"Half of everything is luck, James."

- Sean Bean

"That kind of luck does not exist."

- Danny Kamekona

"And it don't look good."

- Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson

"I used to believe without a doubt that I could reach my dreams, no matter how far off they were. / But that me from long ago now sleeps inside my heart."

- Junko Iwao

"You're the last person I wanted to see me like this."

- Kazusa Yamashiro

"Looky looky, I got Hooky."

- Rufio

"Goodbye, Homura. Take care."

- Madoka Kaname

"Ooo, they're gonna die."

"Shut up, Greg."

- E.T.

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving."

- Marlon Brando

"You're a walking lie and I can see right THROUGH you!"

- Meryl Streep

"The burning, the burning. The unhealable scars left on my hands. / Breaking through the clouds stained red by my torn wings. See, I can fly better than you thought."

- Tsukiko Amano

"FINISH HER."

- Shao Kahn


Mia stood on the transport platform waiting to find out who was going to be catapulted into the killing fields next. This was it. This was the worst-case scenario. All the royal favors and all the ambassador sweet-talking had failed, and now Otomes were just being launched one by one at each other until either someone signed a truce or the majestic flying maidens went extinct. Just like those good ol' Dragon King days.

There were mainly two great power struggles at work, but with enough infighting and holes in morale, those two factions might violently splinter into four factions. And then those four factions could tear each other to shreds to create eight factions. Those eight could become sixteen, and so on and so on, until all the splinters were cutting into the surrounding neutral countries, and however many Otomes remained were all tied to completely radical Masters going after every single other Master's throat. Throw in the fact multiple belligerents will probably get the idea to flatten Garderobe so even those nosey headmistresses will be tossed in with the "fight or die" crowd. And then this extended exercise on how to create a bloodbath would lead to a point where there are only two Otomes left, and those two might as well blast each other to cinders and erase the entire warrior caste from the planet as their final performance. Damn you, Mia, for being the expert combat statistician.

An electronically amplified horn blasted from behind a hill ten miles away. Mia's GEM registered the synthesized frequency as the summons for Cardair Empire, Triumvirate C, Head of Command.

On the opposite side of the field, a pair of platinum white heels reluctantly lifted off from their launch platform with a long striped stabilizer ribbon trailing behind. The flags of Cardair waved high around the ascending Otome—the flags of a nation that had lost the last seven consecutive battles.

They were done clearing out the lower noble houses. Mia had seen too many Otomes on her side fall since the fighting broke out, but the other side was being wiped out at an even worse rate. Things must have been getting desperate if they were sending the personal attendant of one of Cardair's three emperors into the crucible. Their newest and least influential emperor, but still one of them regardless.

Good luck, Kitten. It was all the Beautiful Red Cassiterite could think as her own apprehension grew.

Who was her side going to send to fight this one? She glanced toward some of the other Robed girls waiting on the risers to her left and right. No one looked like they were giddy to find out. They were all just lined up like a parade of despondent pixies sulking on top of giant metal mushrooms. Ahn Lu could whip out the sake jar, drown her sorrows, and pretend to be having fun after winning her round, but she'd go back to shivering in trepidation just like everyone else once she sobered and remembered where she was.

The youngest were 16, four years younger than Mia. The oldest couldn't have been more than 22, or 23. They'd all dreamed of becoming Otomes ever since they were little girls. Now this is where their dreams wound up.

A few platforms across from her, she could just make out Yumi Awa, the other girl from Konala who Mia had planned on training as her replacement before the whole world fell apart. She was wearing a rustic green and black Robe modeled as a chainmail debutante gown. Her long black hair was decorated with little kanzashi beads that hung in front of her ears and matched the muted colors of her Robe. Her Elements appeared to be a plain steel reproduction of Mia's original highly decorative feather fans. Mia hadn't even learned her GEM codename yet.

The once aspiring Pearl-conscripted-to-Meister was just a poor, terrified shrivel of herself now. Several of the younger Otomes on the platforms around her were wearing the same Robe pattern with minor color differences. They were powered by cheaper semi-mass produced GEMs that could be distributed in a hurry with no special ceremonies.

It didn't matter which kingdom the fledgling-Meisters hailed from. The massive coats of arms draping from their launch stands said everyone in this brigade (regardless of age or place of origin) technically belonged to Florince. But at least Yumi got to keep some of her cultural pride by standing in close proximity to her nation's bright red lead representative.

Mia tried to spin this into some kind of positive by thinking Yumi could still learn something from watching her mentor. It didn't matter if that mentor lived or died, just as long as Yumi managed to live longer than her.

