In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

32. The Next Day

Area Six, February, a.t.b. 2015

The Amazon Rainforest was perhaps the greatest single natural barrier that divided Area Six from itself; at well over six million square kilometres in area, any attempt to curtail it had been rendered ruinous from an economic standpoint by the strict laws of the Imperial Conservation Service. This, of course, left those who were the unwanted stepchildren of Britannia, those gentry and noblemen who abided within the borders of the continent, to seek alternative means of limiting the negative impact the rainforest's indelible presence could have on the transportation of their materials; and those throughways of paved road which had been used as a means of taking supplies from one part of Area Six to the other in times of peace was now central to the security of the supply lines to the front, now that it was wartime. Rail lines had been attempted, of course, but the local savages had sabotaged such projects relentlessly; and so it was that from bullets to bandages, provisions to troops to Knightmare Frames, all of it had to come through one of the several roads that cut through the jungle—the rail line through the Andes not having been built for the level of constant transport that waging a war against the empire that controlled nearly a third of the world, even when on one's home turf, would necessitate.

These were the facts that let Jair González de la Fióra de la Rosa de São Luis y Belem, commander of the convoy that drew both supplies and materiel along the eastern road that passed through the jungle, begin to understand the true value of his work. Four supply runs he'd overseen successfully so far, and any egoistic sense that he was being kept away from the true glory of battle, that he was relegated to the back lines, as several of his more hot-blooded contemporaries might have protested to their noble fathers, was an easy ache to soothe away with the knowledge that what he did was far more critical to the ultimate success of the war effort than any pompous Homeland Britannian's head he might otherwise take in battle. It wasn't a role that they would tell tales of, he knew, for the tales spoke only of great tactical flourishes, possessing as they did zero appreciation for the deliberate minutiae and the complicated nuances of strategy, which so often boiled down to a single word: logistics. He knew that there was, in fact, no amount of tactical acumen that could make up for a fundamental lack of war potential; and so he saw his duty of ferrying everything a soldier might need by the thousands as no less of a battlefield than this vague, almost metaphysical space that his cocksure fellow scions dreamed of.

The trees were tall, and they were old; the canopy on high shrouded the road in what seemed like an unending twilight. The road was black tarmac, and any traversal of it was regulated and scheduled—trains had been a revolutionary addition to warfare for a reason, and though they could not put tracks down that could come through the forests, and airborne travel being undesirable for several reasons, most of them to do with the fact that they relied upon resources that were not a simple matter to obtain in sufficient bulk in their current situation, they made up for it by running the truck convoys, guarded by Sutherlands and a few sixth-generation Gloucesters, like they were themselves train lines.

As the commander, of course, Jair had claimed one of the Gloucesters for his own; the improvement over the Sutherland that it constituted in terms of performance was not nearly so great a leap as that from the Glasgow to the Sutherland, but it was noticeable in the way that the KMF responded beneath his hands, and the fact that it specialised in anti-Knightmare combat meant that, in the astronomically unlikely event that he or his squadron of Sutherlands come under attack by an enemy force, he would have the advantage. And yet, he refused to allow himself to grow complacent; he checked his factsphere sensor often, and the road ahead displayed no obstructions—though when he turned it to the sides, neither his cameras nor the factsphere were able to differentiate accurately between any human onlookers (for all that the savages were only barely that much) and the diverse, strange, and often dangerous fauna of the jungle that surrounded the convoy on both sides. Even though the sensors had been tested and were fully effective in forested areas, the jungle was another matter entirely; it was adversarial terrain in all ways, and here especially, there was entirely too much interference for the data gathered to be usable.

A crack jarred him out of the routine of transportation, and the unending stream of chatter that came through his onboard comms cut out immediately; up ahead, just far enough that even if they sped up, none of them could have cleared it, and would only have succeeded in getting themselves crushed underneath the weight for their trouble, a large antediluvian tree creaked and fell, right across the road, obstructing any sort of forward progress they might otherwise have made. It crashed, a heavy thing at least half as thick around the trunk as one of the Grand Duchy of Pacifica's redwoods that he'd seen pictures of as a child, if not a bit more; and Jair groaned at the thought of the amount of work it might take to remove the obstruction. They would be put behind schedule by this, and given the fact that long-range comms didn't work in the thick of the jungle for the same reason the convoy's factsphere sensors were useless in the foliage, with only short-range comms being fully effective, there was really no way to call ahead and warn the boys at the front that their arrival would now be delayed.

There were murmurs that were picking back up again on the comms, and Jair knew that it was time for him to take command of the situation; and so he chimed in, and communications cleared to make room for his voice. "Four of you will go ahead and check out the extent of the damage. Dismount if you have to, but only two of you at any given time; the savages stand no chance against Knightmares, but if you're on foot, you're every bit as mortal in the face of their weapons as if you were naked. So two to check, two to cover. The rest of us will stay by the convoy."

"Yes, sir," came the answering chorus; and as he commanded, four Sutherlands split away from the pack to take a look. The convoy was, all told, eight lorries, each bearing a trailer full of supplies that took eighteen wheels to bear aloft; and for each lorry, there were two Sutherlands, which were able to punch above their weight, numerically speaking, by several orders of magnitude. Four Sutherlands from the pack brought their numbers from sixteen to twelve, thirteen including himself, and that was more than enough force for them to beat back any filthy tribals who might have been feeling particularly opportunistic. It was standard procedure, and Jair was nothing if not by-the-book; in his mind, the book existed for a damn good reason, and absent ample cause to depart from it, it did not occur to him to divert his course of action from what it prescribed.

Two of the devicers, the sons of countryside dons who'd thrown their lot in with Los Peninsulares, descended from the winch that carried them to and from their Knightmares, as he'd instructed; and just as he'd instructed, the remaining two maintained a vigilant watch, keeping an eye out for any savages lurking in the darkness of the trees. They went over together towards the end of the tree-trunk, seeking to ascertain something or other—Jair wasn't certain himself, and neither of them carried the portable comm units they were supposed to bring with them at all times in the field, regardless of whether or not their KMFs came with onboard comm units pre-installed, so they weren't exactly in a position to tell him; he was more preoccupied in that moment with whether this was grounds for him to reprimand them besides, and if so, to what extent such would be appropriate, than with what the two devicers might have spotted that made their walk towards the base of the tree (where a strange bird, a merlin, of all things, was perched, the extremely and unmistakably out-of-place raptor watching them carefully with its sharp eyes as they approached, before it took wing, shooting like a bullet off into the surrounding foliage), in any way a necessity.

Thunder cracked…

Two IFFs came up blank.

From afar, it looked as if nothing at all had taken place—but from Jair's angle, the bloody holes that were just put into both cockpit blocks, presumably shredding the bodies of the men inside each, were clear in his line of sight.

A jolt of shock ran through all of them—an astonished stillness—and then Jair's brain rebooted, his ears picking up the cries of "Ambush! Ambush! Ambu—!"

"We've been ambushed! Form up! Don't let them get to the lorries!" Jair felt his mouth shouting, on autopilot almost, as he moved his Gloucester out of its resting position, taking one last look at the bloody, lumpy smears on the pavement that were the bodies of the two devicers who had abandoned their cockpits, before rushing to get his men into line, ready to repel the enemy advance—or even more preliminarily, to successfully identify the enemy in the first place.

He'd heard of the convoys that had turned up missing—all of them had at this point; but these were the sorts of things that just happened in war, that such a tremendous undertaking naturally had materiel that was slipping through the cracks. It was blamed on how rapidly they'd declared war once the higher-ups got hold of their 'wonder weapon' and assassinated the viceroy, how disorganised the scramble to mobilise had been, and basically every highborn of prominence was pointing their finger at everybody else, with none of them more focused on fixing the problem than they were on absolving themselves of fault. The solution, of course, had been to send more convoys—the previous vanishings had happened closer to the Andes, where the ground was especially treacherous and the river could change its course to erode the earth beneath their feet at a moment's notice, hence how they'd begun to rely more heavily on this road now to ferry forth new wares from the newly-converted factories along the coast to the south to the forming front up north; but this put a wrench very thoroughly into that plan. If there was a force of guerillas capable of taking the convoys out piecemeal, who were actively ambushing supply deliveries…

They came from out of the treelines, then—a tide of Sutherlands, counting out at over twice their number, from either side of the road, both left and right; and there was even another pair that his Glocester could see with its factsphere, which came sallying forth into the tightening encirclement, out from behind them on the road. Save for the two that came from behind, all of them bore the factory-new colour scheme, but for all that, they were clearly not on the same level as Jair's own devicers, who scrambled and panicked even as the noose tightened, precisely and with deft coordination.

The barking of gunfire mixed with the chatter in his own comm unit to create a nauseating concoction of cacophonic sound, and immediately he brought his Knightmare's assault rifle to bear, picking out one of the Sutherlands and charging for it headlong, firing all the way. The landspinners squealed against the road, the sour scent of burning rubber in the air; but while that Sutherland was surprised for all of a moment, the enemy unit began to retreat, in a restrained, controlled, and orderly way that, for all intents and purposes, managed to maintain the encirclement even while evading Jair's desperate hail of gunfire.

Others shouted in his ears; he was not one of them. Their battle cries and impotent protests, to Jair's mind, were nothing more than wasted breath—breath that would have been better spent fighting. Jair saved his breath in this way, and committed wholly to the duel he'd picked in a headlong effort to break himself and his command free of the rope that made to wring their collective necks under their own weight. But the encirclement bulged out instead of breaking, the Sutherland spitting back gunfire at him in short bursts, and thus pushing him to take damage or retreat; but the Sutherland seemed only to fire at him sparingly, as if it was meaning to disengage with all of its swerving, which cleverly gave up much, much less ground than a straightforward retreat would have; but increasingly, it seemed that the enemy devicer had begun to consider that merely drawing Jair out instead was an acceptable outcome.

That was why he wasn't particularly surprised when a black-and-silver Sutherland, one of the pair that had come up from the rear, began charging at him, its stun tonfas deployed; nor was he surprised when the Sutherland he'd been pursuing began opening fire in earnest as it wove its way around him. Even as he felt it happening, he'd let himself get drawn away from his men and isolated from any sort of aid that they might render him—a few tried to break free the same way he did, even following in his wake, but they had also found themselves surrounded and shot apart. In a last-ditch effort, he twisted the yokes, grimacing with the force of the strain, throwing aside his Gloucester's assault rifle and catching the stun tonfa in his KMF's bare hands.

The Gloucester's hands were built to be insulated against the heavy electrical current that made the stun tonfa so deadly, and so that element of the attack was at least neutralised; but the fact remained that the other Sutherland slammed into him at full tilt, the tires of his landspinners screeching against his will, even as a number of bright alerts flashed up on his interface, warning of damage to the servomotors that were its joints, the elastic muscles that made the Knightmare's arms nimble enough to mimic an average human's (or, as in the Gloucester's case, a trained human's), range of motion, and the shock controls that kept all of the interlocking mechanisms from shaking themselves apart under any unexpected strain.

