"All aircraft report."
- Star Fox
"Jimen ga! Jimen gaa! Akai yo! Zenbu akai yoooooooo wompwubworble"
- Fang 4
"I'm here with you. I will live with you in this hellhole, but I must express myself. If you don't let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will go insane AND I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME!"
"Yeah. Well, you know, maybe the house could use some remodeling."
- Delia Deetz and the naval shipyard instructor from The Hunt for Red October
"We're having a moment here! Fuck YOOOOOOU"
- Rebecca
"Sounds broken."
"Most likely, sir. I'll bet it was something nice, though."
- Ace Ventura
Akane crashed to the metal floor of the silo sobbing and shivering. Her empty, listless voice mumbled over the dull whirl of her anti-gravity rings sputtering to a stop.
"Mi… mm… aa… ka… zu…"
Chie ran out from the rest of the Delta team guarding the base and dropped to her knees in front of the trembling Imperial Meister. She threw her arms around Akane in sisterly compassion, but Akane was too far gone to even acknowledge the gesture.
"Which one was it?" Chie sternly addressed her subordinates as she cradled Akane. Gigi, Dorothy, and Jessica stood nearby with their hands closely holding the GEMs on their ears. They shared the narrow chamber with a group of war councilors and a minister for one of Cardair's older ruling emperors.
"We're not sure," Jessica glanced toward her ear nervously. "Immolation Particle interference is filling the sky up there. We're losing signals faster than we can parse them. The intel's coming in all jumbled."
Dorothy dropped her arm away from her ear as her head sank in regret.
"The blip for B. R. C. just went off the grid."
"Her?" Chie gasped in utter horror. She shook her head and weakly patted Akane's shoulder as she felt the nausea suddenly churning her stomach. "Fumi's mercy. They practically made her kill her twin sister."
The Delta Commander clenched her eyes shut as she whispered over the shattered guilt-stricken girl trembling in her arms.
Cardair's war minister raised his voice from the other side of the silo.
"Pure Heart Malachite must return to Standby immediately. We're going to be relying on her quite often after that field test." He gave the order with the impeccable soullessness of a tactical computer.
Chie looked up from her knees with a combination of anger and disbelief on her face.
"She's going into shock! She doesn't even know where she is! Let her see Emperor Krau-xeku! She needs to know he's safe before she loses it completely!"
The minister remained unmoved.
"If he gets within a few feet of her, she'll be in danger of being deactivated. Her contract must be kept intact."
"You god damned…" Chie muttered with frothing rage. This bastard was taking Mahya's own policy meant to keep Akane empowered and capable of defending herself, and twisting it around until she wasn't even considered human. It was enough to send the Delta Commander's emotions boiling over.
"If you want your damn warhead to have any kind of potential payload the next time you launch her, you'll let the lady spend a couple of quality minutes WITH HER FUCKING EMPEROR!"
The minister shifted his eyes in slight consideration, keeping the same distant expression the entire time.
"Very well." He turned toward his other tacticians. "Let the boy come in. But make sure he doesn't break his Florince toy."
The silo's ground entrance door unsealed. Emperor Kazuya scrambled into the room screaming his Otome's name. Chie let go of Akane's shoulders and stood up. As much as she wanted to help and comfort the despairing Meister, she knew Akane needed Kazu much more than her.
Kazuya collapsed into Chie's place as soon as Akane was in his reach. He desperately wrapped his arms around her and squeezed until her body physically couldn't shiver anymore. The life started to return to her blank, bloodshot eyes. She choked on her own voice as she buried her tear-soaked face into his cape.
"Ka… Kazu! Kazu, Kazu! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I did it!"
Her bright white Robe was supposed to make her as formidable as an entire jet squadron and as sturdy as a planet's worth of metal, but right now she was like a powerless rag doll in his arms.
"It's okay, Akane," Kazuya panted for breath as he calmed down. His voice was hoarse from hours of pleading hopelessly for amnesty with nobles who were only concerned with eliminating rival houses. "It's going to be okay. I listened to the whole thing on my ring. She…"
Overwhelmed with terror and grief, the emperor struggled to find the words himself. An entire friendly neighboring country had just been thrown into leaderless chaos for no reason other to keep him alive.
"…wanted you to do it. She wanted us to stay together through all of this."
Akane's sobbing became shriller and more senseless as she sank against his chest.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!"
For a brief moment, in a tiny confrontation that couldn't have lasted more than a blink, the kind and peaceful Emperor Kazuya held his Otome protectively to his heart, looked up at the minister watching him, and scowled in rebellious hatred.
