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.

43. Reflection

Barony of Kai, Area Eleven, November, a.t.b. 2015

On some level, she had expected it to change—the dynamic, the camaraderie, that had existed while on the campaign trail between Marika and her friends, now known to the world as the Order of the Dragon, had at the time seemed like such a time capsule in and of itself, there and then gone in a flash. She'd expected that, on some level, even after all that they'd accomplished together, they would disperse and go back to their families, and she would once again be amongst her mother, her father, her brother, and their servants, only now to face reprimand for acting in a way which, in their eyes, eroded her betrothal into nothing (never mind that it was actually their refusal to contribute from their household troops that had so appalled the House of Steiner); it had shocked her, then, to be only a fortnight on the ground in Pendragon, living in Belial Palace, before all but a handful of them flew across the Pacific to Area Eleven, with the ashen-pale Izanami, or Mireya, or whatever name she was going by right now, in tow. Suzaku had crowed about a 'training camp', while their leader clarified that they were being given the immortal woman's personal attention, as far as the manifold arts of combat were concerned, and that was that.

In a sense, perhaps she had indeed been correct: lodging in the rebuilding city of Kōfu, and training day after day under the exacting instruction of the very warrior who had personally trained both Suzaku, whom she seemed to treat as something akin to a lover, and the Boss herself, was not anything at all like the experience of being in the jungles at war, and instead it reminded her of something closer to their academy days, if anything. She rose increasingly before the dawn (the turning of the seasons was responsible for that, it should be noted) with the rest of her friends for callisthenics, which would be followed by weight training in the middle of the day, and capped off with cardio later on in the afternoon, interspersed with a full day spent as Izanami's student, one-on-one, which was on a rotating schedule; and whenever Izanami wasn't teaching them, they were expected to practise on their own in hand-to-hand drills, weapon drills, and marksmanship drills (none of them could afford to be atrocious shots, nor hopeless melee combatants, if they were truly to be the most deadly of Her Highness's servants, the martial superiors of the Knights of the Round), and, increasingly, to aid Izanami in conducting drills for the new recruits, the auxilia that would, in a year's time, make up the rank and file of the forming First Legion (Legio I, according to their official documentation), on account of that adage that Izanami was apparently so very fond of: 'the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.'

Though, if she was being honest with herself and those around her, Marika would really rather have been spending her time helping out with the training of the Raven Knights—she preferred it to the point where she'd extracted the word of the skeletal order's Grand Master that her name would be one of the very first to be considered for the primary round of instructors. She certainly didn't slouch on her training with her vibroglaive, but astride a Knightmare Frame, she felt, was a method of warfare that was far better suited to Marika's particular brand of impetuousness—she wasn't a berserker in the vein of Suzaku, of course, but she'd certainly come to feel a kind of kinship with a number of historical cavalry commanders she'd put herself to researching as she made preparations to lend her aid to Valerian in the formation of operational doctrine, and none more so (heretically enough) than with the Hussar General, Antoine Lasalle, one of the Great Enemy's more infamous subordinates, whose quote about any hussar over the age of thirty being a blackguard had struck something of a chord with her, in sentiment if not reality. But that relied upon the Kays being ready for production, and then being readily available, and while when last she'd heard, the prototype model would be ready for field testing by the turning of the coming new year, the latter would, as she understood it, prove to be rather more difficult a hurdle to clear. And then there was the matter of selecting and training her Wyrmguard, which, in her mind, while exciting, was a headache in the making unto itself.

That said, there was enough going right with this, with being alongside her friends and helping their leader to assemble a force to be reckoned with, that Marika now felt comfortable stating that she was much more at home in her Order of the Dragon uniform than she had been in the garb that her family had made a point of demanding of her. Well, her former family, she supposed—a courier had come to find her at the tail end of a rather spirited debate on the finer points of cavalry doctrine with Valerian (who said that she found Marika's perspective invaluable, on account of Valerian having been an infantry commander during her previous career, and thus possessing no practical battle experience herself when it came to the successful operations of Knightmare Frames), to put a sealed letter stamped with the coat-of-arms of the House of Soresi directly into Marika's hands. She'd opened it right there, at the threshold of the Grand Master's suite of offices, and read for herself the fact that her parents had come to the decision to disown her, together with her (former) elder brother's urging for her to distance herself from 'the Impaler' (which she supposed was at the very least a more respectful title than that of the 'Commoner Princess'), and to seek to reconcile with their parents.

She didn't doubt that his tearfully-worded pleas were ultimately self-serving—her entire family was made up of regressive degenerates, she had come to realise, and neither her parents nor her brother had ever seen her as anything more than an ornament, a bauble with which they could rise in status without lowering themselves to the 'vulgar' business of soldiery any more than absolutely necessary—but the knowledge that her status had changed was, as Valerian had pointed out when she'd peered over her shoulder and read both letters for herself, a consequential bit of information for Justine, of which she really ought to be made aware with all haste; and that was what brought her here, the heels of her boots clashing against the floors, which were tiled in blackened andesite, as she navigated the halls of the 588th's headquarters, on her way towards the head office, held by their commander-in-chief.

The walls of the corridors were sparse, cavernous, and dark; the mortar of the tiles was concealed in molten bronze and not gold, as would have been a more accurate depiction of the wealth behind this entire enterprise, if not for the fact that making use of only 'martial metals' for decoration had been something of a sticking point during the design phase of this complex, leading to iron and armour-grade steel being used instead of more precious metals for things like door handles, while more fragile bronze was used for light fixtures as well as the aforementioned grout-filler. In time, she had no doubt that these very walls would become festooned with myriad accolades and honours, birthplace of a new martial lineage that it was, and the vaulted ceilings would be spoken of in such terms as the court halls of Camelot, but for now, only Marika passed through it, her fine crimson cloak billowing out around her in her haste, the two letters held securely in her grip as she traced a path she and her friends all knew fairly well by this point.

And sure enough, before long, the dark-stained cedar-wood double-doors that barred the way to the main office loomed large before her, with their cast-iron handles wrought into twin effigies of the snarling head of a dragon; without a moment's trepidation, she huffed, rolled her shoulders, and then pressed a hand to them, pushing one open and slipping inside pretty damn gracefully, if she did say so herself. She breezed past the waiting room, with its black iron furniture and the continued blackened andesite of the floors, plain and lacking in overt decoration as it was, and swept into the door at the other end of it, which led her out of the darkness and into the natural light that poured in through the rear windows to backlight the silhouette of the Boss at her large, heavy desk, made with old growth local cedar, as her right hand worked away, signing off on document after document while she made conversation with…

…Villetta…

…off to the side, who stood poised to gather up the documents herself for the sake of getting back to her own schedule. She caught the tail end of what they were speaking about—Justine asking after Villetta's parents, and how they were settling into their new lodgings in the manor that the newly-minted baroness had seen fit to bequeath them—just before they turned to realise that Marika herself was approaching; and Justine must have read the sign of portent upon her face, because she then turned to Villetta and said, "I won't keep you any further, but do give your parents my regards, if you would."

"I'll be sure to do so," Villetta replied, the corner of her mouth twisted into a fond smirk, remaining even as she raised her head to welcome Marika with a smile and a nod. "As for you, Marika, how have you been adjusting? We haven't crossed paths like this in some time. I'd half begun to think that we might have your brother battering down our doors any minute now."

Marika did her best to maintain her composure in the face of the mortification that the admonition stirred within her, however gentle it might have been, and privately, she rather hoped that she was at least marginally successful in the attempt. She knew that the older woman with whom she was so infatuated wasn't calling her out for avoiding her (which was only partly the case, anyways, given how much of her time was taken up with seeing to various odds and ends as of late, particularly as Justine began to round out the uppermost echelons of their command staff), but the situation still felt unbearably awkward nonetheless. But the second part of Villetta's statement had given her an in, a way to segue smoothly into the matter that she'd come to discuss, so she packed in her crush for a moment, as Lisa had taught her to do, and said, "I'm actually fairly sure that that won't be a problem anymore."

At both Villetta's and Jeremiah's (who was standing off to the side in parade rest, vigilant as always) questioning looks, she raised the two letters in her hand, showing off the broken seal of the House of Soresi as an explanation, before launching into her summary. "Apparently, my former parents have been talking, and they've come to the decision that I am the one at fault for the dissolution of my betrothal to the heir of the House of Steiner. So, as punishment, I've been entirely disinherited. I'm still of the nobility, technically, but no longer as a member of the House of Soresi. My good-for-nothing older brother, of course, also wrote to me, all but instructing me to seek reconciliation—oh, and I've learned from him that they've finally stopped calling you the 'Commoner Princess' at court, Justine. Kewell refers to you as 'the Impaler' in this letter, and if he's using it…"

"…Well then," Justine remarked mildly. "I can't say the sobriquet is entirely undeserved, at the very least. My condolences, however—or, I suppose, my congratulations, depending upon your preference…"

"Congratulations, please," Marika requested, and it almost surprised her how…unconflicted she felt at the prospect, increasingly so as the shock of it wore off. "Looks like I'm finally free, well and truly, to try to carve out my own path."

"That you are," Justine agreed, nodding. She stood from her chair, then, and rounded the desk, giving Marika her complete and undivided attention, even as she leaned back against her desk, arms clad in her signature black silk sleeves, folded over the boiled black leather of her overbust corset, and tossed her head to the side for a moment in a flourish of fluttering, iridescent darkness. "Should I start looking into putting a different name on the rolls, then, or will you be doing as Valerian has chosen to, and keeping your surname as-is?"

"…That's going to be a question that demands further thought than I've had time to give it," Marika admitted with a sound that was just as likely to have been a huff as it was a sigh. She held out the letter, for a lack of anything else to do with her hands but wring them, which would be unseemly of her, and the Boss, for her part, looked at it for a moment, like Marika was some manner of cat who had just brought back the corpse of a field mouse, but then took it gingerly, placing it onto the desktop behind her.

"A fair assessment," Justine said at some length, gesturing airily with the same hand that had taken the letter. Marika was unsurprised to see that, as was usually the case when Justine had her gloves on, her claws were fully extended as she went about her day—which, knowing what she did about the level of destruction they were capable of, perplexed Marika greatly, but she considered that perhaps there were certain nuances of living with them that would erase her confusion, of which she was simply ignorant, on account of…well, not having them herself. "We'll table that discussion for the time being, then. I suppose that means we can go ahead and start footing your stipend?"

That was another point of discussion they'd tabled in the past—her parents, even before this, hadn't reinstated her stipend, her allowance for discretionary spending that was common amongst noble scions, in particular those who had reached the age of majority, which had led to Justine offering to supply her with a coin-purse out of her own funds in her family's stead (Justine was known to be rather frugal, though Marika knew that she indulged on clothes, books, and supplies to take care of her harpsichord, making the Boss the only highborn woman Marika knew to exist who actually enjoyed the instrument they were all expected at least to try to learn), but she'd demurred; part of her had expressed a hope that she hadn't been permanently cut off from the coffers of her house, and another part had been mortified at the prospect of taking money from Justine for her own use, even if it was money the princess openly admitted that she had no use for. But, she didn't really have much of a choice here, did she? Her vices were few, of course, but she did have expenses of her own to look after.

Marika sighed, resigned to the necessity of it. She supposed she'd just have to swallow her pride as best she was able, and deal with it. "I suppose so…"

"If you're uncomfortable with it, we could see about getting you a landed title—gods know Milly's got a fair few of them to give out, if she sees fit—so that you could start managing your own revenue. But I worry that might wind up obstructing your other endeavours…" Justine offered, though the misgivings she stated, Marika had to admit, had a great deal of merit. After all, it wasn't as if she knew the first thing about land administration; she'd probably be beating her head against the first suite of issues that running her fief posed, only to bungle the whole thing anyways, regardless of her efforts…

"I'll handle the matter of her stipend," Villetta declared very firmly; and in that moment, Marika's heart felt like it was twisting upon itself. "I've got my hands full with trying to deal with the barony's needs while also building out my secretariat. I could use an extra pair of hands, and in the meantime, I'll name her my successor. I know what the House of Soresi's like—giving Marika here a fief would be like throwing an infant into the shark-infested deep end."

"Are you certain about this, Villetta?" Justine asked, purely as a courtesy; indeed, there was nothing in her tone that so much as suggested that she genuinely believed that Villetta would think better of what she'd just offered Marika.

"Absolutely," Villetta nodded, before turning a sharp-edged grin upon Marika, dazzling her with her roguish allure. "And hey, if Kewell gets a burr in his boot about it, so much the better."

"And what of you, Marika?" the Boss asked, turning back towards Marika as she stood before their leader. "Would you be amenable to this arrangement, yourself? After all, I should hardly wish to be the one to decide such things in your stead…"

Marika didn't trust her voice not to give away her thoughts—she'd gotten so much better around the dark-skinned woman who was her sexual awakening, she'd thought, but for all that she'd improved when it came to keeping her nigh-magnetic attraction to Villetta Nu under control, she'd obviously not gotten good enough; there was clearly quite a ways she had yet to go. So instead, she nodded her head mutely (albeit a bit more vigorously than was really safe, if she wanted to have any chance of keeping this crush of hers to any extent under wraps) as she accepted the proposition.

Justine clapped her hands together, and the sound was so sharp that if Marika hadn't been used to it, she'd likely have flinched involuntarily. "Wonderful! Now that that business is all nice and resolved…"

A knocking on the door interrupted whatever Justine was going to say next, stopping it in its tracks; cocking a brow, she motioned for Marika to find someplace else to stand, further into the room, and as she obeyed that directive, Justine called out, "The door isn't locked. Please, do come in."

The door swung open a moment later, and Marika watched as Justine's expression changed, shifting into a broad, open smile at the sight of her terrifying wife in her sparring clothes—a smile that immediately froze upon her face, as an entire entourage of people, eight in total, entered the office in Princess Carmilla's wake, led by a woman as pale as Izanami, with the same shockingly blue eyes, whose slight, waifish body was covered in a long, long-sleeved white coat, with a bushy ring of immaculate white fur around the collar of the otherwise mostly-innocuous outer garment.

The woman was pretty enough, if one was into that sort of thing; it was clear immediately that she was shorter, even, than the Boss, who wasn't exactly the tallest of Britannian women herself, and her facial features were delicate even as they were quintessentially Britannian, which made her look, if Marika was to get a bit fantastical, like someone had anthropomorphised an arctic fox and dressed her in the manner of an eccentric businesswoman, with her thin-lipped mouth, her upturned narrow eyes, and her waist-length white hair, straight as a bullet as it hung over her shoulders and down her back. "Well, well, your highness—we meet at last…"

"I'm afraid that you have the advantage of me, madam," Justine replied with a polite chuckle, her posture shifting in a manner that only those who had since become attuned to the princess's shifts in mood (namely her friends and her scary-as-Hell-itself wife) could possibly have managed to notice. "I would have your name, if you please."

