For those of you who are interested, this chapter begins with what is shown at the end of the last part of episode 7 of the first season of Nanoha and at the beginning of episode 8. The point where things begin to noticeably change is the first blow of the fight. The actual divergence point was a slight change in the nature Precia's insanity, but for the main cast this is where the difference becomes noticeable.
For reference, I have decided that this chapter begins time-wise where the last one ended. So it has been about a week since the Arthra was damaged. Also, it is the summer of MidChildan Year 065.
Chapter Two: For Want of a Starship
"Jewel Seed Serial VII! Seal!"
All four of them flinched back as pink and yellow magic struck the artifact, which unleashed a spherical wave of white light. Recovering quickly, the two girls flew up above the Jewel Seed, neither attempting to seal it again.
The darkly clad blonde child spoke first. "It looks like we can't put any more stress on the Jewel Seed."
The auburn-haired nine-year-old in a barrier jacket version of her school uniform nodded slightly in agreement. "Yeah. If it turns out like the one last night… I'd feel sorry for my Raising Heart and your Bardiche."
Fate Testarossa sucked in air sharply at that. Why did the other girl care? After all, it would be to the brunette's advantage if Bardiche was destroyed. Obviously it was as she had thought: her opponent was an innocent who had no business on the battlefield. Fate just had to demonstrate that to her.
"However, I won't yield this match to you," Fate responded. Pointing her black and yellow device at the girl, Fate transformed Bardiche with a thought. "Device Form." Bardiche's mechanical voice assured her that the device was ready for battle as the wings of light faded and the axe-head of her weapon locked into place.
"I just want to talk with you," the other girl protested, but reluctantly transformed her device as well, the flaps projecting the wings of Sealing Mode closing and the head of her staff sliding down to cover the segment containing the flaps. "Device Mode," the feminine voice murmured. The girl's eyes stared into Fate's, seeking something within her. "If I win… and you understand that I'm not just some innocent girl mixed up in all of this… will you let me listen to your story?"
Fate forced herself not to react. Part of her wanted to flinch away from the girl's earnest eyes, but she refused to give any indication that the girl's analysis was correct. She needed to scare the girl away, make her realize that this battlefield was a place for people like Fate, not a place for kind and innocent children. And yet… it was almost as if she was compelled to respond in some way. Fate felt her head bob slightly, but she honestly did not know what that meant.
But it wasn't as if it mattered. She wasn't going to lose.
The two of them hovered briefly, half crouched, as comfortable in the air as on the ground. To accomplish her goal of driving the girl away, she needed to dominate this battle. Fate considered her opponent's weapon for a moment. Were they using mass weapons, Fate would have had a decisive advantage in equipment alone, but Bardiche's axe head lacked a killing edge. While the head of her opponent's staff looked ornamental, it was strong enough to be used as a club, although Bardiche could more easily build up momentum. Yet while her opponent had some talent with bombardment and shooting magic, Fate's melee skills were far superior. The difference in skill would be more than enough.
Fate moved first, and was pleasantly surprised when her foe immediately followed suit. If the girl wanted to charge in at her, that was her mistake to make. She was further assured that this would be over quickly when the girl attempted an overhand strike in response to her own. Staff and axe crashed together briefly in midair before the two pulled away.
The other girl's arms shook slightly from the strain, and Fate used the split second her opponent used to catch her breath to rise above the girl. Fate then used her superior speed to close the distance between them, forcing the girl to block in an awkward overhead position as Bardiche cleaved down towards her before she had a chance to dodge. As the staff caught Bardiche's handle below the axe head, the girl grunted from the force of the impact. Locking eyes with Fate, she would have been caught unawares if not for a cry from the ferret down below. Although Fate did not catch the words, the other girl clearly did, and she jerked her eyes back to Bardiche.
"Scythe form."
Fate watched her opponent's eyes widen in shock as the yellow energy blade grew over her staff, but did not hesitate in spite of the fear she saw. Propelling herself in a flip over her enemy's still-raised staff with her flight spell, she sliced down behind her opponent's guard with enough force to slice open the girl's back. Or rather her barrier jacket- she didn't want to kill the girl, she just wanted to give her a very clear message.
However, the resistance she had anticipated her blade meeting never arrived. Unprepared, she overcompensated and went through a somersault before regaining control of her flight. Looking around wildly, she saw a flash of pink out of the corner of her eye.
Spinning, she created a shield just in time to catch a small pink blast on the magical circle. In spite of the short time she had had, the shield was well made and it held up to the Divine Shooter, giving her a chance to search for her opponent while the shield dissipated the attack.
