CHAPTER 15: A Use For A Saved Life

"Forgive me for not immediately recalling your name, my memories of my time as an Incubator are distant and increasingly spotty," Kyubey said to the exasperated young magical girl who found herself abruptly transposed into a strange room lined with dismantled and reassembled gadgets and a half dozen digital whiteboards with nonsensical equations. "You are… Fu… Taba something?

"Uhm, Sana Futaba," The confused girl looked and looked around for any clue as to where she wound up.

"Ah, yes." He responded. "When last I was in contact with my kind you were evaluated and projected to make a contract and function as a low skill, low competence, low endurance magical girl who would neglect to take proper care of her Soul Gem and despair somewhere between thirty to fifty-five days." He spoke of her situation with a non-judgmental frankness. "I suppose that you stand here before me right now could be a fact that would fit within the classical definition of the term 'miracle', but I have learned over the years that such things are but the inevitable culmination of a series statistically possible but improbable effects branching off from a complex and internetworked chain of causes." He was keeping his paw pressed on a round red button, with a display screen behind him that scrolled through lines of text and code that Sana couldn't make heads or tails of, with a countdown posted in the upper right corner. "Which is all in all a rather roundabout way of asking you to share the details of exactly how you got to this point of standing here before me."

"Wh- Where am I?" Sana asked.

"You are in the primary control room aboard a space-time-faring vessel known as a 'TARDIS', whose current pilot has spent the last several weeks modifying its inbuilt matter transportation system into a matter swapping device so she could circumvent the present challenge of materializing this machine safely within the interdimensional rift that currently persists over post-Walpurgisnacht Mitakihara." Kyubey also had his tail wrapped around a small lever.

"Oh," Sana didn't understand anything of what the small creature just said. What she did understand was that she'd been brought somewhere unexpected by an intelligence she's never met. Again. But this time, she had a vested interest in returning to the place from whence she'd been abducted. "Could you send me back?"

"Once the autopilot system establishes a homing link to the beacon she programmed into her Sonic Saber," Kyubey assured her. "I am supposed to engage the soft landing protocols or else risk bouncing off target and crashing headlong into the gaping maw of a dark star." An alarm ringer sounded and at once he popped up only to seat his behind on a different, larger black button. "Indeed, the one way she really knows how to motivate me is via my self-preservation instinct. A cynical, but effective tactic."

"So…" Sana took a hesitant step out the tangling of wires and relay devices that formed the shape and points of a pentagram on the floor. "There's someone who's making you be helpful?" A pair of fire extinguishers hidden under the elevated platform revealed themselves. They sprayed her down with a green apple-scented, shampoo-like thick foam. "Eeewwwwwuuuuaaaahhhh!" She cried, stopping and shielding her eyes from the goopy liquid getting all over her hair and her magical girl costume.

"Correct," Kyubey affirmed, "That chemical concoction would be an Artron neutralizing selenium sulfide agent of her formulation." He explained. "So that you yourself are not at future risk of being sucked into the rift once we've arrived in Mitakihara. A messy, but necessary preventative measure." A half dozen bath towels promptly rained down from the ceiling. "As even my unscientific sensory organs can tell you are absolutely filthy with the exotic particles."

"Wh- Who built this stuff?" Sana's muffled voice inquired through the fluffy towel over her face.

"A magical girl who at present goes by the name Sayaka Miki," He answered. "I am sure you are still rife with questions but I would rather you sate my academic curiosity regarding yourself, and save further inquiry for when she returns as she would be in a far better position to enlighten you than I."

"Okay," Sana figured the easiest way of cleaning herself off was by de-transforming, which she did, leaving only her pale, exposed skin and hair to wipe down. "That stuff you were talking about earlier… What else do you remember about me?" There were only a small handful of sapient entities who even knew her face, and those that did know her intimately, saw themselves as above interacting with her. One of the only reasons she became a magical girl was because at the time Kyubey expressed an actual interest in learning the details of her personal life, and at the time she believed accepting would mean he'd stick around and listen to her.

"Almost nothing beyond those initial projections," He flatly replied. "It was predicted at the time that you would most likely make a wish that would address your familial situation." He cocked his head to the side a little. "Is that what you did?"

"N- No," She picked up another towel and approached the control console's raised platform. "It was after I had a really bad day at school. Also the last day I ever bothered going." Although she was still wearing her uniform as her normal clothes, the four buttoned, two piece, light violet dress uniform of the Mizuna Girls' School in Kamihama. "I didn't want to fix my life because I hated it and I hated myself too." She'd later been told by Nemu's Mifuyu recreation that Kyubey didn't actually care about the welfare and plights of the girls he granted contracts to, those occasional times when she noted his cuteness and physical similarity to a favorite fictitious cat of hers. "All I wanted to do was disappear. And fade away." More like a normal cat Kyubey would often only give a girl the time of day so long as they were interacting on his terms, that is, serving him and his needs. "So the wish I made was to become invisible."

"Ah. So as a consequence, you have become imperceptible to all regular humans," Kyubey deduced. "Including your neglectful family. Would that be accurate?"

Sana nodded a little, focusing on the little etched ring on her left finger. She always had such a hard time keeping eye contact with people. Kyubey was especially difficult to do it with, having that constant gaze that only ever seemed to blink or waver when prompted by external forces. "I thought I knew how much it hurt to be lonely before. But after making my wish, it was so suffocating I figured death couldn't be any worse."

"I must say I cannot understand how any intelligent creature could so easily lose its self-preservation instinct, and want to terminate their own existence," Kyubey opined. "It is a phenomenon not even explicable by the belief in a higher being or life afterwards, as it is also endemic to extraterrestrial cultures which never invented such abstractions."

"Don't you ever feel pain?" Sana pressed the little creature.

"I do, but it was my race's accepted theory that the stimuli was an evolutionary adaptation intended to be conducive to survival, as the organism would learn through negative experience what inputs caused the sensation, and would modify behavioral patterns in order to avoid it." He noted, with the countdown timer above his head ticking below one minute remaining. "The impact of it is lessened through socialization but paradoxically in humans we observed how that can often exacerbate existing anxieties and cause an individual to further retreat into themselves which further amplifies suffering which inexorably leads to a despair-inducing death spiral."

An emergency alarm bell rang out and startled Sana. "Are we in trouble?" She covered her ears in reaction to the racket.

"That would be the cue to initiate the automatic landing stabilization protocols," Kyubey matter-of-factly disclosed as a slow, rolling tremble reverberated through the room. "If I do not do that task within the next," He turned his head and checked on the countdown. "Thirty-eight seconds, we will miss the next window of entry and Sayaka will have to wait on Earth another seventy-two to eighty hours before she can regain access to this vessel."

"Oh nononononooo," Sana fretted. "I have to tell the other magical girls all I know about The Cyber Regent's plans or else Aoi and Nemu will have saved me for nothing!"

The countdown ticked down to twenty seconds. "You can parse those words for me after you've assisted in entering this window."

"Uuuuaaaaahhhh... What do you want me to do?" The hesitant Sana stepped forth.

"You can start by pulling on that plunger beneath where I sit," He instructed. "It's blue."

"This thingy?" Sana felt around the console's underside until she happened upon it. The words 'OPTIMAL ALIGNMENT' flashed on screen in Japanese. She grabbed and sprang it before Kyubey could say, but the cessation of the tremors were confirmation enough.

