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Chapter Text

Wait, Vena did that?

I land a little bit away from Utena, just close enough that I can here what they're saying. When I felt the same magic that was coming from Magenta appear all over the place, I realized that something had gone horribly wrong. When I cleared the wall and saw several figures—friend and nominal foe alike—ragdolled out, with that pale black fire consuming them, that feeling solidified, becoming concrete.

Vena turns towards me. "NeroAlice. I suppose you did manage to avoid it. It was quite the close call, though, if I remember correctly." She's not denying it. I've known that she's untrustworthy for a while now—I'm pretty sure everyone did—but seeing her true colors on full display is still quite the shock.

Roboko lands next to Utena, and asks, "Baiser, what happened?" She looks around, apparently searching for clues, and only stops when Vena turns towards her.

"You did too, Roboko. Though, given the uniqueness of your nature, I am unsure if it would have taken hold even if you didn't." Roboko opens her mouth, but is interrupted.

"I repeat," Utena hisses out, "What the fuck did you do?" I'd like to know, too. Given that I've had previous encounters with this magic in Magenta, though, I have a few ideas...

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Pesca approaching, trudging through the layer of snow. Her gait is slightly wobbly, and she has an uncharacteristically serious look on her face.

"Hey," she calls out. Everyone turns towards her. "I don't know what's going on, but that magic is—"

"Pantano Pesca..." Vena interrupts, "How puzzling. I'd figured that everyone outside of Enormeeta would have it by now. Were you going out of your way to avoid Magia Magenta, perhaps?" Pesca flinches. Vena turns back to Utena.

"And finally, Magia Baiser. To the very end, you continue to surprise and impress. I didn't think it was even possible to throw it off, and yet here you are." Vena tilts her head. "It's a shame; I'd have loved to have you in my collection."

"You've crossed a line, Vena," Utena grits out, "I'm not gonna let you get away with this." Seemingly unperturbed, Vena floats over to Magenta's face-down body and enters the black magical fire rising from it, obscuring her features. She lands on her head, resting on it.

She leans forward, making just her face visible. "Still... Magia Magenta here acted as a far more effective vector than you ever did, even though you had a headstart. Is it that she has more potential than even you? Or was that just one of your weak points?"

"Vena..." I look up to see her counterpart, the mascot of the magical girls, floating a meter or two above them. Her voice is horrified, barely above a whisper. "What have you done?" Vena lifts off of Magenta, rising to match her counterpart's height.

"I'm just reveling in my victory, Vatz. Since your here, you'll get to watch the cleanup." Cleanup? That doesn't sound good for our continued health, not that that's particularly surprising.

Vena turns back to Utena. "Either way... While keeping you would be a boon, it is by no means necessary." As she finishes, Magenta and Azul, still wreathed in pale black flame, suddenly get up to their feet. Judging by the way the other loci of dark magic in my senses are twitching, the others that have been taken ahold of by it have done the same.

"Okay, I'm out of patience." As they lift off the ground and start floating away, Utena draws her wand back, web materializing at its tip and being weaved into rope as she does so. She then snaps it forward, the rope coiling tightly around Vena. She detaches it from the wand and wraps the remaining length around her target, tying it off.

She shoots up and roughly grabs the still-levitating bundle of Venalita. "You!" she shouts, turning her head towards Vatz, "Can you prevent her from escaping?" Vena asks why she'd want to escape, but they ignore her. Vatz gives a reluctant nod.

"Then do it!" Utena shoves Vena into Vatz, then descends back to the ground. I wasn't at a good angle before, but now that I have a clear look at her... she isn't doing too well, is she? Her breathing is heavy—not in the way it normally is—and there are cuts and a few bruises all over her body. I can heal her, but—

"Pesca," Roboko calls out, interrupting my thoughts, "Please finish what you were saying earlier." Oh yeah, she was saying something, wasn't she? Everyone turns their attention to her.

"Oh, right. Whatever you do, don't let the magic they're giving off come in direct contact with your own. When I tried to with one of my clones, if I hadn't isolated it from my network..." I'm going to assume that doing so would lead to me getting possessed or something like that, since that's what the few clues I have are pointing to. Good to know.

"Except, we're probably gonna have to do that if we want to reverse their conditions," Utena says grimly. Pesca winces. "Well, I've already demonstrated some level of resistance to it, so I'll have to be the one to free them. You guys will have to support me, then." Well, duh. All three of us give her a nod.

A pulse of the dark magic draws my attention towards its location about a dozen meters ahead of us. All of the girls that were taken over are gathered there, arranged in some kind of formation that I don't recognize. The visibly blazing magic around them expands unevenly, seemingly spreading with the formation.

The fighting is probably going to start very soon, then. I'm not exactly a frontline fighter, so I don't want to be caught in that. I start retreating, flying backwards—so that I don't miss anything important that may happen—towards my castle. For their part, the other three—along with two unusually large birds, for some reason—lift off the ground, putting some space between each other.

The waves dark fiery magic emanating from them are meeting each other, forming into a coherent shape—that of some sort of a four-legged beast. And not a small one, either; it's the size of a small house. Each of the girls is situated in a different place within it: Matama in the mouth, Kiwi deep within the head, Imitatio in the neck, Azul in the front chest area—perhaps the lungs, Sulfur in the middle of the spine, Berserga where the heart would be, Magenta in the stomach, and Nemo in the tail.

Going over the castle wall, I quickly retrieve the wand I had just finished making and start flying back up. Well, it isn't much of a wand, since it can only cast one spell, but... well, I only had a pipe and some glass shards to work with while making this, so I'd say it turned out quite well.

Coming to a landing on the wall, I look out towards them through the parapets. I am greeted by a flash of light—three bolts of lightning, extending down from the sky towards the three girls, being cut off just above them by two streaks of light—followed by a loud crack a moment later. They startle, breaking off their forward charge. Having taken on a flickering glow, those two birds are now gliding over their heads. No, seriously, where did they come from?

The beast rears back, clearly preparing to lunge at them in their momentary disorientation. Another flash; two streaks of light, crossing each other, passing through the beast. The beast staggers, the birds are swooping up from where the streaks of light ended.

Taking advantage of the opening, Utena—oh, duh, the birds are her summons—shoots forward. Her wand changes form, growing to a massive size. When she gets close enough, she swings it forward, the rope making up its length curling around its whole body and restraining it. Huh, given its flame-ish nature, I thought its body would be a lot less substantial. Or maybe it's just that her wand has the correct magical properties to be able to interact with it.

The beast throws its head back into a roar, and a deep rumble—with a hint of Matama's voice layered on top, disturbingly enough—washes over me, being heard clearly despite the distance. Suddenly, the sections of rope-wand near its head rip into pieces, and Utena is yanked towards the beast by an invisible force. It raises its paw and swipes at her. She moves to evade a moment too late, the paw clips her side, sending her rocketing into the ground.

That's... a little too much red to be seeing from this distance. I hastily fumble my wand, pointing it at Utena. A paw raises, poised to come right back down onto her. I channel a little bit of my magic into the wand, activating its role. Her injured form appears right in front of me. I shoot my arms forward immediately, before she starts to drop, and she lands in them awkwardly. A faint thud reaches us from a distance.

As I propel myself towards the healing circle, I take in the state of her body. There's the numerous cuts and bruises that were already there when this fight started, but that's not where my attention lays. That would be the wound in her side, currently gushing blood onto my dress. It's... big; less of a cut and more that a whole chunk of flesh was ripped out.

Finally reaching where I placed it—the very center of the castle—I set Utena into the magic circle. It's design is simple: a five-pointed star, a circle containing a piece of chalk at each point, all bound by a larger circle. Ignoring the patch of off-color white I see in her wound, and the churning of my stomach it elicits, I channel a trickle of my magic into the circle, activating its role.

One of the pieces of chalk crumbles into motes of light. A gentle glow encompasses Utena's body, intensifying into a blinding glare before suddenly winking out. She stands up.

"Wow, thanks! I feel good as new," she says, looking down at herself in amazement. Yeah, I can tell: she looks good as new too; it even cleaned and repaired her clothes. Good, I was worried that it wouldn't be effective enough, being a hastily thrown together untested method and all.

"Ah, I gotta get back to the fight!" She takes off, flying out of the room and leaving me alone. I... should probably do that myself; if I miss when someone gets injured like that... I run out, heading back to my place on the walls.

Only four uses left. I had to give it limited uses, even after placing it in a favorable location and consuming what was left of the piece of chalk I used to draw it to create the role, for it to function at all. I settled with that, figuring that it would be enough if the fight before went badly, but now that the situation has changed...

I come to a halt, arriving at my destination. Four heals likely isn't going to be enough. But how am I going to get more? With how little in terms of material I have available, and how difficult it was to get what I already have set up...

Actually, I do have a convenient option available. Everything I typically use for healing when I'm better prepared is still back in Nacht Base. I regularly maintain the roles on them, so they shouldn't have worn off. Heck, their roles are still present in my senses, way off in some direction that I can't face. And I have a whole host of materials and trinkets I left there as well for conveniences' sake. Well, my absence will be brief, so leaving the fight should be fine. I imagine two mouths of a portal opening, one right in front of me and one in Nacht Base.

Nothing happens. Huh? I try again, creating as clear of an image in my mind as I can, really immersing myself in it.

No portal appears. My mind races. Why isn't it working? And why now? Am I doing it wrong somehow, maybe from the pressure of the situation? I try again; nothing. Gah! I wish I could feel what my magic is doing for that—

—like with everything else. From that perspective, it's obvious: if I can't tell what my own magic is doing, it isn't my magic doing it. There's only one real option as for whose magic it is, and obviously they're not gonna let any of the remaining Enormeeta members use it.

The implications sink in; a weight settles in my stomach, something intangible catches in my throat. What I have now is all were getting. If grievous injury is sustained more than four more times...

I turn my attention to the fight. Explosive shells are being launched out of the beast and raining down all around it, particularly concentrated on where the three girls are. They seem to be doing a fine job of defending themselves.

Roboko is floating throughout the battlefield in multiple pieces, each one thinning the rain by targeting midair shells as quickly as possible with continuous laser fire. Pesca and her clones are erecting mounds and carving trenches in the soil and rubble with eerie coordination, the topography of the area shifting from moment to moment in such a way that everyone's exposure is minimized. Utena seems to be taking control of any shells that come near her, directing them to collide with other shells often before they even have the chance to settle into a new form.

I notice that some of the shells are veering onto a new trajectory while still midflight, with no obvious cause. Some of that seems up to Utena's electric bird minions, pulses of crackling electricity around them being followed by nearby shells being deflected away. The rest of it, though... upon closer inspection, I can just barely make out electricity coursing up and down the beasts back, and in the open air, I think I can see the occasional jagged arc around where a given shell changes course.

A shadow of one of the shells briefly covers Utena, and she freezes for an instant. Was that Nemo's ability...? She turns around and shouts something—presumably a warning, but I'm too far away to be able to hear it.

If I blinked, I would have missed it. It makes me wonder what other subtle, vital details I am missing. What if there's something that will catch me flat-footed when I have to bring one of them to me again? Just how bad my deficit in knowledge of the state of the battle is sets in; I need to rectify it.

...But actually doing so would require me to get a lot closer to the fighting itself, to which I wouldn't be able to contribute much and, if anything, would be a net liability. Worse, I'd be in a bad position to do anything when any of them gets badly injured; I'd likely become too involved in the fighting to act on a situation just as it happens, and it would take a lot longer to get them back to the healing circle when I am able to. I'd say I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place—and I currently am, at least in other respects—but one of these is so much worse than the other that the decision is actually pretty easy.

...Then again. I look up into the sky. Dozens of indistinct silhouettes stand out against the sky's deep, searing blue, some hovering in place, and others drifting in straight lines and smooth curves. Drones, each recording the clearly very important battle taking place. If I can get my hands on one, I could easily rectify my relative lack of information without giving up the convenience of my current location.

There's one directly above me. I launch myself upwards towards it; it's unlikely to notice me before being caught. I rapidly approach its underside, reaching out my hands in preparation... There, got it!

Being careful to avoid the whirring blades keeping it aloft, I pull it down in front of me and peer into the lens of its built in camera. It starts jerking in different directions, whoever's controlling it probably trying to get it free. It's pretty weak, so I'm able to compensate easily. I continue to evaluate it for one more moment.

Yes, it will serve my purposes nicely. I gather various fluctuations in the rolestuff around my body, layering them over each other into a new role. With an extra body comes an extra set of eyes and ears. Let this one's body and senses be mine. I superimpose it onto the drone held in my hands... it catches.

The sight of a face blooms into my awareness, entirely separate from my already existing vision. It's my own. I take it in stride: in the past, I might have found the change in my senses to be disorienting, but I've had so much practice with additional perspectives that it's almost natural to me now.

I loosen my grip, letting it rest in my hands, and make it fly upwards. It does. I fly it around me, getting a sense for how it controls. Hmm, it's a lot of effort to control all four blades like that... and its movement is slow and rather clunky, it probably wouldn't do too well if I sent it down there now...

...Yes, one more role should be fine. I extrude a new role out of nothing. Separated as it may be, it's still a part of me. This body has the same physical and magical capabilities as my own. I pull it further, into the drone... it takes.

