A wave of power washed over Alicia as she put the finishing touches on securing a Ragnite bomb to the support structures holding up the rail system over Fouzen. The pressure wave was enough to press her against the support and filled her eyes with dust as a brilliant column of blue energy blasted away the cloud-cover and exposed the dusk sky. The energy felt…cold…and concentrated to the point that it raised the hairs on her arms and neck and pimpled her flesh as it raked over her skin in waves. Below her Marina was holding hand to a circular bruise around her right eye from where her scope had smashed into her face from the wave. Marina knew exactly what building it was that exploded like that. She had met the crippled girl's eyes and left her to die but yet she felt a strange sense of relief as she replaced her palm with her scope and witnessed the one armed girl rise from the wreckage as twisted steel began to rise with her. With a quick shout to get Alicia's attention she sprang away to find different cover as Equus thundered its way onto the rails above. Alicia nodded in understanding as she furiously rubbed her tearing eyes clean and sprinted back towards Welkin, the Eidlwiess and Zakka, Alicia failed to notice that her body has jarred lose one of the ignition wires on the Ragnite bomb. A tortured howl followed her away from the canyon.

Ranma was lost in it. She swam in a vast sea of power she had not felt in near a month. Her Ki reserves were filled to bursting and she loved it. Covered in all manner of scrap metal and tortured building materials she shivered in the ecstasy of her own power. She could feel the Ki of her tormentors. Feel the Ki of the tormented souls nearby. Her power sang within her veins as her power crashed ever higher and she felt some vent explosively into the air around her. It sang for vengeance. It cried for blood. It howled for death.

NO.

With startling clarity Ranma overcame her bloodlust and sank deeply into the Soul of Ice. She had to save the innocents first. The Imperials had crossed the line by planning to execute the Darkscens on little more than a whim before they pushed back up the canyon. They would pay, but not with their lives if she could help it. Not yet. Pain would be their moral tutor this night. With her resolve set and her power restored, Ranma rose to feet to be met with the sight of near 50 imperial ground infantry of all types and near twenty armoured units of different tonnage. She threw her head back and howled her fury at the now exposed sky and the cry echoed throughout the un-natural stillness of the canyon. Bringing her head back down Ranma's eyes narrowed as she set her sights on the tank with the perdition turret and raised what used to be her right hand on instinct.

In her mind the techniques were all neatly categorized on a mental shelf of martial destruction and deep within the Soul of Ice usually granted clarity of mind and, as a result, much more thought out combat. This time Ranma was filled with, surrounded by, and literally super-saturated with a power that was hers yet…thicker, more potent and intoxicating. Instead of calling out an attack technique or even going through the slashing motion associated with a vacuum blade Ranma simply wished that which was in front of her was no more. The power complied. The Ragnite saturated Ki flowed into the crystal structures imbedded in her flesh and coalesced the latent Ki and Ragnite in the air around Ranma and focused it into a ½ inch iridescent beam. This all happened in a fraction of a second and suddenly the perdition tank and its three closest neighbouring tanks all lit up like a miniature sun before violently ceasing to exist with a howl of displaced air.

Men flew through the air as the crew of the tanks were displaced by the wailing energy with three splashing down in the river and another four bouncing painfully off of a roof some 200 meters downrange. Ranma paid it no mind and immediately twirled into her attack dance that sent armored units and men alike running for safety and failing horribly. Ranma pulled the force of the river to her bidding and swirled it around her as a shield against the initial salvo of gunfire and coalesced an iridescent rod of Ki that attached to her right arm and deliberately kept the edges blunted. With a sharp cry she burst through the wall of water and collected the spend slugs from the river and sent them careening into the viewports of five tanks to ricochet within. Ranma drew out the punishment she delivered upon the remaining forces and made them confront their fate. She cut off their attempts to run and danced through their ranks as they desperately tried to keep from shooting their own. All the while she dealt suffering and pain through quick strikes and sharp blows to soft areas on their bodies. She denied them death as she taught them with pain.

