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.

35. Bottom of the River

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

There was something incredibly gratifying about their trek through the jungle, Justine could finally admit, something that felt more than merely 'hopeful.'

She tore her gaze from the darkening sky above, still visible as it was through the dense foliage of the thickening canopy, and she raised an arm to allow her companion, Satanael, to alight upon her sleeve, before the raven worked her way up to the pauldron of Justine's coat; then, the princess's gaze swung back to the camp that was pitching itself with remarkable efficiency behind her, especially for a group who had had to learn the skill while they were on the road.

Justine and Suzaku had brought with them enough supplies, with the help of the Knightmares which now knelt in dormant vigil over the campsite, to allow her best friend to use her Geass more than once, if a deteriorating situation demanded it of her; this turned out to be, along with the supplies they'd filched from the extermination town that was now nothing more than a smooth, featureless crater, quite enough for them to support their meandering convoy of displaced Sixes, getting them accustomed to being properly fed and watered again as they moved (though, admittedly it did help quite a bit that Suzaku was only too willing to help supplement their supplies with foraged foodstuffs), and as the strength of the survivors' bodies grew, Justine saw, day by day, the realisation beginning to dawn on them, slowly but surely, that the desolate nightmare they had laboured under for so long was finally over.

Many didn't seem to know what to do with this realisation, having existed in misery for so long that its relief felt alien to them, uncharted territory in which they were stranded and blindly groping in the dark for the way through, or any way through, and while she'd hardly be so presumptuous as to compare all that she had experienced to the horrors that had been inflicted upon these people, and in fact it made her feel more than a little ashamed even to think of it, Justine couldn't help but feel a painful sense of kinship with that sentiment, and for the sake of that, she tried her best to push aside the sense of trespass that came along with such a feeling. Certainly, she had never known hunger as they had, an intentional starvation that went beyond merely a mother's disdainful neglect; and though she had known efforts to snuff her out, and was in truth in the midst of one even now, she had never been so wholly impotent in the face of them as the Sixes she and Suzaku were guiding along had been. In all senses, it felt like almost a sort of blasphemy, to claim to feel in any regard the things that they felt; but regardless of how true some might have said that was, the fact remained that down that path lay Marianne's voice, and the lessons she had burned into Justine's body; perhaps selfishly, she valued her own fidelity to her wife far beyond any sense she might have had that any such misgivings had real or legitimate grounding.

She shook her head to clear such thoughts from it. The question of whether or not it was right of her to feel some kinship for the plight of a group of Numbers she had rescued from the excesses of the Empire was utterly trivial in the face of the fact that she had rescued them, had taken them under her wing and had thus taken upon herself an obligation to protect them. Perhaps even such considerations were themselves a sign of her privilege, that she had the luxury of having them trouble her; certainly, the looks in the eyes of the former factory workers, hollow and desolate people who had begun to reclaim some embers of life as they got further away from the town, as she handed out rations to each of them at the beginning and end of each day were far from the resentment and dismissal that Marianne had taught her to expect. They cared that they had been saved and fed, she reminded herself; they cared only that suddenly, they had a future. Perhaps, she considered, that commonality that lay between them was more important than the itemised disparities in the experiences they had undergone throughout their differing circumstances.

"You're broodin' again," Suzaku chastised her, her tone level and her expression entirely serious as she came up alongside Justine. "Care to share with the class?"

Justine's face flushed with a flash of shame, and she shook her head. "It's silly."

"If it's really that silly, then why're ya lettin' it get to ya?" Suzaku countered.

"The alternative is much easier said than done, I'm afraid…" Justine huffed.

"Maybe handin' out rations for dinner'll get your mind off of it, whatever it is," said her best friend, with an expression that made it abundantly clear that the brash swordswoman did have some idea of the thoughts and insecurities that were racing through Justine's head. "C'mon, now. I've got 'em all linin' up as we speak. Time's a-wastin'."

"You're quite correct, of course," the princess sighed in return, shaking her head once again before following as Suzaku beckoned, over to where the pallet of their supplies sat, between the knelt forms of the two dormant Sutherlands; and it seemed as though Suzaku had taken it upon herself to begin the process of partitioning the rations for Justine to hand out. This was the system—that Suzaku would divide a portion of their supplies up according to a predetermined plan of theirs, and then Justine would be the one to hand all of it out to the throng of hundreds that made up the forming queue. In practical terms, it got the refugees to begin to associate Justine's face with the food and water that was given to them, but Justine, herself, had begun to suspect that Suzaku insisted upon this division of their labour for Justine's sake, more than for any end goal related to classical conditioning.

And though Justine was embarrassed by the implications of this speculation of hers, and truthfully, more than a little uncomfortable at the prospect of being given such a great degree of consideration that felt entirely unearned—after all, she had been ready to wipe them all out, and it had been Suzaku who had then argued for them to be saved, so really it was Suzaku who ought to be receiving the credit for whatever sort of heroism one might read into the act of saving some of the Sixes and condemning the rest—but gratitude, of all things, stilled her tongue. There was a gentle, comforting warmth that bloomed deep within her core, growing a little brighter with each ration she gave out—a sensation that she'd thought she'd only ever feel when it came to protecting Juliette, and being for her sister the sort of figure she wished she'd had. It was more than merely a good feeling, nourishing those she had taken under her wing, fostering strength in their bodies and hope in hearts that may have never known it; she felt like a starveling herself, in a way, having grown so accustomed to her hunger that it ceased to exist for her, only now noticed anew because the act of feeding these people felt like it was nourishing her, in turn. It was a strange sensation, and perhaps just a bit disquieting to boot, but it refused to leave, and with each person she helped, with every hand she extended to show these people how to lift themselves out of the bleakness of the lives they had known until now, she felt as if the world grew just that much brighter, the colours around her a little more vivid.

It hadn't been until Milly that the world held any true colour for Justine, that ideas like 'beauty' or 'pleasure' meant much of anything to her other than a word printed on the pages of a book; and doing this, handing out portions carefully measured that each could get their fill without their bodies rejecting it from unfamiliarity, only built and iterated upon that foundation that her wife had laid down in the bedrock of her soul to start with.

The realisation made the sectioned-off ache in Justine's heart at their abrupt separation prick at her just that much more sharply, and she did her best to shut that train of thought down before her composure came into any real danger of splintering, or, hells forbid, shattering entirely; she focused herself on the task ahead, feeling her mouth move in the familiar motions of each name as she greeted them in turn. Some of them were still startled, that anyone with any sort of power bothered to address them by their names instead of by the numerical designation tattooed onto their bodies in bright blue ink, and they were mostly the ones who were the newest at reclaiming any powers of speech, and indeed at responding to any names at all; the ones who had begun to stir from their malaise first, however, beamed at her instead, as she smiled back at them and let a few generic, but genuine well-wishes pass from her lips.

The rations were nothing special—nutrient-dense bars formulated by the Office of Military Victuals back in the Homeland, meant for missions when soldiers had to venture deep behind enemy lines and travel light—but they took up very little space for how well they met the needs of those relying upon them, and at first, they had even had to cut the little marvels of nutritional engineering into smaller portions, so that the malnourished Sixes wouldn't be made sick at its consumption. They'd worked their way up as time went on and they devoured the distance between themselves and their destination, the base camp right beside the village of the River-folk, to the point where they were finally beginning to give out whole bars to almost all of the people who stood waiting in the queue; and of course, Justine and Suzaku subsisted upon the same, sitting amongst the people they had saved and eating as they ate. They did not compare, of course, to even the lightest and simplest of meals that Taliesin might have provided them at Belial Palace, but these people seemed to regard them as miraculous, that something so humble in its appearance could begin to build back the strength in their bodies that they had either lost, or indeed had never had the opportunity to truly gain in the first place.

Four hundred twenty-five were the names she had taken it upon herself to learn and remember, even if the people to whom those names referred themselves did not; and indeed, it was into eight hundred fifty hands that she placed the food that would sustain them, until Satanael was asleep upon her shoulder and the sun had long since sunk beneath the horizon, leaving them in the dark, lit only by a few meagre flames. Yet it was enough, Justine found, as she took up a bar for herself in silence alongside Suzaku, as well as a flask of clean water, carefully portioned out.

She left her position beside the pallet, and settled herself in amidst the mass of bodies that made up all those whom they had saved, whose hesitant conversation in broken, stilted fragments of half a dozen similar languages more and more frequently began to set ripples adrift in the tranquil pool of nightfall; but it was enough for Suzaku and her to sit amongst them, near to each other, feeding themselves before going to sleep as those they guided slept.

It was enough.

When the morning dawned, Justine arose to the knowledge that the sun had not yet risen; and yet, since she was, as usual, fully alert immediately upon waking, she dragged Suzaku back to consciousness, also, that she could help partition the rations of food and water for the morning. Once their charges all rose, none of them seeming capable of sleeping in unless they were perched upon their deathbeds, all of them would set about breaking camp, such as it was, and then the day's march would begin, with Suzaku and Justine both going to mount up in their Sutherlands so as to better guard the front and the rear of the column. Already had they ventured deep into the jungle, travelling the foot-paths of the River-folk and their neighbours, an intricate system of trails and roads that were imperceptible to the untrained eye, none of whom knew what, in truth, they were looking for, but they had a handful of days left to travel through the brush before they were truly safe, and once again among friends, and so maintaining proper vigilance remained every bit as crucial now as it had over a week ago, when they had begun this return journey with half a regiment's worth of extra bodies in tow. Suzaku grumbled, as was customary, but she knew her part to play in this every bit as well as Justine knew her own; and sure enough, before the sun had even truly risen high above the jungle, the Sixes roused from their rest, stretched, chatted briefly amongst themselves, and formed a new queue, just as they had the night before.

Once again, Justine handed sustenance to each of them, indulging with perhaps a little bit of guilt in the warmth the act suffused her being with, and Suzaku remained, as had been the case throughout the span of this journey, a source of quiet support, a pillar upon whom she knew she could rely. Justine didn't love Suzaku as she loved Milly, and indeed, Suzaku did not love her as she loved Lady Izanami, but not for the first time, that morning, the princess wondered if there indeed existed a more potent sign of the love they bore each other as friends than these rituals between the two of them, morning and evening, filling every last one of the over four hundred hungry bellies they had taken responsibility for.

Four hundred twenty-five were the mouths filled that morning before either Justine or Suzaku had any for themselves; then, after half an hour's rest, both girls began to move towards their Knightmares, and the Sixes, knowing well by this point what this meant, scattered the evidence of their fires, picked up what few effects they had of their own, and settled themselves into a rough approximation of a column, moving out without delay once Justine's black Sutherland began to lead the way through the jungle path, Satanael soaring aloft on black wings to scout ahead, but never straying too far from Justine herself.

It was some time through that day, with the sun finally high in the sky, when the calm mundanity of their extraordinary march began, at last, to change; and it began with but a few notes, a buried remnant of a half-remembered ghost of a song, passed from mother to daughter. One of the women in the column began to sing it, discordant fragments earnestly relayed, and though it rang out into silence for a while, it wasn't long before another began to sing another part of the song—just as distant a memory, but completely and utterly recognisable as a different part of the same piece all the same.

It was not a kind song, not by any means; it was more of a dirge than anything, a lament. But it was nonetheless a shred of the innocence that had been lost, a bit of their common selves that had been shorn from them, and to labour to recall such at all, let alone to succeed in any capacity, was as much an act of rebellion as any shot from out of the barrel of a gun might have been. Justine did not recognise the song; it was not uncommon for Numbers to keep parts of their cultures jealously guarded against those who would seek to erase them, and so it was understandable, though lamentable, that she would not have been able to give over her own knowledge to aid them. This was not like the case of the River-folk, where the lost shards of their past were themselves ancient artefacts, physical and tangible, that Justine could arrange to be returned to the hands of those who were their rightful owners; a song, an oral tradition by the sound of it, was something ephemeral, and while it was possessed of immortality of a sort, as all ideas to some extent are, its immortality was delicate in the way of the spoken word, such that it perished with the last person to hear it. There was a limit to how much she could help these people, and the ache in her heart that persisted in the wake of that realisation was a powerful reassurance, if indeed she had needed any, that she had not been speaking idly when she had told Suzaku that if she had the choice, she would have jumped at the chance to heal the world, and the people in it, the 'right way.'