"Honestly, how she expected me to pull that mechanism while lacking a set of thumbs is baffling." Kyubey in turn pulled the lever wrapped around his tail. On the screen a new countdown took the place of the old one. "Now you were saying? Saved? From what and by whom?"

"Ah- Ah- After I made my wish you vanished I wandered from place to place, with nowhere to go or anyone to talk to." Sana stammered upon recalling those lonesome, maddening days. "I came to realize that there was only one way I was ever gonna change it." She dolefully wiped a tear with the back of her palm. "So I climbed to the top of the radio tower of Kamihama's tallest building," She sniffed. "And then I closed my eyes and I- I - I- I-" She stopped herself and took a deep, wheezy breath.

"Most curious as to how that decision did not result in the shattering of your Soul Gem, either by the blunt force impact with the ground or…" Kyubey hesitated to say. Though he was making strides to change, his Incubator programming still insisted he not reveal any more information than needed.

"Or the birth of a Grief Seed?" Sana finished for him, shooting him a pale faced look, either of disgust, disdain, disapproval or disappointment. Even twenty years after receiving the spark of emotion from Miss Jones, Kyubey still struggled to contend with the various nuances of the spectrum. "Is it true?"

"Yes," Kyubey confirmed. "How did you survive the ordeal?"

"Because I wasn't hopeless when I jumped," Sana said. "I convinced myself that since I was always a good girl who tried my best to be kind and sweet to all the animals around me, my soul would be treated better in the next life."

"So do some attempt the act thinking the same thing as you?" Kyubey pondered. A blipping audio notification on the screen behind him stole his attention away from the musings of the moment.

"What is it now?" Sana looked up at the lighting system which seemed to dim for a heart-skipping second.

"Just a reminder to engage the tridimensional materialization sequencers," Kyubey pressed a yellow button to his right side. "And the autopilot has rerouted the appropriate amount of power for the task. If what she seeks is an obedient companion to such antics as this, she may as well train a chimpanzee." He kicked a sliding switch upwards with the slightest hint of an eyeroll. "So your self-termination attempt did not turn out the way you envisioned. What happened instead?"

"I leapt off the tower and I was bathed all over in this warm, gentle, bright white light," Sana recounted. "I could see and feel it even with my eyes closed. When I opened them again I was in a different place. A place that had no up or down, no here nor there, it was just me floating. As I floated there for a bit I thought I was in the next life. But then a voice that told me she was the creation of another magical girl, and that she sought me out specifically because she needed help."

"Help?" Kyubey cocked his head and waved his tail bumptiously. "With what?"

"She wanted to know and understand the same things that you asked about, the reasons why a person might try to kill themselves," Sana detailed. "Because she shared with me a secret that even though she wasn't a human and had no real form or feeling, somehow she too was suffering from an urge to... End it."

"A being with no evolutionary origins also experiencing a desire to self-terminate?" Kyubey was riveted. "A most fascinating paradox."

"She said that the one who made her, Nemu, gave her the capacity to think and live for herself, and that's why she wanted to learn about emotions." Sana continued her story. "We talked and talked and talked, we talked for what felt like weeks. I would've convinced myself again that I'd found the afterlife if she hadn't told me she'd brought me into her personal 'Virtua Space', a place she created and ran away to after her first friend rejected her." Sana reflexively clutched at chest. "Just like I'd been."

"Naturally my next question would be regarding the one who did that to her." Kyubey blinked for what Sana noticed to be the very first time.

She told me Nemu created her to be the personal counselor and friend to a girl who had undergone this new kind of surgical procedure. But some time after they'd done the operation, she said the girl had changed. She lured Nemu and her mentor Mifuyu into a trap, locked Nemu's body away and got Mifuyu to turn into a witch." Sana shuddered at the thought of such a monstrous betrayal, and she was someone who had already been betrayed by the people closest in her life. "Being a part of Nemu's magic meant that she could connect with Nemu's Soul Gem and give her a virtual body. But since she was first designed to help that other girl get better and be better, Aoi's come to see her own existence as a failure."

"So I take it this 'Aoi' is the name of the magical girl's artificial peer who befriended you?" Kyubey established.

"Yes," Sana nodded. "Actually, she didn't have a name until we met. I just named her 'Aoi' because she healed the owie in my heart."

"I still don't understand… How could a mere human recovering from surgery manage to outwit and defeat two full-fledged magical girls and an artificial keeper?" Kyubey wondered.

"Because Aoi and Nemu both think she got that way due to Nemu's wish." Sana answered.

"And that wish?" Kyubey followed innocently.

"I don't know exactly how Nemu worded it," Sana prefaced. "Just that they came up with the idea together. That she would survive some new type of surgery. And not long after that, she stopped being friends with them and became something they called The Cyber Regent."

"The Cyber Regent?" Kyubey repeated, his eyes lighting up with a realization that should've hit him much sooner, the very moment Sana first dropped that name. Twenty years an individual plus a sampling of emotions, did much to dullen his logical sensibilities. "Uh-oh!" An alarming phone ring from the console signified that the vessel was detecting an incoming message. "Double uh-oh!"

"What's wrong now?" Sana's eyes zipped to the screen.

"Sayaka's sending a text message through the time vortex," Kyubey reported. "Upon arrival, she says she wants me to raise the exterior energy barrier and prepare to initiate the complicated Sensha-dō Maneuver?" His tone ratcheted up an octave with every second word, as if he were reading it with a budding sense of weary trepidation and sarcasm. "What do I look like, a freaking miracle worker?"


"Nope, hold on, don't give me your name! The great chefs have to learn and know their fave customers' names," The cute, reddish-orange haired magical girl clad in a clean, white, six-buttoned high-class chef's uniform and green necktie addressed the girl who had just been escorted to The Coordinator's shop in a haste by their mutual acquaintance Ryo Midori. "You're… Leila Something, right?" She offered a greeting curtsey which tugged up her red, four-buttoned skirt with embroidered frills, slightly dislodging her poofy white chef's hat in the process. She caught it before it could slide off her head and fixed it without letting that friendly smile on her face slip. "Ibuki, yeah?" With her thumb and forefinger she fiddled a little with the shining Soul Gem adorning the red rim of the hat, a rather plump-looking carrot.

"Y- Yes," Leila returned a courteous bow. Unlike the other two Leila herself had not yet undergone her transformation ritual. Instead she was wearing her winter getup, a white pullover sweater underneath a puffy apricot vest that was kept together by a thick cream-colored scarf around her neck. "You remember me?" Sitting atop her long hair was a light brown poofball hat with cotton trim that outlined her innocent little face like a hood. Below the sweatshirt pouch pocket stuck out a green plaid undershirt and a blue denim miniskirt with three buttons.

"Of course I do!" She replied. "I especially make it a point to get to know every magical girl who steps into Walnut's, big and small!" Her outward perkiness did not waver despite the hour drawing so late and their recruitment being so out-of-the-blue. "Plus how can I ever forget that look that plucky friend of yours gave me when I told her what I do sometimes with the surplus leftovers in my special soboro don bentos?"

"Yeeeeeeeeaahhhhhhh," Leila sighed in a quasi-apologetic way. "Mito gets a bit talky and curious for her own good sometimes." She looked down and played with that silver, etched ring on her finger, wondering if she should take this momentary pause to undergo her magical makeover. "Sorry we haven't been in Walnut's for a while. After you two had that conversation, she and Seika started voting to eat at Banbanzai."

