"What… the… fuck?"

Lucy nearly dropped her own Soul Gem from surprise. Here she was standing in front of hundreds of Soul Gems, pristine ones too. She quickly formed her Gem back into a ring, slipping it on and running up to one of the pillars. She inspected the gem, alongside the screens on the side.

"'Cassandra Luscene, may your Soul Gem find purity amidst this stressful world.'" She ran to an adjacent Soul Gem. "'Violet Cole, we'll be right where we were when you wake up, no sweat!'"

She ran to the next, and then the next, and then the next, reading over the screens on each one. All text read vaguely the same and Lucy could make some inferences, but nothing concrete. She deduced that Girls were put here semi-unwillingly, but sometimes willingly, in order to… purify them? That's what the text implied, but the mechanisms behind it, Lucy wasn't sure. As far as she knew you could only purify a Soul Gem with a Grief Seed, no matter how many other methods Magical Girls tried.

"Agh, my head hurts worse than my chest…" Sarah woke up, stumbling to her feet and putting her hand against the wall for balance. As she opened her eyes, she glanced around the room, stopping as Lucy mockingly outstretched her arms, showcasing the legion of Soul Gems behind her.

"Are those…" Started Sarah.

"Yeah! We found them!" Lucy turned around, gesturing towards the long hallway. "There's gotta be hundreds! We've found where all the bodies went! And better yet, they're still alive! We can revive them!"

Sarah walked over to a soul gem, crouching down to read the holographic text ascribed beneath it. "We're in luck, looks like each one has a corresponding 'body number.'" She stood up and looked around, stopping on a closed, metal bunker door, with the label "Body Storage" sitting above it. "There it is, think you can-"

Before Sarah could even finish her sentence, Lucy yelled, ramming into it full speed and breaking both doors off of their hinges. They flew inwards, bouncing around with the sound of loud clanking metal, then coming to a stop.

Lucy looked at Sarah, "Find an important looking Magical Girl… and let's talk to her…" she said, taking staggered breaths.

Sarah browsed around the Soul Gems, weaving between the pillars and glancing at the bios of each Magical Girl she could find.

"Botanist, gladiator, rescued foreigner, engineer, therapist… Chief Scientist? Let's go with Chief Scientist." She carefully reached for the Soul Gem, cradling it in both her hands as she picked it up delicately, glancing at the body number, and then walking back towards the door Lucy Caved in. "Body 7A." She said, watching the Soul Gem as she walked, making sure she didn't drop it.

Lucy nodded, inspecting each hatch in the wall alongside their number. "Considering what's happened, I can't believe we were this lucky. To revive a Magical Girl, all we need to do is bring the Soul Gem close to their body, and their innate healing should bring their corpse back to life!" She stopped at a hatch, immediately unlocking the mechanism and pulling it out. "This one!"

On a long metal drawer was the emaciated corpse of a little girl, with nothing but surprisingly intact underwear on. She was partially petrified, perhaps by some sort of mummification process used to preserve the bodies.

The Soul Gem glowed as Sarah brough it closer, placing it near the hand of the corpse. A shimmering sound emanating from it, and gold particles spread out from the body, slowly but surely repairing joints, correcting muscles, fixing the facial structure, and finally, turning the skin back to the color it once was. The sound rose in pitch as the body healed, stopping as it was now fully repaired.

The two stared in anticipation, and Sarah started to have doubts. She looked over at Lucy, who was practically giddy with excitement. Sarah turned back to watch the girl.

She coughed.

The once-dead Magical Girl coughed, scaring Sarah, who recoiled back slightly to Lucy's amusement.

The girl shot up, taking a deep breath, grasping her neck, and gasping for air. She took a few more short breaths as she composed herself, and finally turned to examine both Lucy and Sarah, stopping on the former.

"Did you guys find it?" she asked, with curiosity and panic in her tone.

Sarah raised an eyebrow, and Lucy tilted her head. "What?" asked Lucy.

"Did you guys find the solution!?" The girl jerked forward, grabbing Lucy by the collar of her dress. "You guys have to have found it! That's the only reason you would revive me!"

"Woah, hey calm down!" Said Lucy, who was confused at this sudden outburst. "We're… new in town, we're just trying to figure out what happened to this place."

The girl let go, looking between Sarah and Lucy repeatedly. "Wait a second, you're a soldier wearing a maintenance outfit, and you're a… from the looks of it, vagabond. You people aren't scientists, why the hell did you revive me?!" She stood up, getting in Lucy's face as she shouted.

