Arisa whipped fire towards the black-winged familiar as he leapt into the air to pursue her. He dodged a bolt, letting it hit the bare concrete floor below, then blocked a second one with his forearm. It looked like he was doing it with ease, though she had no idea how it was really affecting him. He snapped his wings out, coming to a stop in midair, and began conjuring a spell of his own.
"Like stars falling from the night sky," he incanted, yellow-green "bullets" of shooting magic forming around him as he did so, "descend upon my enemy. Meteor Shower!"
Six bursts of magic fired towards her. Arisa retreated and dodged in the air, but the shots arced to follow her, guided by Tengu's will. One of the shots near the edge of the cluster grazed the wall, detonating there, but the others continued to pursue her. She dove back down, turning intangible, and passed through a bank of lab equipment that looked like it had come from some TV hospital show. The lead two shots crashed into the device before Tengu could react, making the others dive out and around after the fleeing ghost, zipping at her from different angles. Arisa zigged when she should have zagged as she dodged into the air and one of the shots blasted her left foot. She squealed in pain, the sudden shock making her stop moving, and the last two shots raced towards her from the front. With no time to dodge, she called up fire almost on reflex. The magical bullets crashed into her makeshift shield; Arisa's arms trembled as she felt the impact, but her defense held.
The fires started by the various destructive blasts that had gone off were starting to get beyond the staff's haphazard attempts to control them. Clouds of smoke began to rise, making Arisa glad that she didn't have to breathe.
"You can't keep this up all night," Tengu warned. His croaking voice was eerie and inhuman on account of the crow's beak he was speaking from.
"Quoth me to the raven: get stuffed," Arisa snapped back, unleashing two fist-sized fireballs at him. He blocked one and dodged the second, but she was learning fast; the second blast reversed course and swept backwards to take Tengu in the back, adding the stench of burnt feathers to the smoke.
Screeching in rage, he launched another Meteor Shower at her, but this time Arisa was ready. Instead of dodging within the room she simply flew straight backwards and passed through the roof, luring the shots into the solid object.
Just because intangibility won't help me against his magic directly doesn't mean that I can't use it in other ways!
She popped back into the lab and struck out at Tengu again.
"I'd think you'd be good at this," she mocked him. "Don't crows usually spend their time preying on stuff that's already dead?"
"Fucking bitch!" he howled, and unleashed a pair of crackling spheres the size of basketballs, which detonated bomb-like in midair when they neared her. Arisa got a shield up in the nick of time but even so she felt the bleed-through tear into her. She reeled in the air and he was on top of her, his right arm swinging like a thunderbolt to almost literally rip the front half of her skull off with his clawed hand. That was purely physical damage, though, and so it caused no pain and inflicted no permanent harm. Arisa slammed her palms against his body and called up fire once more; he screamed as it engulfed him and he went spiraling down to the floor. The flames died out, but he looked shaky getting to his feet.
The heat and smoke, meanwhile, had apparently reached some threshold level. The sprinkler system went off, spraying a steady rain of water from over a dozen roof-mounted nozzles. It was starting to become an effort for Arisa, but she sent another firebolt down on Tengu; he blocked it but it drove him down to his knees.
"Enough, enough, enough!" shrilled the voice of Tengu's master, and in the next instant glowing blue shackles seized Arisa around the wrists, ankles, and waist. She tried to fade to intangibility, but even in that state the binding magic held her fast. "Finish her off, so we can go!"
Tengu rose to his feet, shaking his head to try and recover from the effects of Arisa's assault. Whatever he was going to do, she was a sitting duck for it. The crow familiar flexed his hands and rolled his neck; apparently she'd been giving him a good working over until his master had decided to butt in and save his feathered behind.
"Arisa!"
Damn it, she's awake.
"Suzuka, look away! You don't need to watch this!"
"Arisa, no!"
Tengu raised his hand, another crackling ball of energy beginning to form in his palm. If a beak without flexible lips could be said to sneer smugly, he was somehow pulling it off.
"Arisa!"
There was a loud grating, squealing sound from the table as Suzuka literally managed to bend the frame of the gurney as she tried to wrestle free from the shackles. Tengu and the man Arisa presumed was Morris both spun towards the sound, Tengu breaking off his spell.
"Ah, must emotion always demand recalculation of a person's capabilities?" the skeletal man complained, then jolted Suzuka back with another binding spell that chained her down more firmly. "Finish her, Tengu, did you not hear me?" he snapped, gesturing at Arisa.
The reprieve had ended, then, Arisa realized. Suzuka's efforts had bought her only a few seconds. Tengu's sneer returned as he looked up at the bound ghost.
Oddly, though, those few seconds proved to be enough.
Fire, water, smoke, and alarm klaxons were joined by an explosive blast as the back wall was ripped open.
