Ad Victoriam Military Academy, July, a.t.b. 2013
One of the benefits of this arrangement, Justine considered, was that her quarry was liable to come directly to her. There was no hunting or seeking to be done: Justine was herself both the bait for the trap and the trap itself, hiding in plain sight; and so she felt comfortable enough to sit herself down atop an old stump of a long-since fallen tree in the middle of a clearing, having attired herself in full uniform and with her tachi fastened to her hip. She listened to the influx of information being fed to her through her earpiece, and with her face turned up towards the canopy of the woodland battlefield, she let her eyes fall closed as a shifting three-dimensional map of the battlespace, a diagram of sorts, took shape within the chamber of her mind, the mental vision keeping track of the data that her comrades were reporting back and what it implied. She could see Odette and Marika in the centre of the opposing formation, ripping through their foes' defences with remarkable zeal (which was a surprising development from the latter girl, as Justine had estimated that it might take Marika a while yet to fully come out of her shell, if ever she did), could make out each shift in position as Yennefer and Sif worked to keep each other safe while laying down suppressing fire. The shrill hunting-cry of the oddly stiff merlin, Artemis, on high heralded the combined efforts of both Hecate and Elizabeth, working together to whittle down the other force from a range of such a vast length that Elizabeth considered it a worthwhile challenge, and each retort from the eagle-eyed sharpshooter's Knightmare-sized anti-materiel rifle sounded rather like a thunderclap, poetically enough. Lindelle and Liliana brought up what amounted to a rearguard, on the lookout for any last-minute reversals from their opponent, and though Justine rather doubted that her enemy, Integra Harrowmont, truly possessed the mettle to accomplish an upset at this point, she felt it was perhaps a bit foolish of her to leave any sort of space for her to underestimate the particular low cunning of the girl she was picking apart, piece by bloody piece.
She could feel Suzaku, could feel the joy of battle setting her soul ablaze: even now, Justine felt her own spirit resonating with such boundless battle-fever, wild and pure and forever free. She smiled serenely into the sky above, and understood that this much, her mother could never have accounted for: the bond the two of them shared, forged in their childlike exploration of the primordial savagery of mortal combat, was one that defied the trappings of station or society. What Milly had said to Justine upon entering her room was as much a sorely-needed reminder as it was a point of shame for needing such a reminder in the first place; and with it came a corollary, one that was much more easily felt than it was articulated. She was oddly certain, then, that she would never again find cause to sincerely doubt this bond of friendship and sorority that she shared with her first, dearest, and best of friends.
All of these things and more were laid out before her within the compartmentalised chambers of her mind, and it was marvellous. Problems were identified by some members, and in response, others offered their resolutions, whether it was Suzaku's ecstatic thrill at getting to tear her way through a succession of flanking Knightmares, the sound of Elizabeth's rifle cleaving through the air like a bolt of lightning, or even the swift manoeuvring of Liliana and her spear on occasion. Only a few times did Justine have to cut into the conversation with one note or another, correcting minor mistakes before any of them could cascade into a catastrophic blunder, reminders about positioning, or what have you; but otherwise, as a leader, she was practically overflowing with pride as her comrades, her subordinates, worked together to prove their mettle, both to themselves and to each other. I'll still take a more active role in commanding missions with higher stakes, of course, but there are certainly worse ways to help them build enough confidence in their own skills for them to learn how to seize an opportunity to take the initiative…
"A captain's prowess has ever been constrained by the skill of her companions, has it not?" spoke she into the open sky, witnessed only by those fortunate few free enough to soar the heavens.
The air shifted. The cylinder clicked, shifting a new, separate thought process into the chamber. Justine took in a deep, slow breath, and opened her eyes on the exhale. "You know, for someone who sought to undermine and unravel the bonds that hold my company together, you are actually rather abysmal when it comes to skulking about undetected, surprisingly enough. You're welcome, of course, to come forth out of those shadows that shy from you so, and thus to stop embarrassing yourself. I would not wish to have you think me discourteous—provided, of course, that such a thing can indeed be helped."
"Wait, I was supposed to be hidin'?" came a surprised voice, its register somewhat low while still clearly feminine. The speaker emerged, then, from the foliage—a young woman garbed in full uniform, her frame tall and strongly-built, with bright, narrow crimson eyes and a thick, full-bodied mane of blonde hair that carried an orange tint reminiscent of a sunset. "Shite…"
Justine smiled without mirth. "Flanderization ill becomes you, Catrìona Anderson."
"Why don't ya be tryin' that again, your highness, but with smaller words this time," the larger girl replied with a cocksure smirk.
With that same mirthless smile, Justine looked Catrìona in the face, rose to stand from her seat upon the tree-stump, and spoke. "A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh."
"Gesundheit," she replied without a moment's hesitation.
Justine nodded. "I thought as much. But yes, feel free to abandon the falsified accent. It's fooling no one of consequence—and honestly, it's more than a little rude."
The smirk dropped from her face a moment later. "What gave me away?"
"The fact that your accent was region-nonspecific, for one. That was the first amateurish mistake on your part," Justine listed off on her fingers. "And for the second, your choice of pseudonym. The majority of Britannian families that can trace their origins back to Scotland tend to have kept their original surnames only, while abandoning their traditional forename conventions in favour of instead adopting whichever particular style of Britannian nomenclature is 'in vogue', as they say, for the time being. The outliers from that norm have maintained both their traditional forename conventions and their surnames as a point of pride in the age and illustriousness of their esteemed lineage. But a given name as unmistakable in its origins as 'Catrìona', coupled with a surname of such unclear descent as 'Anderson'? You couldn't possibly have picked a name that was more blatantly an alias. Jane Smith would have been a better choice. Certainly more circumspect."
The blonde woman stared at Justine in absolute silence, blinking in shock. When she spoke, her dry tone and smooth voice was a far cry from the affected brogue. "You really are the most insufferable sort of know-it-all…"
"Derivative, pedestrian, and tragically uninspired. Four out of ten," Justine judged without missing a beat. "If you wish to trade insults, you really must at least attempt to bring some better material. The trouble with always going for low-hanging fruit is that eventually, you wind up with a mouthful of rot, after all. Though, I suppose I ought not to be too harsh. I really should be thanking you, you know."
"Oh, really?" the woman who was not as she seemed rejoined, her tone just as dry as she propped a hand upon her outstretched hip, a saucy smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Whatever for?"
"For exposing the weakness in our synergy when you did," Justine replied with absolute sincerity. "Much as it might not feel like it sometimes, this is only a school. We might not have had the wherewithal to address the issue before graduation without you, which would surely have only resulted in that chink in our armour being exploited in much more dire circumstances. That we've had this flaw of ours, of mine, exposed while we're here, in a place where the stakes could not reasonably be any lower, is a kindness that may well prove to have saved more than one of my comrades' lives, and for that, I do indeed owe you a debt of gratitude, so I thank you. Truly."
"Don't mention it, I guess," the woman said wryly. "No, seriously, don't. It's making my teensy widdle brain hurt just trying to make sense of it right here and now."
"Ultimately, whether or not you understand the nature or the magnitude of the service you've done us is inconsequential," sighed Justine, her gloved hand perched upon the butt of her tachi while she looked up into the sky, just in time for another crack to echo like thunder in the distance. "The fact remains that you have done it,and I've expressed my gratitude for that already. But if you wouldn't mind too terribly, I have another favour to ask of you, if I may be so bold."
Catrìona shrugged dismissively. "Suppose that'd depend on the favour."
"Then as brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief," Justine quoted with the ghost of a smile upon her lips. "To put it simply, I'm going to need you to try to kill me. Right now, in fact."
"I beg your pardon…?!" Catrìona baulked with a bray of startled laughter.
