The outcome of this scene had to be altered from the original concept to avoid detracting from the fact this is Aurica and Misha's arc. I'm hoping this doesn't mess up the foreshadowing, since there was going to be a reveal in there relevant to what will happen in the fic after Harmonious is sung. This delayed the chapter, obviously, because I had to try to figure out how to rework all that. Still, the fact it turned out this way let me establish a few other things that will become relevant very soon, so I'm much happier with this chapter than this week's chapter of Defintion. Still, notice that this is the one I waited until after Friday to post...

"So what are we singing?" Misha asked, as the Seraph blocked the Guardian's blade with her own. Whatever they were doing, they'd better decide quick.

"Well, they need to be able to harmonize… And I've never been able to do that," Aurica confessed. "It's one of the reasons I wasn't ranked very highly…" She'd wondered if that was why Lyner had never asked her and Misha to sing together, until a conversation at an inn revealed that Lyner had never noticed she had a problem with it. He'd just thought that since they were doing a lot of walking, which wasn't good for reyvateils, they should at least be able to rest their voices as much as possible. It was military doctrine that during long battles, the reyvateils fought in shifts, so he'd asked whichever of them was least tired to sing. Just like he'd change the front line fighters if they got tired, provided there was someone to take their place.

It was typical Lyner, really, that he'd never taken a break himself until Ayatane forced him to. He'd always been in the vanguard.

As a pure-blooded beta type, Misha didn't need to worry about dying prematurely from telomere damage because her metabolism was too high, but she'd also been locked up in a room almost all her life, while Aurica had been training to become a holy maiden and going on missions with the church knights. So the singing had been rougher on Aurica than on Misha, and the walking had been tougher for Misha than Aurica.

"Well, songs that harmonize are more powerful songs, right?" Misha pointed out.

"You think it's because I was afraid of power, and of opening my heart to people?"

"Why not? Well, another reason could be that you're a third generation and the tower was giving you a beta type's amount of song magic power by mistake," hymn codes were supposed to make sure that didn't happen, but Aurica had Mir's, "so it was already hard to control and trying to harmonize with another third generation would make it a lot worse." Since suddenly they would be trying to deal with a level of power they hadn't been bred to handle, and hadn't spent their entire life dealing with the way Aurica had. "But I'm a beta-type, and I've sung Chronicle Key. Too much power isn't going to be a problem," Misha said, grinning like she was boasting.

It wasn't a boast.

The harsh training Leard had put her through, and his ancestors had put her ancestresses through, had a point. Most reyvateils would stop singing when their systems alerted them that they were handling too much power, that it was starting to burn them out and do permanent damage. That was probably what had happened to the church reyvateils that had tried to sing with Aurica. Misha, on the other hand?

She'd keep singing no matter what. Even if it killed her.

She'd been born, bred and raised to be a sacrifice for the world, after all.

"We ca-Ah!" Aurica cried out, as the Guardian finally managed to dive past the Seraph!

"Forgive me!" the seraph cried, but it was Marlone that knocked him away.

It wasn't so much the force of the blow that did it – any version of Lyner had a trained stance, and a knight getting knocked out of the way so the enemy could use the opening and attack the reyvateil was bad – but the bomb in her hand. "This is tougher than it looks," Marlone said, scowling, as she jumped back herself to let the Seraph dive in, the momentum forcing him back further while he was still off-balance and keeping him from attacking the weaker Marlone.

Marlone's words reminded Aurica of overheard conversations among the knights. Reyvateils had the easy job, didn't they? They just hung back there and sang, while the knights did all the work, and then they'd screech if they got hit once, while the knights were out there getting attacked constantly. And they said they were tired, when the knights were the ones swinging heavy swords around?

The reyvateils, on the other hand, thought that if the knights couldn't recognize hard work when they saw it, then they were the ones who were whining.

"…Why don't I use a blue magic," Misha proposed, because if the guardian was getting through their guards, then what about… Mir was gathering power for a song magic.

Why hadn't they sensed that until now.

"It won't do any good, we'll have to power up fast and hit her before she hits us!" Aurica looked at Misha. "There's one song magic we both have." Aurica wasn't sure if she could do this, especially with such a powerful song magic, but she'd learned that determination mattered. She didn't know if she could do this or not, but she had to do this, for Radolf and Mir and the entire tower, so she would.

Was Misha with her?

"Right!" Of course she was, and Aurica had made the right call. No blue magic was going to protect them from the level of power Mir could channel. Even the ones that absorbed damage could only take so much. Marlone could handle the healing – they'd seen that on the way here.

They might not have been so confident if they'd heard what the Seraph was saying to the Guardian, as their blades clashed ground against each other. Even though she was calling on the tower for strength, she knew he had to be able to do the same thing, and, "You're going easy on me." Why?

"You're a reyvateil." That didn't stop him from doing something involving a sharp and sudden twist of his blade followed by a thrust that almost knocked her sword out of her hand. "And a rookie. Why aren't you using a spear?" Like Radolf. "You knowledge of…" he dodged to the left to avoid being buffeted by one of her wings – they might look white and ornamental, but a swan's wings could break bones. "Fighting is limited." And she'd had more years to study Radolf's style than Lyner's. "You're imitating a style. My style." The defensive art Platina had honed over centuries, to hold the line. Ayatane might use two swords, and there were certainly others whose body types weren't suited to it or preferred other weapons, but the Guardian was far past a master. Protecting reyvateils was the core of this aspect of Lyner's being, after all.