"Ephraim Morris and Tengu, you are under arrest for the unauthorized use of magic against the sapient natives of a non-administered world! Surrender immediately and you will be given the right to defend yourself at trial."
"Whaaat?" Morris keened, staring at the figure that emerged from the smoke. Lindy Harlaown, Admiral, Time-Space Administration Bureau Navy (Ret.) strode with measured pace through the gap she'd created. She wore the blue jacket and crisply pressed white trousers of her old uniform, with dragonfly-like fairy wings of shining golden light at her back. Arisa had only known this woman as Fate's sweet and caring adoptive mother; seeing her like this made the blonde realize how it was that she had attained flag rank in the Bureau.
"No!" the professor hissed. "No, I will not be stopped! I am so close to a breakthrough! Tengu!"
The familiar spun away from Arisa and charged Lindy, while Morris tried to cast a binding spell to trap the Admiral. A blue-green rune sprung up around Lindy's feet, her wings buzzed, and the sky-blue coils shattered even as they tried to form around her.
"Round Shield!"
The shield spell sprang up from her upraised palm; Tengu crashed into it and bounced off. Lindy kept her hand up as streams of viridian light swirled out of the air to gather in her palm. Morris shrank back away, apparently recognizing at least some of what was about to happen.
"From the sky comes your destruction!" Tengu incanted.
"Eternity..."
"Midnight Striker!"
"Breaker!"
The two spells were cast all but simultaneously, blasting from the combatant's outstretched palms towards one another. It would be inaccurate to say that they clashed; Lindy's Eternity Breaker blew straight through Tengu's buster without any apparent pause, scattering its energies, and slammed into the familiar, lifting him off his feet. Arisa wasn't completely sure if it had knocked him unconscious on impact, but was fairly certain that by the time the cannon-style breaker had carried him not only through the laboratory wall but the three rooms beyond he wouldn't be getting up anytime soon.
Lindy flicked one white-gloved hand towards Arisa. A blue-green haze surrounded the magical bonds and they shattered. At once Arisa summoned up fire again while Lindy freed Suzuka.
She fired a blast through the sprinkler spray, but as it neared Morris, pale blue light surged up around him and he vanished.
"What the--? Where'd he go?"
"Short-range teleport," Lindy said. "I couldn't seal off the area with a barrier without a support team; that isn't one of my talents."
"Then the bastard's getting away?" she swore, descending to land next to Suzuka.
"Only for the moment; we have his familiar and can track him through the link between them. But Arisa, I never knew that you had magical abilities."
"It sort of came with the 'being dead' thing." Since Lindy had shattered the professor's binding spell, Arisa was able to work the bolts loose and free Suzuka from the gurney. "Are you okay?" she asked, helping the other girl to her feet.
"I was so scared!" Suzuka exclaimed, seizing Arisa in a fierce hug the instant she was upright. "When I saw that monster attacking you--and then when the professor caught you with that spell my heart nearly stopped!"
"Me? What about you? Did that lunatic do anything to you? Do you need any medical help?"
"I'm all right, I think. When I was awake he just ran a couple of tests on me with some kind of scanning devices, so nothing really bad happened. Besides," she added softly and cupped Arisa's cheek in her palm, "I have everything I need right here." She drew her girlfriend in for a warm, lingering kiss.
"Suzuka..."
Lindy interrupted them, chuckling.
"Well, that's something else I didn't know. I hate to spoil the reunion, but we need to get away from here before the fire department and police respond to the alarms. Before that, though, I think we need to destroy these computers. Sharing TSAB technology isn't necessarily an offense, but leaving it in the hands of these people is extremely irresponsible."
"Yeah, if magical technology is going to get into Earth's hands, I sure don't want it to be through the Sato Institute Special Projects Group!" Arisa said. "And Morris has been stopped, since I'm sure whatever he was up to wasn't going to be good for anyone, so that's a good thing."
"I just wish it hadn't cost so many lives," said Suzuka. "You, and Falin, and I even feel a little bit sorry for the Sato people and the kidnappers."
"Well, I don't," Arisa said. "You lay down in scum, you end up covered in rot. And Falin's not dead."
"What?" Suzuka's face lit up with excitement.
"Nah, her body's a wreck but Noel got her memory core out intact. It's mostly a matter of building her a new body now. That's why I came alone, because Noel's making sure she's all right."
"I'm so glad."
"So come on, let's take Lindy's advice and get you home and out of these wet things."
"Arisa, so bold..." Suzuka with a shy tone of voice but laughing eyes.
"Argh, I didn't mean it like that!" Only now that Suzuka had said it, Arisa couldn't help but notice the way her girlfriend's white blouse clung to her torso.
"Too bad."