It was a comfort to Justine, to know that even though the corrupting influence of power was the inheritance into which she had been born, to the extent that she was susceptible to it, she had yet to fall beneath its sway.

And yet, they came together even without the aid that she could not give, piecing together clumsily but earnestly the fragments of their shattered sense of shared self. That much, also, was a comfort.

The days came and went, and the nights with them; by the end of the first day, the Sixes had run dry of pieces that they remembered of that song, but by the time they were on the march at the beginning of the second, the same woman who had gotten the idea to sing what she recalled in the first place began to add her own verses, not from memory, but from improvisation. Attuned now to the unifying influence of song as they were after the first day of it, it did not take nearly as long this time for another to take on this trend, adding their own inventions to the mix. And this, too—this act, this process of collective reconstruction, now that reclamation had proven to be, in and of itself, wholly insufficient, was also an act of rebellion. But more than rebellion, it also felt to Justine to be something of an act of rebirth, and threaded through each new verse was the realisation that what was lost was gone forever, and that there would be no erasing what had been taken from them, and how; but the hope for a new future won out, building back the shards into a new whole.

There was an art in the land formerly known as Japan, Justine recalled, known as kintsugi. She now considered that perhaps it was an art worthy of further study once she returned at last to the home her wife had built for her.

By the third morning, the song had become something new, and by late afternoon on that day, when they came at last to their destination, and Justine bore witness to how the encampment of the 588th had, in her absence, begun to grow together with the village of the River-folk, its tune was in every throat, even those to whom the sound of their own names remained the sort of thing to marvel at; and though it faltered when a trio of Sutherlands came forth to intercept them, it did not fall to silence.

Justine knew, however, that if these people were not to come to the conclusion that they were being led into a new sort of captivity, they would need a show of such; so, she popped the hatch on the cockpit of her Sutherland and slid her seat out, clamouring from it up onto the shoulder of her black Knightmare, and thus gaining the attention of the increasingly nervous throng of Sixes.

"I know what you must be thinking," she spoke to them, making sure her voice carried as the words of the ad-hoc bastard tongue all of them knew from their time in the extermination town and even now still continued to speak flowed out from her throat and her lips. "That this is some new cruelty, some fresh trap. It is not, you have my word on that. These are my friends, and they will help you as we have helped you, my friend Suzaku and I, and more besides."

There was a ripple of reassurance that flowed through them—they trusted her to an extent now, and it went beyond simply their desperation for any chance of salvation at all—but there was still a tension that wound its way through them, a trepidation, and that would not do. So, in a flash, she popped up even more firmly onto the balls of her feet than usual, hopping once, twice, and then somersaulting off of the shoulder of her Knightmare to land deftly on the ground amongst them. "If my words are false, and they seek to do you harm, then now, they shall have to inflict that harm upon me, as well."

This, at last, calmed them; and with that done, Justine turned back to the three Sutherlands that had come forth to meet them, waving her hands to get their attention.

One of the trio's loudspeaker systems crackled to life, then, and a heavy sigh was the first sound that made its way through into the open air. Justine found herself unwilling to suppress her grin at that; after all, she knew that sound very well by now. "Your highness, we've talked about this…"

"It's lovely to see you, too, Jeremiah," Justine called back, her voice threaded with joyous laughter. "I'm sorry to make you worry for me once again."

"Eh, don't worry about old Jerry, your highness," came Villetta's voice from out the speaker system of the next Sutherland over. "He's used to it by now."

"That hardly makes it any better, Villetta," Jeremiah complained as decorously as he could manage. "In fact, one could argue that that makes it quite a bit worse."

"You can chew her out later," came the voice of the third and final Sutherland pilot, which, by her voice's natural waspish quality, could be none other than Odette. "If you haven't noticed, she's got a small battalion of people in tow here. We should see about getting them sorted out first."

Justine folded her hands behind her at the small of her back, settling at once back into the carriage of command. "There are four hundred twenty-five Sixes travelling with Suzaku and myself. Please ensure that each of them has proper lodging, food, and water, and inform Lindelle that she's got a number of new patients to check over for any serious medical issues—such was rather beyond our capabilities while we all were on the move. Suzaku and I will be along to the central pavilion for a full debriefing shortly."

"Right away, your highness," Villetta replied, immediately on task. "Odette, will you aid me?"

"Sure thing," she sighed from the far Knightmare.

A small smile flashed itself into being on Justine's face, and then she whirled her way around to the still-calming mass of people. "You shall have food and water aplenty, your injured and your sick shall be healed, and your weary may rest. The ones who guide you are mine, and they will protect you as we have. Go with them, and leave your fear behind you. You're safe now."

There was a muttering of softly-spoken deliberations among the group in their bastard tongue, but it seemed increasingly as though the consensus settled upon doing as Justine said. It was heartening, if not a little overwhelming, that these complete strangers that she had been cajoled into rescuing now trusted her enough to place their lives in her hands, to take her word for truth—though the thought occurred to her then that, lest she grow arrogant (a qualifier spoken in Marianne's voice), it was perhaps a much simpler matter of them not having anywhere else to go. She shook the thought from her head, and reminded herself of the fact that, while that might be true in a vacuum, that was a concern that was perhaps beyond the ability of a group of recently-starved people to really reckon with when put on the spot. And so in honour of Milly, she chose to believe that they did truly trust her, and that once again, her mother's voice was wrong, and not to be given any credence whatsoever.

It was when her aide-de-camp and her friend began leading their way down into the encampment, and the displaced throng of people followed in their wake, that she finally returned to herself, dislodging at last the lingering whispers of her insecurities, at least for the time being. As the pressing mass of bodies shifted to move around her like a rock in the stream, she took in her surroundings once again, and saw the final Knightmare that had come to greet them power down, the hatch popping; a few moments later, there was Jeremiah, riding the stirrup down to the ground to dismount, and when he reached the ground, his long legs devoured the space that lay between them, cutting through the clear path that had just begun to reveal itself. No sooner had the four hundred twenty-five Sixes cleared off than did Justine's Knight of Honour stand before her once again, studying her with some inscrutable emotion writhing in his amber eyes.

Then, in a single smooth, swift motion, he lowered himself to one knee, his head bowed and an arm held across his strong chest.

"Your highness," he said, his tone stilted and formal, as if this were some formal ceremony and not a simple reunion—the implication of his tone made her stomach plummet. "I, Jeremiah Gottwald, beg your leave to return to your service at your side, if you will have me."

That…hadn't been what she had expected. Shamefully, perhaps, but still truthfully.

Justine blinked. Once. Twice.

And then, as if to add to the oddity of the situation, Satanael chose that moment to swoop down and land herself deftly upon the edge of the metal pauldron of Justine's black coat, before adjusting herself into a more comfortable position by sidling her way closer to the princess.

"Jeremiah," she said softly, carefully, a moment later. "Whatever it was I did to make you think that I had any intention whatsoever of dismissing you from my service in the first place, I deeply apologise for it. You have only my utmost contrition in this matter."

And yet it was as though her words had fallen upon deaf ears. Jeremiah would not hear her.

At once, a sudden, strange impulse seized her—it had never come upon her before, for she had not learned such when other children might have learned it—and in truth, it unsettled her a little, but, with two fingers to her collar for strength, she gave it heed nonetheless.

And perhaps it was the song that had been sung on the road that had convinced her to go against her better judgement. Perhaps one quiet act of rebellion begat another in its likeness; nonetheless, she resolved herself to her course, and let her voice slip into the form of command, that others would lower their voices to heed, and she would not raise to be heard. "Jeremiah."

There was a shudder, a flinch, that ran through the teal-haired knight's body all at once at the sound of her voice, cracking like a whip against the shape of his name.

"Rise," she commanded simply, with an evocative gesture of her gloved hand—her claws had come out, she noticed distantly, changing the shape of the specially-made gloves but neither tearing nor impeding them in any meaningful way. And as if he was some manner of toy soldier, to be wound up and set loose, it took less than an instant for him to obey, rising to his feet and standing before her, over her, taller than she was by almost twenty centimetres—though only around five centimetres taller than Milly, Justine couldn't help but to have noticed in the past.

She halted, then, uncertain of how to approach this. She'd read of the act in the pages of more than a few books when she was younger, and to say that Milly was a very physically affectionate person would be to speak a severe understatement into the world, so by this point, Justine had been on the receiving end many dozens of times, albeit almost never without many more intimate forms of physical affection being in the mix as well. She considered for a moment the best way to proceed, and when her mind came back with a number of different less-than-ideal but still serviceable solutions, she elected instead to take a more direct approach to the situation.

It was unfamiliar, the sensation, and her limbs felt stiff and stilted as she stepped closer to Jeremiah, her knight, her gallant defender and dear companion, her hands slipping under his arms and her own arms sliding around his waist to encircle his body, with Satanael briefly hopping off of her shoulder and onto his. It was the source of some comfort, at the very least, that the form of her Knight of Honour was as stiff and unresponsive, uncomprehending, as her own felt. But he was warm, in a way that should not have been as comfortable in the humid jungle heat as it ultimately proved to be, and she placed her head against his strong, muscled chest, with her head near his heart, as she did her best to give herself over to the unfamiliarity of initiating a gesture like this, one that she had never once in her life received in a context that wasn't romantic, even though she knew, in that abstract space of intellect, that the act was reasonably commonplace in any number of other affectionate settings, not simply romance. And though Jeremiah never relaxed into it fully, his own arms eventually came forth to encircle her body as well in reciprocation.

It was as awkward pulling away as it had been initiating, in part because Justine was taken suddenly rather off-guard by how adamant a part of her was about not letting go; but the act was nonetheless brought to completion, and Justine nodded to herself at a task well-executed, holding up her arm to catch her raven as she began her return to her perch on Justine's shoulder before speaking once again, truthfully and with every last scrap of candour Justine could muster, infused fully into her voice. "I wouldn't have done that if I didn't want you around, Jeremiah. And besides, you gave me an oath, didn't you? You can be certain that I won't release you from it that easily."

Jeremiah looked down at her with a strange, twisted expression on his face, and after a moment, she realised he was trying not to smile. "Your highness, that was highly improper…"

"I wouldn't have punished you for pulling away if it truly made you uncomfortable, Jeremiah," said the princess, smiling right back at him and folding her hands behind her back again—though with the heels of her boots being set against one another, the posture she now assumed was hardly parade rest. "You know that, don't you?"

Jeremiah sighed, dropping his head and shaking it with a rueful chuckle. "Yes, your highness, I do indeed know that."

"Excellent," Justine effused, nodding once again as she took another step back. "Now, I do believe I said that Suzaku and I would be at the pavilion for a full debriefing soon, and I'd hate to keep Sif waiting for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. Suzaku?"

And indeed, there she was, having dismounted from her Sutherland some time within the past few minutes, another chamber of her mind registered, but having stood at a respectful distance throughout the span of the recently-resolved situation with Jeremiah. Her gallant knight, for his part, startled at his sudden recognition of Suzaku's presence, taking a step back even as his hand flew to his breast, his face ash-white in shock. "Ah, nah, ya don't gotta mind me. I was just appreciatin' the view, an' all that good shit."

For the first time in a while, Justine looked her best friend up and down, assessing for the first time since their march had began not her condition, but her appearance. She'd brought a set of her own uniform clothes along with her and had been wearing those mostly continuously for the entire duration of the return trip, and she looked absolutely filthy—not that Justine thought that she, herself, would seem all that much better, in the grand scheme of things. "Jeremiah, how have we worked out bathing accommodations?"

"Lindelle had the foresight to inquire after any cleansing agents the locals might use, in the interest of us not polluting their water supply," Jeremiah began, having recovered quite valiantly indeed from his shock, and deftly stepping back into his role as her knight. "We've worked out a system of bathing with a set amount of water drawn from the river per person, and then returned to the river downstream at the day's end. Hecate's birds kept us up-to-date on your progress, if not its…particulars…so both your highness and Suzaku ought to have the water drawn and the cleansing agent set aside in your own lodgings."