"Koko Hekmatyar, at your service," the pale woman said, and Marika wondered as she bowed if this woman could say anything without it sounding at least somewhat like she was secretly taking the piss. "I've come representing the interests of HCLI, as well as my own personal curiosity."

"Your personal curiosity, you say?" Justine repeated with a bemused smirk.

"There's a lot people say about you these days," Hekmatyar said with a shrug. "Naturally, I started to wonder just how much of it was actually true."

"I'd venture to say 'more than you'd think, less than you'd hope,'" replied the princess, and she left the front of her desk to circle back around it as she spoke, lowering herself back into her chair and crossing her legs, one over the other. "And what business, pray tell, would the premier weapons manufacturing outfit in the Empire have with me, then?"

"A great deal, I'm hoping," the arms manufacturing magnate shot back, and Villetta left her position to round the table herself and bring forth a chair for the newcomer, who availed herself of it quite swiftly thereafter (stripping off her coat to reveal a white pencil skirt, secured with a white leather belt at her waist, and a commoner's starched white button-down shirt with a striped light-and-dark blue neck-tie), leaving all others on both sides of this meeting, the woman's bodyguards, Jeremiah, Villetta, the princess's wife, and Marika herself, to stand. "Your sister and I did good work together, after all, and I think it'd be a waste to let a golden opportunity like that wither on the vine."

"I see," Justine said noncommittally. "I'm afraid that I'll have to disappoint you, Miss Hekmatyar. I don't believe we'll have much need for state-of-the-art imperial ordinance here, given that the hardware the Five Hundred Eighty-Eighth is going to be supplied with is proprietary in nature."

"Oh, I don't doubt that you have the ability to develop any amount of bleeding-edge hardware," said the pale woman without missing a beat, as if she'd expected that counter precisely. There was a glint in her eye, for all that her expression remained unerringly professional, that Marika didn't trust in the slightest. "All that takes is funds, facilities, and talent, really, all of which Area Eleven seems to have in spades. The question is, though—do you have the ability to manufacture all of it?"

That got the Boss's attention, practically instantaneously; a shiver passed down Marika's spine and a flutter arrested her heart as Villetta passed by her, taking up a waiting position by her side, and Marika was at once immensely grateful that the meeting seemed as if it wasn't actually going to wind up being as open and shut as it had initially seemed, if only because without the dialogue between the two women before her to distract her, Marika gave herself roughly even odds on whether or not she'd spontaneously combust from sheer Sapphic panic.

Frankly, Marika wasn't entirely sure that she'd be able to avoid having her face turn the same colour as her cloak, even with the distraction handy.

"I'm afraid I'm not sure I quite grasp your meaning, Miss Hekmatyar," said Justine, leaning forward in her chair, propping her elbows up upon the tabletop, and steepling her hands, her fingers threading together under her nose, claws and all. "If you would be so kind as to elaborate…?"

"Certainly," the white-haired woman nodded, her lips lifting into a little smirk of her own. "When I say manufacture, I mean mass production. I mean economies of scale. I mean supplying several armies with arms and armour, proprietary or not. Because while I don't doubt that you could foot the bill for all of that production without even wounding your bottom line that much, there's still the limiting factor of time. Mass production requires a level of infrastructure well-above and beyond the scope of anything R might need, after all, and that's even harder to do without the proper resources and knowledge. Let's not forget how the first factories were child-maiming monstrosities, or even the Triangle Shirtwaist Disaster—industry, to put it bluntly, isn't exactly a walk in the park, your highness. And that's what I've come here to offer you."

"…You're certainly well-researched enough that I won't insult your intelligence by assuming that you mean to have us produce our arms and armour, as you have so eloquently put it, Miss Hekmatyar, in HCLI's factories," Justine said after a moment of pregnant assessment. "Which leaves one option: that you seek to give us your assistance in setting up mass production infrastructure of our own, here in Area Eleven. Do I have that right?"

"More or less," said Hekmatyar, waving a hand flippantly as she leaned back in her borrowed chair. "Less 'give,' more 'exchange,' if you catch my meaning."

"But of course," Justine chortled. "Quid pro quo, is that it? One of the most fundamental bargains. I find myself curious, however; what, exactly, would you wish of us in return? It can't simply be money, else I sincerely doubt you'd have bothered to come out here yourself. Nor can it be sakuradite, given that you'd then be doubling up on the bargain you made with Juliette, and that sets a bad precedent… Will you tell me what it is, I wonder, or would you like me to guess?"

"No need," the pale woman replied, shaking her head and leaning forward ever-so-slightly.

"Wonderful. I'm quite atrocious at guessing games, as it so happens," the Boss candidly admitted.

Hekmatyar smiled at that confession, and for once, it looked like it was genuine. "The deal is this: knowledge for knowledge. We at HCLI will supply you with qualified personnel and proprietary tech to get your manufacturing infrastructure up and running, and in return, you kick over some of the juicier bits that your labs manage to churn out—and let's be honest, His Majesty was never going to let you keep all of that close to the chest for much longer—and sign a noncompete agreement with us, that you're not going to seek to sell what you've made to anyone else."

"Something to show to His Majesty, and something to show to your company's Board of Directors," Justine remarked, leaning back from her desk to recline somewhat into her chair. "I can't help but notice, Miss Hekmatyar, that this deal you've proposed to us is weighted suspiciously heavily in our favour. After all, with everything you seem to know, you couldn't possibly have come to the conclusion that I'm about to be in the business of arming anyone other than my own soldiers in the first place, and as you yourself said, I was going to have to reckon with His Majesty's empowered displeasure if we tried to hoard everything to ourselves anyways. Your price, then, Miss Hekmatyar, becomes a piece of paper describing something you already know to be true, and a freely-given service of giving us a channel to control the dissemination of any and all of the new weapon technologies coming out of those aforementioned labs of ours. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but…what's your angle here, precisely?"

"In a word, your highness? Alliance," said Hekmatyar. "Your sister's schemes with the former chief general got my father and brother both ousted, and thus helped me get to where I currently am; therefore, it seems to me that the most advantageous move going forward is to hitch my wagon to yours, in the interest of forging closer ties. Not to mention, as my brother liked to say, 'a rising tide lifts all ships'; I've been told a great deal about the late Field Marshal Hargreeves's chosen successor, and I'm certainly not blind to how her little vendetta against you motivates her. You show up to a sortie with that kind of equipment, and she'll be starting up an arms race to match you before you can blink; and an arms race, your highness, means windfall for HCLI."

"On top of the technologies you'll be getting from us, which, naturally, you and yours shall provide to any interested parties at a premium mark-up, the Imperial Army chief amongst them, while also keeping your operating costs low with the deal you cut with Juliette on refined sakuradite out of Area Eleven," the Boss summarised, equal parts intrigued and amused.

"Well, you know what they say, your highness," the pale woman replied, as she leaned back into the chair once again, grinning like a madwoman. "Caveat emptor."

Justine smirked in return, the same sharp, cutting expression she'd given Santa Anna before giving the order for his co-conspirators to be beaten to death with rifle-stocks, and said, "Caveat emptor, indeed… In that case, then, Miss Hekmatyar, I do believe we can do business. When do you intend for this to start?"

"Depends. When are you going to be able to give me something I can take back?" asked Hekmatyar in return.

"Within the next twenty-four hours, like as not," Justine replied easily. "The body armour employed by the Five Hundred Eighty-Eighth in the Peninsular Rebellion ought to be a good start. It's lightweight, flexible, and incredibly durable, estimated at around two and a half times more effective than the current state-of-the-art protective gear issued to infantrymen. And, best of all, the armour is designed in such a way that it offers full coverage to the soldier wearing it, while keeping the obstruction incurred by that coverage at practically zero. We were able to modernise the old IJA production lines to produce around four thousand suits of it, but naturally, we'll need a production capacity on a different order of magnitude to equip even as many recruits as we currently have, and we get more signing up by the day, so I must say, Miss Hekmatyar, that your aid is quite timely-given."

"Glad to hear it," said Hekmatyar. "And please, call me Koko. After all, we're likely to be working together pretty closely, moving forward…"

Justine flashed a smile, there and then gone in an instant. "I believe it would be better for us to try to work our way up to it."

The pale woman shrugged. "Suit yourself. But yeah, that sounds good. Once my people back in the home office tell me they've got the plans, I'll…"

"Hold on for a moment, if you would," Justine interrupted, raising a clawed finger as she did. Then, that hand went below the desktop, fiddling for a moment with one of the drawers, and a few moments later, it emerged with a manila envelope in hand. "A-ha! I'd thought I recalled keeping one of the paper back-ups in that drawer…"

At that, Jeremiah, Villetta, the Boss's wife, and even Marika herself couldn't help but laugh.

Justine kept her poker face on even through the cascade of laughter at her inside joke, handing the folder to Hekmatyar over the desk; and instead of taking it up herself, one of the magnate's bodyguards, a towering Amazon of a woman in grey cargo pants, a black compression shirt, and Euro-issue combat boots with a medical eyepatch over one side of her (admittedly very pretty, in an austere kind of way) face, stepped forth and took hold of the envelope herself, fluttering through its contents so quickly that the draft of the moving pages stirred up the jet-coloured locks of her chin-length black bob. Once she'd flipped all the way through, closing the manila envelope, she rapped it against her open hand twice, and nodded, before handing it over to her boss. "It's legit, Koko. All of it's there."

"I'd hardly have gone to the trouble of having a forgery drawn up," Justine remarked, resuming her previous steepled-hand posture upon the desktop, black gloves and black silk sleeves with lace cuffs held in place by her elbows upon the wood. "I'm sure you of all people can appreciate how bad of a precedent that would set, if I were to begin dealing with potential allies in bad faith. It's outmoded tech anyways; easier by far just to give you the genuine article…"

"Trust, but verify, your highness," Hekmatyar countered with a nod. "It's a rule I live my life by."

"A good sentiment," agreed the princess, nodding herself in turn. "Likewise, I hope I can trust that you'll oversee your end of the bargain as well, Koko Hekmatyar."

"It might take a day, but they'll be here," Hekmatyar confirmed as she rose from her chair. "I'll be the first to admit that I didn't think you'd actually have the payment handy…"

"I like to keep several tactile records of such sensitive information, in addition to the digital master," Justine shrugged. "One can never be too careful with such things, especially when cybersecurity becomes a meaningful concern."

"A little paranoid, perhaps, but fair enough," the weapons manufacturer shrugged. "Also, just as a quick note moving forward, if I'm ever not available, Valmet here has the authority to act in my stead."

"Likewise, you may prevail upon my retainer, Villetta, Baroness Nu," Justine replied, gesturing with her other hand towards Villetta, and thus reminding Marika that she was right next to her right now…! "She is likewise to be considered my proxy, should circumstances render me in any way indisposed."

Villetta, as if responding to some invisible cue, stepped forth towards the muscular one-eyed woman in the middle of the room, plastering a cordial smile upon her face as she reached out her hand. "A pleasure to meet you, Major Velmer. I look forward to working together."

The woman recoiled at first, momentarily taken aback, but after a moment, she remembered herself, and smiled right back at Villetta, the gesture only as genuine as the baroness's polite expression, and took the offered hand in a firm grip, shaking it. "Likewise. Though it's rare to encounter anyone who knows who I am out in the wild. Did the other princess tell you?"

"Actually," Villetta began, her smile growing more genuine, and thus sharper. "I was the one to tell her. You made quite a few waves during your time in the Finnish State Army, and I make it my business to know 'who's who' when it comes to potentially active combatants on the world stage. Though, I must say, I do hope, for your employer's sake, that you haven't let private security life make you rusty…"

"Mm. Maybe one day, you'll get to see how rusty I'm not…" Major Velmer—Valmet?—replied, an edge to her tone that set danger signs flashing behind Marika's eyelids.

But no one else, at least amongst Justine's side of things, and therefore Marika's, seemed to share in her sense of alarm; indeed, Villetta seemed to meet the challenge evenly, grinning, and responding in a low, promising purr, "Well then, I suppose I'll just have to look forward to it."

If this woman hadn't ruined her already, Marika knew, this moment, right here and right now, would have been when she knew for certain that she was done for.

(She really was a walking stereotype, wasn't she…)

"Now now, play nice, you two," Justine interjected smoothly, rising from her own chair in turn. "I'd ask you if you wished to take a tour of the complex, but I suspect you're likely pressed for time; it's just as well, though, since when next you grace us with your presence, Koko Hekmatyar, you'll be able to tour this place in its finished state…"

"I suppose you've got a point," Hekmatyar sighed, fanning herself with the folder. Then, she stood from her chair, turned upon her heel, and rejoined the rest of her bodyguards (all of whom, Marika, noticed, were male), waving over her shoulder as she retreated from the office. "Until next time, your highness."

"…I'll go with them," Princess Carmilla sighed, once they were out of earshot. "Have to make sure they're not getting anywhere they're not supposed to be…"

"Thank you, darling," Justine sighed, nodding. "And hurry back, please. We suddenly have quite a lot of work ahead of us…"

"I'll get to filing the documents you've already signed off on," Villetta volunteered, turning her gaze away from the threshold and slipping back into her 'perfect professional' mode so quickly that Marika felt a little whiplashed at the change. "Marika, will you come with me? If I'm going to be teaching you much of anything, I suppose there's no time like the present…"

How she'd fantasised about being asked to accompany Villetta anywhere… But no, she had to keep it professional. She was here to learn, not to bury herself in lovesick daydreams about her newest teacher. In a moment, Marika felt like she'd composed herself enough to respond without making a fool of herself. "Of course. I'll be right behind you."

"Very good," Villetta praised her, and Marika felt the words like an electric jolt through her body. The dark-skinned, silver-haired goddess turned away from her again, then, and strode for the door, tossing over her shoulder a casual, "Come along, then."

And Marika, lost cause of a Sapphite that she knew herself to be, followed Villetta out of Justine's office as if drawn along by a string, sticking right on her heels, just as she'd promised.

---

Another day, another sparring session in the yard—or at least, one of the yards. Marika's vibroglaive grew more and more familiar in her hands by the day, as well, so it wasn't as if she could honestly contend that Izanami's methods weren't producing results, but far from conventional training with drills and forms, since, according to Izanami herself, she had 'better things to do than teach choreography to brats who really ought to know better,' leaving them to learn those in their off-time to tighten up their movements, Izanami's training method boiled down mostly to beating the shit out of them with their chosen weapon over and over again until they started learning how not to get the shit beaten out of them. Of course, she gave all of them a thorough run-down of where they'd fucked up and how after each round, so this wasn't entirely an exercise in sadism, but she didn't believe in holding back, contending that 'coddling you lot will only leave you with a bucketload of bad habits, and I won't have any of you out there embarrassing me or Her Highness with such obvious and exploitable failures.'