"You know, your captain is remarkably talented," said the princess with a secret smile. "Her record speaks for itself in that regard. Integra Harrowmont is quite capable indeed, especially for her age. But she shares a crucial and fatal flaw with my estranged elder sister, you see: much like Her Highness the Second Princess, Cornelia li Britannia, Harrowmont sorely lacks imagination.
"I won't deny that she did indeed manage to assemble a rather comprehensive portrait of the Justine vi Britannia of two weeks past as a commander. In fact, I'd wager that if I was at this very moment still the same girl I was back then, then she'd have me dead to rights, like as not. And yet, in the end, all it took for the delicate threads of her intricate web to fall completely to tatters was for me to decide to be better than I was; those results, too, speak for themselves." Justine gestured to the air around them with her free hand to illustrate her point, and the saucy smirk on Catrìona's face began to flatten out. "You know, it's the funniest thing in retrospect. In the moment, I'd believed that I'd failed to ascend, that I'd missed the leap to greater heights. The truth, however, was somewhat more mundane: I was rusty. It'd been too long since I'd had to defend myself against someone who was wholly intent on murdering me, and ultimately, it dulled my edge. I made sure to see about remedying that over the past couple of days—it'd also been too long since Suzaku and I actually went all-out while sparring, as it happened—and as I whipped myself back into shape, it occurred to me that I'd been going about all this entirely wrong. Do you know what my mistake was, I wonder?"
"Enlighten me."
"My mistake, you see,was in considering Integra Harrowmont to be a worthwhile whetstone, even for a moment," Justine explained, her rich, melodic voice crisp and clear, making certain to enunciate every syllable so that her meaning could not possibly be mistaken. "Oh, she dearly wished to murder me, alright, but her intent to kill was feeble, clouded with things like malice and envy and spite… And ultimately, she made for a very poor meal indeed. The sad fact of the matter is that this is the limit for her, the end of the line—the very summit of Integra Harrowmont's martial prowess. From that height upon which she stands and thinks herself mighty, there is no further ascent for her. I imagine it'd almost be funny, if it wasn't so dreadfully pathetic. Not, of course, that I won't laugh anyways."
"Not that it isn't nice hearing you lecture me on shit that really doesn't matter for minutes on end," Catrìona interjected, huffing some of her fringe out of her face in a gesture of performative boredom. "But is there a rest stop between here and the point, by any chance?"
"Why, my dear Catrìona, don't tell me that you haven't realised it yet," Justine gasped rhetorically, her own smirk equal parts bemusement and mockery.
"Realised what?" she sighed.
"That I'm hoping that you'll succeed where Integra Harrowmont failed," explained the princess, her smirk broadening to a smile like a tempered edge, or perhaps broken glass.
"What, by killing you?" Catrìona laughed.
"By providing me with a proper meal," Justine corrected, shifting her posture subtly as her tongue darted out to lick her lips. "It's been ages since last I've had much of anything worth devouring, you see, and just between you and me? I'm positively famished."
"You've got an odd way of making a girl feel special, you know that?" the larger girl remarked.
Justine shrugged. "My fiancée doesn't seem to have any complaints."
"You know what? Why the fuck not," Catrìona sighed, stretching her arms and hopping in place to limber up. "It's not as if I've got anything better to do. Might as well kill some time cleaning your clock."
"Thank you for humouring me," the princess replied, her posture growing more dramatic.
"I mean, I've heard weirder last requests," said the taller woman.
Justine's smile sharpened even further. "That's the spirit…"
Silence fell between the two of them, the sounds of distant battle their only accompaniment.
Her instincts were calmer this time. They did not scream; they nudged. She noticed the grass under her opponent's feet shrivelling and dying, going from green to brown and then to grey, and though her opponent gave no telegraphs at all when she shifted forth to strike, her killing intent was all the warning Justine needed.
There were waves of heat distortion coming off of the woman's fist as it flew past her face. Justine leaned and evaded the blow, weaving out of the way of the leg-sweep that followed, and ducked underneath the body-shot that was aimed for her centre of gravity. It was the oddest feeling, really, to be in that space where her mind was working in full flourish, her cognition following several separate trains of thought all running simultaneously without distractions from any of them. One track was on this fight; another kept track of the influx of battle information; the battle-space was monitored by yet another—there was one she always kept for her own amusement, which was at the moment consumed with a recitation of King Henry VI, Part III. There was a charging tackle up next, with her opponent shifting into a grappling strategy, and one of the chambers of her mind occupied itself by calculating the exact moment she would need to begin moving to counter the attack before it could land. Her hand wrapped around the hilt of her tachi, then, and in one fell sweep, she drew it, striking through with the same motion.
Moments parsed themselves into fractions, individual instants suspended in celluloid. The laws of momentum and physics made it impossible for her opponent to evade; instead, she rolled with the hit, a cut that ought to have had her dead to rights slicing into her flesh, but not as deeply as it was meant. She put a fair bit of distance between Justine and herself, then, and their conflict paused.
"Slippery little bitch, aren't you?" Catrìona swore.
"I was trained by the very best," Justine replied simply, returning to a battle-ready rest. "I trust that you're all warmed up, now?"
"…That was bad," the larger girl complained. "And you should feel bad."
"I thought it was rather clever, myself," sighed the princess. "But then, I suppose it's true what they say: there really is no accounting for taste, after all…"
"Alright, then. You asked for it," Catrìona warned gravely. "The kid gloves are coming off."
"I'm mildly insulted you thought to don them in the first place," Justine sniped back. Then, a nudge from her instincts sent her whirling. Her blade swung up, the edge cutting into an open palm that had been poised to strike her from behind. Immediately, the metal of her sword began to smoke as the edge glowed a dull ruddy hue that elevated to a bright cherry red with remarkable speed; faced with the prospect of losing her weapon, then, Justine did the first thing that came to mind, and threw a fist, decking Catrìona directly in the face and feeling cartilage give beneath her hand even as her glove and the flesh of her knuckles gave way, as though she'd just stuck her hand into a foundry furnace for a split second.
The other girl recoiled, rocking back with the force of the blow in surprise, and disengaging.
Catrìona gave a low whistle while her gashed hand went to her bloodied face. "I'm impressed, kid. I don't think I've had anyone see through that one in years, at least."
Justine looked at the edge of her tachi as the cherry redness subsided into a dull metallic hue, the brief contact having done considerable damage to the differential heating treatment that tempered the edge; then she looked at her knuckles, which were smoking, the skin on her hand underneath bubbling and blistering as its melting began to subside. She flexed the hand anyways, silently demanding it work properly, the pain of the injury immense but distant, and easily put in its place as a result of that dissociation. "Fascinating! I wonder what else you've got!"
"Eh… You okay there, kid?" Catrìona asked, her tone wavering with uncertainty, the pretence of the two of them being around the same age having been abandoned entirely as she snapped her nose back into its proper place.
"I mean, you've ruined my sword, and you owe me a new pair of gloves, but…" Justine began, her eyes wide as one of the chambers of her mind worked to analyse and parse the implications of what she had just borne witness to. "Control of heat to the extent that illusions constructed of bent light can be conjured, regeneration by way of cauterisation, and…is that a hint of thermal metabolic acceleration that I'm picking up here? Marvellous. You've exceeded my every expectation."
"What did you expect, dare I ask?" the blonde asked warily, while the wound Justine had inflicted upon her hand, as well as the one that crossed her torso from shoulder to hip, sealed themselves shut with a rush of steam, leaving behind one entry into a veritable tapestry of similar scarring, from what the princess could see.
"Someone of such immense ability that I cannot hope to conquer them in battle as I am…" Justine explained, amazed, as she brought her damaged tachi to bear once again. "An icon of absolute annihilation, to drive me to ever-greater heights… In other words, the perfect whetstone…
"I think I can do it now…"
Catrìona stepped forth, bringing herself back to the point where their personal combat zones came into tangential contact with one another. "Do what?"
