Divergence
"Where's Agito?" Yuuno asked.
"Agito developed irreconcilable differences with Signum. I had to transfer her." Hayate explained, without actually explaining anything. Eyebrows went up, but no one pressed the issue. No one except Nanoha, and she had the good sense to wait and ask Signum later.
"What happened, Signum?" Nanoha was forthright.
"I...made a mistake. Thoughtlessly I performed an action and thoughtlessly I dragged Agito along into a rather traumatic experience." Signum replied, cautious.
"Have you tried to make it up to her?" Nanoha tended to make people think she was blind to the feelings and concerns of others, but it was a selective blindness, a deliberate falsity. Nanoha regarded her conscience as sovereign and acted according to it without regard to the feelings of others; but she was deeply aware of them and in her own way quite empathic.
Signum regarded Nanoha quietly for a moment, then spoke. "I made her go through the experience of being both murderer and murdered, Nanoha. I do not believe that what you suggest is possible."
Nanoha shook her head hard. "Never admit defeat. Especially," a cheerful grin, "to me."
Signum shook her head. "Try not to do your reputation for psychosis any favors, Nanoha. I am not one of your trainees." Signum was not in the mood for any antics from the Ace of Aces.
Nanoha smiled her most-innocuous smile. The Ace of Aces was utterly incapable of appearing sinister or frightening even at her angriest. This was not, however, the same as incapable of actually being sinister. It was a lesson Signum saw demonstrated before her now. There was absolutely nothing threatening about Nanoha at this moment she could point to, not her body language, her expression, the way she moved or the look in her eyes. All of it suggested harmless amusement.
But still the Wolkenritter crushed an urge to shiver. Harmless as she appeared, the Ace of Aces was anything but, and some unknown thing was eager to remind Signum of that.
To see a Wolkenritter in action was to witness the perfection of the martial art. There was something hypnotic about it, an inhuman grace and a complete absence of mistakes. You could not exploit flaws in technique as such against a Wolkenritter. They were still handicapped by their choices of weapon to some extent, it was true.
In the end though, the only way to reliably defeat a Wolkenritter in a straight fight was to bury them. Overwhelm their ability to keep track of their opponents with too many warm bodies and hope for someone to land hits that mattered. Bloody, inelegant, but effective.
Signum did not participate in training today. Hayate had grounded her, even taken Levantine away as a symbolic gesture, though since it was by Hayate's order Signum would never violate it. Nanoha would not have this and had come over to argue the point with her nominal commanding officer. "You can't punish her this way, Hayate." Nanoha said simply. It was presented as a statement of fact rather than a opinion.
"I am her commanding officer, Nanoha, I can punish her however I want." Hayate replied testily.
"No. You can't. Punishment must not only work to punish the wrongdoer, it must serve the greater good. Grounding Signum does not do that." Nanoha's voice grew softer. "And you don't seem to realize how badly it will hurt a kensai to be forced to lay down their weapon."
Kensai. Nanoha remembered her Japanese heritage more strongly than Hayate did, or at least made reference to it more. To be a legend in the use of the blade, a sword-saint. Even Musashi had only been widely hailed with the title after he was dead, but Hayate was reasonably certain that Signum could have left Miyamoto Musashi an interesting stain upon the floor. The Wolkenritter knew far more about the use of a blade then mortal humans could ever learn.
Yes, the title was deserved. And in it Hayate could see Nanoha's reasoning. The blade, the use of the blade, was as much a part of Signum has her right arm. Hayate felt a moment's horror, a sudden sensation she was slipping off the edge of a cliff with only endless blackness below her. And I tell myself I'd never cut off her arm, but I already have!
"Signum." Hayate called out. Her most senior knight turned and was surprised to find Levantine's storage form had been tossed to her. She caught it with a questioning look. Hayate waved her towards the training field. "Don't ask. Just get out there."
Signum did not display how startled she felt, but did as told. Nanoha patted Hayate on the back. "You did the right thing."
Hayate regarded her closest friend with a questioning look. "You knew I'd freak out. You knew." Being unlike the Wolkenritter's previous masters was one of Hayate's greatest goals in life; to treat them different, treat them better, care about their feelings and their needs. It wasn't always easy. They were conditioned so strongly to suffer in silence that realizing when she had done something wrong was difficult.
