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.

37. Closer

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

They were finally here, at long last.

After being told, at first, that it would only take a month for the brass to gather and arm the reserve forces that had yet to be deployed, only to then experience delay after delay while several of Gino's and Anya's classmates were stuck fighting for their lives in the brush down south, the scions of the Houses of Weinberg and Alstreim had begun to think amongst themselves that the time for them to travel to the south in force might never truly come, or that they would only be deployed to find those very same people that they had gone to school with, and were passably friendly with, long-dead upon the field. So when Justine's wife, who turned out to be Gino's cousin, of all people (hey, small world), had approached them, sat them down, and given them assurances of equipment delivered in a timely fashion, even in the face of the brewing scandal with the Chief General, Gino felt no shame in admitting that he'd been sceptical.

And yet, even as the scandal of the treasonous corruption of Reginald Hargreeves quickly began to compound, to snowball, and to spin out of control as more and more evidence began to surface (and really, how had it taken all of this so long to come out, that there was so much proof of it to be found, spanning the course of years? Did the OSI simply not care? Did His Majesty truly consider the issue of one of his top military officials, second only to the much younger Minister of War, being so thoroughly compromised inconsequential? Or had the OSI, perhaps most terrifyingly of all, become disloyal to the throne?), Milly had delivered on each and every promise she had made. Everything from Knightmare Frames down to the individual bullets were present and accounted for. A mobilisation order handed down from the office of the Minister of War, who had sent his right-hand man, High Admiral Oberstein, to handle things in the interim (given that virtually all of Hargreeves's staff officers were implicated in the scandal alongside him, to some degree or another), had supplied Gino with all of the regiments of trained soldiers he could possibly have asked for, and with all of that in order, it had taken them a little over a week to parcel out all of the materiel before moving out of the Homeland.

Gloucesters, Sutherlands, tanks, APCs, field guns, supply lorries—Gino actually felt a bit bad about receiving so much support, especially in comparison to the pittance that Justine must have been given at the beginning of her campaign, but Anya had been, as always, quick to call him on his idiocy. In any other circumstance, the force that had been placed at Gino's back, a host of around three hundred fifty thousand, give or take, would have been considered to be on the smaller side of things with regards to putting down a rebellion on the scale of the noble uprising in Area Six, she's argued; and she also argued that expressing sentiments that could be interpreted as lèse-majesté—or worse, sedition—in the presence of a full-fledged Knight of the Round would be a terrible career decision, even if the two of them weren't under assessment by said Knight of the Round, regarding whether or not they would be considered worthy of full initiation.

To the latter argument, Gino had quickly ceded the point.

Dame Dorothea Ernst, the Knight of Four—he and Anya were in agreement on the point of the fact that, as far as it concerned which of the Knights of the Round could have been assigned to accompany and assess the two, there were certainly far worse members of the Order to be stuck with in a warzone. Indeed, though she had quickly proven herself to be rather taciturn in her affect, possessed as she was of a severe precision that spoke greatly of the influence the Knight of One had had upon his colleague, she had proven herself more than willing to lend a hand whensoever her expertise was necessary, if only to a point—after all, it wouldn't do for her to compromise the integrity of the assessment. Gino appreciated that there was a fine line between assistance and interference, and he appreciated as well that however fine that line might have been, Dame Dorothea walked it with a level of grace that Gino couldn't help but envy.

Lady Ernst didn't stand on ceremony, and she certainly wasn't shy about getting her hands dirty, if and when the need arose. She joined the grunts for weapon maintenance, she chatted with the pit crew of technicians assigned to her Gloucester, and she was absent from the G-1 Base the command staff that Gino had been assigned worked out of more often than she was seen within it—when Panama City, and the long defensive lines cleaving across the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, stood before them, the Knight of Four was among the first devicers to volunteer on a dangerous mission to range a few days ahead of their host to shut down the rebel artillery; when it came time to charge into the breach alongside Gino and Anya, she followed their orders without question or hesitation; and when the siege assault was all over, and the rebel fortress was theirs at the end of four gruelling days of miserable battle, Dame Dorothea hadn't been in the slightest bit reluctant to join her two assessees as they took in the sheer volume of defensive measures the rebels had built and had available to them before they broke and ran south, into their own territory—she'd agreed when Anya made mention of how much worse the siege could have been, and then took it upon herself to turn it into a teachable moment, pointing out to them all the indications that this fortress, and the defensive lines and trenches and howitzer emplacements that ran from it right across the span of the isthmus, were undermanned.

It was by a factor of about half, she'd concluded, informing the pair directly that the position was missing around half of its fighting strength, and recently so by the looks of it.

They'd rested for a day, and then gave chase to the remnants of the rebellion that had retreated into the northern Andes; and once they made their way through the mountain pass, where the retreat of what was left of the rebellion that had been at Panama City seemed to have grown more organised, based upon the traces of it that Dorothea, and Gino, who had grown up mostly at his family's countryside estate, and whose father was quite the conservation enthusiast besides, had been able to discern from the roadside snow, it became clear after a few days' travel precisely what had befallen the other half of the rebel force that had been stripped from Panama City's defences.

The hundreds of square kilometres of open field before them, across a river that ran high and swift and treacherous, flushed as it was with fresh rainfall (that had thankfully passed them by for the most part as they descended from the pass) was a thick, ugly cluster of craters and mud, littered heavily with pools left behind from the aforementioned rainfall. The wreckage of tanks, armoured vehicles, and Knightmares was as widespread as it was dense, and the ground was glutted with corpses numbering in the tens of thousands at the very least. And at the other end of the field from the forces Gino, Anya, and Dame Dorothea had led down from the pass, behind one, two, three layers of trenches, there was an orderly encampment, bustling with personnel.

"Welp, I think it's fair to say that we found her," Anya remarked to him, as they stood at the feet of their own Knightmares and stared out across the river—just the two of them, this time. "Right where I had imagined she'd be…"

"How do you mean?" Gino asked, his brow furrowed in confusion at the sudden subject-broach.

"Well, you tell me," she replied with a nibble of sarcasm. "Where else would you have expected to find Princess Justine, other than across a battle-scarred wasteland that's layered thick with the corpses of her enemies?"

Gino wanted to contest that, he truly did—but honestly, he'd already assumed that the encampment across the way belonged to Justine's 588th, and he was, frankly, a little afraid to discover if it was for the same reasons that Anya had just pointed out; so instead, he thought better of it, and shook his head. "Then we might as well venture across and tell her we're here…"

"I mean, yeah, sure, whatever, we could do that," Anya shrugged sardonically; then, she raised her hand into the sky, pointing at something above them. "But I'm going to go ahead and guess that she knows we're here already."

Gino looked up at the sky, following the line Anya's pointing hand drew, to what looked like a bird of prey soaring high above them. He brought a hand up to shield his eyes against the glare of the sunlight, but once he'd spotted it and gotten a good look at the animal, or at least as good of one as he could hope to manage at such a distance, he returned his eyes to Anya, and asked her, "So, is this, like, some sort of…I don't know, albatross situation, or something…?"

Anya sighed in exasperation, her arm dropping back to her side. "…Do you remember the rumour back at the Academy that the Gaunt heiress could talk to birds, and have them respond back?"

"I mean, yeah," replied Gino, his confusion only growing. What relevance did schoolyard gossip have to their current situation? "But since they also called Justine 'the Ice Queen,' and she turned out to be plenty nice, I didn't think it was smart to take the rumours all that seriously after that."

"Well, I have it on good authority, from someone whose cousin grew up with the current Duke of Rocambole and his sister, that that particular rumour, at least, wasn't just gossip," Anya explained. "So, if she's to be believed, apparently Hecate Gaunt can hold conversations with her pet bird, which means that now that it's seen us…"

And then another bird joined the first, this one rather large and lacking in the particular profile of a raptor, as they circled the two friends' position on the bank before flying off back towards the camp on the other side of the river and across the field. "Huh. Two birds, it seems…"

"In that case," said Gino, doing his best simply to take the revelation in stride as much as he could manage, "then I'm doubly sure we'd better cross the river and tell her we're here, don't ya think? After all, as my dear cousin very accurately pointed out, it's pretty rude to just loaf around in someone's doorway."

Anya slugged him in the shoulder, hard.

"Ow!" he complained, rubbing at his arm dramatically.

"Yeah, yeah, well fuck you, too, Gino," Anya huffed, rolling her eyes in exasperation and turning back towards where their own forces were arrayed behind them. "Fine! We'll do it your way."

"My way?" Gino asked with a smug smirk. "What, do you mean to say you weren't planning for us to link up with Justine's forces at some point?"

"How about you just shut the fuck up, okay?" his pink-haired best friend snapped at him. "It's not my fault you're too boneheaded to be as creeped out by her as I am!"

Creeped out…?

"Wait, Justine creeps you out…?" he asked, confused all over again.

"She creeps everybody out!" Anya cried, gesturing wildly in her apparent frustration. "News flash, Gino! Your cousin's wife is fucking scary!"

"She's never been anything but nice to us," Gino protested, folding his arms across his chest.

"Yeah! And that's part of the problem!" the rosette exclaimed with a sigh. "If she's that absolutely fucking terrifying when she's being all polite and playing nice, then just think of how bad she must be for people who piss her off! I swear, she does this thing with her eyes where it feels like she's staring into your soul! Literally everyone else we went to school with who wasn't in her clique felt that way about her!"

Gino kept his arms crossed, staring down at her until she was done freaking out. He felt for Anya, truly, and in almost any other circumstance, he'd drop what he was doing and try and help her work a way through her fear, but…it was more than just his life on the line here, or hers, or either of their careers. Carmilla and what she'd said hadn't been far from his mind since even before they'd left the Homeland: her ability to help him protect Ayame was contingent upon him returning her royal bride to her, safe and sound. And even without that hanging over his head, the fact of the matter was that they had a war to win—and from the looks of it, their own success was dwarfed by the victory the young woman that they were making wait while they talked, a princess of the realm, had won with what couldn't have been more than a fraction of the fighting strength they'd brought down with them.

So when it seemed as though Anya had run out of the energy to be afraid, he asked, as kindly as he could manage, "Are you done?"

Anya looked at him, wide-eyed, but he maintained his meaningful stare, and from the flicker in her eye, she was picking up what he was putting down, so to speak. So, she sniffed, rolling her shoulders, and shuttered her face for a few moments, eyes and mouth closed as she composed herself. She nodded, then, a gesture of sharp affirmation, and opened her eyes again. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm done. Let's go meet your creepy cousin-in-law, then…"

"Alright, good," Gino replied with a nod. "Let's go find Dame Dorothea and get moving…"

"What did you need me for?" came a familiar, businesslike voice that startled them both.

"L-Lady Ernst!" Anya exclaimed. "We were just…"

"Whatever it is looks like it's going to have to wait," the Knight of Four interrupted, her intensely green eyes locked on the far side of the field across the river. A gust of wind caught the hem of her cyan cloak and sent it billowing dramatically as she crossed her arms beneath her chest, and jerked her head in the direction she was looking. "Seems like we've got company…"

And indeed, when Gino turned to look, two Sutherlands, one grey and the other crimson, were now heading across the field towards them at high speeds—one of them, the crimson, wielding an EM jousting lance, and the other, the grey, holding a dormant heatsabre. Yet, in spite of the potential menace of the two approaching Knightmares, Gino found himself grinning—he knew those colours and those weapons, and he'd wager that he knew the women bringing them across the field. "More than company, Lady Ernst—I'd say that's our escort, in fact. We'd best mount up and get going, just the three of us."

Dame Dorothea shrugged, jostling the black braid draped upon her shoulder. "If that's the way you want to handle this…"

Watching the two Knightmares draw up short at the river-bank, only to stand tall and waiting, gave Gino ample confidence to nod his head, and confirm, "It is."

Restricting the party to just the three of them turned out to be the right call, Gino thought about ten minutes later as they came up the opposite bank of the river. It had taken them the better part of that time since he gave the order, after all, just for them to make the crossing in Knightmares—and so he shuddered to think of how time-consuming moving the entire army across would have actually been. The better part of the day, he was sure, at the very least—and that was if they were lucky.

Escorted on either side by devicers Gino was reasonably certain were Odette Rochefort and Marika Soresi, the three of them in their Gloucesters—Anya, Dame Dorothea, and Gino himself—made their way across the battle-scarred field, past forming piles of bodies being assembled by crews of what looked to be infantry attired in strange battle-armour, wrecked tanks of foreign make, destroyed Knightmares that Gino could now identify by sight as belonging to the rebels… There was a clean-up effort well underway, and it was on full display as they proceeded to the main encampment at the heart of it all—a well-organised set of concentric rings of tents and other temporary habitation units, with a yard off to the side that had been cleared for the express purpose of servicing the ranks upon ranks of kneeling gunmetal-grey Sutherlands that lay dormant upon the green already, and another yard upon which two familiar figures that he thought he recognised as Elizabeth Bernadotte and her girlfriend, Liliana Vergamon, were holding a drill session, it looked like, for a moderately-sized group of off-duty infantrymen, though Gino and his two companions were escorted past far too swiftly for him to get a definitive look at them, and thus, to know for certain. He wasn't exactly inclined to fuss about that, however—he assumed, of course, that he'd be able to see them more closely a bit later on, once he'd presented himself to their royal commander properly.

A larger structure rested at the centre of the encampment, and it was to this central position that the pair of colour-coded Sutherlands ushered them; they came to a stop a little ways away from it and made to dismount, all five of them—Anya, Gino, and Dame Dorothea all bearing the uniform of the Knights of the Round to some degree, while the grim-faced pair of Marika Soresi and Odette Rochefort (oh, sweet, sweet vindication) stood guard in their crimson and grey normal suits, respectively—and at their silent, implied urging, Gino ventured forth past the two black-armoured close-helmed soldiers who were also standing guard, into the entrance of what could only have been the command pavilion, and thus into the murmurs of conversation taking place within.

"Hey, sorry we're late! You wouldn't believe…" Whatever clever quip Gino was about to break the ice with died in his throat as he registered the interior of the pavilion—and the fact that he'd interrupted, it seemed, a strategy meeting.

There were five people whose bodies already took up space within the pavilion, and of those five, three seemed to crowd about a folding table to some degree or other: Sif Blaiddyd, Gino recognised, and a woman dressed all in black with wavy, chin-length raven hair was positioned opposite her; the woman who could only have been Yennefer Desrosiers, then, brought over a very plain tray laden with a steaming kettle and a set of nondescript ceramic cups, and she placed it down on the side of the table, adjacent to what must have been a map spread out upon the surface of the portable furniture, before pouring it—and as she did this, a dark-skinned woman with bound silver hair that Gino recognised in only the most vague of terms from Ad Victoriam (which didn't bother him all that much, given how rare it was for there to be much social overlap between the hundred students of the youth program, and the several hundred candidates attending the Officers' Academy, in his experience) leaned, as politely as one could lean, about the raven-haired woman in black's slender shoulder to indicate a few points on the map itself, while a man with teal hair and eyes of burnished gold loomed in his combat armour over the woman in black's other shoulder.

