Waves lapped around Flint's ankles where she stood at the edge of the shore and stared down Garnet. The water beneath the gangly Quartz roiled, and a halo of steam rippled off of her body. Her smirk rippled in the superheated air as her puff of red hair phoomphed dry and stood upright. "Do you feel that, Doublet? That quiver deep inside your stones? That's fear," Flint told Garnet, sneering through the last of the steam. "Bet you haven't felt that in a long time, safe and isolated on this ball of rubble with your Off-Color friends."

Garnet didn't budge. Gauntlets at her sides, the fusion stood at the shoreline with her back to the temple, her stance unreadable, unconcerned but focused entirely on the threat that strode out of the ocean. The gentle sway of her afro in the breeze was the only break in her statuesque vigil.

"See, I walked here through that glorified puddle hoping to burn down your base, or maybe catch one or two of your friends unaware, shatter them while the rest of you rode to the rescue of your little freaks. Just a bit of annoyance to wear down your resolve, eh?" Flint stepped dry onto the beach. The yellow and green strands of seaweed clinging to her curled into brown flakes and crumbled off of her, leaving her armor pristine. "But lo and behold, I find the very prize herself standing here alone, ready for the taking and with nobody coming to save her."

"Except for us!" Connie shouted. She barreled after Steven, pounding through the sand. They skidded to either side of Garnet and formed a line against the hostile Quartz. Lion loomed behind, rumbling, the shadow of his lashing tail dancing in front of them.

"Yes," Flint continued, glancing briefly at either teen, "nobody but them—wait, what?" She looked again, registering Connie's and Steven's arrival, and staggered back in annoyance. "Milky, you great big tottering mound of mediocrity! You had one job to do!"

"Steven, you shouldn't have come back," Garnet said without looking.

"I didn't know you meant because this would happen! And if I did, I would have come back anyway!" Steven insisted.

"I didn't know this would happen," Garnet said through clenched teeth. "I just knew that you needed to go for you and Connie to be safe. You're in danger here."

"You're in danger here!" countered Steven.

Eyes smoldering, Flint snarled, "Excuse me! You're all in danger here!"

Connie looked between the lot of them, confused, and said, "I feel like we're losing focus on what's happening here."

"Thank you!" Flint shouted.

Garnet shifted, putting herself between Steven and Flint. She lifted her gauntlets and said to the Quartz, "Leave. This is your last warning."

A sharp smirk cut across Flint's features. "Is that a threat? From you? Consider me half-impressed. But I suppose you do have me a tad outnumbered, what with the return of your squishy experiments and that pink hair-thing, whatever it is."

As the renegade Quartz spoke, her hand slipped behind her back, and then emerged with something purple and round. Connie recognized the shape and color at once as being identical to the object Milky had carried. Flint had one of her own, and she tossed it out between them onto the sand.

The object began expanding even before it landed, flattening itself into a broad circle upon the sand. Its surface glimmered, then blazed with twinkling iridescence, glowing with such intensity that Connie had to shield her face behind one arm as she staggered back from the glare.

Flint's voice emerged from behind the flash. "What say we—"

Garnet's gauntlet rocketed off her wrist and smashed into the circle of light. Smoke and shards exploded into a lavender plume, peppering the beach in hot fragments. Steven manifested his shield and covered Connie, crouching with her as they flinched at the spray rattling against their translucent protection.

As the smoke cleared, Flint reappeared through the purple haze, her mouth agape at the crater in the sand that had been her device. "What the…? What did you do? Do you have any idea how hard those are to get hold of?" she howled.

A hurricane gust answered her, blasting a geyser of sand out of the beach. Connie was glad again for Steven's shield as the blowing sand pounded them back a full yard with the backlash of the gust. Squinting against the wind, Connie saw a mote receding into the sky, perfectly in line with a long gash that had been gouged into the beach where Flint had stood.

Straightening, Steven let his shield dissipate as he stared at the empty scar being filled with seafoam. "Wow. Thanks, Jade," he said.