It had become clear fairly early on that the mutagen that all of them had to down daily was meant to toughen them up, and it became just as clear almost as early that while the mutagen worked even while they were at rest, it worked significantly faster if they got beaten half to death with it in their systems. It was like a rebound in a bottle—none of their aches and pains would be all that major, considering, and with a bit of extra care on Izanami's part, come morning, all of them would be back at a hundred percent, no matter how many of their own bones ought to have been shattered taking the force of a freight train into their respective chests, which, in Marika's case, was delivered through the medium of the butt of a naginata, glaive, or other polearm that their hardass of an instructor felt like beating her black and blue with that day. Today, she'd chosen a naginata, which Marika understood to be the local equivalent of a glaive, the profile of which also all but matched the profile of the weapon that Lloyd Asplund had made for her use, and while this level of symmetry was rare, Marika had noticed that Izanami tended to tailor her weapon choices during instruction such that there was some degree of it at all times; and as a result, Marika had taken to observing how Izanami handled her choice of weapon as readily as she paid attention to her own motions, and tailored her practise after the fact to mimic the form the immortal warrior used as nearly as she was able.

She admired Izanami's style, sincerely, especially when it came to handling a polearm: the immortal was quick and precise, but ceaselessly aggressive, and had no qualms with using the reach of the weapon to dominate as much space as she could with it. It made it even more impressive, really, that watching Justine fight, Marika could now tell that she'd taken practically zero cues from Izanami's own style, developing her own while using Izanami's as a whetstone instead, and was still able to contend seriously with the woman in a duel, and even come out victorious a few times; it put into perspective just how vast the gap in skill and in proficiency was between Suzaku and Justine, and the rest of them, and it made Marika appreciate also why it was that Izanami was working them as hard as she was. It was only partly because the immortal's teaching style wasn't one particularly given to sympathetic pedagogy—the rest of it was that all of them had quite a lot of ground to make up, and even then, part of her doubted that any of her friends would ever manage to match the combat prowess of the Boss and her most bosom of companions, if that was how that phrase was meant to work (Marika wasn't actually sure). The better she got, the clearer it became to her that the two of them really were just on a whole other level.

The vibroglaive rested in her hands, deactivated; she held it as far back on the shaft as she could without giving up too much control of the cutting edge, cautious as she was not to sacrifice her leverage in its entirety, and kept light on her feet, going for little teasing blows maybe, but not committing to anything. The little swipes she took at her opponent were more to deter Izanami's advancement than to menace her in any meaningful capacity, and the immortal batted them away with an ease that was not quite contemptuous, but was rather fully aware of exactly what Marika was trying to do. Her cloak she had doffed and left off to the side, alongside her tailcoat and her gloves, with only the patterned sleeveless black shirt beneath it as a means of guarding her modesty, and Izanami had chosen to mirror that choice, her own jacket, gloves, and vambraces off to the side as she prowled around Marika, both of them sizing each other up in the lull before the engagement proper.

"Tatakae," Izanami instructed simply, and immediately she was upon Marika in a violent whirlwind of shaft and sharp metal, a favourite means of hers to dictate her territory, creating a position from which the immortal could strike out at her leisure. Marika had learned from this woman to think of the blade at the end of the weapon as something akin to a tongue, or the horsehair of a paintbrush, and so she took up with the engagement, swiping and clattering up her cadence before she could really get going, since that was just about the only way to shut that particular trick of the immortal's down—to end it before it got the chance to start up in earnest—unless you were Justine, and could parry every swing unerringly, regardless of where it was coming from. Marika had once made the attempt to mirror that defensive web approach, but while she could get her glaive spinning pretty fucking quickly, to the point where it even matched Izanami's at times (which wasn't all that surprising, considering the biometrics they were working with were about the same), she'd critically overlooked that matching Izanami's speed wouldn't give her Izanami's control, which was a much more difficult thing to develop, Marika continued to find. It was deceptive, but it wasn't speed alone that made Izanami's defence so impregnable, and rather it was her ability to ensure that the blade or shaft of the naginata was always precisely where it needed to be to fend off attack, which took a level of control that was disastrously easy to miss.

Izanami had picked her apart that day, laying bare the folly of attempting to use a technique that the immortal (obviously, in retrospect) knew inside-out and backwards, including, most critically, where it fell short, against her in record time; and Marika was sure never to make that mistake again.

Of course, that experience was an immense benefit to Marika in retrospect, because it'd forced her to stop and consider her own style, rather than simply mimicking someone else's motions by rote; it caused her to begin to experiment, to try what felt right, what she could make sense of, and think ahead of time of reactions and counter-reactions, plays and counterplays, parries and ripostes and counter-attacks, and with a single opening having presented itself, she didn't hesitate even for a moment. She struck low for Izanami's shins, because the one constant of combat was that the power behind a strike came from the legs and core more than anything else, with the arms only there to present the proper technique, and once she'd taken the immortal's surety of footing, she spun to build extra force and momentum, adjusting her grip to sacrifice a bit of reach for better leverage, and channelled it into her heavy slash at Izanami's side.

The immortal parried the blow, blade against blade clashing and shearing against each other, but she had sparred with Justine long before Izanami, and so, anticipating the deflection, she adjusted her grip once again, and struck with the butt of her vibroglaive, catching the immortal across the mouth, and cheering as she felt the bone give in Izanami's jaw, albeit internally. With her opponent stunned and reeling, Marika stepped forth again, and twirled her vibroglaive to conceal her grip shifting lower on the weapon's shaft, sacrificing control for reach and power, and carving a deep, bloody furrow into her opponent's chest across the clavicle as Izanami gave ground; Marika twisted, bringing the arc low as she pirouetted again and registering the splash of hot, dark blood on her back as she turned, and with the extra energy behind her as she advanced, she adjusted again, and cut up Izanami's body from hip to shoulder. The blood splattered upon the side of her face this time as she turned, and, knowing that Izanami had probably recovered by now, she slashed up with the force of her turn again, catching Izanami's downward punishment upon the vibroglaive's blade.

She realised her mistake immediately, that Izanami had the critical leverage advantage now, but she couldn't adjust in time; the immortal shoved the vibroglaive down towards the ground, thus entangling their weapons together, and brought them face-to-face in a low bladelock, where the undying warrior could now dictate what would happen next. Marika tried to reverse this and strike with the butt again, but that was one of the responses the immortal had anticipated, and she countered this by planting her boot in Marika's chest and driving all the air out of her lungs as the auburn-haired girl was kicked back across the arena, her feet leaving the ground with the force behind the strike.

Thankfully, she kept her grip upon the vibroglaive, and so even as she struggled with breathlessness, she could strike the ground with the blade and catch enough drag to slow herself, and she knew at once that the added agony of her shoulders popping out of their sockets would be far less than crashing into whatever was behind her. Her two-handed death-grip kept the weapon in her grasp, but her knees were weak enough that when she stopped, she collapsed to the ground onto them, gasping and wheezing and trying to get more air into her lungs, even as each breath sent blooming flowers of tingling pain radiating out across her torso.

Footfalls echoed with the muted clatter of segmented armour plates moving against each other, and it was a sign that Marika ought to devote her attention forwards; and as she struggled to recover, she saw the ashen woman walking towards her, stopping at the very end of the furrow her vibroglaive had dug into the ground beneath them in her frenzied effort to halt her flight. Her knees ached from how she'd landed, she wouldn't be able to use her arms until her joints were shunted back into place, and on the whole, she was helpless; as she realised this, she watched the wounds she'd dealt Izanami rapidly mend themselves closed, and that pair of deathly blue eyes that so disqualified the (much) (unimaginably) (unconscionably) (inconceivably) older woman from the status of albinism studied Marika as if she were some exotic new specimen in a menagerie assembled by a heathen king of old. Marika's chest heaved with the labour of each new breath, but she was recovering, and much faster than she ought to have, as well—the benefit of the mutagen, she supposed—as Izanami watched her, and as she continued to recover, she became increasingly more aware of the dull, throbbing ache in her dislocated shoulders and her (almost certainly) bruised knees, leaving her to wish that this damned woman would just say whatever she was going to say and be done with it.

"You know, if I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead right now," Izanami began casually, as though she was discussing the weather, as opposed to Marika's fragile mortality. "And, as a side note, just so that you can appreciate how important the elixir I give you all to consume on a daily basis truly is: I just kicked you hard enough that without it, your dislocated shoulders and your diaphragm spasming would be the least of your problems. Shattered ribs, bruised organs, internal bleeding—and that's just from the kick itself, to say nothing of the landing. And yet, in spite of that, all you have to deal with, now that the mutagen is well and truly inside you, is having a difficult time trying to get enough air back into your lungs. Do you understand what it is that I'm saying?"

With the power of speech obviously very far beyond Marika at this point, she settled on nodding.

Izanami looked down at her for a moment more, and then gave a sharp nod of her own. She set her naginata upon the ground, then, and approached Marika openly, kneeling down beside her and taking hold of her back and her arm. The pale-skinned immortal gave her a sympathetic grimace, and remarked, "In the ordinary course, I'd tell you to take a deep breath, but…"

Marika nodded, continuing to wheeze and flinch around the spasms in her chest, and braced herself as best she could; a moment later, a sharp pain erupted around the joint as Izanami forced her shoulder back into its proper socket with a sickening snap, and Marika was quite suddenly very glad for the near-total lack of air in her lungs, as it meant that she didn't have to worry about crying out in pain even slightly. Izanami wasted no time in moving onto the other shoulder, putting her hands against it and forcing it back into place as well, that snap sounding out again with a sharp, blossoming pain that passed as soon as it came, and left her full control of her arms again in its wake. Izanami retreated a short distance while Marika flexed both of her restored shoulders dutifully, demonstrating that she still possessed a full range of motion to the watchful blue eyes of the immortal, before the woman deigned to speak again. "I imagine that it likely doesn't seem like it, but you did exceptionally well just there. That you managed to push me to retaliate with such force is a very good sign—crafting your fighting style is an invaluable milestone for any aspiring weapon-master, and what you showed today is a good foundation to build off of. Remain mindful, however; an aggressive style like that is vulnerable to those whose approach to combat is built around baiting and misdirection. The dragon's patience is the natural enemy of the impetuous tiger."

Marika wanted to respond—truly, she did—but she was still left all but breathless as she continued to wheeze, and while she didn't think that she was in any danger, it was still vexing.

Izanami, seeming to sense this, approached her, and slipped a hand in between her and her weapon, which was still planted into the ground and held in both of her hands; the immortal placed her palm against some point on Marika's torso, and with a muted grunt, she forced the heel forward, sending a strange jolt to course through Marika's body, soothing her diaphragm and allowing her lungs to inflate to full without pain almost immediately. She sucked in a big breath, and coughed, a ruinous sound that shook through her body in one furious torrent, and it was at this point that Izanami stood, and said, "I think we're done for the day. I want you to develop your style, and hone it as well as you can. I expect you to last twice as long against me with that aggression next time you come up in the rotation. Am I understood?"

Marika nodded. "Crystal…"

"Well, if nothing else, that was certainly a lively way to end the day's training," said a voice that the auburn-haired girl knew exceptionally well—after all, who wouldn't be able to recognise the voice of their best friend ever since their earliest childhood memories? While it was unfortunately the case that Liliana and she didn't see each other one-on-one anywhere near as often as they used to—which was a side effect of Liliana being all but joined at the hip with her paramour, Lisa—Marika, at least, still considered the blonde her best and closest confidante, so when she struggled to her feet (with Izanami's help, for which Marika was quite grateful) and turned to face the heiress of the House of Vergamon, she did so with a smile upon her face. "I admit, getting thrown clear across a ring is a feat I myself have yet to inspire out of you, Izanami."

Izanami didn't say anything in response to that, and instead just smiled; but Marika figured that she had a good chance of guessing exactly why that was, that Marika had pressed such a stark, violent reaction out of the immortal where Liliana had not done the same.

While they wielded the same weapon—both of them worked hard, day in and day out, at mastering the use of the vibroglaive—their manners of using them were wholly distinct from one another. Of them, it was Liliana who had been the first to pick up the groove of what she wanted her own style to be, and it was one that Marika had actually watched her practise before this, after the blonde's own bout against Izanami earlier on in that very week. Liliana's style was graceful and agile, but it was also tempered and patient, and it was strikingly defensive, emphasising restraint and the swift seizure of opportunities, instead of Marika's forceful creation of openings. It wasn't a boring or a cowardly style, not by any means, for all the ease that Marika had in imagining why it would be a nightmare (ugh) to fight against; Liliana's method of handling a vibroglaive was focused upon delivering a merciless and opportunistic death by a thousand cuts, rather than anything decisive, and while that was impressive in its own right, it wasn't the dynamic push-and-pull that had allowed Marika's always advancing, always offensive methodology to provoke the ashen immortal into such an impulsive response, for all that it had also done the job in making the woman bleed.

But of course, Marika didn't say any of this, not as Izanami loped over to where the pile of effects she had discarded at the beginning of their bout was, nor as she began to don the discarded garments, ripped sleeveless shirt and all. Instead, she took her cue from the immortal, and tested her knees as she staggered a bit on the way over to her own effects, her footing growing more sure with every step as her bruised knees set to figuring out how they were meant to work all over again, while Liliana, for her part, approached her destination, crimson cloak and all, and met Marika as she began to dress once again, and kept in mind how grateful she ought to be that the weather was cold enough at this time of year that she wasn't drenched with sweat—that certainly would have made putting her uniform back on and going about her day a significantly less pleasant experience than it already was.

Sometime around when she'd shrugged on her tailcoat and was part of the way through donning her gloves, Marika found the presence of mind to ask her silent friend, "What's up, Lili? What do you need me for?"

"Can't a girl just decide she wants to come down to one of the sparring rings and have a nice, casual chat with her childhood friend?" Liliana replied cheekily, her smile innocent in a way that immediately shot Marika's suspicions astronomically high up into the sky. Marika knew firsthand that Liliana Vergamon was many things, but 'as innocent as she was presenting herself to be right then' was not and never would have been one of them. That was the face she gave you before she put a garter snake in your bed for daring to touch her new doll, or before she decapitated all of your new dolls because you made the amateur mistake of thinking that turnabout was fair play, and that putting a snake in your bed when you were sleeping over was an excessive overreaction to setting up a tea party between a mixture of both groups of…

Anyways, that was a whole thing that Marika very suddenly no longer felt any need whatsoever to belabour, ground she now realised would not have been productive at all to break open, lest they exhume by accident those hatchets they'd buried so very long ago; instead, she shook her head seriously. "Lili, you've proven that you have absolutely no compunctions about asking me to third-wheel when you and Lisa go out together. If you wanted to hang out with me, you absolutely would have brought her with you. You're here, in this part of the complex, on your own, not because you want to hang out with me, Liliana Vergamon, but because you want something from me. So, out with it."