"Take it easy." Said Sarah. "We don't want any trouble."

"Oh?!" The girl turned around to Sarah. "And now the human is lecturing me?! I'll freak out at whoever I please with the two fucking minutes I have left to live! You revived me fully knowing there was no plan to stop the runaway grief buildup, you fucking idiots!" She sat back down. "And to think this is how I go out, revived by a couple of dumbasses looking to… what, play a prank? Who put you up to this? Who wants me dead this bad-"

"Stop!" Yelled Sarah. The girl looked at her and surprisingly, followed the order.

"We… Utopia is gone." Said Lucy.

"It's been gone for forty years." Added Sarah. "Destroyed by a Witch."

The Magical Girl stared downwards for a moment, mulling over those words, no doubt a mess of emotions running through her head.

She shrugged.

"It was bound to happen." She looked up to them. "So what does that make you two? Explorers?"

"Didn't you say you have two minutes? Do you really have time for-"

"Agh!" The Magical Girl coughed up a spurt of blood, a pained sound coming from her mouth. Her Soul Gem was rapidly losing its pristine color as it filled with swirling black specs: Stress, and at an unheard-of rate. It was as if this Magical Girl was expending all of her power and then multiplying it by ten, and even then it might not match the passive drain it was going through.

"Oh my god!" Lucy quickly reached into her bag, grabbing one of her four Grief Seeds and setting it next to the Soul Gem. Even as the clouds disappeared from the gem, more kept being absorbed into the Grief Seed. "What the hell's happening to your gem?!"

The girl chuckled, wiping the blood from her lips. "Heh, Olivia is happening. That bastard thought she had it figured out, thought she had worked out the big secret to removing stress without a Grief Seed."

"Can you start from the beginning?" asked Sarah. "We don't have any context here, and-"

The girl got up again, completely ignoring Sarah as she walked past the broken bunker door and into the Soul Gem room. She glanced at them, before turning her attention to a cupboard sitting above a lab table. "I have two- no-" She glanced at the grief seed Sarah was holding next to her gem, still absorbing Stress. "-three minutes to live and now I'm being bombarded with questions? Maybe this was how I was supposed to die." She laughed to herself, pulling out an unbranded food bag and placing it on the counter. "Tell you what. My Soul Gem is interconnected with the door to the main research lab." She pointed at a random wall. "It's a hidden door there, should automatically open once my Gem is nearby, even if it's damaged." She pulled a mug from the cupboard, and filled it with water from the sink, which surprisingly was still a steady, clean stream. "Good thing this place is built on a natural well…"

"We'll find everything we need to know there?" Asked Sarah.

"How do we save you?!" Lucy interrupted. "Can we bring your Soul Gem away and return you back to sleep?"

The girl sprinkled in the powder, and took a sip from it. "Thirty-seven years past expiration, that's still some good instant cold brew…" As she lowered the mug, she considered Lucy's question. "There is one way." She went to a different part of the interior, a wall, which she knocked once on, revealing a secret compartment which rotated around with a soft mechanical whirr.

On the revealed platform there was an opaque container.

"Hand me my Soul Gem."

Sarah did as instructed, giving the Soul Gem and Grief Seed back to the girl, who placed it next to her on the table. She stared at it for a few moments, taking a deep breath, before dropping the spent Grief Seed to her side. It landed on the needle, balancing perfectly and spinning slightly.

"You wanted to save me, right?" She asked Lucy, turning to her.

"We can do it! I've got three Grief Seeds left, we have time!" She said, a hopeful smile on her face.

The girl's eyes turned completely blank, emotionless. She looked down, thinking for a bit, then back to Lucy.

All sound was sapped from the room as she spoke. As those words reverberated through the wide interior and through Lucy's mind again and again.

"You can save me by destroying every single Soul Gem in this facility."

She turned her head to Sarah. "Human, grab her."

Something glowed in Sarah's eyes, and Sarah took hold of Lucy, acting with strength unfitting even the strongest humans. She felt her own ribs cracking and muscle tearing as she was completely immobilized.

"What are you- let go of me!" yelled Lucy. "Sarah!"

"She won't listen, that's one of my powers, I can put others into trances and then make them perform orders with top efficacy. My fate doesn't concern humans, but I'm making sure you watch." The girl opened the opaque container, pulling out a modern firearm, a pistol. She ejected the magazine, checking if it was loaded.