Jair slammed his Knightmare into a hard reverse. One charge, and his Gloucester's arms had all but buckled under the momentum; and he was still getting shot at, to boot. Not for the first time, he cursed that he didn't know more about unarmed combat, that he'd never taken the time to learn…

Metal sheared and screeched deafeningly all around him.

Jair looked down, mildly surprised.

Huh… There's a jousting lance's head through my chest…

He marvelled at the sight of it, even as the shock kicked in; and at last, he knew no more.

---

If anyone—or at least, anyone to whom she was inclined to answer honestly—were to approach Villetta and ask her if she enjoyed her job, and if she found it particularly fulfilling to serve Princess Justine as her retainer and aide-de-camp, she would answer, in short, with a definitive 'yes.' Despite their group's circumstances being what they were (which in reality was not too thoroughly distinct from the reality of the more eventful parts of Villetta's own service record, first as an enlisted woman, and then as an NCO), this was in all likelihood the best-run military campaign she'd ever been a part of—and though she was by no means self-effacing enough to deny that she had played quite a significant part in that, being the one tasked with handling the minutiae of logistics and the day-to-day administrative operations of their camp, the fact remained that she had this opportunity solely because Justine had delegated it to her, believing her to be best-suited to handling it.

That was why she felt neither guilt nor hesitation in returning to the camp with her head held high, her chest puffed out with pride. The contents of the lorries had been primarily foodstuffs and supplies for field hospitals, as there had been four lorries filled with those alone, but the remaining four had also been stuffed to the brim with munitions, tools and spare parts, and an entire two trailers' worth of energy fillers, which she knew for a fact were increasingly necessary—every one of these ambushes resulted in a haul of KMFs that, even if they weren't usable in and of themselves, were easy enough to dismantle and set aside as spare parts for field repairs.

It was why the Sutherlands they'd taken down were brought along as well, dragged on their own little convoy made up of cables used for slash harkens; and as they traipsed through the jungle floor, along paths they'd all learned fairly well by this point, joking and celebrating, Villetta let herself feel as good as she damn well wanted to. These were taken in good condition, more or less, and so they'd be an easy job to fix up, promoting yet more of the former infantry to the level of devicers—a shift brought about in part due to the sheer number of Sutherlands they were bringing in from these guerilla raids. With the rebels having purchased this many fifth-generation Knightmare Frames, Villetta would be lying if she said she still didn't understand why the Homeland's main forces were taking so long to mobilise. Reinforcements had been due weeks ago, after all—but they were making do nonetheless.

Errantly, she thought to check in on her old friend, who'd been silent and more than a little morose for a while now. And while it wasn't as if Villetta didn't know why Jeremiah was so upset, just as it wasn't as if she didn't understand how he felt, she still did what she could to help, in the interest of keeping him from doing anything stupid. "Nice teamwork out there."

"Thank you," came Jeremiah's laconic reply, over his Sutherland's short-range comms.

Villetta waited for a moment, but when it became clear that he'd said all he wished to say, she let herself give a weary sigh. She shook her head. No matter; they'd be coming up upon their camp, right next to the village, in short order, and she could corner him then. Her best friend's foul mood would certainly keep until then.

Sure enough, barely a few minutes had passed before the raid team burst out of the foliage into the grounds that had been torn up during the battle to protect the village, and then rebuilt into the start of their villageside encampment. Proper trenches had been dug that they now passed over, encircling the perimeter of the base; and past that was a mixture of tents and hutches crafted with local methods; and she could see all the soldiers under Justine's command striding between them, with clear and definitive purpose in every step. Here, the current rotation stood guard at the supply tent; there, a work crew of volunteers were deep in the village, aiding their hosts with their manual labour—she was fairly sure they were constructing another domicile from this distance. Many a head snapped in their direction as the procession of Knightmares made their triumphant return, and cheers went up from all of those who looked—including many of the villagers, oddly enough.

It was strange, to be so amiable among these strange people in this strange land of theirs, for all that it was becoming less so by the day; but Villetta, much like most of the others, had taken Justine's manner of dealing with them as an example that they strove to emulate as best they could—those who were born of common blood, and thus were not by any means categorically disposed to having learned other languages such as Spanish from a young age (which had become their makeshift lingua franca, after a fashion), were aided by those who had indeed been given that opportunity; and sometimes there were locals who didn't understand much Spanish themselves, and a fellow villager who knew the tongue had to translate to their native language. There was, from the Britannian side of things at the very least, a silent agreement to attempt to just politely ignore the discomfort they felt around the oddities of some of the realities of life among the 'River-folk,' as Justine said they were called; after all, if a princess of the realm, an exemplar of the Britannian doctrine of xenophobic superiority, could so easily move past such an obstruction, surely these common people, whose often humble circumstances far more closely mirrored those of the villagers than they did their princess, could at least attempt to reach that same level of acceptance and cooperation.

There was also a growing sentiment among the rank-and-file that disappointing the princess in any way was almost worse than death, but Villetta was content to do her best to leave that much untouched, at least for the time being. There was no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole, as was often quoted by the high of mind; but of course, soldiers were almost uniquely predisposed to creating their own cults, their own battlefield religions. They had no need of any civilian's god.

With her entourage in tow, Villetta arrived at the designated spot for unloading; she cut the power to her Sutherland, and popped the cockpit. The process of dismounting a Knightmare, which once upon a time had required she consult a handbook, was now almost more familiar to her than the motions of getting into bed at the end of a long day. She performed them deftly, and rode the stirrup down to the dirt, stepping off alongside the other devicers, both the experienced and the greenhorns, before rounding the Sutherland's leg and coming face-to-face with the ground crew, headed up by a soldier named Avery, a woman from the Gaunt contingent whom she'd selected as among the first members of her increasingly necessary secretariat. Talented though she might be, Villetta Nu remained but one woman, and there was entirely too much that needed doing for her to feasibly handle it all on her own. A single Sutherland was worth five to seven hundred men in a tactical sense, certainly; but in a strategic sense, as Villetta was beginning to recognise with a steadily growing feeling of dread, they generated the administrative busywork and record-keeping of a full thousand, by virtue of the maintenance they required alone. "Two of the trailers are full of field provisions, two are full of medical supplies. One and a half trailers full of munitions, half a trailer full of replacement parts and tools for Knightmare maintenance, and two trailers' worth of energy fillers."

Avery, a woman who was a head shorter than Villetta, with a head of short, close-cropped black hair and a thin, hard-featured face made especially memorable by a prominent nose, almost too large for her small countenance, saluted promptly and then nodded, her dark, flinty eyes sharp and focused. She was proving to be quite the find, in Villetta's own estimation, able to keep abreast of the facts and the figures that she was growing increasingly familiar with alongside the best of them, and possessing a practicality and an ability to see the bigger picture that Villetta was quickly beginning to consider invaluable. "I'll have the lads write it down in the logs, ma'am."

"Very good," Villetta replied coolly, with a sigh. "We also brought a number of reclaimed units with us on the way back, as you can clearly see."

"With respect, ma'am, the boys in the recommissioning detail've got a backlog of five days," Avery replied bluntly, clicking her heels together as she said so.

"Render them for parts if you must," Villetta dismissed. Of course, that report exposed once again the one glaring fault that Avery possessed as a subordinate: she lacked initiative. But that can be taught… "But be sure to note them down, whether or not we'll be able to make use of them in a timely fashion, one way or another. I don't want to see any omissions in those ledgers. Am I clear?"

"As crystal, ma'am," Avery replied, snapping off another salute. Then, she pivoted on her heel, with a score of unarmoured men and women arranged behind her. The contrast was stark; while Avery, standing in full armour with her helmet held under her arm, looked every inch a soldier, the others, their garb little more than plainclothes, would have seemed like civilians, but for how they held themselves. "Alright, you heard the boss lady, lads! Get your asses moving!"

As one, the civilian-garbed infantrymen, commoners with backgrounds that included mechanics and vehicle maintenance, whose own technical knowledge had been augmented by a seminar of sorts that Justine had conducted before she and Suzaku left, clicked their heels together and snapped off a salute of their own, before rushing forth past the gathering devicers and going about running through their battery of post-sortie tasks: cataloguing the reclaimed gains, checking the Sutherlands for any damage, et cetera. All Villetta knew was that it would only be her job to deal with when it landed on her desk a while later—as forms, as reports, and as ledgers. Once again, Villetta thanked whatever good fortune had sent an array of office supplies a few ambushed convoys back—without it, she might have been reduced to trying to keep her records on clay tablets, like a Sumerian.

No, none of this required her direct oversight; her concern, wholly and solely at this moment, was Jeremiah, and his well-being—both as the princess's aide, and as one who considered the man one of if not her closest friends. And so when the devicers that had gone on the ambush mission, all thirty-six of them, not including herself, Jeremiah, Hecate, and Lisa in the count, were gathering themselves around her, she slipped into parade rest. "You've done well, all of you. All except for Lord Jeremiah, dismissed."

Hecate, who still looked like a delicate fairy-tale princess, even clad in her normal suit as she was, with her vibrosword clipped to her hip and a bird of prey (in the form of Artemis) swooping down to settle upon her shoulder, nodded back; and Lisa, whose maroon eyes flicked towards everyone and everything around her seemingly by force of habit, her deceptively cute face every bit as impassive as normal even as strands of her chin-length violet hair (in contrast to Hecate's bright blue, which was almost full-length but had been pinned up into a bun for sorties) were stuck to her forehead with sweat, her cheeks flushed with it, rolled her shoulders and sighed, seemingly anxious to be gone. Villetta could sympathise; the sharpshooter was probably in a hurry to find some water, given how stuffy the cockpit of a Sutherland could get in these tropical, muggy climes.

A moment later, they'd all gone off to refresh themselves, taking some time off before they needed to resume their normal duties; and that left her standing face-to-face with her friend, who looked every bit as impeccable as ever, save for a bit of flush about the cheeks, and the deepening furrow of his brow. It was at times like these that she was reminded that the Gottwald holdings were located in the Duchy of Florida, and that a version of this humid, muggy climate was most likely the environment he'd been acclimated to since the days of his youth—he was, after all, handling the jungle far better than many of them were able to manage, particularly after a sortie, skirmish though it was. His teal hair was immaculately coiffed, and the amber of his eyes was every bit as bright and alert as ever; and yet he seemed at all times but a moment or two from a scowl, and this close up, it seemed like his body almost radiated an aura of invisible tension.

They stood in silence for a few moments, Villetta crossing her arms under her chest as she stared at him expectantly, and he looked back at her, professional but thunderous. Two grown adults participating in a children's staring contest, in the middle of allied territory that was deep behind enemy lines; there was a bit of incredulity in Villetta's mind, even as she found herself immersed in the situation, that this was where the two of them truly were.