"Fine," Liliana huffed. "You know, in any other circumstance, I'd ask if you were always this much of a bitch about everything, but that would imply that both of us don't already know that the answer to that question is a resounding yes."

"You say that like it's meant to be a bad thing," Marika snarked right back, as she donned her cloak, slinging it across her shoulders in a flutter of crimson fabric, and securing it at the front.

"Odette, Lin, and Hecate all landed in the Tokyo Settlement a few hours ago," Liliana said, rolling her emerald-green eyes and tacitly refusing to gratify Marika's remark with a response (so really, of the two of them, who's actually the one being the bitch right now?). "And I figured that it would be nice of us to get our asses down to the train station and welcome our dear friends back. Which is why I came to get you. Now, is that going to be a problem, or…?"

"No, not in the slightest," Marika shrugged, tapping the butt of her vibroglaive into the ground twice in quick succession. "We'll just need to swing by the living quarters so that I can stash this old girl away all proper-like, and then I'll be only too happy to go with you. After all, it's been quite a while since we've had the opportunity to partake of Odette's particular brand of commentary, hasn't it?"

"Yes, well, some of us don't have actively adversarial relationships with our parents." Liliana rolled her eyes in obvious antipathy, and Marika rolled along; to say that the elder Vergamons hadn't taken kindly to their only child romantically involving herself with a commoner, even if said commoner couldn't've been any more obviously the illegitimate child of a noble house if she tried, would be an understatement. Unlike Marika, however, Liliana was, again, an only child, and if there was anything that her dear old mother, the head of the House of Vergamon, liked even less than the fact that Liliana and Lisa were regularly sleeping together, and probably had vague plans of getting married sometime in the near future—all of them were of an age to do that by now, after all—it was the idea of one of the cadet branches inserting their own heir into the main branch of the family, so removing her as Heiress Vergamon was a no-go, and publicly punishing one's scion was considered somewhat gauche, so Liliana, at the very least, wasn't likely to be suffering any overt consequences for her unpopular life choices anytime soon. "Could you imagine?"

"Sounds exhausting," Marika agreed with a faux-sagacious nod. "But all the same, I'd really rather not go down to Kōfu Station armed if I can help it, so…"

"Fine, fine, you big baby," Liliana sighed playfully, rolling her eyes in pantomime and pivoting on her heel just hard enough to send the end of her cloak flapping against the shins of Marika's boots. "C'mon, then, let's get moving, quick as you like!"

"Yes, yes, keep your cloak on, I'm right behind you," Marika faux-groused. She turned, then, to the immortal, and bowed. "I'd try to give the proper farewell, but honestly, I think I'd just butcher it, so…thank you for the lesson, and everything."

"You ought to listen to Liliana. Go retrieve your friends," Izanami, who had, of course, by that point fully donned the parts of her own uniform she had previously discarded and retrieved her (probably genuine antique) naginata from where she'd set it down on the ground, said in response, shooing them off. "I've got an entire class of fresh recruits I need to prepare to induct."

"Right, right," Marika nodded jerkily—she had never quite figured out how she was meant to act in the immortal's presence—before turning on her heel and following after Liliana as she walked quickly over to the living quarters, where the members of the Order of the Dragon, Justine, and Lord Jeremiah lived (for no one, except for Suzaku and Justine, possibly, knew if Izanami even slept, let alone where), and where she made a quick stop into her still relatively barren room, which was certainly better than her dorm room at Ad Victoriam, though she was still undecided as to whether or not it was better than her technically much more lavish rooms back in what was once her family home, to leave her deactivated vibroglaive laid out upon the spread of her queen-sized bed, before turning upon her heel and leaving the room to rejoin Liliana.

It was still a bit of a strange feeling, walking down the populated corridors of Headquarters, where a number of the earliest recruits, particularly if some of them were any of the four thousand former Sixes (all of whom had since been registered as Elevens, and then as Honorary Britannians under that definition) who had already seen combat as members of the 588th, ceased any conversations they were having and drew to the side to clear the way for Marika and Liliana, bowing low in something approaching reverence as both of them passed by, but she tried to put it out of her mind. She'd raised her concerns with Justine before, which Justine had shared, to an extent, but when last she'd heard anything on the subject, she'd discovered that the former Sixes were doing it of their own volition, and the auxilia who were (relatively speaking, considering that enlistment hadn't opened up until early October) furthest along in the course of their training took their cues from those whom they saw as veterans, and so on down the line. Marika had realised upon learning all of that that there was no helping it, so she did her best to roll with it, but she still wasn't quite used to it. She didn't think Liliana shared the sentiment of being uncomfortable with this, but Marika's best friend was deceptively forceful, and had been since they were children, so perhaps it was unsurprising that she'd be all but unphased by the experience of having others clear out of her way and then bow down before her. At the very least, Marika nodded to them as she passed, murmuring nonspecific messages of well-wishing, before, at last, both she and Liliana stepped out of the building into the main courtyard, where a black limo awaited them, driven by one of Princess Carmilla's shinobi, who was disguised in a full chauffeur's uniform—and indeed, there the undercover driver was, standing in front of the open back door, black coat, polarised goggles, black cap and all.

Much like with the corridor, Liliana didn't spare the driver more than a curt nod before climbing in, and Marika followed suit, largely on account of not knowing how one was meant to conduct oneself around a bona fide ninja, climbing in after her best friend and sitting on the clearly opposite side of the passenger cabin from her, with Marika's back to the driver's seat instead of the rear. The door slammed closed behind them, the shinobi-chauffeur climbed into the front, and they were off, the automobile descending down the road from the compound to Kōfu Station—Villetta had mentioned recently that she intended to commission a light rail line to run from the station to Headquarters, but that that was rather further down the list of priorities right now than the more essential things, like 'completing all construction on the Headquarters compound itself' and 'setting up a proper civil bureaucratic infrastructure,' so in the meantime, they used the limousines. Rail was, according to her, the sort of thing that was governed by an economy of scale, and while the money that the Ashford Foundation was willing to front them to get all of this done was essentially infinite, given even the slightest glimpse that Marika had gotten into just how much raw wealth the Ashfords were excavating and refining on a weekly basis, the pool of available manpower was considerably more limited.

And then she'd chuckled, but Marika had more or less just chalked that up to some inside joke that she and her friends were too new to Justine's life to understand. Villetta and Lord Jeremiah had, after all, sworn themselves to the Boss's service two years before any of them even met Justine at Ad Victoriam, so it stood to reason, in Marika's mind, that there would be a fair amount of that to go around.

The urban bloom of Kōfu sped past them as the car delved into the city centre, signs for refurbished subway lines attracting healthy flows of people on either side of a mostly-vacant roadway, more of a hybrid walkway than anything that Marika had seen in photos taken of several E.U. cities, where the streets that ran through those places were widened more and more every year for the sole purpose of being increasingly further strangled with unmoving, sprawling, metallic blocks of packed-together single-person automobiles; a number of people on bicycles cut around the crowds and through the street, and the chauffeur, who was, it seemed, well-used himself to dealing with the many and manifold nuances of Area Eleven's mixture of foot and bicycle traffic, slid the limousine smoothly through the mixture of traditional and modern architecture, the latter of which displayed strong Britannian influences alongside regional sensibilities, the two meshing together to create something that was greater than the sum of its parts—or rather, at the very least, that was how Marika chose to see it; any doctrines of supremacism with which her former parents and former elder brother had attempted to pollute her mind had thinned and worn themselves threadbare by virtue of her knowing Suzaku, only to fall away entirely over the course of the Peninsular Rebellion, where, even after what she'd seen when she and Odette had descended into the putrid depths of the extermination town of Cáceres, those who had been Sixes went on to fight every bit as hard, every bit as viciously, and every bit as steadfastly as any of their pureblooded Britannian comrades.

They'd believed in Justine even before that point, those who'd been part of her Royal Force; but the belief had been in Justine, personally. It was only after that point, after the sights they'd seen, the horrors that had been wrought by the hands of their own countrymen, who had been born every bit as high as many of them, that they'd come to believe in Justine's ideals, as well; and to those ideals, Marika would venture to say, she and her friends were true devotees.

"Marika," Liliana called her softly, and that was what jolted Marika out of her unknowing trance, making her suddenly all too aware of how sore her knees and hands were, that she'd been holding her legs in a white-knuckled grip for the duration of the car ride. Marika turned, then, to come face-to-face with her best and oldest friend's jade-eyed concern, as Liliana asked her, point-blank, "Are you alright?"

Marika took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, nodding as she did. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm alright."

Liliana nodded in understanding; and in the emerald hue of her eyes was the selfsame confluence of haunting and galvanising that Marika had seen in her own sky blues, staring back at her in her reflection in her bathroom mirror. "Were you thinking of Cáceres?"

Marika knew that she didn't need to nod, no more than she might have needed Liliana to confirm as much, were their positions reversed. Every member of the Order of the Dragon knew this as well as any of the others, had seen their own shades of the same horror, and though Marika was grateful to Justine for her insistence that each of them go to see the extermination towns in person—in a grim sort of way that knew as she did that she would never have understood just what it was they were fighting against, the urgency of their…their crusade (for lack of a better term that wasn't tainted with several legacies' worth of mindless zealotry, unthinkable savagery, and spectacular failure), had she not seen it with her own eyes, and had not herself experienced what it was like to ferry those desolate people to safe harbour, and bear witness as they began to rebuild themselves piece by piece, a process that was at once so very beautiful and so ruinously heartbreaking to bear witness to—sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she could see those so desolate and so hollowed-out that they were beyond salvation, beyond hope, and had to be forsaken, left behind to be sacrificed. Even now, Marika could recall the sour stench of human rot in the air, the decay and necrosis of the living as well as the dead, the weak wailing of infants, newly-born and already half-dead, who had never known anything but hunger… It was a memory she knew would haunt her to her death-bed, for all that it drove her, drove them all onward, day after day, whether that was in paperwork or in working themselves to the bone training—and one look at Liliana told Marika that she felt the same way.

"I still remember Jatai, sometimes," Liliana replied, nodding, and she took Marika's hands into her own, her thumbs, strengthened with her own ascending mastery over their shared weapon, rubbing soothing circles into the backs of them, into her knuckles and carpals. "That's why Lisa and I sleep together so much, even if we don't make love: each of us dreams of it whenever we sleep alone, and the memories of it hound us even into our waking hours. And in the beginning, I confess, I might have thought that Justine was cruel, to give us this curse, this burden to bear…but Lisa helped me to understand: we may have witnessed it, but those we commanded, the Sixes who are now Elevens? Maria, Raphael, Diego, Lucia, and all the rest… For so long, what we witnessed for but a few days was the measure of their lives. Lisa…she tells me to see it as a gift, that having seen it, we might never forget it, never forget what it is that we fight for, what we fight to uproot, to prevent from ever again coming to pass…and I'll admit, her words have actually begun to rub off on me, little by little, day after day. So…if you ever need us, need people to lean on, to talk to, I'm here, Lisa's here, Odette will soon be with us again… All of us saw it for ourselves, so the least we can do in its aftermath is to use it to try to bring us closer together, right?"

"What we're building here…" Marika began, struggling to find the words to articulate her thoughts, and it hit her very suddenly, just how far she'd come from her days spent as a girl who had given up, whose future in a loveless political marriage had seemed all but assured, to here, where the heady weight of what it meant to change the world, to fight against its depravities—for 'injustice' was far too small a word for what the extermination towns had been, and the legacy that Marika had come to learn to have preceded them—in truth strangled the words in her throat, for though she could have spouted endless meaningless diatribes in the past, here, the meaning was so great, the weight in her heart so heavy, that she could scarce find words possessed of enough strength to contain even their merest fraction. "…Justine was right, that night around the fire. We began then, in that moment, and came to understand later; and now, what we're building here, what all this means, is the first step in this process that we're taking on our own terms, and I… I believe in it, I do. But it becomes too much, sometimes—the weight of it all…"

"Then I suppose it's a good thing that we're all here now, lifting that great weight together," Liliana chuckled without mirth. "And we'll carry it together, to the bitter end if need be."

Marika echoed the grim sound, and nodded her understanding. There were a few pregnant moments of silence that persisted in the aftermath, broken by the limousine slowing, and then coming to a stop, as the chauffeur parked the car, got out, and walked around the back of it to open the door for the pair. Beyond the door that the driver now went to open was perhaps the most obvious fusion of modern Britannian methods of construction and traditional Eleven architecture in the form of the refurbished Kōfu Station; and, seeing it, Marika turned back to her friend and attempted a more lighthearted smile of her own, to try and alleviate the heady atmosphere that her own thoughts had provoked in the space between them. "Looks like we're here. What do you say we go welcome our friends back into the fold?"

"Yes, let's," Liliana nodded, her expression firm and resolute; when the door opened, she was quick to be the first to exit the cabin, extending a hand towards Marika in pantomime, which she nonetheless took and used to haul herself out of the black car. Once her boots touched the pavement, Marika brushed out her cloak, trying to make sure the ride in the automobile didn't end up rumpling it too much—Sif had made a point about leading by example when it came to the cleanliness and presentation of their uniforms, and if Marika disagreed with her on that point, she certainly wouldn't have chosen to spend as much time as she did around Valerian, who was every bit as fastidious as her white-haired friend, if not more so—and as she occupied herself with that, Liliana, who seemed to have entered and exited without so much as a hair out of place afterwards, peered around her, and said, "It seems our friends aren't the only ones inbound…"

The blonde pointed to punctuate her statement, and Marika turned to see what her fellow lancer was pointing at, only to have her vision filled with a procession of the 588th's own APCs, which, in peacetime, had been repurposed to ferry recruits from the train station to Headquarters, to begin their training as auxilia for the year it would take them to become legionaries. The first four months to receive basic training, which used the Britannian Army's basic training program as a model, but carefully upscaled, and then the rest to get an education on how exactly Her Highness Princess Justine meant for them to wage the coming wars. All of the nuances of the emergent form of infantry doctrine that the new Grand Marshal, Julian, Justine, Sif, and Yennefer were working on were in large part lost on Marika, much of the talk of ten-member strike teams as their foundational tactical unit and the flexibility required of proper orders of battle going right over Marika's head (as she worked to fill it instead with information pertaining to massed charges and wedge formations, the exploits and tactics of the Polish-Lithuanian winged hussars and the writings of Gustavus Adolphus—given that while the Knightmare Frame on the whole was a cavalry unit, it was more akin to mediaeval heavy cavalry than the light cavalry of the Napoleonic Wars—so that she could better contribute to the work that she and Valerian were doing), but she knew at least the broader strokes of what kind of training the new recruits were signing themselves up for; and having personally fought at the Battle of Two Rivers, where the unshaken resolve of their dug-in infantry, bolstered by Justine's Geass ability, had been a large part of what won them the day, Marika very sincerely hoped that the incoming auxilia appreciated how much they would have to rely upon the gruelling conditioning and strict discipline they were about to have drilled into them for their own survival in the coming days. "Well, in fairness, Lili, they are coming in on the recruiting train…"

"Still," sighed Liliana. "Sometimes, it doesn't quite feel real, you know? And then we go to get our friends at the station, and I'm reminded that with them comes a rush of people, some of whom are our age, and some of whom are old enough to be our parents, who've signed up to fight and die at our command. It's… It's just a lot to take in sometimes, is all."