"Splendid. I'd wager the both of us are in dire need of a good bath—and a very thorough laundering besides," Justine said, her eyes not wavering from Suzaku throughout the duration of the exchange.

"For once, I'm not even gonna argue with ya," Suzaku sighed heavily, rolling her shoulders. "Feel like there's more grime on my body than skin at this point…"

"Please escort us to our lodgings, Jeremiah," Justine said with a nod. "And once we're bathed, with a change of clothes, we'll be at the pavilion. Make sure to inform Sif of that, as well, if you would."

Jeremiah gave a measured nod. "Of course, your highness."

Justine rolled her shoulders, and gave a heavy, brisk sigh. This may not have been her home, but it was enough.

And it was good to be back, all the same.

---

The House of Blaiddyd was a cursed lineage.

One of the oldest highborn bloodlines in all of the Holy Britannian Empire—far older, even, than that of the Imperial Family—it was said that they were themselves descendants of that ancient king who was their namesake, whose consorting with the powers of magic and the blasphemous art of necromancy had, it was said, inflicted a blood-curse upon all those who followed him, from the reign of Leir onwards; and not even the very public schism between the Tudor Dynasty and the Church of Rome, nor the waning of the Church of England, even, in the wake of the short-lived Hanover Dynasty, had been sufficient to exonerate them of the stigma they bore, their maligned reputation having long since outgrown the bounds of its initial reasons. A Blaiddyd had come with Elizabeth III to the Homeland in the wake of the Humiliation of Edinburgh, and even then had their house been in steady decline, losing whatever noble titles they may have had until, now that it was the modern day, they were gentry at best, and not especially wealthy gentry to boot, whatever past glories to which they might once have laid claim having long-since faded into obscurity.

This was the lineage of misfortune, the inglorious legacy, into which both Sif and her fraternal twin, Brynhildr, had been born, with only nine minutes' difference between them. Their estate, Usher Hall, was situated near to the original colonies, but not properly within them, and though their lands bordered one of the five Great Lakes of the Homeland, this lent it less of beauty, and more of a deathly, dour chill; it was a mean place, never grand, but quite old in its own right, and though the fight against its dilapidation was a valiant one, to which even their own father had taken with frightening vigour, the fact was that it was a losing battle, no matter how many heads of their house laboured against the inexorable decay of their ancestral home. Their patriarch throughout the days of the twins' childhood, the honourable Ser Duncan Fortinbras Blaiddyd (for indeed, as Shakespeare was the source of the remembrance of their less-infamous ancestor, occasionally their forebears had found it fitting to honour that service with the names of their heirs), was a widower for most of their lives—it had not been the twins' birth that had claimed their late mother's life, but rather the bereavement and malaise into which she had fallen in the aftermath of bearing them which had at last stilled her beating heart—and though he meant well, and loved fiercely, his manner was hard, and it was difficult for him to understand how best to show it, doubly so when the ghosts of his past during the Emblem of Blood made him increasingly quiet and remote, difficult to rouse and frequently absent even when he sat amongst them. It was a ravenous mire of an existence, and no environment for children; and had things stayed as they were, it would have been easy to say that the twins, with their easy-tanning skin, their stark white hair, and their golden wolf's-eyes, would have begun to rot before they even reached majority, just as their father had, and the procession of his fathers and mothers before him, a never-ending spiral into destitution and abject ignominy.

It had been the sudden and tragic death of one of their tenants, a second-generation French immigrant of meagre means but gentle birth by the name of Msr. Desrosiers, and the subsequent orphaning of his young daughter, an only child who was, fortuitously, of an age with Sif and Brynhildr, that had marked the start of the very same change they needed, if either sister wished to escape the moribund legacy of their forebears; Yennefer was her name, and their father had taken it upon himself, in a hard-won moment of lucidity, and in recognition of his deficiencies, to adopt the young girl as his ward, and as a playmate for his children.

He had stood on the front step of Usher Hall alongside both Brynhildr and Sif to await her arrival, dressed in his finest suit—which was nonetheless a rather humble-looking collection of garments, even for one of his station as a baronet—with his face washed, his white hair combed, and his bright blue eyes alert even as he tried his best to make it seem as though he was not relying upon his sturdy oaken cane as much as he was. Sif and Brynhildr had known even then that the clothes associated with prim ladies were not for them, and so when they greeted her, they were dressed in brown boots and breeches, plain white blouses, brown waistcoats, and dark green tailcoats, identical in spite of their physical differences (Sif was taller and more broadly-built, even though her frame remained lean, while Brynhildr was smaller and more slender, which made the feats of strength and athleticism she was capable of that much more surprising).

Though Sif had been dazzled from the first at Yennefer's dark beauty, enthralled by how her dresses and gowns made her look, those first few weeks at Usher Hall had been difficult for all three of them; while Yen was beautiful even then, she was clever and mean, with a tongue like a razor and an even sharper wit. She had been lashing out, and they had returned the sentiment in kind; that they eventually found common ground and got along, leading at first to firm friendship, and then to the deep love that now lay between Sif and Yennefer, was the result of not a single incident that tipped the scales, but rather long, gruelling months of cohabitation, and the need for allies against the suffocating pall of misery that seemed engraved into the very walls and foundations of their childhood home, all of which had brought them together, slowly and by degrees, and in each of those degrees was hidden a way in which that love might later manifest.

Right now, the form of their love was two sets of slender, sure fingers, rhythmically massaging the flesh of an aching, burdened scalp.

Sif let her burning eyes flutter closed, and with a low moan of relief, she allowed the love of her life to guide her head gently against the back of the seat upon which she was perched, going over yet more of the endless tasks that had to be done every day. It was a small refuge, perhaps, a moment of reprieve amidst hours upon hours of frustration and tedium, but Yennefer's hands were deft, her motions soothing, and Sif was loath to dismiss such an offering of sanctuary, however brief; she made certain to avail herself of such at each and every opportunity she could, and truthfully, she was increasingly sure that this was perhaps the sole tether she had to her sanity nowadays, with Justine and Suzaku both out on their covert mission.

She leaned her head back fully, to which Yen smoothly adjusted, and she let her eyes open to behold the beauty that loomed over her, with her raven hair, her fair skin, and those smokey amber eyes that were so like hers and her sister's on paper, and yet entirely distinct all the same. Golden eyes, perhaps, but they were certainly not wolf's eyes.

Her full, wine-red lips curved into a mysterious, teasing smile as their eyes at last made contact, gold against gold; she brought them down, closer and closer, and pressed them at last against Sif's own in a moment of pure, serene bliss.

She didn't know how long they'd been engaged in this before someone cleared their throat, and that alarmed her, given that the two had been alone in the pavilion when they'd started. Sif's eyes shot wide, her head jerking up to smack into Yen's, quite suddenly and painfully; she swore an oath in a low voice, and Yen's squawk of pain was immediately identifiable.

"…I do apologise; it was certainly not my intention to interrupt prematurely," came a very familiar voice indeed, emanating from the threshold of the command pavilion. "But I was under the impression that this was a rather pressing matter that required some urgency."

Sif and Yennefer paused in the midst of nursing their most recent injuries, and immediately, both of them whipped around to look towards the entrance to the pavilion, at the threshold of which stood…

"…Justine…" Yennefer said first.

Justine vi Britannia's plum-hued lips flattened out into a frown, her now shoulder-length raven hair still damp from the bath she'd just taken in her quarters. Her marble skin was rosy from the humidity, and she stood what seemed just a little taller and stronger from her expedition; she seemed to have left behind her coat, but even in only her lace-cuffed black blouse, her black gloves, her armoured black corset, her black breeches, and her knee-high black boots, with the ever-present silver-and-ruby serpent collar circling her slender throat, she seemed even more than she was the month prior, when she'd left them for a time with Suzaku in tow. The air of regality that hung thick around her, always potent, had become noticeably more prominent, and Sif didn't think it would be too fanciful of her to say that their friend's amethyst eyes were distinctly more haunted than they had been when she left.

She opened her lips to speak, but was immediately interrupted; the pavilion's canvas door-flap split apart to admit the entrance of a ponderously large black bird of distinctly corvine shape and form, which alighted and settled immediately upon Justine's shoulder, and then Suzaku immediately behind the animal, freshly-bathed with her still-damp chestnut hair, her skin sun-kissed and darkened by the elements, but with the spark of wild madness that so regularly lurked within her almond-shaped jade-green eyes noticeable for its distinct absence; her gaze was calm and controlled, and this, more than any change that may have taken place with respect to Justine's demeanour, was alarming. "You two done suckin' face yet?"

"Suzaku," Justine warned calmly, her tone immediately prompting the Honorary Britannian to raise her hands in the universal gesture of surrender, as the princess's own hands folded behind her. "Now then, why so shocked? I was under the impression that Hecate and her avian network kept you all rather reliably up-to-date on our movements through the jungle. At least three of you knew that we would return today, and I explicitly asked Jeremiah to inform you both that Suzaku and I would be coming around shortly for the purpose of debriefing. Did any of that come to pass, or…?"

"He did, yes," Sif replied, finding her voice at last with a hard swallow. And indeed, what she spoke was as true as she could make it: Jeremiah had, in fact, stopped by to inform them of all of this, and then he had gone on to inform others, on the stated presumption that the debriefing would be best given to each and every member of Justine's inner circle at once. But even so… "It's just that…it's one thing, Justine, to be told that you and Suzaku had returned, and it's quite another to see it with our own eyes…"

Justine's dark brow arched dramatically towards her hairline, one amethyst glittering with mirth and the other—the eye that, they'd been informed, bore the brand of Geass—obscured by the low fringe of her wavy raven hair, and her full, haughty lips quirked up into a half-smile. There was an empty chair, one that folded and was designed (much like the desk) to be transported with ease, and it was into this one that their friend and commander settled herself, deftly stepping around it and slipping into the wooden seat. "Was it quite so incredible that we would return intact?"

"Hardly," Sif countered with a scoff. Indeed, if there was a single certainty about this entire mess of a campaign—however well they'd managed to salvage it from its ignominious beginnings—that all of them had been sure of from the start, it was that Justine vi Britannia would come out of this conflict unscathed; hers was too bright a flame, too grand a destiny, to be extinguished in a provincial rebellion, of all things,regardless of however well-funded and supported by foreign powers it might have been. "It's just that we were all so accustomed to your presence, and the certainty of it, that having to carry on in your absence like this, under any circumstances, felt oddly…interminable…"

Justine's teasing expression sobered immediately, and she nodded. "I see. You will have to forgive me, then, my friends, but the necessity of our mission was even greater than I had initially anticipated."

"We can certainly tell, given the amount of new personnel that you've brought into the encampment with you," said Yen, her hands resting firmly on Sif's shoulders as she stood directly behind Sif's chair in a show of support that had long since become second-nature for both of them. "But I must also ask that we delay the report on such matters, until the others arrive."

Justine's brow arched again, and it was quizzical instead of teasing this time. "The others?"

"Guess Jeremiah thought it'd be a good idea to round up the rest of us for story time," said Suzaku, crossing her arms beneath her bust and shrugging. "'Spose it saves us from havin' to spin the same damned yarn over and over again."

"Agreed," sighed Justine with a calm nod, her eyes sliding closed. "My commission abounds with capable subordinates, it seems…"

"Mm, better than havin' to baby-sit 'em for every little thing," Suzaku contended.

"You have a point, there," Justine agreed. "It's good that I can leave my people in another's hands without having to worry about it all falling to bits in my absence…"

Sif shrugged, herself, perhaps a touch uncomfortably. "We've done our best."

"And from what I've seen, between you and Yennefer, you've done excellent work," said Justine. "I had to walk through a large swath of the encampment to get to my own quarters and then back here—I certainly couldn't have done a better job orchestrating all of this. When 'your best' proves to me that I was correct to place my faith in you two to oversee the affairs of our comrades in my temporary absence, then I should like to think that 'your best' is more than sufficient."

At that, the raven perched upon Justine's shoulder hopped from it and onto the desk, leaping around in search of a decent perch, before spotting at last the tall, wooden stand that one of the locals had crafted and given to them as a gift, which was meant to host Hecate's companions; they puffed themselves up, and with a mighty flutter of their wings, they ascended to alight upon the stand deftly, where they settled with a degree of apparent comfort. Justine craned her neck in the bird's direction, then, and said, "That's fine for now, Satanael, but be aware that you're likely going to have to share that spot."