She shoved the magazine back in, pulling back to the slide with a click, and aiming at her own Soul Gem. Lucy was powerless to stop her. She screamed and thrashed against Sarah in ineffectual protest.

"Olivia did this when she tried to play god, when she subjected this to all of her citizens. She took shaky, unproven science and didn't give it the time it needed. And now, her entire kingdom is gone, alongside everyone that lived in it."

She stared straight into Lucy's eyes, tears beginning to fall down her face, her composure rapidly falling as her voice quivered. "And the worst part? Once you learn why…"

"You're going to thank me for what I'm about to do."

The hammer hit the mechanism, and the pistol fired. The bullet arced through the air, piercing straight through the girl's gem and exiting out the other side, fragmenting it into uncountable pieces. The light disappeared, and the steady hum of the Soul Gem withered into the empty air, like a gear that's turned for an eternity suddenly coming to a grinding halt.

The girl fell forwards.

"No!" Screamed Lucy, finally breaking free of Sarah's grip as the trance lifted from her. She ignored her broken bones and crouched down to the girl, feeling around her cold, lifeless body.

She was dead.

Lucy cried hard, not even trying to hold it back as she dug her face into the warm corpse of the girl. "Why?! Why?! Why?!" She repeatedly yelled, voice muffled by the girl's skin.

"What- oh no…"

Sarah walked over and put a hand on Lucy's shoulder, while Lucy continued crying over the corpse.

Seconds turned to minutes, and Sarah eventually let go, getting up and walking away. She grabbed a piece of the girl's broken Soul Gem as she walked towards the wall.

Lucy poked her head up, looking at her. "Wh- what are y-you doing…?"

"Honoring a dying girl's wish." Said Sarah, no emotion in her voice as she held the Soul Gem fragment up to the wall. Mechanisms inside the wall clicked and whirred as a Magical Girl sized line cut through the wall, splitting into two as both sides opened outwards.

Lucy looked back to the lifeless corpse. "I don't know… how much more I can take…!" She dug her face in again. "I can feel… feel my psyche… being ripped apart… with every passing second…"

Sarah stopped, turning back to Lucy. She didn't say anything, staring blankly.

"Can you say something?!" Lucy yelled, standing up and confronting Sarah in an instant, a trail of dust in her imperceivable movement. She stopped with her hands grabbing Sarah's arms. "Every single time I suffer, you just sit there, staring blankly into the void! You don't react, you display less emotion than that fucking AI! What the hell is wrong with you?!"

Lucy let go and stepped back, a look of betrayal on her face while tears fell to the ground. An innumerable mix of emotions ran through her head, and despite feeling like she could trust Sarah, she now felt double-crossed.

Or even like Sarah wasn't real.

What if she wasn't? What if Sarah was just a trauma-induced hallucination? What if none of this was real? What if she was still laying down there in the desert sand, near death from the space-manipulating Magical Girl, a vaporized female soldier staining her conscious?

Lucy stepped back, gripping the sides of her head with immense strength. "I can't…! I can't…! I can't take it…!" Her gaze rapidly shifted between the dead Magical Girl, Sarah, and the sea of Soul Gems before then. "You're not real… none of this is real… I'm still in Iraq… while that Magical Girl is sitting over me- no, I'm back in America, in a coma in some hospital bed… while my mom… my dad… my brother… and my sister… they're all sitting over me… waiting for me to wake up!"

Lucy let out a fake, maniacal laugh, induced by her ongoing panic attack and shattered psyche.

"Magical Girls? Utopia? Soul Gems? Witches? None of these things make sense! They aren't real…! They're the stories Jack and I made up when we played with toys!"

"Lucy!" Shouted Sarah. "Calm down, we can make it through this, we-"

Lucy's face turned to pure anger as rage filled her mind. "Shut up!" She dashed forward, accelerating near mach speed and sucker punching Sarah, who was thrown into an adjacent wall, dropping the Soul Gem fragment and collapsing. She screamed out in pain. Sarah had been injured in her ribs previously, and this wound would only elevate that pain.

Good.

She wasn't real. Lucy was sure of this fact in her rage filled, panic attack induced state. Sarah was a figment of her imagination, a soldier representing her will to keep going, to persevere through whatever came next.

But she didn't want to persevere.

She wanted to go home.

She wanted to see her family again.

And even as the back of her mind reassured her that this was impossible… She fought it.

She fought against reality.

Sarah took rapid deep breaths while Lucy stepped up. She was powerless to stop Lucy, and could only watch as she prepared another fist.