"Well, someone had to do something," Jade groused inside of Connie. "Honestly, does anyone on this planet have any survival instinct anymore? Talking, and talking, and talking… And you! What were you thinking, charging at a Flint like that, human? You are mostly water! Water boils!"

Connie remained silent, instead watching Garnet for some cue as to what happened next. What else had the prescient fusion seen? Everything about Garnet's demeanor told Connie that the danger was far from gone, despite Flint's blustery ejection from the beach.

Steven noticed it too, and his fists clenched as he rounded back upon Garnet. "Did you know this was going to happen? Is that why you wouldn't come with to save Connie?"

"I told you, I didn't know 'what' would happen," Garnet snapped, her visor still fixed upon the ocean. "I knew that you'd both be safer if you went to help Connie, and that we would all be in danger if you stayed."

"Well, why didn't you say that?" Steven exclaimed, throwing his hands above his head.

"There wasn't time for a debate," Garnet said. "I thought you would trust me."

"Then don't be so mysterious about it!" cried Steven. "You have to trust me to trust you!"

"I do trust you to trust me 'when' you trust me," Garnet insisted.

A flash on the horizon drew Connie away from the twisting argument. She saw an orange glimmer where the sea met the sky, and squinted across the water to fix upon it. In seconds, the glimmer expanded into a jittering blossom of red-orange color, and it grew larger as it cut down through the glare of the ocean, growing closer at an astonishing rate. Eyes widening, Connie backed away and said, "Um, I think she's coming back!"

"What was I just telling you about survival instinct?" Jade chided.

Garnet's head shifted, and the warm color filled her visor. "Steven," she barked, "bubble!"

The world around Connie turned pink as Steven summoned a bubble shield around them both. She watched the blossom of fire grow larger still, its flames becoming a billowing contrail behind its approach. A mote appeared in the heart of the blossom, revealing herself to be a furious Flint, who rode on roaring jets of fire that blazed out of her soles. Above the roar of the inferno, Connie could hear the Quartz screaming in rage, and saw Flint lift her hands toward them all. Then the world around Connie vanished into flames.

Everything was fire. Connie could feel the heat in the surface of the bubble, and jerked her hand back, shrinking into the bubble's center with Steven. Sweat prickled in every inch of her mottled skin. Her sneakers stuck as she shifted around, and she realized that the rubber soles were melting against the bottom of the bubble.

From outside, they heard a feral feline yowl pierce the flames. The yowl became a roar, and the roar became a tear, a bright scar of white visible through the fire. Lion's silhouette flashed across the scar, then vanished.

"Lion!" Steven cried, too late. The big cat's roar winked out as quickly as the scar vanished back into the fire.

After agonizing seconds, the inferno around their bubble finally abated. Flint crawled out of the bubbling ocean completely dry. The corona surrounding her turned any water near her into billowing steam. "Right, that's enough frolicking!" snarled Flint. "I'm poofing all of you, shattering three of you, and walking out of here with the only one of you worth her facets!"

"Roll back to the house!" Garnet bellowed at the bubble shield.

Then the world became fire again, and the fusion vanished behind a red-orange veil, its crackling underscored by Flint's hysterical, high-pitched laughter.

Connie's voice rose with Steven's to cry out for Garnet, reaching to help, but then flinching back from the intense heat that seeped through Steven's protection. She could feel it cooking up through the bottoms of her shoes, feel it stinging in her eyes and scraping at her lungs. The sand at the edge of the bubble was boiling, turned to liquid in the unimaginable heat. Through it all, a faint silhouette stood at the center of the firestorm with her arms raised in triumph, laughing all the while.

And then a shadow shaped like Garnet speared through the haze and swung a haymaker gauntlet through the silhouette's chin. The firestorm vanished in an instant, and Flint collapsed onto the muddy glass her heat had made of the beach.

Scrambling onto her knees, Flint lifted one hand and sent a stream of white fire pouring into Garnet, vanishing the fusion into a torrent so bright that it hurt Connie's eyes just to see it. "Burn, you shameless double-stacked little waste of—eh?"