"I get where you're coming from," Marika nodded, and she reached out to rest what she hoped was a reassuring hand upon her friend's shoulder, to return the comfort that Liliana had just given her in the car. "Sometimes, it catches me off-guard, too, if I'm being completely honest. But you said it yourself—none of us are doing this alone. We might have gotten to the top of the class off of Justine's leadership, but it wasn't Justine who sat for our exams, or who wrote our essays, or who participated in our classes in our stead, Lili. It was us. Hard as it might be to believe sometimes—and trust me, I know how hard it can get to keep that in mind, probably better than most—but we are qualified. We've trained for this. And frankly, I think we'll have more trouble keeping the Boss from trying to handle everything by herself than we will handling most of what the coming days have to throw at us, just going off past experience."

"Just like you to try to turn the tables on me…" Liliana groused, tongue lodged firmly in her cheek.

"I'm serious, Lili," Marika emphasised, squeezing her shoulder a bit harder to punctuate. "It seems overwhelming, yeah, but if we trust in each other, trust in Justine, and maybe, just maybe figure out how to trust in ourselves, then I think it's safe to say that the people stepping off of that train and into our ranks are in pretty good hands."

"Alright," huffed the blonde, slumping her shoulders. She shook her head vigorously, as if trying to dislodge her ruminations physically, and she reached up, slapped her own cheeks twice in quick succession, and then managed a smile. "I think that's quite enough of the heavy conversations for now. Let's go see our friends, alright?"

Marika returned the smile as best she could, clapped Liliana's shoulder again, and jerked her head to the station, where the platform bell began to ring, loudly signalling the approach of the armoured train from the Tokyo Settlement to all around; and, walking side-by-side with one another, the two girls entered the train station together.

---

A week after Marika and Liliana reunited with the surliest member of their trio, and welcomed both the medic and the primary scout of their number, with Lindelle apparently having returned to Rathbone Hall to brush up on her skills, which led to her applying independently to sit for the Imperial Medical Licensure Examination (which, of course, Lindelle had passed with flying colours, thus making her officially Doctor Lindelle Rathbone, M.D.), and Hecate having returned from a brief visit with her parents in Gauntlgrym, as well as a much longer stay with her paramour, Maria, at her family's country estate, Pimpernel Grange, the proudly disowned daughter of the House of Soresi and the disinherited daughter of the House of Rowe both looked up from the hard light diorama and models they'd set up to simulate and demonstrate a few different tactical scenarios involving their cavalry in an attempt to devise an ideal solution for each one at the door to the chamber they occupied sliding open. Both of the women in question straightened from their somewhat hunched-over positions a moment later, as Justine stepped over the threshold, coat and all, Satanael perched upon one of her pauldrons, and flanked by both Lord Jeremiah and Villetta.

"Your highness," Valerian said, bowing every bit as properly as the woman seemed to do just about everything. "Pardon us. We were not expecting your arrival."

"At ease, Valerian," replied Justine, holding up the hand that wasn't attached to a perched raven. "I would be surprised if you did, quite frankly, considering this is somewhat impromptu. I hope I'm not going to be interrupting anything if I should ask you two to accompany us somewhere?"

Marika looked over at the older woman she considered a colleague, who met Marika's glance with cold, dead eyes (which had never really bothered Marika all that much, surprisingly, especially as she grew accustomed to them, and came to know the woman behind them better), and then back towards Justine with a small shrug. "Nothing that will suffer from being postponed, I believe."

"Excellent," Justine said with a grin and an enthused nod. "Now then, Villetta, Jeremiah, Julian and I were actually about to take the train to the Tokyo Settlement. We've been called to a small exhibition, you might call it, at Annwn. Apparently, Lloyd's elder sister has been hard at work over the past few weeks, and she wants to demonstrate to us the new infantry equipment she's developed; not to mention, Lloyd let it slip that the pre-production prototype Kay is now fully-functional and ready for field testing, so we would also fold this in with you taking it for a test run, Marika."

"…Me?" Marika asked, blinking in astonishment. "Why not Suzaku?"

"Because Suzaku isn't going to be the one who'll be leading the training regimen of the first crop of Raven Knights, once selection starts in February of the coming year," Justine said simply. "That would be you, Marika. So, since you're going to be teaching them how to use this model, once all of its…peculiarities get ironed out, and the unit goes into mass production, it seems only sensible that you should be the first to get to grips with it."

"I…" Marika gaped, but with Valerian's eyes on her (her colleague had a shockingly weighty gaze for having eyes like she did), she remembered herself quickly, bowing slightly to recover some measure of composure. "Y-yes, of course. It would be my honour."

"Wonderful," Justine nodded; then, she turned to Valerian, and said, "And in case it wasn't clear, I'd rather you be present as well, Valerian, seeing how this pertains to your area of responsibility as well."

"I had assumed as much, your highness," Valerian replied with her own nod, her full lips curled into a bemused smirk that was so similar to Justine's version of the same expression that Marika felt some need to do a double-take, save for the fact that her eyes didn't change even slightly between total calm and mild amusement, just like always. Was it strange that Marika had come to find that somehow comforting? "We'll be ready to accompany you presently."

"Very well, then," said the princess, pivoting on her heel and leaving the chamber behind her. "And please, do hurry along."

Marika grabbed her crimson cloak and Valerian her black cavalier's cape from the same set of hooks on the wall of the room, and in but a few minutes, they had departed from the compound down to the same station where Marika and Liliana had welcomed their friends, albeit on the opposite platform, taking one of the armoured trains that ran this line from Kōfu to the Tokyo Settlement, approximately three hours away.

They sat in the staff cars, which in time would be reserved for the higher-order officers, once any of those amongst their forces had demonstrated sufficient merit and fibre to warrant the titles, but for now was exclusive to members of the Order of the Dragon, as well as the commanders of the fledgeling partitions of the 588th, and Justine herself, of course, complete with her household; thus, they spread out somewhat, and more or less spoke communally. Marika, however, hadn't actually managed to get the chance to make the personal acquaintance of Julian Cardemonde, the Dread Legion's Grand Marshal, up until this point, so just about as soon as the train began to move, she looked to Valerian, and took the initiative to approach the new member of the 588th's command staff.

"Hey there," Marika called out to the one person here she didn't know. "You're Julian, right? Julian Cardemonde?"

The one who turned to respond to her address was a tall man, almost certainly closer to two metres than one-ninety centimetres, and muscular in a way that made Marika certain that he'd be spectacular in a rugby game. He was certainly handsome, with a softer version of the sharp features typical of Britannians, a fair, albeit very discernibly sun-kissed complexion, and a square jaw that reminded Marika of old photos that she'd come across in the past of carnival strong-men, though his clean-shaven face lacked any of the myriad of walrus and vaudevillian moustaches many of those men had boldly sported; his richly blue hair was tousled in style, but fastidiously well-kept, to the point where Marika figured that he and Jeremiah were more or less tied with regards to whose haircut was the shorter, and the brown eyes beneath his strong brow were warm as they regarded her cordially, while the laugh lines around his face, although somewhat faint with his obvious youth (Villetta and he were the same age, Marika knew) marked the elder of the two Cardemondes as one who, much like his energetic younger cousin, smiled easily, and probably often.

He wore his uniform well, though—Marika had to give him that. It wasn't really all that dissimilar from that of the legionaries he would come to command, the main differences being the peaked black cap he was now holding under one arm, upon the front of which was affixed a gold pin of the legionary draco upon a background of a crossed sword and a percussion-cap rifle with bayonet affixed, the golden trim that decorated his pauldrons, and the fact that his coat went to his knees, rather than mid-thigh, as the uniform of the legionaries did, but all the same, Marika would not have expected such a large man to look good while in a uniform that seemed to have been designed to conform to a more slender aesthetic sensibility. In times of cold weather in the field, he would adopt a long black cloak, akin to Valerian's cape, though running full across both shoulders instead of hanging off of only one, while the remainder of the legionaries would take longer coats, and she could imagine how imposing of a figure he would probably cut in such garments.

But, regardless of how he looked, of significantly greater concern to Marika's mind was precisely what manner of man the elder Cardemonde actually was. Villetta had vouched for him, Justine had met him for an interview, and Valerian hadn't said a word of faint praise about him (not that she'd demonstrated any compunctions about giving direct insult right to someone's face if she felt the situation warranted it, and given that Valerian concerned herself in her totality with matters of practicality and competence, while they were always scathing, they were never untrue), so he couldn't be that bad at all; and yet, on some primitive level, the fact that she didn't know him, and couldn't verify as much for herself irked her something fierce. Hopefully, that part of her mind would dutifully shut its fucking mouth after this interaction, and those that were to come, but only time would tell.

"Yes, that's me," he confirmed with a friendly nod. He looked her up and down, then, assessing, but not at all in the way that her former parents and even Kewell used to, as if their concern was never for her merit, but rather the condition of their livestock; instead, it seemed as if he was trying to place her identity. That much, she could tolerate, given that they'd never met before now. "You're…Marika Soresi, right?"

"On a technicality, yes," she confirmed in turn, reaching a hand out from under her crimson cloak to shake his, and he took it, black glove meeting black glove and shaking firmly. "We'll have to pardon our lack of having made each other's acquaintance. Our days are so busy, and there's much to be done."

"You said it," Julian chuckled, shaking his head. "Sometimes, it seems like there's a never-ending list of things that need to be tended to on a daily basis, if not hourly…"

"We're having to play catch-up, in large part," Marika explained. "Whatever rudimentary chain of command we managed to hash out in the jungles of Area Six functioned well enough for our purposes in the field during the Rebellion, but it was never going to be able to cut it in the aftermath, especially not as our ranks expand as much as they seem to be doing during this peacetime period."

"It seemed as though Her Highness had the structure of the new hierarchy more or less hashed out before I got brought aboard," he said with a small shrug. "But then, on the other hand, implementation can be a separate beast entirely, certainly, especially since you're not exactly overflowing with personnel able to fill all levels of command…"

"I imagine that we'll have to pull double-duty from the top down for a while as we build out our ranks, our officer corps in particular, as you said," Marika agreed, nodding. "Frankly, I'm just thankful that the construction is continuing to outpace recruitment, for all that it's starting to swell; and a lot of these old IJA personnel that we've been getting, I'd wager, will rise up in the ranks fairly quickly, given that they've already got a few of the necessary skills, at the very least. Unlike some of the others, they won't have to be trained from scratch—just retrained in the Legion's methods."

"In that case, it seems like you and Valerian are about to have the rougher go of it," Julian chuckled. "After all, it's not like the IJA ever got the chance to develop or adopt a Knightmare doctrine of their own."

"Certainly, but our need isn't quite as urgent," Marika conceded. "Our past experiences have taught us to put an emphasis upon our infantry, given how critical their unfettered operations proved to be in the success of the few conventional battles we fought during the Peninsular Rebellion; and when it comes to Knightmares, they make for ideal shock cavalry. Doctrines oriented around those tactics are fairly resilient against failures in delegation, since we're not in a technological situation that makes massed operations as unviable for the Knightmare Frame as they are for infantry. Not to mention, Sutherlands, at least, didn't require an excessive amount of training for a new devicer to get to grips with them. Depending upon how much longer it'll take for us to train the new blood to a baseline level of proficiency with the Kays than the Sutherlands, we ought to have at least a few decurions trained for field command, by Valerian's estimate. We might even have one or two knight-commanders, though admittedly, that's more optimistic—not to mention, Knightmares are a new addition to the field as a whole, relatively speaking, and its doctrines are still being written, so we're essentially guaranteed to be well-ahead of the curve as that doctrine becomes gradually more sophisticated."

"That might be true, but you'll still need staff officers either way," argued Julian.

"Oh, absolutely," Marika nodded animatedly. It wasn't rare to converse on topics such as these with people who got it, as she was swiftly coming to the more she sought to educate herself, especially given just how much time she spent with Villetta (yes!) and Valerian, in between her burying her nose in every treatise and account that she could get her hands on—but while Marika could say nothing for his tactical or strategic acumen as of yet, obviously, being able to talk shop without condescending, and being at least reasonably comfortable doing as much, was certainly a large mark in the man's favour, as far as Marika was concerned. "But the training of staff officers is neither your responsibility, nor mine and Valerian's, my lord Grand Marshal; rather, it's a task that Villetta has taken squarely upon herself, given how she now seeks to create a unified secretariat. Apparently, that'll lead to more coherent and consistent record-keeping; though, I'll admit that I'm not the most well-versed in matters of administration and bureaucracy."

"Well, that certainly takes a load off of my shoulders," Julian half-huffed, half-sighed, and a tension that was all but imperceptible before now fell away from off of the set of his…well, his shoulders. "You know, I'm pretty sure that it was a question like that that got Her Highness on board with my appointment on my own merits. She asked me about what I thought the most important quality for a commander to have might be, and I told her that I'm not sure that anyone can really go about calling themselves a commander without a healthy appreciation for the necessity of paperwork."

"Justine is fond of saying that strategy is nine-tenths logistics," Marika remarked with a small smile of her own. "And when I asked her what the remaining tenth could be, can you guess what she said?"

"Manoeuvre," Julian replied without hesitation. "I asked her that same question myself, actually."

Marika let out a startled laugh, taken off-guard that someone else had thought to do as she had. "I'm sure you'll fit right in around here, then. I'm curious, though: where were you before?"

"Well, like most soldiers who're around my age, I actually got my start in the Indochinese War," he began, though he looked to the side of the car, and said, "but it's a lengthy story, and I don't think that either of us would benefit any from standing for its full duration, so why don't we…?"

"Oh! Of course," Marika exclaimed, her eyes going wide—she'd been so caught up in the moment that she'd forgotten to ask if her conversation partner wanted to take a seat. Her cheeks burned as a wave of embarrassment crested over her, but the man before her didn't seem to think anything of it, so she took this as an opportunity to practise maintaining her composure—and maybe, just maybe, she would eventually get good enough to be able to hold it together whenever Villetta did anything that her lovesick brain kept trying to construe as romantic, intimate, or erotic. It was likely a vain hope, but it was one to which Marika herself clung, nonetheless.