"It all makes sense now…" Lucy struck her across the face. Hard enough to hurt, but not enough to cause permanent damage to her skull. "Why I just… just stumbled on a female soldier just wandering in the desert!" She struck again, grabbing Sarah's collar after and bringing their faces close together. "Why do you have the same hair color as me?! Are you me?! Are you a projection of what I need to be?!"

A mote of blood fell from Sarah's mouth. "Please… Lucy…" she raspily let out. "Please…"

"Stop fucking calling me that!" Lucy threw Sarah's head against the wall, sending out another spurt of blood.

Sarah screamed, and Lucy screamed back in response, stepping back and remarking almost subconsciously on Sarah's remarkable durability.

She had to be fake, a blow like that would knock any human out.

Lucy turned around. "Utopia… this city never existed did it?! It was spontaneously created to teach me a lesson! Olivia isn't real, the AI isn't real, and you-"

A bullet grazed past Lucy, not even hitting close to her. She frantically turned around to face the source, and apparently this soldier still had a trick up her sleeve, in the form of her sidearm. She must not have disassembled it like her main rifle.

Lucy stretched her arms out, standing there. "Oh? The human wants to take me out?! This is my reality! My imagination!"

With shaky and bloodied hands, Sarah fired two more shots and missed her mark completely. It was obvious that she was barely hanging onto consciousness.

"You can't even hit me! I'm immortal! I'm a god! How can a human be expected to take on a go-!"

At that moment, one bullet found their mark. And with Lucy not in any state of mind to dodge it…

It impacted her Soul Gem.

Not directly, it was a grazing blow, impacting off the ring and chipping off a bit of the crystal.

A pain like no other filled Lucy, a pain that reminded her of what it was like to be human, to have an attachment to the mortal world. A pain that reminded her of the past.

But mostly, it just hurt like getting a spinal tap and root canal at the same time.

She screamed incoherently, doubling over into her back and curving outwards, raising her torso into the air while her wide eyed face babbled unrecognizable speech between the screams.

Spit flew from Lucy's mouth as Sarah got up, limping over while holding her gun arm with her other hand. She walked over to Lucy, still screaming, and shot one more time, severing her finger, and thus her soul gem, from her body.

Lucy was powerless to stop her, trapped in an infinite cycle of screaming, pain too intense for any mortal to comprehend, with her Magical Girl physique making sure she stayed conscious, unable to even disassociate.

Sarah shakily picked up the ring and finger and stared at it for a moment, Lucy's screams echoing through the facility.

She reeled back, and threw the finger away.

The screaming stopped.

All feeling stopped.

There was one last feeling she had.

Regret.

Sarah dropped the gun, grasping her chest and letting out a pained noise. She almost certainly had a concussion from the punches and impact against the wall, and could barely keep herself conscious, much less concentrate on anything.

"AI…"

She fell against a wall, desperately trying to stay upright. "Are…. Are you there…"

"Human? Are you doing alright? I do not have a visual feed in the room." The AI spoke from the elevator, and Sarah walked along the wall towards it.

"Lucy… Lucy went insane… I think she had a panic attack and… and…" Sarah used the last bit of her brain and thought for a moment, asking herself if saying she shot Lucy in her Soul Gem was the right thing to tell a Magical Girl AI. "I had to knock her out… she's fine, but…"

Sarah fell to the ground, more staggered breaths as pain shot through her body.

"I'm not sure… if I'm gonna make it…"

"You'll make it." The AI shot back. "Hacking into city hall manifest…"

Sarah crawled up against a wall, flipping over and slightly lifting her tank top. Her torso was blackened from top to bottom as her insides filled with unseen blood, while her head spun from the numerous hits she took from Lucy.

"Manifest scanned. There is a mummification machine farther into the body storage room. I'm currently working on a program that will turn it into a basic automated surgeon, but…"

Sarah coughed up some blood, looking at the crimson stain on her dirtied hand. "You're… about to say… there's no painkillers…" She once again got up to her feet, stumbling over towards the broken bunker doors.

"The machine is… brutal, there is a non-zero chance that while the injury will be repaired by the machine, it will be incredibly painful. Chance of death via shock assuming normal pain tolerance… sixty-six percent."

"Well… lucky for you-" Sarah nearly fell over again, catching herself along the bunker door frame. "I'm… already trying desperately to stay awake… I can feel the darkness coming…"

"Program complete and plan devised: get onto the mummification mach- er… automated surgeon…"

Sarah spotted the machine around the corner, resembling a screwed up dental chair complete with straps and multiple needles and drills attached to arms.