All of them stilled to varying degrees, and the armoured man's eyes flicked over to glower at Gino, only for the woman in black to hold up a gloved hand, and rise from her position above the table to regard all three newcomers with an intense, piercing amethyst stare. "Ah, good, you've finally arrived—and not a moment too soon, difficult though that may be to believe, given the circumstances…"

Gino blinked, once, then twice, momentarily stunned by the sight he beheld, and the recognition he suddenly found in the planes of her face, the elementality of her gemstone eyes, and the distinct timbre of her unmistakable voice. "Justine! I-I almost didn't recognise you. Have you done something different with your hair…?"

His former classmate's full, haughty lips twitched upwards at one end, forming themselves into a crooked, plum-hued smile that was equal parts fondness and exasperation. She drew herself up to her full height, drawing an errant lock back from her face with her fourth finger, and responded, "Well, I suppose you could say that… Though I will confess, it was Suzaku who did most of the cutting."

"You look good," said Gino, scrambling not to let himself flounder. She'd been beautiful at school, true, but he'd had an easy enough time of ignoring it then (partly because they'd been younger when they met, and he was at least a little intimidated by her, himself); now, though, after not having seen her at all in the months (and oh dear gods, had it already been a year?) since graduation, only to meet her again during a time when she was so clearly in her element, he was painfully aware that he'd lost whatever inoculation he'd managed to cultivate against her allure. "Like, really good. The hair, it suits you."

Her visible dark brow arched dramatically, her bemusement clear—the direct sunlight streaming into the pavilion through the entrance, glinting off the band of engraved silver and glittering rubies that had been fastened about her throat for as long as he'd known her. "Gino, I'm married."

"N-no, I meant that…platonically," he clarified, though his voice sounded pathetic even to his own ears. He shook his head vehemently in an attempt to shake loose the enchantment of her beauty, and to call to mind once again all the reasons why he'd never even entertained the hypothetical, not even as a joke, at any point during their acquaintance—which was a list upon which his friend's status as a Sapphite and the existence of Ayame both competed for first place. "Sorry, I was just a bit…shocked."

Justine shrugged, and gave him a dismissive wave. "You're certainly not the first, I assure you, my friend, and I'm afraid I can't quite say that you'll be the last."

"Um…hi, your highness," Anya piped up, her expression a transparently artificial mask of calm, her face ashen-pale, and her posture a ramrod-stiff one hundred sixty-three centimetre tall pile of fraught nerves and fear as she bowed about as low as she could. "W-we're here, too…!"

"And it's a pleasure to see you here, as well, Heiress Alstreim," Justine replied in an even tone, as she favoured the smaller girl with a smile full of polite serenity. "It gladdens me to see that there are some things that remain unchanged since our school days—where Weinberg goes, Alstreim is certain to follow. Though you can rest assured that, unlike those who typically give voice to such observations, I certainly mean no derision by it. Gods below know Suzaku's absence would have been tantamount to a lost limb…"

Anya nodded jerkily, clinging as closely as she could to his left side without making it obvious that she was doing so; but to Gino's right, one final presence went unremarked upon.

Dame Dorothea crossed her arms, and cleared her throat rather pointedly, prompting Justine to turn her head slowly and regard the Knight of the Round, her gaze growing harder and sharper—and Gino immediately decided that he had to be imagining the sudden chill that suffused the interior of the pavilion. "Ah, and you even brought along the Praetorian. How very…quaint."

"A pleasure, your highness," Dame Dorothea replied with an easy smile that didn't reach her eyes.

The brief flash of a smile, more of a twitch of the face than anything worthy of the title, that Gino's former classmate shot in the Knight of Four's direction oozed condescension and disdain. "Oh, is it, now? Would that I could say the feeling was mutual. But then, I expect you'd understand that better than most, wouldn't you? I mean, as long as we're on the subject of unrequited feelings, at any rate…"

"And here I thought we'd be linking up with a commander worthy of her commission," Lady Ernst shot back, maintaining her composure but for a small, nearly imperceptible furrowing of her brow. "Not some spoiled princess with nothing better to do than hurl tired insults…"

"Me with the tired insults, you say?" Justine replied mildly. "That the irony escapes you only lends further credence to my condolences, I should think. But then, perhaps I shouldn't expect too much of you, should I? You're in good company, at any rate—perhaps it's becoming something of an epidemic amongst your entire kennel of beaten hounds, to wag your tongues so carelessly. Why, Lord Bradley, for instance, swaggered in with his careless insults in much the same way,as though he believed himself to be beyond reproach! It's the darndest thing, too…

Justine smiled, then, her eyes flashing, and immediately, in that moment,Gino saw exactly what Anya was talking about—she was abruptly the most terrifying sight he had ever beheld, more so even than his cousin's creepy art galleries. "You're beginning to remind me a lot of him…"

Silence fell in the interim, as Dame Dorothea began to work herself up in protest to the open threat; but the posture of the remaining four occupants shifted in an inarticulable way, and suddenly, the Knight of Four seemed to be very much aware that, if she chose to take issue, the three of them were outnumbered, and very much surrounded.

"On the subject of the judicious allocation of our time here,however, I believe we do indeed have a great deal to discuss," the princess remarked, abruptly changing the subject; and with the softening of her expression now that the Knight of Four stood momentarily cowed, the atmosphere began to bleed menace until it was once again as it had been when they entered. "So tell me, Gino, Heiress Alstreim—how much have you brought here as far as fighting strength is concerned, and how many casualties did you suffer in the course of your arrival, hmm? I'm given to assume, on account of your presence here in this pavilion, that the rebel stronghold at Panama City has fallen?"

"That would be correct, your highness," Anya replied, stepping forth as the first of them to shake off the primal fear that Princess Justine had just driven into them (which perhaps made sense, given that of the three of them, she was the most used to having to work through her own fear of the woman) to supply the relevant information. "We set out from the Homeland with around three hundred fifty thousand soldiers at our backs a few weeks ago, taking the roads down through Area Three—we didn't think the southbound railway infrastructure was likely to be able to withstand the stress of mass transit of modern materiel…"

"We didn't think?" Princess Justine interjected softly.

"…I didn't think, your highness," Anya corrected herself after a moment. "And Gino agreed."

"I'm sure he took your word for it, like as not," the princess remarked airily. "In any event, it was a prudent decision—even if it was built with that kind of freight in mind, the rebels and their sympathisers along the provincial border are almost certain to have sabotaged it. How many days did it take to assault Panama City? That entire isthmus is inhospitable terrain during peacetime, and the rebels aren't idiots: I'll have to assume that the defensive line they set up made life quite miserable…"

"Four days, and around thirty thousand casualties," said Anya; and finally, Gino found his voice.

"Our equipment took an even rougher beating than we did, honestly…" he added. "Dealing with all those howitzers they parked along the defensive line was a real pain, but we managed."

"That makes enough sense," said Princess Justine as she stepped around the table, folding her arms beneath the corset-encased swell of her chest as she leaned back against it—with Sif Blaiddyd positioned between her and the tray of tea. "In such a situation, and with such advantageous ground, it is far easier to set up autonomous defences to counter materiel than it is to prevent the progress of infantry, and it's much more efficient besides, and it explains where the rebel artillery was all this time… Though, with your forces suffering such relatively light losses, given that all you seem to have brought with you is an array of field guns and a Knightmare corps, the rebel garrison would have had to have been depleted…?"

"By about half, at our estimate," said Anya, cutting back in smoothly now that the discussion, this impromptu debriefing, was underway. "At the time, we weren't exactly sure where the rest had gone, but I would venture a guess to say that at least some of them wound up here?"

"This was their target, in fact," said the princess with a slow nod. "Or rather, I was. As it turns out, being starved of supplies for months on end turns the difficult task of maintaining unity between a group of prideful, upjumped noblemen determined to reach beyond their station into an impossible one. The leader of the rebellion, a man calling himself 'Santa Anna,' as we've recently learned, gambled what sounds like half his fighting strength, and the entirety of the upper levels of his chain of command in the form of those noblemen who were his co-conspirators, upon coming south to crush me, and the 588th along with me. So we bled him and his men upon the field, slaughtered his troupe of Zilkhstani mercenaries to a man, fought our way through somewhere on the order of eight-tenths of his materiel, and sent the rest to flight before we could arrange a proper crossing. Depending on how many of the northern garrison made it out into the Andes, I'd imagine the remnants of Santa Anna's army joined up with their retreating allies, and are now trying to escape into the heartlands of their territory to lick their wounds…but the question is where…"

"Wait, wait, wait," Dame Dorothea interjected, clearly taken aback. "You mean to tell us that you, your highness, and your…your ragtag band of irregulars…managed to fight off the other half of the army that was initially positioned along the Panama Line? Part of which included Zilkhstani mercenaries?"

"We suffered around six hundred casualties, ourselves, in so doing, of which some two hundred-odd were ultimately lost to us," Princess Justine admitted with a sedate nod, and a heavy sigh. "That so many were wounded or killed, even in spite of our best efforts to prevent it, is… Well, we'll certainly have to do better in the future. But I'm not blind to the fact that, given the circumstances, the outcome could have been far, far worse…"

"Told ya," Anya snorted, elbowing Gino in the side.

"Told him what, pray tell?" asked the princess.

"Oh, I said that…there wasn't any better place to find you, you know, than on a battle-scarred field that's carpeted with the corpses of your enemies," said the rosette, stiffening up like a mouse in the eyes of a hawk as she did.

And Princess Justine's eyes shot wide, her lips pursed in shock, before grinning, to the point where she even looked down for a moment, perhaps a bit bashful—and, as if to compound further confusion onto the situation, once again, Gino couldn't see the princess as anything but Justine: his classmate, a girl he would tentatively call a friend, and his fellow former force captain, to boot. "Really, now? Well, that's a very kind thing for you to say, Heiress Alstreim. Indeed, that's high praise, coming from the woman who's so clearly the brains of the operation…"

"Bullshit," Lady Ernst snarled suddenly, prompting both Anya and Gino to start, and back away; it was the first time either of them had seen the Knight of Four lose her temper to such an extent that it broke through her composure, and neither one of them was keen on catching the proverbial shrapnel. "That you would spout such an obvious—!"

"I haven't yet given the order to commence with corpse disposals, Lady Ernst," Justine interrupted, her tone, her posture, and her affect all cool condescension. "You're welcome, of course, to venture out of here yourself and count them until you're satisfied—though I'd imagine counting from one to one hundred eighty-four thousand, approximately, would be quite the time-consuming task. I can have you shown to the lot we've cleared to take stock of the destroyed Ghedo Vakkas, or the Europian tanks we're still breaking down for scrap as we speak. In fact, name your preferred method of verification, and I daresay I'd be only too happy to provide it to you. But until that time, I would ask that you kindly refrain from impugning my honour, or the honour of any under my command. Else, I shall be forced to seek redress, and frankly, you and your skills are far more valuable to this war effort alive and unmarred than eyeless—or, as I once promised Lord Bradley, heartless. Are we clear?"

Dame Dorothea seethed, and shot a sharp glare at both Gino and Anya as they put some distance between themselves and her, but Justine's voice lashed out like the crack of a whip, or perhaps a shattering glacier. "Are. We. Clear? Or must I fetch myself a crop to remind the wayward mongrel of her place?"

"I don't answer to you, princess," Dame Dorothea spat venomously, as she visibly worked to bring the shattered pieces of her decorum back together.

"As an irregular unit, the 588th exists outside of the established chain of command," remarked Justine, miming checking her nails through her black gloves as she spoke and not offering so much as a glance in the direction of the Knight of Four. "So when His Majesty, in his infinite wisdom, sent me here to do the impossible, or to die trying, he granted me, de facto, the ultimate authority to conduct operations in this theatre as I see fit. So yes, Dorothea Ernst, Knight of Four, as of this moment, you do answer to me, as per His Majesty's orders. Mark my words: you may bark all you like, and it will come to naught; should you think to bite the hand that holds your leash, however, I will not hesitate to put you down."

Dame Dorothea continued to glare, and Justine held her gaze evenly, her contempt so profound and tangible a force that Gino almost thought that he could see his breath fogging for a moment there—so in the interest of preventing this conflict from coming to blows, knowing as he did that any reprimand he or Anya might get for what he was about to do would not be anywhere near as severe as the shitstorm that would rain upon them should Lady Ernst be killed in this pavilion, he stepped forth, catching four sets of speculative eyes from both the two members of the former Royal Force and the pair Gino assumed were Justine's Knight of Honour and her retainer as he did so, and said to his examiner, "Lady Ernst. I order you to stand down. Please."

The Knight of Four's hackles raised, but ultimately, she broke off her glare with a hissing grumble that could have been any number of curses.

Justine nodded sagely. "I'm glad we understand one another. Now, Gino, this wasn't at all how I'd wanted to announce my intent to take command of your forces, but…"

"You have it," Gino sighed, answering before she was even finished posing the question as he drew his own black-gloved hand through his blond hair. "It's thanks mostly to your wife that we're even here in the first place, after all—and I like to think I know you well enough, Justine, to take you at your word, no matter how…incredible it seems, that you fought that battle and won… It certainly looked like there were enough bodies for it out on that field, just at a glance, but even so, you've always been a stickler about not lying, so I think I speak for both Anya and myself when I say that, in light of that, you're the one we think is most qualified to direct our efforts."

"We're at your disposal, your highness," Anya echoed in agreement with another bow.

"Lovely," Justine sighed in what sounded like joyous relief, hopping off of the edge of the table and circling back around it to reclaim her former position, the silver-haired and dark-skinned woman who looked like she was a retainer, based on where she stood in relation to Justine, smoothly shifting back into her own previous posture as the princess moved. And, as if that itself had broken some manner of spell upon the pavilion's original occupants, Desrosiers moved towards the table once again, and continued pouring out and distributing the still-steaming contents of the humble-looking tea-kettle. "Now that that potentially unpleasant bit of business is well and truly settled, we can finally proceed."

"You got a plan in the works?" Gino asked, crossing his arms as he drew closer to the table.

"Indeed we do," Justine replied with a sharp, cutting smirk. "Tell me, Gino, Heiress Alstreim…

"How are you two with hunting?"

