#EN: Hey look, a present for the holiday! Just in time, too! I was hoping to finish editing this one... well, a while ago, truthfully, but something about the scenes with Ruiko and Frenda fought me every step of the way- it sure felt like more than ~4400 words! I think we're both satisfied with what came out on the other end, though. The end is in sight.
A/N: It is indeed! Happy Holidays!
Misaki hissed through clenched teeth as Kazari helped her up into a sitting position against the alley wall, trying her best to keep Misaki's shattered hand from moving. Kazari herself periodically swiped the blood out of her eyes from the wound on her head. She was unsteady and trembling and Misaki gathered her in with her less-injured arm to keep her from trying to push herself further still. Nokleben had managed to get himself off the ground and out of the storefront he'd been tossed through to help both of them, his handgun drawn in a modest show to ward away any other potential threats.
"You know, this is precisely why I don't usually do field operations," she remarked with a strained smile, "It makes my clothes dirty." Kazari returned it weakly.
"New threats!" Nokleben trained his gun at several people advancing on them, likely Dark Matter's low-grade minions.
"I know, I know..." Misaki sighed, "Be a sport and pass me my bag, if it's not too much trouble?" He hooked it with his foot, never taking his eyes off the mooks, and flipped it her direction. Her flower knew what she needed and rifled through it to deposit a remote in her hand. "Thank you, dear! Now..." Lazily, she pressed a button. "...why don't you fine lads help us out?" she asked the two dozen individuals wearing SCHOOL colors that had been not-so-subtly trying to surround them. Nokleben seemed momentarily surprised before he let out a small chuckle, lowering his gun and looking to her for further direction.
Misaki, feeling a touch mutinous now that there were no threats on hand, sniffed with exaggerated haughtiness.
"Honestly, I take a few bruises the past couple days, and suddenly everyone and their bargain store thugs think they can walk all over me. The nerve of some people!"
In no time, Misaki was being helped onto her feet alongside a very tired and woozy Kazari by her newly acquired... employees, surrounded by attentive agents making phone calls for an ambulance, setting up a proper perimeter, and debriefing Nokleben on everything they knew. The unconscious Last Order was being given basic first aid by a pair trained in it, a relief given the general quality of Teitoku's... gift to her. (She appreciated them trying to splint her hand much less.)
Misaki looked up into the sky a ways off, meeting eyes with the Level 5 who so hated her? Where is Acceler- "Ah!" Teitoku's brief respite was courtesy of Accelerator laughing at him for how all his back-up was now Misaki's back-up, and she did savor his pure, unadulterated fury.
"Pitiful." She hummed as she tucked the remote away. "Brute force isn't everything, you barbaric simpleton."
"Hmmm…"
A silver haired tyrant smiled in delight from his personal prison of liquid, his gaze seeking outward to his floating tarot set. To the two cards that had so fascinated him.
The Devil was in Reverse. It had completed its journey, it had found enlightenment at the end of its life: doom at the hands of The Magician imprisoned in The Tower's hatred and madness.
If he had blinked, he might have missed the change. The Devil's certain doom was no longer so certain. His eyes drifted to the neighboring card and his grin grew wide.
"The Chariot is Upright, and the Victorious Hero has finally arrived."
Thick droplets echoing from a growing puddle.
Dust sliding from stone.
Concrete cracking before clattering onto the hard ground.
Searing pain at her waist.
Was she dead?
She had to be. That's the only way any of it made sense.
Frenda's eyes slowly fell down to her waist, staring at the small hole burned through her borrowed shirt, the blazing beam of energy having seared deep into the concrete, but only leaving a palm-sized burn on her person.
That was as far as the beam went?
Her eyes were drawn upward to the giant hole by the artificial light beaming down from the floor above. It had to be nearly a foot of concrete shattered apart, piping ripped and scattered from an astonishing impact.
Her gaze slowly fell back down at last, still stained with tears from the overwhelming pain of existing, to a shocking tableau.
"Rui...ko... How…?" She asked softly, disbelievingly.
"Just in time, eh?"
The Ruiko that stood before her, the Ruiko that had burst through the ceiling above, tossed a fleeting roguish smirk over her shoulder at Frenda before looking back to the woman she blocked. Distantly, Frenda acknowledged that Ruiko was covered in suspicious white fluid, but she was too shocked to even make a quip about it, let alone consider what it might be.
Because Mugino.