The implacable fusion walked up the length of the stream, striding up to its source until the white flames jittered off of her chest piece like water blasting off a stainless steel pan. Then Garnet backhanded Flint, sending the Quartz tumbling back onto the hard glass beach.

"Oh, yeah," Steven said, easing back in the cooling bubble. "Garnet swims in lava. I forget that sometimes."

"That might have been useful information in planning our counteroffensive," Jade said dryly, radiating displeasure in Steven's direction.

Flint dragged herself backwards and reached to her gemstone for the glowing haft of a javelin. "Now, let's chat about this," she stammered. "What I meant was—"

Garnet's boot sent Flint flying again. Even before Flint hit the ground, Garnet was chasing after her, pausing only long enough to shoot a pointed look at Steven's pink sanctuary. Then she pounced on the Quartz and became a hurricane of gauntlets.

With nudging from Steven, Connie helped roll their bubble uphill toward the beach house. They hamster-scurried to the foot of the porch before Steven dissipated the bubble to let them up the stairs. Flashes of warm light and the muffled screams of strange, unintelligible cursing chased them through the screen door, intercut with the sound of a merciless pummeling.

Connie hesitated near the couch, unsure of where to go. It concerned her that they were taking refuge from a fire-slinging Gem inside a wooden house, but she didn't have any better ideas at the moment that didn't involve a fire truck or one of those fireproof tinfoil suits she had seen stunt people wear for special effects. "Will Garnet be okay?" Connie asked Steven.

He had taken up a vigil at the window, peering through the drawn blinds to watch the carnage outside. "She seems to be doing pretty good." A vertical stripe of orange light poured across his face to illustrate the point before the sound of a gauntlet smashing something and a flinty cry of pain extinguished the light.

After adding 'swims in lava' to her constantly expanding list of amazing things her friends could do, Connie let the adrenaline trickle out of her brain, making room for rational thoughts again. "what was that purple thing Flint threw at us? Some kind of weapon?" she asked.

"Dunno. But she didn't like it when Garnet blew it up," Steven said, his eyes still glued to the fight outside.

"A weapon seems unlikely, given her proximity to it when she activated it," Jade answered inside Connie. Though Connie's uneasiness had started to fade, she could still feel her passenger's worry digging into her like a needle. "If I did not know better, I would suspect its purpose was to create a vectored spatial distortion. But that is impossible, of course."

Connie scowled at the idea of anything being impossible at this point. "Impossible? Why?"

"What's impossible?" Steven asked distractedly.

"Such a thing would require a fixed, tethered point, such as a warp pad," Jade chided Connie impatiently.

At Jade's words, Connie finally recognized the glow she had seen in Flint's disc. It had been identical to that of the warp pad the Crystal Gems used. "Are you sure that's still true after five thousand years?" Connie pointed out.

The silence and uncertainty welling in Jade was answer enough.

Working from that assumption, Connie said, "If that thing she threw really was a warp pad, what did she need it for? Was she trying to run away?"

"She probably should have," Steven remarked, and winced at something he saw in his gap through the blinds. "Garnet doesn't usually take her time like this. I think she's really mad."

"However erroneously so, the Flint was certain of her presumptive victory. Did she not speak of numbers when she activated the device in question?" Jade said.

Connie thought about the pad that Milky had carried. Perhaps the two had meant to work together, with one ready to back the other up if too many reinforcements came to either fight. She supposed that it no longer mattered. With Flint's pad destroyed, Milky wouldn't have anywhere to arrive at on this end of things.

Nowhere, that is, except…

The chiming sound of the temple's warp pad rang behind them an instant before Connie could complete the thought. She whirled and saw a column of white light splitting the house, coalescing into the outline of an enormous figure atop the raised crystal platform. As the light faded, and the figure took form, she felt her heart leap into her throat.

