Chapter III

"Champions Of The Old Guard"

B-Garden, Third Floor.

It wouldn't be long, now. Quistis and her team were en route to the Centra Ruins where they would almost certainly find dead SeeDs. If their intelligence was correct, they'd also find the core of the Blue Heaven leadership - Rinoa Heartilly included. Sitting in what remained of his office just below the Garden bridge, watching through the windows as the contrails of the departing Ragnarok ripped clouds in half, Headmaster Cid wondered how far Trepe and the others would go to accomplish the mission. Dincht and Tilmitt were shocked, to say the least, when he briefed them at the Garden gates - Rinoa had been their friend, and for a time even a comrade-in-arms. They suffered through the Timber invasion, capture at Deling City, and the horrors of Time Compression - all together. All as a family.

And yet, Quistis' hesitation seemed to disappear almost immediately - a front, he assumed, to reassure her friends that they were in the right. Were Zell and Selphie as dedicated, though? Would they go so far as to kill Rinoa to save their fellow SeeDs?

"Ah! Headmaster! Finally, a face I recognize!"

Even through the hiss of the elevator bringing him up, Irvine Kinneas' voice rang clear and true, full of the same youthful vigor as when he left to live among the Shumi. He'd done away with the long coat and cowboy hat, however, and the months spent toiling underground had hardened his boyish features into the face of a man that knew who he wanted to be. Still wore those damned chaps, though.

"Mister Kinneas. I heard you were returning, but I didn't expect it to be so soon."

"A year feels like twenty when you're wrestling moombas for a Water Stone every other day. So where is everyone? I know Squall was meeting with those Galbadian officers in Balamb - "

Cid narrowed his eyes, straightened up and glanced at the elevator. "I'm afraid it's classified, Irvine. SeeDs only. Just like this room."

Irvine chuckled, but the laughter quickly faded when Cid took him by the shoulder and walked him back to the lift.

"H-Hey...come on, Cid. This isn't funny."

"No, it isn't. It's a waste of my time. Now, I'm sorry, but I have business to attend to. If you'd like to wait for your friends downstairs, I can arrange..."

Wrestling Irvine into the elevator, Cid nearly missed it - a squeal in the distance, and a deep rumble. The 'setting sun' Irvine had seen earlier expanded and engulfed the horizon south of the Garden - an explosion.

"What the hell was that?" Kinneas shrieked as he fought free of Cid's hold. The elevator shot down empty, and came up filled to capacity by Nida and his bridge crew.

"Helmsman reporting, sir!"

Legs unsteady, Cid grabbed at a hand rail and tried to collect himself. "Nida. Uh...take the helm. Evasive maneuvers. Get me a status report from Balamb and have medivac teams ready to move out."

"Aye, sir! You heard him, cadets - man your stations!"

As Nida's men swarmed the command center, Irvine saw the man he once thought of as a father slink down to the floor, panicked. The Headmaster always had Xu, Nida, or Squall to handle intense situations like this, and Kinneas was beginning to see why.

"Squall!" he remembered, rushing back to the elevator. Squall was meeting the Galbadians in Balamb today.

"Nida! I'm taking a car!"

The helmsman turned away from his instruments for a second and shot Irvine a look of surprise mixed with a newfound authoritative snobbishness.

"K-Kinneas? You're not authorized to - "

"Ah, shove it, Nida! I'm going!"

By the time Nida thought of an appropriate retort, Irvine was halfway down the hall into the garage.

Ragnarok, Passenger Room.

"Is everyone clear on the mission parameters?"

Quistis Trepe may have given up her Instructor position, but she still possessed a gift for public speaking, and it was hard for her to not turn every mission briefing into a full affair, charts and all. She'd personnaly mapped out their approach, drop point, suggested magic stocks...all without mentioning their target by name. Selphie, Zell, and even the younger support crew tasked with setting up a communications relay on the surface knew they were probably going to confront Rinoa Heartilly, and if the situation escalated, she would have to die - but that didn't stop Quistis from glossing over it every chance she got.

Zell was the first to speak up. "What kinda resistance are we expecting, exactly? These guys are just amateurs, right? Like in Tim..ber."

Sour note. The room grew uncomfortable for Zell Dincht as he immediately wished he'd kept that last comment to himself.

"No, Zell. According to Xu's reports, Blue Heaven is mostly comprised of Dolletian ex-military, but recent excursions suggest they may have gotten their hands on a stolen weapons cache."

"Galbadian?" asked Selphie, actively taking notes to tailor her stock of spells.