"Why, one of the only things worth doing in a mortal duel, of course," Justine breathed, firming her stance as she slid the tachi back into its sheath—priming herself for a quick-draw attack. "Transcend."
"…You're fucking deranged…" Catrìona swore.
"With a best friend like mine, you kind of have to be," the princess replied wryly, but fondly. Then the cylinder rotated again, another train of thought clicking into the chamber. "Belay that move, Odette. Let Suzaku handle that one on her own. She's got it well in hand, I'm sure."
"Wait a fucking minute… Are you…?" the obviously older woman asked incredulously.
"Commanding the battle here and there while we fight? Of course," said Justine, her feet prowling beneath her so as to manoeuvre herself into a better position. "I've also switched from Henry VI, Part III, and have in fact just begun Richard III. 'Now is the winter of our discontent,' and all that. Shall I recite it aloud for you? Or would you prefer Shelley? I haven't gotten to break out my Chaucer in a good while, if your tastes are a bit more mediaeval in inclination—the Canterbury Tales originated as an oral tradition, as I understand it."
"…You're a really strange kid, you know that?" the older woman sighed.
Justine shrugged. "I'm an othermind. It comes with the territory. Something of an existential hazard of living as I do. Now, shall we?"
"You have to know that you're going to lose this," stressed Catrìona, cocking an eyebrow. "There is no way you could possibly not understand that you can't beat me, not here…"
"Ah, but victory is a funny little thing indeed," Justine refuted with a smirk. "Far more often, and to a far greater extent than most people will ever realise, victory abides in the eye of the beholder, wherefrom it comes to inherit its specific nature. You could say, in fact, that I've actually already won."
"How the fuck do you figure that?" asked the blonde, exasperated.
"Haven't you been paying attention?" rejoined the princess. "It's true that, for the moment and as I am now, I cannot possibly overcome you through force of arms—and yet, as that was never my objective in arranging for this meeting to take place, that assured failure cannot truly be considered a defeat, can it?"
"Alright, enough talking," the woman sighed, resigned. "You said you wanted to keep fighting?"
"Indeed I did," Justine replied, grinning as broadly as Suzaku. "You see, there's something that my teacher once showed me, and I wasn't able to accomplish it before coming here… But right now? Let's just say I'm feeling quite a bit better about my chances…"
Immediately, the cylinder shifted, and another train of thought slid into the chamber of her mind with a soft, muted click. She'd been on the receiving end of what she was about to attempt more than once, it being one of Lady Izanami's favoured techniques; she'd deconstructed the technique to its base elements in her mind, had mastered each individual motion, but with every attempt to replicate the full attack, she'd always lacked a certain something that made it all come together into a cohesive whole. In this moment, at this hour, however, Justine swelled from within with a certain fullness of spirit, and there was a certainty in the core of her being that she at last understood what she'd been missing all this time.
She leaned back; then, with a sudden shift of her weight, she launched herself forward, crossing the critical distance without hesitation or fear.
Catrìona stood there, making no attempt at a defensive or countering posture, but her fighting spirit rose all the same, her intent to kill a river after heavy rain, overflowing its banks. The air grew much hotter and sharply heavier as Justine approached, searing her throat with the sudden evaporation, scorching brown the foliage beneath Catrìona's feet, distorting the air with waves of delirious heat; Justine did not flinch, did not relent. She was fully committed to this, as she needed to be, this potent moment of do-or-die, teetering upon the very knife's-edge of absolute destruction—she let the thrill of it pass over and through her, and as it left, she alone remained, galvanised, pure, and rapidly approaching a state of oneness.
She'd come this far before; she'd thought that that was what this technique demanded of her.
Now she knew, however: that from the first, she'd been so very wrong…
As she drew her sword and struck in the same fluid, powerful rising motion, she contemplated this within another train, as the cylinder clicked yet another into the chamber, like rounds in a revolver, albeit a non-Euclidean one (she'd never felt the need to test how many trains of thought her mind could track, but she still had yet to brush up against the limit of how thoroughly she could compartmentalise her faculties). She'd thought she'd needed oneness at the start, had clung to the idea of it and let it shape practically every aspect of how she conceptualised the arts of combat as Lady Izanami had taught them to her and Suzaku. It had, she could now see, shackled her; for though oneness was a state of total synergy, it was still something in a very real and definitive sense, and thus was tangibly bound by limitations and rules, both natural and imposed, both practical and absolute.
She had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of transcendence. It was no wonder she'd always failed to achieve it.
To transcend was not to reach an absolute state of oneness, not at all.
Transcendence was to go beyond that.
With every blocked blow that bit into searing flesh, with every narrow and efficient evasion that scorched her skin with gusts of hot, displaced air, with the engagement and gaining and losing of distance across ashen cinders of what had once been grass and leaves and wildflowers, she reached that state of total solidarity and pushed herself past it, deeper and deeper into her innermost self. In her mind's eye, she could almost see the numbers winding down, integer becoming fraction, fraction diminishing further and further, until it reached that impossible state she knew now she'd needed so desperately…
Zero.
Couched within the central point and complete absence of infinity, Justine recovered from a cut that hadn't reached its mark, and slid smoothly into kasumi no kamae.
"Hiken…"
In a moment of alarm, a scarlet symbol like an abstract figure of a bird in flight unfurled its wings, one in each of Catrìona's eyes. In any other circumstance, it would have caused Justine to grin; for she had not met His Majesty's eyes since before she knew the power he possessed, and had no intention of breaking that habit now.
In that space of total nothingness, the origin and ending of all things, Justine drew a single line with her tachi. Then she added another, and then a third. In the span of but a single moment, from within a space that abided between moments, she drew these three lines into the instant that would follow, upon the next frame of reality, suspended in celluloid.
How fitting it is, some part of her thought, that I use this technique to cleave a bird…
"…Tsubame Gaeshi."
When Integra Harrowmont finally came to, she knew immediately that she'd lost.
Her last memory was of her fingers wrapping around the fail-safe lever for manual ejection beneath the seat of the cockpit, the ignition firing the entire cockpit block out of the ravaged slag heap that had once been her Prytwen, right before she finally succumbed to the head injuries she'd sustained attempting to best Kururugi Suzaku in Knightmare combat. It had only taken her a few instances of being knocked around the interior of the cockpit and bashing her head against one surface or other hard enough to draw blood for her to admit to herself that, from the first, she'd had no chance of victory here.
She only needed to lose ninety percent of her force's fighting strength for the Royal Force under the Fourth Princess of the Realm to triumph over them; and she knew the moment she strangled that lever as if her life had depended upon the fail-safe functioning, which for all she knew it very well might have, that as far as her subordinates were concerned, she was the ninth to fall.
"That girl is…a monster…" she muttered to herself groggily, blinking her eyes against the sunlight around her, which was entirely too bright.
"You're telling me…" came a familiar voice, off to the side a ways, but in a very unfamiliar tone.
It was at that moment that Integra realised that, far from being ensconced within the built-in escape pod of a now-scrapped Knightmare Frame, she was supine, on a travelling bedroll laid out in the middle of a clearing that Integra could not recognise for the life of her, and seemed to her senses to be very firmly out of the bounds of the examination's battlefield. She blinked and moved to sit up, only for a hand to almost immediately land itself upon her chest, gently pushing her back down. "Easy there. That body of yours has a lot of value to me. I can't exactly have you damaging it through sheer force of carelessness before I get to put it to proper use."
"Excuse…me…?" she tried to squawk, attempting to muster up offence even as her brain sluggishly placed the voice as belonging to her second, though the accent was rather conspicuously gone.