"Aurica thinks swords are more heroic." Even though the statue of the guardian…

"And what do you think?" he asked her, tilting his head as he studied her, looking for an opening.

"…I'm part of Aurica."

"And you have to agree with her, even when you'd be better able to protect her if you fought with a spear?" She could fly. A weapon that gave her a longer reach would be a massive advantage. "Even cosmosphere avatars… You don't know what you are, do you?" he wondered. "Or what you almost were."

"…What?" she asked, forced to use a wingbeat to help her dodge, wincing as that let him slice deep into her right wing. At least Marlone took care of it with a potion, after she took advantage of the fact that the Seraph had finally pulled back from the Guardian to hit him with a handful of small bombs.

"I thought…" he said, although no one could hear him over the explosions. Finally, he shook his head.

And lowered his sword. "Mir! Are you going to fight or aren't you?"

The black behemoth looked at him. A lesser man – or being, since avatars were only fragments of men or women – would have quailed back. He met her eyes, his own hard, although it didn't stop him from lashing out with his sword to hit one of Marlone's bombs back at her.

"How did he do that?" Marlone wondered, ignoring the pain as she got another Healy-C out of her pocket. It wasn't a serious injury, but burns were distracting. "He's using the tower's cameras!" she yelled to Seraph. Because there was no way he could have seen that bomb coming otherwise. Not and hit it so perfectly.

"Song," Misha said, her eyes distant, her arms spreading as if to embrace the world. That was what she sang for now, that was what the tower meant to her. It was always where she had sung, but now, someday soon, she would sing free.

"Harmony," was Aurica's answer, reaching up to the heavens.

"Grant us power!" they called, and the tower answered. The guardian, the seraph, Marlone, Mir – even Shurelia felt it.

The guardian had to cover his eyes then, so the light didn't blind him, but when he lowered his arm he went right back to staring down the Mother Virus. "Aurica is young, but her power is the equal of yours," the guardian reminded Mir, even as the Seraph and Marlone turned to light and vanished, all of Aurica's heart dedicated to this song. "Misha is your nemesis. The only way for me to stop them from singing now is to kill one of them, and when they release this song it will destroy both of our manifestations here. They'll win and take Harmonius. But you don't want me to kill Aurica, I'm sure, and as for you… You're reminding me of when Bourd thought he could use Misha to attack her friends: you're hesitating. When you fought them before, you didn't fight like this. You're just charging that up, and charging it up, and every guardian worth their salt knows how to judge how much power a song magic has. You can't expect me to believe that's the limit of your abilities.

"You're not putting your heart into that song," he accused her. "It's not just that you aren't drawing power from me: I expected that. None of the scum that raised you thought you could care: they never taught you to turn that into power." It was simple math: say people cared so much about themselves. Add the amount they cared about a second person to that? And a third, and a fourth?

He'd thrown himself in front of some of Marlone's bombs for her sake. The reyvateils Lyner had grown up with, or almost any decent person? That would have meant something to them.

He hadn't expected Mir to care about him. He hadn't expected gratitude for something she hadn't asked him to do in the first place. Part of the reason he'd said that he wasn't doing it for her was because otherwise he'd been quite sure she wouldn't accept the help, not from someone who had been a human, who fought like a human and symbolized, to her, humans and their hypocrisy in claiming to protect reyvateils.

He was a guardian, like Misha's Yasha. Meant to serve and protect, without ego. If he wouldn't mind death, he certainly wouldn't balk at not being thanked. It would have been ridiculous to expect her to care what happened to him, from the Guardian's perspective.

He did expect her to care about herself.

The guardians and their pains didn't matter. The reyvateils did. Reyvateils were not supposed to be harmed, and now Mir was going to just let herself be hurt? Again? "I said I would protect you, but I cannot protect you if you do not want to be protected. What if I was to try to kill Misha to protect you? What then? Would you unleash that song on me?" He shook his head slowly, eyes still not leaving those inhuman ones. "Are you willing to fight them to protect yourself, or not?"

The behemoth bared its teeth as the light around Misha and Aurica flared.

"I won't kill one reyvateil for the sake of another who doesn't even care if she lives or dies," he said angrily, sheathing his sword. Then he bowed his head. "Forgive me." It wasn't her fault: he had no right to be angry at her. "But now is the time. Strike now, or they will take the crystal," he reminded her.

Mir's power pulsed above her head, a dark halo as she looked at the two of them. They weren't singing aloud, but she could still hear it, the hymn words their hearts spoke as they communed with the tower.

She hesitated. Or rather, she realized that she'd been hesitating this entire battle. When she'd fought them before, there hadn't been anyone to keep the vanguard off her. Her anger at the humans who dared strike her had interrupted her and she hadn't even really tried to sing powerful songs, instead using other powers.

Why had she suddenly decided to fight like a partnered reyvateil?

Had she wanted an excuse to stand back and… not do nothing, but not do anything that would hurt her daughter?

What had happened to her as she slept? Where was the killer instinct that had destroyed one of the Wings of Horus without remorse?

But those were humans and collaborators. This is your daughter.

And here it came.

She could have retreated, or rather withdrawn the virus she used as her avatar before the song hit it. Purger meant that attacks in the real world could damage programs now, and it would take time to repair it.

Frozen, she didn't. She/it just stood there, trying to understand what the hell she was doing.

At least she understood why the guardian didn't withdraw, let himself be engulfed by the tower's heart, by her daughter's heart, by power akin to the sun's heart alongside her.

Cosmosphere avatars were proverbially insane, after all.