Now that's more like it. Now I can maneuver it though the air with ease, its flight now working the same way as mine. I fly with it for a moment, spinning around in tandem with it before sending myself back down and the drone towards the battlefield.

The situation has evolved since I last had my eyes—well, camera now—on it. Shells are no longer falling; they seem to be at a standoff. Utena and the beast are facing each other, and Pesca is somewhere off to the side, a bit further away. They both seem fine, if a little dinged up. Roboko is—where is she? My heart leaps into my throat—

No, never mind, I can see that she's still in pieces, floating in the air. I breathe a sigh of relief. I know it's a natural state for her—a preferred one, even—but does she really have to stay in it for extended periods of time like this? It makes it difficult to tell how she's faring, if nothing else. Well, nothing I can really do about it.

I land back on the wall and start focusing on the beast itself. Kiwi and Matama have swapped places, with Kiwi now at the back of the mouth. Her arm is sticking out straight ahead of her, magic visible around it, obscured pale black flame as it may be, coalescing into some form of construct.

A moment later, and its form is clear: it's a cannon. There's already a faint glow coming from it, and its only growing brighter. My drone has gotten close enough that I can hear talking—Utena's voice, probably—but I can't make out what she's saying. Just a little closer...

"...really think I'm just gonna let you hit me?" Utena jumps to the side a bit, just enough to not be directly in front of it. Neither the beast nor Kiwi's figure seem to do anything in response. A moment passes.

Utena mutters to herself, "Huh. I was expecting it at least try to track me. Is it going to snap to me at the last second, or..." Trailing off, she turns her head backwards, parallel with the cannon's aim. I turn my head with her, my gaze following hers—oh.

Far behind her is the city center. It's the middle of the work day, so there are a lot of people there, and it probably hasn't been evacuated, being as distant from the fight as it is. Whatever it fires, probably a beam of some kind, probably isn't going to be big enough to engulf the entire area, but cutting a path of destruction through it wouldn't be much better. And my mom—no, focus, I don't need to be thinking about that right now.

"...Shit." Turning back around, Utena throws herself up into the line of fire, her wand moving, conjuring a webby bundle of something as it trails behind her. She swings her arm, pointing her wand in front of her, whatever it is at the end of it fanning out, taking on a reflective sheen—

The arm cannon fires, a bright, white beam laced with the sharp, pitch black lances that are characteristic of Kiwi's magic. In an instant, it reaches the shiny object in front of Utena. There, the directionality of the beam seems to be lost, ephemeral spokes of white light radiating out every which way. For a single moment, dazzling rays wash out the entire area.

Something gives. The beam surges forward a bit, the shining spikes fold inward towards her. It stabilizes, the beam engulfing her form, fanning out around it like a hedgehog. Dark flashes of her magic in its rawest form peek through, accompanied by the black spears of Kiwi's jutting out and flying off aimlessly. For a few seconds, there is a standstill, the beam creeping forward ever so slightly.

It cuts out, just as suddenly as it fired. My breath catches. Her right arm—the one she stuck out—is significantly shorter than it should be. Its end forms a dull tip, which is glowing with a very faint red. Black char extends from there to a bit beyond the elbow. The rest of her body didn't get out unscathed, either: the center of her body seems to be fine, but the hair at the very top of her head is smoking a bit, and her lower legs down have blackened a bit, too, though at least they have maintained their form.

No, she's fine, I can still heal her, probably. She's still standing—er, floating—even, so from that perspective, her injuries from earlier were worse. Actually, yeah, I'm not even wrong about that, there's no blood loss, and clearly nothing vital has been hit.

"Baiser," Pesca calls out, a note of distress underlying her voice, "I'll cover for you while you're getting healed." Oh, right. As better-than-they-seem as the injuries may be, they're not exactly superficial. I lift my arm, pointing my wand at her.

She shakes her head. "No, I can still fight. Given how difficult it's been, wasting time that we all can be working together seems like a bad idea." Well, if she really is okay... I put my wand down; there are only four heals left, best to prolong them as much as possible. "Besides," she continues, using her remaining hand to pull her wand out of nothing, "there's another one coming." I swivel my drone around to see that a faint glow in Kiwi's arm cannon; energy is gathering again.

Pesca flies up to where Utena is. "Let me. I have the tools to handle this." Clearly curious, Utena gives a bemused nod and flies out of sight. I catch some of Pesca's clones moving, so I pull my drone back to get a better look.

Her clones are moving into a formation around her. It's like several circles, or spirals, maybe? Lets just say it's something in between. Pesca herself has thrust her arms out in front of her, her face racking in concentration. The cannon is now nearly as bright as it was when it fired last time, so—

It fires. The beam reaches her outstretched hands, then stops, just for an instant. Then, it splits. Rather than splashing out around her on contact—in fact, I don't think it's even touching her—it breaks into a dozen smaller beams, as well as a few black spears, each headed towards her nearest clones, each of which take them gracefully. A moment passes, and those clones start relaying that energy to clones further out, breaking apart the continuous stream of energy their receiving into discrete bundles.

Before long, the rest of the clones are bouncing blindingly bright parcels of energy between each other. It seems like a single misstep would cause it to crumble in on itself at any moment, but that moment never seems to come. Entranced by the increasingly dense pattern of light, I almost miss some movement out of the corner of my vision.

Tilting up a little, I see that it's Utena. She's flown up and is now doing... something? She's definitely concentrating, I can tell that much. Wait, around the beast, I can barely see it, but I think there is a web of some kind. Yeah, there definitely is, looking closer; it's sparse and wispy—I can only tell it's there at all from the increasingly bright light illuminating it—but there is definitely a webby structure surrounding it.

The beam finally cuts off. Just as it does so, as if she were waiting for it, Utena shouts out, "Pesca! Dump it all into this! Quickly!" Pesca blinks, then dashes towards the beast, stopping right where the webs begin. Simultaneously, the clones start moving, reorienting themselves while keeping all of the energy stored between them in balance.

They settle into a funnel shape pointing towards Pesca. The outermost clones send the luminescent orbs bouncing amongst them inward, towards the next nearest clones. Then those clones take it and do the same. Like a wave, it propagates through the funnel, the increasingly bright concentration becoming blinding. Thankfully, my drone seems to be incapable of going blind.

A flash, and the thin web starts glowing and simultaneously tightens, snapping inward. The now glowing thread is digging into the beast's blazing, dancing flesh. It immediately begins violently struggling, tongues of flame flaring outward, yet it's unable to break free, or indeed even move very much.

Pesca and her clones back away. I notice that they didn't use everything: the pitch black projectiles of Kiwi's magic are still bouncing between them, somehow maintaining a jagged appearance despite being perfectly spherical at this point. Before I can ponder further, Utena leaps into action.

With a roar, she dives through a gap in the threads and into its head. She immediately encounters resistance, her movement stops in its tracks... Then, there's a pulse, sending the pale black fire that was clinging to her out and away from her body, and she's moving forward again. A moment later, they converge on her again, and there's another pulse. As this process continues to repeat, I realize she's headed towards Kiwi, who's been relocated back to her place in the beast's head.

Finally reaching her, Utena reaches out and grabs her with her extant hand. The beast starts struggling even more violently, somehow, and, between the beast's jerky movements and the sheer amount of its 'flesh' between them and my sight, I lose track of them. I move my drone down near the ground, a bit behind Pesca, to get a better view.

The thread suddenly lets out a brilliant flash, most of it concentrated on the beast's left flank. An instant later, a crack echoes out, followed by a boom. The thread is gone, and the it immediately starts moving, rearing its head back with a low roar.

It snaps it back forward, and Utena comes hurling out of its mouth, straight towards Pesca. She starts jumping away, and then, with a crack, a fireball is blooming from right where she just was, carried outward by a wave of concussive force.

It quickly clears, and I am greeted with the sight of Utena falling, blood spurting out of her back. Even through all the blood, I can see that a sizable hole—perhaps around the size of my palm—is going though her lower body, around the stomach. Past her, I see Kiwi's form in the beast's mouth, wielding a bulky firearm over her shoulder that's probably longer than her whole body. Finally, Pesca falls a short distance, trailing blood from several areas, crumpling onto the ground.

Crap. I snap my wand at Pesca and cast it, then immediately jump up and grab her arm with my left hand before she can start falling. I then do the same towards Utena, catching her arm with my right hand. A smell resembling that of burnt pork, along with another, weaker scent that I can only describe as being unpleasant in a fleshy way, wafts into my nose. With them dangling from my grip, I start flying towards the healing circle.

Concurrently, the beast bursts forward in a sprint, heading directly for the castle. I maneuver my drone to the side to get out of it's path; I don't want to test if it could survive contact with it. As it passes by—far closer than I'd like—I notice something: dozens of glowing ribbons of magic are flowing out from Magenta's form to the places where the thread was digging into it earlier, as well as where Utena was digging into its head.

The few Pesca clones still in front of it suddenly send the jagged black spheres being stored between them—two or three dozen—hurling into the beast. Upon impact, each one unfurls back into a form more closely resembling its straight, angular nature; black spines jut out every which way, presumably including into the beast itself, before quickly dissipating entirely. The combined effect stops it in its tracks.

The remaining clones, still maintaining several dozen more of those projectiles between them, use the time to catch up and get in front of it. It's interesting that the clones are still active in spite of their... Progenitor? Mother? ...template going down. Something in the beast's body catches my attention. It's really faint, but... I think I can make out a blue glow around Azul's form.

It starts sprinting forward again with a burst of speed, and the Pesca clones immediately let loose another volley, once again halting it. I pull my drone up to get a better view, and I notice that some of Roboko's segments have joined themselves back together.

I feel a growing wetness under my left hand. Come to think of it, there's also a hard lump in Pesca's arm that I don't think I have in my own—oh. It's shrapnel. And my hand is directly on one of her bleeding wounds. Ignoring it—ignoring it, I fly into the healing circle room.

I lay Utena into the circle's center roughly—it's not like it won't be healed off right after if something doesn't happen—and activate it. At the same time, the clones fire off a third volley. It looks like it's the last, since I don't see anymore black balls flying around. Turning my attention back to Utena, I see that her right hand is back, and that she's no longer bleeding from a hole in her stomach.

She gets up. "Phew, thanks again—" I cut her off, shoving Pesca into the circle and, consequently, Utena out of it. Carefully keeping my gaze away from my hand, I note that her clones now seem to be absolutely tearing up the ground around and in front of it, tearing the ground into fissures and throwing up walls in an attempt to impede its movement, before activating it again.

My view of her clears, revealing that her wounds have closed. She remains in the circle, motionless, for a worryingly long moment before letting out a 'huh' and suddenly springing up. "We gotta get back out there quick! The, uh, whatever it is is headed straight for us!"

Utena responds, "Oh jeez, okay." At that exact moment, light flashes in my drone's vision for an instant, a straight line crossing it. In the aftermath, I see the beast at one end, a large plume ablating off its body. Tracing to the other end, I see a floating turret, with another, glowing one nearby. Roboko, then. Utena rushes out of the room.

Wait, do they know my healing capacity is right now? As she's darting past, I grab Pesca's sleeve and give it a good yank. Her head snaps towards me. She opens her mouth, but I cut her off by gesturing with my free hand to each of the two remaining pieces of chalk. She stares for a moment in consideration, then her eyes widen.

"Ah, shit." Indeed. She sprints out of the room, shouting, "Baiser! We gotta be more careful! We can only be healed two more times before she..." I hear Utena's voice in response, but it's too far away from both me and my drone for me to make out what she's saying.

Another flash, this one from the other Roboko turret, and another wave of pale black flame spirals away into the open air. Right, now that they've been healed and are re-entering the fray, I need to get back out there too. I run out of the room.

Just before I return to my spot, they reenter the fight. The beast stops; it was definitely pursuing them, then. I reach the top of the wall and—wow, it got a lot closer than I thought it did. It's not quite close enough that I could be caught in the crossfire from here, but even a little closer and it will be. That it traversed such a distance in not very much time... scary. I can even see where it started, courtesy of the trail of destruction in the ground behind it.

Now in range, I can hear Pesca, "...were in there, what did you find out? I was able to sense a lot of it, but..." I notice small... granules floating around the area. Were those always there? Well, everyone seems to be looking at them warily, so probably not. Roboko is even going so far as to position her segments outside of the volume they occupy. Actually, that's probably a good idea; I do the same with my drone.

Utena responds, "When my magic was in direct contact with her, I felt the... whatever it is that's attached to her." As she talks, webs materialize on a rectangular section of ground. "I tried attacking it, but that did nothing. I found bonds connecting it to her; it doesn't seem to have blended itself in, thankfully." Then, those webs, along with the underlying slab of earth, lift up out of the ground and changes into a translucent onyx slab, curved like it was taken out of a large sphere. "They seem more vulnerable, but I couldn't really get at them, at least not with enough to do anything." It then furls in on itself, collapsing into a ball that's far smaller than it has any right being given its previous size.