---

The sun rose first upon the seaside of the Rio de Janeiro Settlement, administrative capital of Area Six; the sparse cover of fluffy white clouds did nothing to impede the lustrous god-rays as they hit the sea and sent the surface of the south Atlantic to sparkling like the legendary golden city the conquistadors had sought in centuries past. The Settlement belonged to an earlier era of Britannian architecture, a more rustic period of engineering, and this lent it an almost ageless beauty, a relic of those bygone days of grandeur as the Old World was put to the political (and, at times, literal) torch, and those who had escaped to the New obsessed themselves with recreating it, so that at least part of the realms over which they had ruled in their rose-tainted dreams might endure in Napoleon's wake. It was a city out of time, its streets sprawling and endlessly organic in ways both large and small; and while the decline of gold as a measure of wealth kept this time capsule fading into obscurity, once means were measured at first in coal and kerosene, and now in the luminous pink mineral that had sparked more than one war on its own, it remained one of the jewels of the Holy Britannian Empire, even to this day.

And yet, none of that concerned Justine in the slightest.

No, what concerned Justine vi Britannia right then, as she sat in the palm of Jeremiah's Sutherland, which was itself perched upon high ground directly northwest of the rebel capital, was the veritable fleet of ships that lingered in the bay, meandering to and fro.

Many of them were private vessels, she could see, and they were bad enough—but that didn't even begin to approach the problem presented by the flotilla of Chinese Federation warships that were guarding them, thus providing an easy method of escape, for her enemy to slip through her fingers, denying her the assurance of a definitive end to this conflict. After all, were the High Eunuchs not craven bottom-feeders known for wielding so-called 'governments-in-exile' as a political tool to establish new vassal-states? That had served as the manufactured casus belli for dozens of different armed conflicts the Chinese Federation had waded into over the course of the past century, especially after the ascendancy of Mao Zedong to the halls of power, the man who spearheaded the restoration of the institution of the Tianzi, and thus the foundation of the government of the Chinese Federation as it existed today.

To say that the situation vexed her was to put it lightly.

"Jeremiah," she called out, as she carded her hands through her hair, correcting the windswept look that was prone to developing given her new mode of travel in the wake of her Knightmare's destruction.

"Your highness," the man replied affirmatively from within the confines of his cockpit, his voice feeding directly into her earpiece as she glared malevolently at the sight before her, as if the sheer force of her ire alone would be sufficient to make the offending vessels vanish from her sight. That power would certainly have made her life much simpler if it were hers. "I presume you'd like for me to set you down?"

"If you would be so kind," she sighed—the sound of it turning guttural in irritated displeasure as she shook her head, satisfied at last with how her hair sat about her face. "I suspect we have a great deal to consider… I'm calling for a strategy meeting, full attendance, post-haste. Tell the soldiers that they're free to set camp if they so choose—we won't be here overnight, I don't believe, but it may take us a little bit to figure something out."

"Yes, your highness," said Jeremiah; and as he relayed her orders to the rest of her friends, she was certain, the Knightmare lowered itself into a kneeling position, placing the hand in which she sat upon the grass of the verdant hill, where she could slip back onto her feet, upon solid ground, with minimal issues. This she did, the scalloped tail of her coat fluttering behind her as she set her heeled boots upon the earth, and once she'd also made certain to adjust her coat's high collar to her satisfaction, she held up an arm to catch Satanael as she swooped down to alight upon the outstretched limb, before the raven quickly climbed her way up to perch herself upon Justine's shoulder, pecking at the loose, wavy locks of her hair as if attempting to preen her.

Lowering the arm, Justine sighed heavily, her breath laden with exasperation and frustration, as she lifted her other hand to place it upon the cap of her vibroblade, fastened to her hip underneath her black coat. They'd risen to the grey predawn sky, and here they were now, positioned a ways away from the rebel capital and having hit what she might charitably call a 'minor setback,' with the hour of the day beginning to encroach upon the start of what some people (Justine among them, for instance) might have deemed midmorning—there had already been several points where it galled her, just how much of a difference even a little bit more would have made in this campaign, in terms of the resources she had to hand. And while certainly, the field of siege warfare had advanced quite precipitously since the days before the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Constantinople, there was still a hard limit on what she could do, even with her exceptional five thousand at her back, that did not include incurring hideous casualties in service to only the most pyrrhic of victories.

"Do you think it counts as being outsmarted?" she asked her knight, now dismounted, and coming up from behind to stand alongside her—or at least, as near to it as protocol allowed. "Given the fact that I did predict this eventuality, I mean…"

"It isn't a lack of cleverness that has made this situation such an impossible one," Jeremiah mused, pausing for only a fraction of a step before he took his place at her right-hand side (as it was a point of personal preference for her to wield her blade primarily with her left hand, and to reserve the employment of her right for other manual tasks, such as writing), looking out as she did over the bayside settlement. "In light of that, your highness, I'd respectfully argue 'no.'"

Justine smiled wanly. "Well, I suppose there's that, at least…"

"'There exists no stroke of strategic genius that may surmount in truth a particularly egregious lack of war potential'," Jeremiah quoted aloud, his suited-up form shifting in her periphery in a manner that suggested he'd folded his arms behind his back, the winged sword pin upon his breast glinting with pride. "Now, precisely what it is that qualifies as a 'particularly egregious' lack, as opposed to an egregious lack, or perhaps even just the simple and elemental lack, is relative, with the mark of a superior general being the ability to do more with less, and by how much. There's no real way, however, to eliminate that truth entirely. One cannot do something with nothing."

"You're correct, of course," she conceded, shaking her head again. "But that doesn't do very much to change the fact that we were charged with prevailing at the very beginning of this, does it?"

"…No, your highness," her knight sighed this time. "It, in fact, does not."

They stood there in relative silence as Justine waited for the rest of her friends to join them, and the commotion at the base of the hill filled her ears with the telltale sounds of an encampment's erection for a few long minutes before she sensed the presence of her other companions—the thought occurred to her that, in all likelihood, they'd eventually come to need a group name that was more wieldy than 'the former Royal Force,' but that was far from her most pressing concern at the moment, so she noted it down and let it pass from her mind. Villetta, her indispensable retainer, brought up the rear alongside Suzaku, but by and large, they didn't dally, gathering themselves at the crest of the hill against which the camp was being set up, and awaiting Justine's calling them to order.

"Right, then," she sighed, turning on her heel to face them, Satanael looming upon her pauldron. "I daresay we have much to discuss. But first and foremost—Hecate, if you would?"

Hecate nodded. "I took the liberty of sending Artemis out when I heard that you'd called us for a meeting. She should be back momentarily."

Justine felt her brow raise—and though she remained impressed, as well she should be, by both the competence and the initiative of those under her command, it was complicated somewhat by the feeling of being managed instead of managing. But she was also well-aware, by this point, that she had something of a complex when it came to people going out of their way to help her, even in the case of subordinates, so it was a complication she tamped down into a little box, and carted it off to the back of her head. It wouldn't be a productive use of their time or her energy to dwell on it right now, and they were on a timer.

Perhaps, she thought, that would be a good place to start.

First, however, credit where credit was due. "Exceptional foresight, Hecate, as always."

"Of course, Justine," Hecate replied with a deferential nod.

"Now, while we wait on the results of Artemis's reconnaissance sweep, I'm going to ask, just as a point of procedure, so to speak, if you all saw what was docked in the bay," said Justine, taking a step into the collective her friends and most immediate subordinates had formed. "I'm sure you have, but just to be certain, so that we're all on the same proverbial page."

Everyone nodded, with scattered murmurs of affirmation.

"As of now, we're on a time limit, my friends," Justine explained with another sigh. She was doing quite a lot of that, she noticed, and had done over the course of this campaign—she made a mental note to herself, for after the end of this conflict, to take the time to fill the ranks of the 588th, and to construct for her warriors a proper chain of command. Partly, she hoped that that would cut down on the high frequency of frustration she'd experienced across the course of this rebellion, though she did accept that there was a certain degree of irritation that was simply endemic to warfare; but also, while they made do initially, they were already beginning to strain administratively with only five thousand soldiers. They needed an officer corps even now, really, and that need would increase exponentially as their numbers grew. But the issue of just how she would—she and her friends would go about organising the 588th Irregulars into what would surely be the single deadliest and most effective fighting force in the world, as befitted the steadfast valour her warriors had consistently displayed, was one that would have to wait until after they were no longer in the middle of an active war zone, no matter how thoroughly they'd broken the enemy's backs already. "If I'm correct, we have until Gino's forces crush the rebel remnants to take the Settlement for ourselves; else, the rebellion shall continue to vex us in exile, and we may all of us surely find ourselves marched up to the headsman's block for our perceived failure…"

Just then, a very familiar raptor swooped down from the higher-altitude thermals—and without any visible effort, Hecate reached her arm up and caught her companion's talons upon the reinforced forearm of her normal suit. The merlin gestured and cried in rapid, warbling successions, to the point where Justine couldn't understand what was being said (on account of her total lack of exposure to the specific quirks of Artemis's unique methods of communication); but from how Hecate's azure gaze hardened as the report of her feathered friend continued, she could understand,and it wasn't good.

Hecate nodded, hefted Artemis onto her shoulder, and with her words, confirmed it. "The city has been heavily fortified. The ghettos… They slaughtered them all. Gunned them down in their homes…"

Cold lanced through Justine's heart at that, an increasingly familiar friend—the deathly chill of the flames of her anger licked their way down her veins. She saw her friends' faces harden into grim casts: her anger was theirs, now, for they had seen as she had seen, and knew as she knew.

Hecate took a deep breath, and continued. "It looks like martial law. Artemis estimates somewhere on the order of thirty thousand as a garrison, including Knightmares…"

"So it was as I suspected," Justine huffed, shaking her head. "After all, what can an aristocrat value more in life than their legacy? Their lineages, through their spouses and their heirs… They must be all the household troops that were left behind to guard the estates…to make sure the lords' wills are obeyed, even in their absence… Panama City fell a scant few days before we met Santa Anna in the field. I would not in the slightest be surprised if, when the fortress came under siege, the lower-ranked spares and vassals that were left behind told the rebel nobles' families to take their retinues and seek shelter in the Settlement. A clever contingency, admittedly, and one which we, my friends, at the moment, have frightfully little in the way of resources to effectively counter…"

"We took on almost seven times that number a few days ago," Suzaku remarked, even as her brow furrowed in brooding. "Any reason we can't pull off that kind of upset again?"

"We prepped our ground last time," Sif replied with a sigh. "Trenches. Earthworks. Gun nests. The chaos mines. That had as much to do with our eventual victory as any clever tactic we might have devised or adapted otherwise, if not more so. But we don't have that luxury here. We're not in a strategic position that forces them to come to us. The proverbial shoe's on the other foot—we're going to have to try and successfully capture the Settlement ourselves, now, and assuming what Justine predicts is correct, which, as we all know by now, it usually is, time is not on our side. We have no naval support, so no blockade. No blockade means no siege worthy of the name, and while that leaves us the option of an assault, we, to be quite frank, just don't have the time to put in the kind of clever prep work that lets us take the Settlement in an assault without taking hideous losses… For Hell's sake, we don't even have artillery…"

"She's right," Justine admitted ruefully. "We don't have the numbers to capture the Settlement, we lack the ability to make up for that lack of numbers with clever allocation of resources, and to add insult to injury, unless we want our quarry to slip the net, and subsequently become yet another in a long, long line of Luoyang's 'governments-in-exile', any assault we mount must strike hard and fast to cut off the enemy as they try to escape. If we want to bring an end to this rebellion once and for all—if we want to forge any justice for all that we have seen here, to make it so that all those people, the ones we couldn't save, did not die in vain—then that objective becomes non-negotiable."

She could see her friends' agreement reflected in their eyes, but it was ultimately to no avail: no matter how she looked at the problem, they simply didn't have the tools to deal with the situation that now arrayed itself before them effectively. And so they pondered in silence, an open forum with no speakers: it was, even to Sif, upon whom Justine had come to rely when it came to matters of battle tactics, a problem without an acceptable solution.

"I could go rampagin' through," Suzaku volunteered at last with a flippant shrug. "Cause a whole lotta chaos, let y'all get into the Settlement to take care of shit, make sure the trash doesn't try to take itself out…"

"One or two Knightmares, I'll grant you, and even that's risky," Justine refused immediately. "But, in all likelihood, you'll have to contend with dozens in there, if not a number in the low hundreds. That is not a fight I'm putting you into even without the rest of the garrison, infantry, which will cut you to pieces as quickly as you can regenerate, just through sheer rate of fire. The amount of damage you would take in the process…there won't be enough calories in the entire Settlement to restore you after that. You'll die, Geass or no, Suzaku. So no."

"Justine, my Geass is the only one that's got any shot of…"

"I said no, Suzaku. And that's final," Justine snapped, who was officially out of patience for this. "My personal feelings on the matter aside, there are wars we have to fight after thisone, Suzaku. Or have you forgotten that? To consign you to death so brazenly here may, in fact, win us the battle, I'll grant you, but it will put us one step closer to defeat in our overarching war for the fate of the world. So no, Suzaku. Categorically. I will not let you waste yourself. Not here, and certainly not to them."

"Alright, Justine," Suzaku relented with a huff. "So, any of you eggheads got any bright ideas?"

"It sounds like the sort of situation that would require a minor miracle to turn out well for us, if I'm being honest," remarked Lindelle with a shrug, her moss-green eyes fixed firmly upon the ground as she chewed upon a bare thumb. "I'm not a tactician, not by any means—so if Justine and Sif can't think of anything short of one that'll pull our collective asses out of the fire, I sure as hell can't…"

A tense silence fell upon them in the wake of that statement—and Justine could see that Lindelle's point of view on the subject was by no means unique.

It was then, however, that Justine noted Satanael perking up.

First Satanael, and then, a moment later, Artemis followed suit.

"What is it?" Justine asked the corvid perched upon her shoulder. "What have you noticed?"

"It's flying!" cried Satanael, her first proper vocalisation; and yet, any celebratory statement Justine might have thought to make towards that end died in her throat, as the raven continued talking. "It's big! It's flying! It's flying! It's big!"

"Satanael, what on Earth are you talking about…?" Justine asked, as Hecate similarly engaged with Artemis; but a moment later, she could hear it, too.

It started as a low whirring, almost a hum, but not quite—too regular, not nearly cyclical enough. It sounded like it was coming from the west, and while it was getting louder, the sound remained soft, barely distinguishable above the murmured clamour of the 588th setting up camp. In fact, Justine was almost sure that none of the soldiers at the base of the hill would have been able to hear the approaching sound.