The raven puffed up their feathers and squawked once, then beat their wings, and squawked again.

"Be nice," Justine chided the bird. "You don't have to like them, but if you can't manage civility, at the very least, rest assured that I will be very disappointed in you."

The raven bobbed their head and squawked more quietly, fluttering their wings twice before subsiding entirely to rest on the perch.

"Good girl," Justine praised with a nod.

"This is getting out of hand," Yennefer remarked quietly, and Sif could hear the smile in her voice. "Now there are two of them…"

Sif bit back the urge to laugh, just as the door-flap of the pavilion split wide again to admit another pair of occupants, one with her auburn hair freshly shorn and her bright blue eyes alight with focus and determination, while the other's blonde hair was bound into a hasty bun, her emerald eyes darting this way and that—both of whose faces were flushed from what seemed like relatively recent exertion. Immediately, Marika turned to Liliana with a smirk, and sniped, "Told you we wouldn't be late. Looks like we could've settled that last bout after all…so I'll call that a forfeit."

Liliana frowned, glaring at her childhood friend. "Your sportsmanship is atrocious."

"If you want to have a rematch after the meeting, I'm certainly not against it," Marika offered with a sharp smile. "We'll settle once and for all who the best spearman in the unit is…"

"Well! You both seem to be in fine spirits, indeed,"Justine chimed in with a small smile, causing both girls to stiffen—somehow, it seemed, neither of them had quite noticed that Justine was…here here, for lack of a more elegant turn of phrase. And it seemed to Sif that this being further evidence of the phenomenon that she'd just recently pointed out hadn't evaded Justine's notice, either. "In fact, it's almost enough to make a girl nostalgic. Reminds me of how Suzaku and I used to train…"

"I'll say," Suzaku snorted, stepping aside to further distance herself from the mouth of the pavilion.

Both of them shook their heads, short auburn and long, bound, blonde hair seeming to fly all about, cleansing themselves of their momentary stupor. "It's good to have you back, Justine."

"Yeah, really," Liliana agreed with a nod.

"Thank you both," Justine replied. "It's good to be back. And I'm especially glad to see that neither of you have apparently been letting your training lapse in our absence."

"Fat chance of that ever happening," remarked the 588th's resident sharpshooter, as she deftly wove her way through the entryway with Odette in tow. Lisa, who seemed to be almost completely unaffected by the reality of Justine and Suzaku's return, gave a slow, canny smile, the closest she ever got to a grin, and jerked her thumb in the direction of the seemingly perpetually surly swordswoman who followed her into the pavilion. "Between the three of them, I swear they get more practice in than I do per day, and I've been on, what, maybe four out of every five raids?"

"Somewhere around that, at any rate," Yen confirmed after a brief pause.

"Well, their diligence does them credit," Justine said approvingly.

"Sorry for the delay," came Villetta's voice suddenly, which caused Marika to lock up immediately, her eyes wide with helpless alarm. It would have been a concerning reaction, to Sif, if she and pretty much everyone except Villetta, Jeremiah, and Justine didn't know for a certainty that it was a reaction that was provoked solely by Marika's intense infatuation with the dark-skinned baronetess. She ducked through the entrance, then, as immaculately composed as ever, and Hecate entered the pavilion right behind her, with Artemis perched attentively upon her shoulder. Suzaku pulled Marika to the side, allowing Liliana and Lisa to stand together—they exchanged a brief kiss—and for Odette to stand herself against the structure's wall. "Jeremiah and Lindelle will be around shortly. She's just finishing up with a…personal matter before she prepares to check up on our new guests."

"Comrades," Justine corrected mildly. "Or at least, that's the hope, unfortunate though it is."

"…I'll make a note of that for our next resupply request," Villetta replied after a moment, taking the revelation in stride as best she could manage. "Should I inform Lindelle of this proposed eventuality?"

"No need, I heard her loud and clear," said Lindelle, as she stepped into the pavilion, with Jeremiah right on her heels. She was frowning, her arms crossed beneath her modest chest, and that pose, alongside her white coat, made her seem the part of a displeased paediatrician, for all that an oddity in her diction did interfere with the effect to some degree. "I know you'll likely have a good reason, Justine, but I hope you'll forgive me for having to hear it, all the same."

"You alright there, big girl?" Suzaku asked sceptically. "You sound a little…"

"Took the red pill," said Lindelle off-handedly. "It's about that time of day for me."

"Ah," Suzaku nodded, and then let it be.

Jeremiah stepped his way fully into the pavilion, and now that all twelve of them were assembled at last, with the teal-haired knight making his way over to stand at Justine's immediate left-hand side, thus prompting Villetta to mirror him at her right, Justine sighed, and sat up a little straighter, as the temperature inside the pavilion seemed to drop noticeably. The chill was a familiar one, and it had yet to cease to amaze Sif, the sight of Justine visibly assuming supreme command of the situation. "Now that we've all gathered here, let us begin."

A moment passed in absolute silence. The floor was Justine's, wholly and truly.

"A number of weeks ago, I judged it prudent for Suzaku and I to slip away from the main host and journey towards one of the rebellion's primary industrial hubs, the extermination town of Pirapora," Justine began shortly thereafter. "My rationale at the time was simply that, since we lacked the means to take direct action and lop the head off of the snake, as it were, we might at least break its spine. But it quickly became apparent to both Suzaku and myself, upon reaching our destination, that Pirapora's designation, that of an 'extermination town,' was no act of hyperbole.

"We spent five days there, living among the Sixes that the rebel lords had forcibly displaced to that place—to call it a 'hellhole' would be to slander Perdition—as we sought the most effective and expedient means to eliminate the installation as a factor in this war, but…" Justine paused here, closed her eyes, and took a deep, shuddering breath. When she spoke, her voice was tight, and it made every word terse. "I want you all to imagine, if you would, the worst slum or ghetto you can. I want you to imagine the most squalid and desolate place you've ever seen, inhabited by living embodiments of despair in the shapes of men, hollow and hollow-eyed, the children as savage as they are doomed… And I want you to take all of that in mind, and consider for a moment that your most horrid ideation is not even one tenth so awful as that town.

"It is a slow, withering obliteration of debasement that had been forced upon those people, this evil that is not particular to these rebellious provincial nobles with delusions of empire against whom we wage war, not by any means. Indeed, I do not doubt that those very same forces against which we now fight hold within their domains any number of horrors of similar natures, dedicated solely to the utter debasement and eradication of the Numbers that once called those places home… To stand there… It is the wickedness in the hearts of the most entitled of mankind made manifest, that town that once was, which bore the name Pirapora; some of the very worst instances of inhumanity that may be inflicted upon one's fellow man were the commonplace events of those who withered and died there, their bodies piled up and left to rot, not even enough material to properly burn them…

Justine stopped, closed her eyes, and sighed once again; her anger was as a physical force, and the chill it brought grew deeper even as they all stood there, transfixed by the retelling of such a story—for even if none of them could imagine what Justine and Suzaku had seen, they could clearly witness it in the frozen, seething, molten rage carved into the angles of Justine's face, and in the sobriety of Suzaku's demeanour, who stood there without even a single jape to be found anywhere in her eyes or her face or her bearing. And for those who counted themselves as Justine's friends, whose vows of loyalty bound them to one another as strongly as they bound them to Justine herself, even that much was more than enough to move them. "Disease, violence…venality… I believe, very firmly, that there is no greater example of the world we seek to destroy, or of why it is doomed, regardless of our actions, than what one might witness, walking down a single dirt road in that place…and in all those places that are its spitting image across this land, and most all the others within the Empire's dominion… All those people who journeyed with me to join us here, I called them our comrades; and that is why. None of those under our command have seen and known the face of our foe as dearly as they. None have even half so clear an imprint of their tormentor's boot upon their necks and faces. Pirapora will haunt them, in their dreams and nightmares, in moments that wake or sleep, for the remainder of their lives, of that I have no doubt; and as it is none other than the very spectre of Pirapora, of the men who erected it and the systems that enabled them to do so, that we seek to hunt and to slay, we must make common cause over our common enemy.

"It is atrocity beyond accounting, beyond acceptance, beyond any form of absolution known to men or gods," Justine finished, her voice crisp and clear as a winter morning. "It is atrocity beyond sufferance, and so I shall not suffer it. We shall not suffer it. When we declare to the world no more, Pirapora and those dark places built in its likeness must be the adversary of all of our minds and hearts; indeed, it is clear to me, almost beyond the point of explanation, that there can be no liberation from the yoke of our doomed world that does not include that adversary's utter eradication."

Silence followed that last declaration—it was not a silence born of indecision, for indeed, every one of them knew where they stood, now and always, but rather a silence born of articulation, and the desire for it when it lingered beyond their reach. Perhaps it was a blessing, then, that Sif was so laconic by nature, for it was she who first found her words. "If you say it, so mote it be. Where you command, we obey. Justine, your vision is our vision, and the world you describe and desire is one we wish for every bit as dearly. And even if this was not so… I don't think any of us have ever seen Suzaku this serious, not since the night you lay half-dead through our weakness, our cowardice, our inaction. The truth of what you witnessed, even if we could not see it ourselves, has become a lingering echo that hangs around you two like a funeral shroud. So, with all of that said…what would you have of us?"

Justine sat very still; the chair she occupied was a throne as she sat within it, as always, but it was a grander, more terrible image now than ever it had been before. Even now, Sif could sense the truth in all of her fellows, traced back through the lingering tendrils that Justine's Geass had embossed into their souls, to protect them and give them strength, to aid them in common cause with one another…

They were hers, more loyal than any of Arthur's knights, or indeed any sworn to Charlemange; her judgement was theirs to bear forth into the world, and so it was that judgement that they now awaited.

"…How soon can you all be ready to move?" Justine asked at last. "We know now, I believe, what we're up against in each of these places. Suzaku and I left you behind as we scouted, but now we have, and I think it's high time we put what we have learned to the test. There exist four further industrial centres of comparable size and manufacturing capability, all of which are powered by the forced labour of the captive Sixes. We destroyed Pirapora utterly through the application of a cascade failure in the main complex's sakuradite reactor, which, along with a few choice compounds scattered precisely within the span of the initial incidence zone, resulted in a disintegration phenomenon of considerable size and scale. Such means would not be feasible for all of you to use, given the degree of knowledge and precision it requires, but…"

"But…?" prompted Odette, with shockingly little of her usual sting.

"…How regularly have you all been dosing yourselves with the draughts that our erstwhile teacher, Izanami, has been supplying us with?"

That question took several of their number off-guard—but noticeably not the three who had been in Justine's confidence the longest, as Jeremiah, Villetta, and Suzaku seemed wholly unperturbed by the odd query. Justine and Izanami both had told them to dose themselves regularly with the glowing phials of pale green fluid, and though they had initially all thought it perhaps a bit dodgy, Sif knew for a fact that they all drank them all the same, because they trusted Justine implicitly. But their relevance…

"We have taken them as regularly as we were instructed to," Lindelle replied after a moment. "I'd thought to make sure of that earlier on, but it seemed that there was no need; we were all very consistent on that score, of our own volition. Though I don't think I'm alone in wondering what the relevance is…"

"Physical limitation," Justine replied immediately. "The contents of the phials were refined through a number of alchemical processes from Izanami's undying blood. They do not automatically instil prowess, nor conditioning; rather, they make it possible to refine both of those faculties beyond the limitations of the human body. It allowed Suzaku and I, as children, to survive Izanami's more demanding training methods, to the point that our wills alone were what decided how far we could go, and what pain we could endure and surmount. It is a sort of multifaceted durability that compounds upon itself, the gift imparted by that which is contained within those phials; and if all of you have been as diligent and regular as you say, then I can give these commands in good conscience."

"So, you mean the contents of these phials…somehow aren't steroids…?" Lindelle interjected.

"Not at all," Justine replied easily. "It would be far more accurate to classify them as 'mutagens'."

Lindelle nodded, and with that interruption out of the way, Marika finally recovered enough of her faculties from the shock of suddenly being in the same room as the object of her affections for her to guide their meeting back onto the proverbial tracks by asking, "What are your orders, then?"