As Utena waves her wand around the onyx ball, doing something to it, Pesca talks. "Yeah, that fits what I was sensing. No offense, but I don't think you have the precision needed to do anything worthwhile here." The granules have grown to the point that it's clear as to what they are: crystals. Perfect prisms of the same size and shape, and still growing. "I do, but I don't have whatever that thing inside you is that lets you safely interact with the, uh, Dark Possession Dog Thing."

"Dog? That's clearly—" The crystals, now the size of my body, suddenly go cloudy. Utena wastes no time in responding; the onyx ball flares out into a dark, spherical shell surrounding them. Just as it does so, the beast opens its mouth. An invisible, incredibly fast wave seems to radiate out, making the prisms it passes go all blurry as it does so. A moment passes.

Then, all at once, all of the exposed Pesca clones within the volume are destroyed. Earthen limbs being sheared off, being pulled apart into dust and debris, simply exploding... Unsettlingly, I can hear none of it, neither through my ears or my drone. It's like the whole area is a sonic dead zone. Well, though it's hard to see through the shell, Utena and Pesca seem to be doing fine, at least. The ground around the bottom portion isn't, though: it's getting wrenched out of the ground and slammed into the barrier protecting them, leaving it floating there.

Actually, are they... covering their ears? That doesn't really make sense, but that's probably not a good thing. And if they're trapped in there... I point my wand forward and cast it twice in rapid succession. They both appear, still covering their ears.

They look around for a moment, confused. Then, a painfully loud cacophony rings in my ears, and suddenly I'm not focused on anything else. I dimly feel arms wrapping around me and the feeling of falling. The noise level has gone from ear-splitting to loud, so I'm now able to get a bearing on my surroundings. The three of us are inside the castle's walls on the ground floor, right below the spot on the wall where I was before.

"Alice, Pesca! Can you two hear me?!" Utena shouts out far louder than she needs to. Pesca responds with an equally loud 'YES!', I opt to give her a nod. She continues a more reasonable volume, "From the ice, I was expecting for a blizzard attack, so it being sound-based really caught me off guard." Ice? Is that what those crystals are made of?

"It still managed to block most of it, though," Pesca says, "It was a lot quieter than what I was hearing through my network." That makes sense; I put a few roles on the castle to help improve its strength and protective ability, and it does seem to be attenuating the blast of noise quite a bit, despite having nothing to do that explicitly.

A double flash of light. I see that the two Roboko-turrets fired off, one after the other. Two of the crystals, near the edge of the volume, have smooth, wavy holes going through them, with steam rising up and water dripping down. Yeah, it's definitely ice. Suddenly, the noise bombarding the castle quiets down, and, simultaneously, a wave of force crashes into the turrets, sending them flying apart into Roboko's constituent pieces. A moment later, a transparent shell of light comes up around each of them, apparently insulating them from further damage.

"Ah, it seems like Roboko came to the same conclusion I did," Pesca continues. How did she—ah, right, she does have a few clones left, and she just established that she can sense things through them. "The ice is what's letting Lococo's sound control range be so large." What are you talking about? Matama uses projectiles all the time, and you're implying that she's a short ranged fighter?

"Well, duh, even I figured that out." Roboko is now having each of her segments focus continuous laser fire on one crystal. The laser lights pass through it, deflecting and scattering as the ice warps and melts from the heat. Once most of it is melted, she moves on to another. "Well, let's get back into the fight."

"Wait!" Pesca shouts. "We need a way to protect ourselves from the sound blasts that are going to come our way. Sure, we'll be outside the kill zone, but it's still pretty dangerous outside of it, too." She stops for a moment, pondering. "Hmmm... I can probably use my power to filter out most of it, at least from my ears. Conferring that to other people might be possible..."

"Ah! I remember learning that sound needs air to travel through. So if I..." Utena trails off. Several points scattered throughout the air around us seem to waver. They all coalesce around her, making her image shimmer. She starts speaking, but no voice comes out. Stopping for a moment, she continues, "Yep, it works."

"One more thing," Pesca interjects, raising her hand up. Three lumps rise up in the ground in front of her, quickly taking on a humanoid form. Soon enough, they are looking exactly like her except for one thing: they're small, about the size of my head.

A line flashes into view, and one of the ice crystals suddenly shatters, with something moving away from it and into the distance extremely rapidly. It happens again, and this time I catch that it's one of Utena's birds. I guess they're moving fast enough, even after colliding, that they're not being exposed to the sound long enough to hurt them—

A weight settles on my shoulders. I look around. Pesca is holding one of her miniature doppelgangers, another has sat itself on the almost-ring floating over Utena's head, and I can't find the third one. Looking down, I see a small leg hanging down from each side of my neck.

"One for each of you, and this one's for Roboko," Pesca explains, "These are for communication, since that will be pretty difficult as things are. There's no need for a proper C3, since there isn't enough of us for that to matter, so I'll keep it simple: they will repeat anything you say to the rest of us." I don't know what that is, so it's probably a good thing that it doesn't matter.

"Oooh, so like walkie-talkies!" Utena says cheerfully. "We really should get back into the fight; I don't like sitting here with no idea of what's going on. If there's anything else important, tell me out there." As she finishes, she takes off. Pesca, seemingly having no qualms with such, takes off after her. They both fly over the wall and back onto the battlefield.

As I'm ascending back to my previous spot, Pesca's voice rings out right above my head, "Hey, Baiser. Something I noticed while we were out... While I can't really make heads or tails of what I'm sensing from the magic making the bulk of our opponent's body, I did feel Magenta's healing magic flowing to the places that were dug into."

"So it can be hurt, then? Good." Utena's voice takes on a vindicative quality. Unbidden, the image I saw when I first popped up over the wall, that of Magenta—as well as Azul—laying still on the ground, being consumed by that substance. Right, I dare say that her feelings are justified.

"Damaged, maybe, but—whoa!" Pesca stops in the air a little bit away from Roboko. A moment later, she resumes, "Sorry about that, it's so intense up here that it's making my body vibrate. Other than that, though, my filtering technique seems to be working." Reaching her target, she says, "Here, Roboko, take this." She places the mini-clone on one of the floating pieces, not acknowledging the fact that it is firing as she does so. "Just speak and all of us will be able to hear you through it."

As she finishes speaking, she cuts her flight and drops toward the ground feet first. When she hits the ground, it acts like water, sending ripples out along the surface and dozens of large, earthen 'droplets' into the air. Said droplets quickly morph into several dozen identical copies of herself.

As they spread out, she speaks, "Roboko, I have a plan to deal with the ice prisms near the ground, so focus on the ones higher up." Roboko gives no response. To be fair, I don't think she's actually destroyed any near the ground yet, so she doesn't have to do anything different.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side, Utena suddenly shoots forward straight towards the beast. She enters the volume. A ripple washes over her. The shimmering air around her becomes patchy. She immediately reverses course, her face twisted in a grimace. New distortions appear around her and immediately move to fill in the gaps.

Pesca concernedly asks what happened. Utena replies, "I tried going into the 'kill zone', as you called it, thinking that the vacuum gap would protect me. Unfortunately, it was able to concentrate the sound enough in there to breach through it. I got out just fine, but it managed to destroy over half of my air wisps, so I had to make new ones so that I don't get—" A stream of crumbled rock is suddenly launched at her. She manages to evade, and it continues on a ballistic trajectory into the distance.

She backs further away, presumably to give herself more time to react if something like that happens again. After a few moments of silence, she speaks again, "Say, anyone else find it strange that it hasn't moved at all since it started doing this? Like, why hasn't it tried moving itself and the crystals so that we're in range?"

Pesca replies, "Now, that is a good question... If I had to guess, well, controlling sound precisely enough to, like, do the kind of stuff it's doing must be taxing. If you put moving around on top of that, having to compensate for the effect that will have too, it might just be too much for it to be able to handle." She pauses, then continues excitedly, "If we can force it to move—"

"Wait!" Utena interjects, "So if it can't move without disrupting the sound or whatever, and the sound propagates through the ice, to cut it off we only need to—" Roboko, as quick on the uptake as ever, immediately redirects her laser fire onto the ice crystal right above the beast's head. "...Yeah, that." As she finishes, her birds come in and smash two more crystals near the outskirts of the volume. Seems that they aren't so quick on the uptake, which is pretty odd, considering that they're her summons.

The side of the beast's head begins frothing, bulging outward. The spitting, almost tumor-like mass pulls together into a more coherent shape. A snout, mouth, ears... it's a second head.

Suddenly, the shield around one of Roboko's segments flashes while. Almost immediately following, the telltale crack of a gunshot hits my ears, along with a high pitched 'ping' right after. Kiwi's body has migrated into the mouth of the second head, which probably explains why it's there in the first place. More gunshots ring out, and Roboko's segments start to take evasive maneuvers.

"Hey, I just noticed something important," Pesca says, "When it's body was reshaping, I felt a surge of Berserga's magic in that area. I think she's the one keeping it in a single, coherent shape. If we can free her..." It took a few seconds longer than usual due to her erratic movement, but the crystal above the beast's head finally breaks. Instead of the three closest ones below it, she targets a higher one that's a bit further away...?

"Baiser," she continues, "Can you wrap your magic around your Pantano Doll? Not replacing mine, but covering it like a sheath." Utena makes a sound of affirmation. After a few seconds, "Yes, just like that! I can channel magic through it, so doing that makes it so I'll be able to interact with our oppenent's magic safely. When you go in for another round, I'll help break her out. Speaking of..."

The ground inside the volume starts rippling, concentric circles centered on the beast appear and disappear as they slide past each other. Looking around the edge of the volume, I see that Pesca's clones have spread themselves out evenly in a circle surrounding it, and that they are rhythmically stomping in time with the ripples.

Suddenly, they all sink partially into the earth. The ground bounded by them shifts and, in an instant, spikes shoot out of the ground underneath the lowest ice crystals, gouging them through and shattering them. Cracks run through the rest of the surface before all at once it subsides, as if it all underwent a very shallow cave-in.

"Now!" Pesca's voice rings out a bit too loudly for when it coming from right next to you. My drone happens to be in the exact right position to catch the grin that splits Utena's face as she starts charging forward. Her wand once again takes the form of a very very long whip, this time with a gigantic curved blade attached to the end of it.

She reaches the edge of the volume and swings her whip forward, the blade cleaving a crystal perfectly in two. The left over momentum sends her into a spin. Instead of stabilizing herself, she leans into it, accelerating until she looks more like a spinning top than a person. As she plows forward, she's tilting herself so that the blade slices through a nearby prism, carving a path of destruction through the air. As she does so, the ones she slices through break apart further into tiny shards and suddenly hurl themselves at her, at which a few distortions—air wisps, she called them—break off of her into their path and deflect them off course.

A gunshot rings out, and concurrently a shower of sparks scatter off the leading edge of her whip. She's sent into another spin—this one along the axis of her sides rather than her body length—and does a quick dart to the side just before second shot is let off. Just as she's almost completed a full forward rotation, she suddenly completes it with a jerk and—clang! All of her angular motion suddenly stops, her whip flies back in recoil. Meanwhile, a bullet hits the ground somewhere off to her left.

Her forward momentum, however, hasn't diminished at all; she's really close to it now, and is on a collision course straight for its head. She pulls her hand holding the whip back in preparation for a swing and, mirroring her, the beast brings a paw up, ready to swat her out of the air.

It throws its paw forward, and Utena darts to the side, narrowly grazing past its leg. She slams into the ground in a crouch right beside the beast's flank. Just as she does so, the length of her whip suddenly contracts, bringing the blade at the end of it flying towards her, slicing across its side. Before the contraction is even finished, she pushes off, diving into its dark, flickering flesh and heading straight towards Berserga.

The beast makes its displeasure clear, thrashing, throwing itself around, and generally tearing up everything in its immediate vicinity. That, combined with the general difficulty of seeing through the fire, makes it impossible for me to get a good view of her or what she's doing.

A few moments later, and the beast goes a bit... blobby, it's shape losing a large amount of its definition. It's still lashing out quite fiercely, but it's no longer making full-body movements, either. I bring my drone in closer to get a better view.

Deep in its center, there are two figures enshrouded in darkness, one grabbing the other. The third, smaller figure on the grabber's shoulder identifies her as Utena. As the seconds pass, nothing much happens; the figures only make a few subtle movements.

Then, Pesca's voice echoes out from behind my head, "Tch, this isn't working. We can figure out how to free her later, just pull her out." Utena listens and starts to drag Berserga away from where she's situated. The beast's form loses even more definition, with even large, basic aspects of its shape becoming indistinct.

At that moment, things go wrong. Crescent shapes burst out of Berserga's form in every direction. Utena's grip is instantly lost and she is pushed back, the miniature form tagging along with her seems to disintegrate. She's left slowly drifting towards the beast's outside. I don't know how bad she got it from that, but I should be prepared for the worst. I train my wand on her.

The moment she reemerges into the outside world, I cast. As she appears, I catch her by the arm. I feel her jerk around for a moment, coincident with a gurgly hacking noise that makes my stomach lurch, but she stops doing so. I take off towards the healing room.

As I travel, I work up the will to turn my head and evaluate her injuries. Deep, gushing gouges run across the entire front side of her body. One of them trails particularly high up, the edge of it nicking her throat. Above that, there seem to be no injuries, though it's hard to tell under the blood running down from her mouth. Her eyes are still open and moving, so she's conscious. She hacks up more blood, and I turn my head back forward.