The shadow it cast upon them, however, was perhaps a bit more definitive, as far as early warnings and notifications went.

"What in Hell's name is that…?" asked Marika, her eyes wide and her jaw slack in shock, with her body turned halfway to gaze upon it.

Lisa, whose eyes were every bit as wide, but whose jaw remained firmly in place, replied, without taking her gaze off of it for even a moment, "I might be wrong, here, but I believe that that, there, is our requisite miracle…"

It was the size of a battleship, snub-nosed and symmetrical in shape, with a silhouette that was in the approximate form of an A. Its ski-laden underside was a sterile white, its ever-so-slightly recessed hull reddish-orange, almost to the point of terra cotta, and a large black cannon was fitted upon its bow, while what looked like small runways were fixed to its wings, located near the rear, forming what looked like, at first glance, three prongs, like a trident.

But, perhaps most wondrously of all, it was flying.

"Lloyd, you mad, brilliant bastard," Justine couldn't help but mutter aloud, halfway to herself, as she staggered backwards, her own eyes wide, astonished to behold the magnificent spectacle that was the flying airship. "You did it. You finally cracked the code…"

Satanael fluttered her wings and took off with a flurry of panicked squawks, quickly gaining air as she fled the vicinity—and that was the moment when Justine realised that the ship was descending…

"I think we'd best clear the area," she advised her friends, tearing her eyes away from the airship to look upon each of them in turn. "Now."

Thankfully, none of her friends were too gobsmacked by the sight to acknowledge her orders. One round of nods preceded a collective organised retreat from the ground where the large airship was coming in to land, the aforementioned set of skis operating as landing gear; it wasn't long before they'd managed to put a (presumably) safe distance between themselves and the flying battleship's estimated landing zone, and it was from that distance that the twelve of them observed the vessel's descent—alongside, of course, the steadily-swelling crowd of soldiers who'd come from setting up camp to see what the commotion was about, up close and personal.

The hill they were standing on was a large one—almost like a plateau—and it was the only nearby ground that was both clear of trees and out of the direct view of the Rio de Janeiro Settlement. Justine couldn't imagine that such a large craft coming in for a landing here would go unremarked-upon by observers, of course, which might have been a cause for concern…but then, she herself had ample experience with people being unlikely to look up, so perhaps the landing would be able to be done with more discretion than she'd have otherwise thought. She shook such considerations from the forefront of her cognition, and took a few deep breaths to corral her racing thoughts back into their proper places, each train of thought realigning itself as she drew the mantle of calm about her and her hoarfrost heart. It wouldn't do for her to present herself as a discombobulated mess—even to people she considered colleagues, and, perhaps, even friends in their own right. She needed to have herself in order, and be ready to act on whatever game-changing element Lloyd and Doctor Croomy were bringing with them to the battlefield, whether that was the completed Lancelot, or perhaps something more.

The airship touched down upon the ground with a muted thud, as all that weight rested itself upon the soil, and the large turbine-esque structures built into the vessel's underbelly, which had emitted bright and vivid green light while the ship was in the air, now began to grow dim, before darkening entirely into dormancy. In the silence that followed, Justine occupied part of her mind by doing her level best to ignore the fact that, with how the vessel had positioned itself as it landed, the long barrel of the ship's very large bow-cannon was pointed almost directly at her; and then, after a few interminable moments, the airship's white underbelly split open to extend a gangplank that Justine surmised to lead up into a hangar bay, at the top of which stood a number of figures shrouded in relative shadow.

"Yoo-hoo, your highness!" cried a very familiar voice in an unmistakable playful, sing-song tone. "Special delivery~!"

"Lloyd!" Justine called out in response, not bothering to suppress the grin splitting her face as she took a few steps forth, so as to better greet the man. After a moment, she noted, Villetta and Jeremiah both stepped forth as well, taking up their positions to either side of her—it was almost enough to remind her of the peaceful time before her wedding, and the mixture of nostalgia and yearning that thought provoked was too heady and potent for her to allow to influence her freely. She stuffed it, too, into a box, and put it away—though she made sure to keep it within arm's reach nonetheless. "It's been too long. I trust that you brought Doctor Croomy along with you?"

"A pleasure to see you again, too, your highness," said Lloyd, the sing-song tone subsiding, if only by a hair, as he began to amble his way down the gangplank, high-collared lab coat and all. "And you say that as if I could get rid of her if I wanted to."

"Lloyd!" came an equally-familiar scolding hiss, as, sure enough, out came Cécile Croomy herself, who was similarly dressed in attire that Justine couldn't help but think was far more fitting for a laboratory environment than a battlefield. "Ah, hello, your highness! We've brought a few other people along with us as well, if you don't mind."

"Now, why would I mind that, when you come at the appointed hour, bearing the instrument of our salvation?" Justine quipped lightly, shifting to stand with arms akimbo, a hand upon her wide hip. She raised her free hand, then, and pointed towards the hangar. "That is, of course, assuming that what you've brought here to us is none other than the completed iteration of the Z-01 Special Weapons Platform, Unit Designation: Lancelot? Aside, of course, from this…rather spectacular airship, that is. Bravo, Lloyd."

"Thank you, your highness, although I'm afraid I can't claim much of the credit," was Lloyd's airy declaration in response. "In fact, it wasn't me who ultimately figured out how to make the Float System work at all. That honour goes to our dear colleague, Miss Einstein."

A moment passed; then, motion stirred from the hangar once again, and down the gangplank came a pair of young women that Justine remembered having seen in attendance at the ball at the Ashford Estate they'd thrown to celebrate her sixteenth birthday—Milly's friends from the Ashford Academy Student Council, who were also heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of Annwn, she recalled. Now that she thought about it, Milly hadn't actually introduced anyone but Kallen that night, a state of affairs that Justine figured existed, at least in part, because she'd gotten herself sidetracked talking to Lloyd, and then Juliette had reminded her that she had her own friends from the Academy to see to, and then they'd just never crossed paths again before the other three members of the Student Council returned to the Tokyo Settlement.

Perhaps this was an opportunity to put at least a brief effort into correcting that blunder.

"I remember you two from the ball, though, regrettably, we were never properly introduced," she greeted the pair descending the gangplank—a taller, leggy, pretty, hazel-eyed strawberry blonde, with the lithe build of a swimmer, or perhaps a fencer, standing in support of a much more petite girl, black-haired and quite pale (though noticeably less so than their aborted last meeting), with a large, round, rimless pair of glasses assisting a piercing indigo stare of her own, which appeared to have torn itself away from the large tablet she held under her arm only a moment ago, or so. "Miss Einstein, yes? And Miss Fenette? I've heard quite a lot about you both."

Most of it, admittedly, concerned the pair's penchant for bickering—but, given the way that they maintained their proximity to one another, even as they descended, Justine felt as if it was reasonably safe to conclude that they'd managed to resolve that particular issue in recent months.

"Your highness," Wilhelmina Einstein acknowledged with a perfunctory bow that was precisely as deferential as it needed to be, given the situation, and not a hair more (Justine marked that as a point in her favour), while her taller companion bowed more deeply, but not insincerely so, not exactly.

"I'm given to understand that it was you who figured out the solution to Lloyd's little problem with the Float System in its earlier stages," Justine prompted, shifting her weight onto her other leg and folding her arms across her chest, tilting her head interrogatively. "Would you say that's accurate?"

"A solution to a conceptual problem is useless without a means of practical application," Einstein replied, causing the brow that Justine hadn't hidden behind her fringe to arch. If this was going where she thought it was, she was in genuine danger of coming to like this one. Brilliance and humility, Justine had found, was a rare combination in a research and development setting. "And as Shirley—Miss Fenette has played a material role in that solution's realisation that cannot be overstated, I would much prefer to call it a joint effort, your highness."

Deliberation over. She did like this one. Would Milly be upset, Justine wondered, if she gave some serious thought to poaching Miss Einstein? On that note, would it even count as poaching, given that they were married? Perhaps it was better to err on the side of caution… Although, while Justine did prefer to do her own maintenance, just for the sake of being as intimately familiar as possible with every minute quirk of her Knightmares, she wasn't delusional enough to think that she'd continue to have the time to lead any technical division worthy of the title, particularly as the Knightmares they fielded grew in complexity. She would have to get that role filled somehow, she recognised, but on the other hand, that was hardly her most immediate concern at the moment. "Very well, then. In that case, Miss Fenette, I would also like to laud the contributions you yourself made to this ship's timely construction. Does it have a name?"

"We've taken to calling it the Avalon, your highness," Shirley Fenette replied, bowing her head in another deferential nod, her hands folded in front of her earthen-brown skirt.

"Avalon, you say? A fitting name, perhaps, given the namesake of your cargo…" she mused aloud. Then, she turned back to Lloyd and Doctor Croomy, and asked, "Will you be needing any assistance with unloading the Lancelot, or any of the rest of your equipment?"

"No, your highness, I believe the young Mister Cardemonde has it all well in hand," said Lloyd as he threw his hands up in an airy, illustrative gesture, proceeding the rest of the way down to stand upon the ground, Doctor Croomy hot on his heels. A moment later, the two Ashford Academy students, at least in a nominal sense, followed after the two project leads, succeeded swiftly by a small four-by-four automobile that towed along an unmarked oblong trailer behind it—a mobile one-stall stable that, to Justine's eye, was more than large enough to house the prototype Knightmare in question. "Protocol dictates that we bring a security force of some design along with us when transporting such invaluable cargo, of course, especially when the destination is in the middle of hostile territory—but, well, in this instance, we'd figured we had quite enough to qualify for that already…"

The four-by-four proceeded down the gangplank and carted to a stop once all of the wheels of the trailer it was transporting were firmly upon the grass; then, its passengers disembarked the vehicle.

There were four seats in the automobile—one for the driver, one for shotgun, and two rear seats for passengers—and all of them were occupied.

Out of the driver's seat, there came a young and sturdily-built man of no particular height, with dark blue hair and brown eyes, that Justine was pleasantly surprised to realise she recognised immediately as none other than Rivalz Cardemonde—the boy whom Milly had selected to be Annwn's deputy chief of security. She recalled that he'd taken it upon himself to join in with Justine's friends while they trained in the courtyard, just as she recalled that he was an eager hand with an axe, well-conditioned and energetic, if more than a bit rough around the edges in terms of skill and technique. Skill and technique could be taught, however, and she looked forward to finding out, potentially, how much he'd managed to improve since his days of getting trounced by her friends before the wedding.

Out of the front passenger's seat, there came another man, perhaps a few years older than Rivalz, and a bit above average height for a son of Britannia—and from the vivid crimson and glittering sapphire of his shoulder-length hair and somewhat narrow eyes, respectively, Justine immediately decided that this must be Kallen's elder brother, and her father's spare: Naoto Kōzuki-Stadtfeld. Rather shockingly, she'd never actually met the man, not to any appreciable extent, which she had no reasonable explanation for, given how closely Milly worked with him: in fact, given his choice of dress, and the semi-familiar briefcase he carried with him, it seemed as though Milly had made him her retainer while Justine was gone. But while Rivalz, immediately upon hopping his way out of the driver's side, circled around to the back of the vehicle to unmoor the trailer from the four-by-four's tail, Lord Stadtfeld, on the other hand, concerned himself chiefly with the vehicle's two rear passengers.

Justine felt the air freeze in her lungs, felt her heartbeat stutter—perhaps she hadn't noticed before, because in her mind, she had subconsciously deemed the possibility of it to be so incredibly remote as to be unworthy of honest consideration. But the truth was before her right then, sliding out of the back seat as Lord Stadtfeld held the door open, and the evidence of her senses—the weight that rested still upon her throat, the physical reminder in even her darkest moments, that she was desired, that she was cared for, that she was wanted and loved and possessed, becoming something new and novel all over again, unmistakable—would not be denied.

She was moving before she thought to command it, before her mind could even deliberate upon the question of if she should, or if it would be better for her to maintain her composure. She was walking, and then she was jogging, and then she was sprinting across the field, no longer the driver in truth but the chief passenger in her own body—no longer the Fourth Princess of the Realm, eldest daughter to an illustrious and unloving mother, but a girl of sixteen, newly a wife, where every moment of separation, every breath taken apart was a new agony, a fresh and livid maiming of the spirit.

Justine cast her decorum to the wind, eschewing dignity and composure. Her vision blurred before her, her cheeks growing wet, her chest heaving and shuddering, months upon months of feelings that had been put in their place, of insecurities that had been gagged and bound for being unproductive, of need she had chosen to neglect, surging up within her past the bounds of her restraint and self-control, as though it all sought to drown her in it. A fitting vengeance, perhaps, against one who had cast them into a lightless, labyrinthine realm of ice and mirrors—Justine couldn't rightly find it in herself to care.

None of that mattered.

She was here.

Her feet were no longer touching the ground. She was flying through the air, falling, falling…

Caught.

Strong, lean, powerful arms, the equal to any classical marble statue of ancient heroism, wrapped around her, and tensed as they pulled her close, bodies drawn flush against one another, like two opposing magnets, day and night, light and dark, summer and winter, gold and coal—horrible, wretched sobs ripped through her chest, the tears flowing freely. Princesses do not cry came the spectral admonition, further from her now than ever it had been, and easier to force away; she was weeping, and she was powerless to stop it even if she'd wanted to. Through watery eyes, Justine gazed up into glittering diamonds; with a deep breath taken between sobs, her nose filled her lungs with soft rosewater and sharp citrus. Her knees buckled, and her head went light with intoxication, her stomach twisting upon itself in euphoric nausea, a dear pain, dearly-felt—firm fingers dug into her pliant flesh through layers of leather and silk, and a low, husky voice, like a phial of liquid ambrosia, through thin lips painted red and into her ears, like the hebenon that won Claudius his throne, caressed her deprived soul. "Hello, my love. Have you missed me?"

A laugh forced its way out of Justine's lungs, wet and phlegmy, halfway to a cough—she just knew she'd be mortified soon, she must look a mess! She'd taken five months before finally being ready to finish here, how dare she think to appear before her wife, the love of her life, in any but the most immaculate of fashions?

And then a hand lifted from her waist to thread into her hair—oh, merciless Hells, her hair, why did she cut it, why didn't she let it grow back, Milly had always talked about how she loved how easy her long hair was to grab, how dare she—and grip her scalp with a sharp, jerking pain that made her hiss as it was pulled, exposing the nape of her neck, her face, her lips…

Ruby red met dark plum, and every train of thought, every insecurity and recrimination, derailed as one unified ruin. Her mind was so suddenly awash with the darkling expanse, twinkling with distant stars, that she barely registered when the tongue pressed expectantly into her mouth, and her painted lips yielded in supplication. The remaining arm about her waist clutched her ever more tightly, bending her backwards with it, as if afraid that if it relaxed for even a moment, she'd vanish like a river in the desert. Hunger and heat, searing and intense, poured into her, and her eyes fluttered, unseeing, unknowing, drinking it in like a drug, like the sort of narcotic that sparked wars.