"You're excused," said the girl she knew by the name 'Catrìona', a sordid edge of mirth in her tone. "Looks like we both got pretty banged up. But you're the priority right now: I'll never hear the end of it if I deliver that body in anything less than perfect working order, believe me."
"A-am I being trafficked?!" Integra exclaimed at last, her eyes struggling to focus through the lack of corrective lenses, even as she located the approximate silhouette her brain told her was Catrìona—albeit, a touch less symmetrical than normal.
"Not in the traditional sense, but yes, in a manner of speaking," Catrìona replied without missing a beat, insouciant and wholly unrepentant as she seemed. She shrugged, a shoulder lifting alongside a stump. "Much as I might hate to admit it, but the slippery little bitch was completely spot-on. You've had your fun, megalomaniacal sociopathic pest that you are, and while I'd be lying through my fucking teeth if I said it hasn't been a fucking riot, tagging along for the ride, the fact of the matter is that playtime's over. It's time for us to buckle down and get to work."
"What are you talking about?" asked Integra, her tone bordering on pleading with how thoroughly lost she was in all this. "And…whatever happened to your arm?"
"Pro tip about tangling with the great wyrms, kid," Catrìona chuckled mirthlessly. "Their breath might be their most notable threat, but it's far from the only one. And woe betide anyone who forgets that they're also packing a hell of a bite… Of course, it's not like I knew what she was, but that's a fine excuse to have while I'm trying to get this fucking arm reattached…"
"In English, if you please," Integra huffed.
"To put it bluntly, that princess is way above your paygrade," the one-armed girl explained. "I went up against her in the forest, she cut off my fucking arm, and I'm having a right hell of a time trying to get it back to where it's supposed to be…"
"I have so many questions…" the Harrowmont heiress confessed.
"Well, let me do you a solid and lay this out for you, real slow and simple-like, hmm?" her abductor began, as if she was speaking to a small and particularly feeble-minded child. "The princess that you kept insisting that you didn't want to sleep with, no matter how many times I told you in no uncertain terms that I wasn't buying it, not even slightly—I still don't, as it happens—was waiting for me in the forest. She saw through me, something you still haven't managed, for which you have no fucking excuse, so I don't even want to hear it; and then she went and asked me to fight her, while she was still keeping track of the battle and commanding it. She pulled a right nasty little trick out of her sleeve that would absolutely have taken you down with one shot, even if you were anywhere near good enough to draw it out of her (spoiler alert: you're really not), and because of that, I'm currently down an arm. Are you following me thus far?"
"I'm incredulous, but yes, I'm attentive," Integra replied.
"Good. So after getting my arm lopped off—to which I may have overreacted, just a little—I gave it a little thought, decided that she was right and that you are washed-up, or at least soon to be, and made the executive decision to cut my losses and do what I actually came here to do in the first place," said Integra's captor, her friend who had seemingly betrayed her. Integra was still in quite a bit of shock, and had no idea of how to feel, given the suddenness and absurdity of these new developments. "So I found the landing site of your little escape pod, dragged you out of there, grabbed my bag, and started hauling ass. I mean, really, I'm doing you a major solid, here: if the princess's lover is who I think it is, you've ideally got around two weeks, tops, before you die screaming. And that's if she's feeling merciful, because the woman I know does not fuck around, not even slightly. You so much as lay a finger on her wife, your ass is grass. And between you and me? You did a whole fuck of a lot more than just laying a finger on Justine vi Britannia."
"So you've abducted me," Integra summarised flatly.
"It's not so much abduction as it is retrieval," Catrìona corrected mildly.
"I'm serious, Catrìona," the defeated force captain snapped sharply.
"Alright, first off, name's not actually Catrìona," said the young woman who had apparently been playing the part of her abrasive but ultimately trustworthy adjutant for the better part of a year and change. "It was funny enough while I was undercover, I guess, but I can already tell that it's going to get old real fucking fast on the road ahead of us."
"Then…if your name isn't Catrìona Anderson," Integra began warily. "Who are you, exactly?"
The woman ceased with her shuffling, leaned her head up to the sky above, and sighed heavily. "It's going to take me until I can get to specialised tools for this sort of thing anyways, so I guess it can wait… Also, on that note, fuck swallows. African, European, I don't care. Next one I see, I swear I'm pegging it right the fuck out of the sky with a coconut out of spite… Anyways. Rȳlviā nȳ Cȳrn, at your service. If you need to call me anything, you can call me Rhialla for short. It's a fuck of a lot less of a mouthful, at least."
Integra blinked for a few moments, her faculties chugging along lethargically. "Rhialla, then…"
"Lady Rhialla," the woman corrected, her tone very sharp indeed.
"Lady Rhialla," Integra parroted back, startled. Then she thought about it for a bit, the initial rush of panic sweeping through her and past her, leaving her with the same question she'd started from. "That's not a name that fits any linguistic tradition or cultural naming convention I know of…"
"That isn't particularly surprising, all things considered," sighed Lady Rhialla. "Been a while since I've come across anybody who can still speak the language… And I mean a long, long while…"
"And where are you taking me?" Integra pressed, her sudden wariness helping her to keep a hold on her composure. "For what purpose have you abducted me? Lady Rhialla?"
"I've told you already," said Lady Rhialla, standing up and approaching Integra. The woman knelt before her to better reach her, and put something onto Integra's face with her one remaining hand that took the disgraced Harrowmont only a moment to recognise as her glasses. The world came into sharp relief just then, as her eyes adjusted to the aid of the corrective lenses once again, and she could see that not only was her captor missing an arm—the stump, much unlike a natural wound of any description, was steaming, the air around it wavy with heat distortion—but also, bubbling, steaming ichor (for it wasn't blood on display, not by any definition of the word) leaked from it freely to land with a harsh hiss against the ground. "I don't actually need you. In fact, it'd probably be best if there was as little of you as possible remaining when we get to where we need to be. All I really need is your body, and the innate mortality that comes with it—I'd say humanity, but you and I both know you had little enough of that to start with. Don't we, little Teggy?"
"My name is Integra," she snarled, indignation turning the corners of her restored vision scarlet. "I was born Integra of the House of Harrowmont, the sole legitimised heir of Arthur Harrowmont and the last of my illustrious line. I was born as such, and I shall die as such."
"Now you and I both know that's a steaming crock of bullshit," Lady Rhialla remarked drily. "Why would you need to have been legitimised if you were already born the heir?"
"That's not what I—!"
"Didn't ask, don't care," Lady Rhialla interrupted firmly. "What you are is a dead woman, and you would have been a dead woman even if I hadn't plucked you out of that ejected cockpit. How about instead of whining on and on about how I'm going to kill you in every way that matters, you try being thankful that at least my way isn't going to hurt. Because believe me, the woman you just pissed off with your petty little pretend-rivalry and general schoolyard antics? She'd make sure that nothing remained of the girl you once were well before she finally granted you the sweet release of death. At least with me, whatever little bit of you is left when the time comes will get to live on, in some form or another. Face the facts, kid: this, right here? This is your best-case scenario. And you've got no one to blame for that but yourself. Now get some rest. We're heading out at nightfall even if I have to drag you along by your ankles, and neither of us wants it to come to that. We should hit the nearest Thought Elevator in about a week or so—especially since I plan to catch us a ride, because we are not walking all the way there. No way in Hel."
With that, the conversation was over, Integra's fate decided for her once again. She had managed to come full circle, it seemed; and though this woman had deceived her, teased Integra's trust out of her, if it was true what she said, that Integra's scheme to bring down her mortal foe had brought this situation down upon her head, then she really had no one left to blame for the sorry state of her circumstances but herself.
After all, had it not been a point of pride for her but a scant few hours past, that all her brilliant and meticulous plans and all her furtive and clandestine schemes had always been entirely of her own devising?