I see that the beast is still in place, regaining its shape a lot slower than I expected it to, but I barely notice over the continuing gurgling noises coming from Utena. Thankfully, I won't have to bear with them for long. Bursting into the room, I rush to the center and practically throw her into the circle. She attempts to catch herself, but her movement is too sluggish and she fails. The moment I see that she's fully in the circle, I activate it.

The light clears, and Utena's already standing up. She takes a quick look down at herself, then promptly speeds out of the room without a word. I take a glance down at the circle—only one stick of chalk left—before doing the same.

As I return, the beast finishes reforming itself into its properly beast-like stature, minus the second head. The onyx shell that Utena deployed earlier curls back in on itself, reverting to its previous size, and starts flying back to her. On its way, a small Pesca clone, like the one she had with her earlier, bursts out of the earth and lands on top of it, hitching a ride.

The beast seems to have finished molding itself back into form. Water starts pouring out of several distinct points, all arranged in a circle above it. The water acts as a shroud, pouring down around its body and seemingly disappearing as it hits the ground.

Utena visibly double-takes. "Bwuh? Water? Which one of the girls can even do that? Can any of them do that?" A light mist has accumulated around the veritable waterfall pouring down, obscuring things further.

Pesca replies, "Oh, that ability's from Imitatio. It's a part of how she makes her poisons." Her voice pauses for a moment. "Be careful, that water is flowing straight into the ground, and it's definitely doing things while it's down there." Looking around, I see that Pesca's clones are spread out evenly along the surface, each one mostly staying still and occasionally tapping a foot.

"Poisons? Should I be worried—" Utena suddenly cuts herself off and starts flying back, her wand changing form once again. A moment later, the beast comes hurling out of its watery veil right at her, legs outstretched, the water-producing points trailing behind it. Her wand finishes transforming—into a giant hammer—and, as it's coming close to her, she swings it with a spin. The head smashes into the beasts body with extreme force, stopping it dead in its tracks.

It then detaches from the rest of the wand. A ridiculous amount of flame starts spewing out the other end, accelerating itself and the beast along with it into the ground, where it then plows it across the ground with its sheer force for a fair distance. Then, just as it seems to be losing steam, it detonates. A flaming orange plume shoots up high in the air, carried by a shockwave that is now visibly radiating out in a shell around the epicenter. I get the unique honor of hearing it twice: once through my drone, then through my ears an instant later.

Pesca whistles. "Daaaamn. Uh, as for your question: no, there's no magic in it besides what's controlling it right now, so it should be ordinary water." The beast comes flying out of the plume of dust and smoke and, upon landing, bursts forward in a sprint. "Oh, and I can feel it more clearly now; I definitely feel a build up of Sulfur's magic inside its body."

The beast is now really close, and it's now apparent that it is aiming for Pesca. It travels the final stretch with a leap, its trajectory set to land right where she is. As it comes down, she sinks, disappearing into the earth. It lands in a crash, and her clones are already approaching it en masse, the closest arranging themselves into some sort of pattern and doing something to the ground beneath them I can't see.

The streams of falling water get cut off, each point generating them redirecting into a focused, violent deluge aimed up and to the side at or around Utena. She weaves between them flawlessly, even as they try to cut her off and box her in.

She's so confident in her dodging ability, apparently, that she begins to speak. "Sulfur, huh? When she was doing that earlier she used it to throw stuff at me really fast, so..." She swipes her wand through one of the streams as it gets close to her. As it comes back out, there is a glob of water covering its tip. "Either way, it can't be good to just let it happen. How do you feel about whaling on our opponent until that gets disrupted?"

At that suggestion, my eyes can't help but be drawn to the beast's chest, where Azul's body resides. No longer the faint, almost wispy thing it was before, the light blue glow around her is by now clearly visible. Sure, we can't expect to progress if we don't do any damage anyways, but is that really the best idea?

Pesca pops out of the ground a safe distance away from the beast, a dozen of her clones closely surrounding her. I can't help but notice that she looks a bit more... muddy than usual. As they scatter back to a roughly even covering of the surface, a simple, short reply sounds through her mini-clone, the voice slightly strained, "Sounds good to me."

Spikes of rock shoot up from the ground underlying the beast and pierce deep into its roiling, pale black flesh. Two or three of them immediately fracture and spall with corresponding cracks. A dark wave starts slowly spreading out from the center of its body, pushing foreign rock and earth outward as it meets it.

"Tch. That set it back a bit, but not as much as I hoped—" Suddenly, Pesca and her clones are diving away from where they were just standing. Immediately after, geysers start vigorously spewing light brown-tinged water high into the sky, each one centered on a clone's previous location. The few clones that got clipped look like they just got out of a sandblaster.

Two pulses of light hit the beast in quick succession, being pushed into the ground a bit by the instantaneous forces. Tracking my eyes to where they came from, I see that Roboko has returned to her two turret form. The streams of water coming from above it suddenly redirect again, the majority of which end up pointed at her.

The other few each end up pointed at a Pesca clone. Concurrently, some of the geysers seem to run dry, and brand new ones burst forth through the ground, each clearly aimed at one clone or the other. Sinkholes are beginning to form in several areas, some through gradual subsidence, and others through sudden collapse.

Turning my attention back to Utena, I notice that there's no glob of water on her wand anymore, but there is a metallic spike floating in front of her that's about the same size. Webs appear directly to her right, flying out, stretching and spreading before curving back in, converging and completing the shape. The end result is a huge spherical volume bound by very little web, the strands thin and junctions few and far between.

A thin, translucent purple film spreads across the web. The sphere starts to shrink, its strands coming closer and closer together until the whole thing looks more like a solid mass, no gaps apparent. The shell of web, no larger than a fist, adheres to the back of the not that much smaller metal spike. Utena grabs the new construct, holding it between two fingers where the two materials meet, then throws it at the beast. She then immediately crosses her arms over her face.

At about a quarter way through its travel, I see the instant its back bursts open, giving it the appearance of a pointy shuttlecock. It very quickly accelerates to blazing speeds, reaching its target almost immediately after. It doesn't actually reach it, however: it crashes into a partial dome of water surrounding the beast. It punches through, sending water droplets spraying everywhere, but doing so robbed enough of its momentum that it doesn't do much damage afterward.

At least, not to the beast itself. A shockwave rushes through the water to its source. The ground around it, already torn up, huge chunks still flying upward from the force of all of the water that was composing the dome welling up at once, seems to give way entirely. It quickly spreads radially, and in two seconds or so, the surface of much of the battlefield is collapsing.

It settles surprisingly quickly. The area's elevation has lowered several meters, every surface covered with loose mud and rubble. The terrain is not at all smooth; there are many hills, some of which have peaks approaching the area's original height, and many valleys, crevasses, and divots that go deeper than the usual, though its hard to tell how much so through the muddy water pooled in all of them. I look down the wall—good, it didn't reach the castle, though it got uncomfortably close.

The beast itself is situated at the bottom of a particularly deep ridge, halfway submerged, and shadowed by a sheer cliff. Water is once again pouring around its form, rather than shooting out at someone or another. I look at Utena, who, aside from her hair being a bit tossled, looks none the worse for wear. Roboko seems fine too, though it's hard to really tell. Pesca...

The formation that cliff is attached to shifts. It's only then I notice the several Pesca clones around and on it, cracks in the ground emanating from them. It continues to shift, tilting towards the beast, before all at once shattering into huge boulders, all falling towards it in a landslide. Its body suddenly loses its fiery texture, as well as the accompanying strange pale hue, becoming an opaque black blob.

The rocks falling onto it seem to get engulfed by the black void that is now its body—or, rather, its body is climbing up the surfaces of the rocks piecemeal as they make contact. Once the ground finally settles, it is left sitting on top of a waterlogged pile of rubble, already pulling itself back into shape. As it regains its color and texture, I notice a crackling glow, emanating from deep within its back, just starting to peek out.

One of the Pescas up on a small hill a bit further away—the real one, I think—snaps its head towards Utena. "Baiser, below you!" In response, Utena looks down and, concurrently, the largest geyser thus far springs forth from the ground distantly beneath her with extreme force. As it's rushing up to reach her, the onyx ball that's been floating beside her unfurls into a spherical shell, protecting her.

The water washes over, hiding her from view. Then, a moment later, all movement stops. The geyser froze over in an instant, every detail of the water's flow captured in the fresh ice. Looking at the beast, the water pouring down around it has parted around its entire front half, revealing that its head is facing exactly towards Utena's location, its mouth wide open. Contained within is the form of Kiwi straddling the barrel of a gun large enough that it extends out past its barely-distinct teeth. For a few seconds, it holds that position.

Then, suddenly, it snaps its head in a completely different direction—pointing directly at Pesca. Realizing the danger, she begins to throw herself out of the way—a flash. For an instant, the same crackling glow from before is visible around and in front of the gun's barrel. In the next, it's gone, replaced by a deafening boom.

A secondary crack coming from my right, accompanied by a nearby rumble, grabs my attention. Looking over, I see that a large section of the rightmost wall is now open air and a bit of dust, the stone that was just in its place now still settling piled up rubble on the ground. My heartbeat picks up at the reminder that my current position isn't exactly safe, even accounting for the current lack of aggro on me. Thankfully, only the periphery seems to have been compromised; the actually important part remains untouched. Speaking of—

Twin pulsed laser cross the sky from Roboko, yanking my attention back. I see Pesca laying on the ground not far from where she was, there's a lot of red—Before I con even process anything else, I act almost automatically. My wand is cast, and I catch her as she appears.

Just as I start taking off, large cracks form in the frozen geyser, shearing off large chunks of ice. Utena emerges out of a particularly large opening, scanning the area. Her eyes land on us a moment before we go behind a wall, disappearing from her line of sight.

I look at Pesca to evaluate her injuries. Her right leg is simply gone, all the way up to the hip. As it gets closer to that point, her body is progressively more mangled. I don't bother looking at it further—I already know it's bad just from that. Meanwhile, through my drone, I see that jets of water are being directed at Utena again. She makes another one of those web shell things, purple film and all, but smaller this time—

"Hey, Alice," Pesca's voice sounds out from the back of my head, making me jolt in reaction, "Thanks for, uh, retrieving me. Or, at least, I think that's you." She's fully conscious? Actually, I should have realized that from not seeing the clones go down, but still, there's something really offputting about her talking to me remotely while I'm carrying her dying body.

The web shell thing, now full of water, undergoes several sudden changes. Its purple color darkens to a near black, and dozens of something like hairs or spines grow out of it. It begins to move without Utena's direct action, interposing itself between her and incoming water shooting at her. As the water hits it, it doesn't splash off, instead seemingly catching on the spines and wicking into its body.

Just as I enter the central room, the spiny water ball starts flying towards the beast, traveling along the water jets as much as it can. The one its travelling along partially freezes, the flowing water now carrying chunks of ice, but those are pulled into it as well, seemingly posing no issue. I run to the center and drop Pesca into the healing circle, activating it shortly after.

As light builds up in the circle, the water ball comes close to the beast, breaking off from the water in order to reach its target. The beast, rather than allowing itself to get hit, leaps some distance away. The water-producing points that are floating above it suddenly stop producing water, as if someone shut off the tap. Meanwhile, the ball redirects itself and starts heading towards its new location.

The light clears, revealing Pesca pushing herself up onto her feet. Just as the last bit of glowing dust from the final piece of chalk crumbles away, the role giving the healing circle its power slips, then unravels entirely, falling away. Pesca flinches, then starts staring down at the now ordinary circle.

Pesca has not been idle: as the ball approaches the beast, earthen walls come up around it, courtesy of nearby clones. A web of pillars come up from the ground, threading between its legs and attaching to the surrounding walls to further restrict its movement. As it gets close, however, the beast gets ready to jump anyway, seemingly disregarding its apparent prison—two laser pulses, one after the other, from Roboko each hit it with enough force to slightly drive it into the ground.

As it recovers, it tries to scrabble away, but its far too late. The ball passes through the earth pillars easily, the rock composing them crushed and guided into it along its spines. As it plunges into the beast's side, the pale black flame composing its body appears to get pulled in too, though I only get to see for a moment before it's too deep in for me to tell.

Its detonation is marked first by a bright flash of light. Everything the ball absorbed—rock, chunks of ice, and of course a massive deluge of water and, somehow, steam—comes bursting out all at once, jetting out through several large holes torn through its body. The sheer force of the mostly water washes the earth walls, as well as everything else, away, leaving the immediate vicinity as mostly flat ground.

Turning my attention back to my surroundings, I realize I'm the only person in the room. Guess Pesca's already going back to the fight, then. My eyes linger on the former healing circle. That, it, then, if something goes wrong after this... I decide to follow Pesca's lead and begin to head out.

I hear Pesca's voice from behind me, "Railgun, then. It's good that we know what it was building all of that up for, since it's already charging up again." Looking at the beast with my drone, I can't really tell; there are so many of Magenta's healing ribbons flowing through its body that they're visible from a distance. Scanning the area, I catch her coming from the castle.