"Magnificent isn't she?" The Doctor smiled as the initial beam cut the cloud cover of the evening and a pressure wave crested her position high above Fouzen.

"She is much stronger than I would have believed doctor. Even crippled she wields her power to a degree that Selvaria cannot match and without the aid of a lance even!"

"I can see why Maximilian wants her so badly. Come we are going to need all of what we brought." So saying, one Doctor Kriena hopped out of the turret of her personal transport and signalled to her personal guard to lock and load. Unfazed by the presence of the opposite gender, Kriena stripped off her overcoat, shirt and slacks to don her padded and specially insulated combat under suit. The suit was specially designed after studying the effects Sylvaria had on the Gallian forces at Barious and through various tests thereafter. It was fitted with a special type of Ragnite absorbent material and featured a rat's nest of wires that connected to an armored backpack. Kriena pinned her long blonde hair out of her eyes and away from the latches of her chest plate as her Lieutenant dressed her. The armor was sleeker than the usual imperial fair with smooth lines and overlapping plates along her belly, chest and back. There was no exposed cloth in these suits either; even the joints were skilfully crated from interlocking and rotating metal pieces. The matte black plates whispered over each other as she knelt to clasp shut her greaves. The arms of the suit were similarly housed but her right shoulder sported a large rectangular plate with a honeycomb finish. This emitter plate combined with a special type of Ragnite converter on her back armor created the perfect defense against a Valkyrur. With a manic grin on her face Kriena straightened to her surprising height of 6"5 and accepted her rifle from her Lieutenant and plugged it into her backpack. This night her life's research came to fruition. With one last nod to the Lieutenant of her unit, she slid her horned helm over her face and laughed. This night they hunted Valkyrur.

Jeriik was still on the side of the canyon of Fouzen when the valley lit up and Jeriik knew that his night just got exponentially worse. Without even having to glance back, Jeriik signalled his men to duck and cover. Just as the words were leaving his mouth a massive shockwave hit and sent him and a handful of his men careening up the incline and over a lip onto flat ground. What he met there was not what he was expecting. Gearing up in front of him was what looked like a specialized unit that Jeriik had never seen before. The sleek black armor barely glowed in the unnatural light of the Valkyrur and it highlighted across the overlapping plates and closed face masks in a haunting way. The fact that these soldiers carried the Imperial crest on their breasts only served to give him a deeper chill than he had from the frigid air from below. These were of Maximilian's specialized sector and not something that he had ever seen deployed into direct, offensive combat. A huge soldier with a horned helm instead of the uniform smooth topped helm the rest of the unit save one that sported a single horn, stepped forward and towered over Jeriik. The curvature of the armor suggested that the soldier was female but her stature boggled Jeriik's mind as she stood nearly a foot taller than him and slung a rifle as long as he was tall as if it weighed nothing. The soldier's breathe was misting out of the grill of their helm and Jeriik could almost hear the smile behind the mask as the tinted shield seemed to examine his eyes for something that it seemed to find. The massive soldier straightened again and nodded to Jeriik before moving him aside with its arm and signalling the rest of the black unit to the ledge to watch the Valkyrur at play.