Jeremiah was the first to break, cocking an eyebrow and all but demanding, "What?"

"That's what I ought to be asking you," Villetta replied, shifting to lean her weight on one leg as she cocked her own brow in response. "Whatever's crawled up your ass and died, Jeremiah, I'm going to need you to spill it, because we're running the risk of it beginning to affect morale."

"You know perfectly well the source of my ire, Villetta," Jeremiah said, his voice seemingly caught halfway between a hiss and a huff.

"I know that Justine went off on a mission of her own, leaving Sif and me in charge in the interim," said the dark-skinned woman, her tone flat and unimpressed. "And I also know that she took Suzaku with her as back-up, with both of them leaving the camp both armed and well-supplied. Am I missing anything, do you think?"

Jeremiah grimaced; he shifted from one foot to another in discomfort, grumbling subvocally. "No, that is an accurate summation of the current set of circumstances."

"Then what is it you take issue with?" she pressed, unwilling to let this go. "Do you somehow think that Suzaku is unequal to the task of protecting Justine? Or do you believe Justine is incapable of defending herself? Because I know that you don't take issue with who was left in command…"

"Of course not," said Jeremiah. "You are Her Highness's retainer and aide-de-camp. It's only proper that you be in charge until she returns. And Sif has proven herself to be an excellent tactician and a strict disciplinarian. Both of you together was the natural choice for the role."

"So, you don't think that Suzaku can defend Justine?" she prompted, not bothering to remove from her voice the edge of accusation—perhaps it would prompt a revealing reaction from her old friend sooner rather than later, which was really her final recourse, given how devoted he seemed to his own laconism to all other entreaties regarding the subject. "Or that Justine is capable of properly defending herself?"

"No, it's simply…" Jeremiah huffed in frustration, running a hand through his hair hard enough that she was fairly certain he'd pressed his own scalp white in the process. "I am her Knight of Honour. I'm the one who's meant to protect her, to guard her safety. And she left me behind."

"She's explained that your skill set is ill-suited to the mission, Jeremiah," Villetta reminded him, in an honest attempt at consolation. "You can't take it personally."

"I'm not taking it personally," he denied emphatically. "It's a matter of honour, Villetta, of chivalric good faith. I swore an oath to defend her—and right now, it's an oath that I cannot fulfil."

"But you are fulfilling it, Jeremiah," Villetta insisted, leaning forth and getting into her friend's face to at least a small extent. "Because your oath was not merely to protect her. You swore also to serve her and her interests, to see her will done. Your oaths are in conflict with each other at the moment, Jeremiah, and I do sympathise; but saying that by staying here—as you were commanded, no less—you're failing to fulfil them in full, is at best willful ignorance, and at worst, active insubordination."

Jeremiah stewed on that unhappily for a moment; and then the tension fled out of him all at once, as he sagged with a heavy sigh. "…You're right, of course. It's just…it's vexing, having to stay put here while she's away, putting herself at risk—and here I am, a Knight of Honour, forced to remain ignorant to even the threats that may rise to place themselves in Her Highness's path, let alone to how I might help. Heh. Some knight I turned out to be…"

"Hey, no one ever said that knighthood was going to be easy," Villetta replied wryly, shrugging off her friend's self-deprecation with a good-natured slug to his shoulder. "Or at least, no one who didn't then turn around and abuse the power and status they were given."

Jeremiah chuckled ruefully, closing his eyes and shaking his bowed head. "I suppose you may have a point there…"

"I always do," she declared very modestly indeed, nodding as she stepped away. She'd by no means fixed the problem her friend was facing, of course—that much was his own battle to fight, she knew, and she certainly couldn't do that for him—but she liked to think she may have given him an alternative way of looking at it that might make it easier. "And besides, there are more of us who feel the way you do than you may think. We swore our own oaths to her, too—remember?"

He paused in his step at that, his eyes going wide, as if he'd somehow failed to consider that until just now; but to his credit, he recovered quickly, nodding, as he came up alongside her, and they pivoted to walk away from the pit area where the Sutherlands were getting looked over.

Now that Villetta's back was turned to that whole rigmarole, she looked across the way to see many sling-like pulley structures that were hanging from tree-boughs at the other end of the camp—a monument, of sorts, to the nature of the cooperation between the Britannian soldiers and the villagers who lived here, where Britannian needs and knowledge came together with local ingenuity and innovation to create a set of levers and tethers that would allow reclamation crews to lift cannibalised Sutherland parts into place during retrofitting procedures. There were similar slings and hammocks set up at several levels to allow for a sort of verticality for the sake of the crews' ease of labour, and she could see them in use as, just as Avery had said, there were other personnel hard at work retrofitting more Sutherlands and getting them battle-ready. A combination of solar panels and the strong, harnessed currents of the Amazon River kept a steady supply of electrical power for tasks that required them, like reformatting the onboard computers of reclaimed KMFs, but by and large, their needs were met not by metal machines of Britannian manufacture, but by some sort of syncretic fusion of local and Britannian methods, to make up for more or less everything that the 588th Irregulars otherwise sorely lacked.

The sun was bright over the sparkling grey of the Amazon, and the lush, vivid green of the foliage; river-insects chirped and screamed, their sounds audible even over the dull roar of soldiers about their daily tasks around camp, and locals eager to make use of their guests' strong backs to help make their own lives a bit easier. The 588th was paying their tenancy with work, and receiving a strengthening of relations and a great deal of goodwill in return; Villetta saw the value of what Justine had hammered out as she walked through the camp, side-by-side with Jeremiah, both in a strategic and a diplomatic sense, but the feeling of that goal in action all around her was no less prima facie surreal for it.

Sometimes, she got the oddest feeling that she was meant to take another path in her life. The sight around her stirred that in her, as it always did; and as it always did, she immediately and ruthlessly shut it down. She didn't particularly care what path she was meant to take: she far preferred the one she was on, thank you very much. She'd chosen it for herself, after all.

The companionable silence between the two old friends endured, even as they passed by a number of Justine's school friends—her own friends, now, strange as that thought might be given that she was half again their age. But then again, war has ever made for strange bedfellows… Okay, ew, no, bad phrasing, I regret even thinking that… They might legally be adults, and Justine's even married, but that's indecent…

Thankfully, there was a shrill chorus of bird-cries in the trees that drew her up short, cutting through her little spiral regarding—nope, not thinking about it, uh-uh—and instead of that, it turned her attention towards wondering exactly what news might come. It wasn't a general forest shriek that heralded hostiles; it was more like a relay, a bird-call that kept coming closer. She held out a hand in front of Jeremiah, and he halted without question: they both knew what this was, and they both knew who they were waiting for.

Accepting that there was a member of Justine's friend group who could speak to animals had in the past proven, weirdly enough, to be more difficult than acclimating to the idea that there were an unknown number of ageless immortal beings who walked among humans, giving out magic powers on a whim. Hecate's conversations that went back and forth between her 'avian companions' (as Justine had once put it), Artemis the diurnal raptor, and Apollo the nocturnal, and herself were still something of a strange thing for Villetta to wrap her head around, but both she and Jeremiah were long past incredulity and scepticism; and it was a good thing they'd gotten over that, because as soon as they set up this semi-permanent base of operations, that same gift that Hecate Gaunt possessed began proving itself to be terrifyingly potent.

It seemed as if nearly every bird in the jungle was in on this; events that occurred at one end of the jungle took mere hours to get to them at the other, as specific cries were communicated along a chain relay of them, to be picked up by Artemis or Apollo, and then relayed back to Hecate in full, who then came to both Sif and Villetta in Justine's absence, and told them what the birds had seen, and where they'd seen it. And the spy network of wild birds was unfaltering; they planned their ambushes around what convoys were going where, how large and heavily-armed they were, the trailers of supplies they brought with them… No one would ever have thought that this was how they stayed informed, just as humans oh so very rarely ever looked up at the skies, and so it was that their military intelligence was all but invulnerable to discovery. In fact, Villetta would not put it past Hecate to somehow find a way to convince the aquatic and the terrestrial beasts of the jungle to also begin spying for her, given enough time to learn what she called 'the nuances of their languages.' Villetta figured that she couldn't have been the only one who found Hecate's ability to be at least a little mind-boggling, of course, but Justine took it in stride, the rest of their friends were used to it, the soldiers hailing from Gauntlgrym and the surrounding lands had at least heard tales of this before, and the rest of them, she would wager, just weren't particularly inclined to try and look a gift horse in the mouth…potential pun notwithstanding.

And so, like clockwork, Hecate emerged from the encampment's organised mess of tents and hutches and off-duty soldiers, Artemis perched expectantly upon her shoulder. She hadn't even shucked off her normal suit. "Villetta, I've just got confirmation that there were no survivors from the skirmish; the carrion birds are descending upon their remains as we speak. They send their thanks…such as it is."

Villetta nodded, and let out a relieved sigh; she needed time to recharge before thinking about trying to plan another sortie. She'd pinned her silver hair up into a bun much like Hecate's before the ambush, and now it was beginning to give her a headache—the humidity being, of course, no help at all. "That's good to hear, Hecate. Keep me posted."

Hecate nodded. "Always."

Of course, it probably helped a great deal that the woman who had the ability to talk to animals was also an incredibly pleasant person, and a highly capable officer to boot.

"Lindelle's off talking with the midwives and the medicine men, according to Odette. Marika's with her, so no need to worry," Hecate further informed her. "Sif and Yen are in the command pavilion. They'll be wanting to confer with you at your earliest convenience. And Liliana's…occupied…"

Villetta chortled. Occupied, indeed. The Lady Vergamon could hardly keep herself away from her sharpshooter girlfriend when they'd been in the same camp together for days; after a sortie, though? Both of them would be out of commission for the next few hours. "I can certainly imagine…"

Hecate smiled back at her pleasantly, silent laughter glittering in her bright blue eyes. But, time was as limited a resource as ever, and so Villetta could neither blame her nor act surprised when Hecate made a motion towards the larger hutch that served as the command pavilion—a workspace, not a living area, now occupied by the other couple among Justine's friend group. "Shall we, then?"

Jeremiah, taking his cue, nodded to both of them. "If you two ladies will excuse me…"

"Please feel better, Jeremiah," Hecate bade him as he made to leave.

He halted in his tracks for a moment, and then nodded once more, though it was slower this time. "I shall, of course, endeavour to do so, Hecate. But…thank you."

And with that, he was gone, striding into the distance of the encampment.

Villetta, in turn, returned her attention to Hecate; and, smiling, she replied, "Please, lead the way."

---

Kururugi Suzaku could recall having heard, on multiple occasions throughout the sixteen-year span of her life, about how the Areas were often shitholes. She'd heard entire libraries about how Numbers were lower than slaves in Britannian society, about how their deaths by the millions in forced labour camps and to narcotics and crime were so often celebrated by the viceroyalties as 'new living space.' This same sort of spiel she'd heard from everyone, from her own late father, to his yuppies and yes-men, to Tōdō-sensei, and even Milly fuck-mothering Ashford (now vi Britannia); all of them had gone on and on about how awful conditions were for those who had been brought under the yoke of the Holy Britannian Empire.