When Suzaku finally found her best friend after half an hour's search, she couldn't help but sigh.
The clearing she'd chosen, the location of which she hadn't told anyone because she hadn't wanted her presence to be 'a persistent fetter upon their performance as a team,' or something to that effect, was a ruin. Where once there had presumably been fallen leaves and other foliage, there was now only grey ash; where once there had been lush soil, enough for a forest of this size to be planted and take root, thriving even now, years after the fact, there remained only dry, cracked earth. It formed a decently accurate circle, enough for it not to seem even remotely natural, and while lush growth began abruptly at its boundary, Justine didn't lay there. Instead, her body rested, supine, in the centre of the burnt circle, what looked to be a severed arm strewn upon the ground next to her with the mangled remains of a tachi in the grip of its hand, warped with heat to the extent that it doubtless fouled the steel. She felt it was safe to say that there would be no reforging of this sword that Justine had somehow managed to lose for herself this day.
Suzaku's fingers worked at the controls of her Knightmare, and within moments, the cockpit came open and her seat was sliding back out of the block proper. Once the mechanism was completely still, she slipped a foot into the stirrup and rode the winch down to the ground, as a cool breeze rushed through the trees, picking up the ash upon its whirling eddies that swirled above and about the Honorary Britannian in a great pale-grey cloud. It took her very little time to properly set her feet upon terra firma once more, and while she began at once to rush towards her best friend's supine form, she didn't break out into a full run; she was still high off of the endorphins of having beaten the white-haired cunt to within a centimetre of her life, and she needed for her hands to be as steady as she could get them, should her friend require medical attention.
As she drew closer, she saw quite clearly that Justine's chest was still moving, allaying a worry of hers that her royal friend might wind up having need of a second reviving tincture; yet, on the ground, there was a message that had been scrawled into the ash and the dirt beneath with the point of a blade, filling her with consternation:
Before you ask, it was in self-defence.
Suzaku had drawn closer to read the message, and in the process of puzzling it out, she noticed that the arm in question was wearing one of Justine's gloves, and was clad in half of the sleeve of the jacket she wore as part of her uniform. Then she turned her attention to Justine's limbs, and noticed that where her left arm ought to have been, there was something that looked as though it'd been flayed. A naked forearm, bare of skin, with all its muscles and sinew exposed to the air—it exuded a steam that she hadn't noticed among all the smoke from the scorched earth, and when Suzaku took a closer look, directing the lion's share of her attention to the elbow joint, she could see pale flesh seeming to sluggishly crawl its way up her arm, little by little.
"So, ya wound up downin' Izanami-sensei's regrowth serum after all," the brunette murmured, half to herself. She let herself sigh heavily. "Well, at least you're startin' to pay some mind to your safety, so I guess this counts as an improvement, fucked-up as it is. Though, ya can be damn sure that I'm sure as fuck not gonna be the one explainin' this whole shitshow to Mills. Our friendship can only go so far…"
"So, have I finally asked too much of you as well, my friend?"
Suzaku's head snapped up in alarm, and caught Justine gazing up at her with a sharply smug smile on her face—an expression Suzaku had come to recognise as her weird-as-hell best friend's version of a shit-eating grin. It was a mighty effort, turning the grin her face wanted to respond with into a scowl, and if she was honest with herself, Suzaku knew full well that she wasn't exactly successful, but she lifted her fist all the same and shook it at the only girl her age who'd ever understood her for who she really was, and accepted her on those same grounds, in mock-rage. "Ya keep mouthin' off, and I'll beat your fuckin' ass."
"In your dreams," Justine refuted, her tone equally playful. Then her expression sobered. "So, have I been forgiven?"
"Yeah, we're good," Suzaku nodded, regarding what lay between them with all the seriousness and severity it warranted. "I was still a little mad at ya earlier, but I've gotten it all outta my system beatin' the bony bitch to a pulp, so… What's that idiom you guys use over here? Some shit about rivers and bridges?"
"'Water under the bridge'?" Justine supplied with a bemused expression.
Suzaku snapped her fingers and pointed at her friend. "That's the bitch."
"Well, I, for one, am very much glad to hear it," the princess sighed, laying her head back against the ground. "How do I look?"
The brunette shrugged. "How's it feel?"
"Worse than I'd hoped, but not as bad as I'd expected," she replied sincerely. "But I have the strangest feeling that it's supposed to feel quite a bit worse than this, for some reason—regenerating an arm. Though the serum's certainly taking its sweet time, I have to say…"
"Yeah, it's goin' a lot slower than it should, especially for you," Suzaku noted, putting a hand on her chin as she spoke and thought. "You've always had these things work way faster for you than they ever did for me, ya know?"
"I remember it vividly, yes," said Justine with a wry smirk. "Though, I feel I really must inform you that this is the only way you're going to be getting me onto my back. Sorry to disappoint you."
Suzaku snorted again, barking a laugh. "And thank fuck for that. I don't need your fuckin' girlfriend on my ass."
"No?" Justine prodded, arching a strong, dark brow halfway towards her hairline. "I'd have thought you'd relish the challenge."
"Fuck no. I might be crazy, Justine, but I ain't that crazy," said Suzaku, her tone as brutally honest as she could get it. "Mills's fun and all, but she's fuckin' psycho."
Her best friend grinned, broad and dreamy and dopey, her eyes growing cloudy and more than a little fogged-over. "Fuck yes she is…"
"Hey, save it for when ya see her," Suzaku admonished, for all that her heart wasn't really in it. "Ya start makin' moon-eyes in my general direction 'cause of her, I swear I'm gonna start gaggin'."
"Fair enough," Justine chuckled, looking to either side of her as she did so. "Looks like I'm in need of a new sword…"
"Yeah, your old one's toast, in more ways than one," agreed the brunette. "What the fuck happened here, anyways? Looks like someone went and glassed the damn place…"
"You're not far wrong, funnily enough," replied the raven-haired princess. "I trust you recall the girl who served as Harrowmont's adjutant?"
"Blonde bitch, muscles, danger aura, fake-ass accent?" Suzaku recounted. "That girl?"
"The very same, yes," Justine confirmed. "So, as it turns out, we were right about her having a few extra tricks she wasn't wearing on her sleeve. I met her here, and we fought. She was able to manipulate her body's heat to accelerate and amplify her metabolism, making herself stronger and faster in the process; she used the heat to bend the light around her, leaving an illusory apparition not dissimilar in nature to a mirage; and as I was able to discover, albeit at great personal cost, she can also generate and manipulate fire. Oh! And I also managed to perform the Tsubame Gaeshi."
Suzaku blinked twice. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Oh, come off of it," her friend sighed, leaning her head back. "It's really not that big of a deal. Honestly, I feel less like I accomplished something today, and more like an absolute dunderhead for having taken so long to do so…"
"Okay, first off, fuck you," said the taller girl. "And second, if ya managed to land that, then what the fuck is all this shit for?"
Justine looked around again, taking note of all the devastation as if this was the first time she'd had a thought to do so—which, since Suzaku knew her friend as well as she did, she could say with confidence that that was way too plausible—and smiled, slightly sheepishly. "Ah. That. Well, one could say, provided they were of a mind and an inclination to do so, that my opponent took exception to that achievement. This devastation that surrounds us, as you've no doubt surmised, is the result—as well as how I learned that she could create and control flames, albeit at the cost of the arm that is still taking far longerto regenerate than it should…"
"Well, it'll have to keep healin' as we go," Suzaku sighed, running a hand through the sweaty mane of her thick brown hair. "Can ya walk?"
"I lost an arm, Suzaku," Justine replied, slightly affronted. "It's hardly a spinal injury…"
"Good, 'cause we're gonna need to ride side-saddle on the way back," said the brawnier girl, as she leaned down and offered her hand. "C'mon, I'll help ya up. We gotta haul ass."