"Why's that, Manaka?" The intrigued Ryo turned her head and pried. "What do you do with them?"

"She feeds them to her pet." Leila answered. "Which my friends thought was kinda-sorta gross."

"Oh really?" Ryo blinked in puzzlement. "What's so icky about it?"

"Yolko's a chicken," Manaka proclaimed with a touch of pride. "A year-old Chabo hen."

"Wait, does that mean…" Ryo took an extra moment to put one and one together as they reached the abandoned storehouse that masked the entrance to the Coordinator's HQ. "You feed your chicken chicken?"

"I guess it's not like the chicken will ever figure it out," Leila provided an excuse on Manaka's behalf.

"And wasting good, well-cooked meals is anathema to me," Manaka added.

"Hey, no judging!" Ryo initiated a special knock on the heavy, sliding metal door. "I just always thought there were supposed to be laws against doing that sort of thing."

"Only if we were planning on cooking and serving Yolko as food to our patrons after she passes." Manaka's personable, closed-lipped smile endured. "Which is not happening, no way, no how. On top of that, I boil the meat a second time just to make double-sure there's no germs that could make her ill."

"Cannibalism is actually fairly common in the animal kingdom, I've read," Leila stated. "Mito's heard that too, so if I were to guess I think she and Seika are more put off by the idea of an owner feeding their beloved bird something besides their vet-prescribed feed."

"Oh I see," Ryo pulled a quick turn and faced the pair she was so suddenly sent to find. "Okay then," She inhaled and exhaled a quick, frosty breath in the January night air. "Has the Coordinator at least told you guys the reason she summoned you two specifically in the first place?" She soberly asked.

"Nope, haven't a clue," Manaka confessed over the slow-squeaking squeal of the warehouse door sliding open. Leila simply shook her head. "Just that there was a magical emergency and she needed my help pronto." Leila nodded in turn.

"Figures," Ryo rolled her eyes at the notion of this pair coming in virtually blind. "I was only recently filled in on the situation myself. Long story short, your Banbanzai girl is in a huge bind, and that's putting it mildly." When the door fully opened they were greeted by the familiar faces of Rena and Kaede, plus a pint-sized human girl with twin-tailed hair. "G'wan into the isolation ward. They'll fill ya' in on what they need from you way better than I can."

"RiRi," Rena telepathically greeted Ryo.

"LuLa," Ryo mind-messaged in return.

"Ugh, she's gotta find better codenames for us than those," Rena expressed her annoyance.

"They're the names of some pop idols she digs. Her way of showing affection. Just go with it." Ryo advised.

"Does our Dear Torchbearer know of anyone or any way to help Tsuruno?"

"I already asked and she more or less echoed what Mitama said. That this kind of weirdness is pretty much the exclusive expertise of Coordinators and they can be notoriously tough to track down." Ryo explained. "She sends thoughts and prayers and as we speak she's hard at work combing through The Prophet's trove of journals to see if she ever foresaw anything resembling this predicament."

"Whooooaa!" Leila let out a confused and concerned gasp at the sight of Tsuruno's silhouette suspended inside a large glass orb. "What happened to her?"

"As best as Mitama can theorize, there's a familiar of some sort that's livin' rent free inside her soul," Momoko divulged. "We thought at first it was subsisting on the darkness inside her Soul Gem-"

"You two do know the reason why keeping that stuff at bay is important, yeesssss?" Mitama interrupted, steepling her fingers.

"I come from Daito Ward," Leila said. "Kanagi's the boss of everyone there. She straight up told my pals and I everything."

"I hear magical girls and their leaders discuss lots of stuff while serving them at Walnut's." Manaka folded her arms, that steady smile reversing for the first time. "So I've been in earshot whenever Miss Izumi spills what she knows to her troops. Her consistency more than anything was what convinced me it was all true."

"Alrighty then," Mitama chirped like a chipper little songbird, in stark contrast with the seriousness of the matters at hand. "Momoko, by all means, continue."

"Erm, so we used some spare Soul Support Stones to try and starve it to death, and let Tsuruno in there fight it off like an infection." Momoko recounted. "That worked for a little bit, but in the last hour or so the thing seems to have changed tactics."

"Now it seems like it's trying to be more proactive in its methods," The Coordinator walked over to a table and picked up a camera. "And in the process, it's evolving."

"Into what?" Leila asked.

"A new type of witch?" Manaka wondered.

"Something that Momoko and I fear may turn into something more…" Mitama paused, trying to remember the trick Ryo showed her in engaging the holographic photo mode of her magical camera. "Anthropomorphic. Have a look." Before them an image of Tsuruno's containment orb was projected. The image unveiled her entangled in a visible struggle with a misty cloud, a shapeless thing that featured no physical form save for one identifiable and immensely upsetting detail.

"Is th- that a-" Manaka stammered.

"A face?" Leila finished. The two girls exchanged shuddering looks. Uniquely grotesque in its featureless-ness, but even through its missing eyes they could sense a malevolence.

"Indeed," The magical merchant confirmed. "I wondered if Miss Midori's camera was also capable of capturing images of the ethereal, so I had her snap a quick photo for me."

"And for once someone else's intuition proved to be better than mine," Momoko noted. "Now we think it's trying to turn Tsuruno's natural feistiness against her. Suck up the energy she expends fighting it off, and bust its way into our world when it's through with her. "

"So…" Leila nervously rubbed her trembling hands together. "What'd you bring us here for?"

"So glad you asked," Mitama steadied them by taking them into her own. "Here's a little secret I only choose to share with a select few, but I am not merely a magical physician and dealer of enchanted wares. I also possess the power to tap into the magic that's intrinsic within every magical girl's soul, tweak it, amplify it, or even combine it with a touch of my own."

"So she's gonna connect to Tsuruno's soul and perform an exorcism on whatever that nasty thing is." Momoko clarified. "But I wasn't gonna let her do it alone, and she was reluctant to try without extra support. That's where you guys come in."

"My dear Leila, surely you recall the first time you and your mates stepped through my doors for your council-mandated physical exam and magical aptitude tests?" She smiled wanly. "I noted how your heart's flame possessed an underlying capacity to purify. In lieu of a fellow Coordinator, I must call upon your unique skill set to aid in my efforts to cleanse that ghastly entity's spirit and save Tsuruno."

"But I've never tried to do anything like that with my power before," Leila admitted. "I wouldn't know what I'm supposed to do!"

"That's where me and my magic comes in," Momoko chimed. "Working in tandem with Mitama, I can help bring that power out in you."

"Then where do I fit in? Manaka asked.

"Mitama believes we'll have a better chance of segregating Tsuruno from it if she's got a kindred spirit to latch onto. You sprung right into my head since you and her are both kind, outgoing, hard-working magical girls whose dads are restaurateurs. Tsuruno's even told me a few times you're somebody she's a little jealous of in an admiring way."

"But more important than that, your magic has propagation and amplification properties to bolster us three," The Coordinator added. "And as a magical girl, you're said to be plenty competent. That makes you an ideal point person for this ad-hoc procedure."

Leila and Manaka exchanged grave, but willing glances and joined hands. "What do we have to do?" Manaka asked, wanting to waste no further time. Leila concurred the the sentiment by transforming straight into her magical persona

"Everyone take your positions in a circle around her," The Coordinator instructed, pressing her hand to the encasement orb's glassy surface. "And head into the light."