Nanoha smiled and shrugged, projecting her best image of harmlessness. "You aren't the only one concerned by the amount of power you have over their lives, Colonel Yagami."
Signum was moping again, though not lonely. The others did not worry as much, but they did worry. Only Zafira did not, but he kept it to himself.
The wolf was both the most and the least human of them, at the same time usually. The two things were inextricably linked. Because he could be the wolf, he'd been best able to protect himself from ten thousand years of insanity and abuse. It had been Zafira who had retained his ability to laugh, Zafira who had still been able to appreciate the irony and occasional unintentional comedy of the grim existence that being a Wolkenritter had turned out to have been before Hayate came along.
He had been the wolf so that he could cling fiercely to his humanity, and the humor in that wasn't lost on him either. The humor of Signum's situation also wasn't lost on him either. They'd gotten used to thinking of themselves as beyond the errors and frailties of humans, but Signum's mistake fighting her clone was getting her a crash-course in the fact that she only qualified as a demigod, and only on her good days.
And Zafira thought she'd be better, stronger, for it. A wise person never considered themselves perfect, and Signum was providing the Wolkenritter with a useful reminder of this.
Agito had been...adapting. She had started with having two roommates rather than one. Tre had made space for Agito's things amid the Number's own, though in truth there was room enough for her to move into either of the two's personal items storage space aboard ship, as both only packed the regulation clothing and toiletries were the ship's problem. Tre hadn't had time to accumulate much in the way of non-standard personal items. Samuel simply didn't pack any.
Perhaps she'd find out why, Agito thought. She liked Samuel, but in many respects she didn't really know him. This didn't bother her much, she hadn't known Signum very well either at first. Samuel was compatible, he was a fighter, he wasn't a lunatic, and he wanted to work with her. The rest would sort itself out.
And there was nothing quite like combat duty to get to know someone with. They'd participated in three raids against New Belkan facilities since Agito had become part of Team Seventy. And Samuel was genuinely rather different from Signum in that, in ways that had surprised Agito.
It was a subtle effect, one she doubted she would notice but for their Unisons, but he seemed more...animated, more alive, in combat or planning for combat. It wasn't, though, against merely flesh-and-blood enemies. Simulation and practice against live opponents seemed to do the same.
That was comforting. Agito had never actually known somebody who liked fighting, but at least Samuel seemed able to channel it into non-destructive outlets if necessary. And the planning part suggested there was more to it than a love of combat.
So she confronted him about it. Samuel was sitting at a table in the mess, doing paperwork...which in the Bureau was no longer done on paper. He leaned back slowly and regarded Agito in silence for several seconds. "I don't make a deal of it. It's not the sort of thing you can say in polite company without sounding like a barbarian. Well, at least with the job I have. If I were a civvie I expect it'd be reasonably normal and I'd just play games."
Agito crossed her arms and flitted down to stand on the table. "You're dancing around the point."
A faint smile. "Yeah. It's easy. Some people have hobbies. I have my job. Some people do crossword puzzles. I solve tactical problems. That's my idea of fun." Samuel's smile faded and he shook his head. "I imagine you've had this conversation with Signum about swordplay."
Agito blinked a couple times in quick succession. "Uh...no, actually. Though I see your point." It really was the only thing Signum ever showed passion about, the only thing aside from her work that she actively pursued. If, Agito thought, you could really separate swordplay from Signum's job.
"So. I do this because I like it and I'm good at it." Samuel shrugged. "Am I too psychotic for you?"
"Not yet." Agito replied. "Do you, perhaps, also enjoy killing people?"
Samuel was silent a moment. "Enjoy? No. But I won't pretend that I don't take satisfaction in a job well done, and my job often happens to involve hurting or killing people. You know that." And she did. Three separate combat actions had taught her that her new partner was actually very different from her old one. In some ways, he was better for it. Certainly he was more easily related to for the Unison Device. Signum's ageless qualities, her endless confidence, they were in their own way intensely intimidating. Samuel still gave the impression he felt things when he fought, even if it didn't seem to affect him very often.