However, she still couldn't see her enemy.
"Sir."
Bardiche's warning did not go unheeded, and once more Fate spun around. She only had a moment to reflect on how she should have remembered that her opponent's Divine Shooter spell fired multiple shots, before the second shot slammed into her device's hastily prepared protection, sending her careening backwards across the sky, barrier jacket miraculously unharmed thanks to Bardiche's Defenser.
That was when the third and fourth blasts came rocketing towards her.
Nanoha Takamachi was still a novice mage, albeit a powerful one. She was working on it, to be sure, but she had only a rather small skill set to draw on. Shields, flight, Divine Shooter, Divine Buster, Wide Area Search, and a binding spell that she could only make work one out of three times. Not bad, especially considering she had only been doing this for a month or so, but not enough to let her best Fate.
At least, not in Fate's preferred style of combat.
Fate had a wider range of skills, far more experience, superior speed, and far greater close range combat abilities. Sure, Nanoha's Divine Shooter was a guided spell while Fate's Photon Lancer was aimed, but guiding even one spell to hit the incredibly fast blonde was not an easy feat. And in battle she could not risk putting all of her focus into blasting away; she needed to defend herself as well. To make matters worse, Nanoha didn't have any spells that Fate couldn't dodge or block given half a chance, although she had an idea or two in the works. She felt sure that she would be able to best Fate later, but for now she had few advantages.
So when Bardiche's energy scythe slashed down at her, and Fate's view of her was ever so slightly obscured by the scythe's glow and Fate's own body for a split second, Nanoha exploited one of Fate's weaknesses for all it was worth.
With a thought and a murmur, she deactivated Flier Fin.
When a raw recruit shows up at their first flight training session in the TSAB, they do not immediately learn a flight spell. This holds true for every other opportunity for learning how to fly that exists on any of the Administered Worlds, and most of the Non-Administered Worlds for that matter. Screwing up in the air is a good way to die quickly.
For an hour or more, depending on the instructor, the recruits have certain facts drilled into their heads, which will later be re-drilled into their heads with practical experience supplemented by, depending on the instructor, various amounts of pain and suffering.
One of the first things that they learn is that moving in the air is very different from traveling on the ground. For one thing, your velocity is completely dependent on your flight spell and the medium through which you travel. If you want to break the sound barrier, you can. Quite easily, in fact, although for most people it takes a while to build up the momentum to do so.
And if your barrier jacket isn't up to snuff, your liquidated corpse will then leave an appropriate splatter mark on the landscape. Other ways to die include flying quickly between trees, running face-first into something (including water!) and breaking your neck, and doing pretty much anything involving flight spells and blindfolds.
It could be suggested that these all have something in common.
Another concept drilled into a would-be flier is that you aren't standing on the ground. While this should be obvious, it is surprisingly easy to forget. People are used to having 360 degrees of motion, plus jumping and crouching and so on. In the air, you can go left, right, forwards, and backwards. But you can also go up, down, left and down, right and up, backwards in a loop-de-loop…
As one instructor put it, when you are on the ground, rolling on the ground is a desperate attempt at dodging. In the air, you do barrel rolls all the time. There is a lot more to it than that, of course, but that is the general idea.
Eventually, recruits are taught a flight spell for their magic system if they do not know one, and are allowed to attempt flight under controlled conditions. To have the notation 'Air' on one's record indicates that a recruit is capable of casting and maintaining a flight spell without the aid of a device. You don't have to be able to fly quickly, and you don't have to be able to do anything while flying, but the basic requirement is that you can stay in the air for at least five minutes without using a device. The reason for this is that if a mage is capable of doing that, then they will be able to survive having their device broken while flying in a planet's upper atmosphere.
With a device, the expectation is that you can be useful in the air in some way. That is where mage ranking and the like comes in. But the difference between a 'Ground' mage and an 'Air' mage is the ability to make sure that a flight spell is always, ALWAYS, active while they are in the air.
After all, what goes up, must come down.
Of course, sometimes flight spells are disrupted by any number of things. But nobody trained by anybody who had ever been associated with the TSAB in even the loosest of ways would even CONSIDER turning off their own flight spell on purpose while in midair. Such a maneuver would be insane.
But while Nanoha had been taught to fly by Yuuno, she had taught herself how to fight in the air using Raising Heart's training simulations. She had never heard of such a thing as the TSAB or cared about 'proper safety while flying'. She knew perfectly well that she was very good at flying, and she had spent hours thinking of ways to push the envelope. Nanoha was born to fly, and she felt as comfortable in the air as on the ground, perhaps even more. A normal person would panic at the thought of accelerating at a rate of about 9.81 meters per second towards the ground, but to Nanoha, it was just another option. As she always had, as she always would, she chose between safety and success…
…and dropped below Fate's field of vision in an uncontrolled fall.