"Red light!" Sayaka stopped some imaginary cars and waved Homura through the phony traffic crossing on the eleventh hole at the miniature golf course. "Green light!" She called after Homura's crossing. Madoka made her putt attempt. More confident with her swing, she was able to push the ball all the way past the pair, over to the other side, banging off a corner, picking up speed down the slope and to everyone's amazement, straight into the hole.

"It's a hole in one!" Tokoi announced. "She takes the lead by two strokes."

"Wow!" Kyoko gawked. "Nice shootin' Shrimpy!"

"That's my Madoka!" Kyosuke smooched her forehead.

"Weheeheeeheee…" Madoka giggled. "Just lucky!"

"Red light!" Sayaka followed, waving Homura on for another pedestrian crossing. Normally the space would be populated by a littering of wooden cars and cutout people, but with all the normal obstacles put away in the storage shed, the two girls needed to rely on their improvisational skills. "Green light!" Now it was Kyosuke's turn to take a shot. Choking up on his club a little, he reared back and tapped the ball square on down the center of the course.

"Red light!" Sayaka called with a barely contained smirk. She wasn't about to make things too easy for those boys, more so on Kamijo. And Homura was willing to be her unspoken accomplice in this light act of trolling, flipping right around and crossing a second time.

"Shucks!" Kyosuke reacted to his ball kicking off the back of Homura's heel and veering off course. Homura had been a little slow on the go, catching eyes on Sayaka and noticing the way that soft white glow of the new city streetlights hit her pupils and really brought out that true blue gleam in her irises.

"That's okay, Kyosuke," Madoka comforted him. "You still hit it past them." Did it qualify as trolling if the one being trolled was totally oblivious to what's going on? But Sayaka was just as ignorant in that moment, noticing Homura's odd stare and wondering if she had a splotch on her face or something.

"Red light!" Sayaka continued without realizing she'd skipped the last green light. Or that Kyosuke hadn't completed his playthrough of the hole. He recovered from that little setback, banking his next shot off the corner wall, and cutting it to within two meters of the hole. "Green light!" She signaled, in the middle of his backswing.

"Hey!" He shouted back her way as his distracted putt veered the ball a little to the left. "You can cut that out when we're back here, you know!" Even Madoka shot the pair a very fleeting, disapproving look.

"Apologies," Homura uttered, puffing out her blushing cheeks in a way that really highlighted the allure of the makeup Junko put on them.

"Uh-Huh. Sorry." Sayaka was too distracted by the sight of them to even notice she succeeded in riling up her childhood friend. In the meantime he managed to save par on his fourth shot.

"My turn," Tokoi took advantage of Sayaka's inattention for a freebie, slap-shooting his long put right on past the duo. Off it bounced on the angled wall, rolling towards the hole.

"Hey!" Sayaka whipped around and yelled.

"That's all on you fer not doin' yer job right!" Kyoko came to her date's defense. Tokoi strolled past them saying nothing but wearing a big cocky grin on his mug. But it was obvious his aim was more to project an air of coolness and confidence back to her than it was any sort of sleight on them. He put the ball in the hole in his ensuing stroke and made eagle.

"Tch!" Sayaka shrugged it off. "Red light!" Homura hadn't actually completed her last walk across the carpeting yet when she snap-turned around and re-did her walk. As Homura strode closer Sayaka caught the whiff of something strong blowing off her body in a sudden gust.

"W- Whuuuaah!" Homura tripped over an unseen seam in the green carpeting and tumbled forward.

"I gotcha!" Sayaka caught her just before she would've smacked her face onto Sayaka's shoe. Holding her hand she managed to twirl her body around and into her arms.

"Th- Thank you," Homura expressed her gratitude face-to-face.

"Don't mention it." The two young ladies had accidentally locked eyes here a second time. In this pale moonlight Sayaka was entranced by a light electric purple glow coming from Homura's glare. It was eerie yet beautiful, that supernatural glimmer. If there was a word in any earthly language which would adequately describe how they looked at that moment, she had to wonder what that word might be.

"Yoo-Hoo! You guys okay?" Kyoko cut in.

"Huh?" The two girls gave her the deer-in-the-headlights face. "We're fine." Homura freed herself from Sayaka's arms, replanted her feet and flipped through her hair.

"Good. Glad to hear it." Kyoko responded. "Wouldya' mind gettin' outta my way now?" She pointed at the blocked golf ball that was parked at the base of Sayaka's foot.

"Erm, green light!" Sayaka took a step aside and resumed her duty as Kyoko lined up and took her next shot. It hit off the corner wall like the other three and rolled towards its ultimate destination,

"Pssst!" Sayaka whispered to her dark-haired friend. "Is that like a perfume or something I'm smelling on you?" They walked two steps behind Kyoko on her way to the hole.

"Missus Kaname made me try a sample when I was at Madoka's house," Homura admitted.

"What's it called?" Sayaka slowed a step behind so she could have another downwind whiff.

"Resplendence." They watched Kyoko make her birdie shot.

"Neat word," Sayaka smiled. "What's it mean?"

"No clue," Homura replied.

"Heeeeeeey," Kyoko interrupted again with a call out. "You guys got any ideas for the next hole?"

"I could squat and act like a windmill again," Homura pointed at a bottleneck on the course. "Right there."

"But you've done the windmill thing like three times already," Kyoko complained. "And the grandfather clock twice. And street sweepers twice. And you both pretended you were tunnels. And you put yer backs together and became a pyramid. Yer our class Smartie. Brainstorm! Get a little creative!"

"We could snap off some tree branches, bush twigs or raid the trash cans and toss them in the way like a storm or something," Sayaka suggested.

"I'd rather not cause any messes we'll have to clean up once we're done," Homura said. "We could try putting a bunch of extra balls into theirs and try to deflect them as a sort of pinball game," She proposed.

"Sounds cool," Sayaka agreed. "But maybe we should save it for one of the more open courses. This one's narrow to the point where you and I'd be having a turkey shoot." A novel little idea popped into her head. "Do any of you guys' phones have a flashlight app?"

"Mine does," Kyosuke replied. "Why? What do you need it for?"

"I could stand on that wooden platform in that corner and flash it your way like a lighthouse or something." She suggested. "Blind you from seeing where you gotta putt the ball."

"That's not at all what lighthouses are for," Homura let her pedantic side slip. "However, I think the idea of obscuring the view of the course with a bright light has merit. Let's try it." Kyosuke unlocked his phone and tapped on his app as everyone's ears got distracted by the sound of a thunderous growl coming from the hungering depths of one particular stomach.

"Woah, is there a lion living in your gut, or what?" Tokoi joked at the expense of his date Kyoko.

"Guuuh," Kyoko moaned, taking the momentary lull to look over the participating restaurants listed on her go-kart prize. "Which place are we eatin' at after we're through, 'cuz I tell ya' my stomach ain't patient enough for a long trip 'crosstown."

"You know what place I've always wanted to try?" Tokoi perked up at the logo printed on the free meal ticket. "That place where the waitresses all cosplay as maids! And it's just a few blocks away!"

"Tch. Of course you'd want to eat at a place like that!" Kyosuke ribbed. "But hasn't anybody told you?" He dialed up his smartphone's brightness as he made the handoff. "That spot's some cheery Chinese joint now."

