he answered. "Anything to take a break from history revision."

Grinning, she sketched a playful bow and turned, leading him downstairs and out of the house towards the dojo. It wasn't rare for them to do this, to go down to the dojo and spar even outside Miyuki's lessons. It was good practice, and fun besides. She hadn't decisively beaten him yet, but she got fractionally closer to it every bout, and was already managing to land minor strikes on him.

What was unusual, however, was to find the training hall occupied.

"Uh… mum? Dad?" Miyuki blinked in confusion as Kyouya leaned over her shoulder to see what the matter was, checking again to make sure that her eyes were telling her the truth.

The tableau before her didn't change. Her mother stood in the centre of the dojo, clad in a beginner's gi and breathing heavily with her hands on her knees. Shiro stood near her, his arms folded and an eyebrow raised in an expression Miyuki recognised as mildly chastising. His gaze moved from his wife to his son and daughter as she watched, and the eyebrow lowered.

"Ah, Miyuki, Kyouya," he greeted them, and paused. The confusion was fairly plain on both of their faces, and he absently scratched his cheek as he considered how to explain the situation.

He opted for blunt simplicity. "I'm training Momoko in the Fuwa style," he stated frankly. Kyouya raised an eyebrow and moved around Miyuki, who was still frozen in the doorway, to enter the room properly.

"Yeah," he deadpanned. "I can see that. Um… why?"

Momoko smiled taking a deep breath and pushing herself back upright. "Well, part of it is because he was worried about me," she said fondly, nudging Shiro with her hip and receiving a glance that bordered on smouldering in return. "But we've also discovered something… interesting."

"Uh oh," Miyuki frowned, leaning on the doorframe. "The word 'interesting' does not fill me with confidence. The last 'interesting' thing I found out was that my little sister was a magical girl. Who is trying to save the world from weird jewel-things." A thought seemed to strike her, and she fell silent, with a faintly worried air.

Shiro rolled his eyes at her. "Yes, well, this is a little less world-shaking. We discovered… well, it might be best just to show you. Dear?"

Momoko nodded obligingly, closed her eyes in concentration, and ignited.

It was so sudden, so completely out of the blue, that both teenagers flinched backwards into combat stances, Miyuki with a gasp of shock and Kyouya with a startled yell. There was no other way to describe the effect, either. An aura of deep red-pink flickered and surged around Momoko, who stood with a placid smile as her husband flowed the short distance over to her. Kyouya's eyebrows rose even further as he sheepishly relaxed somewhat. That wasn't a normal walk, his father was moving in full combat mode. And from the tiny hints around his chest, it looked almost as if he were about to…

He was proven right a second later, as Shiro twisted with lightning speed and planted a full force punch to Momoko's chest. The teen was well aware of how hard his father could hit – the force behind that blow should have been enough to shatter concrete and break bone. Kyouya himself couldn't pull off something like that yet – Miyuki certainly couldn't. It was a punch from a full Fuwa master, a lethal and blindingly fast move more than capable of killing a person. And Momoko hadn't even tried to move with it, let along dodge or block.

And yet the only effect was to force her back a step and drive the air out of her lungs in an audible gasp. Shiro caught her as she staggered slightly, but she didn't seem at all harmed, smiling up at him after a moment and gesturing that it was alright for him to let go.

"How…"

It was Miyuki, staring in complete confusion as the aura around Momoko died down. Shiro nodded, folding his arms again and tapping his fingers on his bicep.

"It… appears that Momoko has a certain amount of magical ability herself. We discovered it while I was teaching her the Fuwa style… and that's the really interesting thing. I think, from what we've found, that so do we. Our fighting style seems to use magic in a very minor role – it's what makes us so strong and so fast. It just seems that…" he frowned slightly, not liking the taste of the next words, "… that we're all fairly weak mages – or that our style is inefficient, I suppose. Regardless, either way, Momoko is able to get far more of an effect from it by supercharging the effects. Where we make ourselves tougher and stronger, she… well, you saw."

All eyes turned to Momoko, who offered an embarrassed smile. "Shiro was talking about how it was possible to train your endurance, and… it just sort of made sense, after seeing what that boy from the shop had. He said he had a 'covert Jacket' on, and I guessed that it was possible to make… invisible magical armour, I suppose. I'm not sure how he makes it invisible, but I thought visible might be easier first. The technique that Shiro explained was a big help."

Miyuki considered this for a second, before letting out a slightly hysterical giggle. "So… what you're saying is that not only is my little sister a magical girl, but so is my mum? And possibly so am I?"

The sides of Kyouya's mouth twitched upwards slightly at the phrasing. "Well, I hope you'll leave out the flashy transformations and speeches about love and justice," he smirked. "And wear a proper length skirt. But… actually, this could be a good thing. If we can learn to use this better, more efficiently… maybe we'll be more effective against these TSAB guys, next time."

Shiro nodded, animation and enthusiasm starting to flow back into him as ideas began to fly between the four as to where and how they could develop their new discovery. And outside, on the sill of one of the thin, high windows that lay along the top of the dojo walls to let the light in, a dragonfly perched. Its body was a muted violet jewel, and its eyes only superficially resembled the compound structures found in real insects. All four wings were extended, the lower pair vibrating slightly, the top pair so perfectly still that a close observer would have been able to pick out the hair-thin tracery of metallic patterns threaded through them.

It was a simple thing, a low-level summon designed and created for a single, specific purpose. It followed. It watched. It listened.

And everything that it took in, it sent back to its creator.



"So. It's not just the girl."

Zest frowned at the image, hooded brows creased in annoyance. "That could make things difficult, if she decides to follow her daughter's example," he mused. "And I don't like how fast she's learning, either."

"Like Nanoha." Yuuno leaned forward, chewing on his lip thoughtfully as he stared at the Takamachi family through the feed. "I mean, she's almost invented a crude Barrier Jacket there, though it looks horribly inefficient – yes, see?" He gestured at the window, where the dimming aura around Momoko had guttered out completely. "She can't sustain it for very long, it looks like. Even so, that sort of progress… I wonder if it's something cultural, or just a quirk of the family? Nanoha has an enormous amount of mathematical talent which she seems to have inherited from her mother. Perhaps this creativity is related to it?"

"Personally, I'm a little less concerned with where it comes from, and a lot more worried about how we're going to deal with it," said Chrono dismissively. He glanced around the room – the same meeting room that they had convened in after their disastrous first contact with this mission, though now it was slightly more crowded. Lindy sat at the head of the long table with her hands folded in front of her mouth, masking her expression. The backup team were congregated together, though Chrono noted that the attention of the youngest one seemed to be wandering somewhat. The specialist team, by contrast, were focused on the screen and the subject at hand. The three separate clusters of people showed rather clearly, Chrono noted with a hint of morbid interest, how divided they still were. Try as they might, this was not a single cohesive group.

He just had to hope that their divisions wouldn't cause any more trouble than they already had.

"Alright," said Lindy, entering the conversation for the first time since the feed had been switched on. "I hesitated to do this after the first time, but if the family has begun to experiment with magic, I think it might be time to try and contact them again."

Chrono winced. "That… didn't work so well the last time we tried it," he observed. Lindy nodded.

"I know. That's why we're not sending you, or going to the mother. No, I think what might be needed here is a professional apology to Mr Takamachi for how we have mishandled the situation, and an assurance that an elite team is now on the case. Scyra-san, you mentioned that he was a bodyguard some time ago?" Yuuno nodded in confirmation, and Lindy glanced back assessingly at the screen that still showed the man interacting with his family. "Right. Then he'll probably appreciate professionalism." She turned to Zest and his squad. "Now, Investigator Alpine has already made contact with his wife, and we don't want him to be paranoid. And forgive me for saying so, but you are… hmm…"

Zest cracked a slight smirk. "Not the most reassuring of faces, no," he finished. "I'm better at intimidation. I doubt he'd be happy about his daughter facing me down. Which leaves Quint."