As Nanoha fell towards the treetops below, she concentrated, forming the glowing pink orbs of Divine Shooter. Launching one on a spiraling curve to intersect Fate's flight path, she accelerated it as much as she could. Just before her first attack slammed into Fate's luminescent magical circle, she fired off another, this one aimed at the blonde mage's back. This one moved even faster than the first, and Nanoha watched it connect with Bardiche's Defenser.
"Flier Fin."
Her device's words, spoken aloud more to tell her that she could fly again than to reactivate the ability, reminded her that she needed to bleed off speed before she reached the treetops. Taking the few seconds of respite that her last attack had won her to alight safely on a tree branch, she wasted no more time in letting her final two attacks loose.
Her peripheral vision seemed to blur and darken as she focused so hard that she experienced tunnel vision. The two pink attacks blurred forward and Nanoha set them on converging parabolic arcs. They were weaker than her previous attacks- a trade of power for speed- but if she could keep Fate off balance and confused then she might be able to pull this off.
"Raising Heart."
"Yes, my master. Shooting Mode."
Although she would never admit it, dodging the two magical spheres was more due to luck and panic-fueled speed than to skill.
So unprepared for the attack was she that the logical response- dissipating the small pink projectiles with her scythe- never crossed her mind. Fate simply reacted, doing the aerial equivalent of lunging away from incoming danger. The orbs shot through her previous position, missing her by mere feet.
And because she just had to have an intelligent opponent, the attacks took less than a second to adjust course and arc towards her again. A second hurried dodge kept her safe, but she wasn't going to wait for them to try again. Accelerating upwards, she found herself enough space to turn around and try to respond proactively to her opponent's attacks.
Seeing a pink glow from beneath the treetops, Fate decided to deal with her enemy rather than her attacks, and sped between the incoming pink orbs towards the other mage. Moving faster than her opponent could hope to react, she was at tree level in a heartbeat. Bringing her scythe across her body in preparation for her attack, Fate closed the distance as the other girl turned to face her-
"Divine Buster!"
The world turned pink.
"I guess this is my win, huh."
Fate didn't respond, choosing instead to sit bonelessly against a tree trunk with her eyes closed. She did her best to ignore the girl who had moved her there after catching her, just as she tried to ignore the tattered remains of her barrier jacket.
The Japanese mage sighed heavily, unsure of what to do.
For a few moments there was an uncomfortable silence. Then Fate spoke.
"Mother."
"Huh?"
Fate opened her eyes, but didn't look at Nanoha. Somehow, Nanoha thought that the other girl suddenly looked fragile and small.
"You wanted to know why. You have no real right to know, but if I must explain myself to dissuade you, then I will. Mother wants them, so I am collecting them."
Nanoha frowned. "But what does your mother want them for? They're really dangerous! That's why Yuuno-kun and I are collecting them, to protect everyone. Why would anyone want them?"
But Fate was silent again.
"Fate!"
"Nanoha!"
Hearing her familiar call her name caused Fate to try to stand up, only to have her knees buckle. A pair of hands steadied her, and Fate turned her head to find the other girl- what did the ferret call her? Nahoma? Nanoa?- at her side with a concerned look on her face.
"Are you alright, Fate-chan? I didn't mean to hurt you so badly."
"You should worry about yourself." Fate croaked out, pulling away.
"What?"
"I've been going easy on you because I don't want to kill you by accident. But it seems that I can't do that anymore." Fate looked Nanoha in the eyes, her face expressionless. "If I need to I will take you out. Mother wants the Jewel Seeds, and I will bring them to her so that she can smile again." She hadn't meant to add that last part, but she couldn't stop. If she showed doubt or hesitation, the girl would feel that she needed to continue to interfere. She had to make this girl understand.
"Fate!" Arf, in wolf form, landed before them. "Fate, are you alright?"
"I'm fine, Arf."
Yuuno scampered over to Nanoha, but kept his eyes on Fate and Arf. The ferret and the wolf had both kept out of the previous fight by mutual, wordless, agreement, but he wasn't sure what the familiar would do now.
Fate turned away and walked to Arf's side.
"Okay, I've had enough of this," Arf growled. "Come on, Fate, let's take them down togeth-"
"We're leaving."
"What?" Arf was taken aback, her eyes widening at Fate's decision.