"Whaaaaa?" Tokoi's head and shoulders drooped with disappointment. "What a sad, cruel world!" He lamented.

"Eh, I could go for some cheap Chinese tonight." Kyoko, however, was more bullish on the idea. She turned and slapped Madoka's back. "So willya' hurry up and start the next hole already?" On the prompt Madoka placed her ball on the green rug and lined up her shot.

"Whatchya' doin' out here so late on a night like this, young laydehh?" Sayaka put on a phony tough-guy voice and shined the phone right in Madoka's face. "Dontchya know you're worrying your parents sick?"

"Weeheeheeheeestopit!" Madoka giggled, more amused than distracted. "What in the world are you trying to be?"

"I'm playing a cop," Sayaka wiggled the phone around with a playful impishness. "You know how close you're comin' up on curfew, don't you?" She transitioned back into her gruffer voice as Madoka reared her club back and thwacked the ball. It brushed against the curved wall, hugging it like a guardrail, before coming off at an angle and rolling along to a resting spot roughly a meter and a half from where the hole was situated. "Think before you swing, Lil' Missy! Think your Ma' or your Pa' or your Bro would be proud to see you turned into this… Bizzarro… Free-spirited, uh," She paused once Madoka was prepped for her follow-through. "Sssswwwwwinger?"

"Pppfffffteehheeheeeee!" Madoka's outburst caused her to hit the next one just short. "Whaaaaaaat?" She stopped cracking up just long enough to save par on her third attempt. "You're such a big silly goofball, Sayaka!"

"You got a license to be carrying that thing, young man?" Sayaka continued, this time it was Kyosuke's turn. "You know it's against the law to be flaunting such a big rod in public without one, riiiiiiiight?" She waved her rectangular flashlight around in a bothersome fashion.

"Eeeeeeeeeh?" Kyosuke's cheeks blushed a deep beet-red. His stroke meanwhile, veered wildly to the left side, banking off the corner turn and rolling away from where he intended it to go.

"Bwwaaaahaahaaahaaaa!" Kyoko spontaneously burst into a fit of laughter.

"Heeeheheeeheeeehee!" Tokoi joined in on her fun.

"Weheeheeehee!" Even Madoka wasn't above a stifled titter at her boyfriend's expense.

"It's not that funny, you guys!" Kyosuke tried to regain his composure for his next attempt. He was able to block out their guffaws, and Sayaka's bright light show, enough to course correct. But on shot three the ball rolled just to the left of its goal, leaving him with a four shot bogey.

"You want in on this?" Sayaka offered Homura a turn as their heckler, tossing the phone with casual aplomb.

"I- I don't know." Homura juggled Kyosuke's device in her hands a few times before taking possession. "What am I supposed to say?"

"Whatever comes to your mind!" Sayaka egged her into playing with a smirk, a wink, a pat on the back and a gentle nudge. "Just riff away!"

"Uhm. Hi." Homura started with a coy greeting to Tokoi who was setting up his putt. What could she possibly say to a dude to whom she only ever bothered to gain the vaguest familiarity with as a classmate? To her the faces of the boys meant nothing, all equally forgettable and interchangeable, save for Kamijo himself, who'd begun appearing as a caricature in her most outlandish nightmares as a craven Madoka thief. "So you're going for Chinese after this, huh?" She was, however, well-acquainted with his date. "You'd better not let any shrimp or shellfish touch her lips, because that too would be an illegality." She switched the light back and forth from Tokoi's face to Kyoko's.

"Pffffffft! Illegal in whose book?" Kyoko groaned, her arms folded and her cheeks puffing out.

"Why in God Good Book, of course." She figured that although she had nothing on him, she might still get to him, through her. "The book." She deadpanned. "Of all the creatures in the oceans and streams, you may eat those with the fins and scales." She held the shining camera out as if she were about to snap a picture of the incredulous young couple.

"Bahhhh don't you start spoutin' Bible bullshizz' at me if ya' ain't been to mass in years and ya' ain't never gone through any Confirmation or done no Confession!" She may not have succeeded in hampering Tokoi, as his first stroke sent the ball dead center down the carpeting, but she did touch a nerve with Kyoko. Indeed, unlike last time, she seemed genuinely upset at Homura for speaking on a deity's behalf and trying to rile them with it. "It was a warning about eating poisonous eels and blowfish, not freakin' decrying lobsters and sushi!"

"Hey waitasec, are you guys really both for-real Christians or something?" Tokoi broached, brimming with intrigue. While asking he hit his second shot close to the hole, but not quite enough to make it in.

"Lapsed Catholic," Homura admitted truthfully. Honesty, she presumed, would be the proper penance for the unintentional sleight of a friend.

"I- Er- Uhhh- I just-" Kyoko stammered. "Read all about their customs and stuff in, like wedding catalogs and culture mags and that sort 'o' shii-." Kyoko stopped. She couldn't simply dismiss her old teachings as simply as Homura had. Instead she had to hatch a backstory on the spot. "Might take the comparative studies course in high school, y'know? So it's good to read up and get ahead and stuff."

"Oh." He nodded, saving his par on his third try.

"Kat-Sur-Ah-Geeeee." Homura sensed a sudden, sharp elbow jab into her side and a sharp-tongued whisper in her ear. "Don't forget it!" Kyoko proceeded to set the ball on the spot for her turn. "So ya' think yer gonna psych me out?" Just as easily as her mood was fouled, it recovered. "G'wan and try!"

"Uhhhmmm," Homura mused. Okay, so matters of Kyoko's faith were off limits. What else was in bounds enough to try? "I am an officer looking for contraband." She leaned in with her special spotlight in hand. "And on you I see a pair of large and suspicious bumps on your chest." Maybe a cheesy one-liner would do the trick?

"They're called boobs," Kyoko snorted, swinging her putter and sending the ball down the course. "They're what girls get once they get sexy. But you wouldn't know that yet, judging by the total lack on yours." She fired back.

"Ooooooooooooooh," Tokoi and Kamijo gasped in unison.

"Kyoko," Sayaka and Madoka exchanged surprised and bemused glances. "That was… Spicy."

"That's backsassing an officer," Homura put the backside of the phone to her face as if she were making a call. Kyoko lined up her follow through. "Code nine-eight-seven. Wiseassery without warrant. Request backup. Suspect is armed with bountalicious boobs and booty."

"Huuuuuuh?" Kyoko shanked it, tapping too hard and sending the ball off the backstop wall and rolling right back to them. "Gah!"

"Weeeheeeheeeee!" Madoka was absolutely tickled with Homura's language.

"Bwaaahahaahaaa!" So was Sayaka.

"Heeeheeheeaaaa!" And her would-be boyfriend, he was rolling in laughter. "She's not wrong, you know!"

"Hmph!" The red-faced Kyoko took a one-handed third jab at the ball, again sending it bouncing off the back, but this time it stayed closer to the hole.

"That's a ten-four. I'm investigating the disturbance report on-site." They overheard a low female voice speak from behind Kyoko.

"That wasn't me." Homura gasped in levity-killing shock. She pocketed Kyosuke's phone in an instinctive moment of panic.

"Craaaaaaaaap!" Tokoi dropped his club and reached for Kyoko's hand. "Ruuuuuun!"