"Great," he nodded, and then led the way over to a set of seats in an open cabin by the window, with the recovering countryside of Area Eleven whipping past them. Once they were seated, Marika doffing her cloak as she did so in the interest of not rumpling the fabric, folding it quickly and placing it into the next seat over, which was echoed by Julian placing his cap upon the tabletop that was positioned between them, the new Grand Marshal tapped his gloved fingers upon the surface in a quick staccato, before asking, "Now, where were we?"

"You'd just told me that you got your start serving in the Indochinese War," Marika replied as she leaned back into the cushioned seat behind her.

"Yes, that," he said, nodding. Then, he hesitated, and asked, "Tell me, Dame Marika, how much do you know about that conflict? In terms of specifics, I mean, not broad strokes."

"A fair amount, I should think," Marika replied, and she just barely stopped herself from tilting her head, the exact same way that Justine was so known for doing. This wasn't the first time she'd noticed that she'd started to mimic their leader subconsciously, and she really needed to get a better handle on it, for all that she wasn't actually the worst in the Order of the Dragon when it came to that particular peccadillo. "I assume that you were going to start by explaining the Braunschweig Plan?"

"Yes," he replied with an almighty grimace. "The Braunschweig Plan…"

In the course of her continuing doctrinal education, Marika had actually done a fair bit of reading on the strategy in question, for which the most charitable possible descriptor was 'hare-brained'; dreamt up by General Otto von Braunschweig, who was at the time the most significant political rival of and opponent to the current minister of war within the Imperial military, it had all the shortcomings of the oh-so-infamous Schlieffen Plan, which had taken the E.U.'s armies through a disastrous invasion of Denmark, drawing in Sweden-Norway in the process, merely to strike at Saint Petersburg through the Gulf of Finland, with even less of an excuse than that earlier travesty, on account of that strategy having been tried and failed before, to such a catastrophic effect that it wound up extending the Great War for the next three decades. The idea was to strike from the Andaman Sea, and split the Imperial Army both east and west, to seize the administrative capitals of both the Militarised Zone of India and the Militarised Zone of Greater Indochina within a matter of a few weeks to decapitate the regional response, and to force the main bulk of the Red Army to respond on terms that Britannian generals and field commanders would be able to dictate at their leisure; and, high on the recent success with holding Area Eight against the E.U.'s 'liberation task force' in the form of the Defence of the Falklands, von Braunschweig's plan won out—though she had it on good authority that the Minister of War had only allowed it because High Admiral von Oberstein had suggested he do so, and thus give their last major headache just enough rope to hang himself with.

The strategy, of course, failed spectacularly, particularly in its western half, with the supply lines stressed to their breaking point and the invasion force hyperextended from their point of landing in the Bay of Bengal leading to the Disaster at Delhi, in which both Lord Jeremiah and Villetta had notably taken part; and given that the two had met at Ad Victoriam—Julian and Villetta, that is—Marika hazarded a guess as to what he was going to say next. "You were in the Eastern Division, weren't you?"

"Four Hundred Fifteenth Regiment of Foot, to be specific," he nodded slowly. "The Cardemondes, I should note for the record, are technically gentry, but that technicality is so thin that I had to enlist from the ranks, and hope to rise that way. I reached the rank of master sergeant through merit, and second lieutenant through battlefield promotion; believe me, I know that the Western Division's destruction is the famous one of the two, but serving in the Eastern Division was a lot of bloody, costly fighting, too."

"Will you tell me about it? What it was like?" Marika asked, leaning forth across the tabletop a little bit as she spoke. "I've heard bits and pieces from Villetta and Lord Jeremiah, and my former brother was in the Western Division as well, but I've never personally had the chance to talk to anyone who actually took part in the fighting on the Eastern Front."

"Aren't you curious as to why I didn't go through officer training before Villetta?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Ennoblement is a long and complicated process by design, so it's no great surprise that your field promotion didn't stick," Marika replied, shaking her head. "Getting the chance to break into the ranks of the nobility is and has always been the hard part. General Darlton's a counterexample that people love to cite, but he got to where he is because a princess of the realm was pulling for him, and she expedited the process significantly, while the expedition of Villetta's ennoblement failed on account of the fact that it was initiated by the 'Commoner Empress', who famously had a great many very powerful enemies and didn't actually care enough to double-check. I'd imagine you spent several years as an overqualified NCO before Her Excellency the Prime Minister actually looked into it for Villetta's sake, and pushed through that wave of ennoblements that had been held back since that time, only to find that the notoriously elitist Imperial Colchester wouldn't take you. Thus, that left you with little recourse but to matriculate at Ad Victoriam at around the same time that Villetta did, considering she entered the student body shortly after the end of the Second Pacific War, so that she and Princess Justine would graduate at around the same time. Am I wrong about any of that?"

He blinked twice, momentarily speechless. "Uh… No, no, that's about the size of it…"

"Then unless you'd rather speak about your postgraduate service history, which is only about a year or two's worth, I'd like to hear about the last war you were involved in," Marika concluded, leaning forth a bit further. "Her Highness, Villetta, Valerian, Sif, and Yennefer all supported your choice, but I don't know you, Grand Marshal, and if it's all the same, I'd like to have ample reason to support you as well."

"Ah." He nodded sagaciously. He smiled, and said, "You really are a protective bunch, aren't you? The Order of the Dragon."

The implication made Marika bristle despite herself. "No less so than Her Highness deserves."

"I don't disagree," Julian replied, continuing to nod. "Not even slightly. My cousin speaks highly of her, and Rivalz is a shockingly good judge of character; not to mention, I've seen her type before. I hope to feel as loyal to her as you all obviously do, one day—though, obviously, I couldn't possibly do so right this very moment."

Marika nodded, and leaned back into her seat, satisfied—at least for the moment. "I propose a trade, then. Stories for stories. You tell me about your experiences in Indochina, and I'll tell you about mine in the jungles of Area Six."

Julian grinned, and clasped his hands together in front of him. "Sounds like a deal."

The train ride from Kōfu to the Tokyo Settlement was three hours long, and for every last minute of those three hours, the two traded tales of their exploits back and forth, and in the interest of fairness, Marika did her best to match the extremity of his stories, meeting tales of muck-mired marches with braving the torrential downpour of the tropics to get into position for the next convoy ambush, stories about emergency rations that made his teeth sore with the foraging that they'd done to support their allies and supplement their own rations, to the point where Lindelle, ironically, had taken ill after eating the wrong thing, and all of it without ever mentioning what they came across when they went in pairs to the extermination towns. That felt taboo, the sort of thing she could speak about with others who'd already been there, who were as haunted by what they'd seen there as she was, but she didn't wish to inflict that upon this cheerful man across from her—because even if she did try to explain it, he wouldn't be able to understand it; he hadn't been there, he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. The words that she would say to him would remain only words; they would have no power to conjure the stink and sounds, the open sun upon their backs and cracked dusty streets beneath their shoes, what it was like to see children so thoroughly devoid of hope that they'd resort to killing each other simply to feel something. And maybe that would change, in time; maybe, in the course of his service to Justine, he would see as they saw, would know as they knew, and if that day ever came, then, and only then would she speak to him of Cáceres. His stories of civilian targets used as shields to hide their enemies, and the horrors of gunning them down to find those of the Red Army among them, she countered with the final assault upon the Rio de Janeiro Settlement, and the horrifying realisation that the soldiers they were fighting were commoners conscripted to the defence of the rebel upstarts' highborn families as they made to escape on Chinese warships, and as he had no tales to tell that approached the knowledge of what Britannian rule meant for those who had originally called those lands home everywhere else in the Empire, with Area Eleven being the one notable exception, Marika kept her most harrowing tales close to the chest.

Perhaps it was for the best, however; her tale in exchange, speaking about what it was like to fight at Two Rivers, had only just finished by the time that their armoured train pulled into what Marika recognised at once as Tokyo Central Station. Yokohama would have been closer to Annwn proper, but they'd be taking the subterranean line from the bowels of the Government Bureau to get to the facility, so that made Tokyo Central, which was less than a stone's throw from the House of Ashford's secondary (and much wealthier) seat of power, the ideal destination.

Once the train shuddered to a stop, Justine made a beeline for them, flashing Julian a smile, and then leaning in to say to Marika, "Sif and Yen are already here. They went ahead this morning to deal with some matters regarding the expansion of recruitment and the chartering of further trains, and await us now inside the underground station, to accompany us to the showcase. Just as a head's up."

"Understood," Marika replied with a resolute nod; then, after Justine left them to turn her attention to other issues, Marika looked at Julian as she gathered up her cloak, and said, "Well then, I suppose this is our stop."

"Indeed it is, Dame Marika," Julian replied, taking up his cap and setting it firmly upon his head, as Marika sent her cloak into a crimson flutter to don and fasten it. "I suppose that in the future, our tales will be made together, eh?"

"Very much so," she nodded, extending her hand again. "And, in the spirit of camaraderie, I believe that I may also owe you a very special 'welcome aboard.'"

"You needn't strain yourself," he chuckled, shaking his head with a smile, but then taking her hand anyway. "You've made me feel plenty welcome already, I assure you."

"Truly? I'm glad to have managed that," Marika said, returning his smile in turn. "Shall we, then?"

The armoured train had come into a private platform in Tokyo Central Station—this line to and from Kōfu was one of several, for all that there was fairly little civilian traffic travelling into it, at least from the Tokyo Settlement—so when Marika and Julian stepped out of the train car and onto the pavement of the platform, it was empty save for them, and thus it was easy to see and follow behind Lord Jeremiah, Villetta, Valerian, and Justine as they left the platform behind them, delving into the private areas of the station that had been sectioned off during the reconstruction of this very complex after the end of the war. It was quiet in these winding corridors, which were so like the rest of the building for all that access to it was so limited, though echoes of civilian voices and foot traffic filled the halls all around them; and yet, even that subsided into silence the closer they drew to the Government Bureau.

Justine swung a hard left at some point along their progression, and they followed her silently down into one of the few entrances to the subterranean station, reserved for only the most private of use; the dark stone of its construction made it familiar to Marika, who, much like the rest of her friends, had grown more and more accustomed to the common threads that tied together many of Justine's design sensibilities, and in their predominantly black uniforms, all of them looked like some maudlin portrait of a supernatural funeral, to the point where, after waving to Sif and Yen as they fell in with the group, and Sif went to converse with Justine in low tones, feeling the need, for whatever reason, to respect the silence as absolutely as she was able (not that she had much room to stand on, herself, considering how infectious the sepulchral aura of this space, at once both liminal and ecclesiastical, was), Marika occupied her mind with thinking of what the tableau could be used to represent if it was ever committed to canvas. She'd settled upon the ferry-station of Charon by the time the last of their number stepped into the car, the automatic doors hissing closed behind them; and she took it upon herself to guide Julian to sit before sitting herself.

Even then, his eyes widened with alarm as the train jolted to sudden life, speeding across nearly half the Tokyo Settlement in a matter of minutes.

Marika, of course, had taken this very train two or three times in the past: she had yet to get a handle on how to brace herself properly, but its sudden lurch into high speed didn't catch her off-guard anymore. A scant handful of minutes later, the train came to a stop that was just as stomach-turning, inertially speaking, and once it stopped, the doors opening with a hydraulic hiss, Marika rose, followed by Julian, and together, they followed the others out into the white floors and high ceilings of Annwn—the classified birthplace of the Lancelot, the Avalon, and of likely countless war machines as-of-yet unseen.

It was a shock of sorts, to go from such quiet seclusion and isolation to the dull roar and 'hustle and bustle', so to speak, of an active workplace—a sort of atmospheric whiplash—but Marika had weathered it before, when the Order of the Dragon, sans its three most recently-returned members and the two who now accompanied them (Villetta excluded) had first arrived in Area Eleven. She remembered it as something of a sobering experience at the time, to be walking the halls where the foundational principles behind so much of their extant war-gear were being twisted into new and increasingly creative shapes; she couldn't imagine what must have been going through their new Grand Marshal's mind, who had not yet held a vibro-weapon in his hand, and especially not while fully intending to end the lives of others. She imagined it might be like a person who had never learned to play music attending the concert of a master musician—likely some vague awareness of the skill on display, the prowess and dominion over the instrument, but not nearly as much as one who had been trained in music enough to parse the flourishes might understand enough to be awed by.

He would learn in time. She didn't doubt that for even a moment.

They weren't on their own for long, though.

Marika looked to the side for a moment, and then looked forwards again, before starting as her mind registered what it had just seen. She jumped, composure shattering as she cried out, "Gah!"

"You've got really nice hands, you know," said the…eccentric-looking woman who had, in essence, just snuck up on them. "Been playing with one of my little brother's toys, have you? Then again, we kinda developed it together, so I guess it's one of our toys…"

Marika eyed the woman up and down, all but blind to the others around her: lavender hair, bound up in a messy, rushed excuse for a ponytail, large, slate-grey eyes, a cute, soft-featured face that Marika might have described as 'fey,' were she feeling particularly given to poetry or pretence (which she was not), and a skinny frame, more boyish than waifish, all lanky limbs and ungainly proportions, that was dressed so very unseasonably that Marika felt cold just looking at her. A tie-dyed crop top, blue daisy dukes, and a pair of purple flip-flops were the only clothes covering her body, and as she leaned over to stare at Marika without blinking for so much as a moment, Marika, for her part, couldn't help but notice how her neckline left her all-but-flat chest on nearly full display at this angle.

"Lady Holly Asplund, I presume," Justine's voice said, cutting through the discomfort creeping up the back of Marika's spine.

"You presume correctly!" the woman exclaimed, her attention switching so quickly that Marika felt some mental whiplash, snapping her position into an upright salute in Justine's direction so suddenly that Marika felt physical whiplash to go along with it, and grinning at Justine with an almost childlike glee that Marika found she actually envied somewhat, strangely enough. "And you're Princess Justine, yeah?"

"That would indeed be me, yes," Justine chuckled, approaching the strange woman who seemed to have no understanding of the concept of personal space. Then, Justine turned, and said, "Everyone, please allow me to introduce Lloyd's elder sister, Holly, whose steadfast efforts have resulted in the lion's share of what we're here to see today. Lady Holly, if you would guide us?"

"Oh, yeah, duh!" the elder Asplund (and really, in Marika's opinion, her being Lloyd's older sister made entirely too much sense) replied, smacking her palm to the top of her head and blowing a raspberry. "I can show you guys around, for sure! Just stay close, follow me, and it'll be a snap. Prepare to be amazed!"