It wasn't Milky Quartz who stood upon the pad, as Connie had first feared, but instead a new Gem almost as large as the pale Quartz warrior. This new Gem was built of lean, predatory lines, with limbs that belied their nimble power and a tall, elegant frame to match. Her shimmering metallic purple hair framed golden features that were half-masked behind a mirrored visor. Beneath the angular crystal mask, her mouth was drawn into a dissatisfied pucker. She had formed black leggings that rose up over her body into a leotard patterned with bright red flames across her chest, with a black brand of the three-sided broken diamond sigil over one breast. A purple cape hung from one shoulder, obscuring her arm to the elbow as it wrapped around to drape behind her.

The strange Gem's mirrored gaze fixed on Connie, sending a jolt through her. "Steven!" Connie cried.

Steven turned from the window and jerked in surprise. "Oh. Um, hello?" he said, and waved nervously at the new arrival.

Curiosity and caution spilled up through Connie's chest. "A Pyrite? Have a care, human. They are relatively unremarkable soldiers, but can nonetheless be dangerous. Let the hybrid dispatch it, and then we can—"

Light erupted from beneath the fold of Pyrite. Striding off the pad, Pyrite reached across her body and under the fold of the cape. From out of the glow she drew a long, double-headed butterfly axe. The golden sculpt of the axe head gleamed, intricately woven from metallic strands into identical blades that looked to hold a deadly edge. One swipe with the axe obliterated the island counter in the kitchen, turning it into a scattering of flinders that crunched underfoot as Pyrite advanced on the teens.

Steven leapt forward to meet Pyrite's next swing. His shield twinkled into being and caught the axe blade, stopping it cold. A pure, rumbling note tolled from the shield, shaking the whole house with the force of the blow. Lip curling, Pyrite swing again, and again, moving in a blur to carve Steven apart. Each time Steven put his shield between them, if only barely in time to save himself from being bisected.

A low rumble emerged from the fading chime of the shield, and Connie realized that the sound was Pyrite's frustrated growl. With her free hand, Pyrite reached down and snagged the edge of Steven's shield. She couldn't hope to pry the bonded protection away from Steven, so when she flung the shield aside with an irritated flick, Steven went with it, smashing into the far wall and shattering pictures and drywall alike, then tumbling down through an end table on his way to the floor. His head lolled, his eyes glassy and unfocused as they searched for Pyrite, who stalked toward him with her axe raised to finish the fight.

"Never mind," Jade uttered, her shock radiating through Connie's body. "Run."

"Steven!" Connie screamed. She sprinted after Pyrite, scooping up the shattered leg of a kitchen stool in mid-run.

"The other way, human!" Jade howled. A gust began to gather ahead of Connie to push her back the way she came.

Both Connie and her passenger were too slow. The arm beneath Pyrite's cape shot out in a blur, and Connie's scream became a choked squeak beneath impossibly strong fingers that wrapped around her neck. She dropped her stool leg and grasped at Pyrite hand, gripping it for all she was worth. The Gem's grasp would never budge for her human strength, but she feared if she let go, her neck would snap like dry spaghetti.

Her own puffing, purpling features stared back at her in horror as Pyrite lifted Connie to examine her, staring from behind that mirrored visor. Connie thought she saw Pyrite's hair jerking back and forth, as if caught in a series of torrential gusts, and thought she might have heard someone screaming in the back of her head. But she couldn't hear anything over the sound of her own racing pulse as Pyrite's grasp squeezed it up into her ears.

A sudden red glow colored Pyrite face, and the visor angled away from Connie. She found herself swinging around as Pyrite carried her away, bashing the screen door off its hinges. The door tumbled over the porch rail, and then Connie was outside, dangling in sunlight.

It was hard to see from the prison of Pyrite's grasp, but Connie saw Garnet crouched on the glassy beach some distance away. The fusion was hunched over a crumpled black and red form, pounding a scrub of poofy red hair deeper into the scorched glass while limbs flailed uselessly in an attempt to escape Garnet's pummeling.

"Get off of her." The voice was gravelly, and it rattled against the side of Connie's head. Pyrite didn't shout, but her voice carried across the entire beach, echoing back from the cliff behind them. "Flint, get up."