But she'd never had cause to internalise that information, or to experience those facts on a visceral level, until this specific away mission.

The town of Pirapora, just northeast of the capital of Area Six at the Rio de Janeiro Settlement, was all the worst stories she'd heard and more; and she said that without exaggeration or hyperbole. It was one of the largest industrial centres in the continent-spanning territory, and while it had been built to hold to the ecological standards of the Imperial Conservation Service, according to Justine, it was still a blackened city to look at. The only Britannians who lived here were those who did administrative work and those who did security work in the area, and so the only buildings to maintain that Britannian standard of clean and sleek and modern were the factories and the abattoirs, where everything the town was built to produce was made: bullets and bandages, tanks and tools and spare parts for Knightmare Frames, meat and milk and leather… And outside of that was a rambling expanse of a shanty-town, enclosed within high walls, crowned in razor wire and studded with machine guns, turrets, and searchlights. The shanty-town, or ghetto, was the exact sort of bombed-out ruin that Milly had seen as a real and dangerous possibility for Area Eleven, though it was not in such a state from bombs, and more just general disrepair.

Close to the wall, the Sixes, all of whom had been displaced from where they'd originally lived to work themselves to death here, either personally or generationally, lived in hovels and lean-tos made from scraps of wood and slabs of sheet metal, unstable and rickety; the streets were little more than packed dirt, with no water-pipes, nor electricity of any sort in sight, and it was those streets that led from the edges of the town to the huge prefab tenement blocks, featureless brutalist concrete given to dilapidation and erosion from the elements. These were controlled, she'd learned from personal experience, by roving gangs whose rule in these parts was subsidised by the local government, who looked the other way for barely a pittance of a bribe as smugglers brought in guns and ammunition—there was no Refrain here, but only because the people who lived here were too far gone to have any happy memories left, if they'd ever had any in the first place. Bullets and guns to kill each other, yet no sanitation or clean supplies to patch themselves up after; there were bodies that were discarded carelessly in piles, some of them having been burned to leave little more than blackened remains, but many were not, left to the open air to attract flies and diseases.

Pestilence and plague were obvious wherever Suzaku looked, as were the marks of starvation; after all, the gangs did not restrict themselves to controlling who 'got to live' in the tenements, but also who got food and potable water, with access to them tightly controlled by children who'd grown up here, who resorted to brutality so as to feel some measure of control in an otherwise impotent existence. They were a symptom, not the cause; but nonetheless, people died in droves to starvation and dehydration, even before they got sick, and there were spindly women with bloated bellies who grabbed the legs of armed men and offered their bodies up for food or water. For these people, it was as if the world had ended; Britannia had shipped them off to a hundred thousand towns just like these across over a dozen different Areas, forcing them to work while doing all they could to facilitate them slaughtering each other wholesale.

Because of course, for as tough as the gangs liked to think they were while they killed each other pointlessly in the streets over rotting scraps, not one of them was tough enough to actually point their guns at the installations where Britannian soldiers sworn to Los Peninsulares stood guard, not even for the vast stockpiles of food and medical supplies that could be found within.

She walked down miserable, corpse-strewn streets, her nostrils burning with the nauseatingly potent stench of human waste and living rot. Babies crying weakly with hunger bombarded her from all sides, and she passed half a dozen corpse piles before she found one that people had found enough gasoline to burn. From out of ramshackle hovels on both sides of the main throughway, such as it was, the glassy eyes of the locals stared out at her as she passed by, and there was no distinction between those who still breathed and those who had long since stopped in those ceaseless stares. They were bent and ravaged, reduced to a state that was something wretched and subhuman, such that only the despair of a beaten animal remained; and in the distance, she heard the bark of gunfire, and voices yelling at each other in a rapidfire language that was an almost ad hoc bastard child of Spanish and Portuguese, as if what they were doing mattered in any way.

The more she saw, the better she thought of Milly, who had done all in her power and more to avert this desolation, for which squalor was entirely too small of a word, from coming to pass upon a people who no longer claimed her, but from whom she could not find herself alienated so easily; and the more grateful she was that Justine didn't even need to see all this to be hell-bent on wiping it out of existence. She swiped the buzzing of corpse-flies out of her face as she walked, a sack made of threadbare burlap and filled with various farming chemicals and bags of dirt slung over her shoulder. Justine had asked for them specifically, and the more Suzaku saw, the more desperately she was clinging to her knowledge that Justine had a plan, holding onto it like some kind of lifeline for her temper and her sanity—for all that she loved fighting, and thought nothing of killing someone else, what she beheld now remained wholly unacceptable. Better a quick death than this endless, undignified wasting.

Huh, she thought to herself, darkly amused by the realisation. Maybe me and my old man weren't so different after all…

No one cared that she looked like what she was, an Honorary Britannian hailing from Area Eleven; no one had the energy to care, physical or emotional. The boot-heel of Britannia had been pushed down on their necks for too long, and now those necks grew bent and misshapen, their half-Britannian young (since she could not possibly imagine any of the desolate men she'd seen ever willingly inflicting this world they lived in upon a child of theirs, and off-duty Britannian guards often ventured out here looking for 'fun' and 'kicks') born with their spines caved into a mimicry of that same imprint. It had allowed both Suzaku and her best friend to slip in undetected, once they'd gotten past the guarded wall, and it had allowed them to remain so, even as they'd carved out a space for themselves in one of the tenement blocks. It was there that Suzaku went to now, trudging along, a strong and healthy woman even after a handful of days spent here (she slipped out of the wall nightly to go hunting); and because of her strength and her health, those poor sods who had any presence of mind remaining, who could still be corralled and forced into the factory for them to work themselves to the bone, looked away, assuming that she was a gang member or worse.

Though, at least they were right about the 'worse' part…

There was no door on the tenement; the most there was was a faded quilt over the front of the door, once a family heirloom, now a banner for any of a number of tribes made of desperate children, driven to brutality and savagery, bent on killing each other. She pushed past the curtain with a shoulder, and into the run-down shell of a building. There were streaks of blood on the cracked bare concrete of the floor, where a body had been dragged out; and on the walls, there was more blood in the imprint of a human back, as well as a litany of bullet-holes that had taken chunks out of the plaster and drywall. The gangs kept this place as clean as they could, she'd give them that—but that was a pretty shitty sign when she could take a step and kick off a chorus of spent casings in a clattering cascade into the wall.

The stairs creaked and cracked in a threatening way that might otherwise have given Suzaku pause, if she gave a shit anymore. But up she went (around where bodies had fallen, beaten and bloodied, and yet to have the days' screw-up gang member tasked with dragging them out), all the way up to the third floor, and the tenement room she temporarily shared with her best friend.

"Ay, ay, mamasita…" came a wolf-whistle as a child, no more than thirteen years old and still clear and obvious in his malnourished state, for all that he was comparatively strong, stepped out of one of the few doors that were still intact. She didn't know this one—there'd been a different kid in charge when she left to go get what Justine had asked for—and so she could only assume that this one was the head of a new gang, or at least the mouthpiece for one, who'd just taken over this tenement, and so didn't know the score, unlike the last occupants. "We didn't know such a fine piece of ass lived out here! If we did, maybe we'd have killed the idiots who owned this place sooner!"

The gaggle of gun-toting children, none of them older than fourteen, and all of them skinny to the point where they were only just shy of skeletal, laughed along with him. It was phoney, fake, wholly unlike when Suzaku, Justine, and their friends did it; it was rehearsed, forced, the product of fear and hunger and a desperate, festering, impotent anger.

There would be no joy in this fight. She knew it already.

"Look, kid," she sighed in exasperation. Fuck was she so very past done with this situation already. "I really don't wanna have to kill ya. It'll be borin' as fuck for both of us. So don't force me."

The kid's face hardened, and it would have been fucking adorable in any other circumstance. As it was, it was just…sad. His little starvation-friends shuffled around behind him (and it was so rare for a kid to make it past sixteen here, she'd learned) in an attempt to puff themselves up and look intimidating, but again, the effect only managed to sharpen Suzaku's morose mood. "Oy, maybe you don't know who you're dealing with, chica! We're the—!"

"Don't know, don't care, get lost," Suzaku said flatly. "Go kill your little friends across the street if you're that bored. I've got a metric fuck-load of more important shit to do."

"Ha. We're gonna make you regret talking back to us, chiquita…!" the lead boy snarled, taking one step forth and pulling out a cheap, poorly-maintained switchblade—free of rust, but bearing what looked like an exhaustive census list of other forms of wear-and-tear.

"I'm quite certain that you will do nothing of the sort."

Suzaku looked rather pointedly around the gaggle of armed kids, and saw Justine, stepping out into the hallway from the door of the 'apartment' they were sharing. She turned on her heel to regard them, and even though she'd packed away her cleaner clothes, the all-black outfit that marked her as the princess she was, having eschewed them in favour of the hodgepodge of threadbare fabrics they made clothes from out among one of the ghettos of the Sixes, the way she held herself, her very aura, radiated a terrible grandeur. A chill ran down Suzaku's spine at the sight of it, and through that of the children who'd turned to face her as well—like it'd grown noticeably colder in here…

Then she spotted Justine's hard amethyst eyes from across the way, and studied for a stolen moment just how coldly they glittered. It clicked in her head, then: holy fuck is she pissed…

It was the leader, the boy who could least afford to look weak, who gathered something resembling his courage first. "N-now look here, chi—!"

"Silence," Justine commanded; and immediately, probably well-before the kid even knew what was happening, his jaw snapped closed with a click. "You've made quite the clamour, playing soldier. I did not make myself known then, because one must be understanding of children. But if you insist upon arresting my friend any further, young man—and if you or your friends, or anyone really, disturbs us in any way… Well. You'd best use your imagination. I can promise you, it'll be far more merciful."

Silence arrested the children, even as they actively began to shiver, clenching their jaws to try and keep their teeth from chattering. The chill wasn't directed at Suzaku, and even she could feel the backdraft, and she had to admit that her best friend cut a very intimidating picture, backlit by the shattered window, with her amethyst eyes glinting impassively, luminous even when they were cast in her immediate shadow. "Have I made myself quite clear, little soldier boy?"

The lead boy nodded his head emphatically, his brown eyes shot so wide that his sclera were fully visible all around his iris. The other boys were similarly affected, and they nodded along just as swiftly, just as terrified. To Suzaku, they kinda reminded her of bobbleheads…

"Excellent," Justine breathed with a vacant, deathly serene smile. "Then I trust that we shall have no further incidents. And of course, if we do, I fear I shall have no recourse save to hold you lot personally responsible. Now, do run along, children…"

And just like that, the spell that bound them all in place broke, and they scarpered away, fast as their spindly little legs could manage.

