Disclaimer: I do not own Zero no Tsukaima or Destiny
Chapter 3: Emergence Day
Luna, Sol System
The Hellmouth
Revival + Three Days
Her ghost had not been exaggerating when he said that there was going to be much worse than thralls between what Louise now knew as the Summoning Pits and the surface. What should have been less than an hour's walk by distance had turned into a seventy hour running battle through the Hive's stronghold.
Louise had awoken at the bottom with virtually nothing. No weapons, no idea what she was facing, and even less information about how she had arrived in this place. By the time she reached the highest levels of the Hellmouth, that scared, confused girl was dead and gone, several times over.
The Hive had been merciless in their attempts to kill her, and had succeeded several times. But death was not the end for Louise, far from it. With every death, the pain and terror became more familiar. With every life, she grew stronger, and every time they killed her, she made them pay a higher price.
The Louise that emerged from the fortress, and took her first step out onto the grey surface of Luna was something new. Broken by combat and death, then put back together and reanimated by her Light. Over and over again, she was beaten into shape, as would a chunk of steel be heated and folded many times on its path from ingot to sword. She was the weapon now, having emerged from the trials behind her transformed. Louise had emerged from her forging a Guardian, a Warlock, a Voidwalker.
But even three days of hell could not have prepared her for the sight that greeted her eyes now. Beyond the Hellmouth, the surface was uniformly grey and lifeless. A distinctly pervasive coldness came over her out here. This was a thoroughly dead world.
Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw a bright disc against the black sky.
Louise focused on it, her eyes resolving great swathes of blue, green, and white. She stared unblinking for what felt like years, but was probably no more than half a minute. Something primal inside firmly instructed her that it was the most beautiful thing those eyes had ever seen.
"What is this place?" She asked her ghost in awe.
"You really did come through a portal down there, didn't you?" The little sphere appeared and floated over into her field of view. "Every human alive in this system would recognize the surface of Luna, Earth's great moon."
"I told you, all I remember is being pulled through some green portal into that cavern. Everything before that is just hazy and jumbled." Louise replied.
"Not surprising. It's common for Guardians to experience memory loss of the time before their rebirth. There are a few that remember everything, but many more newly awakened Guardians that do not even know their names. But I've never met any human, Guardian or not, that can't identify Luna and Earth." He told her.
"Speaking of names…" She trailed off. It had only just occurred to Louise that she did not have a name for her ghost, and if he knew her name he had yet to use it. Had they really just fought for three days straight without even knowing something so basic about each other?
"I'm Saito." The ghost belatedly introduced himself.
"Louise." His guardian informed him.
"Alright, Louise, our first order of business is to once again get out of here in a hurry. Just because we made it out of the Hellmouth, doesn't mean we're that much safer. There haven't been any permanent friendly outposts on this rock since the Golden Age, despite the proximity to Earth." He explained.
"Where are we going now?" She asked, checking the charge of the wire rifle she had looted from the corpse of a Fallen vandal. The House of Exile's assault on the Hellmouth had been almost perfectly timed to take the pressure off of her, and give the Hive a more pressing target. As the Hive cared little for alien weaponry, the bodies of the Fallen patrol she discovered were still fully armed. She relieved one of them of its burdens, and told the dead alien that its weapon would continue the fight against the Hive without it, not that the dead could hear her speak. Not that she even knew what these creatures thought or felt for their dead.
"Not that far, I'll mark it on your map. Since we don't have any form of transportation, much less a ship, we'll have to get to the local transmat beacon and hail the Vanguard for a ride back to the Tower." He told her. She didn't quite understand all of that, but she got the idea.
"'Not that far', huh." Louise quipped.
"It won't be as bad as down in the Hellmouth. There are Hive on the surface, patrols mostly, as well as some Fallen scavenging parties, but not nearly as many as down below. If we made it through that, we'll be fine up here." Saito tried to reassure her.
Louise brought up the wire rifle, scanned the local terrain through it's low zoom combat sight, and saw no immediate threats. She started walking, hoping but not really believing that her ghost was right.