"Yeah," Utena responds, "Now that we know the timing of it, it's not gonna be much of a concern anymore." Flying up above the wall, my eyes catch on the collapsed section. Sure, the attack that caused it needed a long time to build up, but my belief in its protective abilities is shaken regardless.

Then again, it's not like there's anything in there that needs it anymore. Aside from me, I guess, even though I'm not technically in there right now. I look around the area, taking in just how much it's been transformed by the battle, and how much smaller my castle is in comparison. I... As things are now, staying here means pinning myself down with questionably effective defenses to compensate. I think mobility is favored here. Decision made, I fly away from the castle and start flying along the outskirts of the battlefield.

Two lasers from Roboko flash into existence for an instant, this time concurrently. It's amazing that Roboko has been the only one to draw aggro from it and not take any major damage. Sure, she isn't the one that's done the most damage to it, but those lasers look like they really pack a punch. Benefits of keeping at range, I guess.

Whether the beast just finished healing itself right then, or if it decided that it was close enough now that it was attacked, I can't tell. Regardless, water is appearing around it out of nowhere again, though this time it isn't really moving, just collecting in several spheres that quickly stop growing after reaching a certain size—the diameter roughly matching the height of a person. Interestingly, though they have stopped growing, light seems to have an increasingly difficult time passing through them.

Pesca says, "Be careful. It's still not her poisons, but Imitatio's other ability is definitely in play now." After a few moments, they stop dimming too, resting at a deep, almost black blue color with only a few faint glimmers visible through them, despite the strong sunlight bearing down on them.

"...Shit, it must be illusions, then." Utena's wand transforms, the tip transforming into a spear topped with a long, sharply pointed metal blade, the length becoming a very long rope attached to such, and the handle remaining as is. That... fits what we're seeing with those orbs, actually. Though that doesn't explain why we aren't seeing anything else, or why it would bother doing that specifically.

"No, not that either. It's good to keep in mind, though; I'll warn you if I sense anything like that appearing." Utena, with the spear end of her—uh, harpoon, I think?—in hand, ready to be thrown, does a double take. She takes a moment to regain her composure, recenter her aim, then let it loose.

As it flies, the coiled rope attached to it unwinding, she voices her confusion, "I—what?" It flies straight and true into one of the orbs. Instead of sinking into it like I expected, it bounces right off, barely—if at all—perturbing the water composing it. The moment the after, the orb starts flying towards Utena with blazing speed. The rope of the harpoon catches on it, rapidly winding around its equator with enough force to yank the handle out of her hand.

Still staggering, Utena manages to deploy her onyx shielding minion just before the water orb impacts, having it fan out into a large circular wall instead of a shell. The impact releases a very loud, weirdly resonant sound, and a torrent of water of a much greater amount than what I'd expect from its size explodes outward. Most of it splashes away harmlessly, but some of it, particularly that radiating off the sides, suddenly stops, freezes into numerous needles of ice, and then curl around and launch at Utena from behind the barrier. A burst of her raw magic deflects flares out, knocking them off course and breaking them, with the side effect of creating an icy mist around her.

"Oh, right, you wouldn't know about that, would you—" Though I don't hear it through the doll, I see Pesca gasp in the distance out of the corner of my eye. The mist has cleared enough to reveal Utena's state. Her arms are crossed in front of her to protect her body. The spear end of her harpoon is sticking straight through one of them, the tip ending just in front of her neck.

The harpoon loses its form and dissolves into an indistinct blob for a moment, vacating her arm with no resistance. Before any blood can flow out, a dark purple—the same as that that was on her web ball things—appears overlaying the wound. It gets darker, filling the space within the wound, and finally webs appear over it, obscuring it from view. The indistinct blob that was the harpoon solidifies back into her wand's normal shape.

"Please continue," Utena says, her voice slightly strained, "this sounds important." Stupid! I had plenty of time to react there; I could easily have pulled her out if I'd thought of it. They are certainly capable of handling themselves, but I need to start taking them out of risky situations now, before they resolve.

"Y—yeah." Large chunks of earth start getting launched towards the beast, courtesy of Pesca's clones. "As I was saying, Imitatio was playing this close to her chest, so you wouldn't know, but illusions are not the full extent of her ability." As the first rocks approach it, one of the water orbs comes down, deforming and interposing itself into their paths, breaking the rocks as they fall upon it. "It's like this: Any material she has influence over, she can control its bulk properties. Stuff like temperature, composition, toughness, how light interacts with it... I've never seen this specific effect before, but I'm now pretty sure that its increasing the water's density."

"Hmm... There's a few reasons that doesn't really make sense, but hiding something like that to get a one-up on me sound exactly like something she'd do..." Utena seems like she's talking to herself more than anything, but it's being relayed to the rest of us regardless. "Hey! If it's compressing the water or whatever, which it definitely is, that means its copying what I just did." The last part comes out in a growl. I suppose it checks out that she doesn't like someone else taking her style for herself.

Taking... I take a good look at the beast, and the figures suspended inside of it, in consideration. My eyes fix on the one floating right in its center. Pesca was saying earlier that the beast's form is being held together by Berserga, and going by what happened when Utena was trying to get her out, that seems to be true...

While I was thinking, Utena flew right into the beast's immediate vicinity. Three orbs fly at her, but they stop as they get close. A dark purple aura appears around them before slowly concentrating on to their surfaces. Webs appear in its midst, following their surfaces as well. Two more laser pulses from Roboko hit the beast, pushing it down hard enough for the ground to crack under its feet.

"No. If you're gonna steal my moves," Utena shouts, unreasonably angry, "then I'm going to steal them right back!" The three orbs change all at once, becoming indistinguishable from the spiny ball she had earlier. The three remaining unoccupied orbs—one is still being used to block the boulders being thrown at the beast—move toward her, but stop when the three captured orbs move between them and their target.

I continue my train of thought. Even earlier, my wand was able to target them even when they were totally enclosed by something that has shown itself to be quite tough. Surely the beast's 'flesh' shouldn't be a greater obstacle than that, right? I point my wand forward, aiming it right at where Berserga is. Then again, is this a good idea? There's a lot that can go wrong...

No. I've been reacting to situations as they develop this whole time, and things are going rather poorly. If I can change the course of this battle for the better, I should definitely take it. I steady my aim, make sure it's pointed right at Berserga's body, and cast... only to get a bundle of its black flames flaring outward right in front of me before dissipating. Oh. Figures that it has a defense against that kind of thing.

Through my drone, I see a fist-sized glob of water come off one of the orbs and shoot off in my general direction at a blinding speed. I immediately throw myself to the side, then point my wand at the ground and cast, hoping that targeting something too large would instead relocate me to where I aimed, kinda like how a grappling hook would work. That didn't happen, but a large chunk of earth appears in front of me. I maneuver myself to the other side as it begins to fall, and—

A high-pitched, tingy crackle rings out from the other side. Even from my position, I can see long spikes composed of ice radiating from some point on the other side of the earthen chunk's surface. Letting it fall, I see the full extent of the ice. For some reason, I can't help but think the whole thing looks like an urchin eating a sea cucumber.

Turning my attention back to the fight, I see that the three remaining orbs have risen high up into the air, smaller head-sized orbs having started to split off from them. These smaller orbs flatten into discs, waves disappear from the surface, and they take on a perfectly reflective, mirror-like finish. More split off from them at an increasing rate, each of which undergoes said changes, until in the end the three large orbs of water are gone entirely, and the sky is filled with thousands of these discs.

The discs shift, tilting and arranging themselves in concentric circles. I hear Pesca shriek—from my drone, not the doll—and then see an eye-searingly, almost impossibly bright spot on the ground where she was, along with some kind of vapor rising from it. She herself is running away from that point, a hand covering her eyes, but the point is already moving, tracking on her position.

A dozen of her clones converge on her, surrounding her on all sides and above. The area around them darkens considerably, and the bright spot disappears into it. Continuous beams of light begin to emerge from them, bouncing amongst themselves and the rest of the clones spread throughout the battlefield, the light splitting and recombining into various colors as its bounced around.

"Fuck. Whatever you gals do, do not look up at the sky. It's, uh, blindingly bright. I'll have my dolls looking up there, so I'll warn you if there's a new development in that regard." Some of the clones start directing their beams towards the beast, but the orb it was using to protect itself earlier is still there. Its surface suddenly turns mirror-like as well, reflecting them back, so they point them elsewhere.

I check to see how the other two are doing. Utena is sheltering under her three spiny orbs. There's quite a lot of light being directed towards them, but it seems to be being absorbed like, apparently, everything else that touches them; it even looks like the light is flowing into them, like a liquid, along the spines in the areas it's all being concentrated. Roboko, still in her two turret form, seems to be perfectly fine with the amount of light being directed at her. Well, not perfectly fine: the turrets are moving a little erratically, keeping the full extent of the light from bearing down on them.

The beast's mouth opens, pointing at Utena. Kiwi's form is there, same as last time. A flash—instead of an electric discharge, Utena's two birds are there, hovering right in front of its face, and now visibly crackling with electricity. A moment later, they're dragging their feet across its body, from which innumerable bolts pierce deeply into it. The water its using to shield itself—which looks more like living metal than water—comes crashing down onto their positions, but they are gone with a flash before it reaches them.

Still, while it didn't get a boost from the electricity, the gun—which is pointed at Utena—still went off. I pan my drone to face her... she seems fine. I take a closer look, trying to find any new wounds, sealed or otherwise, but I don't spot any. I guess she must have dodged it or something.

"This isn't sustainable," Pesca says, "We need to start trying to free the others again, and soon. We're on borrowed time, and that's the only way we can make progress here. Also, I think it's safe to look up at the sky now." I look up. The discs are losing their reflective character, taking on a duller, metallic sheen. At the same time, they are deforming, elongating into rods.

"You're right," Utena agrees, "but... Well, we're only gonna get one shot." What. "Forcing my way through our opponent's, uh, 'flesh', for lack of a better term, takes a lot of my magic, and considering that I'm not exactly fresh right now... it's gonna be cutting it a bit close." It's only now, hearing her lay things out like that, that it sinks in just how bad our situation really is.

As if to mark the moment, the rods start falling from the sky. Cutting through the air like arrows, there are rods aimed at Utena, Pesca, Roboko... and me. Thankfully, I'm at an angle where I can see all of them at once, and there are relatively few that are coming for me, so I'm able to move out of their trajectories long before they actually hit me. There's a lot coming down on the other three, though. Utena's completely safe under her water orb minions; the rods tear apart and large strips are siphoned along the spines as they impact. Pesca has dug herself underground, and her clones are deflecting the rods away from where she was, though the occasional failure to do so sees one of them getting impaled or having a limb sheared off. Roboko is simply weaving her two-part body around them as they fall.

"Shit," Pesca's response comes, though slightly delayed. "Okay, we've gotta make it count, then. Target someone that's important to its function, and just go in and pull her out; we can free her properly after that." Translation: The best we can do now is save one girl and hope it's enough to turn the battle around. It's not a bad plan; it really is the best we have. If it proceeds without a hitch, it might even work. But...

"I can't go for Berserga again. I don't have any great ways of defending myself while I'm in there." The beast has proven itself to be a tricky foe, to say the least. It has access to the powers of every girl composing it, making it impossible to consistently stay ahead of it in battle; its eventually going to get the drop on us. Speaking of...

"Yeah, that's fair. I'm thinking that we should target Magenta. I can't really tell why it does, given its seemingly simple composition, but it apparently needs her to heal off damage." My eyes can't help but linger on the shining, electric blue glow coming from the beast's chest. It's clear that it's been using Azul's ability to absorb damage this whole fight, and at this point so much energy has built up that I can't even see Azul through it anymore. Whenever it decides to put it all to use... it's gonna be bad.

At this point, the rods, now all buried halfway into the ground, all at once evaporate into a glowing orange gas. What the glow is, exactly, is given away as a burst of steam rises from the now bone dry ground, and several areas catch aflame. As the superheated gas rises, Utena protects herself by... moving up a bit, situating her spiny ball minions below her. This works for a few moments, somehow, but then the nearby gas that's rising above starts reversing course, drifting towards her.

She changes strategy, having the water orbs each orbit around her, tilting them to catch less attended areas. Any gas that does get through meets a shimmer of movement in the air and promptly gets blown away. I can't tell how Pesca's faring, but her clones are still moving—if a little bit goopy—so she's at least alive. The gas is moving too slowly to catch Roboko, and it's cooling fast enough that it probably wouldn't do much damage even if it reached her.

Okay, so our general position in this battle is catastrophically bad. The consequences of such haven't been made manifest yet, but unless things go perfectly, it's only a matter of time. Is there anything I can do to salvage this, or even improve our odds even slightly?

...No. Every resource I could possibly use is either locked away elsewhere, already exhausted, or is already in use. As for creating new ones... there isn't exactly much around here to work with. Or, rather, I don't have nearly enough time to ramp up and acquire enough synergies to actually grant effects that have a chance of turning the battle's tide. Maybe if I'd continued while I was still in the castle... Well, if I did that, the battle would've soon been lost, since I probably wouldn't get to healing them as quickly. Maybe there was an opportunity to resume when the healing circle stopped working.