"Tadaima," Suzaku joked weakly, holding up the sack over her shoulder. "Got whatcha asked for."

"Okaerinasai," Justine replied flatly; the chill around her remained, frost in her aura, and so it was clear that she was still incredibly pissed. She shook her head and sighed; she could have stabbed someone, and it would have seemed less aggressive than that sound. "This is no way for mankind to live, Suzaku…"

Justine's tone took even the bare glimmer of joviality that she'd been attempting to maintain, and then snuffed it right out. She sighed heavily, feeling her body sag as she looked down at the floor, covered as it was in spent bullet casings and smeared with every substance of human slaughter, and kicked at it, as if she was attempting to scuff her boot—because even if they were trying to go undercover, Suzaku refused to settle for the industrial scraps the locals used as half-decent footwear. "Ya don't say…"

Justine didn't dignify that with an answer, jerking her head towards the open door to the apartment they were squatting in for the duration of this mission. She pivoted and returned to pass the threshold, with Suzaku pausing for only a moment before taking her cue and entering behind her.

"Throw that sack into the corner there for now, if you would," Justine called out as Suzaku passed under the frame of the intact door, closing it behind her. "I wouldn't have asked you to transport them this way if they were too volatile to handle a little roughing-up without incident."

"Don't mind if I do," said Suzaku, taking the sack off of her shoulder and tossing it into the proper corner, alongside two or three other such cloth bags, filled with different types of fertiliser and mulch. "Uh, actually, Justine, what the fuck are all these sacks for, exactly?"

"Consult the notebook for answers, if you must," Justine replied from the other side of the room, her voice huffy in a way that Suzaku was, in all honesty, not particularly familiar with, at all.

Suzaku nodded, looking away from the sacks she'd been asked to fill and transport here, which she had seen done without once questioning the reason why. It wasn't particularly surprising—Justine had a bit of a depressing habit of never asking anything of anyone without ample and often dire reason, presumably filed in triplicate, so she trusted her friend enough to assume that she had a damn good reason why Suzaku was being asked to do this, instead of Justine doing it for herself. She looked up at the apartment all around them, and was stricken, a bit, by how this place had really begun to shape itself up in the time they'd been hiding out in this shithole of an extermination town.

The rubble and debris, mostly plaster dust and concrete sand, had been painstakingly cleaned from the space; and there was a miserable little dresser that was made of metal and squeaked wherever it'd been riveted together for all that it was nowhere near old enough for furniture to sound like that, in which she'd put both her and Suzaku's actual clothes, to keep them relatively clean and out of sight until the night they put Justine's still-mysterious plan into action. Right by that metal safe, then—for it resembled nothing else so closely—were a set of vibroblades in their scabbards: her pair, and then Justine's tachi, ballistic scabbard and all. In a corner, upon a hat stand that really looked more like a piece of metal scaffolding, was sat upon its perch a black bird of ponderous size, and very far afield of where it was meant to be.

Justine had given her the run-down on the subject when they'd come across her: that a few decades ago, a little under a century into the past, a group of highborn Britannians whose holdings were primarily in Area Six had gotten it into their heads that it would be a fantastic idea to make a fashion of keeping ravens as pets. In a few weeks, they'd gotten their hands on large shipments of the things; and then almost at once, they'd lost them. The ravens, Justine had explained, were 'surpassingly clever birds', and so it took them almost no time at all to find their ways around the caging mechanisms and set themselves free, loose into the wild. They'd propagated since, and given how often things just happened to die in the jungle, they had taken up eating corpses, eventually even graduating into hunting small rodents in the undergrowth; this one in particular was as big as they tended to get up in the northernmost reaches of Area Two, Justine had said, and she was occupied not only with nursing her back to health—they'd found her with a broken wing and a few cuts to show that it wasn't just the wind that'd tried to kill her—but with 'freeing her tongue' so that she could learn to speak human languages. Suzaku was glad that Justine had managed to find herself a pet; in caring for it, she'd somehow forced herself to learn how to take breaks, instead of working uninterrupted for several hours at a time.

"Hey, Satanael," Suzaku called out, for the first time in a while not feeling the need to make a joke about the pompous-sounding name her friend had given the animal that was, by all accounts, the very first pet she'd ever had. Maybe she'll be enough to keep any other smart-mouthed Britannians from making that assumption about me, Suzaku thought to herself, and not for the first time.

The raven caw-edback at her, her wings hitching as the cry escaped her long black beak, and so she knew that at least the bird acknowledged her presence.

"Satanael," Justine snapped. "Mind your language. She is my friend."

That brought Suzaku's train of thought to a screeching halt. She held up a hand, and her jaw flexed to no avail for several moments as she tried to find a way to even get past the mental block around the fact that she was asking this question in the first place. "Wait, did…did the bird just insult me?"

"Yes, she did," confirmed Justine. "And quite rudely, to boot. I know that I at least didn't teach her any such concepts…"

"And you can…understand?" Suzaku asked again, her brain still moving sluggishly. "I thought that Takane-chan's lessons didn't work for ya… Somethin' about the birds bein' too stiff?"

"I still learned enough to work out the rest, at least in Satanael's case," Justine informed her, as she stepped back and whirled around to regard Suzaku anew. There was a metal table, cheap but sturdy, that at some point Justine had managed to scavenge for them, and it, too, was clean, save for a number of cups and beakers, phials and cylinders—a rudimentary chemistry set. "Bring the bottom sack here. Our tarrying here is over. We're moving, tonight."

Something about her voice as she said that was enough to drag Suzaku's mind back to where it had been, before the bird had so thoroughly derailed it. "So, tonight, huh?"

"Indeed. So if you would be so kind," she repeated impatiently.

Suzaku made no move to grab a sack, crossing her arms and staring at her friend.

Justine made a guttural noise at the back of her throat. "What is it, Suzaku? Time grows short."

"Ya still haven't told me the plan," she replied pointedly, shifting her weight to mostly one foot.

"Yes, I did," said the princess, her amethyst eyes glittering like ice catching the reflection of a blaze. She gestured wildly, and Suzaku couldn't help but notice that she had her claws out as she swung her arms around. "The notebook, Suzaku. It's all there."

Suzaku sighed, and went over to the metal vault where their actual clothes were stored; and atop it, sure enough, was a notebook Justine had brought with her, which Suzaku had personally seen be the death of several different pens over the past week or so. She picked it up, its nondescript cover warning nothing about what was inside of it, and then cracked it open, going through a few pages to the most recent entries, and upon reaching them, immediately snapping the notebook shut. "Justine, what the fuck is this?"

"Notes," she replied simply. "I sent you out to get all those different compounds for me—fertiliser, mulch, soil from a number of different spots around this area based on their acidity—because I mean to put them to use in formulating a series of high-yield explosives. What you hold in your hands are the formulae I have worked out to that end. Does that clarify things?"

"But…" Suzaku blinked in confusion, re-opening the notebook to flip through several pages, all of them nearly black with Justine's tight, neat, yet dramatically slanted hand (but for that it lacked much in the way of overt and obscuring ornamentation, Suzaku might actually have called it 'calligraphic'), save for the spots where drawn pictures occupied the otherwise blank space. "If that's actually what it is, then what all's with all of this…poetry and pictograms…?"

"That's alchemical notation," said Justine.

"…Why, exactly, did ya write the formulae in alchemical notation…?"

"Because I detest balancing chemical equations, Suzaku," she snapped, her voice lashing across the space between them enough to make Suzaku physically recoil. "Now, prithee, do you have any more inane questions you'd like to throw in my general direction, or will you finally deign to bring me that blasted sack I asked for,Suzaku, so that I can get this underway?!"

Suzaku couldn't have obeyed, even if she'd wanted to. Justine had… Justine had raised her voice. Never before had Suzaku witnessed her doing that, save for when she was projecting her voice, perhaps, or as a good-natured exclamation—that she'd done so here and now, seemingly in anger, was further beyond the scope of what Suzaku knew how to deal with than she'd given it credit for as a hypothetical. The reality before her was…honestly quite terrifying. "Are… Are ya…?"

Justine raised a brow challengingly, and Suzaku clamped down on that ridiculous question before it passed her lips into the open air. Of course Justine wasn't alright. One of the most consistent women she'd ever known had just broken one of the unspoken rules that governed her behaviour—that was about as far from 'alright' that Suzaku thought she could get, maternal trauma notwithstanding. So instead, she changed her tack. "And whadda ya mean to do with these explosives, exactly?"

The princess huffed into the air, and then stepped away from the table towards the door, getting the sack herself. Suzaku would have stopped her, wrung the answer out of her—she remembered vividly the last time she'd let Justine stew in her distress while thinking she was giving her 'space' and 'privacy,' and it was not an experience she ever cared to repeat—but as Justine hauled, she spoke, answering the question that Suzaku had asked of her. "The industrial complex at the centre of this enclosure is a marvel of an increasingly outmoded era of Britannian engineering. At its core, the whole thing is powered by a sakuradite reactor that requires many times the raw material as a Core Luminous, as it is not even a fraction as efficient. With the explosive solution outlined there, the destabilisation of the volatile material will be sufficient to cause the reactor to reach criticality, achieving a chain reaction and wiping this entire wretched place off of the map. The rebellion will return, if they care to look, to nothing more revealing than a smoking crater. There will be nothing left."

That note caused Suzaku to straighten, putting the book down and crossing her arms once again. "…Justine, are ya sure that you've thought this all the way through?"

"Quite certain, yes," Justine replied, setting the first sack down by the table. She pulled it open, and began to pull forth from it the smaller sacks that Suzaku had filled them with, to keep the compounds from mixing prematurely.

There was clearly no elaboration that was forthcoming, so Suzaku tried again. "And what about the Sixes, then? We're just gonna leave 'em to die in the blast?"

"Better that than what fate would befall them were they to survive," said Justine, as she opened up the smaller bags and began pouring them into the presumably purloined beakers arranged before her. "If the Number population is left as it is, with the industrial complex ruined beyond repair—which, as you should know by now, is a non-negotiable point if this is to work at all—then when the rebellion sends its princoxes and its coxcombs in all their swagger and braggadocio, tasking them to investigate what has happened here that production has ceased, they will place the blame upon sabotage or incompetence from the Sixes, and they will make the whole Six population throughout the Area suffer for it. Never underestimate the creative cruelty a provincial noble scion may develop, given that he has precious little else to do save to hone it."

"Then…why don't we evacuate them?" asked Suzaku, grasping for something, anything to avert the course of action that Justine was set upon. "Get 'em the hell outta dodge?"