"...I've created a monster," Arisa laughed, and claimed another kiss to make sure Suzuka knew she was joking. And it was easier than breaking down in tears of relief in front of Lindy. A girl had to have some dignity, after all.
Elantra was waiting for him on the beach as promised. The moonlight glinted off the waves and painted the sand silver, adding a touch of mystery to the scene that Professor Morris didn't even notice.
"Excellent! Yes, yes, you're here!" he panted.
"My employer had the chance to review your submission, so coming here was fortuitous," she responded. "Now, what's all this about? Why did you need a face-to-face meeting?"
"I need your help to relocate," Morris said. "Those stupid, shortsighted fools in the TSAB found me! First the subject's annoying pest of a friend, and then an official raid destroyed my lab." A solid-light keyboard appeared beneath his fingers and a few strokes opened a screen that showed the TSAB officer who'd ruined his plans.
"Lindy Harlaown," Elantra said. "A retired admiral, currently Director of Liaisons, who settled on this world and now maintains an informal TSAB field office here in addition to her regular duties."
"You know her. You know her?"
"We have better sources of intelligence about local conditions than you do," she said dismissively. "I presume you took precautions against being followed?"
"A series of short-range teleports, enough to shake off any tracking capacity, even if they had a ship's sensors."
"Which they probably don't."
"But that fool Tengu was no doubt captured by them. My familiar!"
Elantra nodded.
"Then the TSAB could follow your connection right to you, given the proper time and equipment. Even if you went to Africa or Europe or the Americas, it wouldn't be enough."
"Exactly. I need to relocate to another world entirely. There I can begin again. I can press on with my work!"
"And you want my employer's support for that." It wasn't a question.
"Yes, yes! My breakthroughs, my vision can't be stopped now! They can't be set aside just because of stupid, stupid, stupid restrictions on necessary experiments! Shortsighted fools, all of them, to place outdated morality before science!"
"My employer would have to agree with that," Elantra noted. "However, there is a problem."
Morris didn't bother to hide his disgust.
"Money. Concerned only with how to profit from knowledge, like all corporations--"
She shook her head.
"On the contrary. It's a purely scientific question. The top mind in TSAB-administered space has, as I said, reviewed what you provided. Your work with non-traditional methods of tapping and expressing magical power is intriguing, but the examples you cite from this world are limited and inefficient. Ultimately, they are a curiosity. And your research into the genetic origins behind the natives' tendency towards extraordinary magical potential is superficial at best. The ancient Belkan records we've uncovered, fragmentary as they are, go much further. So you see, there's not much point in financing someone whose 'breakthroughs' don't even reach our current level of knowledge."
"Impossible!" Morris screeched. "No corporation could have access to--"
Elantra's lips twisted into a thin smile.
"But, Professor, I don't represent a corporation."
Her image seemed to swirl, and in the next instant he was staring at a blonde woman in a close-fitting bodysuit in shades of blue. But how? I didn't detect any illusion magic--?
"The Doctor believes it would be very inconvenient if the Bureau was able to trace his location through you. Particularly since the association with an inept failure like yourself would be too humiliating for him to..."
Due sighed. Morris's eyes were already glazing over.
"That's the trouble with you. For as long as I've known you, you can't be bothered to listen."
She slipped her clawed hand out of the dead man's chest, then quickly searched his body and removed his personal communications unit. Leaving him crumpled where he lay, she walked down towards the shore, where a violet-haired child waited patiently for her, no reaction on her face despite witnessing a bloody murder.
"Come, Lutecia, take me home," Due said. "There's nothing fun here."
Arisa & Friends Omake Theater!
Scenes From Uminari City
"Again! This is the third time that the Clover Organization has been humiliated by these Takamachis and their friends. Well, no more! We're going to teach them a lesson. The youngest child's gym class scores prove that she, at least, isn't a martial artist. She'll be easy prey!"
- - - - -
"Your Honor, the defendant is charged with one count of battery and one count of misdemeanor sexual contact. Offense committed at 1:41 p.m., arrest at...1:42 p.m.?"
"Believe me, I wouldn't have tried to feel up the waitress if I'd known that maid café was the local cop bar!"
- - - - -
"So this year's graduating class includes an air combat mage from a family of ninja, an air combat mage who's an alien clone, the inheritor of a centuries-old tome of black magic and its Guardian Knights, a vampire raised by androids, and a half-foreign ghost. Whatever happened to the days when a transfer student from Osaka was something unusual and exciting?"
- - - - -
"Accel Shooter."
"You know, Raising Heart, we should thank Kyouya-niichan for lending us his villains. I always feel like I'm getting out of shape here on Earth without any live-fire exercises."
"It was very courteous of them, too, my master."
"Think...nothing...of...it..."