Fearfully, she tore her eyes away from Ruiko's striking figure. Mugino was shaking, levering herself upright on one arm while she held her crushed nose with the other, blood dripping off her face to pool around debris on the ground. Mugino had only caught the business end of it by a quirk of her honed reflexes, but Frenda had seen it clearly. The image of Meltdowner's face meeting an axe kick from a girl half her age through the ceiling would live rent-free in her fondest memories for the rest of her life. ...presuming she survived the next three minutes.
Because Mugino.
Mugino's eyes were wide and psychotic, filled with such rancor that it spread into the air like miasma.
"You- I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" she screamed as a dozen emerald orbs materialized, the air sizzling with evaporated moisture as Mugino built a quick charge.
"Bet?!"
And then Ruiko moved.
Frenda blinked as her savior seemed to vanish, her brain only catching up after Ruiko had already closed the gap between herself and Mugino in an instant, fist planted in her gut from the girl with a wild toothy grin. How… How was Ruiko moving like that? How was she… How had she crashed through the stone above- how?
How was she beating Mugino with her bare fists?
She gawked incredulously as she watched Mugino made into a fool, Ruiko beating on her with an onslaught of punches, every hit sending Mugino stumbling backward as she had the ever-living shit beat out of her, unable to formulate a response to the barrage of shattering strikes.
"ENOUUUUGH!" Mugino howled in rage as a shimmering green veil appeared in front of her, Ruiko just barely pulling her punch in time to avoid her hand getting disintegrated. Mugino used the reprieve to create some distance, leaping backward and harassing Ruiko with a random scattering of shots.
Seemingly undeterred, Ruiko practically flowed, seeming to predict every attack before it was even fired and dodging with astonishing speed.
"DIE, DIE, DIE! JUST FUCKING DIE!" Mugino's face twisted in hate and fury, unable to contain it all as she desperately tried to destroy the girl who so humiliated her. After dozens of enraged shots, she managed to graze Ruiko's shirt, setting it ablaze. She had only a moment to respond, tearing it off in one movement and tossing it aside.
Frenda's disbelief shifted to horror as all her questions were answered in the worst way possible: the secret to Ruiko's strength, her speed, everything about this bizarre showdown, was her fault, something she had flippantly told Ruiko about.
"ARE YOU INSANE?!" Frenda found new energy in screaming.
Ruiko's naked upper-body was criss-crossed in a lattice, giving her only minimal decency aside from the school bag still strapped to her back. But the material...
Hard Taping. The ultrasonic elastic taping they'd found in the mech hanger in what felt like forever ago. Probably the very same rolls she had seen Ruiko steal. She had it spread across her entire torso and arms, the taut dark ribbons disappearing beneath her waistline, likely wrapped around her entire body. Every movement, Ruiko gambled against the substance- the ability to move faster and hit harder than any normal human should against her body giving out and tearing itself apart with the smallest of misfortunes.
"Probably a bit! Though that Indian Poker card we picked up for rock-paper-scissors is putting in work. Turns out she's pretty easy to read." Ruiko looked over to give Frenda another of those infuriating brief smiles, raising a hand to flick away some of that ivory liquid that ran with her sweat into her eyes.
Looking past her to the recovering Mugino... it wasn't a pretty sight. Frenda had once considered her a beautiful woman. Statuesque. This pitiful creature clutching her battered face, trying to stem the bleeding, eyes crazed with bloodlust, made her wonder for the millionth time just how it had all gone so wrong. Mugino's gaze shook as she stared at Ruiko with hate, before swapping with a feral twitch to the prone Frenda. Their eyes met and she felt horror grip her chest once more.
"I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll kill you BOTH!" Mugino ranted as she struggled to right herself.
"TIME TO BAIL!" Frenda let out a weary 'oof' as Ruiko closed the distance and swept her up off the ground like she weighed nothing, just barely saving her from a beam of energy melting her position to slag.
"YOU CAN'T RUN FROM ME!" Mugino shrieked as she unleashed a withering hail of shots, Frenda getting the terrifying front row seat from her position slung over Ruiko's shoulders in a fireman's carry, the girl managing to somehow weave and dodge around the beams before finally reaching an intersection, kicking off the opposing wall to launch herself down the hall.
Ruiko made three bounding steps before dropping into a slide, narrowly pulling Frenda forward over her head and tightly to her chest as energy beams radiated overhead, shredding the foundation of the building above them.
A jarring impact. The sensation of flight as physics tore her from Ruiko's grasp. She briefly saw Ruiko's horrified expression, hand reaching out in vain, before they were separated by dust, steam, and darkness.
Then she hit the ground and rolled a bunch. Which sucked. And hit a wall with a "ghurk" that nearly knocked the wind out of her. That sucked too. And to top it all off, she was utterly unable to tell which direction she'd even come from.