"Possible. Their...their leader certainly has the connections necessary to acquire Galbadians mechs and the like. Whatever they have, it was enough to take down eight SeeD candidates and two full-blown operatives."

Zell grunted disapprovingly, delivering a now-trademarked blow to the hardened steel floor. "We don't know that for sure! They might still be alive!"

"We have to assume they're at least out of commission for now, Zell." Selphie chirped, looking up from her datapad only to note the terrain visible through the massive viewscreen.

"Selphie's right. We'll be the only combat forces on the ground. Pilo and his team will follow us down and set up a forward command post on one of the cliffs overlooking the ruins."

"What about the ship?" Zell wondered, regretting he'd forgotten to stock any Float spells.

"We can't risk landing her anywhere they can spot us, so she'll stay airborne. The Ragnarok will secure Centran airspace and maintain radio silence until contacted by Pilo's team for pickup."

Pilo, a stock little bald fellow with about a decade's worth of SeeD experience under his belt, was the resident artillery expert. He was a Fighter-class, but no one could remember ever seeing him without a string of grenades dangling from his belt. No one could remember him ever casting anything stronger than a Sleep spell, either, so tasking him with monitoring radio traffic was probably for the best. His backup was a five-year rifleman and a spearman fresh out of training - not an ideal field team, but all Quistis could muster in the timeframe. Still, Pilo seemed confident in his abilities, and bravado was better than nothing.

"I don't see why we gotta hang back, Commander Trepe. If these guys could take out two whole teams, you need all the help you can get with the rescue!"

"Two teams of cadets, Pilo. Inexperienced, scared...hardly combat-worthy. We're different."

"Yeah," Zell chimed in, amused by the small man's eagerness, "you guys just consider yourselves Plan B."

Road to Balamb.

In just over thirteen months, Irvine had pretty much forgotten how to drive. Bouncing about in the SeeD truck, he pureed one or two bitebugs before he managed to pull himself back onto the road. Nida was no doubt still waiting on reports from the town to come in over the radios, but even now, half a kilometer out from the town, the truck's CB was getting nothing but static.

"Damn it, Squall, would it kill you to wait a whole day after I come back to get yourself blown up?"

The closer he got to the crater that had swallowed the road outside of Balamb, the less he thought he'd find his old commander sitting there, atop a dead Ruby Dragon, scraping the guts off of his gunblade. Sure enough, at the edge of the two hundred meter hole in the ground, all he found was the molten remains of a private command vehicle - Squall's personal escort.

"Oh, no...oh, no..."

Practically launching himself out of the car, Irvine swept through his mental cache of leftover spells for something to extinguish the flames.

"Water!"

The hot metal shrieked as the mass of liquid fell upon it, evaporating in an instant and covering the area in a thick, steamy fog. Making his way to the center of the crater, Irvine could just barely make out the gutted center of the car, and a human figure dragging itself through the wreckage.

"Help me! Oh, Hyne, help me!"

Dyson Taggart looked up from his agony, writhing with broken legs and ribs, and saw his savior extend a helping hand.

"Help...help me, please..."

"What happened?"

"Help..."

"What's going on, soldier? Who did this to you?"

"A girl...it was a girl. She...took the Commander..."

Irvine was too swept up in helping the man to notice the fog dissipating, too distracted by the chain of Curas and Esunas he was casting to feel Traline limp up to them, Triple Triad cards fluttering in the wind... wiping the soot and blood from her face, she grinned and drew another Glacial Eye card, preparing a Blizzara spell to subdue the new -

"Not so fast."

Stunned was the only expression she could manage, as the Exeter shotgun ripped through her silly cards with a deafening blast. Hyper-aware of his surroundings thanks to his Cerberus junction, Irvine had executed a counter-attack so perfect even a SeeD would have been dead on arrival - had the shot connected. Instead, the pellets floated there, frozen in mid-air centimeters from young Traline's nose.

"Ooh. You're good."

Had he not been struck by a Stop spell, he would've followed-up with an armor-piercing shot. He relaxed his body, but it did not give, stuck in an attack stance, shotgun in one hand, Dyson's collar in the other. Traline's eyes twinkled as she took him in, reminding him of someone...someone else...but then it was gone. She turned her focus to someone just to his right, approaching from behind.

"...but she's better. Thanks for the save, matron! Didn't even touch me this time."

"You would've been fine the first time if you hadn't moved around so much, Traline." answered the painfully familiar voice beside him. Straining under the spell's power, he turned his eyes to meet hers, and confirmed his fears: he'd been trapped by a Sorceress.

"Rinoa...?"