"My Geass functions by first establishing a link with those it would principally affect," said Justine, prefacing the explanation of her stratagem, and the parts they had to play within it. "Upon those who are so marked, it bestows strength and clarity of mind, even under extreme stress, sharper reflexes, and a stronger and more accurate sense of instinct and intuition—and it links those under its effects together, as well, so as to enable more precise and reliable coordination between comrades. These effects strengthen along with the depth of the loyalty—true loyalty, mind you, not the kind that's compelled through propaganda, or indeed any other form of indoctrination—those under its effects have towards me, which is why the impact of my Geass is so profound when it comes to all of you. But the link, the marker, is the sole limitation—once you all have been marked, as you have been, then my Geass can affect you even from across a vast distance. It's worth noting that we don't know how far is too far, but for the purposes of what we are to do, the distance limit is functionally nonexistent.

"I will have you all split into pairs," she stated, explaining at last her grand design, as she rose from her wooden throne and approached the travel desk. Sif helpfully cleared away the stack of ledgers she had been working on an hour ago, and Yennefer reached out to take the other stack, to clear away the map spread across the table's surface. Justine nodded her thanks, and waved for everyone to gather around, as she began pointing to the map with the razor-sharp tip of her extended claw—the map being a clear display of the geography and topography of both the northern half of Area Six, and the southernmost portion of Area Three—indicating each location as she spoke of it. "Just as we did back at Ad Victoriam, immediately after the Harrowmont disappearance. With the mutagen being active in your bodies, it is my hypothesis that you'll have some ability to request the activation of my Geass from across such distances, to aid you in your respective missions, which will be to infiltrate the other four extermination towns—those being Jatai here, Coxim here, Cáceres here, and Ascensión here—to gather as many of the Sixes who can still walk, travel, and in time, fight, as you can from them, and then to employ the means by which Suzaku and I destroyed Pirapora to wipe these towns off of the map, which I expect for my Geass to be very useful in ensuring. It is imperative, I must stress, that anyone we cannot save must die. For the sake of Sixes across the Area, we need to ensure that there are no survivors from any of these towns that then do not join our ranks.

"Once we've cleared away the extermination towns, the manufacturing infrastructure of Area Six is, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent; with their supplies nearing critical levels, and our manpower now bolstered by our newfound comrades-in-arms, who by that point ought to be in fighting shape, we will then be able to move our forces north to the main rebel stronghold at Panama City here, where we will proceed to draw them out of the fortifications they have built to withstand an all-out assault from the Homeland, and instead into a battlefield of our choosing in the surrounding highlands, bleeding them all along the way; and there, my friends, is where we will break them. We shall shatter the Peninsulares' military strength in one decisive battle, and we shall lay their dreams of a resurrected Spanish Empire to rest, once and for all," Justine finished definitively, tapping at the mountains of the March of Eastern Panama a few further times for emphasis. Then Justine stood from the map, drawing back a bit from the desk, and turned to face as many of them as she could at once, before prompting, in a prim, cheerful voice, "Any questions?"

Sif stared down at the map, tracing with her mind the movements that would be needed in order for such an enterprise to be undertaken. Then, after quickly crunching some numbers, she looked up towards Justine again, only to find the princess looking at both her and Yennefer expectantly, as well. "It's not going to be easy, supplying double or triple our initial numbers; and even should we swell to six or seven times our number, against the level of manpower the rebellion's likely to have to draw on, a pitched battle's almost certain to be long, rough, and bloody…"

"That's why we'll be relying on the mobility of our Sutherlands to fight a running battle as we draw them out," Justine replied. "The rest of our infantry and our armoured vehicles will be digging in as deep as we can get them, and our eventual killing field will have the deck so heavily stacked in our favour that the superior numbers the rebellion can bring to bear will have their impact dulled significantly."

"I'll notify our suppliers," Villetta informed them. "It'll likely take a bit to get all that materiel here under the enemy's nose, but…"

"We'll be staggering the expeditions so that we're not too drastically undermanned at any one time, of course," said Justine with a nod. "I would much rather avoid discovering an unforeseen limitation of my Geass at the most inopportune of moments, if at all possible."

"In any event," Lindelle interjected, her bare fingers rubbing circles into her temples—a sentiment to which Sif could certainly relate. "It seems as though we've all got an awful lot of work ahead of us…"

The princess chuckled ruefully, shaking her head. "No rest for the wicked, indeed…"

---

To compare leading noblemen to herding cats, reflected Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, political head of Los Peninsulares and the would-be king of their nascent Neo-Spanish Empire, and not for the first time, would be an insult to domesticated felines everywhere…

Sergio Feliciano Siguenza de San Martín y San Verganza, as he had been named upon the moment of his birth, then the sole heir to the Duchy of New Granada, which had flourished under the regency of his mother until his majority, was a man who was only now truly beginning to comprehend the enormity of the task in which he had mired himself. It had seemed like such a grand idea to be taken up with, that they, the provincial nobles who were seen as upjumped gentry by some of the more conservative hard-liners back in the Homeland, could finally claim for themselves the respect due their titles, and it had morphed from that to romantic dreams of the bygone glories of the Spanish Empire, before its fall at the hands of Napoleon, as with so many of the rightful powers of the Continent. He had been so enthralled by it, by how shady, shifty Orientals with their forked tongues and honeyed words promised support, financial, military, and political, to them if they could prove that they could truly challenge the reign of the old guard who so disdained them from their mansions and townhouses in Pendragon. He was young, and drunk off of the glories he reaped of his late mother's careful, crafty labours and deliberate manoeuvres, and so he had leveraged his gifts of charm and charisma and intellect to gather like-minded noblemen, young and old, around him, and even a fair few noblewomen as well—though, with this being an older Area, and one unused to armed conflict on any significant scale, there were very few of those around as a general matter—to form themselves into an aspirational echo of that past glory they sought, the bastard child born of the carnal union of their desire for recognition and their avarice; it had been his idea for them to call themselves 'Los Peninsulares,' and under his banner, they had come together into a formidable political bloc, united by their common cause.

All of this had culminated in the storming of the Government Bureau of the Rio de Janeiro Settlement, where his allies and he brought their retinues to bear upon the city's defences, and where he had made sure that he personally took the head of the viceroy, declaring himself no longer the duke of a provincial estate, but rather the resurrection of the Bourbon Dynasty from which his family were descended; thus had he taken the name of the last great Spanish king, a remarkable man who had held the empire's holdings in the New World together until the Holy Britannian Empire conquered Area Three, and Area Six subsequently fell apart, becoming nothing more than an ignominious mass of bickering, vainglorious warlords, for himself. Indeed, his namesake had accomplished a great deal under desperate circumstances despite the humility of his origins, and to lay claim to even an echo of that ingenuity and determination, in Sergio's mind, would be only to the benefit of the new realm that he and his allies were fighting to create, for their children, and for their children's children, that none of them might be forced to suffer the indignity of a sneering Homeland noble, where the sole fact of the location of their lands emboldened them to reach above their station in their disdain.

It had, of course, gone steadily downhill from there.

Not for the first time, he lamented that he hadn't listened to his wife, Lucia, when she'd told him, in no uncertain terms, that what he and his allies were doing, what they meant to accomplish together, was the height of foolishness. How could he have thought that his blood relation to an extinct dynasty would have made this any easier, when he and all the other noblemen with their artificially elongated nonsense names, the pretence of their forefathers before them who had learned that the length of a name was a signature of aristocracy in the Spanish Empire, were preening amongst each other and vying for glory? This was not so much a coalition, an alliance, or a nascent nation, as much as it was an army of generals. Every man wished to think himself the rightful heir to the legacy of the conquistadors, of Cortés and Pizarro and Quesada, and all those near-mythical figures who had first taken this land from the ancient empires whose iron-fisted rule over it was the foundation of future dominions; and so every man had turned from an ally to a rival, with a loose collection of retinues competing amongst each other, sabotaging and undercutting each other, noble scions with hot heads and nothing better to do quarrelling and duelling each other to the death in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and then Panama City, which they had made into a fortress, and these quarrels and deaths gave rise to new quarrels and new grudges, to the point where all it took was an escalating supply shortage for each proud, headstrong nobleman to accuse each other of sabotage, resulting in their fortress starving more and more by the day.

In the face of such a crisis of infighting, food had to be taken from the surrounding farmlands to make up the difference, but Santa Anna knew as well as he was sure many of his compatriots did that this land and its peasantry lacked the proper infrastructure to feed the nobles, their heirs and spares, their forces, and themselves all at once. So the peasants starved and became increasingly hostile, and in turn, less likely to forgive little slights, like a hot-blooded princox taking liberties with the wife or daughters, or indeed the sons, of a farmer or a rancher, or a group of boys making a mess of the establishment of some common bar owner or tavernkeep, drinking them out of house and home, and indeed the smarter highborn amongst their number knew enough of their history to understand that one antagonised the rabble overmuch at their own risk—they weren't Sixes, after all, what with all the Sixes in this part of their territory having long since been properly shipped off to where they could be useful until they died their unsightly deaths well outside of view of polite society—and so that was a crisis in the making all on its own; but one could not grow out of the ground bandages or anaesthetics, no more than one could fish up with a net bullets and Knightmares, all of which seemed to have vanished into thin air, presumably due to multiple teams of saboteurs fighting amongst each other and wasting their lives far from the front, while their noble fathers put on a brave face and bluster while not admitting to so much as a single transgression. Who knew how many of their soldiers now existed solely to feed carrion on hidden, ignominious battlefields, victims of their betters' grudges and foolish rivalries—their betters, who, above all others, ought to have known better.

Increasingly, Santa Anna found that he was of the belief that, even should they prove successful in shedding the yoke of Britannian rule, their fractious Neo-Spanish Empire would almost certainly collapse into warring states vying for dominance before the decade was out. And if, for whatever reason, he felt that he needed further evidence to substantiate that belief, he needed only to open his eyes and behold the room that surrounded him.

This had begun as a convention of a war council, specifically regarding the subject of what the best possible solutions they had open to them were to resolve this supply line issue, which, over the span of the past few weeks, seemed to have reached a tipping point. All of them knew, by this point, that if they pressed any harder upon the local peasantry, at best they'd be trying to squeeze blood out of a stone, and at worst, they would have created a belligerent on their grounds that they could neither afford to entertain nor to exterminate outright, given that the latter would put them no closer to solving the problem that threatened their ability to wage war, and indeed, it was all too likely to set them back from it entirely. And while it didn't do much to help matters that so many of their supply issues were exacerbated by the fact that the position they had to hold and fortify, despite being the closest thing to a choke point separating Area Three from Area Six, and therefore a prime defensive and strategic position against a suppression force heading out of the Homeland and down through Area Three, was still a whopping eighty-two kilometres of land—land that needed earthworks and pillboxes, resupply depots for their Knightmare corps, their bullets, and their bandages, outposts for reconnaissance along the whole of the front, trenches, anti-aircraft and anti-armour batteries, and most of all, the manpower to properly hold those fortifications, and the food and water to keep that manpower from starving on that line—in Santa Anna's mind, the far more pernicious issue facing them was exemplified best by the fact that they weren't even twenty minutes into the scheduled meeting time, and already two of their number, whose private retinues were third and fourth-largest among those that made up Los Peninsulares' armed forces respectively, were rolling around on the marble floor, brawling like school-children.

It was a mixed, messy, and sorry spectacle, the sight to which Santa Anna was bearing witness right then; for indeed, while it was certainly bad enough that Armando Castillo Salamanca Cortés, brother of the bereaved head of the House of Cortés (who had since retreated to his estate to mourn the presumed death of his only son, Francisco, leaving his brother with plenipotentiary authority), had come to blows with Fabricio Antonio de la Rosa de la Mancha de la Brasilia (plenipotentiary of the also-bereaved Rodrigo, whose own son Gabriel was likewise missing in action and presumed dead), in full view of all of their peers, it was far worse an indicator of their potential for cohesion that the ones who seemed determined to break the brawl up were a clear minority. Most of their would-be highborn comrades-in-arms were more consumed with egging the combatants on than the prospect of returning to the meeting they were meant to be having, and he even spied a few exchanging crumpled bank notes, wagering on which of the two would come out of the fist-fight the victor; altogether, the atmosphere of a war council called to order for the sake of addressing an increasingly existential threat to their very existence as a potential polity had been wholly lost, and the air that so enchanted the dozens of highborn attendees resembled nothing so closely as a lowly cockfight.