It showed its age, but the lack of dust on it was disconcerting, even if Sarah knew that dust came from primarily dead skin cells, something severely lacking who-knows-how-many-floors down below a long-gone society.

She felt incredibly uneasy staring at it, and even more uneasy knowing she had to strap herself into it.

"AI…"

"Please, you must hurry, you could lose consciousness at any moment, and then…"

She didn't continue, there was a slight tinge of emotion in her voice, something completely foreign.

Sarah let out a pained sigh, dragging herself up into the chair and letting the mechanisms strap her into it. The drills spun and the needles moved around, likely the internal mechanisms making sure they were operational, and Sarah started taking heavy breaths.

"Now let unconsciousness take you, I'll take care of the rest. Please, relax-'

"AI… AI I'm… I'm scared…" Sarah could feel the pain modifying her thought process. Her emotionless facade falling like the tears from her eyes. "What if I don't… wake up…?"

"You're a soldier, aren't you?" The AI said. "You can do this, I believe in you. The amount of recorded humans who have survived Magical Girl attacks is in the single digits throughout centuries of records. You are exceptionally tough, maybe even the toughest human I know, even if I've only known you for an hour…"

Sarah took a deep, staggered breath, steeling herself and remembering her training. She remembered the process behind field surgeries performed by combat medics, there was one essential aspect to keeping your patient alive.

Distracting them.

"AI… tell me… tell me about Homura…" she coughed up more blood. "You….you mentioned her earlier… but who was she…?"

The drills retracted, the now-relaxing voice of the AI filled the room, dulling Sarah's pain as she slowly fell into darkness.

"Homura Akemi. I said she was the Magical Girl who told Queen Olivia the truths of this world, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Olivia met Homura in Japan back in 2011."

"So… Olivia's nearly a century old…" Sarah replied, her voice fading.

"She's the longest lived Magical Girl in recorded history, but records of Magical Girls go back millennia. As far as we know, she's the oldest. Or… was… the oldest…"

The AI stopped talking, continuing after a few seconds. "Homura not only told Olivia the truths of this world, but also her story. Homura had dedicated her life to protecting one Magical Girl, one by the name of Madoka Kaname."

The AI stopped again.

"Homura was part of a team of Magical Girls who somehow had foreknowledge that an exceedingly powerful Witch would arise from the Pacific ocean and destroy Japan. Homura Akemi… Madoka Kaname… Sayaka Miki… Mami Tomoe… Kyoko Sakura… these five Magical Girls stepped up to defeat this Witch, and… they failed. Olivia watched the TV broadcast as those girls lost their lives. She saw Homura kneeling near Madoka's corpse, tears falling from her eyes while her parents sat confused, unable to discern what was really happening."

"And then… the Witch killed her. The Witch killed the final member of this defending force, Homura Akemi. And with nothing standing in the way of the Witch, it went on to destroy the rest of Japan… but it wasn't the end. Olivia took the lessons she learned, the sacrifices Homura made, and internalized them, envisioning a world without suffering. In a way… unintentionally, Homura was the reason Utopia was built, Olivia merely stood on the shoulders of Giants as she put her plans into place.

"What did… Homura… wish for…?" Sarah's voice faded to a maximum degree as she barely held onto consciousness.

The AI took a while to respond, and Sarah fell into unconsciousness as she finally did.

"She wished to be strong enough to protect Madoka."

Sarah let out a silent chuckle, and made a fake smile. "How… apt…" her head fell to the side. "I wonder… what Lucy… wished for…"

Sarah fell asleep, and the machine spun to life.

"See what happens when you disobey our orders?"

A gunshot, Sarah watched the bullet as it traveled through the air, still bewildered over how "slow" everything around her was now. She was new to being a Magical Girl, she wasn't used to how they perceived time.

The bullet impacted through the head of her mother, blood spraying from both ends as the pleading figure went limp, collapsing to the ground, while those next to her screamed against their restraints and gags.

Sarah's father was next.

And then her brother.

She couldn't react, but she knew this wasn't real. All she could do was watch this nightmare unfold.

The little girl in a fitted black suit complete with a red tie walked forward, talking in a mechanically augmented voice. "This is what happens to those who listen to Kyubey, and those who go against the values of the Order of the Broken Cycle." She ripped the egg shaped gem, a Soul Gem, from Sarah's uncontrollable hands, and pointed her firearm to it. "You've only brought this upon yourself."

She fired, Sarah's vision went black again.