Justine scoffed, now fully turning away from her work to glare at Suzaku. "Oh, now that's a capital idea. 'Why don't we just move them?' As if you haven't walked these streets, haven't seen for yourself the state that these people have been reduced to. Tell me, how many of those who dwell in hovels do you think would be able to walk the distance outside the town, hmm? Let alone how many might actually manage to climb the walls as we did, with or without avoiding detection? And even if we did manage it, then how do you propose we get the remaining ones in fighting shape? Because to be certain, we categorically do not have the luxury of dragging about a train of civilian hangers-on, bushwhacking through kilometres upon kilometres of hostile territory. How do you mean for us to just conjure from thin air the literal months of steady food and one-on-one rehabilitation they would need? Literal months that we—need I remind you, Suzaku—do not have? Need I remind you what becomes of us, of all of us, if we fail here? No, Suzaku; the Sixes will die tonight. They will have died preventing their countrymen from having the grip of their errant masters tighten around their throats, and their deaths will be a mercy compared to what other fates may befall them otherwise. And since when have you cared about civilian casualties in the first place? Where was this attitude when you purposefully led the raiding party to the River-folk's village that night?"

"I did it for you," Suzaku protested, brushing off the offence and remaining undeterred. "And now the River-folk are behind us. They gave us a chance because of what I did that night, and I did it for you."

"Yes, you did, and while I wasn't pleased to hear of it, I will not deny that it helped," she conceded, nodding even as her eyes still glittered with the glacial refraction of a world-devouring blaze. "And so what has changed, then? Hmm? Between then and now?"

"Nothin's changed, Justine," Suzaku sighed, pushing off from the dresser to step closer to Justine, who, in her agitated state, took an unconscious step back from Suzaku's advance, a hand flying up to land upon her jewelled collar. Ever since that mess with Harrowmont,during which Milly had taken her aside and given her the run-down on what had happened to her best friend before the two of them had ever met, Suzaku now knew what she was seeing on the rare occasions when Justine's emotions were active and had overflowed their bounds, overrunning her mind's ability to compartmentalise them and put them far away from where she had to sit with them and let them influence her judgement; and each and every time something like that little back-step Justine had just taken happened—an act of pure, ungoverned reflex—Suzaku felt as though she understood why Milly was the way she was just a little bit more. "Yeah, the Sixes're sorry sacks, but when we get the fuck outta this town, they'll be nothin' more than a bad memory. I couldn't give two shits about 'em if I tried. But I know you by now, Justine. And I'm worried that you're gonna be doin' somethin' you're gonna regret."

"…Are you questioning my resolve?" Justine asked, her voice dangerously quiet. "The people here will die because it is necessary. And in exchange, I will take the nobles of this land, and I will make of their wailing, wretched corpses a monument to their ruin, to their excess, to their transgression. They will pay in blood for how thoroughly they have debased their subjects; first them, and then the whole of this wretched empire, and every misbegotten highborn parasite that underpins it. No one can be allowed to 'rule' the way they do here without reprisal."

"And how will punishin' them make 'em fix their shit, Justine?" Suzaku almost pleaded. "Ya can't reform people with punishment."

"Of course I know that," snapped Justine, drawing herself up to stand even straighter, as if she was posing to have a portrait painted. "The purpose of punishment is not and has never been reform. That's not the point, Suzaku. The point is deterrence—the leaders of the rebellion and their entire bloodlines will die screaming, and it will be a promise to all those highborn who think as they do."

"Oh, yeah, sure, because deterrence has historically had such a sterlin' fuckin' track record…" the Honorary Britannian scoffed in frustration, agitated despite herself.

"We are on a clock, Suzaku," Justine explained, her voice quiet and calm in the way of a death by frost. "If I could fix all the ills that beset this world 'the right way'—if I had the time to avert what comes to swallow us whole—then rest assured, I would. I would jump at the chance to manage this without suffering, without death, without even a single bullet fired. But those are not the times we live in, my friend. That is not the hand that we have been dealt. I have told you that the time for heroes has come and it has passed. It is we alone who remain, who must pick up the pieces of our shattered world, however bloodied our hands may become in order to do so.

"Threats are useless unless I have previously exhibited the level of violence I promise to inflict: so I shall make examples of those I cannot control, so that those I can shall be cowed," Justine vowed, her manner solemn as the grave. "And so unless you believe you have devised a better idea, Suzaku, then I shall politely request that you keep your own counsel."

And so they came to the crux of it, Suzaku understood. Justine did not want to do this; to consign an entire town full of noncombatants, no matter how desolate, to death was something she would readily admit that she took no pleasure in, and with that admission she would downplay exactly how much it would hurt her to do it. But Justine was, whether by nature or by virtue of her upbringing, a creature who believed in duty, first and foremost: no matter how much she hated doing it, if she believed there was no way around a necessary atrocity, she wouldn't allow herself to hesitate to commit it. She would leave not even a sliver of herself on the table, and she would keep going until what remained was a hollow shell of herself, her desires left to rot until she could no longer recognise them—she would carve away at herself in an act of self-mutilation until what remained was what she needed to be, to do what needed to be done.

This was the horror that had become of her friend, the sickness, the poison that was eating her alive, from the inside out. And within her friend's angered protests, and the lay of her frustration, Suzaku heard nothing more clarion than a cry for help, a desire for an out.

"We'll clear the complex and plant the bomb at midnight," said Suzaku, giving Justine the out that she wanted, but would never, could never, bring herself to ask for outright. "But before then, we'll get out as many of them as we can. We'll restrict ourselves to the ones who're still healthy enough to work, and as we return to camp, we'll help them fatten up. Then, they'll reinforce the 588th. We need the manpower, and you know it. But you're right. Everyone else will have to burn."

Justine maintained her glare for a moment longer; and then, she sagged against the table, every last combative scrap of her anger gone, leaving her exhausted in the aftermath. "Alright, fine. We'll do it your way, Suzaku. Now, please, could you bring the other sacks over? I need to work."

Suzaku nodded. She didn't smile—Justine would refuse the reassurance, so dead-set on seeing only the worst parts of herself—and instead, she walked over to the corner, and carried the next sack over to her friend's makeshift workbench. She helped her divest the burlap of the smaller sacks, and then did the same for the third and final sack. Then, she sat on the floor, in the corner adjacent to the table, leaning her head back against the wall; and while Justine worked away at the explosives, Satanael hopping from her perch to land on Justine's shoulder, Suzaku did her best to get herself some shut-eye.

They both had a very long night ahead of them, after all.

---

The sun was dipping below the horizon when Justine shook her friend awake. Suzaku had played at being difficult to wake early on into their friendship, and she still did every now and again; but thankfully, she seemed to understand that such tomfoolery was unwarranted right now, and unwelcome besides. It was a foul mood that Justine found herself stuck in, and she wasn't inclined to be particularly indulgent.

Rustling up the workers was easier than it should have been; they were both outfitted for the night of wetwork and sabotage that lay ahead of them, which meant that both of them looked very severely out of place. Promises of ample food and clean water were more concrete and compelling to these desolate people than the high-minded ideal of freedom, and a people as doomed as they had nothing to hope for, nothing to lose. Desperation had eroded even the most stalwart of bonds that should have lashed them together; there was nary a protest for a sick father or an ailing mother, nor an infirm brother. Those that they left behind to die were left without incident, and Suzaku ferried the gathered crowd ahead under the cover of night while Justine went and cleared the way over the wall. Together, with the sudden blind spot in surveillance—the guards were dead before they knew what fate had befallen them—Suzaku and Justine worked to aid every person they could save, hollow-eyed men and women who cradled themselves both, over the wall onto the other side. They were told to stay put and await both Justine's and Suzaku's return, and Justine could see in their eyes that the idea of freedom and autonomy were alien concepts to them, let alone defiance; there was not one of them who had not had the will to resist or disobey beaten out of them long ago. Increasingly, she began to feel as though it might have been a mercy for them to die in the blast, as her heart became a lead weight in her chest at the sight of so many, perhaps three to four hundred all told, so thoroughly deprived of the spark of humanity; but Suzaku believed that that spark could be rekindled, that they could rekindle it, so she chose to trust in her friend, instead of the spectre of Marianne she saw reflected in their eyes.

She shook her head to clear it of such thoughts, pressing two fingers to the ruby at her throat in the process, reminding herself that the silver collar was still there; the remembrance of Milly's displeasure was often, in fact usually, enough to forestall those poisonous whispering echoes from rising to the forefront of her mind in the first place. She must have been significantly more rattled than she thought, that she had to exert her will to actively push those misgivings out of her brain tonight. But push she did (she was nothing if not a faithful wife—which was perhaps a more literal statement than anyone she loved would have been in any way comfortable with her making outright, she realised), and once she'd recognised those remarks as the sort of backhanded approval Marianne gave when Justine was docile and obedient, smothering them until they snuffed out was something she took a particularly vicious pleasure in. She held onto that feeling, then; she would need all her cruelty and ruthlessness for the night ahead.

Everyone that remained in this town would die. There would be no survivors.

She intended to see to it personally.

Familiar footfalls approached her from behind, and Justine took a deep, steadying breath, preparing herself for the bloody work that remained ahead of them. Then the person behind her spoke, and the voice confirmed her earlier recognition. "It's just like ya said. They're retreatin' into the complex, and hunkerin' down—seems like they think someone's breakin' in, instead of breakin' people out."

"They're a little under a week too late to prevent that, I'm afraid," Justine replied without turning. She'd sat herself upon a discarded crate upon a decent vantage point, high up upon the roof of one of the prefab tenement blocks, and had borne witness to the scramble her best friend was talking about. The night air was strong and gusty, nearly gales in their own right, and the tails of her coat flapped noisily in the wind even as Suzaku came up next to her. Suzaku was wearing something akin to civilian gear, having sacrificed her last set of traditional clothes during the village battle—a pair of black trousers to go with the black boots she insisted on continuing to wear, even while undercover, the trousers cinched with a leather belt to which she'd gone to the trouble of fastening her twin vibroblades, a button-down white shirt she'd sheared the sleeves off of, and a sleeveless black vest, worn open atop it all. She wore her own gloves for the occasion, and her long chestnut-brown hair hung loose, flowing in the wind much like Justine's coat—she'd elected not to bother with tying it back, it seemed—while her face, so often on the edge of some new ribbing or a bad joke, was as deathly serious as Justine felt. She stomped up to the edge of the building, putting her boot up on the raised edge of it, and leaned over to stare at the armoured, armed men scrambling into their defensive positions, in expectation of some kind of infiltration or attack; after all, it'd taken someone looking to goof off from their watch-shift with a friend for even the guards that Justine had slaughtered to be discovered.

Perhaps the fact that they were so deep into their own territory, wardens for such beaten and broken prisoners, had made them complacent; even from here, without taking Suzaku's position, she could see the naked fear in how they moved, the sheer animal terror.

She closed her eyes, and leaned her head back to savour the odour of desperate fear upon the wind.

It smelled as bitter as her favourite tea. And it was good.

Her internal clock chimed the coming of midnight, precisely; Satanael, who had been such a good girl for all of this, gave a soft cry and a flutter of her wings as Justine stood, taking her own vibroblade off of where it leaned against her other shoulder, and she lowered it to fasten the sheathed weapon to her own waist. The explosive solutions were in a bandolier beside her; she took it up and wrapped it around herself underneath her coat the way some girls changed their brassieres without removing their shirts, and then she was ready.