But even if there was, I doubt it would've mattered. There's a reason I've had so little of its aggro on me; if I ever started to have a major effect on how things were playing out, that would've changed quickly, in which case my efforts to build up would be halted regardless.

And what happens even if they do succeed? Somehow, I doubt that will be enough to end the battle. It's not impossible that the next phase will manifest in such a way that I can actually contribute, but it would take an alignment of the stars, to say the least. And if they fail...

Well, we all die, obviously. Running away wouldn't sit right with any of us, even if I believed there's a chance of escaping in the first place. And there's the ones trapped in the beast, they'd stay trapped indefinitely in the best case; not actually dead, just effectively. In the worst... well, there is one option that's been available from the beginning of this fight that no one has taken yet. Utena's first spiny ball did the most damage to the beast of any single attack in this fight, and I'm pretty sure the three she has right now each contain more energy than that one did. It would be out of character, to say the least, for her to do that normally, but she might if it were in her dying breaths or something like that.

Pesca... She definitely isn't a person to take things very seriously, so seeing her trying so hard now has been a bit of a shock. I haven't exactly liked her in the past, to put it lightly, but seeing this side of her makes me comfortable with the idea of at least respecting her.

I don't really know Azul at all, but she seems nice enough from the few interactions I've had with her. Berserga, too, though with a few caveats. Sulfur... I think I might hate her, actually, but I don't think she deserves the fate in store for her. Similar sentiment with Imitatio, and I don't think she does either.

"...of plans. Keep it occupied for..." I hear Pesca's voice, but it seems far away in a strange, immaterial sense. Then there's Nemo. She's what I'd imagine having an older sister or aunt would be like, all coolly affectionate and willing to show me new things. I interact with Matama slightly less often, but she really gets into it when we play in a way that Nemo doesn't (or maybe it's just a difference in demeanor, come to think of it). And Kiwi and Utena, my life has gotten so much less lonely since I met them. They've done so much for me... They're like an extra set of mothers.

There's my actual family as well. I've known Roboko, in one form or another, for so long... Out of everyone, she's the one who really gets me, at least for the most part. My actual mom is in danger too; I'm not exactly sure what will happen if we fail, but even in the best case it's clear that there will be a lot of collateral damage. Mom has put so much of her life into her work, all to support me... There's an uncomfortable kind of irony there, that there's a very real chance that she could die because her daughter failed to contribute in preventing its cause.

My feet gently touch the ground. I barely notice. And there's Magenta—Haruka. I haven't actually interacted with her that much more than the other magical girls—actually, yes I have, counting time spent with her as Haruka, but even then, certainly a lot less than I have with any of my teammates. Despite that, it feels like my life has been revolving around her lately; it's like she has this kind of gravity to her I just can't shake. The time I have spent with her has been... amazing, for lack of a better term, at least when she's been herself.

Thinking of her, along with everyone else, and the thought of them meeting their ends here... It's unacceptable, I can't let it happen. But that's the worst part: it isn't a matter of me letting it happen or not, it's going to swing that way regardless of anything I do to stop it... unless it doesn't.

Deep within my body—my magic—I feel something click. It started to shift and rearrange itself at some point as I was reflecting, but that was at the back of my mind. I don't know exactly how much time I've lost—am still losing—during this, but it was incredibly stupid to let it go on; I should have shaken myself out of it as soon as it started. Even so, even though there's so much that might have happened in the interim... I think it was worth it. I can do something now.

La Verita.

It's like a dam burst. Magic pushes out from a huge reservoir I didn't even realize was there, filling my body and flowing outward in every direction. As it spreads out across the area—and isn't that strange, the feeling of something so internal being so far removed from my body—and uniformly overlaps over (or perhaps under) everything in it, entirely novel sensory information fills my mind.

It's not quite like vision: For any given object—and I can easily find the boundaries between objects, thankfully enough—its entirety is within my perception, not just parts of its surface, and stuff like air is perfectly 'visible' to me. I'm not perceiving things quite as they are, though: everything has a huge number of slightly different versions of itself overlapping each other, all disappearing and being replaced by new ones from moment to moment. I'm getting more of a vague, flickering impression of a given thing rather than the thing itself.

I focus my attention in on a rock laying nearby. Of everything, it and similarly still objects are likely the closest to their real counterparts—not that I can actually look and compare at the moment, since there's currently a veil of light surrounding me. The many variations of it are still there, like with anything else, but they're all so similar to each other that their form is basically unified—wait, what was that?

I thought I noticed a crack in one of them. I manage to find one like it—and several other similar ones, all grouped together—the moment I start to look for it. Now that I'm paying attention, I see that every variant is placed next to similar ones, not in space but something that's somewhat like it in an abstract way. Either way, the way it's organized makes picking out anything I'm looking for very easy. Out of the innumerable versions of the rock, there's only around ten or so that have a crack at any given moment; that probably means something, but I don't quite get what yet.

Focusing on one of the variants with a crack, I let my nearby magic kinda... fall into it, for lack of a better term. For a few moments, my image of the rock goes crazy. It's now split in two along the crack in the variant I chose; the new variants are smeared out every which way—each way the fragments could possibly fall, I realize—and all converge on each other as they tumble to the ground.

The veil of light clears. Yep, that's a split rock alright. I suppose that means that each version represents something like a potential state that a given object can be in. A potential future state, actually, given how they acted while falling, and, since I only saw a cracked rock, not a broken one, not very far one.

My range reaches the beast—oh, wow, I didn't realize it, but magic is included in my new sense. For each girl trapped within, her magic is wrapped with a mass of obviously foreign magic, the same kind between all of them. From them, there are many tendrils branching off, some digging deep into their respective girl's magic, and others reaching outward, connecting to those of the others. The tendrils making up the bulk of its body are shifting, roiling constantly, yet none of them seem to ever break in any of the variants.

It breaks into a sprint, charging towards me. Gotta hurry up, then. As I focus in on it, I subconsciously concentrate my magic around it in a slightly higher density than the rest of my range. The number of variants has increased—which is interesting in and of itself—but a small cluster of variants in particular catches my eye. Within them, the energy concentrated around Azul seems to spontaneously explode.

The explosion has to be fast, as it's about the size of the beast itself in presumably the same amount of time as it took for the rock to partially break. That means it must be powerful, probably enough so to take it out outright. Actually, scratch that, it definitely is, but unfortunately the reason I can tell makes it a not very great solution: the explosion hits the girls inside too, leaving them in states that, uh, probably aren't alive. Still, there is variation in how the explosion can play out, and there are even a few that leave one or two of the girls intact.

The beast is about halfway to reaching me. I need to see more options, and I think I know how to do that. Consciously now, I concentrate as much of my magic as I can around the beast, to which many, many more variants appear. That'll do just fine... or maybe not. There are many more variants with explosions, yes, but they're all too damaging and not directed enough. The best case scenarios I've seen are ones where the explosion is entirely directed at one side, and the girls on the other are untouched. I should probably give up on this avenue, but there's one more thing. I've noticed that my magic has some slack to it. If I apply as much strain as possible...

The number of variations decreases dramatically, but in return the remaining ones lengthen out, becoming paths leading out to what I imagine is a more temporally distant state. Actually, come to think of it, the paths were always present, it's just that there was little enough variation between extrema that I didn't really notice. More pressingly, while the previous explosion-containing variants are mostly gone, there are a few new ones where the explosion occurs later than what I could perceive before. In these, there are some where its propagation is a lot more complicated compared to the others. Maybe I can find one where the girls are untouched?

There are far too few variants for me to be able to do that right now, though. I release most of the tension, and the existing paths truncate to a much shorter length, and at the same time, many more variants of the same length appear. It seems that I was right: there are hundreds of variants where the explosion passes around six of the girls, and a few that pass around seven... but none around all eight. And looking more closely, it seems like the girls are never entirely unaffected; there are reverberations in the magic composing its body that always reach theirs, but it seems like the parasites attached to them seem to absorb a lot more of them than they do proper, so I think it's fine.

The beast is really close now. I prepare to jump up and start flying away—On reaction, I dump a ton of my magic into a path as it appears in the section of not-space where a path containing an explosion that misses all of them would appear. For a few instants, perturbations appear all throughout the beast's flesh—dense, tangled knots, empty voids, waves, whirls, that sort of thing. Then, as it interacts with one of these perturbations, the glowing energy around Azul ruptures, unravelling and flaring outward. As it propagates, the perturbations shape it; the force is directed perfectly between the girls, separating them almost like walls.

Then, the explosion actually happens—outside of my perception of that path. A bright blue flash is immediately followed by immense, but rather uneven damage to the immediate surroundings. It didn't hit me by pure serendipity, since I just happened to be in a 'shadow' cast by one of the perturbations. It's fortunate that I was, too: I think I'm just outside the range where a direct hit would've been immediately lethal, but it definitely would have hurt a lot.

The beast is gone. The girls that were contained within it fall to the ground—a bit more spread out than I was expecting, but I guess that's a testament to how big it was. The pale black flame surrounding them was reduced, smoldering for a moment, but it quickly returned to its original, blazing state. That is, for everyone except Magenta. The fire, rather than clinging to her, seems to be dancing around her, individual bundles of flame hitting her body, bouncing off, then coming back around and hitting it again.

Looking at what the magic is doing is painting a strange picture. The magical parasite has been pushed outward a bit; of its tendrils that are digging into her, only the deepest rooted ones remain. It's trying to take root again, to pull itself closer, but it's being continually pushed away by... Well, Magenta's magic itself is dormant, but there is an active part that, while clearly one in the same with the rest, is practically separate from it. I put strain on my magic... no, unfortunately, there seems to be no path where it gets uprooted entirely.

...My breathing is heavy. When did I get so tired? Come to think of it, my magic... that reservoir feels a lot emptier than it did a minute ago—it's maybe about half full now. How have I used so much already? Splitting that rock cost me basically nothing, so—wait, maybe concentrating it like I am is the problem? No, there doesn't seem to be any kind of passive drain, actually. Well, either way, I don't need to have it all packed into this small area.

I slacken any tension I had on my magic and let it spread back out—oh, wow, I didn't notice before, but the number of paths for everything outside of where the bulk of my magic was was greatly reduced. That feels relevant to my inexplicable exhaustion, somehow, but I can't exactly place how yet.

My attention is drawn to the magical parasites, specifically the little, invisible feelers they're sending out omnidirectionally. A feeler from one touches another from a different one, merge into a single connecting thread, and suddenly all of the feelers from both are now orienting towards each other. Given that they look suspiciously similar to what the strands composing the beast's body did...

Um, no, I'm not letting that happen, actually. Throwing any caution regarding magic use to the wind, I choose a direction for each of the hundreds of feelers and have some magic fall into a path that has that feeler the furthest in that direction. Then I keep doing it basically continuously, maintaining that same direction or at least choosing a direction that's away from other feelers.

As I do so, Utena and Pesca enter earshot, their voices mixing together, "Ohmigosh Alice your outfit is so Is the dog thing gone what did you That was a cat not a..." As they come over and land by me, I continue manipulating the feelers' movements. Currently, the feelers have looped back to where they originated, now in no danger of connecting to others of different origins, aside from the one that connected before.

If the parasites have a mind to realize with, then I can pinpoint exactly when they realized that something was wrong. They all shuttered a bit, in unison (and isn't that worrying), and now all of the girls they're attached to—except Magenta—are picking themselves off the ground. Somehow, Utena and Pesca don't seem to notice, I suppose since they're too focused on me, so I abruptly point at them. Their eyes—or Utena's, at least—follow and lock onto the now standing fire-wreathed girls. Finally taking notice, they lower themselves into a fighting stance.

Utena makes the first move, sending one of her spiny orbs—which she has floating a bit above her—to move towards the girls facing us, but rather slowly. As it approaches them, they all scatter away in different directions. Now that they're all further away from each other, I stop manipulating their feelers, but I still intend on keeping a close eye on that.

"Good call," Pesca says, "Keep them split up. They formed into the whatever-it-was at the beginning of the fight, so there's no reason they couldn't do it again." Uh... yes there is, I was just preventing them from doing that.

Not heeding my thoughts, Utena shudders. "Yeah... that would suck." Still, I am thankful that she split them up. The drain from keeping the feelers separate was small, but it would've added up; I think I'd only be able to keep that up for a few minutes. As for why none of that used nearly as much magic as whatever happened earlier—

A small chunk of earth flies off the ground right in front of me. As it sails through the air, it morphs into a new Pesca clone, one even smaller than the one on me. It completes its descent, coming to land right on my head. What? Why does Pesca think I need another one. I feel at the back of my neck...

...only to find nothing there. Well, not nothing, there's some kind of fabric there sticking up and out, but the Pesca clone that was there before now isn't. Come to think of it, my hands have been empty for a bit, haven't they? Where's my wand...? I guess they both got destroyed in my transformation, maybe, or perhaps it works like my normal transformation and they're being stored where my non-La Verita clothes are.

My drone seems to be fine, thankfully, though its a bit superfluous at this point. It's actually nearby, too; I guess I've been having it subconsciously track every bit of action that's been happening. Well, it can't hurt to have the information it's giving me, useless now as it may be, so I'll keep having it do just that.