"Rui-!" She slapped a hand over her own mouth, stopping herself from giving away her position.
She allowed herself several labored breaths to process, but was quickly shaken from her stupor as she heard an animalistic roar, more electron beams passing overhead as Mugino stalked through the hall in search of her prey. She felt it again, that fear, that overwhelming existential dread that Mugino inspired, gripping her-
No.
If Ruiko could fight, a Level 0 with nothing but her scant training and fearlessness in the face of certain death, then she wouldn't die like this. She wouldn't!
Frenda rolled onto her stomach, ignoring the pain as she began her crawl into the dust, keeping below the random attacks from Mugino, crawling toward salvation. She would find Ruiko. She would survive!
She would not lose.
Mikoto couldn't help but notice she was smiling. She had forgotten… forgotten after more than a year of moderation, how it felt to go all out. She was smiling, and oh, did she enjoy how angry that made him!
In fact... Her brow furrowed even as her grin remained unchanged while a mountain of rubble, metal, and twisting light and sound rose like a vortex in front of her, reshaping itself into a disgusting approximation of a creature, sharp-clawed appendages growing from the center as she saw Indigo standing, bloodied and wroth, on its misshapen snout.
"Alright, girl. You win." He returned her grin with his own mad smile. "I've terminated all my simulations, all but this one." He threw his torn jacket to the whipping wind and loosened his tie. "No more foresight, no more city-wide predictions. You get my full, undivided attention." He hissed out, unbuttoning his vest and rolling up the cuffs of his dress shirt.
"Let's try a repeat of the Level 6 Shift, shall we?" His grin grew wider than a human's naturally should, eyes alight with a manic gleam.
Mikoto felt the change immediately, the hulking aberration glowing violet as he finally got creative with his stolen Meltdowner. The energy poured through every nook and cranny of the construct, causing rubble to run and flow into a slurry of molten rock and metal, superheating the air like the breath of some fell beast.
"Yeah… let's," Mikoto agreed, her face still straining to contain her joy as she leaped backward once more, jumping from one platform onto another larger one. "I won that one too!"
A deafening boom echoed across the city as storm clouds gathered overhead, lightning arcing from one cloud to the next as they collected into a swirling mass.
"You first?" Mikoto mocked with a smug smirk, satisfied by the animosity she inspired in his face.
The clone stumbled as she turned once more, trying to catch Kuroko in the passing window between teleports.
"Little more," Kuroko breathed out as she vanished and reappeared once more, and then again, and then again.
She was a blur around the clone, remaining in one place for less than the blink of an eye before she was gone again. Every movement was a calculated risk in a dance where to misstep was to learn the answer to whether her internal organs would blend.
Kuroko was good at calculation and risks.
The poor nameless clone continued to chase at her shadow, unable to keep up with the close movements. Kuroko flexed her back muscles as she felt those six new appendages move with her, anchored into the space around the clone. Her original conjecture about outhinking the clone and countering Accelerator's fearsome ability was fast passing through the realm of hypothesis to actionable theory.
Every anchor she left around the confused girl was a tunnel for her personal use. Pre-calculated manifold transits enabled by following those peculiar appendages along their length, the makeup of her makeshift transit system twisting in a beautiful mathematical figure of perfection with every landing even as the anchors remained still.
"I think I'll call this trick a 'Wormhole'," Kuroko mused as she went through several more teleportations, her words stretching into a bizarre echo as she spoke it across her jumps.
The clone weakly grabbed at Kuroko, her hand crossing into one of the wormholes, causing the barrier around her arm to reject the space and trip backward, slamming into another stretch of wormhole and bouncing forward, barely stopping herself in time, only able to turn and feebly snatch at the afterimage of where Kuroko had been three jumps earlier.
And finally, Kuroko got her intended result as the girl fell onto the ground, trying to use her hands to steady her fall before scabbling at the edge of the metal mask and tearing it off forcibly, retching as she expelled the contents of her near-empty stomach onto the ground. Disoriented, her hands slipped out from under her and she crumpled, still dry heaving.
"You may be terrifying…" Kuroko panted out as she came to a stop, pulling her spatial back-appendages (she badly needed a name for them) around her once more. "...but you are still human. Even you get tired, get confused... haah ...and get dizzy." She smiled down at the girl, "You did the best you could."
Kuroko snapped a hand out toward the back of the clone's neck, ignoring her weak attempts to resist. She came up against the vector barrier, that last line of defense, and focused her undivided attention on it- she didn't have long, but now-
She touched the back of the girl's neck, and she exhaled-
"I trust you, Mikoto," she whispered, and unleashed the charge she had been gifted.