A second horn blasted directly behind Mia, shaking her entire launch platform. She didn't have to wait for the computer to tell her what that sound meant. She knew the frequency natively, the one she was dreading to hear more than any other.

Florince Coalition, Konalan Reserves, Head of Command.

The empress of Konala was being called straight to the battlefield. Someone up the chain must have gotten the brilliant idea it would take some older royal blood to stomp out Cardair's two-bit bratty battle princess. And if the brilliant idea didn't work... Well, we're just the auxiliary troops from some foreign vacation spot anyway. Our political stability is optional.

This wasn't the kind of luck Mia was hoping for.

"Hold that chin up, Yumi! Eyes on the sky! This might be the only lesson I'll ever give you!" she hollered with a commanding voice toward her subordinate, a fretful girl who'd only been contracted as a Meister Otome to a retired palace lieutenant three days ago.

Yumi's Master was someone whose death wouldn't hit the kingdom too hard in the highly likely chance she was defeated. In other words, she was low priority to the enemy forces. This stunt with forcing the Cardair emperor's Otome onto the field was a panic move, but it was designed to draw out someone bigger.

A certain king in Florince might have been saying "You wouldn't let us have her a couple years ago? Well, here's the improved model we brought to take her place." All the old family grudges were boiling to the surface in this inferno.

There was no order here. No ranking system between the troops. No logical purpose. They were all just pretty dolls in fancy dresses being thrown at each other by giant invisible hands. They could all be dead tomorrow, but Mia still had the strong instincts to do the "commander thing." To try and be a supportive and enlightening older sister to her younger, less experienced peers.

This was somehow both completely wrong to how things were supposed to work, and yet the perfect culmination of the system Lady Fumi had created centuries ago. Some great plan it turned out to be.

Mia activated her flight rings and raced into the air before her doubts and regrets could catch up with her. The one condolence she could hang on to was knowing she wore the fastest Robe on Earl. Not the most physically powerful, not the most heavily armed, not the most customizable, but fast. And fast is all she needed so she could end this quickly. End the misery for both of those poor souls.

So this is what it came to. The Otome of a friendly neutral emperor conscripted into battle by an allegiance oath to a much larger kingdom, versus the Otome of a geeky emperor who wanted nothing to do with war, or politics, or economics, and would rather just spend his time writing poetry for his significant other. If this sick joke was supposed to have some kind of punchline, Mia wasn't seeing it. And if Kishuku had just said "Not my war. See ya later, old fart!" from the outset, Florince would invade them and crush them in a heartbeat.

Somewhere in a castle on the other side of that hill, the youngest Cardair emperor would be cowering in terror and pleading at the older monarchs, screaming at them not to send his Otome to the frontlines. She didn't deserve this. She wasn't ready. She was just a personal escort. She was never prepared for this kind of fighting. We don't even know who they'll send against her. I'll change the contract if I have to. Please, anyone but her! And they would simply tell him this was the way it had to be. He was next in line and he had no choice in the matter. Just like how he'd been wedged onto the throne in the first place. "Stop sulking, lad. Your reign just might survive past its infancy here, and then the people will start to respect you. You and she will go on to achieve great things that will make up for this little splot of nastiness."

Cardair's elites wouldn't even allow the emperor to get too close to his Otome other than the times he was required to kiss her GEM before she was shipped off on her launch carrier. In the middle of this war, it was considered a national security risk if the emperor and his Otome were allowed to do something that could remove them from the chess board. They were both practically hostages.

In case it wasn't obvious by now, Mia hated this. Being a scummy powerless pawn in some scummy mastermind's scummy game for scummy world conquest and being forced to do all the scummy dirty work by killing all the other helpless, frightened, powerless pawns who should have been her allies. What if something happened that caused Konala to split in half? The same thing had already happened in Lutesia the last time around, and now their divided Romulus and Remus territories were screaming for each others' blood. What if, someday, this scene was Mia and Yumi soaring toward each other into the combat zone? She could already hear the voices of a hundred distraught people screaming "Damn that Sou! He got us into all this. He and his wife are just killing OUR DAUGHTERS!"

In a time when everything had gone insane, she clung to the only single thing that still made sense: I have to get Kishu through this in one piece.

That was the most brutal part of it for Mia: Being disciplined enough to see how hopeless the system had become, but being just like every other meek girl confined to that system with a little ring on her Master's finger and a little kiss on her ear stud. The unique trauma of being a ruler and an Otome.