"And you," Fate looked at Nanoha briefly, "hope that we don't meet again. I won't lose next time."
Within moments, both were out of sight.
"Nanoha…" Yuuno trailed off.
"You saw it too, right?" the girl asked quietly, eyes shadowed. "Her back. It was covered in scars."
Yuuno didn't have anything he could say to that.
"She's a good person, I'm sure of that. I think I'd like to know her better. To be her friend. And if I ever meet the person who hurt her…" Nanoha's eyes hardened.
There was a dreadful certainty to the silence. Yuuno could not help but shudder, and he wondered, in the deepest recesses of his mind, just how far his friend would go to ensure that Fate never got another one of those scars. (Would he be able to stop her? Would he want to?)
"Let's hurry up and seal the Jewel Seed. Before anything else happens."
Some questions were best left unanswered.
"Why did we let them get the Jewel Seed?"
Fate didn't answer, choosing instead to stare out of the window of their building.
"We could have beaten them!"
"We can't afford to fight them."
"Huh?"
Fate smiled at her faithful familiar. "I know you want to protect me, but if she continues to improve at this rate, then if I want to be in a position to capture the Jewel Seeds I can't afford to fight her. We were luck to successfully seal the previous one after that fight; if they had pursued us they could have easily worsened our situation. Now that I think back, it seems clear that she has access to healing magic, probably from that ferret. When we first encountered her she was a novice with practically no experience in fighting. For her to recover so quickly from yesterday's incident, she must have some magical means of increasing her recovery rate. We don't have that advantage, so fighting constantly puts us in a worse position than it puts them."
"I'm sorry, Fate. If I was-"
Fate cut her familiar off by gently cupping Arf's cheek in her hand and smiling lightly at her. "It's not your fault, Arf. You do the best you can without healing magic. Don't worry, we'll just have to be smart about this."
"So, what will we do?"
"Avoid them, for now. Seal the Jewel Seeds we can, but back off if they are too close. We'll cease hostilities until the Jewel Seeds are all sealed."
"And then?" Arf hung on her master's words.
"Then we'll settle this with one battle. And we won't lose."
"Yes sir." "Yeah!"
"…her mother, huh." Yuuno mused as he examined Raising Heart to ensure that the battle had not negatively affected it. "I feel ashamed that I didn't wonder about her family before now. I mean, she uses MidChildan style magic, and MidChilda doesn't have the age limits that Japan does with regards to working and fighting and everything since our culture is so strongly based around magic and there are never enough mages, let alone enough adult mages…" He shook his head. He was rambling, and he knew it, but he just needed to let his thoughts flow for a while. "But even so, nobody sends a nine-year-old out to hunt dangerous artifacts without support. Well, not if there is a better option at least, and I rushed to get here as fast as I could after the Jewel Seeds were lost in transport…"
Yuuno considered that for a moment before shaking it off. He'd sent a message to a nearby site that he knew a couple of his aunts and uncles were running, and he knew that the TSAB had to have been notified that he was on-site. If they weren't here, then it was probably because they had thought he could handle it and didn't have any manpower to spare. He had taken the equipment needed (Raising Heart) and he was a strong mage, so they had probably just given it a low priority. He had thought the matter would be swiftly resolved, and he was the expert! Things had just gotten complicated unexpectedly. He couldn't think of another explanation, after all, the TSAB had been the ones transporting the Jewel Seeds, so they definitely knew about them.
Setting Raising Heart aside, he returned to the issue of Fate. "Something's obviously wrong. Most wounds treated with healing spells generally don't leave scars unless there's a LOT of damage. And I think I might have seen stitches. She's either cut off from help, or…"
A pained look from Nanoha saved him from having to elaborate.
"Honestly, that alone would be enough to make me worried, but knowing that her mother wants the Jewel Seeds makes me wonder if her mother is sane. She obviously wants to use the Jewel Seeds for something, and last night definitely showed that that's a dangerous prospect at best. You would have to be unbalanced or desperate to mess around with them. Fate doesn't seem like a bad person, though. Dangerous, yes, but…"
Nanoha smiled softly, but a little sadly. "Yeah, I feel the same way."
Yuuno hesitated, but spoke a hopeful thought. "We might be misreading all of this, you know. There are plenty of other explanations. We could be presuming the worst."
"I hope so, but if there is a better explanation, then why did we think of the same thing?"
Nanoha went about taking off her hair ties and changing into her night clothes as Yuuno climbed into his basket. Rather than climb under the covers, however, the auburn-haired girl curled up and stared pensively out the window. Yuuno was about to go to sleep when she spoke again.