All eyes turned to the purple-haired woman, who looked round from where she had been considering the video with a cocked head and an absent-minded half-smile. "Hmm? Yes, yes, I'll go," she confirmed. "Let's see… he's probably been in some kind of contact with his daughter, so I'll stick to straight facts without any pushes on how to interpret them. And warn him about experimenting with magic, of course. He should be able to put the pieces together on his own." She glanced at Zest. "Sound good?"

He folded his arms, pushing his chair back slightly and looking upwards at the metal-panelled ceiling. "I'd advise being ready to correct any misrepresentation he's been fed through his daughter. There's liable to be some, I would imagine. Speaking of which, what do we know about who's behind this? Are we sure it's Testarossa?"

Megane cracked her knuckles, wincing as she sat forward and idly rubbing the bump of her pregnancy. "Right, yes," she began. "On that subject, I've dug up some of the old records and found something interesting. Testarossa does in fact have a registered daughter." She waited for the raised eyebrows, before prompting another holographic window to open and delivering the follow-up.

"Who died almost thirty years ago." She gestured at the young girl shown on the screen. "She received a lethal dose of mana irradiation from the reactor explosion. It was only a short time later that Testarossa dropped off the map. Her last known sighting was about ten years ago, and by all accounts she was working alone then, so it looks as though this new girl, Fate – who looks to be about nine, so the timeline works out – is all we're dealing with." She pursed her lips. "It also seems as though Precia Testarossa never underwent the full course of detoxification from the mana irradiation she received."

The reactions to that were rather more dramatic, with the strongest of them coming from Rizu. Gasping, the usually-soft-spoken healer stood, sending her chair clattering back onto the floor.

"Thirty years after inadequate detox?" she exclaimed, horrified. "Let- um… c-can I see the…" Megane regarded her with cool eyes, before nodding slowly and manoeuvring the display over to her, an elegant eyebrow rising in a silent question. Rizu didn't answer immediately, studying the information on-screen for several moments as her shoulders dropped lower and lower. Eventually, she appeared to come to a conclusion and sank back down again, barely noticing Mei hastily pick her chair up so that she didn't wind up on the floor. Her face was pale, and she swallowed hard before speaking.

"… she should be dead," she eventually declared. "She's been getting Phase 3 t-treatment somewhere, somehow, because if she hadn't… n-nobody survives that long, even with the Phase 1 and incomplete Phase 2 listed on these r-records. And… with that incomplete Phase 2… e-even if she managed to p-partially detoxify herself… three decades of time for the damage to build up will have t-taken their toll. Most…" she closed her eyes and swallowed again, before continuing in a lower voice. "M-most of her internal organs will probably be shutting down, slowly. She may not even be capable of magic anymore. It all depends on how g-good the treatment she's got for herself was, but unless it was the b-best, the sort of thing from the best hospitals in Dimensional Space, she'll… she p-probably barely has enough of a working Linker Core left to fire a t-training shot."

Megane's eyes widened slightly at that, and Lindy let out a soft breath into the silence. "I knew mana poisoning was dangerous, but not that the details," she admitted. "So if she should be dead, the question stands: why isn't she?" She glanced at the Investigators, raising a questioning eyebrow.

Quint shrugged. "Zest and I are straight combat mages," she explained. "And Megane is a summoner and support mage, not a focused healer. I think what she does know is mostly trauma, anyway. Not like this."

"I know enough to avoid induced Core haemorrhage and toxic build-up," murmured Megane, "but the long-term effects aren't really something I've ever needed to know." She glanced up at Rizu. "You're in training to be a full healer?" she asked. "What's your opinion? And long would you say she has to live?"

Rizu shook her head helplessly, her eyes flicking across the screen. "I… I d-don't know," she apologised. "There's… I don't even know if I could tell from an examination. It's possible she's been getting t-treatment elsewhere, but it would only be staving off the inevitable. And a life-expectancy… I don't know, th-there are just too many factors."

"A rough guess," pressed Megane, "just to give us an idea of what timeframe we're working with."

"…" Rizu hesitated, her lower lip trembling as she considered. "L-let me just…" her hands shaking from all of the attention directed at her, she made a few nervous gestures, "… pull up the tables." With a series of commands to her Device, she brought up a hologram and studied it intently for a moment. "With that l-level, um… she could be anywhere from already dead, to a decade left." she decided, tentatively. "I… I'm sorry, I j-just can't say without knowing what kind of treatment she's got."

Mei smiled encouragingly at her, flashing a surreptitious thumbs up, and Rizu smiled back tentatively and stood a little straighter.

"Uh… she must have been getting treatment from somewhere," she said, her voice a little firmer, "if she's still alive, that is, but…" her forehead creased in thought, her lips moving slightly "… it's already a foregone conclusion, really. The very best treatment would give you forty or more years from initial exposure, but she didn't undergo Phase 2 treatment properly, so that… that brings her down to this" she pointed at a box on the screen, "c-category, and, um. That's at best. If we assume that she's still well enough t-to do anything with the Jewel Seeds, then… yeah, okay. Okay, we can p-probably say she has at least two months left to live, in that c-case."

"Two months," said Zest, lips turning down at the news.

Rizu swallowed nervously again, and cleared her throat. "Yes. She might not have that long, but if not, she probably wouldn't be able to actually use the Jewel . Or any magic at all, really. In the long run, the only question is how much longer she holds out. I'd g-guess that the only reason she's still alive at all – given we know she g-got full Phase 1 and partial Phase 2 – is because of her power. Her body would be used to handling large amounts of mana, it would have… um… lessened the damage she suffered from the immediate blast, so that with the Phase 1 treatment, it'll be the long t-term organ problems from Phase 2 scarring which kill her, I think. That, and if she's getting Phase 3 t-treatment… even that will only have delayed it a little, though. She'll still be facing catastrophic organ failure." She raised one hand apologetically. "But, um. P-please remember, I'm only qualified as a rank 1 at the moment. This training was meant to be p-part of my qualifications for rank 2, and I've read ahead, b-but… well, you'd really want a specialist for more accurate things. And there's not much information to go on in the first place."

"That would explain why we haven't seen her in person," Tiida mused, as Rizu sagged down into her seat and tried to control her nervous shaking from having to talk as an expert to an experienced team. "But a few months is still long enough for her to wreck serious havoc with the Jewel Seeds." A thought struck him suddenly, and he straightened. "Wait, could this be why she wants them? To heal herself?"

Yuuno shook his head immediately. "No. They're primarily power storage artefacts. Worse than useless, since adding more magic would just make it worse. Besides, from what Cadet Jhanashdi said, she's beyond any cure now." He frowned. "Though I'm still not sure why she hasn't done whatever she's planning. A dozen of them should be enough for almost anything, and there aren't many more left."

"Seven or eight, I believe," Lindy said. "Which brings us onto the next point. What do we have on their locations?"

A general aura of defeat settled over the table.

"Very little, I'm afraid," reported Tiida. "We have the ground-based sensor network set up, but nothing has triggered any of them, and active scanning runs the risk of setting some or all of the Seeds off, however slight."

Heidi cleared her throat, and he glanced across at her.

"In addition to that, sir," she said, "I've been looking at the results of that active scan we took of the anomaly a couple of days ago. The results are horribly skewed due to the point reaction, obviously, but… from the reflections of the pulse, I'm reasonably sure that at least four or five of the remaining Seeds are in the ocean, underwater. And I checked that with some of the technical staff here on the Asura, and they think it's a probable interpretation of the data."

Silence fell again, this time broken by Chrono.

"Damn," he sighed. "Those are going to be a pain to retrieve. Like looking for a needle in a haystack, even if we can narrow them down to a small area. Do we know what the reaction was, anyway?"

"I've been looking into that, too," said Megane, "and none of the options look promising, I'm afraid. The nature of the anomaly, with a hyper-concentrated point-singularity, suggests one of a very small number of spells. Amongst them… we must consider the possibility that they have attempted, and possibly succeeded, in tapping a Jewel Seed."

She met the grim expressions with her own. "And the other possibilities aren't much better. The Familiar creation spell is one – which I would normally discount as taking too long to learn, but Miss Takamachi seems full of surprises on that score. Another is that they have laid their hands on a compression-type Lost Logia, which you may recall are often used in bombs of enormous power, and the like. And the last… is possibly the most worrying. The reactor that Precia Testarossa was working on was supposed to draw energy from the fluctuations in the Dimensional Sea. If she has perfected that technology, it is possible that the influx of mana through the tap would look very similar to what we saw in the anomaly."