"I'm sure that we will be," Justine said, nodding and standing aside to allow their curator to come to the front of the group, so as to guide them more effectively. Then, while looking directly at Marika, Justine jerked her head forwards, while Satanael, on her opposite shoulder, regarded her with the bird's beady-eyed stare, which was entirely too clever for an animal the Boss had picked up out in the wild and nursed back to flourishing health—in Marika's professional opinion, at least.

Regardless, Marika fell in line with the nonverbal cue, coming up to walk alongside the front of the procession as opposed to straggling behind, and Julian moved to do the same, as Holly Asplund led them in between the flow of foot traffic in white coats proceeding through the myriad passages, halls, and corridors of the increasingly vast subterranean research and development complex. Here and there, Marika spotted a number of different uniform colours, signalling each employee's membership amidst different departments of the organisation, but their guide, who was perhaps even more eccentric than her younger brother (which, in Marika's mind, was a singularly terrifying proposition), stepped, and skipped, and pranced, and hummed little nonsense melodies to herself under her breath as she led them jauntily through the white corridors and densely-packed blocks of laboratories and office spaces, across wide-open stables with a number of different models of seventh-generation Knightmare currently under construction (most of which, Marika noted, were in fact custom jobs, based off of the Order of the Dragon's combat data, and meant for their personal use) to an elevator that took them even deeper into the complex.

As they descended, they passed server farms and floors dedicated entirely to quartz-core computers, floors of heavy machinery and bright sparks and people in hazmat suits (where the manual work that came with fabricating the proprietary materials that would go into the construction of their wargear got done), until, at last, they came to their stop, with Holly all but cartwheeling her way off of the lift while the rest of them were still in tow; a few moments later, the woman, who had to be in her early- to mid-thirties by this point, whirled on her heel and threw up symbolic gestures that Marika vaguely recognised as 'jazz hands.' "Ta-da! Welcome one and welcome all to my lair, my workshop, my atelier here at Annwn! Now, my wife's currently off doing other things, like eating lunch and other boring stuff, so you'll just have to bear with me while I show you what it is that we've been workin' on down here, okay?"

"You have my undivided attention," Justine replied without missing a beat.

"That's…a little intimidating, not gonna lie," Holly remarked, quailing slightly. "But I'm sure I can stick the landing, so that's alright. Just don't wander off, 'mkay?"

Without waiting for an answer, she turned and led them deeper into the level that the woman seemed to have all to herself, all the way to a locked blast door; and at the sight of its closure, Holly, in an apparent show of alarm, grabbed her head with both hands and cried out, "Uwah! Shoot! Didn't mean for this thing to close on me… Hold on a moment, I've gotta punch the code in…!"

With that, she rushed forth, and how she didn't manage to trip in those flip-flops was a mystery that Marika didn't feel particularly inspired to solve; she beelined for a number-pad to the side of the door with a retinal scanner for additional security, and once she got there, she started punching in the characters of the passcode, murmuring them under her breath (they were too far away at the moment to hear her), before she leaned into the scanner and verified her identity. A sonorous, industrial clunk settled into place, followed by a deep, mechanical groan and a sharp, hydraulic hiss as the blast doors pulled apart from each other in a hot rush of warm, white steam. And beyond the threshold was…

"It's a gallery…" Marika gasped aloud, though thankfully, she remembered to keep her voice low.

Indeed, the sensibilities on display with how the wide floor ahead of them was arranged most likely wouldn't have seemed out of place in the halls of the Britannian Museum, a maze of gear on display, along with iterations and prototypes that might not have been entirely complete, but nonetheless more than served their functions as proofs-of-concept. Mannequins, weapon racks, what looked at first like loose magazines, and far more beyond met her questing gaze; but she was not left in suspense for long.

"Alright, so!" Holly exclaimed, running to get back in front of them and stumbling over her toe in a mess of flailing limbs that somehow, miraculously, managed to keep her footing stable when she stopped. "I'm sure you're familiar with my little brother and his chief frenemy by now, and how, just a little while ago, they managed to solve the problem of the hadron cannon's output converging into a beam. Well, first, I thought I'd show you what happens when you miniaturise the technology for the use of people on foot!"

With that, the lavender-haired woman skipped over to one of the racks, and pulled from it…was that a pistol of some design?

It was bulkier than most pistols, that was for certain; made of what looked like segmented parts of a material resembling gunmetal, it had a slimmer grip than most pistols Marika had seen, for all that, from all that she could see, the ergonomics were all but identical, with what looked to be the barrel being little more than a pair of clear tubes, filled with what looked like an inert red gas. Despite the strangeness of the design that could immediately be seen, however, Holly held it like it was a genuine firearm, palming one of the square magazine-looking components and slotting it into the side of the gun, just ahead of the trigger guard, with a secure-sounding click. Then, she flipped some kind of switch on the side of it, and with a hum like a sakuradite reactor awakening, the tubes came to life, agitating and coursing with white-hot lashes of plasma within those tubes that served as the exposed barrels.

"The exposure of the barrel serves as a means to vent heat into the exterior, as a way to conserve the internal heat sinks and extend their lifespan. They last fifteen years where once they'd lasted five, though in absolute terms, that obviously depends on how heavily the gun's being used," Holly said, her voice steady, and surprisingly didactic. "An interior supply of coolant cycles through the covered parts at a rate of about four hundred fifty millilitres per second, and a system of compact electromagnetic coils keep the beams on target, compensating for the reduced generation capacity of the miniaturised Gefjun matrix, which acts as a sort of rifling mechanism, to use a functional analogy. The result?"

Holly whirled around, brought the pistol up, and fired it at the far wall, a vivid red beam surging out of the emitter that looked like a muzzle and landing against the blast-rated metal with a sound that started as a hiss, but ended as a rushing flood, and enough force to leave a blackened singe.

"The hadron particle production capacity also suffers a significant reduction, as you can see," Holly said, very matter-of-factly. "So against decent armour, like what's protecting the insides of your average Knightmare Frame, you're going to want to rely on this bad boy's bigger cousins. Still, I figure that infantry really shouldn't be going up against Knightmares in the first place, and even this baby hadron beam's going to net you an increase in penetrative power of about forty percent, give or take two percent, over just about any top-of-the-line ballistic ordinance currently on the market, and if you get yourself a choice shot right into the squishy bits, the heat transference and resulting diffusion basically cooks the target from the inside. It uses, as you saw, these small little energy fillers I've got on the podium next to me, and its storage should work out to around twice the magazine capacity of its ballistic equivalents, per weapon class."

"Per weapon class?" Julian asked, his tone echoing the amazed incredulity Marika felt.

"Well, you didn't think I'd just make pistols, did ya?" Holly laughed, powering down the pistol and removing its energy filler. Then she disappeared into the displays for a moment, and when she returned, she cradled in her arms a weapon that almost looked like some manner of limbless crossbow, into the front-side part of which she was slotting an energy filler about the size of a large fist, such that her spindly fingers had to stretch a bit around it, for all that her hold was secure. She slammed it in, turned it on, and it lit up down its profile with bright red light, especially the larger, wider emitters at the end, with the half-exposed central portion crackling with those same white tongues of plasma amidst brilliant scarlet. "Now, at first, I wanted all of these to use the same energy filler, but I was told that that wasn't realistic. It worked out, though; you have to carry around a lot fewer of these juice-boxes than you would have otherwise to make up for the energy differential, and even in the case of the light hadron cannon, you're still taking less weight than what an ammo belt would run you with a light machine gun, so, I figure it evens out. Stand clear!"

She raised the gun, then, resting the enlarged stock against her shoulder, and fired it. The sound was like that of a howling gale, pressed down into a moment, with the emitters firing forth a red flash, leaving a radial scorch-pattern behind on the blast wall. "The hadron scattergun's emitters function as beam diffusers, allowing the same destructive potential to be spread across a wider area. It's significantly better at midrange than your average combat shotgun, and the beam diffusion gives it a good amount of utility when it comes to tasks like breaching. That said, the diffusion means that the beam will lose a lot of power very quickly at too long of a range, as well as accuracy, so there's also that to be aware of. Interestingly, the same tech that let me figure out how to do this also resulted in the hadron lance, which is basically the sniper rifle version of this. So, all told, there's the scattergun, the lance, the rifle, the pistol, and the light cannon—all of it made possible by the completion of the Gawain's hadron cannons. But of course, that's not all! Follow me."

After stripping down the hadron scattergun into its initial inert state and putting it back where she'd stored it previously, Holly gestured them onwards, and they followed her across the floor while Justine, for her part, began to speak to her, throwing out technical terms that Marika lost track of almost immediately. It inspired their guide, however, who grew increasingly more animated as the two chattered back and forth, to the point where it was essentially just white noise for everyone else. Julian leaned down, and asked, "Not to be rude, but is Her Highness always like this?"

"It happens often enough," Marika sighed heavily. "From what Suzaku's told me about everything we're seeing right now, originally, the stated goal was for Her Highness to understand exactly how and why each piece of equipment she was entrusting her life and the lives of others to functioned; but that seemed to have ballooned to the point where she was actually the one who drew up the original design draft for the Kay, which is meant to be the first-ever mass-produced seventh-generation Knightmare Frame. It's best for you to just…let her do her thing, and reap the benefits. You'll safeguard your sanity better like that, at any rate…"

"…Noted," Julian said, his tone heavy with contemplation. "Though, now that I'm thinking about it, I suppose there's a good deal of sense in the initial mission statement. Knowing how your kit works can let you know ahead of time when and how it might fuck you over…"

Marika rolled her eyes. "I don't disagree, but all the same, I'd rather leave that to the professionals."

Julian shrugged. "If you say so. Though Valerian strikes me as the type to see the sense in it, too."

"Indeed I am," Valerian interjected, a wry undertone in her usual dry delivery. "I see I'll have to do a bit of research on my own time. I really should ask Her Highness for reading recommendations…"

"…Yeah, I don't suppose I have all that much of a leg to stand on, either," huffed Marika, conceding the point. "For all that I've been looking in different places, my own reading is essentially in pursuit of the same goal…"

"And here we are!" called Holly, drawing Marika's eyes front, to behold…a familiar suit of armour.

"Is that…the Scutum?" Marika asked, indicating the sleek, sturdy armoured plates over a flexible, articulated black exosuit, with the articulation itself designed in such a way that it seemed very similar to diagrams she'd seen of human muscle fibre. The version she'd worn had been more overtly mechanised, bulkier, and less…organic in design, for all that it was about as form-fitting, certainly, but she recognised it as the same powered armour she and her friends had worn during their small-team assault on the Settlement in Rio de Janeiro.

"Nope," said the elder Asplund, popping the P. "The Scutum was its predecessor, and it was always more of a proof-of-concept than anything meant for proper production. This wonder of modern engineering has no such shortcomings! It's called the Scutatus, a direct evolution from the Scutum, and far superior in just about every way. That combat data you all gave me, by the way? Exceptional stuff. I really couldn't have done half of these improvements without you all. It helped me work out the kinks and sand down the rough edges until, at last, I had a product that I could be proud to put the Asplund name on! And, not to mention, it comes with a helmet, now! So, yeah. Totally different."

The Scutatus, for what it was worth, was much changed from the Scutum, for reasons a bit beyond the significantly more organic appearance of the armoured plates over the striated under-armour exosuit; as far as she recalled, first of all, the Scutum suits had been gunmetal grey at best, but now they were every bit as black as the improved body armour that this same strange woman had designed (the detailed schematics for which were now in Koko Hekmatyar's possession), with the legionary draco embossed in scarlet upon the left side of the pectoral section of the segmented breastplate—but, perhaps the most striking addition of them all was the helmet itself: just as black as the rest of the armour, but with a faceplate that was modelled after a metal skull, with luminous scarlet lenses taking up the entirety of its eye-sockets.

It was a fearsome visage, to say the least.

"Anyway," Holly continued. "The Scutatus is bulletproof, fireproof, mechanised, and has been fully integrated with both an environmental control system and life support capabilities. The exosuit provides the lion's share of not only the power distribution, but also the suit's augmentations to the wearer's strength, endurance, agility, and speed. A sakuradite-titanium alloy derived from the material in use as the armour for the Kays, which I've started calling 'mithril' for some reason, forms the carapace of the plates, while a secondary layer of liquid armour works both to cool the machine parts of the tertiary layer and to absorb the shock of traumatic impacts, while the helmet contains a communications suite, a heads-up display, and an IFF transponder to allow soldiers to identify each other in the field. The lenses come with thermal and infrared sensors, night vision, and imaging capabilities derived from factsphere sensors, so you'll get roughly the same amount of information on the ground as you would inside of the cockpit of a Knightmare Frame. All of this operates off of dual power supplies in the pauldrons, and it'll maintain full combat capabilities for a twenty-four hour period before the energy fillers need to be replaced. That said, there's a hard cap at ninety-six hours, or the internal components can begin to suffer damage. I'll try my best to amend that in the future, but…"

"No need," Justine interjected. "If a unit's being made to participate in an active combat scenario for the full ninety-six uninterrupted hours, something has gone drastically wrong much further up the chain. It's an immaterial limitation."

"Yes, as you say, your highness," said Holly, nodding deferentially.

Justine looked over the Scutatus speculatively for several pregnant moments. Then, she looked back at Holly, and asked, "How soon can you get these into production?"

"Depends on how long it takes for the HCLI people to help us wrap construction," she replied with a shrug. "But, I'd guess we'd be looking at a full production line by no later than April, going off of current estimates. Oh, and that's the estimate for the Scutatus, and all the different models of hadron weaponry I've made, altogether."

"That sounds like a reasonable timetable," Justine decided with a shrug. Then, she turned to the rest of them, and asked, "What's your consensus?"

"If we're called into action before May, we'll have bigger problems to worry about," Sif remarked. "I trust the Minister of War understands our timetable?"

"He's happy to accommodate it," Justine replied, nodding. "Truthfully, I think he's shocked that the turn-around time is going to be as quick as it is."

"That's only long enough for us to be able to put the First Legion on the ground," said Sif. "If April leaves us with enough time to be reliably supplying our troops come late next year, early 2017, that's more than sufficient for our purposes, I should think."

"The administration of Kai and the construction of headquarters ought to be complete by next July," Villetta volunteered. "Once that's done, we can turn our attention to other things…"

"I'll want to get to grips with all of the equipment myself before I arm anybody else with it, to the extent that that matters," said Julian.

"But of course it matters," Justine chuckled, as if Julian had just said something unbelievably droll. "Though, I must say, it's reassuring that you would volunteer as much, considering I would have requested it of you regardless."

"Then I guess all that leaves is the cost," concluded Julian.