"I'm really worried about her. She just seems so fragile, so… lonely." Nanoha's voice cracked, and she buried her face in her arms, her troubled feelings overflowing.
Yuuno raised his head up over the rim of his basket, but remained silent. For the life of him, he couldn't think of anything to say. Not one to leave a friend to suffer alone, he climbed out of his small bed and clambered over to Nanoha's. Climbing up onto her shoulder, he nuzzled her neck briefly before settling down.
Reassured somewhat by her friend's support, Nanoha slowly unfurled herself as she got her frustration and hopelessness under control.
When they finally fell asleep, girl and ferret lay together, basking in each other's warmth, determined to share it as best with they could, both with each other and with those who were still out in the cold.
Scritch. Scratch.
The quiet murmur of writing implements gliding across paper could be heard as an accompaniment to the cram school teacher's voice as he guided the students filling the lecture hall through a math problem. Nanoha looked every inch the attentive learner as her pencil swiftly and precisely noted down the facts and figures the man at the front of the room drew on the blackboard, showing how to solve the problem she had already calculated the answer for. Her eyes locked on every move the teacher made.
Despite her best efforts, however, the work was far too easy to distract her from the absence of Suzuka and Arisa. Having spent the better part of the past several weeks learning to simultaneously perform fast-paced aerial combat and run complex mathematical computations, Nanoha found that she could not simply disregard her senses now that they had been fine-tuned. That made it impossible for her to forget that she had been alone all day. Arisa had made it very clear that until she got her act together and stopped moping about all the things she couldn't tell them, Arisa was not going to have anything to do with her.
Nanoha sighed inwardly. Arisa wasn't going to let her be. Suzuka was trying to be peacemaker, but being closest to their fair-haired friend (literally and figuratively) that meant she spent less and less time with Nanoha. Yuuno felt responsible, but couldn't do anything to help. Arf didn't trust her to help Fate, or even to not stab Fate in the back. And Fate was in trouble, but didn't want help.
Yet. She couldn't leave it like that. Fate didn't want help yet. But she'd need Nanoha's help, and she'd get it whether she asked for it or not.
A big part of being a mage, Yuuno had told her, was listening to your instincts. The mage was the fudge factor between the Linker Core (the ethereal, magic producing organ) and the results, with devices and spells streamlining, controlling, and simplifying the process of getting the results you wanted. As such, in spite of all the equations and technology, not listening to your instincts was the fastest way to get yourself killed doing magic. Nanoha found that this applied to other situations as well, and her instincts told her that something bad was going to happen if Fate's mother got hold of the Jewel Seeds. Intellectually, she knew that Fate's mother might not be a bad person, but Nanoha had spent a lot of time in the hospital back… back then. And she recognized the signs.
She didn't know what it was called- doctors make an effort to hide such things from little girls, although the young patients did not think to- but she knew on a basic level that something was 'wrong with the family' in the worst way, and that was enough reason for her to try to ensure that both Fate and the Jewel Seeds were separated from the ones who hurt Fate. It might not be the mother, of course, although it seemed likely, but someone was responsible. And the thought of a bad person getting their hands on such dangerous… Jewel thingies…
'Yuuno?'
'Nanoha? Is everything alright?'
Nanoha glanced around, averting her eyes from Arisa (who very pointedly ignored her) and the apologetic, worried-looking Suzuka. Flipping the page of her notebook before she ran out of room and started writing on the wooden surface she was leaning against, she once again began to copy the teacher's notations automatically.
'Everything's fine!' She cheerfully lied. 'But I was wondering about the Jewel Seeds.'
'What about them?'
'Well, I know that they are dangerous, blue, old, and shiny, but well, what ARE they?'
There was a brief silence, followed by several seconds of moaning self-recriminations, which Nanoha suspected he had not intended to broadcast.
'Okay, I'll try to explain it to you, but it needs a bit of background to understand. The first thing that you need to know is that the society that I come from is based around magic used carefully for the betterment of all, at least in theory. We also have turned away from killing and from using mass-based weapons such a swords, missiles, and bullets. The reason for these decisions is directly related to the civilizations that produced artifacts such as the Jewel Seeds.
'My society, which is based around my home world of MidChilda and a number of like-minded 'Administered Worlds', has a lot of rules about what you can and can't do with magic. Some societies were… less careful than us in what they created. The example that is most important to what I'm talking about is a civilization known as Belka, although some pronounce it 'Velka'. It doesn't translate perfectly to our phonetic system. Belka destroyed itself in a bloody civil war which ended when they destroyed both themselves and their home world in a dimensional dislocation. This happened less than a century ago.