This was love.

Their burning lungs, like contemptible creditors, demanded their parting; and once they did, once a few deep breaths filled Justine's lungs with Milly once again, she composed herself enough for her lips to form a tearful reply. "Hello, darling. It's been too long…"

Milly grinned joyously, even as her piercing eyes, like precious stones cut to perfection, glimmered and shone with desire, potent and heady."You cut your hair. I like it—it's cute."

"R-really?" Justine couldn't help but reply—but then, she was a fool if she thought she could keep any part of her mind or soul, no matter how unsightly, hidden from the woman who loved her most in all the world. "Y-you think so…?"

"Mm-hmm. It makes you look more delicious than ever," her wife replied, a low growl in her voice betraying the fathomless depths of her lust—Justine felt herself shiver in the face of it, her core clenching around what felt like a molten ember, stinging and searing, branding.

"Your highness," chimed in a truly brave—or perhaps just remarkably stupid—voice.

Milly's diamond-blue eyes flashed with a mixture of sharp irritation and incandescent rage. When she turned her head to address their interloper, her diction came out more as a growl than speech. "What."

Lord Statdfeld's interruption was enough, however, and her cognizance of the world around her came flooding back into Justine's mind, reminding her very firmly of where they were, and of what sort of situation she'd been attempting to resolve. She noted that her arms had wrapped themselves about Milly's neck; she took one down to lay a calming hand upon her wife's upper arm.

This worked like a charm, as per usual—Milly's gaze snapped back to her, and she calmed at once. She closed her eyes and snarled in annoyance, before giving her head a sharp shake. "Fine. I suppose you all do have a battle to win…"

"That we do," Justine confirmed ruefully. But she smiled nonetheless, and offered, "Though, if it's of any help, think of the victory celebration…"

"You tempt me at your own peril, my love…" Milly warned, three-quarters seriously.

"Peril is quite literally my profession, darling," Justine replied airily, the rush of their proximity, of their reunion, still flooding her brain with endorphins, and leaving her giddy in their wake. But, sadly, the fact of the matter was that she needed to take stock of the situation, and greet the rest of the new arrivals, including the person who had been in the other rear passenger seat, so she set the heels of her boots down upon the earth, and took a step back from her wife, their arms sliding down each other's sleeves until they were only holding hands, each linked with one of the other's. "But there will be plenty of opportunities for us to make up for lost time at battle's end. I promise."

"Speaking of which," Milly said, her lips tilting into a crooked smile. "I would have felt guilty if I left her at Belial Palace, while I returned to Area Eleven so that I could board on the Avalon to see you, so I brought a friend along with me—as Suzaku seems to have realised, judging by the looks of things…"

Suddenly even more curious, Justine turned to look over her shoulder towards where Suzaku had been, only to see that she and a white-haired woman were…embracing? She thought? It was, admittedly, a bit difficult for her to tell, given that Suzaku and the woman Justine somehow knew to be Izanami, despite the difference in her hair colour and her garb, much preferred to replace the physical intimacy of sex with their own brand of physical intimacy in the form of violence and combat, but even if that wasn't quite an embrace, as per se, the corporeal entanglement on display clearly served the same purpose.

"Your highness," Villetta interjected, handing her a handkerchief, and shooting a look towards the bystanding Lord Stadtfeld that Justine felt could be most accurately described as 'vaguely competitive' in the process. The flash of feeling like she was being managed instead of managing flared up again, but this, much like Marianne's voice, was easier to dispel in Milly's presence than it otherwise had been; so Justine took the handkerchief with muttered thanks, and dabbed at her eyes and her cheeks, thanking her past self for having thought to invest in waterproof cosmetics for field use. "I've taken the liberty of signalling for everyone to begin moving towards the recently-erected command pavilion. I'd anticipated that you'd want to continue the strategy meeting there."

"I hadn't considered that as of yet, to be perfectly honest, Villetta," Justine admitted as she wiped away the lion's share of the incriminating evidence of the past few minutes' waterworks. "But that sounds like an excellent idea. Let's go—oh, darling, would you like to come along?"

Milly rolled her eyes, and gave her that smile she reserved for when she thought Justine was being exceptionally silly. "Of course! Wouldn't miss it for the world."

---

There were many sordid traditions that had fallen out of fashion in the Homeland, only to find their second lives among the provincial nobility. This was one.

There were villages that were set up to be sanctuaries and refuges for displaced Numbers, made up almost wholly of true Britannians, acting as good Samaritans for their fellow members of the human race who languished in bondage. Numbers who came seeking these villages out were given food and drink, out of the charity of those who lived there, as well as medical care and lodgings. To the Numbers, this would surely have seemed like a stroke of impossible good fortune, to come upon good and kind-hearted people, who sought nothing more highly than the salvation of the oppressed and the less-fortunate, and indeed, to those who found the strength to continue, who did not succumb to the need for rest, this was all that any of these villages ever were. They would continue on their journey, and tell others of these places, seeking to aid their fellows as they themselves had been aided—motivated by the love of their fellow man.

For those who lingered past nightfall, however, a far different fate awaited them.

It is a human tendency not to look a gift horse in the mouth—to take at face value, particularly in a dire situation, potentially one's darkest hour, the goodwill of others when it is extended to them. After all, a Number woman and her nursing child on the verge of starvation are hardly likely to think to ask of those who lived in these villages where all this free food and drink came from, or indeed the medical supplies in the skilled hands of one who seemed a miracle worker, breathing new life into a swaddled babe made frail from want. And it was these, the most desperate and therefore unquestioning of people, who would refuse to decline a sorely-needed good turn when it was offered to them. Such a harrowed mother, flushed as she was with gratitude at her salvation, was almost certain to avail herself of a sumptuous feather-bed, resting like the dead at long last.

When the sun set, however, the truth became apparent.

These weren't villages.

They were resorts.

A sorely-missed past-time of pre-Napoleonic leisure, a tradition many centuries in the making, was the hunting of foxes, and its status as practically a central pillar of the highborn national ethos hadn't given the Imperial Conservation Service any pause in their prohibition of such results. Regular hunting of these animals, they maintained, would drive them to extinction, and thus infringe upon the beautification of the domain they now called home, a point of pride they sought to hold over the Great Enemy's get. But while that prohibition endured, and weathered significant challenges to remain as iron-clad as it had first been, it hadn't taken very long for the nobility to realise that the hunt itself needn't change—only the quarry.

Come nightfall, provincial aristocrats whose estates resided in nearby fiefdoms arrived in force; at their heels came many kennels' worth of trained hounds, and fine-bred destriers with curving horns lashed to their saddles. There were no exchanges of currency made upon their arrival—those who attended paid for their memberships with contributions of lump sums on a quarterly basis—and nor was any signal sent. Those who lived there, truly, knew that the setting sun was their signal, and those who did not were neither guests nor residents.

They were the prey.

The jaunty night rides of provincial nobles tore through these towns, tearing down many a road and throughway, the moonlight glinting off of steel and gunmetal, the clattering clamour of hoof-beats and the cacophonous baying of hungry, slavering hounds rousing even the most exhausted of refugees from out of their black slumbering. Panic ensued more often than not, with those still in the village taking those most precious things they had escaped with, usually children, and running for it, seeking escape. And once the pandemonium drove the quarry out into the open, that was when the hunt began in earnest.

Screaming and begging and wailing clashed with sounds of mirth and merriment, and occasionally bestial grunts of pleasure, with even those who thought themselves to have slipped the net running for the hills only managing to fall head-first into the clutches of guard squads tasked with capturing any escapees. From the very moment of dusk until the final hour before dawn, the streets of these villages ran red with blood—and at that point, once the nobles had had their fun, clearing out of the village and joking amongst themselves at a night's amusement well-fulfilled, those same guards would then sweep through the town, checking even the smallest nook or cranny in their search for those smart enough to hunker down and stay where they were.

What fate befell those unfortunate survivors thereafter depended upon the Area in question. But it was never good.

It was the legacy of these so-called 'sundown towns' that came to Justine's mind when she planned the moment their assault would begin. They had gone back and forth about whether fire teams would need to be formed to come along with them, but the presence of Izanami, and her stated desire to take part, put a swift end to those deliberations: and so, there were nine people who stood ready, clad in brand-new suits of combat armour, courtesy of Lloyd's elder sister, of all people—prototypes, they were told, of a number of potential further upgrades to protective gear for infantry—with their chosen weapons kept close to hand as they awaited the fall of night's curtain.

Of the strike force, only two members did not avail themselves of the offered armour: Justine, with the callsign 'K-1,' and Izanami, with the callsign 'Azoth.' But when the time came, they would not form a pair—as her callsign suggested, Izanami, having decided to take the opportunity to employ the battle that was to come as a means of assessing their current combat skills, would be working more or less alone, her role granting her the flexibility to go wherever she thought was best. Instead, with Suzaku, callsign 'Q-1', piloting the Lancelot in a solo role, Justine had chosen Jeremiah, 'B-1', as her partner for this dance. And, on Sif's advising, Justine had chosen temporarily to suspend her policy of mixing up the partnerships so as to avoid ossifying specific pairings, and instead settle upon the pairings with the highest synergy: Marika ('N-3') and Villetta ('B-2'), Liliana ('N-2') and Lisa ('R-1'), Sif ('N-4') and Yen ('R-3'), and, last but not least, Hecate ('R-2') and Odette ('N-1')—Lindelle, for obvious reasons, had chosen to abstain.

After all, there would be a great deal of blood-letting this night.

Let's see how they enjoy being hunted for sport, Justine thought with no shortage of contempt. She raised a gloved hand to the comm unit tracing the right side of her jaw as the wind kicked up, blowing her coat's high collar and her hair both into the gust, the scalloped tail fluttering against her legs, and pinged it to make sure everyone's equipment was working. "Testing, alpha, charlie, bravo. Can you all hear me?"

"I think we're all good," Lisa confirmed.

"Loud and clear," said Yen.

"Speaking, your highness," said Villetta.

"We're ready to get moving," Hecate chimed in.

"C'mon, let's get goin'!" Suzaku whined.

"Patience," chided Izanami, though she, too, held her weapons bared, paired blades that she could join together at the caps to wield as a double-bladed sword, while the wind carried her own cloak aloft, her bound bone-white hair whipping at her face. "We await your command, K-1."

"Alright. Synchronising chronometers to seventeen-hundred-fifty-seven, on my mark," she said as she looked at the silver pocket watch she held in her left hand—contrary to its analog aesthetic, she'd been assured by Miss Fenette that it functioned off of the very latest bleeding-edge technology to ensure strict adherence to the most accurate standard of timekeeping possible, and while that was perhaps a bit excessive in the eyes of the lay person, Justine was glad of the extra precision. She watched the hand that counted the seconds with monomaniacal focus, and spoke aloud, "Three… Two… One… Mark!"

"Synched," Lisa reported.

"Let's lock and load," said Odette.

"Lloyd, how're final preparations to launch the Lancelot?" Justine asked.

"We're armed and ready, your highness," Lloyd replied.

"Good. The Lancelot launches at precisely eighteen hundred hours," she commanded, slipping the pocket watch into her coat to free her left hand—making sure to brush her fingers against the handle of her Mauser, also hidden, as one final assurance both that it was still there, and that it could be drawn swiftly, should the need arise. Which, given what we're diving into, it very well might. "That'll serve as our starting gun. Runners, take your mark! Eyes up, watch your six, keep each other alive, and, above all else…good hunting."

"Kill them well," Izanami echoed tersely. "Kill them all. Take no prisoners. Show no mercy. Leave none alive…!"

"Lancelot, launching!"

Out of the trailer behind them, at the edge of the treeline, the white humanoid form of the Lancelot shot forth like a bullet—Suzaku had evidently decided that gunning it, full throttle out of the gate, was the best way to kick this operation off.

Justine couldn't have agreed more.

"All units, move!" she called, throwing a brief look at Jeremiah to jerk her head towards the walled city up ahead. Her knight nodded his understanding, and off they went.

The wind whipped through Justine's hair, her coat billowing out behind her, her arms thrown back to streamline her profile. Every stride was more bound than step, the flat of her boot digging into the earth only to push off of it, throwing her forwards further and faster. Even with his new combat armour's experimental powered exoskeleton, Jeremiah struggled valiantly to keep up with her, but she couldn't help but outpace him slightly—she had far more of Izanami's refined blood-elixir in her body than he did; but as soon as the Lancelot came into range of the wall-mounted point-defence systems, Justine took hold of the Ragnarök Connection and yanked, the winged brand of her Geass springing to life so suddenly and with such intensity that it blinded her for a fraction of a moment. The pain was like a railway spike as it drove into her head, but she put it in its place without missing a single bounding stride—and suddenly, it seemed Jeremiah was finally keeping pace instead of falling further behind.

Up ahead, the Lancelot drew both its block-mounted Maser vibration swords, which sprang to life with a shower of sakuradite sparks and a sharp clack! Handling the experimental Knightmare much more deftly than was possible for the augmented Sutherlands that they'd grown used to, Suzaku set the Lancelot to spinning, even tilting it slightly to get an angle on the cut—and as a twisting, wheeling storm of blades, she smashed through the front gate into the city before the point-defence systems could get a bead on her.

They had a brief window of opportunity, now, where Suzaku would be upon the Knightmares that were scrambling to sortie on the other side, tearing them apart; and when Justine passed through the gate, hot on the heels of the world's first-ever seventh-generation Knightmare Frame, her friends, even Jeremiah, for all that he was at the back of the pack, rushed into the breach behind her.

Once through the gate, Izanami vanished, and Justine slowed just enough for her knight to catch up to her before they joined the rest in splitting off into their assigned pairs. She wouldn't dream of doing this on an open field, but for all that just about any urban setting would naturally boast all the hallmarks of the ideal defensive structure, a small enough team of the correct composition could make that work against an occupying force. Close quarters, cramped hallways, multiple avenues, limited visibility… All these things levelled the playing field just enough for her friends' skills in combat, augmented by her Geass ability, to make up the difference.