Santa Anna dragged a hand through his prematurely greying hair—he was not yet thirty, and yet it was the plight of Marie Antoinette, and the blood of her family the Habsburgs that flowed through his veins even now, generations into the future, that leached the colour from it, from the roots on down to where his locks ended, just past his broad shoulders. His fingers were thick, comparable almost to sausages, and his shadow loomed long across the table at which they were all meant to be sitting; his imposing height, which had once seemed to menace malcontents into silence more often than not, was now useless in the face of the sudden revelry that so arrested the noblemen who had chosen him to lead them, who were, nominally at the very least, under his command. His slate grey eyes slipped from the sorry state of his would-be empire, and instead turned to the periphery of the chamber, to the wall against which two foreign dignitaries leaned, observing the spectacle, and him, with very different reactions from one another.

The first to catch Santa Anna's eye, and visibly to catch onto the fact that the would-be emperor's attention was upon him, was a tall, lean, and exceedingly pretty young man, who couldn't be any older than his early twenties. His long face was curled in faint disdain, his narrow, almond-shaped brown eyes hard in their sockets, and also weary; jet-black hair adorned with a strange reddish hairpiece, the nature of which Santa Anna had accepted he could not discern, cascaded in a straight, fine, glossy wave to the small of his back, which had the effect of softening some of the hardness of his features as it framed his face—and his lips, which had not been particularly full in the first place, were pressed into a fine white line as he stood there, half-leaning up against the wall with his mostly-bare arms (he wore bracers) folded across his chest. But even if his features did not mark him as a foreigner, the make of the long, straight, double-edged sword hanging from a low-slung vermillion sash across his waist, the cut of his white tunic, the gold fastenings of his strange gold-trimmed royal blue vest with its darkened pauldrons of plied fabric, and the loose, low-gathered legs of his trousers as they met his boots, fashioned of simple brown leather, were a clear indication of not only Li Xingke's origins, but also where his ultimate allegiance lay.

But for all that Li Xingke's disapproval was perhaps more impactful with regards to his chances of receiving further support from Luoyang for himself and his allies, it was truthfully the other man who gave Santa Anna genuine pause.

He was tall, perhaps even taller than Li Xingke, for all that his lean, yet comparatively more lithe build made him seem altogether smaller than the Oriental, regardless of the potential difference in height. His shoulders were narrower, as were his hips, and he did not expose nearly as much skin as the reluctant, surly representative from Luoyang and the High Eunuchs did. The slender man's clothes were likewise of clear and unambiguous foreign make, with his dark blue Scythian trousers tucked into his knee-high black jackboots, a loose jacket of rich blue silk richly-adorned with gold and belted around the waist with a thick, layered sash, of a form of silk that Santa Anna remembered learning once was strong enough to turn aside a blade when it was properly folded. Beneath the jacket, he wore a high-necked black undershirt that fit very tightly against his chest, giving way to a neck and face possessed of a complexion that Santa Anna couldn't help but to compare to the mud of the bed of a river run dry; the man's features were the mien of a corsair, with all the ruthlessness and sly cunning one might associate with such a descriptor, and from his full lips to his ear to the arched brown brow above his hazel eyes, his skin was pierced with metal rings and beads and other forms of exotic jewellery, all along the right side of his face, and above his hairline (though a few errant locks of chestnut still escaped it) rested a green-grey turban, decorated with hanging beads of gold and burnished bronze. And it was only partly due to his outstanding, strange foreign-ness that Santa Anna was wary around Swaile Qujappat, the commander of the ten thousand elite Zilkhstani mercenaries that Li Xingke had brought with them, as a 'gift' from Luoyang; another part of it was the age-old wisdom, passed down from the households of innumerable ruined highborn, never to make the mistake of trusting a man who made his livelihood selling his loyalty; but the lion's share was the spark of amusement that danced in his eyes, and unfolded across his cruel, smirking face, as he beheld the unruly discord of the group that his cockless masters had sent him to aid.

Santa Anna did not trust Swaile Qujappat because it was clear that in their strife, he saw profit. He was a vulture, carrion, just as sellswords throughout history had reliably proven themselves to be, time and time again.

That, more than anything else, spurred Santa Anna to action.

Knowing already that slamming the table to get the attention of his nominal vassals would be little more than an exercise in futility, Santa Anna rounded the table, shoving his way through the circling press of finely-dressed bodies, to where two of his most powerful lords were wrestling in the proverbial dirt. He did not hesitate for a moment; he reached in between the two of them, and, with his herculean strength, he wrenched the two of them apart from one another.

Stepping physically between them, so that they could not resume their squabbling without dragging him bodily into it as well, he hauled both men to their feet, and none too gently, at that—de la Mancha first, and then Cortés the moment afterwards. Roughly, he brushed both men off, and then looked between the two of them as they stared daggers and bullets at one another.

"Enough!" he commanded, firmly, his voice booming across the room powerfully enough that all those in attendance had no excuse not to have heard him. "Too much, I would say—it is too much by half! It is no wonder those preening peacocks in Pendragon have looked down their noses at us for the better part of two centuries, for here we do their work for them!"

He glared harshly at both men in turn, and they each looked away, cowed; then, he turned his gaze outward, swinging it about at the spectators, causing them to turn their eyes to the floor one by one, unable to bear up under the weight of his displeasure.

"Our men starve, and we are seated upon the very precipice of ruin, while we brawl like children! I say now that the next man to raise a hand against his fellow shall lose it; and you all know as well as I that that will be a mercy in comparison to the punishment Charles zi Britannia would levy against us, should we fracture here, and by our mutinous disunity be brought to heel," he declared gravely, raising one large hand to thump against his chest, even through the layers of fine fabric in which he was garbed. And indeed, as he looked around at his unruly allies, he could see in their eyes the certain knowledge of the examples that the Holy Britannian Emperor would make of them for their defiance. "We must hang together, my friends, or you may rest assured that we shall all hang separately…"

The silence that followed his pronouncement was louder than any clamour their revelry might have produced. Looking past them, Santa Anna caught the hint of a frown pulling at the mercenary's lips, and he did not bother attempting to deny the rush of satisfaction that flushed through him at the sight of it. Not today, you jackal…

"Now, I must remind you all that we are in the presence of our honoured allies from abroad, and we have already disgraced ourselves in their presence," he continued in a scolding tone. "My lords, let us take care that we do not do further damage to our collective reputation moving forward, and return to the matter for which I called us to order in the first place."

There came then a chorus of shuffling feet and disgruntled muttering—for though, on the whole, the assemblage of highborn were almost certain to obey, Santa Anna's sense of satisfaction was short-lived. He knew better than anyone, perhaps, that this incident, while perhaps the most egregious, was hardly the first of its kind to have come to pass in the process of this grand rebellion of theirs, this great crusade, this war of independence, and if he had been naïve enough to believe that this would be the last such conflict, or in fact the most severe iteration that would manifest for the remainder of this war, then he certainly wouldn't have managed to hold them together, albeit barely, for as long as he had, and they would all assuredly have been dancing the hempen jig by now. What he had accomplished here with his words barely even qualified as a temporary solution, for he had but postponed the inevitable, and thus, Santa Anna had successfully resolved nothing, regardless of permanence.

If we had fought any sort of major engagement by now, he couldn't help thinking to himself as the other noblemen did as he bade them and moved to return to their seats at the large, ovular table made of heavy, rich dark wood, likely centuries old, it would have served as the crucible of our solidarity, uniting us in the flames of battle. In its absence, we are as yet untested—we are unfired clay in a dormant kiln—and so our quarrelsome pride and our combative blustering has been allowed to drive a wedge into the fractures of our differences and disparities. We fight amongst ourselves, for we have come here to fight and we have in fact fought no-one at all…

This part of Panama City, the citadel that was the old bastion at its heart, had in large part been left untouched, or indeed restored, in the wake of Britannia's conquest of it centuries before—the architectural styles of the Continent had been seen as worthy of preservation, even in those days, a sharp reminder of all that Napoleon and his insolent adventuring had taken from them—and in that age, the days of his namesake and the twilight of the Spanish Empire, the people who had built this place had still held fast to the Church of Rome and its doctrines; so, although he, as was the case with the preponderance of the nobility, would scoff at the notion of being a believer, of bowing his head to some distant demiurge who commanded them not to thrive within the order of the world He claimed to have created as such, Santa Anna found himself turning to the large stained-glass windows all around this chamber nonetheless. What he sought in the often gruesome, disturbingly beautiful depictions of penitents, virtuous suffering, and esoteric divine judgement, he did not himself know.

Was it succour, perhaps?

Reassurance?

Redemption, even?

He scoffed at that last thought, for though he may have repudiated the Holy Britannian Empire with every bit as much resolution as his noble comrades and would-be vassals, the ethos, the idea of Britannia flowed strong and true within his veins—truer, perhaps, than it did even within the veins of the Homeland aristocracy who held such disdain for the provincial nobility, even those above their station; the Homeland aristocracy who had grown anaemic, deficient, indolent in the wake of the Emblem of Blood: the highborn who claimed to be truly Britannian, even as they had forgotten the face of true ambition. Redemption was a poison, a narcotic placed into the hearts of the strong by the weak, that the mighty should come to crave it, and thus withhold themselves from their just due simply to feed that shackling addiction.

But even so, he would readily admit that there was nothing that could possibly forge their fledgling empire into a united front—indeed, such would require nothing short of a miracle…

The moment that a highborn courier burst into the chamber, with two of the sons of lesser nobles in tow, however, Santa Anna began to feel as if he ought to reconsider his stance on the miraculous.

"My lords!" declared the noble spare at the head—Santa Anna's vassals were loath to put their heirs into positions that were less likely to gain them glory or acclaim, however necessary such a role might have been, which was a mindset that Santa Anna understood as deeply as he disdained it as abjectly foolish, and it was a mindset he would not have adopted with his own heir, were his own firstborn child old enough to accompany him to the front from the family estate. Indeed, if the tidings this courier brought were at all as consequential as Santa Anna was hoping they would be, perhaps his vassals would be made to see the error of their ways, and the acclaim that could be won from positions that were less stereotypically 'glorious.' "I bring ill news from our heartlands—news that has been confirmed by the outriders that guard our estates."

"Well, then! Out with it, boy!" barked Cortés, who, with his broad, almost portly frame, sculpted by a lifetime of indulgence, his thick, coarse black hair, and his robust, oiled black beard and moustaches, seemed almost ursine with his blood up, his brilliant, electric blue eyes flashing with bloodlust denied.

The boy—and indeed, a boy he was, only barely of-age and looking about as far from a man grown as one his age could get—paled immediately, the urgency of his manner evaporating in the face of the bear of a man who was currently shouting at him. Santa Anna flicked his gaze over to the side wall and caught sight of Li Xingke, whose disapproval had evaporated, his expression shifting instead into one of cautious attention, and of the mercenary, who had perked up much more visibly at the prospect of dire news; but he could hardly allow such breaches of propriety—borderline insubordination, really, if he was being honest about it—to go unchallenged, especially after what had just transpired, so he rose from his seat at the head of the table and slammed both hands upon its surface, drawing the full and undivided attention of everyone in the room with a start.

"My lord Cortés," Santa Anna began, calmly, firmly, severely. "Forgive me, for I did not know that this was your hacienda in which we are meeting, or that your authority otherwise supersedes my own."

Cortés blanched with a pinched frown, but to his credit, he immediately understood how he had transgressed, and settled himself, lowering his head in clear and unambiguous deference. "I overstep, your majesty. I beg your forgiveness."

"It is granted. Mistakes are made when tempers are high," Santa Anna replied with a nod. "Ensure that it does not happen again."

Cortés nodded in return, and then let himself fall silent.