"Anyways. About that question you asked, making Unison less flashy. I think I can do it." Agito said. "But why?"
Samuel grinned, and it was not kind. "If you look different, more people attack you. If you look the same, fewer people realize what a danger you are."
It was an experiment. No one had, to Agito's knowledge, ever tried to suppress the external signs of a Unison before. It wasn't something that would have occurred to the mind of the Belkans, either old or new, who had Unison Devices. Really only Hayate might have tried before now, and Hayate never did.
It was a measure of how ignorant the Bureau was on the subject of Unison Devices that this little experiment, with a trivial outcome and purpose, was actually to be observed by two high-profile research mages and Mariel Atenza was running a variety of scanning devices. Even something this simple was essentially unknown.
It didn't take long. Almost immediately after Unison, Samuel had managed to suppress the most obvious sign, the changing color of his Barrier Jacket, without Agito's help. A little assistance from her and about ten minutes working out how and they'd managed to suppress the color changes of hair and eyes.
Though not without side effects. Little sourceless flames eddied in his wake when he moved. When he opened his mouth to speak, there were flames, and though they did not stray beyond his lips the effect caused Mariel to shiver. It only accentuated the bizarre and somewhat threatening way his eyes reflected flames that did not exist in the real world.
Agito. His voice was calm, not the calm of combat, a simple no-threat no-worry calm. So this was easy. Think we can make it more flashy?
A moment. Hold out your hand palm out. Agito replied, clearly concentrating. They still had to make an effort at conversing, though occasional flashes of thought had begun to slip through, an experience normal to Agito but somewhat disconcerting to Samuel. Agito tended to be a little too eager for his taste. Samuel held out his hand with the palm out, and then, in the subtle stereo of a Unison, spoke. "Spear."
The jet of flame was white, and the temperature in the room spiked alarmingly while flame itself actually melted a sizable hole in one of the walls before Samuel managed to get his hand closed.
"The hell just happened?" Samuel demanded of Agito, who had the good grace to look embarrassed.
"I'm not sure. I really didn't expect that." Agito replied, and looked over towards where Mariel and the two research mages were conferring in hushed tones. "Can anyone tell us what we just managed to do?" She raised her voice and injected a touch of demand in that.
Mariel looked up, and for a moment with her eyes wide and a guilty expression looked incongruously like she'd been caught passing notes by the teacher. "We aren't entirely sure either. What we do know is that you should be dead, Commander. The heat eddying off that should have cooked you, but the Unison somehow protected you from it. That flame was hot enough to match stellar fusion." Mariel frowned. "If you hadn't closed your hand you would have kept punching holes in bulkheads until we ran out of Starburst Station or it ran out of range."
Samuel looked vaguely queasy. Being Navy meant knowing a lot about what happened when you tried to breathe hard vacuum or the Dimensional Sea, the better to keep you from doing something that might cause it. "The station is over a hundred kilometers wide. I don't think I'd have managed to vent the compartment when we're more than twenty kilometers below the outer hull."
"The raw level of the discharge was low, nothing like what Signum can do," Mariel noted that Agito shivered but didn't understand why, "but it was very concentrated. You could easily cut through any known substance and the majority of Barrier Jackets with that in a second or two."
Samuel rubbed his face a moment. "Great. The world's best blowtorch. Not very useful if I kill people who happen to be standing around."
Agito, meanwhile, was reading Mariel's body language. The two were reasonably familiar, since Mariel more or less served as Agito's personal physician. And right now, Mariel looked guilty. "Hey, Doc! 'fess up!" Agito called.
The guilty look got prominent enough even Samuel could read it. "There's a possibility observing that gave us some data we didn't have about the mechanics of a Unison that might fill in a critical hole in our knowledge about Unison Devices. And could potentially allow us to create," Samuel and Agito both noted that Mariel had self-edited another word out and used 'create' instead, "more of them."
Agito and Samuel looked equally dismayed. And though the reason was the same, as they both envisioned guinea pig assignments, the details were different. Agito had nightmares about that. Samuel wanted to be out making a difference.