"Satanael," she began. "Do you think that you can fly in this?"

Suzaku scoffed from the edge of the building. "Sure as fuck a fine time to ask…"

Satanael riled herself up to squawk another insult in Suzaku's direction, but Justine brought her two fingers up and brushed against the raven's back, which settled her right back down. Satanael turned to Justine, ignoring Suzaku's commentary, and replied in a mixture of half-human vocalisations that were supplemented with wing and head-gestures in the effusive and excited affirmative. She would be glad, Justine gathered, to test out her newly restored strength in the midst of this driving air, and did not believe the task would prove to be in any way problematic. She punctuated this, then, by taking off from Justine's shoulders, and riding the wind to where she'd be clear of what happened tonight. She'd probably find a perch to sleep and catch up when she woke up in the morning—she'd been a trooper, but it was past time for her to rest.

"Guess that answers that question," mused Suzaku, watching Satanael fly off for a few moments, to then swing her gaze back towards their true quarry. "We good to get movin'?"

"We are," Justine nodded solemnly, for all that she was anticipating the grim and bloody joy of the fight ahead every bit as much as Suzaku surely was. She stepped away, two paces to the side, and bade her friend, "Wade in their blood, Suzaku."

"Aye-aye, Cap'n," Suzaku replied softly, her mouth twisted into a wry smirk. She kicked off from the edge of the rooftop, and stepped back a dozen paces.

"On your mark…" Justine intoned, bearing the burn without wincing as the bird-brand of her Geass blazed into being.

Suzaku's stance changed, light on her feet, ready to move, her body vibrating with excitement.

"Get set…"

She drew her vibroblades, and they keened as she swept them through the air and grinned ferally.

"Go!"

"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"

And off she went.

One, two, three long bounds, and then—!

She was a bullet. A meteor. A comet. A falling star.

A wrecking ball.

Skittish guards looked around as her cry echoed. They looked right and left, every way but up…

"Hmph," Justine chortled. "She certainly knows how to make an entrance… Ah, well. Tally ho…!"

And with that, she leaned back a bit, and then launched herself forth off the end of the building.

She saw what transpired as she moved: Suzaku, blades and teeth bared, batted aside a few too-late bursts of gunfire and then crashed into a squadron of guards; with a manic cackle, it was barely even a few moments before they'd been reduced to a fine red mist, her swords keening and lashing, wheresoever and whensoever they saw fit to fall. She reaped blood and carnage there, and even as the guards realised what was happening, turning their guns upon their fallen friends with panicked bursts, Suzaku charged out of the mutilated corpse-pit she'd made, head-long, and crashed into another clump in a bloody bull-rush.

Suzaku was a wildfire made flesh, laughing and cackling as her swords swung and cut, keening and killing; Justine's own path, on the other hand, for all that it intersected Suzaku's own, was as direct and piercing as an ice-pick. With grim focus and resolve stronger than diamonds, her heart encased in ice and prickling with hoarfrost, she bolted through the chaos with such precision as to incite envy in a scalpel. There were multiple defensive lines, all of them wholly focused on Suzaku's growing blood-trail; and Justine was a small black dart, vaulting each barricade and slashing the throats of all who stood in her path with her bared claws, which were every bit as sharp whether they were gloved or naked—each was dead before they or their comrades even knew she was there, and just as swiftly was she gone.

Not once did she draw her own sword as she crossed the lines set up by desperate dead men, and for all that Suzaku's path was more thorough and indiscriminate than her own, the preternatural bestial speed, strength, and regeneration that her Geass ability granted her, in all of her bloody-handed berserker frenzy, made it seem that she was keeping pace.

Gunfire was an iron hail that peppered the air, and not a single shot so much as slowed her down. In this state, she knew no pain, no obstacle; fear and hesitation were unwelcome strangers, anathema. All she knew, all that filled her brain, was the bloody joy of slaughter and battle.

She ripped through another clump with all the unbridled glee of a child, her face and clothes already drenched in blood and splattered with gore. Here, this one's entrails flew and struck her across the face, and there, another's brains leapt to her shirt as her other blade split their head down the middle, bisecting them all the way to the shoulder. She giggled as she wrought this ruin, her eyes ablaze with the brand of Geass, and when her right vibroblade had slashed the first guard's waist in half, it lunged forth to bury its point in another's throat, skewering them; she yanked the vibroblade's ever-refolding edge from the second guard's bisected head, and whipped out to decapitate another. Viscera and spinal fluid, blood and bile, screams and shrieks, all to the backing of Suzaku's giggling and cackling as she took special pleasure in turning soldiers into so many featureless lumps of paste.

Justine was nearing the entrance, then; she reached the final barricade, much to the shock of those who stood guard there, but instead of vaulting this one, she mounted it and kicked off, launching herself off through the air; and as she sped past, her right hand reaching down to the ballistic scabbard's trigger, while her left met the Murasama's grip, she focused her mind, the cylinder turning, turning, turning…

Click.

Tick-tock. Tick. Tock. Tick… Tock… Time dilated in Justine's mind, the number winding down as she forced her mind faster, her thoughts accelerating… The space that parted each moment from the next yawned ever-wider, until the gap could be perceived; and it was in that sluggish time, where even the eager leaping and barking flight of bullets was arrested into a single still frame, suspended in celluloid…in that space which meant 'transcendence,' she squeezed the trigger, and did her work.

Twenty-three-point-five centimetres of reinforced tungsten alloy, a blast door meant to withstand a hurricane's fury—in a flash carved apart like a cake.

She did not marvel at her work, with the Murasama extended in the follow-through motion of her draw-strike; the door was sundered, falling in diagonal halves, and she sped through the sudden gap, in no mood as she was to try and cut bullets after having torn attention away from the avatar of violence—Shura, she'd said it was called—that Suzaku had become.

The time for subtlety was long past.

Retribution demanded no less.

Suzaku was hot on her heels, refusing to be outdone; they split ways, and Suzaku delved into fresh prey, administrative staff, late-staying managers, and guards alike. With monstrous joy, she slaked her lust and glutted her vibroblades with their blood. A hundred thousand bullets from an infantryman's rifle could not match the destructive potential of a single Knightmare rifle round, and so Justine, in a split second of assessment, deemed that Suzaku was well-within her parameters—because of course, the power granted by every Geass came with a cost, and Suzaku's had the potential to be especially egregious.

With her friend's well-being assured to her satisfaction, Justine harboured no qualms about leaving Suzaku behind; she ascended a stairway, delving deeper into the complex that it seemed everyone was in a hurry to escape—it was all but deserted, and now that her sword had been drawn, she dealt with whatever stragglers she encountered in her path with the ease of swatting a fly, painting the walls with their blood while leaving her own clothes all but immaculate.

She'd been in this area for several days; she'd scoped it out, found and filched and memorised floor plans, and she knew exactly where she needed to go. Any would-be onlooker viewing her through security footage, as surely at least some existed, would hardly be able to figure out the method behind the paths she took, or why it looked like she dropped some innocuous little burlap sack on the ground at some points but not at others; and yet, it wasn't until she'd forced entry into the main control room for the reactor core, and butchered all the graveyard shift technicians who were monitoring the power station, that she finally took the Murasama, cleaned it off, and returned it to its ballistic scabbard, taking a moment to rest.

Her lungs were like a bellows, slow and strong; her respiration was rhythmic and unhurried, thanks to her diligence in learning to manage it, while her heart rate was elevated, but still strong and slow. She'd sustained no injury worthy of note, she saw, and after taking a small breather, she transitioned to the next stage of her plan.

She'd distributed almost all the compounds she needed on the way in, and here she placed the ones that remained, strategically, about the room. She'd told Suzaku that they were explosives when she'd asked earlier that day—but that, of course, wasn't wholly accurate. It was accurate enough for practical purposes, of course, but any chemical engineer would likely have her guts for garters at the sheer number of minute but impactful technicalities that she'd knowingly misrepresented for the sake of simplicity with what she'd told Suzaku about what the plan was.

The fact of the matter was that a sakuradite chain reaction was fundamentally different from what a miner might call an explosion, whether that be of oil or of dynamite. In appearance, perhaps, one might see the similarities between one fireball and another, but the yield of destructive potential was superior in one of those two by an order of magnitude. Perhaps in another time, another life, someone might have found a way to utilise a uranium-235 isotope to exploit the volatile and highly potent nature of sakuradite to create a bomb-like weapon that could level entire cities with impunity; but they hadn't yet, because until recently, never before had a genius with the brilliance and naiveté necessary to conceive of and build such a device, such a herald of untold tragedy and woe, met with a sufficiently large supply of either of the two necessary materials. In the interim, however, Justine was able to make do with common chemicals found in the soil and in agricultural products (and a few in decaying human bodies, for good measure), using specific mixtures of them to take advantage of an unforeseen interaction she'd theorised was possible, and that her own work told her would succeed. She didn't lack confidence in her skills, of course, and certainly not now, so after she'd set down the remaining charges, she approached the computer terminal that the now-dead technician had left open.

"Now then," she said to no one in particular, cracking her knuckles and leaning forwards across the keyboard with a growing grin. "Let's see how recently you updated your safety protocols…"

In a flash, her fingers were flying across the terminal keys fast enough that it wouldn't be entirely too fanciful to say that they nearly blurred; her amethyst eyes didn't dart down towards the keys even once, and instead remained fixed purely upon the read-outs given to her by the terminal's monitor. Of course, she encountered a snag or two along the way (to which she replied with an approving hum—she hardly wanted this to be too easy, now did she?), but they were remedied easily, plucking the relevant identification cards off of the corpses of the technicians she'd killed and swiping them for further clearance.

All in all, it took her six minutes and thirty-seven seconds to fly through the proper protocols and to bypass the fail-safes by way of unforeseen interactions that, beyond being in no small part the theme of this plan she'd concocted, also really ought to have been patched out months ago; but she stayed until the very first second past minute seven to observe the lights going red as klaxons began to flash. Past the window of reinforced acrylic sheeting that kept the control room safe from anything that might befall the reactor core it observed, there were huge rods that spun in place and brought themselves out of alignment, lights that flared and thick arcs of hot-pink lightning that lashed their way through the air, damaging delicate stabilisers and regulators that were linked to hard-to-replace specialised monitoring equipment—and then the disabled fail-safe failed to fire, neither shutting down the reactor core nor flooding the chamber the way it was meant to, as each of the remaining safety measures that she hadn't bothered to manually bypass or frustrate failing on their own, dependent upon other systems as they were.

She stayed until the very moment she was certain that, even if those measures that had failed to fire now miraculously mended themselves and tried to perform their appointed tasks, it would be too little for it to make a difference, and entirely too late.