Speaking of action, there's quite a bit of it happening right now. Now that I can clearly perceive them, Utena's air wisps are pretty interesting. Their bodies (taking the forms of well-endowed women, of course) are literally bundles of air being held together by magic. As such, they're like ghosts: they can push around their opponents all they want by creating gusts of wind or even just ramming into them, while their opponents can't so much as touch them.

They are putting on a good demonstration of that right now. They're all getting tossed about, unable to find their footing... Actually, taking a closer look, that isn't quite true. Imitatio and Berserga are getting knocked around pretty good, but the rest... Matama was the only one to outright destroy the ones she engaged, and fairly easily, too—and it's no wonder: now that I can look at the sound waves around her directly, they look absolutely gnarly. She's currently being... not quite contained, but definitely slowed down by several Pesca clones, which I suppose are a similar level of distraction.

Also being contained—albeit much more concretely—by such is Nemo. She was able to avoid the air wisps entirely by transforming into her incorporeal shadow form. There's Sulfur, who's simply moving too quickly to be very effected by them. Though, she's currently getting battered around by two of Utena's more avian minions; there is a difference there from how Berserga, for example, is being occupied, but it's an immaterial one.

Kiwi is fighting Roboko—who has decided to return to her humanoid form—high in the air. They are staying at range, exchanging volleys bullets and lasers with each other. The air wisps have been harassing her all the while, but she's been just kinda muscling through any pushes she receives. Her magic is helping in some way; any time a gust of wind gets near to her, it starts to interact with the aura around her—not the flames, but her magic—and dissipates/dampens/becomes generally less coherent before reaching her proper.

And, finally, there's Azul, who... doesn't have any air wisps around her at all. Instead, both Utena and Pesca are personally tending to her; Utena is using her three spiny orbs to block off potential avenues of escape, and Pesca is erecting earthen structures to further restrict her movement. They aren't actually attacking her, which is—an electric blue glow, the feeling of a sword hanging over my head—probably a good idea, actually.

"Okay, so we're gonna try to free her properly, right? We need to keep her in place." Now that I have a good chance to really look at what their magic is like, it's pretty interesting. Utena's is arranged like a giant spider web—though less structured and not confined to a plane—extending far out around her, each thread reacting to anything that crosses them and transmitting that reaction across the entire thing. Also, just like Magenta, she has a nearly separate, seemingly independently acting blob of her own magic attached to her. Does that just come with being a team leader or something?

"Yeah, that's a complication we didn't have to deal with before. How exactly are we going to do that? She's still similar to us in strength, and her resistance is probably going to be a lot more aggressive than usual." Pesca's is kind of like a web itself, though in a different way. There are lines of magic stretching between each of her and her clones' bodies, and floating around each body are dozens of nodes, which are clearly processing and transmitting some kind of information between each other.

"Hmm, good point... Oooh, I have an idea: try encasing her." How the parasite is interacting with Azul's—and everyone else's—magic is equal parts intriguing and horrifying. It wiggles and pushes magic through the tendrils embedded into hers in such a way that it coaxes her magic to be used reflexively, entirely without her conscious input. It reminds me of those mushrooms Haruka told me about that one time, the ones that grow in an ant's brain and mind controls it.

"Huh? Alright, if you say so. It's not gonna keep her for long, but..." Suddenly, the walls currently surrounding Azul collapse in on her all at once, deforming almost like a liquid as they do so. A moment later, and she's completely covered in rock. Impressively, the earth around her looks like a single piece of solid rock, no gaps or seams anywhere.

Immediately, Utena flies over and starts covering the rock formation with a thick layer of webs. She goes so far as to cut the bottom portion connecting it to the ground away to cover that with webs to. In the end, the whole structure resembles a cocoon. Multiple cracks start echoing out from the rock breaking, and the cocoon deforms a bit at the force pushing the chunks or rock outward, but the threads hold.

"Huh, guess that works. Well, lets get started," Pesca says, situating herself right behind Utena. Utena's wand transforms, morphing into a thick, long-sleeved glove on her right hand. Good idea: it's not visually apparent, but I can tell that there is an increasing amount of ice under there, which is what's pushing the rock out. She then takes that hand and covers it with her raw magic, then plunges it into the cocoon, drilling through thread, rock and ice until reaching Azul.

Utena's magic wraps around the parasite's 'body' with many threads and starts pulling it outward. The parasite retaliates, trying to sink its tendrils into Utena's magic, but before it can get very far, that weird blob of her magic diffuses into those parts, pushing the tendrils out and aside. Meanwhile, Pesca has several dozen of her nodes, all sheathed in Utena's magic, each positioned right next to the base of a tendril that's rooted in Azul's magic. For a few seconds, the magic around each one fluctuates wildly, as if Pesca is trying to figure out what can interact with them.

Then, one breaks. It slides out slightly, reconnecting to the body almost instantly. Then, more start breaking. I didn't see how for the first one, but I have a clear picture now: some kind of energy is being transferred in from afar, being channeled by a given node through Utena's magic and focused on the base of a tendril, thus forcing the entire base to dissipate. Dozens more are sheared off—indeed, I think every single tendril was cut off at least once—but they all reconnect like the first one did.

Then, Utena starts to fill in the gaps left with those magic threads before they can be refilled. The tendrils try to reconnect anyway, but are easily pushed back. This continues for a moment, up to half of the tendrils being locked off, but then there's a pulse.

The cocoon holding Azul ruptures. Solid ice rapidly expands to fill a large volume around her, the sheer force of its growth launching Utena and Pesca through the air in an arc. It stops growing, and a faint, flickering black smudge in the center of a large, solid chunk of ice is all that's visible of Azul.

Utena slams a fist into her palm. "DAMN IT! We were so close!" As she rages, I notice a change in Imitatio. As she's getting knocked around, water appears and splashes over her. It has some sort of configuration of her magic imbued into it. Then, more water with a different but complementary configuration starts to appear around her in miniscule droplets, which quickly diffuse out.

"Ah, shit. Be careful around Imitatio! The mist surrounding her is poisonous!" Pesca shouts out. Crap crap crap got to contain that before it becomes an issue. Except, with the feelers from earlier, I was only influencing a few hundred to a few thousand, and I'd have only been able to keep that up for a few minutes. With there being orders of magnitude more droplets in that mist, I'd be lucky to manage even for a few seconds, and that's disregarding the fact that I still don't know for sure I won't trip over whatever I did that drained me so much before that.

Wait. Around when that did happen, I had a lot of my magic concentrated in one place and had its strain increased quite a bit. I still haven't sensed any passive drain, so it must've happened when I actualized the path that destroyed the beast. Therefore, making one of the paths real while in one of those conditions or the other, or a combination of both, must be what made it use so much. I can test this.

Thankfully, my sense of how much magic I'm using is actually really precise. I let magic fall into one of a random droplet's paths to get a baseline. Then, I push out as much of my magic as I can out of the volume containing Imitatio and her mist, so much so that, for any given thing, the once innumerable paths have decreased in number to under a hundred. I then actualize another random path... Yes! That was way less than before. Time for me to get started on containing all of them.

...Except, I realize that the mist is already being contained: All of Utena's air wisps have converged onto Imitatio and are blowing the mist back into her, preventing it from spreading out further. Furthermore, there are several Pesca clones surrounding them, too, erecting walls around the area, presumably so that the mist can't condense and escape that way.

Well, there are quite a few droplets that managed to escape. Not enough to be visible, but I don't know what the lethal dose of this poison is, so it's better not to take any chances. I expand my volume of depleted magic a bit to encompass all of them too and start to nudge them back in to the wind-bounded volume. Speaking of wind... I start altering the course of the air surrounding the droplets, too, which helps speed things along.

So little of my magic is being used that I could keep that going for who knows how long, but it only takes a few more seconds to get it all contained. Turning my attention back to the fight, I see that Utena is engaging Berserga, keeping just out of her range and leading her along. Meanwhile, Pesca is engaging both Matama and Nemo, both of whom must have broken out of her containment recently.

"I know it's a fight and all, but please be careful about how much blood Berserga's using. She has to use biomass to regenerate it, and I doubt the thing controlling her is going to be too bothered about overuse." Pesca forgoes using her real body to speak. Makes sense: she's fighting a running battle, keeping a delicate balance between blocking or avoiding whatever Matama launches at her, keeping Nemo's shadows from impaling her, and walling them off from each other.

"Well, she's been cycling her blood back into herself, so..." As Utena speaks, Pesca and some of her clones draw near each other. Huh, now that I'm comparing them, Pesca's skin is red. Like, really red. It's been like this, too, at least since my La Verita transformation; I just wasn't focused on it enough to be conscious of it. Well, regardless of her redness...

"Bwu—huh? That's... Ewww, that can not be healthy." Now that she's coordinating with several clones, the battle turns in her favor. A pillar of earth shoots up under Matama, launching her into the air. Half of the earth clones pursue, ensuring that she can't immediately return to the battle. One even charges straight at her; it gets ripped apart, but not before large chunks of earth hit her at high speed, knocking her back even further.

At the same time, the other half—and Pesca herself—raise a teepee-like structure around Nemo. A shadow lance pokes a hole in it, through which Nemo begins to flow out in shadow form, but not before another, slightly larger teepee is erected around the first. This process continues, the interior earthen structure continuing to get more complicated as new structures corral her throughout it—

The ice holding Azul suddenly shatters, sending chunks of ice flying out in every direction. Unfortunately, a particularly large chunk hits me right on my back, sending me hurtling forward towards the fight between Utena and Berserga, the latter of whom immediately breaks off her fight and starts sprinting at me. Oh crap that's bad, I don't have enough time to—

Wind! That was working on her before, right? In between me and her, but closer to her, I start continuously actualizing paths regarding how the air moves, selecting the ones with the highest velocity at any given moment. Somehow, it works: she enters the volume of air I'm manipulating, is very briefly ripped around, then is promptly tossed out to the side, spinning on all three axes. I manage to stop myself in midair before entering that volume myself—though I've already stopped feeding it, so it wouldn't have been as bad.

As Utena reengages Berserga, I land and start checking myself over for injuries. That chunk of ice did hit me really hard... but, somehow, there's no lingering pain at all; I feel absolutely fine. How in the world...? Oh, duh. It somehow slipped my mind until now, but a La Verita does come with significantly enhanced basic stats, doesn't it? Durability definitely included, I suppose.

Thinking about it, it's pretty easy to work with air, to get it doing what I want, using my new ability. There are just so many way it can move and interact with itself, as opposed to, say, a rock, which just kinda sits there and at best can be made to break in an interesting way. It's unfortunate that it's hard to do anything more effective than knocking things around with it.

Still, that does have defensive utility, as I have just shown, so I should definitely experiment with it more. I lower the amount of my magic in the volume near me by quite a bit and start manipulating the air into various configurations. Almost instantly, I stumble upon an interesting one.

It's a sphere, the air within slightly compressed and revolving omnidirectionally about its center, somehow. It's interesting in how stable it is: it'll still unravel readily when unattended, but it doesn't need as much babysitting as usual from me to keep its structure, allowing me to focus more on optimizing combat-relevant properties. I feed more air into it, making it more dense, and increase the air speed within as much as I can.

An explosion rings out. Its epicenter is on the structure that Nemo is being contained in. There are several mortar shells in flight well above us, each set to land on a different part of the battlefield. Thankfully, they're explosives; if any part goes off prematurely, the rest goes with it. I easily find such paths for each of them and actualize them, setting them all off at once in midair.

Suddenly, Utena has a lance of shadow piercing through her hip, rising up from the pool of shadow that is Nemo. Berserga takes the opening to rush in. Utena manifests her black-purple magic around herself raw, catching both Berserga and the spear, launching the former away, and pulling the latter, stuffing the wound shut as it slides out. She doesn't let it go, however: instead, she pulls it up, bringing the rest of Nemo into the corporeal world along with it before promptly delivering a powerful punch to the gut, sending her flying across the battlefield.

Meanwhile, while Pesca is still engaging Azul, attempting to contain her apparently by trying to drag her underground, Matama manages to get away from the clones that were pursuing her. Now free to wreak havoc all she likes, she immediately makes a beeline towards Utena, perhaps looking to capitalize on her recent injury.

She's interrupted before she can do so. A flash of light trailing something ramming straight into and past her, and she's hurtling back. It's one of Utena's bird minions. As she begins to recover, it happens again, this time from the second one. Then the process begins to repeat, each bird alternating, each hit taking her further and further away. It's honestly impressive; they're moving so fast that Matama can't do anything. They aren't in her sound manipulation field for long enough to be even remotely affected, and attempts by her parasite to latch onto them directly don't find the time to take purchase.

Although, if they're handling Matama, who's dealing with Sulfur? I find her quickly; she's pretty high up in the air, and still quite far from me even discounting the difference in altitude. However, she's directly facing me.

I barely even have time to brace myself. With a flash, she crosses the distance between us with blinding speed. Her fist drives itself into my gut with its built up momentum, carrying through and pushing my body into the ground back-first. The pain is bad: it's sharp, dull, and a weird combination of cold and hot, all at the same time, but through it, I notice something worse. Everywhere where the black, pale blaze is making contact with me, the parasite's magical tendrils are trying to breach into my own magic. I immediately and almost subconsciously actualize paths for each of them turning them away and deflecting them off.