She never looked over her shoulder once she was off the ground. She never saw Yumi running to the front of her launch tower, nearly stumbling over the ledge in a panic, only to collapse to her knees weeping with her face in her hands. Sobbing bitterly for the empress she idolized leaving her behind.

Mia extended her two Dusters straight out like wings as she glided into the combat zone. Everyone knew she could move in a bewildering crimson blur when she was attacking in close quarters, but almost no one took into account she had ranged options. Nina certainly didn't take it into account—that had been her fatal mistake a year ago.

Mia twisted her wrists forward and opened her fingers, throwing both fans in front of her at a velocity that sent them screaming toward a target that was still two miles away. They flew even more quickly than her, and she could steer them with deadly precision using her GEM's wireless commands. They always returned back to her like improvised boomerangs, just as long the surrounding air resistance and turbulence were always predictable.

Her eyes went wide as she suddenly flew between a pair of swirling jet streams aimed directly at her. She banked 9 o'clock and decreased altitude to quickly recover from the distortion, but her fans were already flung wildly off-course. Before she could even think about what happened, she heard the sound of heated tonfa blades being spun like helicopter rotors in the distance.

Shit. I forgot she could do that.

And who could blame Mia? Cardair's royal belly dancer rarely activated the Robe that had earned her that nickname. And when she did, it was usually in small assist roles where someone else did most of the physical fighting while she just took a few quick swipes with her claws. Her high marks in the Academy (Trias #1 two years ago) were always associated with her ability to care for younger students and find diplomatic ways to settle arguments between rivals, and never based on her ability to rake through opponents with her training baton. This was probably the first time she'd gone into real direct combat by herself with the highest stakes imaginable.

That wasn't to say she was a terrible fighter. Far from it. She could flip her opponents every which way and toss them into the dirt if she wanted, but she was always the non-lethal disarming type in practice bouts. If she had any hope of surviving here, Mia would have to be her first required Otome kill.

That's how desperate Cardair had become: Throwing this sheltered unknown, the empire's docile pet Meister, against the Meister who'd defeated the Ultimate Black Diamond. But now their pet was starting to look like their trump card.

Mia didn't have enough time to fly around retrieving both of her weapons and deal with her rapidly approaching enemy, so she opted to just swoop for the fan closest to her. As soon as it was back in her hand, a pure white streak buzzed past her head.

Akane looped around and swung from Mia's left. Mia's knives parried Akane's tonfa with a loud metallic clang! Akane made a second pass from the right, and Mia's knives parried with another thunderous clang! Akane's flyby attacks were frantic and greedy, allowing Mia to figure out her timing pretty quickly.

Akane turned to make another charge from the left. Mia was ready this time and swung her extended knives aggressively, nearly clipping Akane through her shoulder. Akane veered out of the way with a nimble corkscrew that sent her stabilizer tails whirling around each other in a helix.

Akane looped vertically and came back down with a dive kick. Mia answered with a high kick, and each Otome dodged the other's move as they passed centimeters apart. With almost perfect mirrored timing, they both twirled around with mid-kicks and ended up clashing their ankle rings together. Mia had just slightly faster recovery time and flipped forward over Akane's head. Mia sprung her heels off Akane's shoulders to stagger her trajectory and quickly get behind her. Mia swung her expanded fan horizontally behind Akane's shoulders, but Akane lurched forward in time so all Mia got was a few clippings of hair off of her Cleopatra bob cut.

Damn! You've never shown reflexes like that before!

Mia straightened in the air, while Akane spun around and punched with the long end of her tonfa blade.

Mia opened her knives completely and raised them vertically, holding them like a giant seashell shield in front of her chest. With two fans, she could've shielded her entire torso and tucked her legs up. But at least she had all the vital body parts covered with one.

Akane went lower.

"Gyuhn!" Mia's eyes bulged into saucers as she gasped in pain. She could feel her lunch boiling in her belly for a split second, and then the only thing she could taste was red and metallic.

Two feet of heated vibration tonfa drove through her gut like a pile bunker. Everything between the bottom of her ribcage and the top of her pelvis was cauterized into shimmering green embers the instant it was impaled.

It felt like a thousand weightless flakes of ice suddenly flying out the middle of her back. The icy sensation gradually spread through the rest of her body, causing fluctuating sensations of intense heat, intense cold, and intense pain as the rupturing nanomachines killed off all the nerve roots, all the arteries, and all the organ tissue from the inside out.

Kishu... no...