She pulled up into the forefront of her mind a map of the city she'd memorised earlier that day, and kept track of where they were as they ducked to the side, and the Lancelot made mincemeat of the forces the defenders threw at her, carving through the armour of Sutherlands, Gloucesters, and more than a few old Glasgow models that had clearly been dug out of storage and recommissioned in a mad scramble for disposable bodies to buy time. Suzaku moved so quickly with the Lancelot in her hands that there seemed to be almost no need for her to deploy her Blaze Luminous—she was faster than their ability to target her, and only the Knightmares further away had a chance of lining up any sort of shot.

"This is R-1, ascending to Vantage Point Alpha," Lisa reported calmly. "Got N-2 in tow. No issues with the spider suit's grapnel function so far…"

"Roger that, R-1," said Sif, just as calmly. "The Scutum's good so far—noted no major restrictions on movement."

"Sounds like Stablemaster's big sister does good work," Justine remarked, speaking as she moved. "Is the exoskeleton up to snuff?"

"One way to find out," Yen replied, followed by a loud and resounding bang, and then a handful of scattered, startled barks of gunfire. "Looks like it breaches a door just fine."

"Good to hear," said Justine, and then took her hand off the headset, and nodded to Jeremiah: the outer layers of the Rio de Janeiro Settlement were the lifeless ghettos, after all, and before them now was a door to a tenement building, sturdier than it should have been, and directly along the path of the Lancelot's progress—so if this wasn't crawling with soldiers bristling with anti-materiel weapons, she'd eat a beret. "You heard the woman. Would you care to do the honours?"

"With pleasure," Jeremiah replied, reaching up to take his assault rifle off of the clamp on his back as he marched up to the door, lifted his leg, and crunched rightthrough it with the soft, gentle wheezing of advanced machinery, however nascent. Then, he gestured with his gun. "After you."

"Thanks," said Justine, as she launched herself into the building and swiftly into cover; Jeremiah came in hot on her heels, as the commotion of breaching the door brought the building's load of retinue soldiers out of their foxholes, to try and repel their invasion. There was a great deal of shouting from some of the upper levels, and Justine glanced at Jeremiah, and jerked her head upwards, signalling her intent to ascend the building.

Jeremiah shook his head definitively, and motioned with the gun himself—he wanted to climb the stairs as she ascended, supporting her instead of letting her do this herself, and while admittedly, Justine's first impulse was to refuse his assistance, she clamped down on that, hard: she'd made a promise to Milly, after all, and regardless of her absolute confidence in her own abilities, she would not allow her alleged recklessness to endanger her ability to fulfil that pledge. So, instead, she nodded, and held up three fingers before lowering her hand and extending her claws with a soft, muted shink!

On the count of three, Jeremiah began his procession up the stairwell, bringing his assault rifle up to fire upon household guards who'd probably only ever done cushy guard duty or broken up a bar fight before in their entire careers. They were nothing in comparison to the least of Justine's warriors, and even less in the face of her Knight of Honour—almost immediately, bodies started dropping, falling down off of the balconies above.

Justine took the opportunity to use this distraction as a makeshift smokescreen, slinking forth from out of her position in the cover of Jeremiah's shadow, and over towards the far wall opposite the closest occupied balconies. With her claws bared, she easily gained purchase, and then began to scurry upwards, scaling it like a lizard or a spider.

She registered some cries of alarm at her appearance and sudden ascent, but she paid it no mind; it didn't take her long to get into position to leap across the stairwell, and vault over the railing to land on the topmost occupied floor—the highest usable vantage point to get a clear shot at the Lancelot.

The guardsmen yelled and barked at her, and she let all of it flow over her without letting any of it register. She doubted it would be much of anything more interesting than fruitless pleas for mercy, or cries of terror, neither of which she wanted to deal with right then. She had places to be, after all, and while the plan was more flexible with regards to specific timetables than some others she'd devised, that didn't by any means imply that she had the luxury of lingering. Some of them attempted to open fire, further back in the cramped corridor past the landing, but the one closest to her, she grabbed by the kevlar breastplate and threw from the balcony, while her claws opened the throat of the next-closest one. The third guard, who was back a bit further, casting aside his rifle and drawing out his side-arm to get a better shot, was well within the distance she could bound nonetheless—when the other glorified police forces finally got a bead on her, by the time they opened fire, she'd already yanked him into their path, and hid behind him as their bullets slammed into his body instead of hers, cracking open his armour (which was unlikely to be combat-grade, to be fair) and peppering his torso with bullet-holes.

She took a moment to assess the situation. Four towards the wall, and I hear five, six, down in the hall? No, there's seven, eight, nine… Ten and eleven are in the opposite direction, by the sound of it… The four in front of me will be a good start, I think. Right then.

That decision made, Justine threw the fresh corpse lurching and careening towards them; it would not reach them, collapsing over its own feet before it got far, but that lurch was all she needed. Going low, she slipped out around the dead man's right side, her hand on the ballistic scabbard; she pivoted, using the momentum of the sharp turn to generate centrifugal force, and as she did so, and they began to focus their attention onto her once again, her right index finger squeezed the trigger…

One was sliced from hip to armpit, neatly bifurcated at an unerring angle. Her right hand joined her left at the Murasama's hilt, and the two-handed back-swing cut through the next from shoulder to groin. She brought the Murasama back, and lunged forth to stab the point through the throat of the next, and for the fourth, she turned the stabbing motion into a sweep—with a pirouette, she separated their head from their shoulders.

She was flanked on both sides by men with guns, now, and that was an unenviable place to be. The dispatching of the four household soldiers had taken her the space of a single second, so she had the time to make sure her position was more secure. With one bound, two bounds, three, she brought her blade low, and cut up with both hands, hip to armpit, dropping ten—and eleven made to turn and run, quailing in fear of her, which was a retreat she simply couldn't allow. She considered for the space of a moment throwing the Murasama and impaling eleven with it, but then she remembered that she had a gun, which came with the notable benefit of not having to leave her hand to hit its target.

Justine hardly considered herself a marksman—she was certainly nowhere near Lisa's level of skill at handling firearms—but when she slipped around ten's corpse, slamming her back against it to use it as a way of catching the bullets that flew down the hallway and slammed into him, it was child's play to reach into her coat and draw her Mauser in a single fluid motion, line up a shot, and squeeze the trigger, pithing the fleeing guard with three 10mm rounds in quick succession. I'll have to thank Friede—the recoil on this Mauser is practically nonexistent…

Bullets flew past her, and thumped into her quickly deteriorating human shield harshly enough to jolt her back into the moment-to-moment combat situation. Damnable cut-rate armour plating… I'll have to make this quick, find better cover… Aha!

The sanctuary of an open door to a room that faced the street beckoned to Justine; swiftly, she shed the corpse of ten, and bolted for that open door, the door to the (hopefully) empty room out of which ten and eleven had both emerged in the first place. Her Mauser in one hand, the Murasama in the other, she pushed off of the floor in agile bounds, hanging the sharp turn with an adrenaline-induced lurch in her stomach at the sudden gees, and slipped through the door into the desolate, empty room that would be her momentary pit stop, with only a vacant gun nest for company.

Five, six, seven, and eight's bullets, judging by the rate of fire, slammed into the door frame, with a burst of splinters shattering off of the cheap, low-quality wood that had been used in its construction. That wasn't Justine's concern right at that moment, of course—she returned her Mauser to its holster, and lifted the newly-free hand to her comm unit. "B-1, what's your status?"

"Managing, K-1," Jeremiah replied after a moment. His breathing sounded steady, even if his tone was a bit strained, so she took him at his word that he hadn't caught a stray bullet or anything like that. "It has been a while since I've been in a firefight this intense, but they're rank amateurs—they're more likely to clip me by accident than they are to hit me on purpose. But the floor above me is descending, and that's going to make this a lot more complicated very quickly."

"Copy that, B-1," Justine acknowledged as she checked that the Murasama was in a state she'd consider satisfactory, and then stalked back towards the threshold, bracing herself to delve right back into the fray. "I'll clear this floor in a hurry and back you up."

"Better double-time it," Jeremiah replied, his voice cutting out to a loud roar of gunfire—his own, from the sound of it. But the message was received, and as a quick rotation of the thought-cylinder to the part of her mind that was keeping track of everyone's status through her Geass informed her that no one was dead or really even injured yet, she refocused herself upon the task at hand—closing the distance between herself and the other gunmen while under a great deal of fire, and quickly.

Justine bounced on the balls of her feet, once, twice, thrice, and then took off out of the room, into the bullet-filled corridor. Her boots slammed against the floors as she took off in a dead sprint, the blade of the Murasama flashing scarlet as she cut the enemy fire out of the air, and then she began to properly plant her feet with each step, kicking off with each new stride into longer, faster bounds, building up speed—she used her momentum to scale up the walls, and then to kick off of them to the next. She'd seen Suzaku do this once, in the throes of her Geass ability, quite literally bouncing off the walls like a ping-pong ball, and while she couldn't completely handle it without using her claws, not the way Suzaku could, she'd built up quite enough momentum and kinetic force by the time she hit the quintet of frightened gunmen at the end of the hallway that it really didn't matter—the substantial amount of drag generated by her claws didn't stop her from splitting the first one in half, right down the middle, with a one-handed swing.

A step forth, a second hand, a pirouette, a cleaving swing—two more down in a single unerring line before any of them could force themselves to run. Too close to flee successfully, and caught between two of the most ancient human impulses, eight raised their pistol to fire at Justine point-blank.

The next moment, they howled in agony and terror,their arm split from wrist to elbow, severing the hand that held the gun.

Nine, perhaps wisest of all, elected to take their chances and bolt—and she could understand what was going through their head, that eight was still alive, and so, unlike eleven, nine might actually have a ghost of a chance at flight. It was erroneous, of course, but it was a continuous line of logic.

They turned, took two steps, and jerked to a halt with a dull, wet, meaty thud, leaving them looking down at their chest, dumbly.

Justine planted her other shoulder into nine's back, shoving them forth and tearing their heart free of their chest, held in her bloody glove and bloody claws. She tossed and caught it, once, twice, before she threw it away, as she walked back towards the landing, beheading the screaming eight with a one-handed swing, almost absent-mindedly, as she passed.

She sheathed the Murasama as she turned towards the landing, needing both her hands free, and a tap on her comm unit patched her through to Jeremiah. "Floor's all clear. I'm en route. Hold tight."

The subsequent lack of response wasn't a source of concern for Justine, seeing, of course, as she could sense that her knight was alive and as of yet unharmed, and so without further ado, she mounted the railing, with her back to the stairwell, and let herself careen backwards and fall. She tucked her legs in so that she'd roll over and have her feet beneath her, and as she passed the floor above Jeremiah's, she lashed her hand out, digging her claws into the edifice between levels in deep furrows—then, when she caught an unyielding surface beneath her hand, she anchored herself there, and swung her legs forth into the fray that had Jeremiah pinned down.

Her sudden pendulum-swing had her flying feet-first into the far wall by the time that she realised, miraculously, that putting that much torque on her shoulder hadn't wrenched it free of its socket as she had expected it to—and while in any other circumstance, she might have questioned it, now was most certainly not the time for her to start questioning her good fortune. She bent her knees to absorb the shock of the impact with the wall, sprung off of it into a backflip, and touched to the floor in a three-point landing.

The shock of her arrival gave her just enough time to lunge to her feet, and bolt over the bodies on the floor towards the twenty or so guardsmen who were steadily encroaching on Jeremiah's position. Her right hand was already at the trigger guard, and it was a simple enough task to slip a finger in and squeeze. The Murasama leapt from the ballistic scabbard, and Justine's left hand was there to grab it, guiding its arc as it fired forth out of its sheath, cutting through four gunmen in a single swing, a fluttering coat, a glinting scarlet blade, and a shower of steaming, flash-boiling blood.

The astonished lull that followed took enough pressure off of Jeremiah for his own gunfire to ring out into the corridor, every bullet finding its mark as it took his shocked assailants down, one by one.

Between the two of them working in tandem, her bladework and his gunplay, the hall was cleared before the passage of five seconds; she strode up to him as he came out from behind cover, and grinned at her knight, both of them covered to varying degrees in other people's blood. "Just like old times, eh?"

"Very much so, K-1," Jeremiah replied, mirroring her grin.

"We're done here, so let's move on to the next. As above, so below," said Justine, as she started off towards the stairway, and towards the next building they had to clear. This hadn't taken them five minutes, but it would still be helpful for them to pick up the pace. "We'll move more quickly that way."

"Agreed," her knight assented with a perfunctory nod. "Meet you in the middle."

"Don't die, B-1," Justine reminded him with a smile that he returned; then, they split ways, Justine heading up towards the rooftop, while Jeremiah worked his way down to hoof it on the ground level. She began ascending, several steps at a time, sheathing the Murasama as she went, and now that she had a little room to breathe between fights, she tapped at her comm unit, and inquired into the microphone, "Azoth, where are we?"

"Just about done here, K-1. Their security really is atrocious…" Izanami replied promptly.

"Well, between us and Gino's suppression force, every enemy soldier in the Area worth the title is either dead, or far from here," Justine explained with half a laugh hitching a ride on her voice. "The ones we're killing at this moment are the refuse who couldn't cut it when it came time to choose who went to war, and a few of Luoyang's armed starvelings for good measure."

"How very…Chinese of them," came the immortal's dry remark, provoking a laugh out of Justine; the passage to the rooftop was now within sight, thankfully. "Still, it's more than a little disappointing that all the fun's been had already…"

"There are other wars that are sure to be far bigger than this one ahead of us—of that, I can assure you quite confidently, Azoth," said Justine, as she opened the roof access door, and was surrounded by the ruin of the embattled ghettos, and the semi-distant skyline of the Settlement proper. "You'll have your fill before the end."

"I'll hold you to that, K-1," Izanami said wryly. "Oh, and you'll be seeing the fruits of my labours for yourself in three… Two… One…"

The skyline ignited in a blooming corpse-flower of hot pink and electric blue, and the concussive wave of wind and sound that followed shook the building beneath Justine's feet, very nearly tore her coat from her body, and plastered her hair flat against her face, to the point where she had no choice but to take a staggering step back.

"Sakuradite engines produce such beautiful explosions, don't you think?" Izanami chuckled softly, and Justine couldn't help but agree—silently, for the moment. "Now that your prey can no longer escape by sea, I'll be around, never you worry."

"…Thank you, Azoth," Justine managed, once her insides ceased to feel like they'd been placed in a snare drum and played. "See you at battle's end."

"Mind yourself, K-1," the immortal teased her, good-naturedly. "I won't have you bringing shame upon my tutelage, especially not now that I'm starting to enjoy instruction."