Lindy closed her eyes in a pained grimace. "A safe, renewable and potentially infinite power source. That would be a huge blow against us." She sighed. "Well, we will simply have to hope that that possibility does not turn out to be the one we face. Though I can't say any of them are particularly encouraging." She folded her hands together again, resting them in front of her face.

"Well, there's little we can do about that right now." she decided. "Investigator Alpine, thank you for the information you have uncovered. Please keep monitoring the situation on the ground with your summons. Lieutenant Lanster, have your team ready for immediate deployment upon the activation of the next Jewel Seed, and be prepared for any unpleasant surprises – it is now more important than ever that we seal and recover all of the remaining ones." She looked around, fixing them all with a steady gaze, and finally turned to Quint.

"And Investigator Nakajima, please meet with Takamachi-san as soon as possible. If he can convince his daughter to at least talk to us, we may yet avert a crisis before it occurs."

With that, the meeting broke up, each group heading their separate ways. Megane and Yuuno returned to their respective research, Lindy and Chrono to the bridge. The backup team split up to monitor the ground sensors, Mei helping her still-shaking half-sister along; and Zest set off to run patrols on the surface.

And Quint Nakajima headed straight for the teleport bays. Earthbound, on a mission.



Shiro was in the kitchen fetching himself a glass of water when the knock came. The sixth sense that he had developed during his years as a bodyguard prickled, and he gently put the half-full glass down on the counter, sliding towards the door with feline grace.

Opening it, the figure he was confronted with was nothing like what he was expecting. She was a little shorter than he was, and heavily built, not to mention in as good a level of fitness as he had been in his prime. She was obviously able to handle herself in a fight, from the way she held herself, but her stance was definitely neutral and non-threatening, and he couldn't see any weapons on her.

Of course, if she was what he thought she was, that didn't really count for much.

"Shiro Takamachi?" she asked, and he nodded warily, taking a slow step back out of her range and readying himself to dodge if she moved to attack. Instead, she stuck out her hand. "I am Warrant Officer Quint Nakajima of the TSAB Ground Forces. I'm part of the professional team that has been dispatched to bring this case to a conclusion. May I come in?"

Warily, he took her hand, noting the strength of her grip as she shook it, and stepped back in a silent invitation. She took it, stepping in with a toss of the long ponytail her purple hair was bound up in.

"I won't keep you long," she said, and… yes, he could see the slight discrepancy between her lips and her words that Momoko had mentioned. "I would like to apologise for the unprofessional way this situation has been handled so far, and to reassure you that we are doing everything we can to end this matter without any harm to your daughter. I am aware that she has more than likely told you Precia Testarossa's side of the story…" and Shiro wasn't blind to the way her steady gaze raked across his face, watching for a reaction to that. He kept his expression neutral, refusing to give her anything, and after a tiny pause she continued, "... so I will lay out the facts in short. Testarossa-san is an SS-rank dimensional criminal with a long and storied history, including at least one reactor meltdown that records indicate was primarily due to her lack of safety precautions, and which caused several thousand deaths. She is also terminally ill, and her ability to control the Lost Logia she is attempting to gather will be seriously and negatively affected by her condition."

Her green eyes bored into him. "As well as that, she may think she knows what she is doing, but I rather doubt she does. Lost Logia are given that designation because nobody is sure how or why they function. And messing around with magic that you don't understand is, without exception, extremely dangerous. We have reason to believe she is planning something that could very well tear apart multiple dimensions, and I'm afraid to say that with the number of Lost Logia she already has, she may well do just that if she tries."

Shiro held up a hand, stopping the brisk summary, and leaned back against the wall, his expression deceptively casual. "That's all very well and good," he retorted, "but from what my daughter has told us, she seems to be under the impression that the TSAB are in the wrong here. Something about her trying to save a family member, and your Bureau stopping her. She also claims to have a certain level of justified confidence in the woman's ability to handle these Jewel Seeds."

Quint tilted her head, frowning. "I'm only aware of her two daughters – the one involved in this case, who appears to be perfectly healthy given the level of damage she's able to dish out, and a daughter some thirty years ago who was killed in the reactor incident. And I'm afraid that bringing back the dead is impossible, even for magic."

Something flickered in the man's eyes, as if he was holding back on something else, but Quint knew better than to push. Just the knowledge that there was something was enough, in its own way. On the other hand, he didn't look at all convinced yet, and she decided to move onto the main reason for her visit.

"Look," she said frankly, spreading her hands, "I'm aware that you don't trust me. Or the TSAB in general, and I can see why. This is about as bad a first contact scenario as I've seen in a long time, if you're willing to take that on faith. There have been misunderstandings and mistakes on every side, especially ours. So I won't insult you by asking you to help us. But if you can get a message to your daughter asking her to talkto us, just to sit down and discuss whatever they're trying to do, we would love to try and resolve this peacefully. If we can find a solution that satisfies every party, I promise that we will take it, and we would like nothing more than to do so when a battle over the Jewel Seeds might leave scars on this region of Dimensional Space for centuries to come."

Shiro had to admit, that at least was a convincing argument. Reluctantly, he nodded. "Alright," he agreed. "If I get in contact with her again, I'll pass that message on. But that's all I'll do, if you don't mind."

Quint didn't seem insulted, merely nodding gratefully with a slight smile. "Thank you. And I give you my word that we will be as gentle as possible in keeping her from gathering any more of the Lost Logia and apprehending her, which shouldn't be difficult. Now that we're not operating with a skeleton crew, we should be able to mop up the rest of them in fairly short order. If we do capture her and the younger Testarossa, we will of course inform you immediately and keep you up to date on the situation. And as she's both a native and a minor, I can assure you that she won't be separated from you, and the worst she's likely to be looking at is a powerful limiter on her magic to stop anything like this happening again. More likely, she'll get a temporary lower-level one and a mentor to bring her up to speed on Dimensional Space, magic and so on."

Some of the careful poise and slightly-too-casual relaxation in Shiro's body faded, replaced by genuine relief. "That's… good to hear," he admitted. "I was a little worried." He sized her up again, a faint glimmer of respect – from one professional to another – in his expression. "Alright, I'll pass on your request, and keep your warnings in mind." He gave her a flat look that clearly stated that he was aware of the reason for the one against dabbling in magic without knowledge of what one was doing, and dryly added, "All of them. If that was all?"

"It was. Thank you for your time, and I hope that the next time we meet is in happier circumstances." She offered her hand again, and he shook it, keeping a wary eye on her until she was out of the door and gone.

"Dad?"

He turned. "Miyuki. Something wrong?"

She looked curiously in the direction the woman had departed, but appeared to decide against asking. "Um. Yeah. I…" Biting her lip, she beckoned him closer, speaking in lowered tones.

"You reminded me of something earlier. You know that icy crystal ball thing I found in the woods, at the hot springs? Do you think that could have had something to do with these Jewel Seed things that Nanoha's trying to find?"

Shiro went pale. A moment's silence passed as he considered the theory, before swallowing. "You… were keeping it in your room, yes?" he murmured. She nodded, and he took a deep, calming breath. "I think… relocating it to the bottom of the garden would probably be a good idea. In a bag, so it doesn't attract any attention. And then I'll call Nanoha to have a look at it tomorrow." He paused, considering. "Tonight. I'll call her tonight."

Miyuki nodded shakily, knees feeling rather weaker than they had been a moment ago. "Y-yeah," she breathed, still shivering a little. "Yeah, okay. I'll… go do that now."

She stumbled off upstairs, and Shiro watched her go concernedly. For a moment he stood there, carefully considering everything he had just learned.

Then he took a deep breath, and went to find his wife.



The sun was dipping low after another unsuccessful day of searching the city, as Arisa trudged on weary feet back through the crowded streets. A flash of purple hair caught the corner of her eye, and she turned to see Suzuka approaching her. The girl's tired expression was an answer in and of itself, but she asked anyway.