Santa Anna allowed the silence to persist, unchallenged, for five full heart-beats, purely to make a point—it was a delicate balancing act, to dominate so thoroughly that none of his vassals came to think that they could undermine him, but not so absolutely tyrannical that they baulked, and their prickly egos bucked his yoke in a fit of pique—and when he was absolutely certain that no others were in immediate danger of being provoked into more overt acts of mutiny, he turned at last to the three couriers who were stood at the far side of the room, near the heavy wooden double-doors, shaken and discomfited.

Instead of barking at them, or otherwise commanding them, he smiled as kindly as he could manage as he bade them forth with a wave of his hand. "Come forth now, lads, and let us hear it. The next man to interrupt or countermand you makes of me a liar, for I vow to you three that you shall be free to give what news you bear unmolested. Come, come."

The one in front, a spindly, bookish sort, with pale eyes aided by half-moon spectacles, and a thick mop of dark blue hair, stepped forth with one hesitant stride, and then two, and his movements betrayed the fact that he was very nearly drowning in his fine uniform. He bowed low in deference to Santa Anna, with the other two bowing at that cue, and when he raised his head again, the boy, who was quite unremarkably pretty, had reclaimed some degree of his composure. "Pirapora, Jatai, Coxim, Cáceres, Ascensión, and a bit of their surrounding areas, are no more, your majesty."

That caused a stir, lightning flailing like a whip through the bodies of the assembled vassals; it was, in short, unthinkable that the five towns most critical to their infrastructure could be gone, whatever it was that that meant, especially given the fact that no Britannian force of sufficient size to accomplish anything like that had slipped through their battle lines, or indeed around it (the Imperial Navy was quite thoroughly tied-up in operations against the European national and state navies in the North Atlantic, and there was not a single ship or submersible to spare, according to their intelligence that was verified by Luoyang), and that those five cities had been operational scarcely more than a month ago, meaning that all five of them had to have been 'made no more' in only a few weeks' time, without anyone knowing the wiser until just now, in this room.

But while Santa Anna shared his vassals' sense of alarm and confusion, in this disaster did he see a seed of salvation, which required only proper cultivation. After all, factory towns could be rebuilt, and the Sixes that would fill and work those towns bred like vermin; unity, on the other hand, was much harder for their movement to come by, and depending on what further information he could ferret out of the couriers, a convenient source for that rare resource may well have just been dropped into his proverbial lap. Santa Anna raised his hand, silencing the hissing clamour of wide-eyed aristocrats at the shocking news, and then he asked the question that all of them ought to have been thinking. "What is it that you mean exactly, when you say that these places 'are no more,' then?"

"Exactly that, your majesty," the lead courier replied clearly, reinforcing his voice with steel as he shifted to steady his stance. "There are no ruins, no sign of a struggle, or even of any bomb we know how to identify. The only evidence that they ever existed are their positions on our maps, and the dirt craters that mark where they once stood—as if they were scooped out of the ground with a spoon. The outriders caught a few scattered tracks, but they were unidentifiable, and it is their consensus, as near as we can tell of them, that the overwhelming majority of any significant force's signs of passage have either been swept away by the weather, or deliberately erased."

The whispering clamour was born anew, and twice as furious; Santa Anna was at a loss for words in that moment, and he took some small measure of comfort in the fact that, at a brief glance, Li Xingke and Qujappat both seemed to have been taken as thoroughly off-guard as he himself felt at the idea that such a thing could come to pass, that there existed means to accomplish such an outcome, especially without any of it alerting seismological sensors or surrounding areas—for if such a thing could be done, surely it had to be impossible for the means to accomplish it to be compact enough to not have alerted people who made their homes kilometres away!

But of course, the practical part of Santa Anna's mind, the part that had worked to make all of their political ambitions a reality, and then to keep them afloat for as long as he and his leadership had, found in the midst of the other part of his mind's animal alarm more than merely confirmation that this was what he needed, precisely what he needed, to forge a sense of unity and common purpose between his squabbling vassals; after all, none of them could have done it, for the fact that they lacked the knowledge to any degree that the means to accomplish such terrifying erasure existed in the first place, and none of them would have done it—it would have gone far beyond the scope of merely undercutting and undermining rivals, and into an act of treasonous self-destruction. They were not the nest of vipers here that surrounded His…Charles zi Britannia in the Imperial Court at Pendragon, to be sure, but even so, no one here would have successfully made it out of childhood if they were dangerously incompetent enough to believe that erasing five crucial towns (which, for all that they could be rebuilt, would require a herculean undertaking to create what would be, at best, sub-standard facilities working at a quarter of the manufacturing capacity of their predecessors, if they were extremely lucky, and would likely bankrupt the majority of them besides, even if they willingly went further into debt with their foreign benefactors) in order to get a leg up on their competition would in any way be a good idea—or indeed, if they believed it was not an idea worth lobotomising oneself for even having had in the first place.

Which left, of course, the impossibility that there was a significant force that had been snuck behind their battle lines; and if that was the case, then it was almost a certainty that the disastrous strangulation of Los Peninsulares' supply trains was their doing as well. Perhaps they were even responsible for the deaths of the heirs of several of the lords and ladies who were either gathered or represented here, and perhaps it had not, in fact, been several contesting bands of saboteurs killing each other in the countryside.

In all ways, it seemed, this was the ideal solution: the perfect common foe.

"My friends and vassals, honoured lords and peers of good standing," said Santa Anna, his voice on the verge of bellowing as it overpowered the dull roar of panicked discussion, which subsequently subsided and went dutifully silent. "I believe that our diligent couriers are deserving of a great deal of our thanks, for it is their labours that have exposed a threat in our midst. A strike force that has been behind our lines since perhaps even the beginning of our crusade, an invisible hand that has riddled our side with thorn and briar. It is they who must be responsible for the eradication of our towns, and it is clear that it has been they who have preyed upon our convoys, bringing us now to this state of desolation upon this, which could now, or at any moment, prove to be the eve of battle. They have been clever, and they have been cunning, to have all of us here at each other's throats, to have preyed upon our old rivalries and ancient grudges, that we might accuse each other in our haste of slight and sabotage, and thus to have our common cause for which we are gathered here, our shared vision for which we defied the Holy Britannian Emperor himself, rent asunder at the hands of our manufactured disunity."

There was a murmur of agreement from the gathered nobility, even from the two who had until very recently been brawling; and perhaps they already suspected what Santa Anna was going to say next, and in their alarm and in the face of these revelations, they had chosen to lay down their arms against each other. He could hope as much, at least—and if he wished to go further, he could take the next step to ensure that they laid aside whatever grudge divided them for the sake of mutual vengeance.

"I believe that it is, perhaps, not at all outlandish to conclude that the deaths and disappearances of several of our heirs, in our heartlands where we believed them safe enough as they rallied support from the dons in the countryside, are due, as well, to our phantom foe," said Santa Anna, gravely, and there, he saw the spark of realisation brighten, fertile ground where the sowed seeds of solidarity might at last take root, flourish, and, in time, be reaped. "Well, I say, for one, that this is unacceptable. That we shall be the victims of Britannian machinations no longer. I say that we all shall gather up our forces in common cause, and we shall march south to squash the trickster that sows chaos between us, before their designs can further carve from our bellies the very organs of our vitality, like some wasting disease. And then, undivided, our forces that have departed to destroy our foe shall return here, and spit in the face of Charles zi Britannia, the man who seeks our ruin above all others. Who stands with me?!"

At once, all the vassals of what would be the Neo-Spanish Empire rose from their seats, fists raised, cheering, their faces set into the furious visage of retribution through bloodshed. The uproar was deafening, almost, and it reverberated throughout Santa Anna's barrel chest, his ox-strong heart thudding in sympathy with the outcry's vibrations.

Santa Anna nodded, and he found it within himself to grin broadly. All his most pressing problems, it seemed, now to be laid to rest in a single fell swoop. Whoever the commander of the enemy strike force was, Santa Anna almost felt as if he now owed it to them to look them directly in the eye and shake their hand in thanks—for once they were brought down and laid low, the strength of the bonds that tied all of his vassals together would likely be far stronger now than they would have been if all they had to deal with was a suppression task force coming down from the north, and had not gone through this crucible of suspicion that had been sown, and now dispelled. Whatever factionalism that might have split their empire after they had won their independence from Britannia would have its manifestation postponed significantly, if not prevented altogether, and it was all due to the enemy commander and their clever strategy.

But not clever enough, Santa Anna thought with vicious satisfaction; he turned to the couriers, then, and bade them, "Bring us maps and our commanders with their aides. We must discover the identity of our foe, and their location, posthaste."

"Y-yes, your majesty," the scrawny boy replied, startled and stiffened; he snapped off a brisk salute, which his companions mirrored, and then departed—and though the correct address in this case would be another bow, he figured he could hold off being a stickler for protocol even in the face of well-intentioned errors and honest mistakes until after he had won the right to keep the crown his vassals sought to bestow upon him, so he allowed them to scarper off to obey without comment.

"I might be able to be of some assistance in the discovery of the enemy commander's identity," said Li Xingke, stepping forth from his disaffected lean against the wall. He bowed, with one hand laid upon the hilt of his sword, and then rose, his expression wholly indecipherable even as he spoke further. "I've been instructed to lend you all necessary aid, at least in an advisory capacity, and I believe this qualifies."

Qujappat moved from his place upon the wall as well, swaggering forth from his indolent leaning to stand alongside the black-haired Oriental, his lips twisted into the sort of smirk Santa Anna would not think out of place upon the visage of a particularly venomous and opportunistic serpent. "And if you're going to be arranging for military action, especially the sort you want to be swift and decisive, well…let's just say that the reputation of my Immortals didn't come from out of nowhere. And my people've been kicking up dust around here, and not much else. We'd be much more useful in a field operation than we would be standing guard, anyways."

The man's voice was deep and smooth, very nearly a purr—and Santa Anna trusted it not one bit, of course. But that didn't mean that the sellsword wasn't speaking the truth; indeed, by all accounts he could find, the Immortals deserved every bit of their notoriety and more. It would be folly to leave such an asset, however volatile, out of any sort of operational discussion, especially when said operation had the potential to be of crucial import to the remainder of the war effort, so he nodded to both men in turn, and said, "We would certainly be grateful for any aid and information you can grant us, gentlemen."

He took it as a sign of how good his mood still was that voicing such a sentiment, even if only in Qujappat's general direction (which, of course, this wasn't, and was instead much more precisely targeted than that) didn't fill him with revulsion and misgivings. There was comfort to be found in that old aphorism after all: war makes for strange bedfellows.

Li Xingke nodded sharply, and approached the table in full, with Qujappat in tow. "I believe I can at the very least give you the name of the foe you face. I had previously discarded it as questionably relevant, but I see now that I was mistaken in doing so."

Li Xingke had a captive audience in the next moment, as all the men of consequence who were in attendance there—Santa Anna included—bent their ears to better hear what the Oriental had to say.

"The foe you face is the Fourth Princess, Justine vi Britannia," the man pronounced gravely, his voice half a sigh, but no less heady for it. "And, if my sources are to be believed, she is the woman who, at the age of eleven, single-handedly brought the Empire of Japan to its knees…"

---

The 588th was soon to be on the move.

It could be seen all around the encampment—the way Lindelle ran hither and yon to get as many of her last-minute consultations and errands in as she could, having built quite the robust relationship with the locals' wise women, midwives, and medicine men; the manner in which many hundreds of assembled Sutherlands, several of which had been retrofitted with cannibalised Gloucester components to better synergise with her and her friends' combat prowess, knelt in ordered ranks, with the last of the supply raids having come and gone a handful of weeks ago; the way that the soldiers moved, diligent and purposeful about the area of the encampment as they broke it down—comrades, both old and new.

It was the new ones that concerned Liliana chiefly, if she was being honest.

She hadn't doubted Justine's judgement at first, of course. In fact, she wouldn't say that she doubted what she'd said, her decisions, her judgement, at any point from the formation of the initial stratagem up to now. But she, much like the rest of their friends, had been in those towns, had walked those streets that they were tasked with liberating the prisoners of before destroying them outright. She hadn't been prepared for the reality of everything the former Royal Force had seen upon Justine's face that evening coming true in the worst possible way, and it had shaken her—had shaken all of them, if she was being honest. At the time, as she'd walked through that place that, Justine was correct, would insult the very Pit itself by comparison, it had been difficult for her to conceptualise how these hollow-eyed, hopeless people could be turned into a fighting force of any worth.