Garnet paused with her own visor poised upon Pyrite and Connie. A glimmer seemed to cross the stoic Gem's gaze. Then, with a casual grace, she punched Flint one last time before rising and backing away.

Flint tore her face out of the beach and spat out a sandcastle's worth of glass shards. "Pyrite!" she cheered at the new arrival. Then her joy curdled into annoyance, and she scrambled back to her feet. "Load of help you are! What kept you?"

"Zircon lost the signal to your mobile pad, so I assumed you needed saving. You're lucky you were practically on top of their pad already, or you'd be glitter in the dirt," Pyrite said. Her body shifted, squaring off against Garnet once more, and her voice became an arctic chill. "Unfuse, or I shatter your weird little friend."

Connie felt herself lurch forward as Pyrite lifted her for Garnet to see. The fingers at Connie's throat shifted, three of them wrapping around to back of her head to cup her skull. Her hair tore under the fingers, the tips of which wrapping all the way around to cover her ears and her forehead. The pressure in her head tripled, and she felt the whole of her being squeezed out through her face, held back only by the tenuous pressure of her swollen features.

"I won't tell you again," Pyrite warned.

Through a haze of tears, Connie saw Garnet's fists fall to her sides. The gauntlets vanished in a flash. Connie wanted to scream, to beg Garnet to keep fighting, but she couldn't even breathe. She could only watch as Garnet fell apart into two glowing shapes.

The pressure around Connie's head eased a fraction as the two glows that had been Garnet coalesced. Steven had described the fusion's component Gems , but had failed to describe either of them as being adorable. The pair manifested with their hands intertwined, the gruff little Ruby poised in front of her partner to shield her from the larger Gems. Sapphire's gaze was hidden behind her silken white hair, but Connie thought she could feel the seer's cool gaze passing through her. As she watched, helpless, Connie saw Sapphire nod almost imperceptibly to her, answering a question Connie hadn't even thought of yet.

"Good," Pyrite rumbled. "Flint?"

With a spin, Flint drew a javelin from her shoulder and lanced it at the pair. The black weapon shot through Ruby faster than Connie's eye could follow. In the wake of the blur, Sapphire's hand jerked emptily through the cloud of red smoke that had been her partner.

Then Connie yelped as the world spun around her, sent whirling with a flick of Pyrite's hand. Connie went flying and hit the sand hard, bouncing. By the time she found her feet again, Pyrite had seized Sapphire in her free hand, hoisting the blue Gem without noticeable effort. Sapphire offered no resistance as her captor lugged her back toward the beach house.

"Finally. Let's get her back to Ascension," Pyrite snapped at Flint.

"No," Connie croaked, and staggered forward. Even if her legs weren't wobbling, she had no idea what she might do to the two invaders. She had no sword, no plan, but she felt herself crawling forward, reaching for Sapphire as if she could possibly hope to catch her.

Pyrite didn't spare Connie another glance, but Flint did. The battered Quartz turned, grinning back at Connie, and lifted her hands. Sparks burgeoned in Flint's palms.

Jade's voice rushed back to Connie. "Get down!" she cried.

Fire poured out of Flint's cupped hands, consuming everything between her and Connie. Curling into a ball on the ground, Connie looked away, and with her last shred of sense she hoped that the fire would turn her to ash too quickly for her to feel any of it.

Then her hair blew into her face as the air around her became the eye of a flaming tornado. Winds roared around her with unthinkable force, consuming all of Flint's blast. The tornado channeled the heat straight up into the sky, creating a line of twisting flames a hundred yards tall, blinding Connie to everything but the light and the heat.

The flames clung stubbornly around her, but eventually Jade's tornado won. Outlasted, the curtain of fire dwindled into nothing, and the winds carrying it stilled back into a warm ocean breeze. As Connie lowered her arms from her face, she found herself alone on a circle of black char, surrounded on all sides by glowing, muddy glass. Pyrite and Flint were gone.

And Sapphire was gone with them.