"Any luck?" Frowning at the faint croak in her voice, she rooted around in her bag for a bottle of water and took a greedy gulp from it, the cool liquid flowing soothingly down her parched throat. Noting the envious look on Suzuka's face, she offered it to her friend, who took several long drags before answering.

"Nothing," she said sadly. "Are you sure that searching like this is going to find her? I mean, it's a big city, and…"

"We'll find her, I promise," insisted Arisa stubbornly. "We just have to keep looking." She looked around, craning to peer suspiciously into the long, narrow interior of a convenience store, as if Nanoha might be hiding next to the racks of newspapers at the far end.

Even so, Suzuka couldn't help but sigh despondently. They had been searching for what seemed like a small eternity now, roaming the crowded areas of the city and hoping to catch a glimpse of their friend. In hindsight, it was starting seem like not a very good plan. There were posters up of Nanoha, she'd been on the news – surely if she was around, wouldn't someone have recognised her by now?

Dejected, she looked up at the towering buildings of silvered glass that surrounded them. Office blocks, apartment blocks, business headquarters… this was the high-rise part of town, though they were on the outskirts of it, and the roofs were beginning to drop down to a mere three or four storeys here and there as the two of them wandered back in the vague direction of the bus station. She had been hopeful, given the number of hotels in this area, that they might strike lucky and see Nanoha or the Fate girl here. Or maybe even the orange-haired woman, she didn't really mind. This was a logical place for them to be staying.

Nonetheless, it had born as little fruit as any of the other places they had searched. She sighed again, dragging her feet – which were hurting from all the walking she had been doing today – and bumping shoulders idly with Arisa.

"Where shall we search next, then?" she asked, her voice rather lacking in enthusiasm. Arisa pursed her lips, bringing a hand up to tap on her chin as she thought it over. They split apart briefly, flowing around a harassed-looking salaryman, and rejoined each other behind him.

"I guess we could try the parks?" the blonde mused. "She might relax there. Or… hmm… maybe ask around at some of the hotels? Or…"

"Arisa-chan…"

Suzuka stopped abruptly, blinking. "I… do you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

Purple hair swished as Suzuka looked around, trying to trace the source of the strange feeling. "I don't know. The air feels… greasy. Like that… whatever it was, just before Nanoha disappeared."

A blonde eyebrow rose. "Maybe it's the burger you had? I told you it looked funny." Suzuka shot her a look, and Arisa shrugged. "Hey, don't blame me if you feel sick, it was your choice to…" She trailed off, frowning, and took a careful breath, running her tongue across the roof of her mouth.

"… actually, on second thoughts, I think I can feel it too. What is that?"

A headache bloomed between Suzuka's temples, and she winced, one hand coming up to nurse it. As she did so, she was struck by the memory of those horrible few minutes the day before Nanoha's disappearance, and the symptoms she had felt then. Her eyes widened. She was entirely aware of the fact that she didn't really know what was going on with the magic and artefacts and animal-people, but she was far from stupid, and she was more than capable of recognising basic patterns. From what Nanoha had said, the thing that had affected people all over the world had been some kind of magical disaster. What she was feeling now wasn't nearly as strong, and seemed a lot more local, but it was undoubtedly related, and thus probably due to a lot of magic somewhere nearby.

She could only think of two or three reasons for lots of magic to be building up in the middle of the city. None of them were good. The hand that wasn't cradling her forehead lashed out to catch Arisa's wrist in a grip of iron, and she turned to her friend with a terrified expression. One look was enough, and she saw worried confusion spread across the blonde's face in turn. But there was no time to explain things. They had to get out of there. Now.

"Run," she said, simply.

They ran.

The wave hit them before they got halfway down the street. Suzuka feltit coming, an alien pulse rippling up behind them at incredible speed. Glancing round without slowing down, her grip on Arisa's wrist holding firm, she squeaked with fright at the wall of grey advancing towards them. Even moving as fast as she could, though, dodging around pedestrians and scattering people left, right and centre as they fled, it caught up to them with almost insulting ease.

There was a brief, wrenching jerk as it washed over them. And then the world was different.

The colour was gone. The sky was a dark purple-grey, rippling with strange patterns. The people had vanished, and the buildings had a curiously leeched tone to them, as if they were just echoes of the real things, painted-on scenery for a cheap play. She couldn't smell the scents of city life, either, and her ears were filled with nothing but her and Arisa's own ragged breathing. Beyond them, there was nothing but an eerie silence. The sounds of the city were as absent as if they had never been.

And as they turned around, looking in confusion and alarm at their suddenly familiar-but-unfamiliar surroundings, a rustling sound drifted over from a bookstore across the street. And, drifting slowly through the door, the creature at the centre of the nightmare revealed itself.



It started slowly. Subtly. Almost enough to fool Suzuka into thinking it was nothing at all.

Well, perhaps not quite. The deep violet glow rather gave it away. As she watched, petrified, indigo-tinged sheets of paper slid out through the cracks between the door and the doorframe. Curling upwards, they drew together, layering on top of one another as if they were a papier-mâché sculpture. Paper curled, warped, flowed upwards as the shape built itself from the bottom upwards.

Suzuka heard a strangled gasp from beside her as the paper finished building itself into a sphere. Somehow, despite being made of hundreds of sheets of paper layered on top of one another, she could see no seams, no breaks or edges on the thing. It looked for all the world like a perfectly smooth sphere. For a moment it hung there, glowing softly with the deep purple light. And then, somehow, despite the total lack of any identifying features on the thing, Suzuka felt its attention turn towards her.

There was a heartbeat of silent, perfect stillness. Then the sphere exploded.

Hundreds of sheets of paper whirled around one another in a frenzied storm of activity, a hurricane of pages whipping in and out and around themselves in a mad pattern. Then, as quickly as they had disassembled, the sheets of paper rushed inwards again, reconstructing themselves into a different form.

Her form.

The copy cocked its head at her, a perfect silhouette made from paper, right down to the hem of her dress. Somehow, it had even managed to copy the way her hair fell down around her shoulders, though it didn't seem to have managed to copy individual strands. For some reason, that made her feel better. A ripple crossed over its surface, a wave of pages turning over, and then Arisa's form was the one that stared at them, blank paper eyes looking at them with a neutral, inhuman expression.

It took one step towards them. And then the lightning hit it.

Binds of golden light snapped into place around both wrists and ankles, immobilising it. Another two wrapped themselves around the thing's neck and torso, squeezing it with crushing force. In a rush of air and a flash of crackling electricity, the blonde girl called Fate was standing between them and the paper-thing, clad in the same strange clothing as she had been when Suzuka had seen her at the edge of her home and holding a long black scythe whose blade was a blazing golden lightning bolt.

Less than a second later, half a dozen pink spheres slammed into the thing with sledgehammer force, detonating as they impacted, shrouding the figure in smoke as Nanoha landed, flanked by a huge orange wolf and what looked to be a giant grey-black tigress with bright blue eyes. Suzuka blinked in astonishment. Was that…

"… Vesta?" she whispered incredulously. The animal seemed to hear her, ears pricking slightly as it glancing across to her. The cheerful lash of its tail confirmed that it was the little kitten she had last seen more than two weeks ago, though grown to almost unrecognisable proportions.

Arisa's tugging on her hand reminded her that perhaps standing in the middle of a potential battlefield was a less than wise course of action, and she followed her friend further down the road, taking refuge behind a corner and peeking out at the showdown timidly.

"Did you see that?" whispered Arisa fiercely. "How fast they got here? Seconds, at most! They must have been close by! And I bet they were at home, if both of them were in the same place! Which means that they are living somewhere around here!"

Suzuka glanced back at her enthused friend incredulously. "You're thinking about that?" she hissed back in disbelief. "At a time like this?"

She had no time to reply to that, though, as the smoke cleared and the figure was revealed. Still held crucified by the binds, it was looking decidedly the worse for wear, with singed and smoking pages hanging off it and patches that had been entirely burnt through. It sagged in the iron grip of the bindings, hanging limply.