But this didn't feel like a nightmare, no… It felt like a reality she only narrowly avoided.

Like the memory of an alternate version of herself.

One that made a serious, deadly mistake.

Sarah awoke with a gasp, a sharp pain traveling upwards from her torso to her skull.

"Be careful! The skin fuses haven't properly settled in yet!" Said the AI, broadcasting through the speakers.

She looked down, past her standard issue bra and onto her chest. Her tank top had been torn to pieces and thrown away, and a massive scar extended downwards from her navel and up to her neck.

Sarah grasped her head in pain, feeling that some of her hair was gone, replaced by a separate scar.

"I fixed your concussion as well, while it wasn't significant now, it could develop into something major down the line."

She grunted as she exited the chair, the restraints already undone and the drills retracted, leaning against a nearby wall as she got acquainted with walking. "How long was I out?" She said, slipping the dirty and cold maintenance jacket back on.

"A couple of days. I had to put you into a coma to repair your neural pathways, and that took… considerable time. I piped in some emergency medications from an upper level hospital, one of the few unexpired batches I could find. The skin fuses should be completely set in a few minutes, and then you'll be free to exert yourself."

Sarah, regaining her bearings slowly, walked along the wall until letting go, taking a path through the broken bunker doors and into the Soul Gem room. Each one remained just as they left them, just as they had sat for half a century.

Except For one.

Lucy's corpse wasn't decomposing, the bacteria to facilitate that simply didn't exist deep in the underground of Antarctica. It just sat there, with motionless scared eyes staring forward in no particular direction.

Her Soul Gem was far behind her, chipped and damaged. Sarah wasn't sure how far a Magical Girl could be from her Soul Gem, but she wasn't about to find out.

"... what are you going to do with her…?" Asked the AI, apprehensiveness in her emulated voice.

Sarah looked down and to her side, seeing the pistol she left there days prior, the same one that nearly killed Lucy. She reached down to pick it up, putting it back in her holster. She then turned to walk away from Lucy's lifeless corpse and chipped Soul Gem, giving a passing glance at the dead scientist as she walked towards the hidden lab.

"You're… you're leaving her?"

Sarah stopped, looking down and sighing. "I'm… not sure I can survive another breakdown from her. The first two were just standard meltdowns fitting an emotional teenager, but this last one, when she got violent…"

She leaned against the doorframe of the lab with one arm on the wall and the other on her holster, catching her breath. She was still getting used to walking, and was currently ignoring how severely hungry she was. If the AI had given her an IV, it wasn't one that deposited nutrients.

"I have to face the reality that Magical Girls can kill humans extremely easily. She could have turned me into red mist in milliseconds if she had the goal and the right state of mind. It just…. Isn't safe to have her around. It could very well get me killed." Sarah turned to one of the speakers, as if to address the AI directly. "And do you really think she'll be able to solve this alone?"

"..." The AI took another minute to respond. Maybe it was a sign that it was thinking over what it was told. Weird considering they can usually process responses before humans finish saying anything. Maybe she was corrupted, forty years of solitude would do that to anyone. "I can't force you."

Sarah walked into the lab, examining the mess of lab supplies around her. Various broken Soul Gems littered the counters alongside several labeled glasses of chemicals, some long since corroded, spilled, and evaporated.

"Lucy trusts you. I just… want you to know that."

Sarah stopped.

"From the way she talks to you… I know that you're one of the last people she's trusted, ever…"

Sarah turned to the door, looking at the control panel on the left side of the frame.

"She would help you! If she saw you wounded and on the ground, she would do everything she could to get you fixed! Even if it took traveling halfway across this city carrying your body! You can't-" The AI's voice was muffled to nothingness as Sarah punched the control panel, shutting the door as the two shutters closed horizontally, and a whirring mechanism below locked it.

She stood there, looking down as leaned against the wall.

"Dammit!" Yelled Sarah, kicking the wall. She couldn't deny it in her mind any longer, she had doomed a little girl to eternal hibernation down here, for centuries, maybe even millennia depending how long it takes for the permafrost above to melt completely.

Her body would sit there for far longer than Sarah's natural lifespan.

And there was the small chance she would never wake up.

Sarah stepped back into the Lab, looking over the various decrepit equipment and stopping on a computer. Unlike the others, this one was fully functional, and turned on with a single press of the power button.

The OS was the same as the reception computer, and she breathed a sigh of relief. But as she browsed through the various files: documents, technical files, weird extensions and programs she's never heard of, she couldn't get Lucy's face out of her mind. The immense regret wouldn't let up.