Yennefer snorted. "As if money is in any way an object…"

"The controlling interest that Her Highness Princess Carmilla has on the global sakuradite market is all but unassailable," Villetta explained to Julian. "If anything, the expenditure on the table will only help to keep the wealth of Area Eleven from creating runaway inflation on a global scale…"

"It'll be about twice as expensive as a Britannian regular's kit," Holly interjected, raising a hand. "I checked. Sure, I only did it because Helen told me I should, but I still did it."

"That should do nicely, then," Justine nodded. "Thank you, Holly. Keep up the exceptional work. I eagerly await your next inventions. Now, then, I believe it's high time that we returned to the upper level. Lloyd's almost sure to be awaiting us to field test the pre-production model Kay…"

"Oh! Oh! I knew I was forgetting something!" Holly exclaimed, jumping in place and snapping her fingers all in a single motion that was at once ungainly and fluid, somehow; but Marika paid little mind to the eccentric genius's antics—she was more concerned with how the elder Asplund's interjection made her stomach sink and simmer in its own dread. "Normal suits! Normal suits and safety gear and stuff! Oh, I've got just the thing!"

Marika tried to smile. She really did. She knew that it was the polite thing to do.

(She was sure it came out looking more akin to a grimace anyway.)

She gave the woman a weak thumb's up. "That sounds…fantastic…! Yeah…!"

"Yeah!" Holly echoed emphatically. Quick as an adder she sprung forth, and grabbed Marika's hand in both of her own with a grip like iron as the older woman leaned in with a broad, unsettlingly sincere grin. "C'mon, now! Let's go and get you changed…!"

---

Half an hour later, Marika could admit to herself that at least some part of the dread she had felt at the idea of donning Holly Asplund's newly-designed normal suit was provoked by the older woman's own choices with regards to fashion—part of her had looked at how scantily-clad Holly was, and then dreaded the thought of being made to wear some variation on the leotards that Imperial knights who happened to be women were expected to wear in lieu of proper protection—and the near-total remainder of her hesitance had just been her own performance anxiety, repackaged into an immediately topical form. Now that she was at last dressed in Holly's revision, which, while it was vacuum-sealed to her skin, still covered her body in its entirety, with a few protective layers in key areas to seal the deal, remained shockingly comfortable for a normal suit (not that they were particularly known for the discomfort they inspired, but even so), she could at last reckon with the fact that this…really wasn't that bad. It even had her colour scheme, which she'd had since Ad Victoriam, so that was awfully thoughtful of the woman. Perhaps Marika had been too quick to let her discomfort with Holly's transgressive behaviour colour her judgement of the person in question, not that she'd said anything untoward to the woman's face…

The performance anxiety, however, hounded her even as she ascended the stirrup, and slid from the winch and into the pilot's seat of the machine. It stayed with her even as the chair slid into the cockpit, and the canopy closed behind her. It danced along her knuckles as she inserted the proper key and typed in the passcode, causing the machine to come to life all around her, so similar to the interior of a Sutherland, and yet so thoroughly different at the same time. It ran the pads of its fingers across the recollection she had of the interior of the Lancelot, and it drew the threads taut between that recollection and the realisation that the interior of the cockpit was a facsimile of the Lancelot's, but simplified. As her hands grasped the yokes, her fingers wrapping around the controls, it rested its hands atop hers, and nuzzled its face into the crook of her neck. She could very nearly smell the scent of cinnamon and coffee in her nostrils, and glimpse the lustrous sheen on silver locks out of the corner of her eye, before shutting that thought process down as quickly as she could manage it. Acknowledging the fact that she'd just personified her own performance anxiety as the clone of Villetta Nu hewed dangerously close to realisations that Marika really, really didn't want to have to grapple with, not now, and hopefully not for the foreseeable future—the unshakable, impossible, utterly and completely hopeless torch that she continued to bear for that dark-skinned, silver-haired goddess of an older woman was complicated and convoluted enough as it was; there was really no need for her to start getting all…psychosexual about it.

The RPC-212/0 Kay Trial, Pre-Production Type (hence the '0', as in, 'Mark Zero', though why the designation required both 'Pre-Production Type' and 'Trial' in its name was, frankly, beyond her, and likely had more to do with filing systems than any transparent sense), was something of an anomaly of design, as far as Marika's experience with Knightmares went. The Glasgow, the Sutherland, the legendary Ganymede, last operable relic of the Third Generation, and even the Gloucester, for all that it was said to be the crown jewel of the mostly-lost Sixth Generation, all gave the impression of being, in many ways both great and small, machines first, and imitations of living creatures as something of a distant second. That was an idea that had been baked into the paradigms of Knightmare design ever since they became more elaborate than a glorified ejection pod, a limitation that the Ganymede had conceded to for lack of the technology necessary to truly transcend it, and in the wake of which all subsequent models across the next three generations had blindly followed. As she understood it, that was a large part of why the Lancelot was so very revolutionary: the gangly madman who had designed it had rendered the technology down to first principles and rebuilt it all piecemeal around the core that was his own discoveries, thus breaking the mould that the Ganymede had laid down with all of its numerous shortcomings.

That mould-breaking had only seen itself iterated upon further with the Kay; the Kay was a slender, sleek piece of machinery, elegant and devoid of most ostentation, to the point where it almost seemed a bit organic on account of it, like there was some manner of titanic humanoid creature entombed within layers of restrictive armour, without even a peek of its flesh showing through. Even the horned crest upon its head seemed more akin to a helmet sealed atop the head than the head itself, a nose-tweaking reminder to all who beheld it of the martial lineage of the land of its construction, and the mono-eye that had carried over from the Lancelot did nothing to frustrate this perception; everything about its stature at rest gave the impression of coiled, barely-restrained power, like a prowling panther or a stalking wolf. Marika could feel it humming all around her, and as she went through her initial start-up checks for the shakedown run, making sure that her factspheres deployed properly, that both of its hip-mounted slash harkens were functional, that the unit's interface was tracking the status of its paired Maser vibration spears correctly, she could feel that strangely bestial hum begin to soothe away her tension, her insecurities, and her distractions.

Marika was here for one reason, and one purpose alone: to put this machine through its paces.

And by all the gods above and below, she would do precisely that.

"This is N-3. All systems reading as nominal," Marika said into the comm unit that cradled her jaw. She reached forth and checked the motors on the slash harkens, shifting them up and down to make sure the servos were in working order, and not experiencing any noticeable delay, and when they came back without anything she could immediately notice in terms of sluggishness, she deployed her landspinners, and shifted the unit into a readied position. "Slash harkens are responding normally. Ready to begin on your mark."

"Understood, N-3," responded the Boss's voice over the comm unit. "Begin the test."

Marika nodded, sucked in a deep breath, and sped the pre-production unit into motion on the exhale, the gel-filled wheels of the landspinners screeching against the flooring in the bare fraction of a second it had taken them to find proper traction—about half as long as it would have taken a Gloucester to accomplish the same. Still, it was a note she made to herself, having resolved to be as exacting in her feedback as she could; if she meant to entrust the lives of those under her command to the machine that would be derived from this one, then the least she owed them was to make sure it was the best it could feasibly be.

The G-force of her sudden acceleration hit Marika like a sledgehammer to the abdomen, as it always did, but she brushed it off with the ease of someone intimately familiar with that sensation. With her hands steady on the control yokes, she adjusted to the unit's superior speed as best she could as she guided the war machine into the underground obstacle course that she'd heard the techs call the 'Proving Grounds'. It was a little harrowing to clear the first roadblock, for all that she did it cleanly, but it was less so the second time around, and by the time she had to change direction and swerve the Kay about a third obstacle, Marika had acclimated herself to how the unit handled, and could adjust for it on the fly.

"Start-up took twice as long as it should have to find traction," she reported dutifully, as she guided the Knightmare into a vault over another obstacle, changing up her approach as a means of testing the unit's agility and shock absorption. "Handling it takes a bit of a learning curve, but it's very responsive once you get accustomed to it. Shocks are working, though I'd take a look at the right leg's impact compensation. I'm now entering the shooting gallery…"

"You're clear to engage, N-3," Justine replied; and with that permission ringing in her ears, Marika kept her eyes sharp as she entered the next section of the gauntlet.

Some of our Sutherlands, retrofitted to be piloted as drones, Marika recognised at once. They won't be winning us any engagements, of course—a pre-programmed set of actions isn't exactly a winning tactic on a changing battlefield—but right here, where all they really need to do is point and shoot? I can at least appreciate the 'waste not, want not' mentality behind that… Still, that doesn't mean that they don't have a baseline level of competence when it comes to acquiring a targeting solution, so I guess it's showtime…

True to her thoughts, almost at once, the drone-Sutherlands that now poured out of hidden doors to the sides of the chamber and filed into position amongst the next set of obstacles brandished their rifles and began to fire upon her position; and at once, Marika took evasive action.

Having spent a large amount of time studying both Suzaku's and Justine's piloting styles, Marika's own methods as a devicer very neatly threaded the needle between them, neither as relentless and elemental as Suzaku's, nor as slippery and fluid as Justine's; and with the intention being to stress-test the prototype, it seemed only sensible to Marika to put a little oomph into it, and show off what she could do. She braced her head against the back of the chair as she threw the Kay into a sharp reversal, the wheels of the landspinners screeching in protest as she strafed away from the gunfire. With deep, unhurried breaths, Marika's thumb found the proper toggle and fired her left slash harken at one of the obstacles she'd already cleared, using it as an anchor to swing in an arc and slingshot herself forwards. She grit her teeth as the arc very nearly tipped the Kay over, but the metal held when it counted, and the stabilisers locked the joints into stress-absorbing positions, sending her surging forth. Opening up the throttle, she sent power coursing through the couplings and circuitry of the unit like blood rushing through an animal's veins from its powerful, beating heart, while the mono-eye's combined camera and factsphere functionalities found the point she was searching for, the point where Marika knew that the Sutherland's outdated tungsten armour was the thickest (obviously from personal experience).

The right slash harken released and lashed its way back to the winch, creating unavoidable drag that Marika used to her advantage: aligning her left slash harken, she fired at the Sutherland's anchor point, and as the blade sank deep into the armour, she pirouetted, throwing the Kay's forward momentum into a lateral spin—for while any devicer worthy of their Knightmare would have resisted, the drone program piloting it now didn't know to do that, thus allowing her to haul the Sutherland out of position, smashing into another of its fellows in a way that threw both of them off-balance.

The drag from the retraction was doubled, helping the spin bleed momentum. Marika was precisely where she wanted to be. Flipping another switch, and reaching down to grab the weapons she'd just primed for combat, Marika drew the paired blades forth and declared, "Engaging Maser vibration spears now!"

With that, she drew the two spear-butts together, connecting them end-to-end, where, with a rotation that was punctuated by a green flash, they sealed together, the familiar dull grey snapping into the welcome shade of cherry-red. "Lance configuration is confirmed!"

She twirled it experimentally, glad for the fact that the size and shape of the dual blades were suited to slashing, and dashed forth into the moored and tangled Sutherlands, slashing through both of them, while not making the mistake of lingering to witness the explosion. She had other hostiles to deal with, after all.

The drones were programmed to shoot at her, of course, but she'd known ahead of time that while a fair few of them were directed to fire upon her current position, there were just as many directed to try their best to concentrate fire to where the sensors told the drones she was going to be. It was a delicate dance she descended into, then, weaving and strafing between firing lines and cutting them down with cycle charges, quick strikes with the Kay's slash harkens, and shameless abuses of the redesigned landspinners' ability to turn on a dime, effectively, allowing her to vary up her attack patterns amidst the weakening hail of gunfire. A swing here, an anchor point there, power-sliding towards an obstacle and kicking off of it to gain air at an angle that allowed her to control her descent and demolish one of her artificial opponents with the same slash harken manoeuvre—her cockpit was filled with someone's uproarious laughter, and it took a moment for Marika to realise that the cackling she was hearing was coming from her own mouth.

But she couldn't help it. This was exhilarating. "I think I know why Suzaku gets herself all worked up about this now! This is fucking spectacular!"

The lack of ranged weaponry made it necessary for her to close the distance if she wanted to put the Sutherland drones down effectively, but the challenge of it made her blood run hot. More and more, Marika learned the ins and outs and miniscule quirks of the pre-production prototype, and the more the machine and its devicer began to meld together into a single gestalt being, it felt like, as if this was her true body, or a suit of armour that she was wearing, rather than a multiple-tonne heavily-armoured modern cavalry unit. It was as if she was in some manner of endorphin-induced drug-trance, her heart pounding hard in her chest—slowly and steadily, like the rhythmic beating of a war-drum—as each movement grew more fluid, each stunt more daring than the last, swifter than the last, snappier, driving her to react faster, to react better…

This isn't Justine's power, she knew for a certainty right then. That feels different, like a steady hand at my back, strength flowing into me, steadying me, not this feverish rush, this near-delirium of battle…

"WHOOP~!" she cried out amidst her laughter, strafing and launching a slash harken, taking off the last Sutherland's fighting arm at the shoulder.

Fight like demons, she said, Marika thought, somewhere deep within herself. If we're really to fight like demons, like fiends from Hell itself, then I'll embrace this flame…

One fluid strike-through of her lance, slicing it in half with the rear-blade, and the ruin of the last of the Sutherlands collapsed to the ground, wholly inert.

And like that, it was over.

"N-3? N-3?" She dimly registered Justine's voice calling for her, somewhere out there—somewhere outside of herself, out past the deafening rush of her own blood in her ears. "Marika."

"The target's down, K-1," Marika managed at last, her breathing pushing heavy against her leaden lungs. Distantly, she registered that really needed to put more focus on her cardio regimen. "I have… It's… No further notes."

"Very good," the Boss replied, with an odd note of relief in her tone. Proceed forwards to the end of the gauntlet, and prepare to dismount. The technicians will retrieve the unit's black box for analysis of your piloting data."

"Understood…" Marika managed, urging the Kay out of its follow-through in a daze that felt to her like how she'd always imagined a fugue state might feel, detaching the lance configuration, powering down the spears, and returning them to their sheaths, dull grey and inert as ever, as she all but taxied the Knightmare to where she'd been directed.

"And Marika?" Justine added. "That was some fine work you did today. I'm proud of you."

Abruptly, Marika felt like both grinning her face off and breaking down into ugly, sobbing tears, all at once. Not even the fondest words of praise that Kewell had ever said to her had ever meant half so much.

"…Thank you, Justine…"

"You've more than earned it," said the princess, earnest to the point that it almost felt as if she had no understanding of how much her praise was truly worth. "And, off the record? I can scarce think of better hands into which I could possibly place Valerian's training. Bravo. And keep up the good work."

"I will, Justine," she vowed, with every ounce of flame in her heart. "You have my word on that."

There is no doubt in my mind, Marika thought. This is where I'm meant to be…