And yet, she stood now, corrected—for, as had been the case with the former Royals, who formed now the upper echelons of the 588th, Justine had seen something in these people that perhaps they hadn't even seen in themselves.

She strolled over to the sidelines of the grounds they'd cleared for drilling and training, taking up a canteen she'd set aside, and drinking deep of the lukewarm water within—awful, but necessary. She'd just wrapped up a drill session of her own, in fact, and as she watched her trainees amble away from her, their hollow eyes now ablaze with what she might best describe as a hyper-realisation of life, Liliana Vergamon couldn't help but chuckle, smile, and shake her head in wonder. How Justine had seen this capability in the same sorts of people Liliana herself had seen when she'd journeyed to Cáceres with Odette in tow, she had long since accepted she might never understand; but they'd rebounded spectacularly, and the former Sixes had learned with a fervour, dedication, and determination that she couldn't help but admire. They lived and breathed the crafts of war that Liliana and her friends imparted upon them, to the point where she'd noticed that some of their Britannian comrades among the rank-and-file were actually intimidated, not only by the speed with which their emaciated brethren-in-arms regained their vitality, to the point of straining against the fringe cases of medical science, according to Lindelle, but also by how they conducted themselves once they were once again on their feet and ready to be trained.

A few of her friends had seen this potential division as a looming issue, but Sif and Justine had both dismissed the problem outright: they maintained that a proper engagement would forge them into a full and cohesive unit better than anything, and they had one of those on the horizon even now. Liliana knew better by now than to doubt that they were right—Sif had been granted the position of Justine's field commander, even, as Suzaku's Geass left her rather ill-suited to the necessities of giving orders and revising tactics, and they all agreed that she was well-suited to the role, and only partly because Justine had made the decision, given how well Sif, with Yen's help, had acquitted herself during Justine and Suzaku's initial absence—but it didn't stop her from feeling a sharp pang in her heart at the distance that seemed as if it was determined to linger between the two sets of comrades.

They were around five thousand strong, now—as it turned out, the four hundred-plus that Justine and Suzaku had rescued and brought with them was the smallest group they'd rescued, for Pirapora seemed to have been the worst of them in terms of how efficiently it wore down its prisoners to half-living husks in approximate human shape—and though it had seemed likely to be touch-and-go in terms of supplies, their suppliers had gone above and beyond the call of duty. The suits of body armour were a particular highlight; a note addressed to Justine had come with the first shipment, explaining their new equipment's origins as a superior design from someone who worked for Justine's wife, Carmilla—and, at least as far as they were able to discern, the veracity of the claims laid out in the letter were more or less self-evident, offering better coverage as well as reduced encumbrance and state-of-the-art hardware. The effect its arrival had had upon morale could not be overstated: overnight, they had gone from, at least on some level, the disposable refuse of an empire too consumed in its own ruinous lust for power to value them, to the beginnings of an army of its own that was wholly loyal to Justine.

Hope had settled into their bones, even as they moved to break camp and ready for battle, for what would be the beginning of the end of their war—one way, or another.

Liliana took hold of her vibroglaive from where she'd laid it, gingerly and covered, upon the rich black river-soil, and with it in hand, she stretched, feeling a few of her joints pop with a satisfying rush of relief. She blinked a few spots out of her eyes, and grinned as she spotted her lover, Lisa, headed directly towards her, her anti-materiel rifle slung across her slender shoulders.

"Hey there, stranger," she called out as her sharpshooter girlfriend drew closer—and it wasn't long before Lisa's mouth, still small, but, much like the rest of her features, not nearly so mousey as it had been when they'd first met, broke into a lopsided grin of her own, which seemed to broaden with every step she took. "You come here often?"

"Mm, reasonably so," Lisa shot back, playing along seamlessly. "What about you, pretty girl? Can I get you a drink?"

"I'd wager you could get me quite a bit more than just a drink, stranger," Liliana teased, as she, too, stepped forth, seeking to close the distance between them somewhere closer to midway, lowering the point of her vibroglaive so that it would no longer be so clearly an obstruction.

"I'd wager you're right about that," said Lisa, and now that she was close enough, she wrapped her arms around Liliana's waist and yanked her closer, provoking an airy giggle from the noblewoman, before leaning her head in. "How's this for a start, hmm?"

Their lips met, the taste of brine and fish and raw mint swapped between them on heavy breaths and playful tongues—far from chaste, but nowhere near obscene—and after a scant few indulgent moments, the two separated, stepping back from each other, but not so much that they could no longer feel the heat of the other's breath upon their face. Liliana let a few light giggles run through her body before saying, "Well, I'd say it's plenty auspicious, myself… What do you say we head back to our hut, try and get one more round in for the road?"

Lisa laughed, too, but hers was more of a chuckle than a giggle, a sound that emanated from deeper in her chest. "I see the tales they tell of the insatiability of Britannian noblewomen aren't exaggerated in the slightest, after all…"

"Oh, hush, you," Liliana scolded playfully, leaning her head forth to plant their foreheads against each other. "Don't try and act like you're not a noblewoman, too, Lizzy-love—well, at the very least, in all the ways that matter."

"You know, you might just have a point there, Lili. After all, it's not as if I can get enough of you, either," Lisa relented, her voice dropping into a throaty purr that twisted Liliana's insides up oh so very sweetly, and the sharpshooter's eyes snapped up in a flash, dancing emerald meeting smouldering maroon in a union every bit as intimate as the meeting of their lips. Then, she sighed ruefully, drawing away further and shaking her head. "But, sadly, no can do. The Boss wants to see us. Suzaku said it was urgent, and she looked dead fucking serious. Said she'd handle getting the others, and sent me to grab you."

Liliana pouted at being denied, but she relented after a moment with a sigh of her own. If the Boss (a nickname for Justine that the members of the former Royal Force, with the later addition of Villetta, had adopted over the course of the past few weeks, when they collectively began to feel increasingly strange about using such familiar terms to refer to her when she wasn't around to insist upon the informality) did, in fact, call for them to gather, then Lisa was right—sex had to take a back-seat, especially if the subject of their assembly was so grave that it had Suzaku looking serious again. "You're right, you're right…"

Lisa gave her a smile that was all pained empathy—she took the denial about as poorly as Liliana herself did, which was a nice, reliable little boost to the blonde's ego—and she jerked her head towards the central pavilion sharply. "C'mon, we don't want to be the last ones there."

Liliana agreed wholeheartedly—Justine certainly wouldn't mind, but she swore that Jeremiah had a special talent for levelling disapproving glares at stragglers. "Let's go."

The encampment was large, almost too large for the clearing that it was in; the new growth that they had had to beat back would recover very quickly, as the locals attested, but its relatively recent and quite severe clearance was nonetheless an unambiguous indicator of how far they had come, how strong they had grown up until this point, and as the two lovers strode through the beaten paths through the encampment, surrounded on all sides by soldiers, both new and old, who toiled tirelessly to break camp and embark upon the final phase of the Boss's stratagem, readying themselves to move, to march at last to the 588th's first proper battlefield, far removed in scale from all of the skirmishes, ambush raids, and city breaches that had brought them such success up until this point, Liliana couldn't help but think that it was a bit bittersweet, in a sense, as all things ending are; but, by the same token, if she was being honest with herself, she was certainly eager to leave this war behind her—and she knew well that that sentiment was hardly unique to her amongst her friends.

All that was to say that it was a longer trek than it used to be to reach the command pavilion, to the point where Suzaku and Lindelle came up behind them, joining them in their journey, and making theirs a silent group of four as they passed within the central structure, the final quartet to arrive.

As soon as they entered, Liliana knew something was wrong, and from the way Lisa went stiff, she knew her eagle-eyed paramour had noticed it, as well. She wasn't particularly surprised that Jeremiah didn't spare them even a shadow of the glare that she'd been anticipating—she could hardly blame him, with how Justine was very nearly quivering with icy fury as she stood there, behind the portable map-table, fully attired in what they had come to regard as the Boss's regalia, her black coat and all, her pet raven, Satanael, perched upon her shoulder; after all, it was exceedingly rare for Justine's moods, any of them, to reach such a level of intensity that her state of mind could be gauged merely by entering the room, so the teal-haired Knight of Honour could certainly be forgiven for having his hands full with making certain that his charge wasn't going to do anything drastic.

"We're all here," Suzaku declared levelly.

Justine went still as a sculpture, and then slowly rose to her full height. Darkness seemed to seethe out of her, and Liliana found that she was strangely surprised that the interior of the pavilion remained free of frost, even given where in the world they were; when at last the Boss spoke, it was with the calm of a drawn blade. "Very good, Suzaku. Thank you."

Liliana caught Suzaku's reserved nod in her peripheral vision, and dread dropped like a stone in her stomach—a reaction that one look around at the other six of her friends who seemed just as ignorant of the specifics of the current situation as she was, Marika, Lisa, Lindelle, Odette, Sif, and Yennefer, told her was, once again, hardly unique to her. Suzaku was serious, Hecate was ashen, Jeremiah was worried, Villetta's visage and bearing was so inscrutable that she might as well have been carved from stone, and even now, Justine radiated waves of frozen rage, held on the tightest of possible leashes, on the other hand; but before any of them could step forth to ask that the rest of them be filled in, Justine took a deep, harsh breath, piercing as a winter wind, and began once again to speak.

"I have made…a grave miscalculation," said Justine, her tone like the crackling of river-ice. "And it has led me to make a potentially lethal strategic error. For this, I feel I must express my utmost and most sincere apologies to each of you; it was not my intention to mire you all in a battle that I cannot guarantee we will win. But it seems that, in spite of my best efforts, that shall come to pass regardless of my intent."

The silence that fell in the wake of that declaration was sepulchral, as all of them stood there in the pavilion, awaiting the Boss's next words.

"A strike force has been observed departing from the rebel stronghold of Panama City. It is led by a significant portion of the most powerful nobles of the rebellion, and all of its die-hard supporters of note; a conservative estimate places their fighting strength at approximately two hundred thousand, including their Knightmare corps of no less than sixteen hundred Sutherlands and Glouchesters, as well as all ten thousand of the Immortals, and the one thousand Zilkhstani Ghedo Vakkas they brought with them to the field," said Justine at last, solemn as a glacier. "They have us outnumbered by at least forty to one, they have taken the Knightmare advantage, they are headed south as we speak, and their mission objective is to obliterate us."

Liliana imagined that were they anyone else, the news that they had just received would have struck fear and terror into their hearts. And perhaps that was the goal of committing such a large force to meet the 588th on the field of battle, to break their morale before battle was even joined. Liliana would hardly have considered herself an especially skilled tactician in her own right, not like Sif and Yennefer and Justine, but even so, she could see the sense, and indeed the cleverness, in such a thought.

But Liliana was not anyone else. She was Liliana, Heiress Vergamon, formerly of the Royal Force, and one of Justine vi Britannia's eleven most loyal subordinates. And so instead of fear, hoarfrost and iron entered her heart, girding it, and her resolve along with it.

She knew even then that her friends felt the same, could feel the chill of winter entering their blood, bolstering their souls, and their courage along with it. So she stepped forth before any of them, and she said to their leader, with a shrug of her shoulders, "Then let them come."

A murmur of agreement rolled throughout the remainder of them, with even Hecate regaining all of the colour her face had lost, her countenance settling into a mien of absolute determination as she nodded sharply.

The Boss looked around at all of them in mild surprise—and had they really not yet sufficiently proven the extent of their loyalty, that their leader would not have already understood this reaction to be all but a foregone conclusion, Liliana couldn't help but wonder, though she knew that it was hardly fair of her to think—before the same determination shuttered her own face, her hard, gem-like eyes blazing, the dark and the chill of her aura growing bitter and deathly as it poured off of her in her contemplation.

"Very well, then. Prepare for battle," she commanded with a sharp nod. "Hasten the breaking of the camp, and make sure we're ready to move out within the hour. We'll head north and intercept them, giving battle far away from the village of the River-folk or the surrounding area. And I say this now as an absolute certainty:

"The coming battle shall mark the beginning of the end of this war, one way or another."