Killing adults? Whatever, that barely raised an eyebrow, she was a soldier after all. But killing kids? She wasn't a New Caliphate soldier, or some moral-less CIA goon, she wouldn't even think of killing a kid, even if one was putting a gun to her head.

So why was this one different?

Sarah avoided the question lingering in her head for as long as possible, but she had to confront the truth: she was scared of Lucy. Up until a few hours ago, she didn't even know what a Magical Girl was, but alongside all of the knowledge she had learned from this city, alongside knowing that the girls here just wanted to live normal lives away from the stresses of what they were…

They were dangerous.

Magical Girls didn't make her think of the kinds that came from those old Japanese animated shows, no. They struck her as more like living weapons, some secret project to gain superiority by modifying little girls with… she didn't know, nanobots, alien technology- whatever. Utopia was a project to defy that principle, and like any genetically modified supersoldiers that escape, the ones who created them were ready with failsafes. These organizations never performed these projects without being ready for the worst, and Kyubey seemed like she planned everything.

Sarah knew that Kyubey was behind this, that he created those Magical Girls to "reverse entropy" but what did that mean? How does that even work?

Her mind shifted away from those thoughts and towards the memory of Lucy fighting her. The force she punched with, her blowing those bunker doors away, rescuing the two as they fell down a collapsing elevator, Lucy was an emotional time bomb, and one with the power to kill hundreds of people at the drop of a hat.

And the thought came back: Sarah was scared of her. She knew that the scared little girl she had been exploring with could murder her instantly. Sarah knew that even if she put every bullet in her magazine into Lucy, it wouldn't do shit unless she hit the Soul Gem.

Subconsciously, she had finally navigated to a file full of .holo files, with the label 'PROJECT PURITY.' Most were corrupted, but a few weren't.

Sarah double clicked the first one hoping to get these runaway thoughts out of her head, and the same ball mechanism spotted on the roofs of Utopian buildings sprung to life, casting a blue-shaded hologram across the lab. This one showed the same computer she was interacting with displaying a screen showing a girl in some regal dress, no doubt Queen Olivia, alongside a very tired and very disheveled Magical Girl in a lab coat sitting at a chair that was no longer there, with a male adult in camo military fatigues standing behind her, arm on her chair as he watched the broadcast.

"You woke me up, I hope your reason is good." Said Olivia, yawning. "Make a breakthrough or something? We could use good news."

The adult sighed, and the scientist cleared her throat. "Unfortunately, this… will set us back some time. You should sit down before we tell you."

"I will remain standing, speak." Said Olivia, her voice unwavering.

The scientist looked back to the adult, who nodded as he nodded back. He started talking in a gruff accent. "As you know, I lead a recovery team of Magical Girls into the Japan Exclusion Zone to see if we can find what happened to Ms. Akemi and the rest of her team, and we failed in this goal."

"I fully expected you not to find anything, I saw her disappear on the broadcast. It was more of a pipe dream. I don't see why this is worth contacting me over."

The adult pulled a map from a nearby table, pointing to some labels on it. "When you gave us this map with every Magical Girl signature on it, we found some… curious readings. We investigated one of them and located a Grief Seed of immense power, or so the scientist here claims." He nodded towards her, and she started talking. It's clear she was slightly frantic, but trying to control her emotions nonetheless.

"W-we made four discoveries." She cleared her throat again. "One, that once we quantified the amount of power in this Grief Seed, we discovered that it could only belong to an exceedingly powerful witch, and has enough Stress storage to purify an entire city of Magical Girls for weeks."

The scientist looked towards the screen at an Olivia with a face of disapproval. The adult put his hand on the scientist's shoulder. "I… realize your apprehension to rely on grief seeds, knowing the ideals you built this society around, but it's useful research! We should forward it to the FBEM, once we have time, you know…"

Olivia sneered. "Duly noted, continue."

"Our second discovery was one a bit more good… that this Witch, the one that destroyed Japan, decayed on its own. The Grief Seed shows no fluctuations indicating battle with Magical Girls, but it's still gone. This leads us to believe that given enough time, and with no negative emotions nearby to sustain it, Witches will decay on their own… over the course of a decade or so…"

"That is good news, I appreciate the update, but what is the third and forth discovery?" Asked Olivia.

The scientist and the adult looked at each other for a moment.

"I can-" The scientist cut off the adult.