Ranma danced through a lead storm as the remaining 15 or so foot soldiers opened fire in panic and hosed the area around Ranma with shots. With frightening calm Ranma simply seemed to phase through the hail of bullets to appear before the viewport of the very heavy tank that had escorted her in the convoy. The illumination from her battle aura and Ki baton revealed a terrified driver and the hatch in the turret clanged open as the tank's commander attempted to use a manually operated machine gun mounted on the top of the turret. Ranma cocked her head to the side and made a fist with her left hand. Two meter long Ki claws flashed along her knuckles with a snap-hiss and she plunged the hissing blades into the front of the tank and extended them before twisting her arm and leaping atop a fresh victim near the middle of the armored group. The shredded remains of the heavy tank peeled open in segments and ragged, bloody men fell out. Ranma needed them to learn. Howling again, she sliced the tank she stood upon in two with a flourish of her left hand and proceeded to twirl 13 tonnes worth of tank with her remaining hand and swat the more heavily armored soldiers that still stood into buildings and unconsciousness. Standing in the middle of a nightmarish field Ranma surveyed her handiwork and smirked as the ice built thicker and thicker across the tortured soil. The ground sported strange furrows and long, impossibly thin cuts laced, not only the ground, but the surrounding buildings as well. Shredded, peeling metal that was once over 100 tonnes of Imperial steel lay strewn about the area like confetti and moaning, bleeding soldiers added that nice flair of color to the grizzly tableau. Suddenly Ranma's danger sense pinged and she looked up to see Equus sitting high above Fouzen with its 120mm howitzer pointed slightly over her head.

All this time the Darcsen labourers have that had been trapped in the camp used the lull in the combat to begin escaping along the river bank away from their glowing saviour. The awed people ran as fast as they could on legs shaking from fear, relief and an indecipherable sense of confidence that everything would soon be alright. They had no idea that a half tonne shell was primed and aimed directly at them.

On the opposite bank of Jeriik and his band of black ops troopers Zakka had been furiously mashing the detonator for the Ragnite bomb that Alicia had planted and swore she armed properly. Squad 7 was growing increasingly more alarmed as Equus made its appearance over the river and began the laborious process of turning its main cannon towards the whirling redhead that was just finishing up devastating a battalion worth of the Imperial's finest and the now fleeing Darcsens. Then the Valkyrur looked up.

Ranma could feel the Darcsens running and she knew what that gun overlooking them wanted. She could not allow that. Looking up at the gun from nearly 500 hundred meters away Ranma once again sighted down her right arm and the glowing rod turned inwards on itself and split into a number of floating ring of Ki rectangles that rotated around a central point. At the point what would have been a Moko Takabisha the size of a pickup truck formed, contracted into a sphere the size of a cue ball and leapt at Equus with a loud crack as it cleared the sound barrier. The pinprick of light impacted the center of the armored train and violently expanded in a directional cone that shredded the side of the train facing Ranma vaporizing Equus' main cannon along with the entire center section. A second blast rocked the evening as Zakka's Ragnite charge finally detonated and sent the remains of Equus to the bottom of the river along with her crew.

Ranma tensed as the light had revealed something that his Ki enhanced senses had missed: a large group of black armored soldiers was amassing on the slopes nearest her and she had not felt a single thing from them as of yet. Concentrating more these troops felt like holes to her. Every living thing gives off Ki, it was a universal fact. If something did not then it was either unnatural or dead. She flared her aura into an unfocused blaze of energy that lit the area around her and the pressure wave cleared away much of the debris left from her initial fight. Ranma stood passively and merely reformed her baton into a long thin blade of a Jian and considered her options. While she had a stash of firearms that would be useful against this many enemies in heavy armor she would be unable to reload one-handed while in combat. Her dominant hand held a precision weapon capable of piercing heavy armor and incapacitate with relative ease. Her left hand she simply curled into a fist as it looked like there was only one option left: smash the armor until the people inside couldn't fight. In the glow of her aura Ranma saw one of the tallest females she had seen as it stood head and shoulders above most of the other black armor.

Both women examined the other as each waited for the other to make the first move as the Darcsens fled to safety.

A/N

Well here is the latest chapter! I am sorry about the cliff-hanger ending to this one but final projects are due in the next week and a bit and so I will not be able to write until after they are done…so saying Im giving you what I have currently! New characters have surfaced! Intrigue! And before anyone asks the Black Armor is an idea of my own and not from Valkyria. That said, I hope you enjoyed the chapter and, as always, thank you to everyone who reviewed! To everyone who is worried about Isara: you will just have to wait and see! Maybe shes ok! Maybe not! Maybe we never mention her ever in the story! The last one is not likely and I have some ideas for Squad 7 coming up so stay tuned!