'It was that incident that spurred the creation of the Time-Space Administration Bureau, which all of the Administered Worlds that I mentioned earlier contribute to. Fearing that something similar could happen elsewhere if artifacts capable of causing such devastation were unleashed, all magical artifacts from extinct civilizations are termed 'Lost Logia' and are essentially locked away, only accessible to scientists and archeologists who can study them under appropriate safety precautions.
'If they are found to be harmless, then they can be put on display in museums and generally treated like non-magical artifacts. But some Lost Logia, such as the Jewel Seeds, are incredibly dangerous. In most cases they are either destroyed or sealed away in one manner or another after we learn as much as we can from them.'
'So why would somebody want them? I mean, I know that we want to seal them, but what possible use could they have?' Nanoha asked.
'I don't know,' admitted Yuuno. 'I felt it was too risky to do more than a cursory analysis while I was in the field, so I know only slightly more about them than you do. Maybe they could be used as a power source? If you're willing to lend a hand, I could try and run some scans later.'
'If it'll help, I'm willing to give it a try. But about what you were saying earlier, what is a dimens-'
The jarring sensation of a Jewel Seed activating cut into their conversation. Nanoha almost jumped up and ran out of the room, but fortunately remembered where she was in time.
'I can't get away for 15 more minutes, Yuuno! What do we do?'
'I'll set up a barrier, keep it contained. I'm mostly recovered now, so it shouldn't be a problem. Using my normal sort of magic is much less stressful for me than trying to use Raising Heart.'
Nanoha agonized for a few seconds, but agreed that it was the best option. 'Stay safe, and if it's really bad, contact me. I'd rather have to make up excuses than let somebody get killed.'
'Don't worry, once I set up the barrier there shouldn't be any risk of that. I'll be fine; none of the monsters have been able to break through my shields, and this one didn't feel too powerful.'
Unlike Nanoha, Yuuno could and did start running the moment he felt the distortion of reality that the Jewel Seed caused. However, upon hearing of Nanoha's predicament, he made a quick detour away from the main street into a small alley to transform.
Moments later, a 9 year old boy wearing a cape ran out of the side-street that the light-furred ferret had ran into, and headed for the location of the disturbance he had detected. Fortunately, regular school was out, so while seeing a boy with sandy blonde hair running around town in some kind of adventurer's costume was not exactly normal for Uminari, Japan, it wasn't something anyone took issue with. Less than a minute later it became a moot point, as Yuuno's barrier went up, and on Yuuno's slightly separate plane of reality everything fell silent.
Strangely, Yuuno could not immediately spot the activated Jewel Seed. Flying up above the rooftops didn't help. The Jewel Seed was nowhere to be seen, nor was any empowered monstrosity to be found. But there was no mistaking the sensation. A Jewel Seed had to be here somewhere.
Mindful of danger being near, Yuuno constructed a powerful shield around himself with an ease that reassured him of his recovery. That done, he swiftly calculated and cast again, a second magical circle forming around him in a flare of green, accompanied by a dozen or so floating orbs of the same color.
"Wide Area Examination."
Closing his eyes to decrease the mental strain from seeing through so many 'eyes', Yuuno moved his attention around the area with a speed and skill born of long years spent practicing in libraries and on dig sites. His advanced version of the Wide Area Search spell brought a storm of images that flashed into view and vanished as he dismissed them. Empty buildings, empty streets, empty sewers. Where WAS that stupid Lost Logia?
Thump!
The sound of something impacting on his defenses brought Yuuno's attention back to his own body, and the mage looked up to see a decidedly unhappy, unnaturally large bird shaking off the effects of ramming into his iridescent defensive sphere. Righting itself, it screeched at him, making him wince at the terrible noise. Only the awareness that this was a deadly enemy kept him from losing his concentration and dropping his defenses- the blasted sound was like a feedback screech.
The bird dived at him, talons outstretched, in an attempt to slice open his Sphere Protection. Deciding that it was better to be safe than sorry (he REALLY didn't want a repeat of his last one-on-one fight with one of these monsters) he placed a Round Shield directly between him and the creature. A sickening thud and a crack accompanied the bird's neck-breaking introduction to the mystical equivalent of a glass window. The monstrosity had seen the shield and decided to try to break through with its beak rather than its talons, and had found itself not up to the challenge.
Snap!