Sol System
Space, between Earth and Luna
Revival + Four Days
To Louise's relief, Saito's estimate of the threats on the surface of Luna had been close enough. The pair had only one close call, mainly due to a roving band of Fallen Pike light attack vehicles, but the drivers were distracted by Hive thralls long enough for her to hit two of them with the arc infused molten streaks that discharged from her captured wire rifle.
The rest had been trivial by comparison. Within just a few more hours she was being transported to a place her ghost referred to as The Tower, by a friendly pilot that was all too happy to pick up a new guardian. Louise tried to keep the sheer wonder of this series of events off of her face as they traveled. Even through the shattered lens into the memories of her past life, she knew that she previously known no concept of a craft like this being called a 'ship', or any notion of what 'space' was.
Even with Saito's explanations of the subject, Louise did not really get it until they had broken out of Luna's orbit. He piped a video feed from the rear of the ship into her helmet, and Louise watched dumbstruck as the 'world' fell away behind them, gradually resolving as just a giant sphere floating along in a limitless black expanse.
She remembered from somewhere knowing that the 'world' was round. It had been proven a dozen times over by all sorts of experiments. She knew and believed it to be true, even if she could not remember the finer details. But seeing it up close in real time was something else entirely.
Then, the magnitude of it all hit her at once. That place she had been was not 'the world', it was 'a world'. The lifeless rock behind them was one such sphere, as was the life covered blue and green planet they were approaching. She recalled from some memory that there had always been two moons in the sky, at least in her life before becoming a guardian. Neither were the color of Luna.
"Saito, are there any other worlds like Earth?" She asked him, not sure of how to phrase the question she needed to ask.
"That depends." His response came. "Before the coming of the Traveler, the answer would be no. Every other planet and moon in this system was just as lifeless as the surface of Luna, or worse. Earth was the only living exception. After the Traveler and the Golden Age, many of those bodies have been transformed to be livable, but none of them look like Earth." Louise felt a sudden, sharp injection of distance and loneliness.
"The place I came from, before I ended up here, was a place like Earth. I never saw it from so far away, but there were always two moons in the sky." She told him. He floated around for a few moments before answering.
"There are no other true garden worlds in this system, just Earth. If what you're describing is accurate, it must have been in another star system." He wondered at the possibility.
"What exactly is a star system?" Saito paused as she asked this question. Just what kind of world was she from? Did a colony ship make it out of the Sol system, only for the colonists to suffer technological regression on some new planet? No, it hadn't been long enough from the Golden Age for any population to fall that far. Still, it left him with far more questions that before.
"You know that Luna, the moon we were just on, goes around the Earth, right?" Louise nodded. "In the same way, the Earth, and all of the other planets in this region of space go around the star Sol, which is why it's called a star system, because the star is at the center. From what you said a minute ago, your world of origin is not in this star system, so it must be in another one, somewhere far away from here." He explained.
"How many stars are there?"
"There are hundreds of trillions of stars in the observable universe, Louise. In other words, there are more stars than there are grains of sand in every beach and desert on Earth."
"That's…" Louise's mind threw an error at trying to process that. She simply had no way to comprehend scale of that magnitude. She stopped trying after a few moments.
"Only what we can see." Saito finished for her. "There is more than just the observable universe out there, but that's a story for another time."
As he finished speaking, they both felt a shudder through the ship. Louise felt adrenaline spike through her, but Saito mentioned that this was supposed to happen. His reassurance calmed her a bit. After what they had just been through, she trusted him.
"Beginning atmospheric reentry, ETA to Tower ten minutes." The pilot's voice interrupted them.
"So soon?" Louise asked.
"Space is really big, so we had to invent an alternate way to traverse it in a reasonable amount of time. I'll spare you the details of how a warp drive works for now, but if we only used the ship's thrusters the flight to earth would have taken over two days." Saito added.
He put up a feed from the ship's nose cameras now, showing Louise a view of the world below. She didn't say another word as she stared, mesmerized all the way down.