The only thing louder than Akane's sorrowful wailing was the cold, emotionless battlefield summons that suddenly boomed through the silo's rounded gunmetal walls. Chie scoffed through her clenched teeth and snapped her attention toward her three Robed teammates.
"Damn. That's the Delta frequency!"
Someone out there wanted to deploy one of Akane's handlers to continue her victory, or get revenge for who she had defeated. Chie didn't even bother looking at the war minister for his reaction—He wasn't about to give her any clues.
"Which one?" Gigi whispered with timid dread.
"There's only one," Chie let out a heated sigh. "This whole thing blew up so quickly they never had time to set up a different tone for each of us. They want a Delta, so we have to give them the first unlucky Delta we've got available."
The three lower-ranking troopers instantly became more apprehensive than their commander. Chie scratched her brow and sighed again.
"I'll go." Her subordinates looked at her with worry and regret, but she never broke her resolve. She lowered her voice so she was addressing them directly.
"Don't let Akane out of your sight. We just lost any support we had from the archipelago. We can't contact Garderobe while they're on lockdown. If there's any room left for a ceasefire, we have to make sure Cardair still goes to the right family so this can't happen again. You'll have to figure this out without me."
"Sister Chie!" Dorothy shouted in surprised objection.
"General Hallard! Let one of us go!" Jessica added her own concerns.
Chie shook her head and made a sound with her breath that may have been hopeless chuckling.
"You girls still have time to improve."
She raised her right glove above her eyes in a casual salute as she addressed each of her subordinates.
"Dorothy, your pirouettes are too fast. You're going to drive yourself dizzy if you keep spinning around like you're in a tornado. Jessica, you're still not lining up the mirrors right when you do the teleporting trick. Watch the angles. Gigi, your flips are good, but you need to work on your balance when you land. I don't want you stuck behind a walker because your knees turned to soup when you're a retired grandma."
"Yes, ma'am!" the three Delta Otomes saluted back in unison. Even when their entire world was sinking into insanity, nothing shook their respect toward their commander.
"Wish me luck out there." Chie nodded and lowered her palm. "Maybe I'll see you after the show."
She struggled to leave her team with an encouraging smile. She couldn't do it. Sisters being stripped of their grace and manners, and being forced to compete against their other Sisters in an endless regicide frenzy. There was nothing encouraging about any of this.
The shutters at the top of the silo peeled open on thundering mechanical chains. Chie gave one last remorseful glance toward Akane and Kazuya crumpled together on the floor as her Robe's flight rings began to glow. Then she stoically looked upward and lifted off toward the infernal void hanging over her head.
Author's notes:
And that's why Slaughter & Shieldmaidens Chapter 4 is not an "official" part of the "main" Slaughter & Shieldmaidens timeline.
This could also be called Mai Otome: The Day After (tomorrow a time when criminals rule the city the only wea). It really is like Muv-Luv Unlimited: The Day After (tomorrow a time when cri) because a great disaster has separated events from the main timeline, but you still get to see the surviving characters evolve in a different parallel way. Just fyi, the name The Day After (tomorrow a ti) isn't a reference to Viper from the 90s or that global warming movie from the 2000s. It actually ties back to a TV movie from the 80s called The Day After (to), which is about an ensemble cast living through a nuclear fallout between the US and USSR. But I just can't resist the urge to think of it as a Viper reference. If you ever watch Viper and get to the part in "The Return" where they're in the car talking about Joe's overseas missions, you'll notice even Viper can't resist making that reference to Viper.
Today's romanization of a Japanese visual novel quote was brought to you by: bond007106
(looking at this fanfic alone with no other context) So who did Akane kill before this scene takes place? I'll put it this way: She's an avid shoujo romance reader and she's actually a really big fan of Fushigi Yuugi. She hated to see it end early.
Writing around the other two Cardair emperors is weird because the show SAYS they're there, but you just never see them. I think you can see part of the one dude's arm sitting in front of Kazu during the big battle in the finale of the Otome TV series, but even that's debatable. It could be one of the other emperors, or it's just some captain guy on the ship.
You'll probably have to read "Orange Brunch" (and maybe "Honeymoon Hijinks") to understand why the Deltas are working with Akane in Cardair instead of with Haruka in Aries. Speaking of which, the Deltas in this scene weren't always going to be the Deltas. The first draft I pictured in my head had generic Cardair-employed ceremonial nurse-priestesses trying to help Akane out and arguing with the war ministry dudes, to show the division between the part of the country who sees her sympathetically as their legit heroine, and the part of the country who just sees her as a tool. Akane and Kazu were going to be the only official characters to appear. But then I thought the premise worked better with Chie since she has canon connections to Akane.