Yuuno winced. Apparently a broken neck isn't fatal if a Jewel Seed is possessing you. Well, he could understand it, since the actual body of the bird probably had only a general relationship to the construct. Yet while he had expected something of the sort (the birds wings had not stopped beating) actually seeing the head rotate back into position was anything but pleasant.
He really shouldn't have tempted fate by insulting it like that. He didn't even have any attack capabilities, what had he been planning on doing when he found it?
The bird's talons and beak glinted ominously.
Yuuno gulped.
The trouble with barriers, Nanoha realized, was that they were as good at keeping people on the outside out as they were at keeping people on the inside in. All well and good if you wanted that, but right now it meant that Yuuno was trapped with a monster, and she couldn't help.
While Yuuno had briefly gone over the principles of barriers, neither of them had considered this situation. Since shattering the barrier would be really visible, her only recourse was to try and crack the code, so to speak. If she could figure out the exact details of the temporal shift that Yuuno's Temporal Force Field applied to its contents, there was supposed to be a way to teleport inside. Unfortunately, all she knew was a passing comment that Yuuno's barrier moved the contents 'a few seconds' from normal time, or something like that. And her movement magic left a lot to be desired, so there was no way she could risk creating a spell to move her inside the barrier even if she knew anything about how the barrier actually worked.
After a frustrating couple of minutes, she was forced to admit that her situation was just as bad as she'd feared. Raising Heart helped, but Nanoha quickly realized that she wasn't going to be breaking in any time soon. She even tried walking through it, but rather than finding herself with Yuuno, she found herself on the rooftop on the other side of the shimmering heat-wave of the barrier, but still in normal space-time (or time-space as Yuuno called it).
She was trapped on the outside, and Yuuno was trapped on the inside with a monster. And there was nothing she could do about it.
As it turned out, ten minutes was a really long time in combat. Yuuno found this realization to be oddly reassuring. For one thing, it meant that Nanoha would be here any time now, and she wasn't actually late even though he felt like he'd been fighting the monster bird for hours. For another, it meant that he was fully recovered, as he had managed to remain completely unscathed.
Of course, there was no reason to waste time hiding behind a shield. Yuuno wasn't about to be useless dead weight. Even if he couldn't seal the Jewel Seed, he could definitely immobilize it.
Yuuno dived down an alleyway, the persistent monster on his heels. Yuuno spun around and slammed a magic circle between himself and his enemy. The bird didn't have a chance to slow down or dodge, and hit it head on.
But this time, it slammed right through it, trailing green light as its wings were locked in place and it was sent crashing into the ground.
Trying a different tactic in frustration, Nanoha launched a small blast of pink energy at the barrier, hoping that her 'knock' would let Yuuno know that she was trying to get in.
To her immense relief, the barrier's edge burst outwards only moments later, rolling over her, engulfing her, giving off a warm, prickly sensation that she knew was the manifestation of her magic interacting with the difference in space-time. Yuuno had told her that the barrier sorted things which produced bioelectromagnetic fields into two groups, and she was soon given a practical demonstration. Her magic put her at a higher energy state than a normal being, and with a sensation of movement she slid into the quasi-real realm of Yuuno's barrier.
As her linker core stabilized her existence inside the barrier, Nanoha suddenly was no longer in a city full of evening traffic, but an empty, eerie alternate world. As she took to the air to try to spot Yuuno and/or the monster, she absently wondered at how the streets looked so different without people. Even when she had wandered the empty streets at night there had not been this feeling of wrongness.
Unconsciously, she shivered. Having a sudden NEED to find the battle, she looked around, turning her head back and forth to look around her as her heart thudded in her chest. But no matter where she turned, she could not find anyone and the whole city was empty and there was nobody here and she was all alone and a ball of ice formed in her guts as-
'Nanoha?'
Sudden relief replaced her panic. 'Yuuno! Are you alright? Where are you?'
'Don't worry, I'm doing fine. I've got the monster trapped in binds, I tricked it into hitting a contact triggered Struggle Bind and wrapped a bunch of Chain Binds around it when it crashed. Are you okay? You were projecting a lot of negativity, but telepathy doesn't do a good job of conveying emotions, since they can be pretty subtle and nobody feels them quite the same way-'
'Yuuno! I'm perfectly fine! You're the one next to the monster, not me! Leave the lesson for later! Where are you?'
Swiftly homing in on her friend's location, Nanoha was relieved to see that the Jewel Seed-warped creature was indeed trapped quite thoroughly. Yuuno had apparently caught it in an alleyway and used the walls to help anchor a series of chain binds. The avian couldn't do more than squirm helplessly and produce muffled shrieks (Yuuno had taken a moment to shut it up with a bind around the beak). A green glow from the other side of the alleyway told her where Yuuno was.