Nanoha and Fate, along with their familiars, apparently trusted that appearance about as much as they could throw it. Considerably less, in fact. Keeping their Devices trained on it, Fate snapped Bardiche out into its glaive-like Sealing Mode as Nanoha readied another barrage of Divine Shooters, staying tense and alert for any surprise attacks.

The one that came was not one which could be called predictable in any fashion, however. Squeezed by the bands of electric gold around its neck and torso, the head of the paper figure bulged obscenely, as if blown up like a balloon. Larger and larger it swelled, the features warping and blurring until it was just a huge bulge topping a limp and lifeless body.

The eruption came as a surprise to nobody. Nanoha was already moving as the huge, sinuous form blurred towards her, diving to one side. Even with the aid of a Flash Move, she barely got out of the way in time as three titanic jaws slammed into the street where she had been standing, gouging out a huge crater from the tarmac.

Taking to the air and hovering on the other side of the thing from Arisa and Suzuka, so as to draw it away from them, Nanoha dropped down next to Fate's new position. She took in what they were facing. Even with her experience facing the previous Jewel Seeds, it was daunting. This thing was a monster.

It was almost a hundred metres long, easily six or seven times the length of her school bus. A serpentine, draconic form – and where on earth all of that paper had come from she had no idea – coiled outward from the humanoid figure that was even now reforming itself into a tail. Three jaws were set into the blunt hammer of its face, two beside one another and a third beneath them, each filled with grinding fangs. Six eyes glimmered above them, set in two triangles that gave it binocular vision through the inner two and almost 360 degrees of peripheral vision from the outer four. The sheets that made up its flanks rippled and flexed like scales, waves of turning pages drifting leisurely over the enormous form as the amethyst glow saturated them from within.

"I never thought I'd say this, Nanoha," murmured Fate quietly, "but I think you should have used more firepower when you shot it the first time."

The dragon regarded them with an expression not dissimilar to that of a python looking at a couple of ants in its way. Then it opened all three sets of jaws, revealing three barbed tongues that forked into two lethally sharp points each, and roared at them with enough force to shatter every pane of glass on the street.

Nanoha and Fate burst into motion, breaking left and right in a perfectly coordinated blur as Arf backed away and Vesta simply rippled and vanished. Binds of pink and chains of orange snapped into place around the creature as Fate darted towards it, scythe raised threateningly. Nanoha hung back, the tell-tale rings of a Divine Buster beginning to form around Raising Heart's head as Fate unleashed a flurry of slashes that failed to have any appreciable effect on the dragon's flank. It twisted, snapping at her, and the binds strained and snapped with the force of its movement.

The huge head paused, turning back and peering at the binds that were already stressed to their limit in trying to contain it. With a growl of irritation and a writhing jerk, the binds were shattered and it was free. A flick of its tail turned the thing away from the two young mages – and nothing that big, though Nanoha, should be able to move with such fluid and effortless agility – and with another roar, it leapt into the air and sped away.

Towards the edge of the barrier.

"Fate!" Nanoha shouted, dropping the charging Buster and switching to telepathy as they shot after it, the howl of the slipstream eating up her words like moths in a gale. 'I think it's going to try and break out of the barrier! It can't duck it like the last one, but if it can break through the edges…'

As if to lend credence to her words, a coil of the sinuous, undulating form smashed into a tower block, sending it the top three floors of the building crashing to the ground. The dragon wasn't even slowed by the impact, bales of paper pulling back into the hole in its side and reconstituting it from the damage.

'We have to stop it! Try to get ahead of it, stop it from getting through the barrier! Arf, see if you can slow it down! I'll hit it with a Divine Buster from behind!' She pulled to a halt, levelling Raising Heart at the thing, and again the characteristic rings formed around it. Fate didn't bother replying, instead speeding up even more and shooting ahead in a blurred flash of gold.

Arf was fast, but she couldn't match her mistress for raw speed. She hadn't ever seen anyone that could, for that matter. Still, she was fast enough to gain ground on the dragon-thing as it lashed through the air. It was flying in a series of spiralling curves, coiling and winding its long, serpentine body in midair as it moved. Good, she thought. It meant slower movement, doing that. Had it been going in a straight line, it would probably already be at the edge of the barrier by now. Even so, it was getting alarmingly close, and she honestly had no idea what would happen when it got there.

Time to fix that, then.

There was no warning to herald the first orange plane slamming down in front of the beast. It smashed into it without slowing, three jaws grinding into the barrier, and Arf grunted in exertion at the backlash. But even though it wouldn't hold for more than a second or so, the barrier was just the distraction she needed. Orange chains shot out, snarling the long coils of the dragon and pinning them to one another in huge loops. One set hooked through both of its upper jaws, pulling the roofs of its mouths open and preventing it from biting down. A thick set lashed its tail to the middle of its body, snarling it up in a tangle of twisting paper and violet glow. She didn't stop, either, adding chain after chain after chain, anchoring them to the ground, the buildings, herself. Gold bands started to appear around it as well – Fate, having taken up a guarding position between the dragon and the edge of the dimensional barrier. They singed the paper where they touched, the electricity charring the sheets just from its mere proximity, squeezing down on the violet radiance. Behind them, she could see the building glow of Nanoha's Divine Buster.

Then the dragon stopped thrashing. And for the second time in as many minutes, it exploded.

'No!'

Paper flew everywhere. In long, flowing streams, it arched out away from where the dragon had been as the chains and bindings that had held it collapsed uselessly from the loss of resistance within them. A barrage of razor-edged sheets flew from the cloud towards Arf, and she threw herself out of their path hastily. A creak from behind her signalled them slicing almost casually through the girders holding up a billboard, and she swung yet further out of the way as the huge panel crashed down to the street like a giant flyswatter.

And then, hovering in a cloud of breeze-blown sheets and tentacle-like streamers and surges of paper, the hundreds of thousands of pages quivered for a second as the glow at their centre pulsed. And flew back together, reassembling into a very familiar form.

Insofar as the serpentine, triple-jawed face could be said to have an expression, it seemed to be one of smug triumph.

It was tempered slightly by half a dozen electric bolts smashing into it. 'Bindings won't work on it!' called Fate urgently. 'Nanoha! Hit it with everything you have!' Another barrage crashed in, making the dragon flinch, and Arf followed suit, pelting it with Photon Lancers and conjuring an orange wedge of force to send smashing into the thing's side. But while the bombardment certainly seemed to hurt it, it was nonetheless clear that it was recovering from the damage almost as fast as they were inflicting it.

'Nanoha! Hurry it up!' Arf yelled, as the monster unwound and pointed its gnashing jaws back in the direction of the barrier edge – and of Fate.

But the answer came, not in the form of a pink juggernaut of destruction blasting the dragon from afar, but as a telepathic scream and a distant explosion.

'They're here!'



Things were not going well.

Nanoha burst out of the hastily improvised explosion, checking quickly to make sure that Suzuka and Arisa hadn't been caught by the blast. When the dark blue shots had lanced towards her, immobile and unable to dodge, detonating the energies she had been gathering to fire had been her instinctive reaction. She sighed in relief as her HUD found the girls intact, if scared, and spared a brief second to wonder why on earth they were here, inside a dimensional barrier and next to an activated Jewel Seed.

Then the swordswoman was in her face again, at the apex of a high jump, her energy blade crackling as it swung towards Nanoha. Vesta flickered into existence in human form before it was halfway there, dropping the illusion hiding her as she met the attack with deep red blades that extended out from her hands like claws.

"No you don't!" she snarled, forcing the girl backwards as Nanoha snapped off a couple of Divine Shooters that curved round her. One broke on the girl's shield, but the other took her full in the chest, sending her plummeting back towards the ground. A flurry of purple needles came from her left, and she snapped up a barrier against them. Chrono, she noted, was heading in the direction of the Jewel Seed and Fate. He had also, from what she could see, lost the spikes on his shoulders. Well, that was fine. She would deal with the rest of them.

"Ooooo!"

The exclamation of fascinated curiosity was Vesta's. The cat-familiar was staring in the direction Chrono had gone, blue eyes riveted on… a green-and-tan figure following him.

Oh dear.