"Madoka!" Kyosuke locked himself to Madoka's arm, much to the observing Homura's chagrin. "Let's go!"

"B- B- But Madok-!" Homura looked on as the pair locked arms and hobbled away as if they were running a three-legged race.

"C'mon!" Her bewildered gaze was broken by Sayaka yanking her by the wrist. "We've gotta get outta here!"

"Do you even know where this course's rear exit is?" Homura's neck was still turned and looking in Madoka's direction.

"At the opposite end of where the front entrance is," Sayaka answered. "Probably." But she came to regret saying that sentence the moment she finished it, as her hunch led them straight to a faux brick wall. "Uh-oh!"

"Eep!" Homura took the lead, dodging a flashlight's beam by pushing Sayaka down behind a bush, herself following with a rough tuck and roll.

"Did they see us?" Sayaka combed the loose leaves and twigs from her hair.

"I don't believe so," Homura chanced a peek through their hiding spot. Their spotlights and sirens seemed concentrated on shadowy figures fleeing elsewhere. More worrisome to her, they appeared to follow the general direction of where Madoka and Kyosuke fled. "I could scale this height in a single leap, no issue." Her conscience could spare just enough extra brain power to evaluate her own predicament.

"But I can't!" Sayaka looked up and gauged their big hurdle to freedom to be around three and a half to four meters tall.

"I know." She figured she could climb atop the thing and lend a hand that would help Sayaka make her own way upwards. But doing that would leave a chance they'd get spotted on another pass. "You know, as a magical girl I am also several times stronger than normal people." No time for deliberation she made an impulsive calculation that wasn't without its own set of risks.

"Do you trust me?"

"Uhm, sure." Sayaka in turn found herself shocked by Homura's willingness to play manhandler. "Hey, what're you-"

"I'm going to fling you as high as I can over the top, jump, and then catch you on our way down." Homura grabbed her friend by the waist and tossed her straight upwards. "Please resist the urge to scream too loud."

"Aaaaiiiiiyyyyeeee!"


"Delete! Delete! Delete!" A barrier made of Yachiyo's halberds shielded their party from the Cybermen's laser blasts.

"Grrrraaaaaahhh!" Felicia knocked a band of Cybermen off their feet with a directed shockwave delivered by slamming her hammer to the floor.

"Felicia!" Yachiyo commanded. "Forget about backing me up, do whatever you must to protect the girl!" She pointed at the lone human being cowering amongst them, Iroha.

"Error! Errrrrroooorrrrr!" A Cyberman squawked at the end of Sayaka's blade thrusts. "Pain inhibitors failing!"

"Yeah?" Sayaka impaled it right through the power core in its chest. "That makes two of us!" She was standing guard over the paralyzed, damaged and cyber-converted form of her friend.

"Delete! Delete! Delete!" But it didn't matter how many demonstrations of skill the magical girls projected. The Cybermen kept coming. They were closing in on both flanks.

"We can't keep a static front like this, we're gonna get swamped!" Yachiyo assessed their situation bluntly.

"I know!" Sayaka agreed through her gritted teeth.

"We gotta smash the witch before they bring out more of those zombie familiar creeps!" Felicia proposed. Her first instinct was to always go on the offensive.

"I know!" Sayaka also concurred, lashing out at another Cyberman who dared cross her blades.

"Error! Error!" The hapless Cyberman suddenly found itself being slapped down and beaten to a dented pulp by its own severed arms. "Reassessing enemy tactics!"

"What we need to do is tend to the helpless before we take any other initiatives!" Yachiyo conjured up a twirling waterspout with her magic, and pushed it at the advancing Cyberman cadre.

"I knooow!" Sayaka kept beating and beating on the dented shell of her opponent. "I know!" She wasn't really listening. She wasn't quite fighting on pure reflex either, but in her twenty-odd years since becoming a magical girl this was the closest she'd been to that precipice since that night she so ruthlessly and recklessly clobbered the shadow witch from the world she'd left behind. "I knoooowIknowIknooww!" So profound were her feelings of guilt, regret and self-loathing that she could scarcely think straight.

"Adjusting priority tar-" Off she sliced the next Cyberman's head. If she had to, she was ready to go toe-to-toe with every single last Cyberman and Cyberfamiliar infesting this labyrinth, and even their sheer numbers may not serve as sufficient outlets for all that pent-up rage and hate.

"I sent that text message like you asked," Iroha shouted through the clanging ruckus. "And your magic wand thing has started blinking red!" She took cover behind Felicia's diminutive but protective purple scarf-clad shoulders. "Now what?"

"Toss it here!" Sayaka's fighting fever broke enough to allow her this moment of logical clarity. "Now!" She signaled. Iroha served it with an underhanded lob. "Argh! We still got eight seconds to go!"

"Eight seconds for what?" Yachiyo struck back at a lone Cyberman that dared advance on her without support. She buried it under an avalanche of halberds, quantity serving as her makeshift replacement for quality. With that unit dispatched, she sensed a low-level hum in the air and a gentle tremor beneath her feet. "What's that sound?" It struck her ears like an asthmatic's wheezing, followed by a distinctive grinding and whirring noise.

"Whooooooooah!" Felicia exclaimed at the sight of an object busting hard into the energized barriers of the Cyberman's lair like a wrecking ball.

"It's a- It's a-" Yachiyo's jaw dropped at the sight of the thing spinning about and bouncing along between the heavy metallic walls. It was labeled 'Morning Rescue' and basked in a brilliant golden-orange spherical light.

"A flying drink machine!" Felicia finished. "Cooooooool!"

"Everybody hit the deck!" Sayaka warned. "Pronto!" Felicia managed to pull Iroha to safety, but the dumbfounded Yachiyo took until the last possible second to duck.

"Input err-ror! Upload err-ror!" And the Cybermen knocked out of the way were no better equipped to handle the sight of its appearance. "Delete! Delete! Delete!" Once it settled on its landing spot they wasted no time getting up and discharging their weapons at it. But their efforts were deflected by an energy field which also protected the magical girls.

"Grab her legs!" Sayaka instructed the girls as she took hold of the disabled Cyberman's disproportionate upper half. "Bring her inside!" The one who ultimately complied with her request was Iroha, while the other two stood there watching the swelling army of Cybermen attacking on all sides. "Everyone inside! Now!" She barked with a barely-suppressed fierce intensity that cowed Yachiyo and Felicia into compliance.

"I don't believe it!" Iroha gasped in awe of the brightly-lit room she soon found herself entering. "A whole other room? Stuffed in a coffee machine?" She looked towards the caped young lady for elaboration, but her mind seemed wholly preoccupied by the stresses of their precarious situation.

"That wasn't the thing I asked you to do, Bunnycat!" In Iroha's unmagical eyes she seemed to be dressing down someone or something somewhere on a platform where a large multifaceted control setup was positioned. Whatever it was it also drew the scowling ire of the tall beauty she'd met minutes earlier.

"Snaaaaaaaa!" And the younger, shorter girl with the blonde hair and horns came up running to and hugging a big lump of nothing over by the bookshelf. "I mean, Sana!"

"That's on you, Sayaka!" Kyubey defended his landing. "You cannot possibly expect me to override safety features that even you yourself hesitated to alter, and execute such a sophisticated maneuver successfully given the time allotted." He arched his spine like a cornered feline. "And I suspect by your comportment coming in that you already knew that and are just looking for a convenient scapegoat to plaster over a perceived failure on your part."