The girl let out a strangled cry of pain and surprise, her body thrashing momentarily as electricity ran through her. Kuroko clenched her jaw in anxiety, before she saw it, a tiny puff of acrid smoke rising from the back of the girl's neck as something electrical burnt out.
And then the girl fell still. Kuroko's heart hammered in her chest as she turned the girl over and checked her vitals, the barrier no longer an impediment. She opened the girl's eye to look at her pupils before breathing a sigh of relief, vindication for her trust.
She was fine. Just unconscious. And a quick examination… told her that whatever device Indigo used to exert his influence was no more. Kuroko could not help but smile in pride at Mikoto's foresight- of course he had to have had something implanted to control her. She had probably felt something, a minute datastream that penetrated the barrier.
Kuroko's eyes turned to look up at the battle of titans above her, the storm of electricity and wind colliding with a glowing abomination of metal, stone, and violet energy. Kuroko's eyes widened as she quickly grabbed the girl and teleported, managing to dodge a falling piece of pyroclastic debris, setting down a fair distance off. She needed to help Mikoto! But…
She looked down at the unconscious girl. The unconscious, helpless, and innocent girl.
She looked up at the fight once more.
"You've got this. I know you do."
Long unbearable seconds bled into interminable minutes as Frenda levered herself through the mess of corridors and crossroads of the seemingly endless underground system. It must have been connected to the entire industrial block.
Using a wall to brace, Frenda cautiously got back to her feet. Mugino had finally stopped randomly firing, leaving the low, throaty hiss of heating pipes occasionally punctuated by the splash of water droplets.
She still hadn't found Ruiko.
"Must've gone the wrong way..." she admitted in the quietest of whispers, looking over her shoulder. She was completely lost in the haze and gloom of the tunnels.
She nearly lost her footing and her nerve from a sudden deep grinding reverberation all around her- Mugino had done so much damage the whole place was well into the process of caving-in.
"Ruiko," Frenda whimpered as she began to move once more, trying to find her- just find Ruiko and then the pair could get out of here. They could escape and get to those freaky demigods that could stand up to Mugino. Frenda could… could tell her-
A sound to her right. Reflexively, she spun to face it, hope overflowing in her heart.
"Ruiko-!?"
Sickly, searing, impossibly bright GREEN and then nothing.
Frenda screamed. She screamed and screamed without restraint, collapsing onto the ground as she clutched at her eyes- where her eyes used to be.
"Found you."
Oh. Right. Frenda wasn't allowed to have good things.
Because Mugino.
Rolling on the ground in agony, weeping without tears as she clawed at the ruined, smoking sockets, she cursed her miserable lot and the torment she was suffering. Mugino gave her a kick down the hall.
"Once I'm done with you, that little bitch is next." Something about those words pierced her awareness. Frenda was... resigned. Despite everything, she was going to die. Tortured, pathetic, and alone. Maybe that's just what she deserved. But Ruiko... Ruiko didn't. Ruiko didn't deserve to die and certainly not while trying to save someone like her.
And yet...
"Ruiko… Ruiko… Ruiko…" Frenda sobbed as she crawled along the wall, desperately wishing to see Ruiko's face again, to hear her voice one last time, to be saved and escape this nightmare, no matter how little she deserved it.
"Just fucking die, you pathetic worm," Mugino demanded dispassionately. Frenda felt the air heat up once more, panic driving her forward regardless of the inevitability of this outcome.
"RUIKO!" Frenda howled her final, anguished yearning.
"FRENDA!"
Frenda, in her last moments, felt Ruiko's arms close around her.
The little shit that had been beating on her dashed out of the darkness and threw herself on top of the traitor.
"Good," Mugino sneered, "saves me the trouble of hunting you down."
Meltdowner took aim at the ugly bag at center mass and poured her wrath into her most powerful beam yet.
It was her final mistake.
Mikoto let out a war cry as she slammed a lance of lightning from the sky into the side of the monstrosity animated by Indigo's will, the energy in the strike causing it to fluctuate and collapse to the ground where it immediately began to reform into a usable shape.
"Okay, so I didn't give him enough credit," Mikoto panted as she glared down at Indigo. She was still at advantage against him, but the battle was taking a lot more out of her than she was expecting, and he was still going.
Their staredown was interrupted, both of their snapping to the same distraction.
A scintillating fusillade of emerald beams lit the sky. It was only when one struck a building that Mikoto realized what the chaotic cone of laser lights truly was.
Meltdowner.
She couldn't begin to imagine why, but Shizuri Mugino's beams burned and sliced through everything in their path. Mikoto pulled away from the fight, throwing debris up to shield herself from the suddenly deadly sky, moving down toward where she felt Kuroko had landed.