"I'll be sure not to, Azoth," she replied. Then, cutting the feed, she braced herself, and sprinted off of the roof, flying through the air into the slightly-lower roof of the adjoining tenement. She landed with a roll and a huff, and once she stood, she looked towards the Lancelot, tearing into the distance and forging ahead—while they went building by building to clear the way, to protect the white Knightmare's rear. She tapped into Suzaku's channel, just on a lark, and asked, "Q-1?"

"I did my time! And I want out! So effusive—fade! It doesn't cut! The soul is not so vibrant!" the voice on the other end half-sang, half-screamed.

Justine cut the link, and chuckled to herself as she busted down the rooftop door with a well-placed kick. "Well, at least it sounds like she's having fun…"

---

The ghettos were a sprawling mess of ramshackle structures and nonsensical throughways, and as a result, the different two-person teams could go for long stretches of time without establishing any sort of visual contact with one another as they cleared block after block—and during that period of time, it fell to the Boss to keep tabs on where each of them were, to issue orders for them to advance or pull back based on the reports given by others in the same general area, relying on the maps of the mission area that she'd apparently memorised to predict where and when enemy forces would hit. They went as the crow flew, in the process accruing a body count that, at least in the case of Odette and Hecate, had hit triple digits by the time half an hour had passed, and quadruple digits by the top of the hour—though that progress was aided along by Lady Izanami's infrequent appearances, usually a room or building ahead of them and already up to her shins in blood and corpses; she'd give them pointers whenever they crossed paths before vanishing, and it left Odette wondering just how much she might come to learn from this woman when they had the time to weather her instruction as a unit. If she worked hard enough for long enough, would she be able to catch up to the Boss? Odette had looked up to Justine vi Britannia since the earliest days of their time together at the military academy her father had founded, desiring nothing more keenly than to hone herself further and further, to reach the heights of her friend and mentor—and perhaps, she hoped, training under the very being who had trained that mentor would enable her to finally push past her limitations, allow her to become a disciple no longer, but a peer.

It was, if nothing else, an exciting thought.

The Settlement proper proved to be a wholly different animal, once they ascended from out of the ghettos and into its comparatively pristine streets: it was a denser area, significantly so, and much more organised than the rambling ghettos, with a mixture of splendour and convenience that became much more upsetting than anything—but for the faceless people with guns and (more often than not) defective combat armour, the sort of sorry excuses for 'equipment' that belonged at the bottom of the barrel, that were doing their best in their ultimately pathetic efforts to kill them, or really anyone who'd figured out how the Boss did that bullet-deflection trick and could replicate it half-decently, the Settlement was a true and bona fide ghost town, almost as if it lacked civilians entirely.

Odette bugging Hecate to call Apollo down to do some scouting for them hadn't taken much in the way of effort—it seemed as though her partner had already been considering doing so—and when the bird had returned from surveying the townhouses of the provincial nobility, the results were as unsurprising as they were contemptible.

"They've pulled back to the government bureau, then," said the Boss over comms, after both Lisa and Lady Izanami had chimed in to back up what Apollo had discovered. "I'd imagine they're holed up in there with all the guards they could spare, or press into service in a hurry…"

Wait.

"Press into service…?" Odette asked into her own comm unit—and though it wasn't necessary for her to join in, as Hecate spoke for both of them, and would only fail to do so in the nightmare scenario that saw them separated for whatever reason, the princess didn't seem to have been taken off guard by Odette's sudden interjection in the slightest.

"I'd imagine a not-insignificant part of the armed forces we're currently fighting through were this Settlement's remaining civilian population perhaps as recently as a few days ago," she explained patiently, as though what she was saying wasn't one of the most disgusting things Odette had heard since she'd been sent to Cáceres, and witnessed what happened there. But then, that was, as they'd come to understand, just how the woman who led them was: so long as they held true to her, she was their rock in the storm—even, or perhaps especially, in their darkest hours. "Judging by the looks of things, they dressed them up to look the part, handed them guns, and told them to point the muzzle at anyone they didn't know. It may well be, I should think, that we could have infiltrated simply by wearing the standard combat armour, and not one of them would have been the wiser…"

"That's… That's horrid," Odette protested, practically spitting her words out.

"Desperation is the midwife of horrors, and the leaders of this rebellion are certainly desperate to keep themselves in power," her mentor quipped ruefully. "And now that we've cut away their sole avenue of escape, what with their ships being little more than scrap metal in the bay, they're likely to throw waves of their own subjects against us, hoping to drown us in the bodies of those they consider 'disposable.'"

"I…!" She was at a loss for words, but she still felt like she needed to say something about all that had just been said. But Hecate laid a calming hand upon her shoulder, and when Odette locked her amber eyes with Hecate's azure gaze, the soothing contact and nod actually helped a fair bit.

"We'd best keep moving," Hecate murmured. "The others might be waiting for us…"

"I know how you must be feeling, N-1," the Boss chimed in, softly. "After seeing what you've seen in the extermination towns, what we all saw, you wanted to believe it was for something, some purpose that could be understood, even as it was condemned—that at the very least, their own people wouldn't be treated with as much disregard as the Numbers. And perhaps you even feel as though we might have been, to some extent, culpable in what's happened here, in pushing them this far—but we aren't. Not once did it occur to them, truly, that the lives of Britannian commoners could be of greater value than the lives of the Numbers, at least not to any meaningful degree. They were always going to hide behind those over whom they ruled, N-1, because they love nothing so dearly as they love their own power, for its own sake."

"If we hadn't forced the rebels to sacrifice these people here and now, they would have still thrown their subjects away, and gleefully so," Hecate added, putting another hand onto Odette's other shoulder, to turn her around, so that they could face each other more fully. "It would have been another time, another circumstance, yes, but the result would have been the same either way."

"Harden your heart, N-1, and do not waver," her mentor counselled her. "By the rebellion's choice have these people become the collateral damage of their overreaching—and rest assured, they will pay for it, and for all the abuses of their rule. I meant what I said. We'll make sure of it."

"I… I understand, K-1," Odette sighed, the sound of it unsteady—she hadn't thought that all of the rebellion's soldiers had chosen to be there, or that they believed in the rebels' cause, of course, she wasn't stupid, but…she'd thought, on some level, that at the very least, soldiery was the manner in which they'd chosen to live, in service to lords they were bound to by birth. That conscription had been used, that not a few days ago, these people she was killing could have been any number of other things…

"No, you don't," the princess disagreed. "But you will. And for what it's worth, I'm sorry for that."

"Are you alright?" Hecate stressed, shaking Odette slightly. "Can you continue?"

The Boss was the first person to see all of this… She was at Pirapora and saw it firsthand, with no warning at all, and even still she found the resolve to fight, thought Odette, shaking her head to clear it of all the extraneous thoughts her initial visceral, knee-jerk reaction shoved into her mind. If I'm ever going to catch up to her, to live up to her, I'll need to borrow her strength… I'll need to find the resolve to see this through, to the bitter end… "You said we're going to make them pay, right, K-1?"

"Every. Last. One," said the woman they had sworn to follow.

"Then yeah," Odette replied to Hecate, shaking off her horror, and holding fast to the faith she had in Justine vi Britannia. She nodded, filled with determination. "Yeah, let's move."

It was a blur after that—she'd reaffirmed her loyalty to Justine, to the woman who'd guide them through the darkness, if only they would follow, and the renewed strength of her Geass ability flowed into her like a river after rain. She powered through the empty streets, through the blood and the screams, with her vibroblade cutting a path through the noise. Hecate watched her back, she watched Hecate's, and they kept in contact with the other teams as they carved a way through the Settlement, and at long last, began to converge upon one another as they approached the government bureau. Suzaku led the way, handling that fancy white Knightmare more smoothly than Odette had ever before thought it possible for a Knightmare to be handled, and once she carved her way through into the government bureau, much like the mad dash for the gap in the wall defences, the five disparate teams of two merged once again into a single, united whole; and together, they fell upon the defenders with all the righteous fury of Hell itself, their leader's wrath flowing through their veins with each beat of their hearts.

And then, as swiftly as it began, it ended.

The nobles had holed themselves up in the ballroom of the government bureau, and so when they reached it at last, they fanned out to slaughter the remaining defenders, and to secure the perimeter; and, as Odette's was the stroke that killed the final defender, a two-handed leaping cut that split the helmet in two, and continued down the middle to exit at the hip, hers was the comm unit that crackled to life as the Boss asked, "N-1, would you like to do the honours?"

"…Yes, K-1," Odette replied, after taking a moment to let her heart stop pounding in her ears, just enough for her hand to be steady when she pressed the comm unit to speak into it. She swapped links, and said, in as clear and firm a voice as she could produce right then, "This is N-1 to central control. Mission objective achieved. All units now on standby, begin to converge on the government bureau. Be prepared to sweep the building upon arrival. No risks, no runners."

With that said, Odette swept her blade to the side in chiburi, and slid it home with noto. She took a deep breath in, and let it out—she was already trembling, and if she began to hyperventilate, she'd lose it. Breaking down right now was the last thing she needed…

Then a hand landed upon her shoulder—not Hecate's hand, who was currently standing to Odette's other side, not this time, but instead one clad in a sturdy, blood-soaked leather gauntlet. Slightly startled as she was, she looked toward the hand very quickly, only to then take in the tall frame of the woman beside her more slowly, feeling her tension ebb at the sight of the corpse-pale, white-haired immortal, for all that her deathly blue eyes were focused upon the ballroom below, and not on Odette herself.

Yet, even still…

"You did well, Odette," said Lady Izanami, her tone so flat and matter-of-fact that Odette felt as if she had no choice but to believe her. " I'm sure she's very proud of you…"

"…Thank you," she replied, with a single astonished nod.

The immortal nodded in return, and Odette at last turned her own gaze to the ballroom floor below them, as the soldiers, all the warriors of the 588th Irregulars flooded into the building, very nearly five thousand of her black-armoured battle-brethren fanning out to sweep the complex from top to bottom.

It was over. The rebellion was finished. They'd done their part. They'd won.

And despite it all, despite all the horrors they'd witnessed, everything they'd seen and done…

With each deep, rhythmic, bracing breath, Odette felt, perhaps, just a little bit better.

---

Between wives, husbands, mistresses, brothers, sisters, and assorted children of all ages, there were coincidentally, six hundred sixty-six prisoners that a detachment of the 588th was tasked with escorting into holding cells, and guarding them there until the task she'd set for the rest of them, and for those of her friends who had volunteered—a very pale-looking Odette among them, to her surprise, though perhaps the mild shock she'd felt was a bit unfair to her fellow swordswoman—was complete, and the next phase was cleared to proceed. Justine wasn't sure whether she wanted to laugh or groan at the situation, and a larger part of her was really starting to regret having read the Bible, even out of curiosity; she couldn't imagine, really, what it would be like to have the significance of the detail be entirely lost on her, but with how very tawdry she felt just taking note of that detail, it couldn't have been any worse than the psychological space in which she currently found herself. But then, she supposed the first of the Fallen did have quite a distinct reputation in the ad hoc spirituality of Britannian commoners, and so perhaps the symbology would be, in a way, apt: that the Saviour was a god with two faces—one of Salvation, for the protection of the wronged and the oppressed and the downtrodden, and the other of Destruction, for the punishment of the venal and the vile and the malevolent—was a bit of relatively esoteric knowledge that she hadn't thought would find much use when she picked it up and memorised it for the sake of her own amusement; but then, what was war, if not the domain of the unexpected?

Many, in fact most, of the highborn prisoners—particularly the spouses, she noticed—begged and pleaded for clemency, for mercy, for pity, but Justine rather pointedly turned a deaf ear to their vain cries, and personally, she couldn't have imagined the black helmets of their immediate captors to have been any more receptive. The paranoid part of her, of course, argued that they should be guarded entirely by those whom they brought forth from the extermination towns; and yet, with things being as they were, she tried to ignore that increasingly shrill voice as she ignored Marianne's lingering shade. It was easier, with Milly so close by, to remind herself that the building of bonds, of trust and unity and fraternity (and there really ought to be a gender-neutral form of that term, she thought, not for the first time), were of critical import if she intended for her forces to hold together under any appreciable amount of strain moving forward into the future, particularly as they expanded their ranks in preparation for the wars to come, than it otherwise would have been. It was with that thought in mind that she'd assembled a mixed group out of both the thousand original household troops that had formed the infantry corps early on, and the four thousand they had pulled out of the extermination towns, Justine's friends and her, to task with guarding the prisoners.

And besides, if any of the commoners were liable to break down at the protests of others who only looked like them, that was a crisis waiting to happen that she'd like to know about sooner rather than later; all the better to prevent it revealing itself to be a true problem at a more critical point down the line. It was this rationale, more than anything else, that mollified her paranoid side, and she let it out with a heavy huff as she stood in the ballroom alongside Jeremiah, her arms folded at the small of her back, as they oversaw the soldiers who had been designated as guards escorting the prisoners out and down to the surprisingly rather robust dungeons, for lack of a better term (calling it merely a cell block was somewhat underselling the reality of the complex), below.

"Tomorrow is another day, and upon the near horizon, there await wars aplenty," Justine remarked aloud. Her chest heaved a heavy sigh, and she continued, "But tonight, we are victorious."

"That we are, indeed, your highness," Jeremiah agreed from over her shoulder.

"I wanted to thank you, you know," she said, turning her gaze down towards the lavish floor of the ballroom as she spoke. "For watching my back out there. It was good to fight together again. I must admit, I hadn't realised how sorely I'd missed it…"

"…It was my pleasure, your highness," Jeremiah replied after a strangled moment. She imagined she could feel the shock and pleasant surprise radiating off of him, almost—and, whether it was accurate or not, she took that as an indication of her personal failure. Relationships required maintenance, after all, and she knew already that she'd neglected this one, whether she'd meant to or not.

"It was never my intention for us to grow apart, Jeremiah, or for you to come to believe you were no longer needed, for whatever little that's worth," said Justine, as she pivoted around sharply on her heel to regard him directly. "Suzaku may be my best friend, but she's by no means your replacement."

"I'm aware, your highness," Jeremiah sighed fondly; then, something seemed to occur to him, and he began to chuckle.

"A penny for your thoughts?" Justine offered; she kept her phrasing purposefully open-ended—she would hardly deny that she was curious, of course, but she knew better than to push.

"It's…hardly appropriate, your highness," he refused, shaking his head and trying (and failing) to get a grip on his mirth.

"That's alright. I don't know if you've noticed by now, but I'd hardly call myself much of a stickler for what is and is not appropriate for two people in our respective positions," she remarked, bending her rule about not pushing just a little—she wouldn't have done this if he'd given her an indication that he was truly unwilling to share, but protocol concerns were more than fair game, in her opinion. "And you know you don't need to append my title to the end of everything you say to me, right? I mean, it's not as if I'm in any danger of forgetting it."