Justine eyed her offered hand sceptically. "Your other hand, if you please, Suzaku. I don't trust this one quite yet."
Suzaku's eyes went wide as she quickly switched her offered hand, mildly embarrassed at her own slip-up. "Oh, right! Yeah, sure thing…"
"Thank you," her captain replied with a prim sigh, grabbing hold of the offered hand with her right as they worked together to get Justine back onto her feet.
It wasn't particularly difficult for Suzaku to lift her best friend from the ground; time was that she'd once weighed practically nothing at all, and while those days were long gone, the fact remained that Justine possessed a smaller, slimmer frame than her own, her strength less obvious and built more for nimble speed and deft agility than the brute force that Suzaku's lean musculature lent her in spades. Not for the first time, the Japanese girl watched as the princess she considered perhaps her closest confidante brush herself off in the aftermath of a tumble, and while she could lope and prowl with the best of them, even when she was at her lowest point, Justine seemed at all times to possess a reserved poise and fluid grace that was lost on the larger girl.
"What is it? What troubles you?" Justine asked, seeming to have returned to top form in full, and as perceptive as she'd ever been while in similar states of being.
"Nothin's troublin' me, exactly," replied Suzaku, crossing her arms over her chest. "Just thinkin' 'bout how it seems like every bitchy Britannian thinks I'm your exotic pet, or somethin'."
"Oh, please," Justine snorted, herself. "The only woman you'll ever willingly get on all fours and bark for is the same one who taught us both. And I would hope you well know by this point that I only call you an uncouth, unrefined ruffian out of affection."
Spurred up by mirth, Suzaku snapped a jaunty salute with a broad grin, and declared with all the cheek that she could muster, "Aye-aye, Force Captain Sourpuss!"
Justine smirked fondly. "That's my girl. Now, what to do about this mess…"
"It's not like any trees got singed," Suzaku noted with a shrug, crossing her arms once again. "It'll bounce back with the next rainfall, I guarantee it."
"While that's certainly good to know, it's also not the mess I meant," said Justine, her smirk shifting from 'fond' to 'bemused.' "Especially since we're essentially gambling on my arm having finished its full regrowth before we return to the main campus to avoid difficult questions. And then there's also the fact that I'm missing half a sleeve to consider."
"Hmm…" the brunette hummed in thought, her eyes flicking to and fro about the scene. She caught onto the nugget of an idea, and, following where it led, she stepped forth and carefully pried the remains of the tachi out of the ruined glove on that hand, before peeling both the jacket's and the shirt's sleeve off of the severed forearm that was even now beginning to attract a milieu of curious insects in the market for a home to start their families in; then, with the relatively bloodless (shockingly enough) sections of severed sleeve in hand, she dropped the tachi to the ground by her feet, and with her full range of motion, tied the fabric together, the white button-down to the black uniform jacket. In the process, Suzaku mentioned to her best friend speculatively, "I think we can kill two birds with one stone here."
"You mean to conceal my arm and disguise the loss of my sleeve by pretending that I've suffered an injury to it?" Justine asked, her tone and her affect both suddenly very difficult to read—likely deliberately so—with only a raised eyebrow to communicate any kind of discernible inflection whatsoever.
Suzaku shrugged. "I mean, ya kinda did. Just, y'know, not exactly in the way that they'll be given to assumin' ya did. Nothin' says we gotta correct their misconceptions, eh?"
Justine chortled with a small smile. "How very ingenious of you. I suppose it's quite the fortunate turn that you actually pay attention in Combat Medicine and First Aid…"
"Hey!" Suzaku scowled as she looked up from fashioning the makeshift sling, affronted. "I'll have ya know that I pay attention in every class. I just pretend not to, 'cause it's a surefire way to get under your skin."
"Because Heavens forbid that you refrain from needling me at practically every hour of every day," deadpanned the princess.
Suzaku grinned again. "Now you're gettin' it. C'mere, this's gotta look right…"
"If I must," Justine sighed faux-dramatically with an exaggerated eye-roll; but she stepped closer to Suzaku and turned to offer up the regenerating arm nonetheless. Suzaku took the opportunity to inspect it a bit more, noting that the newly-restored pale flesh had progressed about three-quarters of the way to the wrist already, so the brunette elected to take that as a good sign. That their ruse need not hold up to scrutiny for too much longer surely qualified as a stroke of luck on their part. That in mind, she gathered up the arm gingerly, Justine giving no overt reaction as always (she'd always had an unbelievably high pain tolerance, for as long as Suzaku had known her), and fastened it to hang from around her neck and her clavicle.
"And just like that," the Honorary Britannian said to the princess as she reached down to pluck the mangled tachi up off of the ground, "we are good to go…"
"Excellent," Justine nodded. "But you're going to have to help me get up to the cockpit, I'm afraid. I can't exactly ride the stirrup like this…"
"You don't say," Suzaku deadpanned right back at her.
Fortunately, it proved a simple enough affair for them both to ride the same winch up, with Suzaku holding her best friend flush against her by the waist as they took the ascent right back up to the cockpit. It was a bit of a squeeze, with the two of them sitting atop one another in the cosy quarters surrounding the devicer's seat—especially with the adjutant having to reach around her captain's body so as to properly get to reach the controls—but the mock battle was over, and they managed well enough in spite of the claustrophobia inherent to their circumstances, the two of them cruising through the forest at a comfortable pace, the pair making good time to the rendezvous point with the rest of the victorious 'Royal Force'. They arrived some span of time later without issue or incident, Justine's personalised Knightmare rolling to a stop at the edge of the field, where seemingly all of their friends were assembled in wait, chatting amongst themselves—albeit with a few newcomers in the form of Dame Villetta, Earl Asplund, Miss Croomy, and of course the queen bitch herself (affectionately), come to collect her victorious bride.
"Do you think things will ever go back to normal after this?" Justine asked suddenly.
"Define 'normal,'" Suzaku japed, the shock of the question provoking her to respond on reflex.
"Back to the way they were before this," her royal friend clarified, the fact that she hadn't stopped to admonish Suzaku for having a sense of humour like she usually did a clear indication of just how serious the raven-haired princess was actually being. "I hope they don't. What happened out there today… I want it to stay. I want to protect it, to hone it… I want this to be the start of something new for them—for all of us, if I'm being completely honest. I don't want to let this feeling, this triumph, slip through our fingers like so many grains of sand…"
"Then don't," Suzaku replied, meeting and responding to her best friend's unusual candour with an equivalent degree of honesty from herself. "They showed ya what they can do today, sure, but they only got there because you believed in 'em in the first place. They showed ya that they wanna be able to look in the mirror and see themselves how you saw 'em today. So now comes the time for you to have their shoulders. Act without speakin'. That kinda stuff."
"I can't help but notice that both of those are Japanese idioms…" Justine murmured.
"Ya get the point," she insisted. "Your faith in 'em's what brought 'em this far. Time to take 'em the rest of the way."
Justine went quiet at that, her face flat save for a thoughtful furrow in her brow. She nodded, then, as if she'd just decided upon something, and turned to Suzaku expectantly. "You'll help me, I trust?"
"I didn't agree to be your second-in-command 'cause I thought it'd be a cushy job, that's for damn sure," Suzaku snorted with a shrug. "It'll be a team effort, in more ways than one. But for what it's worth, I believe in us."
Justine nodded, resolute. "I do, too. Now let's go and face the music, as it were."
"Where does that phrase even come from?" Suzaku wondered.
"It doesn't actually have a clear point of origin," explained Justine. "It arose organically during the early days of Julius the First's reign, back when the capital of the Empire was in the northern part of the Atlantic coastline. There are theories as to what specifically might have inspired it, but it's little more than speculation; it could be any number of them, all of them, or none."