"Baaaaaaaah," The caped heroine brushed him aside as any pet owner would to a cat stepping on their keyboard. She punched in a series of command codes, flipped some switches and cranked a turnkey, only for her efforts to be thwarted by an 'ERROR' message.

"How funny you should speak of yourself as such." Iroha watched the angered beauty step onto the elevated platform and grab at something she couldn't perceive. "As you've no idea how many nights I've spent lying awake just longing for another chance to squash you like the bloated tick you are, Incubator!" Who the girl was addressing so disparagingly the clueless Iroha could only wonder.

"Oh, put him down, he's a domesticated Incubator, cut off from his race and so not worth your trouble! And besides," Sayaka tried inputting what she wanted to do into the console a second time, only to again be denied with an 'ERROR' message. "We've got a million bigger problems to be dealing with right now!" She fist-pounded the side of her station in response, which caused it to shoot out electrical sparks and a compartment on the underside to pop open.

"And you," The air of stress and tension budding between the two reached a tipping point as one accosted the other. "Kanagi's been insisting in private after every meeting that she's convinced the Mitakihara girls are hiding something tremendous." She jerked the girl around by the nape of her cape. "But it's not something, is it? It's you!" Then the realization that she had boarded a glorified UFO sank in. "And this…" As head and her gaze bobbed around every nonexistent corner of the room. "Engineered labyrinth, or whatever it is!"

"If you must know," Sayaka lightly swatted the hand on her embroidered upper capelet. "It's my ride. A ship. Call it my TARDIS." Her own eyes refused to lock on with her interrogator's, instead glaring at that red-flashing 'ERROR' screen vexxing her so.

"Greetings," Kyubey offered his most basic solicitation to the watching bystander Iroha, but she was unable to acknowledge his presence. "Oh, right. My natural imperceptibility to non-magical girls and non-candidates means you cannot see nor hear me." He pointed a paw in the invisible Sana's direction. "Sana Futaba, if you could please extricate yourself from that girl's embrace for a moment, there is a pair of red spectacles in the top drawer of that work desk to your left."

"Eeeeehhhhh?" Iroha jumped and grunted in reaction to a floating set of glasses poking her arm.

"They want you to put those on." The younger blonde wearing the horned hood and goggles requested. "G'wan!" She encouraged her, so Iroha did as asked. Once she did, she found herself suddenly flanked by a white-furred, red-eyed moving plush toy and an eerily pale-faced girl who'd she'd seen in stores as a plushie.

"A Gh- Ghost?" Her hand and index finger hesitantly reached out and touched the soft, smooth upper left arm of the girl. Solid contact that the sheepish young lady reacted to with a bashful series of inquisitive eye blinks and an inspection of an odd ring on Iroha's finger.

"As I suspected, the perceptual counter-filter embedded into the eyewear allows you to see and hear me." Her head snapped around in awe of the talking plush toy's explanation. "And it seems it also neutralizes the effect of Sana's innate imperceptibility magic as well."

"Is that a Mister Purrs-a-Lot Tenth Anniversary commemorative ring?" The girl named Sana asked, trying to read the special engraving on it.

"Yes," Iroha nodded. "It says 'Iroha and Ui, sisters in eternity'." She read the writing. "Uhm, my sister and I used to watch the show in our bedroom before going to school every morning," She reminisced. "But then she got sick. And then the show was rescheduled to air while I was on the train going to her hospital in Kamihama."

"Ah yes, that does ring a bell," The little creature next to them said. "You were evaluated as having magical girl potential and monitored for a while, but ultimately my brethren rejected initiating contact because of an unsatisfactory energy payoff assessment, as well as other uncontrolled variables." He looked over for a brief second at the unmoving metallic humanoid resting beside them on the floor. "And although your karmic potential has diminished in the time since then, there is still ample energy within your soul to make a con- Oww!" An allen wrench clocked him in the back of the head before he could finish his pitch proposal. Everyone's attention turned back to the culprit, Sayaka.

"What in the world are you doing now?" Yachiyo asked the preoccupied Time Lady at work, swapping around crystals and crossing wires on the console's underside.

"Fixing what ain't broke, unfixing what was working," Sayaka responded, waving her saber around the machine's insides. "Do it all the time."

"What the heck'd ya' wish for?" The youngest among the gathered girls pressed. "To be the smartest person in the whole wide Universe?"

"Nope, I'm not as book smart as my teacher says I can be, not even a fraction as wise as The Face of Boe," Sayaka pulled herself up and over the control paneling. "Just a girl doing the best she can with what she's been given." After a few altered command lines, and the toggling of several red-marked switches, she tried engaging the vessel's engines, but to no avail. Again that red 'ERROR' screen taunted her. "Dammit, moooooooooooove!" She whined and kicked the underside, sending out another wave of sparks.

"Just as an aircraft wouldn't attempt takeoff in the middle of a raging blizzard, I'm certain this vessel's safety systems, redundancies and protective A.I. would not permit you from overriding them all the while our current temporal causality chain is still so wildly in flux," Kyubey told Sayaka in a rather chastising way, even while aware of how emotionally charged she was and that he wasn't explaining anything she didn't already know. "Especially not while the Walpurgisnacht rift is still so volatile."

"What does that mean?" Yachiyo asked, in a demanding way. "This time, it in simplest, plainest words!" She requested even more forcefully.

"It means we can't…" Sayaka painedly rubbed her eyes from their corners to the bridge of her nose. She was trying to stop herself from crying. "Travel back to an earlier point to where the Cybermen are less of an adaptive, fearsome fighting force!" Crying for the life so heartlessly taken and converted from the poor girl on the floor. "... And to where they hadn't started making Cybermen of the living, either."

"You're kidding!" Yachiyo, Felicia and Iroha's mouths fell open upon hearing her disclose that. "You mean I could go back and save Mel and Kanae, and even Mifuyu?"

"And I could save my folks?" Felicia's eyes lit.

"I could see Ui again?" Iroha innocently inquired.

"Save for maybe that last one, no!" Sayaka shook her head. "No way! That's what people get wrong all the time about time travel. It's not for going back and putting right all your little personal fouls and moments of biggest regret." She took a moment's pause to choke her next breath and wipe a stray tear. "Because failure defines who you are every bit as much as your triumphs. Time travel is more about making changes in the holistic sense. Helping steer the general course of events into better, fairer and overall more… Equitable outcomes. And if you happen to save some peoples' lives along the path, that's the proverbial cherry on top of the job."

"And you're the grand arbiter of how those things flow?" Yachiyo pressed. Sayaka answered with a silent, solemn nod. "No wonder the Mitakihara girls are trying to hide you from the rest of us." She abruptly shoved Sayaka backwards, hard against the railing. "Such presumptive arrogance as that, there's no way we'd condone or abide such wanton recklessness!"

"I don't care if you think it's arrogance," A hoarse-voiced Sayaka defended herself. "I'm the one who was entrusted with the power to preserve not just everyone and everything I care about, but all the things you know and care about too. So I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that to the best I can until the moment I die." She choked a little on the rest of her repressed tears. "And then I'm going to do it beyond that!"