"Sealing Mode."
With a flare of pink light, Nanoha put some extra 'oomph' into her sealing to simultaneously disperse the construct and capture the Jewel Seed. Raising Heart stored it away, announcing the gem's serial number as it did so, but Nanoha didn't really pay attention- if necessary she'd check later, but it really wasn't important. She took a moment to make sure that the raven that was today's victim was alright before rushing to the end of the alley, where she almost ran over the boy at the other end.
"Sorry!" She apologized. "Um, have you seen a ferret around here somewhere? I've, uh, lost mine. Yes, he's, uh, lost, and… scared, so if you've…"
Her voice trailed off at the sight of the boy's incredulous face. A nagging feeling told her that the boy was strangely familiar…
"Are you feeling alright, Nanoha?" He asked carefully. "Remember me? Yuuno? The mage who gave you Raising Heart? I'm the ferret."
The wide-eyed look that formed on Nanoha's face as he spoke suggested to him that he MIGHT have forgotten something. Once Nanoha stopped freaking out, she was willing to fill in the blanks, thankfully without using Raising Heart to demonstrate her displeasure.
In the end, they agreed that Yuuno should remain in ferret form for the time being to avoid awkward questions, but they should share more about themselves in an effort to reduce misunderstandings. Not that they said it that way, as Nanoha felt righteously indignant and Yuuno felt both foolish to have not made his identity clear and exasperated at Nanoha's reaction, but when asked about it later that was how they would tell the story.
But on the way home Nanoha took the time to make it very clear that the next time they went to the hot springs, Yuuno was to go to the male changing rooms. She wasn't sure of all the details of why that was important (although Yuuno, to his embarrassment, was) but she definitely knew he wasn't supposed to be on the girls' side of the hot springs.
By the time they got home, all was forgiven… although to Yuuno's chagrin Nanoha never forgot.
Author's Note:
First of all, if anyone wants to know more about why the fight between Nanoha and Fate went the way it did, please PM me or leave a review, and I'll get right back to you. I took a lot of things into account when I did this and my reasons are a good deal more in-depth than 'I wanted Nanoha to win, so there, HAHAHA!' The same goes for the fight between Yuuno and the monster bird, as well as anything else in this chapter. I promise to take everything you say into consideration, although I don't promise to change anything unless someone gives me a really convincing argument.
Yuuno's info dump in the middle of the chapter was inteded to make clear what Nanoha knows about the TSAB and MidChilda. As in, that is pretty much all she currently knows. I say this, because it is a notable difference between her first introduction in the anime and her first, vague introduction here.
The fight with the bird takes place the day after the fight between Fate and Nanoha.
In a lot of ways, the status quo at the end of this chapter is similar to that of the end of episode 8 of the anime, which is the main reason that I chose to end the chapter here. However, there are a number of differences. For one, as can be seen, Nanoha still has school and is living in her house rather than on a starship. Also, as noted in the title of this chapter, the Arthra never showed up.
The effect on how Arf, Fate, Yuuno, and Nanoha view each other is more dramatic. The reason Fate told them about her mother, to show that she is serious and might kill them if necessary, was essentially missed completely in favor of the connection that Nanoha and Yuuno made between Fate's mother and Fate's scars, and they reacted accordingly. Arf and Fate now have a measure of respect for their opponents.
A reader might ask: Why are Nanoha and Yuuno so sure that their idea of what's wrong with Fate is correct? The answer is that they are nine years old. Furthermore, they are very smart, mature nine year olds, as is Fate for that matter. Trying to convince an intelligent, perceptive child that they are wrong about something can be difficult. When the child is right, then it is doubly hard to do so. Sadly, Nanoha and Yuuno suspect the truth of the matter, although nobody except Precia knows just how bad Fate's situation really is.
For those who do not know what I am talking about, I will speak bluntly: when Fate fails to live up to Precia's expectations, Precia turns her device into an energy whip and proceeds to flay Fate's back open. She does this ON SCREEN, which is one of the main reasons that she is one of the most hated villains in anime. I honestly wanted to punch Precia's face in when she started telling Fate it was for her own good.
The worst part? At this point, Fate honestly believes that Precia loves her. And that often happens in equivalent real life situations as well.
Much less action next chapter, but things began snowballing slowly (and in some cases, not so slowly). For those of you who are wondering, I will not just forget about the cast members that are in the TSAB. They've had their own crisis, and I will be giving glimpses of how they cope in future chapters.
Finally, Happy New Year!