"Well, however it got started, you're right. Time for us to get goin'," sighed the larger brunette, powering down the Prytwen and popping the block so that the seat could slide them out of the cockpit. Suzaku made sure to extract the grey box that recorded her performance data from the mock battle while Justine extracted her key and the remains of her sword as the canopy opened, and they both had their effects in hand as they descended, arm in arm, from the kneeling form of the roller-skating mobile suit.
They had a welcoming party waiting for them near the base of the tungsten titan: Lloyd and Cécile, Villetta and Milly, and last but not least, a surprising addition in the form of none other than Marika Soresi. The redhead looked moderately uncomfortable with where she was standing, to be sure, putting herself out there like this; but Suzaku took a peek at the girl's sky-blue eyes, and sure enough, she saw an iron-clad resolve reflected in that otherwise distressed gaze.
Suzaku let go of Justine as soon as the two of them set their feet on the ground, throwing the grey data cube towards Lloyd with an underhand toss; to his credit, the spindly man caught it (albeit with some fanfare), and after a bit of staring at it, he handed it off to his colleague-turned-minder for safekeeping. She turned to face her friend, then, who had just finished giving Villetta a brief explanation about how she was in perfect health, the sling aside; Suzaku was watching intently as Justine turned to Marika Soresi, and smiled at the girl. "Great work out there. You performed marvellously. I have a few points to address with you, of course, but none of them are particularly major, and all of them can wait. Savour this victory that you've all won together, because starting next week, I think Suzaku and I are going to take a more active role in all of your training regimens."
"Y-yes, ma'am," Marika replied somewhat awkwardly, snapping a salute entirely on impulse before aborting the attempt with a pink flush of embarrassment.
Justine gave her a soft, bemused half-smile. "Your enthusiasm is an excellent sign. Keep it up, and do try your best to hold onto it. And Marika, always remember to hold your head high. You have nothing to be ashamed of, especially after your showing today. Okay?"
Marika nodded sharply, and stepped back, bowing low before returning to her teammates.
But Justine was not watching her retreat, nor had she turned to Milly yet—she'd frozen, wide-eyed, as she stared down at the arm she had in the sling.
Suzaku drew close to the raven-haired princess yet again, and looked down to see what had shocked her best friend to such a degree, peering over her shoulder. And yet, upon catching sight of the forearm in the sling, Suzaku immediately noted both good news and bad news.
The good news: Justine's arm had regenerated fully on the way back, and while the restored skin tone was perhaps a little bit too pale, that was nothing a little exposure to the sun wouldn't fix (and she did mean a little; Justine's skin didn't actually tan all that easily).
The bad news: Justine's nails had grown back, too—only, what had returned in place of the nails of the hand she'd lost was a little different.
Somehow, Justine vi Britannia's nails had grown back matte black.
In the immediate wake of the Royals' latest mock battle, both Force Captain Integra Harrowmont and Catrìona Anderson, her adjutant, seemed to have vanished into thin air.
The impotent rush to recover them or to discover their whereabouts cast a bit of a pall upon the rest of the days of the monthly exam week; rumours and accusations flew about as though the speculation had a life and a will all its own, and in an unexpected development, Sif's twin sister Brynhildr, leader of the Wild Hunt Force (having gained its name from Brynhildr's own preferred strategy, a combination of ambushing and guerilla tactics), had approached both her and Yen multiple times over the course of that period to ask after what precisely had transpired in the course of the Royal Force's own performance at the most recent round of war games—notably with her own very striking adjutant, Trisha Greensbury, heiress to the barony of the same name and kissed by fire to boot, in tow, with whom she seemed almost thoughtlessly intimate. It was a detail that Sif resolved to keep in mind to needle her twin sister about relentlessly a bit later on down the line.
It quickly got to the point where the headmaster himself stepped in and personally got involved, issuing a statement to the student body and taking corrective measures with his son and heir Edmund's aid; and so was the force Integra Harromont had led dissolved, its members, as per the institution's policy, now unceremoniously drummed out and expelled over their captain's and adjutant's dual failures and vanishing acts. Odette's testimony and recounting of the events of the mock battle had placed the Royals above any suspicion of malfeasance in the eyes of the school's administration, of course; many of them were or had become close family friends of the House of Rochefort merely as a hazard of working in the sort of environment that Ad Victoriam was. But their own force captain, Justine, had volunteered to be denied having the now-defunct Harrowmont Force's points added to her own team's nonetheless, stepping forth and insisting that the members of the Royal Force present a united front to the court of public opinion that was the student body—and she arranged for everyone to buddy up and travel in pairs for their own safety, just in case that wasn't enough to mollify their classmates and fellow students.
Justine vi Britannia had put forth a public persona of dignity and grace in the immediate aftermath, as she always did; but there was something that felt very distinctly different about this situation as opposed to previous circumstances. For all that the princess had insisted that they all do their best to ignore the differences in their respective stations, she had nonetheless always stood somewhat apart from the rest of them, perhaps even by accident; but while she remained in a class above them, for it seemed their brilliant leader could not help but be larger than life, there was a sense of hesitance that Sif, Yennefer, and doubtless a few of the others only really managed to put a finger on once it was absent. But of course, the happenings of the past three weeks by this point had been a crucible for each and every one of them, both individually and as a whole: it had changed them all in some subtle, yet fundamental way, and Sif was herself of the distinct impression that they were changed forever.
It was this sense, and the surge of unexpected eager hopefulness that came alongside it, that had all of them arranged out in the grass at the edge of the woodlands in which they'd seen their leader fall for the very first time, in the early hours of the morning—well into the eighth hour, as it happened.
"Ten quid it's going to be some kind of congratulatory message," Yennefer leaned over to mutter in furtive tones into her ear.
Sif smirked, and leaned back, offering her own wager and implicitly accepting Yennefer's in turn. "I've got a tenner riding on this being some major change to how things'll work around the dorm from this point on, if you're game."
Yennefer scoffed. "Be more vague in your wager next time, why don't you?"
"Is that a refusal I hear?" Sif teased in return. "Is the great Yennefer Desrosiers craven?"
Yennefer bared her teeth in a fierce grin. "Not on your life, Sif Ffiona Blaiddyd. I accept."
"Tenner says it's both," Odette Rochefort interjected from Sif's other side, startling them both in the process.
Yennefer recovered before Sif could manage the same. "Oh? Has the adjutant's protégé become privy to aught that we mere mortals are not?"
"It would hardly be sporting of me to place the wager if that were so," Odette rejoined.
"That's technically not a no," Sif couldn't help but point out.
Odette smirked, and the expression made her seem quite a bit more fearsome in profile than her normally very much sullen affect had ever managed. "Hmph. You've got me there… Then no, in this case in particular, I am not. Let Marika here be my witness."
Marika Soresi blinked owlishly as the sound of her name drew her attention, causing her to lean her head forward and peer around her friend. "I'm sorry, what are we talking about?"
"We're having friendly wager on what our illustrious leader has brought us out here to accomplish," Sif explained in her best attempt at a helpful tone. "Yen thinks it's going to be congratulations, I put my bet on it being a major schedule change for the whole dorm, and Odette put a tenner on both."
"She also swore that she's not privy to any special knowledge," Yennefer chimed in, "which is what she's calling you in to be her witness for, ultimately."
"…Why are we placing wagers?" Marika asked, her strong brow furrowing in confusion.
The three of them looked at each other and shrugged. Sif spoke for them here: "Guess it sounded like it'd be a fun way to pass the time."
Marika nodded. "I see. In that case, yeah, I'll totally vouch for Odette's ignorance. It's practically a surefire bet."
"Excuse you?" Odette challenged, turning fully to face Marika, who was smirking back at her with as much insolence as the brunette could muster.