The Beautiful Red Cassiterite, the Empress Consort of All Konalan Provinces and Territories, dropped her only remaining weapon as her arms slumped to her sides and her body slowly changed to the color of common slag. Defeated by the handmaid of an 18-year-old provisional boy-king two years into his reign. The event was a paragraph, maybe only a single line, written with blood in a records book that still had many pages left to be written and demanded much more blood.

The closest similarity between Mia and Akane ended up being the most cruel. Some Otomes wore sniping or artillery Robes that could eliminate blankets of enemies from half a country away. Otome pikewomen could stay in one location and throw their spears or staves into orbit if they wanted. Others could even conjure Child drones that mimicked and amplified all of their attacks so they could fight by proxy. But Mia and Akane were both dedicated interceptor/infiltrators. They each had their own secondary abilities that worked to varying degrees, but both excelled in close-range pas de deux. If they were going to kill anyone, they had to pick their targets very carefully and get within arm's reach to use their full potential. This reduced the risk of innocents being harmed in collateral damage, but it also made each of their kills all the more personal.

They were almost hugging, the strange way they collided in mid-air. They would have been hugging in a different time. "Ahh, Mia! It's so nice to see you! Keeping those wings as sharp as ever, eh?" "How's it going, Akane? Those ears look great on you. Bet you're glad to have me helping you out on this joint op!"

There were no warm greetings in this place. Akane spoke in a low voice that flowed straight into Mia's ear with crystal clarity.

"Sorry. Kazu is more important." The Pure Heart Malachite's tone didn't match the cheerful courtier or the gentle sister-figure Mia knew her to be. Her voice lacked compassion, sympathy, and apology. It was the voice of a woman determined to simply do whatever she had to in the moment, and worry about her emotions later.

All that would sum up Mia's struggling and suffering was a gravestone in Garderobe's private memorial hall somewhere above the Founder Cistern, assuming the school would even exist a year from now. Her stone would be crowded somewhere around Carla's and Haruka's. It would simply say: Meister of B.R. Cassiterite. MIA SOU. Devoted her life to Master KISHUKU SOU. A.R. 314-334.

Mia suddenly recognized Akane's great qualities as a field medic as her eyelids became too heavy to keep open. Cauterizing Mia's wounds. Keeping her cloth shoulder pauldron in one spot so Mia could use it as a chinrest as she slumped forward. Avoiding any unnecessary movements that would bring Mia more pain when she was already in agony...

"I'll make this quick for you."

Metal whistled through the air as Akane raised her free tonfa over Mia's head. Like a cat raising the claws on its free paw while the other kept the bird pinned down.

Mia coughed. Blood trickled down the corners of her mouth as she fought to get her breath out. She knew Kishuku was going through the same thing back at the palace. Akane was killing Mia's husband to save the innocent man who was, for all intents and purposes, her fiancé.

One moment, Kishu was sitting on his throne hanging his head in grief while he and the rest of his silent court waited for any kind of news. The next, he was grabbing his abdomen in agony and spurting blood. It was all too much to think about.

"I would have done the same for you and him," Mia Sou whispered to her friend. There was no anger or condemnation in her frail voice.

"I know," Akane Soir coldly replied.

Akane was a probational case: Mandated by Garderobe's staff to serve as Emperor Kazuya's Otome in Cardair as an alternative punishment for breaking an earlier contract in Florince, after Garderobe themselves had rushed her into graduation to make that first contract. It was the classic example of Personal Love vs. Official Duty, and Akane was one of the softer ones who crumbled from indecision. "Crumbling" in this case meant she had fled across multiple countries with an unauthorized Materialisation device still attached to her ear and implicated herself on Empty Quiver violations. She was supposed to be shadowed by a Garderobe Column officer who made sure she carried out her new contract until they determined when she was allowed to retire.

On the surface, it was all a silly formality where the Academy simply re-contracted Akane to the noble she'd been in love with from the start, and put restrictions on her for a few years to prevent any further conflicts. In a more serious light, Kazuya had been hastily appointed by Cardair's royal committee as the new third emperor after the previous one had abused his power and was killed with his Otome Fiar Grosse in a dispute preceding this war. The new contract was meant to turn Kazuya into one of Garderobe's "long-term political projects" and turn Akane into what one headmistress described as "the state of the art in criminal rehabilitation." But the Academy had lost contact with her when the war broke out, and now she was serving as the emperor's Otome on her own. Out of desperation.

Her only options were to refuse to fight and watch everything she loved be engulfed in the fires of a war she had no control over, or use her powers to prove she and the emperor deserved to live in this world. It was hard to imagine how that must have sounded when Akane was crying her tear ducts dry at the onset of the war. "No. Not Kazu. Not like Argos XIV. Not like Argos XII. Not this TIME!"