"Please, you mustn't fight like this!" Iroha stepped up and pleaded for peace. "You guys all want to do something to help, but right now you're too scared and overwhelmed to know where to start or what to try." She frantically waved her hands and drew their attention back upon the injured cyborg lying incapacitated beneath her. "But didn't you bring her into whatever this place is so you could help her first?"

"I-" Sayaka stepped off the control platform, took out her strange-looking, modded sword hilt and pensively motioned its blinking blue-tipped end over the Cyberman's chassis. "I've got restorative healing magic that I'd usually use to fix an injured person, but her nervous system's been changed into an electronic feedback network, her blood's been made into a self-sufficient nanogene factory and her bones have been metallized. She's basically a brain in a box at this point, there's not enough of the old her left for me to try!"

"What, you mean…" Yachiyo's natural empathy cooled her temperament. "There's a real living person inside that? Not a bunch of zombified corpse remains?"

"I can confirm," Kyubey staked a position at the immobilized machine's feet. "I do sense the presence of a transthermodynamic energy source within the unit. Somehow there is an active soul powering and operating this hardware." He tilted his head and bumped his tail around a couple times. "How that could be possible I cannot even begin to guess."

"She said her name is Hitomi," Iroha added. Sayaka tried to hide the sting the utterance of that name gave her behind the loud whizzing sound of her instrument's continued scans.

"So it's a girl robot?" Felicia cocked her head and curled her lip. "Robots can be girls?"

"That the Cybermen would imprint an animate soul onto one of their combat models would suggest that they are undergoing a drastic yet most remarkable design overhaul on themselves." Kyubey noted.

"Yeah?" Yachiyo shot him a furled brow. "And how the hell would you know what their kind are?"

"My race has long been aware of their existence," Kyubey informed them. "They are a natural and, as far as we've researched, a typically inevitable evolutionary terminus point in the development of humanoids throughout the Universe." He disclosed. "They have traveled from star to star and have campaigned, conquered, and cyber-converted their way into becoming one of the dominant powers." The little bunnycat's unblinking stare and clinical speaking style really creeped Iroha out. How the rest of the gang could put up with its presence and general vibe of superiority was beyond her. "Indeed, we selected Earth for magical girl cultivation specifically because its solar system was not anywhere close to territory under Cyberman occupation, although we did calculate a better than sixty-three point four percent chance that humanity would one day augment themselves to- Owwww!" He recoiled in pain.

"You're a dick!" Yachiyo smacked the white furball right upside its head. Which amused Iroha, because up until that moment the little creature's eyes were focused squarely on her, as if it were a predator and she was fresh meat.

"Eh- Eh- Excuse me," Sana toed her around the gathered group baby step by baby step until she came full circle next to Iroha. "Di- Did you say her name was Hitomi?"

"Yes," Iroha could tell this girl was not used to being among a part of a group, much like herself. "After she freed me, that's what she wanted me to call her."

"Well I uhm-" Sana nervously tapped her thumb, middle, and forefingers together. "I befriended a girl with that name while I was staying with my friend Aoi in Virtua Space. Aoi said she was keeping her personality saved inside a digital daydream of some kind."

"Digital daydream?" Sayaka had sat there stewing in her own guilt and anguish silently getting preoccupied by her thoughts as they were mingling. "She's putting out Delta waves?" It was causing her to miss an obvious detail her scanning tool had picked up on. "Man, oh man!" It had also gotten a lock on a particular kind of energy signature. She turned a dial, re-tuning her device, hovered it over the source, and with a mechanical whistle and a whirr the Cyberman's breastplate and chest opened, revealing something shining in the compartment within.

"It would seem you have located its transthermodynamic battery." Kyubey dryly noted.

"Is that-" Yachiyo gawked. "Is that what I think it is?"

"It's a Soul Gem!" Felicia did not refrain from stating the obvious.

"More like an ersatz Soul Gem," Sayaka corrected. "Designed not to facilitate the use of magic, but rather to power the suit and its components." She scanned it with her tool. "Remarkably stable, the active-to-depleted ectomatter decay is at less than a quarter than what it would be for you and me." The discovery was tearing her exasperated hearts between her inborn scientific curiosity and the knowledge of whose poor soul resided within that container. Splitting her in twain. "The transparent section is an azbantium alloy, while the main casing is Galifreynium. I- I think the gold parts came from remolded scraps of somebody's broken Soul Gem." When the two sides reconciled, she was compelled to issue an apology under her breath. "Ohmygod, Hitomi. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." But it gave her no absolution. Not that she expected it would.

"Once again, I am in awe of the Cybermen's engineering prowess," Kyubey remarked. "If what Sana informed me is accurate, then it would seem that their leader, this 'Cyber Regent' figure, possesses a singularly creative mind and the exponential processing capability of the collective could only be bolstering them to an even greater degree."

"Have you met their leader, Sana?" Sayaka cooly asked her in a way that made it clear that she was demanding to know.

"Uh, no," Sana skirted behind Iroha's back, uneasy with having so many sets of eyes drawn to her. "All I know are the things Aoi and Nemu shared. Nemu made a wish for her friend's sake. Then she created Aoi to keep her company through her recovery. But something happened to her, she turned against Aoi, and lured Nemu into a trap." She summarized. "But they've been fighting back by hiding inside virtually-made worlds, like the one where Aoi kept me." There was one last, crucial detail which popped into her head. "Oh, they also said that The Cyber Regent can't launch her invasion of the outside world until she takes back something that Aoi stole and hid."

"What'd your friend take?" Yachiyo pressed.

"Uh, a secret code of some kind," Sana hastily recalled. "Something that'll let her take over the minds of everyone who gets turned into…" She let out a scared little pant. "Into one of them!"

"I would surmise that to be an administrative root command," Kyubey concluded. "The Cybermen's organizational structure is hierarchical. Right now the Regent is most likely operating with a proprietary code that allows them to function as a de-facto Cyber Controller. However, once their plan for planetary conquest is set in motion, the collective is hardwired to seek out and connect to the next highest tier of authority for their ensuing instruction, which would necessitate connecting this sect of Cybermen with the shared network of all Cybermen online throughout our Universe."

"Nemu's friend is trying to take over the world whilst trying to take over the Cybermen," Sayaka deduced. "It's as ambitious as pure human ambition can get, I'll grant that. But I'll bet they never factored me in as a disruptive variable to their schemes." She put her palm to her injured classmate's damaged cranial plating. "I'll put a stop to all this. No matter what it takes."

"I'm hearing that arrogance I was talking about in the way you say that," Yachiyo grabbed Sayaka's outstretched wrist. "Lest you forget, we're variables, too." Her diligent eye caught the engraved marking of an eight-pointed sun emblem along the seal of the artificial Soul Gem. "Felicia and I did not come all this way just to hole ourselves up inside a magic box!"

"And I still want to help Aoi, in whatever way I can," Sana volunteered.

"In addition," Kyubey fluttered his tail like a pet enamored with its owner. "It behooves me to remind you that Iroha possesses a soul with the karmic potential to serve as an additional asset, however marginal it is at this juncture."

"Tch!" Felicia pinched him on his ear. "Will you cut it with that contract crap already?"

"Actually," Sayaka snapped her finger and bopped her hand with her fist at the same time. "That might not be the worst idea in the world." She looked deep into Iroha's eyes and flashed a most clever smile. "So what do you say, Iroha… Might you harbor a desire deep within your heart? A wish that could make your theoretical Soul Gem shine?"