"You heard me," she replied cheekily.
"Hush, you lot," hissed Liliana, who was standing on the other side of Marika, right alongside the Royal Force's very own sharpshooter extraordinaire and the subject of the highborn heiress's not-so-subtle crush, Elizabeth. "They've arrived, in case you haven't noticed…"
All four of them found their heads snapping straight ahead; and sure enough, right there at the tree line was none other than Kururugi Suzaku, who stood there with a weapon at her belt and her arms crossed beneath her chest, an ill-omened smirk upon her face, and the force captain herself, looking very much the picture of regal refinement and martial poise. She had a small, fond smile of her own as she swept her eyes across the line of them, for all the world looking to patiently be awaiting their silence and attention.
"Well, I'm certainly very glad to see that you're all in such good spirits this morning," she began, catching a chuckle on the back of her gloved hand in the process. "I daresay you've more than earned a bit of merriment after the trial that this past round has been. And yet, I find myself glad that it happened, in a way: I very much doubt that any of you will gainsay me when I pronounce us as having grown stronger for it, both within ourselves and in our bonds to one another. To be certain, your most recent performance and the circumstances of your victory ought to have put at least that much on display. And for that, as well as for a few other reasons, I'd like you all to know that I'm very proud of you. Bravo.
"Yet, let us not for a moment think our laurels an ample cradle. What you all experienced was only a taste of what's to come, if you have the resolve and the willingness to strive for it. I shan't deceive you: it is a long road one must tread to greatness, and mastery is a never-ending process. And so I shall ask this of you all very bluntly indeed, and I shall make this offer only once: I propose a trade. Deliver unto me your determination and drive, your willingness to work and learn and improve, and Suzaku and I will tease the greatness out of each and every one of you. There are greater triumphs to be had if one has but the will to seek them. And so I ask of you, the Royal Force, my comrades and compatriots: have you all the strength of will to do what is necessary? To pursue the potential of your greatest selves?"
It rushed through them like a wave just then, the surge of sentiment, of conviction, and of familiar impulse: they did not cheer, nor did they give vocal affirmations.
Instead, as though they shared one mind, all eight of them snapped to attention in perfect unison.
Their captain looked over them, her hard gemstone eyes seeming to peel away a few layers of each of them at a time as she looked upon their response. Yet, while normally that sharply perceptive gaze made her feel very unsettled indeed, this time and for the first time, Sif found it oddly comforting.
She realised, then, that the question that had caused her such distress almost a year past was still not one she'd found an answer to in an absolute sense; but she'd nonetheless found an answer that she felt she could be satisfied with.
Who was Justine vi Britannia?
She was a leader Sif, over the course of the past year (and indeed, over the course of these past three weeks in particular), had learned to trust. A leader she could see herself being proud to follow.
Then their captain smiled, the expression every bit as sharp as her gaze, as she nodded. "Very well. I bid you all hold tight to that resolve, to your convictions and your splendid will to excel. Because Suzaku and I shall endeavour mightily to teach you to despise us utterly. It shall be difficult, and sometimes it shall be gruelling, but I promise you this: the rewards you shall reap will be more than worth the cost. And when despair whispers into your ears, creeping its pallid fingers up your spines, I want you to recall this pledge I shall make to you, here and now: that there shall never be a thing that I demand of you during this process that I do not genuinely believe you have it within you to deliver.
"Do you all find these terms acceptable, then?" the captain continued. "If any of you take umbrage, then the time to voice such concerns is now."
None of them uttered a sound.
Indeed, Sif mused to herself. We've tasted a greatness within ourselves that I don't think any of us truly thought we possessed. It is only natural, I suppose, that with the whetting of our appetites, all of us should come to crave more…
Justine nodded solemnly. "Very well. Then if that is your answer, I shan't fail to hold you to it, each and every one of you. We're going to spend the rest of the day today laying out what shape the current plan will take going forward; tomorrow, we'll begin in truth."
"Welcome to the Round Table Boot Camp," Suzaku chimed in, favouring them with a toothy grin. "Y'all better buckle up, guys and gals, 'cause I can guarantee that this's gonna be a wild fuckin' ride…"
Beneath the headquarters of the Geass Directorate, far into the depths of the subterrane, there was a prison of a sort.
Much like the Cretan gaol of myth, commissioned by King Minos and constructed by Daedalus as a means of imprisoning his royal wife's misbegotten divine offspring, this prison was not meant to contain a human being, one with human needs and human flaws and human vulnerabilities—for indeed, such extraordinary measures were far in excess of what any mortal human could ever hope to escape within the full and finite span of their lifetime. It was a complex made up of tubes and wires and pipes, and to tread the darkness of its corridors was much akin to traversing the insides of some great antediluvian monstrosity. There was no light from above that reached down here; what strange deformities of life abided in its vicinity were birthed into darkness, and it was into that same darkness that they eventually met their ignominious ends.
Here, the unbound energies of the constantly-active Thought Elevator above seeped into the very air one breathed while traversing these wretched depths, and each of these creatures carried that energy within them, warping them and twisting them into mockeries and monstrosities of themselves. It could be said that the creatures who were born lucky down here were not born at all, dead out of the womb or egg and unable to suffer because of it.
Of course, the wires and cords and pipes were far from mere decorations; at all hours, both day and night, there was a low humming that persisted throughout the artificially organic maze, as if there was a substance of some sort that rushed along the mechanical veins and arteries that were fastened to the walls and the ceiling. Following them where they led was a perilous proposition for the darkness alone; one need not even mention the fact that the grotesqueries grew stranger and more dangerous the closer one drew to the centre of this figurative labyrinth for such a journey to be considered quite the foolhardy undertaking indeed. And yet, for the past year, there had been a trio of interlopers who'd made the journey to the central hub of the prison with some degree of regularity: the large man with the cape was the least often present of the three, followed by a woman whose continued life was sustained almost entirely by a broad assortment of mechanical processes and apparati, but who was no less deadly for the artificial and manufactured nature and origins of her vitality.
Indeed, the one of the three who most often made the journey was an oddity among oddities, though a sixty-year-old man trapped within the relatively impotent body of a small child was rendered somewhat mundane in comparison to all that which dwelt and lurked within the seemingly endless darkness. And yet his affliction was more mundane still: the man whose youth was a shackle like no other was struggling with a crisis of faith, and so he made these pilgrimages in search of guidance. He had turned his sword against the Heavens, however, and so the providence he sought he thought to find within the dark, forsaken corners of the world, where damned things made their homes. It was a tale to which the prisoner bound within the heart of the complex had borne witness several times already, across a few separate variations; and so the prisoner instead elected to seek their entertainment from the boy's follies, from which they drew particular delight in the witnessing as in the recounting.
The children the prisoner had borne and birthed in the dark, however, now sang a different tale into the attentive ears of their mother. It was not a new tale, granted, but it was one the prisoner had not heard in far too many years for them to consider taking a proper accounting of all that time to be in any way, shape, or form a worthwhile endeavour, even as a whim. It was a sweet song, sung to the prisoner on lilting notes, stirring recollections and sensations long since lost to the mother of the wretched grotesqueries that looked upon this Stygian, abyssal realm and called it their own; it dredged up memories of youth: of a home out of time, of a lustrous land of splendour and wonders beyond mortal imaginings, of a war that set all the lights in the Heavens ablaze and littered the cosmos with the corpses of sundered gods, a lichyard to the divine in the dark spaces between the glittering stars.
Of one final act of hubris that brought it all crashing down around them.
There was a twinge of sympathy, a pain that was shared, and though there was barely enough left of the prisoner for them to be recognised as themselves, they mustered up the energy to smile anyways.
And into the Stygian darkness and the humming silence of false life and stolen grace, a single word, a reverent, fond, wondering word, was spoken:
"Sister…"