"No, this is my discovery, you shouldn't bear the burden of telling her." She coughed, and started talking towards the monitor. "We found the source of the Witch."

"You found the Magical Girl that gave birth to Walpurgisnacht?!"

"Walpur… what?" Asked the scientist.

"It's what Homura called the Witch that destroyed Japan, although I'm not sure what that name came from."

"Sounds German." Said the adult, as the scientist continued.

"We used Rorschach, our detective Magical Girl, to track the path of the Grief seed. Over the course of a few weeks, we followed it as it wandered across Japan, until eventually it settled somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, where it stayed for days in our time, and thus decades in the past."

Olivia raised an eyebrow. "Why does this matter?"

"As you know, Rorschach's power was to track an object's history through time." Said the adult. "We used it to figure out where the Grief Seed came from, and…" He set down the map, and dug around for a few photographs. He shuffled through them as he spoke. "We can see here there's an old WW2 submarine crash here, from the IJN. Probably some training accident, but on board was a stowaway, a Magical Girl." He shifted to a picture showing some bones in an underwater closet, the area around stained with rust, coral, and seaweed.

They looked like the bones of a small child.

"We found that during this time, the girl's Soul Gem was lost, and floated too far away from her some time after the crash. She was knocked out immediately, and her body rested there for seventy years."

"Later on…" The scientist continued. "We analyzed this discovery, we wanted to figure out why such an otherwise-normal Magical Girl could turn into a Witch this powerful. We knew that the cause of Stress has an effect on how powerful the witch becomes, but even in the most PTSD-ridden Magical Girls, the ones that are victims of tragedies, cartels, or human trafficking rings, they don't become this destructive. Leveling a city block? We've seen it before but incredibly rarely, but leveling a country? It's unheard of."

The scientist sighed while Olivia watched with anticipation, not interrupting her.

"So… we needed to figure out the mechanisms that turned a city-block-killing Witch into a country-killing Witch, and from this Magical girl, it was abundantly clear that the two mechanisms are entirely separated. And unfortunately for us, we found it."

The adult reached back and pulled up a graph showing exponential growth, with the x-axis marking years, and the y-axis showing projected destructive capability. The scientist talked while pointing to spots on the graph. "We cross referenced Witch data from the FBEM and the lifespans of Magical Girls that spawned them, and found this correlation."

"You're not telling me…"

"I'm afraid we are. The power of a Witch is not only correlated to the cause of Stress in them, but also exponentially correlated to the length of time they've been alive. Some Magical Girls who've lived for multiple years in the FBEM required military intervention to stop them once they turned into Witches, and… and you've seen the power of one that was alive for seventy years…"

Olivia had lost her composure at this point as she stared frantically at the camera. "S-so you're saying that all those hundreds of Soul Gems we have down there, if they were to be revived, would become Magical Girls who could transform into exceedingly powerful Witches?"

"I'm afraid so." Said the adult, while the scientist looked down in tiredness and fear. The adult crouched down to comfort her. "Hey, you won't become a Witch. Trust me, I promise that I'll make sure of that."

"R-right…" Said the scientist.

"Dare I ask what the final discovery was?" Asked Olivia.

"Wh-when we tried confirming this data by reviving an older convict with the plan of turning her into a Witch… her Grief seed rapidly underwent a massive stress buildup, even with her powers disabled… When we tried to put her back under, it continued, bypassing the natural mechanism that blocks stress buildup when a Soul Gem is disconnected from a Magical Girl's body."

"It was only because of me that we survived." The adult lifted up his fatigues slightly, showing a holster. "I… shot her Soul Gem, breaking it into pieces and stopping the runaway stress buildup. It was the only way, trying to put her under did nothing."

"Understandable, you won't be reprimanded for this infraction, human."

The adult nodded in response. "Thank you, Queen Olivia."

"But I… I need to say this now, this research cannot leave this lab, ever."

"What…?" Said the scientist. "We have hundreds of Magical Girls in here! They could all turn into city-killing Witches if we let it stay that way! We have to do something!"

"Do not talk outside of your expertise!" Yelled Olivia. "This problem is higher than either of you now, grave consequences will come to you if this knowledge leaves this lab!" She leaned back, motioning to turn off the camera. "You two are dismissed, be prepared to receive news in a few days on how to continue, but until then, you have some time off. Enjoy it."

Olivia's camera cut off, and the two stared in silence, the adult dropping the pictures he was holding and the scientist starting to cry.

The hologram fizzled out.

Two more files remained to be played.

And Sarah stood wide eyed.

Regretful.