"Vesta, don't-" Nanoha started to say, but it was too late. Phasing into her war-form, all three hundred kilograms of it, Vesta bounded after Yuuno with a happy roar. From what Nanoha could see of her face as he looked back to find the source, the only way to describe his reaction would be 'terror'. For a moment, she started to telepathically call her familiar back to her.

On the other hand… she wasn't likely to see much close combat up here, so she didn't really need a hidden bodyguard. And Vesta's attention would keep Yuuno occupied and leave the Enforcer boy facing Fate and Arf together, without any support. And she wasstill feeling a little bit angry at him for everything he hadn't told her, even if he had done it for what he thought were good reasons.

'Vesta!' she called.

'Uh huh? Hee! He smells familiar, too!'

Nanoha rolled her eyes fondly. 'Don't hurt him, okay? Just scare him a bit and keep him occupied.'

'Aye aye, boss!' came the cheerful reply. 'Come here, mousey-thing! Play with me!'

Smiling at the joyful tones of the happy feline, Nanoha turned her attention to her own opponents. There were four of them, it seemed. One was the sword-user who had tried to attack her in close combat. She hadn't been flying, which meant that Nanoha could probably avoid her just by staying high. Anyway, she seemed to have landed badly, and another girl was tending to her – a healer, it looked like. They would probably be there for a while.

That left the girl who Fate had mentioned blasting, the one that used the purple needle-shots, and the orange-haired man hovering a little way away with twin pistols trained on her. Despite the stakes, Nanoha felt a smile forming. Take these two out, and then go help Fate. It would be interesting to see how fast she could manage it.

'Fate-chan!' she called, 'The Enforcer boy is headed your way! Nobody else, though! Vesta-chan is dealing with Yuuno-kun, and I'll take care of the squad members then come and help!'

Fate's pulse of acknowledgement chimed in her mind. And then, warning given, she sprang into action.



Chrono Harloawn hurtled through the air, barrelling towards the Jewel Seed's signal in an attempt to get there before it was sealed. As he drew closer, it became apparent that he needn't have been worried. The thing was putting up quite a fight, and pressing the blonde girl and her familiar hard. Despite them peppering it with shots and binds, it looked like it was all they could do to keep it from getting to the edge of the dimensional barrier.

In that goal at least, he fully agreed with them. Pulling to a stop to get his bearings, he called up a line to the Asura.

"Amy," he asked without preamble, "how long till the elite team get here?"

"Ah… Investigator Grangaitz is a couple of minutes out, and Investigator Nakajima will be there thirty seconds or so after that. Can you hold out that long?"

Narrowed eyes assessed his foes. "Yes," he decided. More confidently than he actually was, but it wasn't like failure was really an option in this situation. "It looked like Takamachi had a familiar, try and gather data on what its capabilities are. Will the backup team hold out?"

A pause. "They're at half strength due to injury, but they say they'll do their best. The familiar is currently pursuing Scrya-san, who is urgently requesting assistance."

A very faint smirk curled the corners of Chrono's mouth briefly, and he shook his head. "The backup team are outmatched enough against the Takamachi girl, and I need to deal with the Jewel Seed. If he's holding the attention of one of the hostiles singlehandedly, then that's one less hostile for us to worry about. Besides, he's a defence specialist. He'll be fine." Which was tactically sound reasoning, though perhaps not justification for the vindictive pleasure he took in using it. Still, he was sure that Scrya would be fine. Annoying though the boy was, Chrono couldn't fault the quality of his barriers.



'Bad mousey! Come out and play!'

The quarter-tonne feline batted at the glowing green barrier, jaws gaping wide to reveal four-inch fangs as she tried to find some purchase on the smooth surface to gnaw at. A shock sent through it caused her to yelp and back off, growling in frustration as she glared at the boy inside the sphere. He took the opportunity to turn tail and run again, boosting his steps with magic as he tried to escape the monstrous tigress who appeared to want nothing more than to use him as a chew toy.

"Please could someone come and help me already!" he cried to the sky in desperation. He shot a glare backwards at where the big cat had been effortlessly keeping pace behind him before it had turned invisible again. "And I'm a human!" he added. "Or a ferret, sometimes! Not a mouse!"

His answer came in the form of a quarter-tonne weight slamming into his Round Shield from above.

'Vesta POUNCE!'



… yes, Chrono decided. Scrya had nothing to worry about. Chrono himself, on the other hand…

Introducing himself with a thin blue beam that scored a painful gash down the dragon's side, he flew in to tackle it, narrowing dodging a scything blizzard of razor-edged paper that glowed a distressingly deep shade of violet. The Testarossa girl ignored him, entirely focused on blasting the monster anywhere she could. She had apparently foregone the less powerful shots she had been observed using so far in favour of stronger ones that required a few seconds of charge-up time each. It still didn't seem to be meeting with much success.

After a few dozen seconds of combat, he could see why. The thing was a damned powerhouse, a huge, monstrous trainwreck of power and speed that was surprisingly hard to hit despite its tremendous size. Any attempt at a bombardment spell would be pointless, the sheer speed of the creature would allow it to evade effortlessly unless it was bound. And binding it presented its own problems. Not only was it strong enough to rip through any wires he got on it, but the one occasion he had managed to fasten its bottom jaw shut, its face had simply come apart into separate pages and reformed, allowing the binding to dissolve uselessly.

And on top of that, its paper body regenerated from anything either of them could throw at it. A minute and a half of silent cooperation in attempts to blast it, burn it, electrocute it, freeze it and even soak it in levitated water had accomplished nothing but to slow it down. And despite all three mages trying to force it away from its goal, Chrono could see the edge of the dimensional barrier growing closer and closer as it edged the combat towards the purple-grey dome.

'Sir!' It was Lanster. 'We've lost Hostile 2! She pulled some sort of area effect move emanating outward from herself – it looked like what she used to destroy that thorn-based one. It caught Hei- Cadet Zwischenfall as she was between roofs, and the hostile managed to shoot me in the side of the head as I went to catch her. She'll be inbound on you in less than a minute.'

Chrono ground his teeth. 'Acknowledged,' he sent. 'Get Cadet Jhanashdi to check you over, then follow along to provide support.' It was bad news, though. While the appearance of another AA-rank mage would probably tip the tide over into doing more damage than the dragon could heal, it would also almost guarantee that they would be the ones to leave with the Jewel Seed. He tightened his grip on S2U, watching the blonde girl ducking under a paper lash with acrobatic grace. He would have to time this perfectly.

Takamachi roared in like a pink-hued comet, and only Amy's warning telepathic scream alerted him to what else was incoming. Eyes widening in panic, he discarded his hastily-made plan to try and combat the two of them and dived forwards, flaring his magic to attract the beast and luring it upwards. Upwards, away from the ground, away from the girls, away from the high-rise buildings around them. Up into the open sky.

Even knowing which direction to look in, he only caught a brief blur from the middle distance.

The sheer force of the impact, when it came an instant later, almost knocked him out of the sky. The sound was incredible, a ringing crash that must have been audible an entire city block away. Blinded by the brilliant flash of light, Chrono shed altitude to get away from the ringing after-effects and the falling paper, no longer glowing so vividly. As soon as the sunspots had cleared from his eyes, he looked up. And paled.

With a single strike, Grangaitz had split the dragon clean in half. Lengthways. The two halves of its long, sinuous body writhed and twitched weakly as they fell, trying to regenerate but unable to do anything other than disintegrate into harmless sheets of paper as they drifted downwards, the glow slowly fading from them. The man himself was standing where his strike had finished, spear held forward in the culmination of the swing that had rent the creature asunder. His head turned minutely as a less bulky figure soared in, scooping up the weakly glowing Jewel Seed in mail-clad hands and crushing its feeble attempts to reactivate with calm but ruthless force.

Satisfied at the subdual of the primary target, the distant figure's head turned downwards, toward the girls hovering far below him. Chrono was too far away from them to hear anything, but nonetheless he thought he caught a quiet "oh no" from their direction.

'Lanster,' Chrono sent, keeping his distance for now. 'Don't bother coming here. Go after the familiar and help Scrya.'