Nothing quite beats the satisfaction of a job well-done, she thought, as the sakuradite reactor began to overload and overheat, the core burning white-hot as the birth of a new star; and then she turned her back on that spectacular sight, and with the knowledge of a woman keenly aware of every specific detail of just what she'd set into motion, she fled the scene of what she'd done.

Two and a half to three minutes before the reactor core reaches criticality, one chamber of her mind came to after a brief stint of calculation. The blast will grow exponentially from that point onwards; we'll have no more than five and a half minutes, maximum, to get ourselves free of this place, given the current rate of acceleration. We cannot afford to be here once that happens…

With that understanding taking up centre stage in the forefront of her mind, Justine put some extra spring beneath her feet, booking it down the winding corridors. She tore down hallways both wholly vacant and blood-splattered, her passing silent save for the tap-tap-tap of her boots on the flooring and the heavy, leathery flutter of her coat billowing out behind her, one hand sitting ready right near the trigger-guard of her vibroblade's ballistic scabbard, and any worried errant thought about notifying Suzaku was squashed in its infancy, and with a vengeance; her Geass ability did not leave her wholly senseless (and indeed the price may not have been quite so high for it if it did) and she certainly wasn't an idiot. She'd be able to figure out what was going on and get herself clear; it fell to Justine, then, to trust in her best friend's capabilities—and betting against those was practically the definition of a categorical fool's errand. Justine had to worry about getting herself out safely; Suzaku could handle the rest.

She burst into the fire-safe stairwell, looking down at the four-story drop she'd have to take on her way out for a brief moment of assessment, before vaulting herself over the railing with a muttered 'tally ho', and then letting herself free-fall down the shaft. With a calm that a lesser sort of person might have erroneously considered to be utterly misaligned with the dire urgency of the developing situation all around her, another chamber of her mind kept track, running the numbers on exactly—

Now!

She reached out with her hand, claws extended, and dug them into the concrete, slowing her fall just as she'd planned; and no sooner had her claws scythed through the concrete to once again meet the open air than did she brace herself, and slam her hand down upon the railing on the second-to-last story, her fingers wrapping around it with an iron grip. Pain exploded up and down her arm, and the railing was torn free to be mangled by the force of her descent, acting as a sort of artificial source of weight, but it ultimately held, and she stopped right where she was, with a far more manageable drop between where she currently hung and the ground floor of the complex.

She hung for a moment, then two; then, she released, and with a muted oof, her heels met the floor with all the grace she was known for. Then, she surged forth, aligning her arm properly and crashing into the wall beside the fire escape door with all the force of a stumbling drunkard. Pop! She grit her teeth at the acutely nauseating sensation of her dislocated shoulder being forced back into its socket, and hissed as she rolled her shoulder to make certain she'd suffered no damage to her rotator cup—but for a straight drop of around fifteen metres, give or take, she'd come out of the other end of it in about as good of a condition as she might have expected.

The door was unlocked—go figure—and she yanked it open with the other arm, still trying to make certain that her shoulder was still in good working order, striding her way across the threshold and walking as quickly as she could around the corner into the alleyway, past which she'd be free and clear to make the rest of the run out of the blast radius.

It was a dark night out, with heavy clouds obscuring the whole of the sky, bathing them all in pitch blackness, save for the inventions of mankind, meant to drive back the dark; but as she rounded the corner, the wind that she'd noticed earlier did its work, even as her chin-length hair blew into her face and her coat, both the collar and the scalloped tails, flapped in the gust. The clouds were at last pushed away, and where once darkness reigned, now the silver light of the full moon bore down upon the alley, revealing a squadron of security forces, aligned in ranks with their rifles up and pointed directly at her.

Tch, she thought to herself as she halted, raising her hands slowly as the guards and she stared each other down in near-complete silence. Killing them would take time I don't have. Surrendering, double that. What in Hell's name am I meant to do?! Think, Justine! You're meant to be good at that!

No survivors, another part of her mind replied, as if she could have forgotten; and yet, these guards were prepared for her, clearly, with the muzzles of their guns trained upon her chest. If she committed fully to this course of violence, would she be able to get her hands down to draw her blade before she had to worry about even a single bullet hitting her? She cursed herself, then, for the thoughtless decision, impulsive as it was, to remove her hands from her weapon at all, because in her current state, it would be risky. She knew that she was good, but was she really that good…?

A clamorous sound like metal shearing and a cacophony of a hundred thousand wind-chimes in one chased the consideration from her mind; she looked up in time to see—

Glinting silver teeth… Cascading waves of chestnut… Twin swords, redder than blood…

Ah, she thought to herself with a dawning sense of clarity. So this is Shura…

I have to admit, she wears the mantle well…

It was over nearly as quickly as it began. The guards' organisation shattered like prop-glass, as tiny shards of window fell like hail, tinkling upon the hard ground underneath the staggered and arrhythmic barking of panicked gunfire; and with the force of a train-crash, all ninety-two kilogrammes of teenage girl going at enough force to break through a reinforced pane strong enough to rival an acrylic sheet, and then falling for ten metres at the very least, hit the retreating soldiers, her vibroblades flashing and lashing into them with unbridled glee. She moved wholly unlike a human being, all the lethal dexterity and grace of an apex predator sending her spine shifting and undulating in a manner entirely alien to most if not all bipeds; and the rich scent of fear suffused the night air, Suzaku's crazed giggling and their screaming and sobbing and begging for their lives as they fired and fired and fired, all to no avail…

It was over before it even truly began; Suzaku was voracious in her appetites, borderline insatiable, and she never was one for teasing, especially once she got properly into the swing of it.

"Keep your Geass going," Justine commanded, a pain like someone was driving an iron nail in past her eye and directly into her brain blossoming behind her brand. She took that pain and put it into its place; she'd have to get used to the stress of extended continuous use of it, especially if she wanted everyone she loved to come out of this conflict alive. "We've got to move."

A jolt ran through her body, the concussive blast of sound buffeting her from behind, flame erupting from elsewhere within the complex. She brought her arm up to shield her face from the flying shards of glass Suzaku's entrance had left littered, and that now the explosion had blown in their direction. She knew, of course, that the explosion wasn't her doing, and that the real fireworks were yet to come, but it served as apt punctuation all the same. "We need to go. Now!"

Suzaku nodded, her own brand still blazing in her eye from beneath her blood-matted fringe, and even as her best friend's blood-drenched body convulsed with girlish giggles, Justine knew for a certainty that her point was understood.

Justine wasted no time at all; she put her head down, and she ran, with Suzaku hot on her heels. Her internal clock told her that their escape had taken about as much time as they had to leave with less than a minute to spare before the core hit criticality—two minutes to outrun the blast.

They'd done more with less.

It was the first time Justine had thought to turn her own Geass ability, which amplified the physical and combat capabilities of those loyal to her by an amount proportional to the depths of their own loyalty, inward for use upon herself; and yet, in such a fraught situation, she found it simple enough of a task. She and Suzaku ran as if their feet had grown wings, like depictions of the ancient god Mercury; the wall came into view in record time, as if they were keeping pace with a locomotive, and it was as exhilarating a rush, a second wind, as ever Justine had had.

Between her claws and Suzaku's vibroblades, they scaled the wall in no time at all, skittering up it more deftly than the cleverest of spiders; and Suzaku took her bounds again, hurling herself off of the wall meant to keep the Sixes in, with Justine lunging forth into the night beside her. Like two javelins hurled by lifelong athletes of the highest echelons, they soared through the air, granted by virtue of their speed almost the temporary power of flight, weightless and free…

She tucked and rolled as they hit the ground, hard, rolling head-over-legs into the area beyond. The soft soil of the ground was hard at this distance, but she didn't feel anything break, and for that, she could only give her thanks to Lady Izanami, and the fact that she was much more durable than she ought to have been, given her age and her size. Justine laid there, stunned; then, when she was reasonably sure that she'd be able to stand without her legs turning to gelatin beneath her, she did, looking around to try and find her friend in the field alongside her.

It didn't take long under the moonlight to spot the naked blades' scarlet glow; she stormed over to them and hauled Suzaku up, strained shoulder-joint be damned. And it was just in the nick of time, too; no sooner had Justine hauled her dazed friend out of the furrow she'd ploughed by landing than did the brand in her eye flicker and wink out, the battle over and her power spent—she sagged, but Justine was braced to properly deal with that.

Suzaku's power made her into a super-soldier; she was stronger, faster, and more durable than most any other living creature during its duration, which lasted for as long as the battle she was in did. It was, in Justine's observation, as if her Geass transformed each and every endorphin her body could produce into a different heavy-duty amphetamine drug, and allowed her to recover from any wound she took in the course of the fight nearly instantaneously, to boot. But the price was that at the end of it, she had an hour's grace period, and in that hour, she had to locate a source of sustenance—any sustenance would do, really—so she could replace the calories she burnt during that excess of activity, as well as all of the biomass she'd lost in the process of regeneration: 'paying off her debt,' to put it another way. Failure to do that in the appointed time would put her into a coma, which would add compounding interest to how much of that material debt she had to pay—and if she lingered in that coma for too long, she would surely perish. They'd planned for this, of course, and around it; but they needed to get to the food they'd set aside, and let her eat. Then, they had to deal with the other Sixes Suzaku had convinced her they could save, feeding them, watering them…

But for the moment, Justine's attention was riveted.

It was the bright pink hue of active sakuradite, she couldn't help but notice as its unique sound hit and filled her ears; an opaque pink ball of energy, blinding and brilliant as the sun itself, that expanded with a strangely beautiful speed, at once swift and sedate, consuming all in its path…

The soils and fertilisers and mulches and other innocuous chemical compounds she'd gathered were the cause for this; when they were mixed the way she'd mixed them, their proportions measured out to the very letter of the calculations she'd done on the sakuradite core's criticality, the elements that made up the harmless compounds had the capacity to ionise, and those new ions formed fresh bonds with one another, creating compounds that were rendered by the environmental factors of their forming isotopically unstable, neutrons getting shaken loose of their original atoms and knocking into each other, thus further fuelling, extending, and empowering the sakuradite's destructive potential.

She hadn't had any uranium-235 on hand, after all, so she'd had to make do.

And when the expanding ball of hot pink energy suddenly collapsed in on itself in the space of less than an instant, the freshly-formed vacuum drawing in true gale-force winds that buffeted them fiercely and only barely, by virtue of the two of them holding onto one another, proving too weak to sweep the pair of young women aloft even as it bent and threatened to uproot the trees around them, giving them a clear view of the featureless gaping hole that remained of what had once been the factory town of Pirapora…well, she couldn't help but think that she hadn't done half-bad, especially given the circumstances.

Thus did Justine vi Britannia take a moment to savour her achievement; and then her practical side took over. She could gloat later, if, indeed, she thought to gloat at all: she had a friend and a few hundred future soldiers to feed. She sighed to herself as the blood coating her friend's body began to soak onto her.

I suppose there's no rest for the wicked, indeed…