"It's just that… I've often found myself thinking of you as almost a surrogate little sister—more so, even, than I can recall having done for Lilicia," Jeremiah admitted, with his concession to her point implied. "And it amused me that that was the case."

"Oh? Is that so?" Justine teased lightly, leaning forth towards him with a smile. "Well, I can hardly speak for your sister, having never met her myself; but I can say that I, for one, would have been honoured to have had an older brother like you, Jeremiah Gottwald."

"Your highness," called another male voice from behind her, one she could already associate with a face and a name. Justine straightened her posture, then, and switched gears smoothly.

"And speaking of elder brothers," she said as an overture, turning once again to address the dressed down form of Naoto Kōzuki-Stadtfeld directly. "A pleasure, as always, to see you again, Lord Stadtfeld. Is there aught I can do for you, pray tell?"

"I was bidden to deliver this, to your hands only," said the redhead, producing from his waistcoat a letter written on very familiar stationery, and handing it to her.

Justine plucked the letter from his grasp, her cheeks warming a bit in anticipation of what could be written there—and when she flipped the card over, she found, penned in an instantly-recognisable hand, a command in three words:

Come to me.

It was unsigned, of course; a signature would have been unnecessary.

"A-ah, thank you, Lord Stadtfeld," Justine managed to say, as she struggled to tear her gaze away from the note in her hands. "I believe I can…take it from here…"

"I was also bidden to show you the way," Stadtfeld added with a wry smile that she liked not a bit, as he gestured towards the stairway behind him, located at the far side of the ballroom, in an alcove on its own. "Shall we?"

"Go. I'll inform Villetta, and we'll handle affairs from here," Jeremiah urged her firmly.

"If you're certain…" said Justine, wincing from the stab of guilt at the thought of pushing her work onto those under her command.

"Your highness…" he stressed.

"Very well," Justine relented with a sigh. "I leave the rest in your capable hands. Lord Stadtfeld, do lead the way, please."

Milly's retainer nodded, and started off towards the stairway he'd indicated, with Justine following, close on his heels.

The corridors of the bureau were mostly blank, with a few anodyne decorations here and there; she supposed that they were technically still in a government office, and she thought it stood to reason that the rebellion hadn't yet found the time to fully do the building over into the lavish palace it so resembled from the outside, mimicking the old paintings she'd seen of the Houses of Parliament that had been done before the Humiliation, and the foundation of modern Britannia. And yet, as they went deeper in, more and more did the true tastes of those nobles who had reached beyond their station begin to reveal themselves; as the plain walls gave way to expensive tapestries and gaudy curtains, marble busts and statues, the décor of the bureau's interior became increasingly gauche at an alarming rate, the anodyne and unassuming giving way to the truly pretentious and needlessly grandiose.

But Justine had not ventured here to critique the artistic sensibilities of a foe whom she and her friends had vanquished and laid low—or the lack thereof, as the case may be—and so she did her best not to gawk at the sheer lack of good taste on display, and instead stubbornly kept her eyes forward, her steps measured, and her focus upon the route that Lord Stadtfeld was leading her down, around corners and up a handful of stairs here and there.

"Oh! Miss Shinozaki!" Lord Stadtfeld exclaimed in startled surprise, his eyes shooting wide as he turned another corner ahead of her. Justine, curious, came up beside him to look down the path ahead; and, sure enough, there stood Shinozaki Sayoko, who, though dressed in her familiar maid uniform, made zero effort to mask the truth of how deadly she was—the passive killing intent radiated off of her in waves, and strangely enough, Justine found that it calmed her nerves just that much more. "I wasn't expecting you…"

"The young mistress has given you leave to aid Her Highness's knight and retainer in their duties, should you wish it," said the shinobi, brushing right past Lord Stadtfeld's startled reaction. "I will take her the rest of the way. Even if you don't want to lend a hand down below, I'm sure that you'll find other ways to spend your time productively."

Justine could see the tension in Stadtfeld's hackles wind at her affronting tone; but, to his credit, he took a deep breath, and let it go, bowing to her at the waist. "As you say, senpai."

Once he'd straightened, turned on his heel, and walked out of earshot, Justine turned her attention towards the maidservant who was practically Milly's surrogate mother in full, and raised her visible brow. "You don't have to treat him so coldly, you know. You two are working towards the same goal, after all, or at the very least, nominally so."

"I've ferreted out several dozen different infiltrators tasked with undermining the young mistress in the time since she took office as sub-viceroy," Sayoko replied with a sigh, as the tension slowly bled from out of her shoulders now that the two of them were alone. "Even if Naoto is every bit as trustworthy as he has always seemed, old habits die hard."

"So I've heard," said Justine, taking a step or two closer to her new guide.

"In any event, I've drawn you a bath," Sayoko informed her with a small but genuine smile. "After all, I don't believe you'll want the young mistress to see you all covered in blood and viscera as you are."

"O-oh…" Justine looked down at herself, suddenly very painfully conscious of how filthy she was, covered in the innards of others and the inescapable grime of the ghettos. "I—yes, of course. Thank you."

Sayoko nodded, her smile gaining a knowing edge. "I will, of course, take your clothes and see that they're properly laundered—some of my cousins have taken better to housework than others, after all, and I made sure only to bring along some of the competent ones."

"Ah. That's going to take some getting used to again," Justine remarked, her attention momentarily diverted from her sudden self-consciousness. "Having my clothes laundered instead of doing the washing myself, I mean."

"In my experience, your highness, it's a transition that gets easier to make the more times you have to make it," said the shinobi, as she turned back towards the corridor ahead. "Come along, then—let's not keep the young mistress waiting."

"Agreed," Justine sighed emphatically, before setting off after her wife's body servant.

Justine did not bathe unassisted that evening—Sayoko helped her undress, folding away her soiled garments as she did, washed her back and her hair as she bathed (she couldn't help but notice the smell of belladonna extract in her shampoo and conditioner, and knew from that alone that they'd brought Justine's own suite of hygiene products from home), and then all but physically forced her into the tub to soak, after the fact; she understood the sense in it, of course, especially as the near-scalding water worked away at her muscles, soothing away tensions she'd held for so long at this point that she'd no longer noticed them until they were gone, but Sayoko's unwavering insistence upon removing her collar as she bathed made her feel impatient and anxious. She'd avoided removing it as much as she could in the past few months especially, keeping it on as she'd waded into the Amazon, or even when Suzaku and she had gone undercover into the first of the extermination towns—its removal made her feel stripped, shriven, and while it wasn't the most unpleasant sensation she'd ever had to withstand, it reminded her far too keenly of those distant days when her flesh burning had been enough to elicit a scream for her to feel at all at home in her own skin.

When Sayoko had finally allowed her out of the tub, her body was relaxed, yes, but her mind was more tightly-wound than it had been in a long time. She hated her hollow-eyed reflection in the mirror, loathed how she could once again pick out even the blemishes in her skin to which she'd long since grown blind, a tapestry of reminders Marianne had left etched into her body over the years. She felt small, she felt weak, she felt ugly and stupid…

It took Sayoko's refastening of the silver collar about her throat for her to realise that she'd gotten dangerously close to hyperventilating; she stared into the mirror, focusing her attention on the rubies that glittered back at her in her reflection, ignoring the faded scars from hot metal and broken glass and half a hundred other implements that represented any of the almost innumerable memories of pain and anguish and despair that she could recall with crystalline clarity even now, and forced herself simply to breathe. Deep, steady, rhythmic, in, hold, and out, in, hold, and out—she was conscious of but refusing to acknowledge the mounting alarm and concern with which Sayoko beheld her nudity—until the passage of each breath made her skin feel a little bit more like her own again. She was not the girl her mother hated anymore, she had to remind herself, not the mistake who couldn't even be born right. She pushed those thoughts away as surely as the voice that formed them. She was loved. She was wanted. She was desired. She was possessed. Milly had murdered her own mother to have her, had dropped everything and flown herself halfway across the world to be with her over an event as minor as a schoolyard spat. Milly was here, not because she had to be, not on account of any obligation she might have had, but because she hadn't wanted to be separated from her, from the Justine vi Britannia the mirror reflected back at her, the woman who was her wife, for so much as a moment longer than was absolutely necessary.

Justine could doubt many things, but never Milly's love for her—and that was the mortar that held the bricks of her being together as she pulled them back into place, breath by breath.

She closed her eyes, and opened them once again. She was there once more in the mirror, pale and slender, small in the shoulders, toned and lean in the waist and the limbs, but generous in the chest and the hips, with a decently short mop of raven hair framing a face that she understood to be 'beautiful,' at least from a detached, aesthetic perspective—the eye with which one might judge a painting. And there sat the most important piece of them all: winged serpents painstakingly engraved in fine silver, with rubies cut by a master's hand at the hollow of her throat, and the eyes of the beasts that flanked it.

She was Justine vi Britannia. And she would allow no one to take that from her—not even herself.

Justine brought her hands with their black nails, her claws retracted and hidden from view, up into her face, and carded her fingers through her wavy hair a few times so that part of her fringe would conceal her now-dormant left eye from view; then, she turned back to Sayoko, refusing to look towards the eyes of the shinobi so that she wouldn't have to see the pity she dreaded finding there, huffed out a quick, bracing breath, and nodded sharply. She was together enough to hold until she reached the bedroom, she thought, and with that in mind, she told Sayoko, "I'm ready. Let's go."

Wordlessly, Sayoko nodded, and Justine couldn't help but think that her lips down-turned into a frown was bad enough, couldn't help but feel vindicated in having not even allowed her eyes to go above the shinobi's nose. The maidservant's white apron was dark with stray water—Justine liked to think that she bathed fastidiously, but of course, that did only so much—and while Justine couldn't much help how her body flinched away from contact when Sayoko's bare hands landed upon her shoulders, unseen due to her attempts not to let her gaze waver, she could contain and smother the flare of self-disgust that spiked inside her the moment after, when she registered what had just happened.

"My apologies. I… I'm a little fragile right now…" she managed to force out of her lips without going back to pieces, and she raised a hand to place her fingertips upon the cool silver of the collar, letting its presence and its weight ground her.

Sayoko looked as though she was about to say something—her jaw flexed around the shape of any number of half-formed words—but she thought better of it, retracting her hands and nodding sharply. And as she turned and began to lead the way out of the bathroom she'd previously prepared, Justine ruthlessly strangled the thoughts that had begun to percolate at the shinobi's reaction, that she obviously loved Milly like a daughter and so was obviously disgusted by Justine's weakness, that she was dismayed by Justine's deficiencies and did not consider her a worthy wife to her surrogate daughter, that what she saw when she looked at Justine was a silly little girl with her head in the clouds, a pretty nitwit with no good sense that amounted to little more than a bauble kept for amusement and discarded when the novelty wore thin… These were not all of them Marianne's words or sentiments, but they were all at the very least descendants of that line, and so it was with an iron will that she stamped them out, knowing that Milly would consider their entertainment as a form of infidelity, and desiring to avoid that above almost all else.

She came back to herself, and to her senses, when the door closed behind her, shrouding her in the darkness of the chamber. The air was cool upon her bare skin, but she did not feel the cold, not really; not even gooseflesh prickled across the pale expanse of her arms and legs, and her eyes adjusted to take in the light of the full moon as it poured in as a silver flood through the windows—and how had she not noticed that, she wondered? She had fought out there under the night sky for hours, and not once had she thought to take in what phase it was, whether it waxed or waned, gibbous or crescent…

A snap and a hiss drew her attention, the striking of a match's nascent flame, and it was a ghostly sight indeed as that flame bobbed in the hand of an intimately familiar silhouette to find itself housed upon the waiting wick of a tallow candle, tall and thick and stately. Then another, and another, as the silhouette moved across the room, lighting candles as she went, the form growing more distinct and discernible with each silent lighting.

"I had thought to rely upon this room's electric lights," said the voice Justine needed to hear most, as if her tongue and her lips were caressing each word with care as she spoke it. "But I thought that might have been a bit of an anticlimax, and…well…that's rather the opposite of what we want, now isn't it?"

Justine's body seized with a spark of mirth despite herself, and in a single mortifying instant, she at once became aware that she'd begun to drift apart from herself again.

"From what I can tell, this was intended to be the rebel leader's royal chambers—once he returned from the front triumphant enough to see himself crowned, at any rate," Milly continued, her voice low and husky with lust and anticipation—guilt was like a hammer into Justine's chest, at failing to live up to the mood, at being such a fractured pane that she couldn't keep herself together for long enough to… "Of course, none of it will ever come to pass now, but I, for one, think it would be a bit criminal of us to waste such fortuitous accommodations. Wouldn't you agree, my love?"

At last, Milly turned to regard her, in all her splendour—and it was a fresh font of disgust at herself that would not be silenced, that she could look upon Milly, the love of her life, with her hair hanging as an unbound spool of gold down her back, her chest supported by a black leather corset designed to be worn against bare skin, her legs encased in low-slung black leather pants and shod in black boots, and not feel a fire beneath her flesh, but instead a raw, yearning need that was a ragged, wretched thing in her own chest.

Justine wasn't aware of when she'd started crying, when her tears ran heavily down her cheeks. It wasn't something she registered, the moment her knees buckled beneath her and she fell to the floor, the jagged edges of herself pulling apart to expose the hideous, unsightly seams of her being. She understood the world again only when Milly's skin brushed against hers, a familiar urging—the tips of Milly's fingers as they caressed the curve of Justine's jaw, and lifted under her chin, gentle in their pressure, but firm and insistent. The diamond glimmer of Milly's blue eyes still simmered with desire (of which Justine was glad—she didn't know what she would do, what would become of her, if the dreaded day ever came when Milly could look upon her without it), but in the forefront of her gaze was a sharp, piercing attention, as if the entirety of her being, of Milly's mind and body and soul, of her elemental spirit right down to the very foundations of her existence, were focused solely upon Justine, and could perceive nothing but her.

Whether her heart melded together or shattered entirely, Justine could not say.

"What do you need?" Milly asked—a simple question, grounding, and the sole axiom upon which Justine could orient her existence. "Tell me, my love. Let me hear it. Make it real."

And though it rendered Justine's soul down to metaphysical gristle, she could neither lie, nor refuse to answer. Wretched and pathetic though she might be, she bared her faith in Milly's love to her like a raw, weeping wound.

The plea came from her chest and out her mouth as a great, heaving sob. "Love me…"

And so she did…

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Author's Note: Looks like we had a bit of a minor hiccough with regards to email notifications for updates last week. Hopefully the issue doesn't repeat itself.