'No need, sir,' came the quick reply. 'Scrya reports that the familiar just broke off its pursuit and headed your way at speed. We're following as fast as we can.' Chrono nodded absently, not really surprised. So the cat-familiar was coming to help her mistress. It wouldn't, he was fairly sure, do much good. With this much force arrayed against them, the girls would have to pull off a miracle to avoid capture now.

One of the figures above stayed high, still crushing down the last of the Jewel Seed's protests and sealing it. The other one dived, spear held ready, in a sudden and lightning-fast stoop towards the nine-year olds. One of them shot away on a level trajectory, back towards the backup team and her familiar. The other rose up to meet the descending powerhouse, her familiar following at a close distance.

Their clash was earth-shattering, breaking every window nearby and sending the smaller girl tumbling back downwards at speed. Not sticking around to see any more, Chrono turned, sighted the fleeing silhouette of the native, and set out at an angle to head her off before she got there.



Bad bad bad bad bad. This was very, very bad. Nanoha hurtled through the city heights, keeping an eye on the dark-clad figure moving to cut her off. A glance back gave her a brief snapshot of Fate fighting the giant spear-wielder, and she winced in worry at the crashes that their collisions were producing. The man had cut the paper-dragon-thing in half with one blow! How were they supposed to compete with a monster like that? From the look of things, it was only Fate's insane speed that was allowing her to fight him at all, and even with that taken into account, she was losing ground quickly. They needed some sort of a miracle.

Fortunately, Nanoha had already thought of one. She hadn't shared the half-formed plan with Fate, mostly because she was pretty sure the other girl would deem it insane. But she was relatively sure it would work. Now all she needed to do was to shrug off the Enforcer and get Vesta to carry it out.

A thought on how to accomplish the former occurred to her, and she rolled to avoid a trio of sniper shots from the boy pulling over in front of her. They weren't really meant to hit her, more to get her attention and force her to back off, preventing her from getting away from the second mage who was still sealing the Jewel Seed. That would be his goal here, slow her down enough for that one to get here. All he had to do was present enough of a barrier that she couldn't get past him without being hit. He would be expecting her to try and dodge past the shots he fired, and slip around him.

So she altered her course to collide with him, and sped up.

It was fairly clear from the widening of his eyes that he hadn't expected that. Even if she had been meaning to try a melee attack, she would have slowed down enough to properly use her weapon. This, though, was nothing short of an all-out ramming attack, and he took the opening for what it was worth, shooting her twice in the shoulder as she shot towards him and dodging to one side. She could see him preparing to bind her as she went past, and at the speed she was going at, she couldn't correct her course enough to hit him now that he had started evading.

She did, however, come close enough to see his face as her Barrier Jacket shone white, and detonated explosively.

Coughing, waving away smoke and nursing her shoulder as the smoke from the explosion cleared and her Barrier Jacket reformed around her, Nanoha winced. Those two shots had been well-placed and powerful. She wasn't going to try that again, that was for sure. A telepathic purr of joy signalled Vesta's approach, and she smiled through the pain at her familiar's happiness.

'Hi, Vesta-chan. Did you have fun?'

'Uh huh! Lots! I chased the mousey all over town like you said, until he turned into a smaller mousey and hid in a hole that I couldn't get at. Are you okay, mistress?'

Nanoha looked down speculatively at the hole in a garage roof that Chrono had made as he fell.

'I'm fine,' she declared. 'Now come on, we have to go and help Fate-chan and Arf-chan, and then get out of here. Fast.' She raised Raising Heart to her lips and kissed the crimson ruby of its core, speaking softly to it out loud. "Just like we went over, Raising Heart. Okay?"

[Let's do our best, master!] Even the mechanical tones of the Device sounded confident, though this was by far the most ambitious spell they had performed yet. It would still take too long to cast, though, unless she could find a lot of ambient mana…

Nanoha's eyes alighted on the cloud of falling paper, still glowing softly as they fluttered through the air, each tinged with a pale shade of violet. Vesta landed beside her, growling happily, and her hand drifted out to stroke the soft, silky fur absently.

"Stay close, Vesta," she said. "Protect me."

And headed back towards the battleground, straight for the centre of the cloud.

She got halfway there without incident. Then things started going wrong. The flashes of gold and orange were holed up between two skyscrapers, and Fate was obviously having trouble. The huge man was stunningly fast and powerful, his Barrier Jacket shrugging off direct hits as he slashed Arf's binds in half and delivered brutal, punishing blows with the haft of his spear. He wasn't using the lethal-looking head, which was perhaps the one small mercy that had prevented Fate from going down already, but she was already heavily favouring one leg, and had an ugly bruise covering the side of her face from where she hadn't dodged fast enough.

Nanoha shouldn't have been paying so much attention to her friend's plight. It was a combat situation, and what she was doing was dangerous, flying into the middle of a battlefield while preparing a complex spell that demanded considerable attention. But her concern won out over her rationality, and so she was trying to pick out details of how badly off her friend was when the woman chose to make herself known.

The fact that Nanoha's Barrier Jacket had almost finished repairing itself from the reactive detonation she had used to take out the Enforcer was the only thing that saved her arm from being broken. The woman appeared out of nowhere on Nanoha's left, freewheeling past her on a road of light at high speed and clipping her upper arm with a gauntleted fist that smashed clean through the Protection spell Raising Heart put up without slowing down. Even the reduced, partial impact was enough to cause a horrible wrench and a blinding stab of pain that almost made Nanoha fall out of the sky before she caught herself. She cried out at the pain of what was probably a dislocated shoulder, ducking away from the road and spinning around frantically, trying to follow its path to locate where the woman was now.

'Give yourself up!' the woman called out telepathically as Nanoha searched for her position. 'Put your hands in the air and surrender, and you will not be harmed!' Nanoha ignored her, eyes flickering around the winding blue tracks to locate their endpoint.

Vesta's scream of warning proved that this was not a good way to find her blindingly quick opponent, and she shot straight downwards just fast enough for another of those bone-shattering punches to breeze over her head. Though it didn't seem quite as powerful as the last. The woman was holding back a little more after dislocating her arm with the first blow.

Even with that, though, her position was not good. Her left arm was unusable, and the woman was too fast for Vesta to react against in time. She had already shown herself able to punch through shields and barriers, and far too much of Nanoha's attention was taken up by the spell she was gathering energy with – energy which she had already soaked up enough of that letting it go again was not a valid option. And it would take her at least another minute to gather enough to cast the spell.

She would not, she knew, last another minute. She had to get to that cloud of paper.

A whirring announced the woman's return, this time heading straight for her. Nanoha screamed, flipping over and flying away as fast as she could. This was not how she wanted to fight. People shouldn't be fast enough to get up in your face like that! The woman was a monster at close range, she had to get away. But somehow, even in free flight, the metal-clad figure was gaining on her, rollerskates sending up twin rows of sparks on the road of light she moved on.

'Vesta!' pleaded Nanoha. Her familiar's understanding was instant and in total agreement with her. She wasn't yet fast enough to intercept the woman's attacks before they hit her mistress, which left one other way of doing her job. Jaws open in a silent roar, the three-metre long tigress leapt back towards their pursuer, muscles coiling and illusion falling away as she pounced in an vicious charge of claws and fangs.

The woman swerved to the side faster than Nanoha would have thought possible, and backhanded her in the ribs. With an audible snapping noise and a strangled yelp, Vesta flew off to one side and fell out of sight, Nanoha's panicked shriek following her.

But that brief reprieve gave Nanoha's terrified mind time to latch onto an observation. The woman was moving on a track. That meant she probably couldn't go straight upwards. Veering through ninety degrees, Nanoha skyrocketed upright, firing half a dozen Divine Shooters down at her monster of an opponent with all the power she could spare. Two missed entirely. One, she simply punched clean through, scattering the motes of light with a casual wave of her hand. The remaining three struck clean and true against her layered metal armour, and utterly failed to even rock her backwards on her heels. For a second, she craned to look up at Nanoha's new altitude, judging it.

Then she gathered herself, and leapt.