"Mikoto!" She heard Kuroko call to her as she landed, but Mikoto had no time to answer as she raised more shields.
She saw Indigo do similar, using his monster as an ablative armor to protect himself. She redirected a few of the stray beams his way for good measure.
"No, no!" She hadn't hit him, so what was he so- she glanced to the side and it became clear. The beams raked over the spire he'd so devoted himself to protecting, his shield seeming to have done nothing at all to protect it. Huge chunks were carved off, explosions and fires breaking out from shorting conduits, before finally one pierced straight through it.
"NOOOOOO!" Indigo wailed in indignation.
He had good reason for ire: Mikoto was already feeling a second (or was it third) wind coming as that infernal pressure in her head waned with the abrupt termination of the attack on the Misaka Network.
"Ruiko...?" The tiny, forlorn voice of Frenda kindled a new ember in her breast. Frenda Seivelun didn't do "meek". Ruiko wished she could give her lover a comforting answer, but she couldn't find her own voice through the excruciating hellish inferno that clung to her back. She stared into the lightless holes where Frenda's baby blues should have been alight with mischief and fanned the flames of her grudge, pushing the feeling into her limbs and forcing herself through the pain to turn her head and look over her shoulder.
As she did, she felt the straps on her school bag snap, falling to the ground with a loud crash of tinkling glass. The bathrooms back at the house were a bit empty and that fancy hotel might not be too happy, but the plethora of stolen mirrors, now shattered by thermal shock, had done their job. It was just as Uiharu had said when she hacked the Bank for her… Meltdowner's powers were, after all…
"Reflective…" Ruiko rasped out as she looked at Mugino.
Mugino couldn't be described as staring back. She had turned her body to the side as she looked down at them, aiming with two fingers from her right hand as she fired… and so she remained, locked in a five hundred-yard stare. The left side of her face was smoking, burned unrecognizable, her left eye seared away to nothingness as if fate decided to visit swift retribution on her for what she'd done to Frenda. She shifted and Ruiko took grim solace in how that demonic right arm cracked and rapidly disintegrated, falling off into a pile of smoking cinders.
"This… This can't…" Mugino mumbled, gesticulating weakly with the blackened stump, jaw clenching as shock overwhelmed her. Ruiko let go of Frenda as she finally rose, turning to face her nemesis and marched ominously forward, radiating malice. Every wound on her body burned harshly as she felt the blood of that creature getting in her wounds with the sweat and sanguine lines sliding down her frame. She took another step. She had a job to finish.
"I- I AM A LEVEL FIVE, I AM MELTDOWNER, YOU- YOU CAN NOT-"
Ruiko leaped forward, grabbing the stricken woman by the face, pulling her along as she dove toward the opposing wall, roaring as she slammed the back of the psycho's head into it, the stone cracking from the force.
She panted heavily as she felt the Hard Taping, strained beyond tolerance by the heat of the blast, finally snap apart around her, pieces falling to the ground. Her entire body ached from the abuse she'd put it through. She released her hand as the white-eyed woman slid motionless to the ground in a heap.
"Who fucking cares," Ruiko muttered at the motionless Level 5.
She turned away and began to stumble back toward Frenda, every step punctuated with a strained gasp for air.
She only managed a few steps before she toppled forward, the pain beyond description. She heard Frenda crawling toward her, pushing rocks aside to get to her.
"Ruiko?" Frenda whimpered, questing hands patting the ground in search of her. She winced a bit when one landed on a gash in her shoulder.
"Hey… Frenda…" she murmured as the hands grabbed at her. "Sorry… I'm late..." she coughed out, the world growing darker.
"Ruiko? Are you…"
Ruiko jerked as Frenda's hands reached her back.
"Ruiko?" Frenda whispered quietly as she pulled a hand back, Ruiko absently seeing it in her peripheral covered in blood. "Your back- your back it's…"
Ruiko wasn't sure what her back was as she finally, blessedly faded from consciousness.
"Ruiko?!" Frenda blindly curled around the unconscious girl. "Please- please don't die, please!" she wept, probing the injury with trembling fingers.
Even from touch alone, Frenda could tell that the skin of Ruiko's entire back had been burned away, shards of melted glass embedded in her exposed, fried muscles.
"Please… please someone… anyone…" Frenda cried out in helplessness, unable to do anything as she cradled Ruiko, the pain from her blind, useless eyes emanating from her face.
"ANYONE!" she yelled out in desperation.
"FRENDA!"
She had never been so happy to hear Shiage's voice.