The poor girl. All she accomplished today was convincing allies and enemies alike to take her more seriously so they could put a giant target on her. Well, Garderobe ended up getting the loyal and ferocious Otome they wanted out of her. Were those bitches happy now?

Mia always found it irritating how the Academy was so obsessed with arresting Akane, when there was another Otome who effectively stole her GEM in an almost identical situation years prior to Akane, and they never spent a single resource trying to reprimand her. They were allowing her to operate completely rogue and without a care in the world. Maybe Malachite is just a lot more valuable than Ruby these days.

Good luck, Kitten. Mia returned to that thought in those final seconds. She hoped Akane and her Master would have better luck than her and could survive for another week, or another day. Maybe at least another hour in this madness.

Metal whistled again as a shadow descended in a crescent angle toward Mia's neck. Her eyes were wet. Partially from pain, partially from the fear of losing her...

The last vision Mia saw was Akane squeezing her eyes shut in an agonized, regretful scowl, as if she were suffering even more than Mia. As if this outcome was killing her more than it was killing Mia. Mia spent that last instant knowing she'd not only failed at protecting her Master's life, she'd failed at sparing Akane from devastating guilt. Guilt Mia could have managed if she had won, but would torture a nice girl like Akane for the rest of her life. However long that life might have left.

Oh no. It's too much for her.

The poor, poor girl. She never wanted to fight. She never even wanted to be an Otome once she made up her mind where her heart really belonged. Mia blamed part of it on herself: She was always there saying "Just slow down, Akane. There's no rush. You can be an Otome and be with your Master! Look at how it's working out for me and Kishu! All you need to do is be patient!" And now this is what they had turned her into, just so someone could say "See, boys? We killed an emperor today!"

She heard the beginning of Akane's frenzied sorrowful scream. A sweet, innocent, soft-spoken voice making a feral bloodcurdling sound it never should have made in any sane world. The edge of the swinging tonfa reached the side of Mia's exposed neck an inch above her flight collar. She thought of Kishu, Kishu, Kishu, Akane, Kishu, Akane, Akane, Kazuya, Kishu, Yumi, Akane, Kishu, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm. The blade continued smoothly and mercifully through its course, ending everything in a blink.


Author's notes:

I watched the Ian McKellan version of Richard III about 167 times in preparation for this chapter, and it keeps getting FUNNIER every single TIME I SEE IT! Not the mention the fact you're talking to a self-proclaimed medievalist guy!

Cardair lost seven Otomes in a row, so this scene can be considered "Episode 8." Episode 8 is an important concept because: It's the episode where Miyu ganks Kazu-kun (and Akane's brain) in the original HiME series, AND it's the episode where the flashback stuff with Monica and Sylvie is first shown in the Otome series (which this chapter is heavily reenacting).

The whole fight choreography is meant to be surreal. The "motif" I was going for is they're two Akanes and they're both trying to out-Miyu each other. Writing this was pretty rough, though. I just wanted the nearly identical power waifus to be tomodachi. Why must the vicious cycle of feudal drama keep repeating itself? ;-;

This also works as a metaphor for NBC in mid-1994 when they had to choose between killing SeaQuest or killing Viper so the surviving show could get a second season funded. Hopefully it doesn't continue the same pattern where Viper and The Sentinel were both completely cancelled from syndication around the same time (the pair of "sister" shows both developed by Pet Fly Productions).

When Mia and Akane work together, they can do the Megatigerzord finisher. When they're forced to fight each other, they get downgraded and someone has to die to the Dragonzord in Battle Mode finisher. It's very logical if u think about it.

Probable soundtracks for this chapter: Kenji Kawai - "Recover" (a. k. a. that remix of "Union" that only plays in one scene when the GN Flag shows up), that Ron Wasserman cue that plays the first time the Red Ranger and Green Ranger fight in Green With Evil Part 1, or that ridiculous MIDI rendition of "Hips Don't Lie" where the main synth instrument is a banjo and everyone on tumblr thinks it sounds like music from an N64 Zelda game.

If you were going to make a Mai Otome OVA based on the Dragon King arc, would you set it entirely from Sylvie's POV? Or would you do a To Live and Die in L.A. thing where it's mostly told from Monica's POV but then it switches to Sylvie for the last episode after Monica gets shot in the face by a random thug with a Mossberg 500 Cruiser shotgun during a botched counterfeiting raid?