The jump took her far beyond anything humanly possible, cresting even higher than the level Nanoha had fled to. As she started to fall again, the road sprang to life ahead of her, a curving downward path leading her straight towards Nanoha. Her rollerblades touched down on the glowing surface as smoothly and naturally as an acrobat born on the high bars and she somehow, impossibly, accelerated even more, shooting down towards Nanoha like an arrow from a bow, her mailed fist cocked back in readiness.

Tears of fear brimming in her eyes, Nanoha threw everything she had left into the strongest bind she could manage. This close, the woman couldn't dodge in time, and the glowing pink bands caught her full in the chest. Without waiting to see the results, Nanoha flipped over and shot towards the still-fluttering cloud that was all that was left of the Jewel Seed's manifestation. All she had to do was reach it in time.

Behind her, a harsh electronic voice barked out something - [Entkettungsknöchel!] - and she felt the bind shatter like glass under a violent wrench. But there was no time to think about that, because the cloud was coming up and she pushed her mana out into the surroundings and pulled

But she could hear the whirring of the rollerblades, even as colour leeched from the pages and the light within her grew. She was almost ready, but she wouldn't be ready fast enough. The woman was an unstoppable juggernaut, ripping through anything she threw at her, and too fast to get away from. Pale and trembling, Nanoha turned…

Just in time to see a grey and black form tackle the approaching woman from the side, knocking her off the light-road completely. 'Mistress!' yelled Vesta, pain clearly evident in her mental voice, 'Hurry! I'll hold her off as long as I can!'

The last of the mana trickled in. It was actually a little more than she might have liked, the air far more supercharged with mana due to the Jewel Seed's rampage, but she would have to accept the corresponding loss of control. It was enough to cast successfully, and that was all that mattered. Below her, she saw the glint of metal as the woman got away from Vesta's savage attempts to maul her and rose, not bothering with a road anymore, pushing herself for true flight. Mentally, she screamed at Fate and Arf, a barrage that was comprised more of images and emotion than words, warning them of what was coming.

And then she pointed Raising Heart out across the city and vaguely upwards, and let loose the energy she had gathered in a voice hoarse from screaming.

"Starlight Breaker!"

The blast cone eclipsed the sky.



It was nothing like the Divine Buster. That was a coherent beam, a concentrated pillar of power sent against one target. This bore as much resemblance to the bombardment technique it had been based on as a tsunami did to a river. The energy erupted from Raising Heart, a cataclysmic outsurging of power that spread and spread and spread, roaring out in a jagged, irregular torrent that shook the sky and made the air around it scream. The light was blinding, the sound was deafening, and everyone airborne dived downwards in an instinctive urge to get away from the deluge, which wasn't so much targeted at any particular point as much as the entire skyline.

Unfortunate high-rise buildings that caught the top of the wave were obliterated, the winds of its passage filled the streets with gales, and the far edge of the dimensional barrier rang like a bell the size of a city as the uncontrolled torrent struck it, battering against it until the last of the raging flames died away, the over-taxed barrier starting to flicker and fade as they did so.

Blinking and battered, shielding their eyes warily in case of another blast, the agents of the TSAB looked around from where they had landed, searching for their opponents.

But to no avail. Ready for the blast where the TSAB hadn't been, the girls had vanished without a trace.



The door to the apartment swung open and Nanoha trudged in, dragging her feet in exhaustion. She had taken the long route home, carefully circling around half the city on foot with her mana suppressed so as not to lead any possible tails back to the penthouse. Moving sluggishly into the main room, she found all three other occupants waiting for her, having already made it home.

There was also a mug of hot chocolate on the low table. Blissfully, she fell onto the couch and cradled it in her right hand, drinking deeply from the warm, soothing liquid and sighing in gratitude. Little ripples covered the surface – she was still trembling, it seemed, and the mug clattered slightly as she carefully put it back down, the pain in her arm a dull ache that made it hard to think straight, or at all.

"… what was that?"

Fate's voice didn't sound angry, or accusatory. In fact, it didn't sound much of anything, she was apparently too exhausted to muster up anything but a dull monotone. Nanoha blinked slowly as her tired mind processed the question, only working out what the other girl meant after a pause of a few seconds.

"Um," she mumbled, "Starlight Breaker. It draws on all the ambient mana from the surroundings to increase the power. I got the idea… from what Vesta-chan said about using ambient mana instead of the Jewel Seeds." She glanced over worriedly at her familiar, who was draped on a soft cushion in kitten form. "Is she okay?"

'I'll live,' croaked Vesta without looking up or opening her eyes. 'You'd make me a happy kitty if you told me you hit the crazy metal lady with that thing, though.'

Nanoha's mouth twitched slightly, but she shook her head. "I don't think so. She was too low. It was meant to be a distraction."

"It succeeded." Fate's eyes fixed on her, before settling into a slight frown. "Your left arm looks wrong. What happened?"

Nanoha cast her mind back. "Ah… the woman. The metal one. With the punching." She rubbed at her stinging eyes with the back of her hand. "She… hit me. I can't move it. It hurts a lot."

Fate shifted a couple of times in her armchair, before looking pleadingly at Arf. Grumbling slightly, the orange wolf nudged her muzzle behind her master and helped push her upright, then quickly moved to steady her as she wobbled alarmingly. Leaning on Arf, she stumbled over and half-sat, half-collapsed onto the couch next to Nanoha. A few seconds of examination, and she sighed.

"Dislocated shoulder. Here." She fumbled around for a moment, before handing Nanoha a cushion. "Bite. This will hurt."

Obligingly, Nanoha swallowed nervously and took a grip on the cushion with her teeth. She felt Fate's gentle hands on her shoulder, feather-light, and tensed slightly.

"Count of three," Fate murmured. "One. Two."

Pain exploded through Nanoha's shoulder as something grated, and her arm popped back into its socket. She bit down hard on the cushion, a strangled scream forcing its way up her throat, and then sagged as the cool wash of healing magic spread through her arm and shoulder, taking the pain away.

"That… should do for the pain," Fate offered, lamely. "Not enough power to make it heal quicker at the moment. Tomorrow, maybe." The bruise on her face was by now an angry purple that covered half her cheek and most of her right eye, and Nanoha suspected she'd been too low on power to fix that, either. Vesta's breathing seemed natural and unpained, though, so it looked as though she had received at least basic treatment for whatever that woman's blow had done to her ribs. Or possibly that as a magical construct, it was easier for her to fix herself. Nanoha didn't know, and was too tired to care. Arf, while the fur made it hard to tell, appeared to be singed and bruised, but nonetheless in the best condition of them all.

"… we should go back to the Garden," breathed Nanoha in defeat, considering the scope of their loss.

"No." Fate's answer was in the same exhausted monotone, but the speed and firmness of it made her position clear.

"We can't win against them," Nanoha argued. "They're too strong. If we try that again, we'll be caught for sure!"

"And if we teleport home, with mages of that calibre in the city," pointed out the blonde without looking at her, "the chances are that they will detect it, and track us back to the Garden. Which will lead them to Mother. And Alicia."

"But-"

"Mother has all of the Jewel Seeds we've gathered so far. We haven't collected any more. We don't have anything here that would help with casting the spell." The crimson gaze settled on her, as implacable and determined as the time that seemed so long ago now, when they had first clashed as rivals for the Jewel Seeds. "She doesn't need us. If we went back, she'd be gaining nothing and risking everything. We stay here."

For that, Nanoha had no reply. Bowing her head, she shifted over to rest slightly against Fate's shoulder, on the side opposite the impact that had bruised her face. Closing her eyes, she shivered, curling closer to Fate's warmth.

"… okay," she said. A pause. "I'm scared, though."

Shifting. A faint impact, and a brief padding. A small, furry form clambered up onto the couch and rested in her lap, purring reassuringly. Another warm presence, this one large and heavy, lay down at their feet, and Fate's hand searched out her own in the space between them.

"I know," said Fate. "Me too."

Blue eyes blinked sleepily at the admission, but the demands of stress and exhaustion overrode that of surprise, and they drifted closed. Red ones followed them less than a minute later.

Silence fell, save for scared, shallow sounds of breathing and the wind outside the windows.

It would be a long night.