Disaster averted, at least relatively, but I still need to get her off—which I thankfully have a way to do. As I guide the swirling ball of air that I've been maintaining to her, I get a brief look at her face. There are no emotions on it at all, aside from perhaps the slight slack giving an almost peaceful appearance. Then, the ball of air comes into contact with her.

Now that it's brushing up against a solid surface, maintaining its form is impossible. It unravels all at once, sending out a concentrated, almost skin-tearing burst of air in all directions. The force rips her off the ground and carries her away. It also drives me into the ground just a little bit more than I already was—ow—but it was still worth it.

I don't need to turn my head and look to see what Sulfur's going to do next. She was knocked in Pesca's general direction, so she reorients herself to target her. Much like she did to me, she speeds in front of her and drives her fist right into her gut—and I immediately start to deflect her parasite's tendrils away from her, keeping them from taking root. Unlike with me, however, she doesn't follow her punch through all the way, instead letting her impact the ground and bounce up off it.

Sulfur jumps up a bit, landing softly in a squat on Pesca as she reaches the apex of her bounce, then pushes off with full force, propelling her up and slamming Pesca back into the ground. An instant later, two bands of light flash by right behind her, one missing entirely and the other barely clipping her. Those are Utena's bird minions—good, that means Sulfur will be occupied again for the foreseeable future.

...Laying on the ground like this is probably counterproductive. From the pain, I'm pretty sure there's going to be major bruising on both my front and back, and I feel tightness on my skin radiating out from there that I think might be electrical burns. I bear through it with difficulty and slowly pick myself up into a standing position.

I hear Pesca's voice though the micro-clone on my head. "Holy shit. Holy shit. Thank you Alice for doing, uh, whatever you were doing to prevent that. For a moment there..." Um, all in a day's work, or something. Rather than getting up like me, Pesca retreated underground to get away from from Azul, who's currently doing a good impression of ice fishing, except the ice is rock and the auger is ice.

Thinking about the past few moments, that's the weakness of my new power, isn't it? I knew what was about to happen, but there was nothing I could've done to stop it. Or, rather, there was, but it would've had to been done well in advance of me being in that situation in the first place. And there have already been other situations where I've gotten out only by the skin of my teeth.

Heck, that weakness is even sort of built in: shaping how Azul exploded by sheer brute force like how I did took a ton of my magic, but if I'd somehow had the foresight to set up every kink and vortex in the beast's flesh in just the right way manually, the whole endeavor would have used a lot less than the single actualization that happened. No matter how I slice it, even though it's at least somewhat capable of supporting wholly spontaneous action, it's a lot more effective if I set things up beforehand.

I can't exactly see the future—not very far into it, at any rate, and not necessarily accurately at that—but there are things that can be useful in a lot of different situations. Like that compressed ball of air: in practical terms, it was only useful for blowing something away—the wind itself wasn't strong enough to do any real damage—but that can often be all I need.

I begin to form many more of them all throughout the battlefield. Thankfully, that configuration is just as straightforward to form as it is to maintain. I keep their distribution sparse, as to not hinder my allies' movements, but it's still enough that I can get one to any given point on short notice.

Actually, speaking of wind, Imitatio is... still releasing poisonous mist. It's still all contained, thankfully, but—actually, how is that possible? Has she not tried escaping the containment herself, or tried shooting a jet of poisoned water though the barrier? Because I don't think the air wisps would be enough to contain that—oh, that's clever. It might be that she's deliberately maintaining the state of affairs, so that all of the air wisps remain on her and not messing with her fellow infected individuals.

It's working, too. The momentum has decidedly shifted against us ever since she took the pressure off them. I can't help but feel a little smug at the fact that I'm about to ruin that plan and do the exact same thing the wisps were doing.

"Incoming!" Roboko's shout instantly grabs my attention. Kiwi comes crashing down, the earth cracking underneath her feet. Or, rather, her hard metal boots: she's currently donning a full set of power armor. It's made of her magic in the same way the weapons she materializes are. Roboko is following a bit behind her, keeping several lasers trained on her, but it's clear that they're not having much of an effect at all, just heating up the surface a bit.

She points her left arm at Utena, and it shifts into a gatling gun. It starts firing, spinning rapidly and ejecting several dozen shells over the course of only a few seconds. Utena, of course, doesn't just stand there, but rather puts herself behind one of her spiny orbs, which just absorbs the gunfire like it does everything else. Berserga, who is still fighting her, pursues her, of course, so I move one of my swirling balls of air to her.

It goes off a bit prematurely because I tried to move it a bit too fast and couldn't correct the introduced deviations in time, but it sends her flying all the same. I see she's about to pass by another one—they're kind of like mines, now that I think about it—wait a moment, then let that one unravel too, sending her in a different direction. I could probably knock her around like a pinball, but she's far enough away for now that I decide to wait and turn attention to more pressing matters.

Matters such as Kiwi literally rocketing towards Utena's position, flames jetting out of her boots behind her. I set one of my air mines into her path, but when she connects with it... It's the same thing as what was happening with Utena's air wisps. As it unravels, the air seems to lose its directedness, making it diffuse and interfere with itself. That, combined with the fact that her armor seems to be really heavy, makes it so that the wind barely moves her, if at all.

Kiwi redirects slightly as she reaches where Utena is, flying past the ball and firing at where she was hiding behind. Utena herself simply moved opposite of her current position just before that in anticipation of such. Kiwi reacts, surging to the side and firing again, but Utena got behind it relative to her again. This process continues. It looks a bit silly, honestly, but I guess it works.

Berserga charges at Pesca, interrupting the fight between her and Azul. Perhaps to not risk friendly fire, Azul stops launching icicles at Pesca from afar and enters close range, resulting in her having to fight off both at the same time from up close. I don't have faith that she'll be able to hold them off for very long, so I very carefully path one of my air mines right in between the three of them and let it go off.

The cat and mouse game between Kiwi and Utena is still going on. Kiwi seems to be slowly escalating her offense, though, executing more and more elaborate movements and firing patterns, so Utena's not exactly safe. I need some way to get at her, or at least distract her for a few moments. Hmmm...

My mind wanders back to the sound field around Matama, how the air could be wildly compressing and moving in one spot, but be perfectly still only a millimeter over. If I can replicate something like that, the shear such a sound wave would cause when passing through something would cause a lot of damage. Paying close attention to the surrounding paths, I give my hands an experimental clap.

Yes! The timing will be tight, but I think that's something I can do. Paying close attention to the places in the not-space where my desired paths will appear, I align my hands towards Kiwi and bring them together as hard as I can. Actualizing the requisite paths as they come into existence, I guide most of the sound waves so that they're all in a small, thin arc, aligned with the seam between my met hands and pointed at Kiwi.

Deep gouges open up in the metal on her shoulder; not deep enough to pass through entirely—it's deceptively thick—but it's not exactly purely cosmetic damage either. As it propagated, I made sure none of the sound waves deviated from the arc, taking particular care that the width stayed as small as possible. Deviations took hold, seemingly unavoidably, as it entered her weird chaos aura or whatever it is. Still, it wasn't in it for very long at all, so when it reached the armor, it still mostly maintained its structure. As the sound passed into the armor, the steep differences in force where it passed through caused it to shear apart along the arc, until the sound was diluted enough in structure that the forces weren't so extreme anymore.

Then, the bit of Kiwi's magic composing that section of armor shift a bit, and the gouges disappear like they weren't ever even there in the first place. And she's continuing to try and get Utena from around the ball, like she didn't even notice. Figures it wouldn't be that easy.

Pesca has been doing an admirable job of keeping Berserga and Azul away, through a combination of her clones and static earthen structures, but they've just broken through and are speeding right at her. Azul conveniently passes right next to an air mine, so I let it unravel and send her flying, but Berserga was far enough away to be mostly unaffected. She quickly enters melee range, instantly putting Pesca on the back foot.

Thankfully, I was already in the process of getting another air mine in range—though I could have just created a new one, I realize now. I decide to experiment a bit, letting this one unravel inhomegenously, keeping the air within stable until it reaches the point I stopped maintaining. This has the effect of directing all of its force into a single stream of air, all directed at Berserga. This sends her flying significantly further than a normal air mine would have.

At that moment, Kiwi takes something off her hip, throws it out to near Utena, then shoots it. The resulting explosion sends her flying away, out of her cover and into the open. A long, glowing blade blooms into existence along and past Kiwi's right arm. She rockets towards Utena, the blade held out in front of her in clear preparation to slash forward. Whatever it's made of, it's clearly very energetic, only being held there by something I can't see. If I amplify a few of the currents...

At the last moment, just as she's beginning to swing, the blade loses its form, its component material streaming across invisible lines parallel to her arm. Phew, that was a close one. If I were but a moment later... Utena would've probably been fine, actually; her onyx shielding minion is floating out right in front of her like, well, a shield. Still, disrupting an attack's structure like that is a very interesting idea.

Oh, duh. While the magic composing it is a little to inert for me to do anything substantive to, what it's mimicking certainly isn't. All throughout the apparently very high-tech armor, I let my magic fall into basically every path where it looks like something is going somewhere it shouldn't be. It's hard to tell in certain in quite a few instances, due to the paths covering a very small amount of time, but...

...even if not all of them didn't cause malfunctions, enough of them did. Internally, it's hard to parse what went wrong, but the effects soon become externally apparent. The power armor suddenly locks up, stopping Kiwi with it, then starts falling off her in pieces, some sections more explosively than others. Now, she's a lot more vulnerable.

And Roboko's lasers are still on her. Suddenly, she shoots up, ping-ponging erratically to get them off. As she does, she lets out a barrage of jagged, lancing projectiles by the dozen, large groups converging on all four of us and a few smaller groups targeted elsewhere.

There's nothing I can do to stop them; it's like they have Kiwi's chaotic structure-destroying aura times a million. Paradoxically, I can set paths for them just fine, and that does result in a completely different internal state, but it doesn't result in anything looking substantially different from before. So, I have to dodge. I form an air mine right next to me, set it up for a directional unraveling, and—

Owowowowow! In hindsight, it would've been probably a good idea to make sure that wasn't aimed at my stomach. Still it did give me a lot of distance very quickly, so—oh crap. That's when I notice that the projectiles are redirecting themselves to hit me. Not all of them—there are plenty that aren't curving in time and hitting the ground—but enough to put me in a really bad position. I watch their speedy approach, up until they're almost right in front of me—

—then, something flies in front of me. The first projectiles hit it, and it releases a brilliant blue flash, so big and bright it seems like it can't be coming only from the object itself, but also the space around it. The light persists, somehow, for a scant few moments, during which I see—only through my new La Verita ability and accompanying sense—the projectiles sink into it and disappear. When it fades, the object falls to the ground.

It's a part of Roboko. A surge of sorrow and gratitude wells up within me, but I will myself to put it aside for the moment and check how the rest of her is doing. She's back to fighting Kiwi, taking her away from the rest of the battle. I don't see anything missing on the outside, so the component is probably an internal one. I can see her internals now, but I'm not familiar enough with them to tell where this particular one came from... I hope it wasn't too important. Regardless, I pick it up.

As for the rest, Utena seems to be fine, having apparently sustained no further injury. As for Pesca, well, her clones have captured all of Kiwi's projectiles that were directed at them, considering that they are bouncing several dozen of them around between each other. And she doesn't seem to have been hit by any herself, either, but Berserga and Azul managed to close distance on her once again. And she probably hasn't been dealing very well with that, either, if the icicle sticking through her shoulder is any indication.

She finally regains her balance by slamming her feet into the earth. A wave in the earth spreads out from her, almost like a liquid, but for her opponents it's as tough as more static, inert ground. Azul is staggered, but Berserga is much quicker on her feet and vaults over it, a blood blade brandished and ready to slice into Pesca's unready form.

I intervene with the fastest method that immediately comes to mind. My magic flows into any and all existing current and instability strengthening paths in the blood blade. The effect isn't as dramatic as it was with Kiwi's, but it's enough to dull its edge to the point that, while it does transfer enough force to knock her back a bit, it isn't enough to actually puncture her skin.

At that moment, Utena comes crashing down between them and begins to engage Berserga. Now that the pressure has eased off of Pesca, the fight becomes more even. Actually, how is it that she's been engaging in close, nearly hand-to-hand combat with Berserga so readily—with a clear advantage, even? Utena's unusually strong in general, yes, but I know that isn't as strongly reflected in physical combat for her, and Berserga, while more dangerous than strong, should still be outperforming her at this range.

...Ah, I see. For a split second, she's materializing threads—from her incorporeal magical threads, which is interesting—around some part of Berserga, usually one of her limbs, pulling them taut to restrict movement, then immediately dematerializing them. So she didn't suddenly get better at it, she's just making her opponent's worse.

Suddenly, the ground around both Berserga and Azul shoots up at an angle, sending them flying away. Pesca probably had a good reason to do that, so I start directing air mines into their paths, or creating new ones when I have to. I manage to get Berserga with several no problem, but Azul managed to encase herself in ice anchored to the ground after the first one, which is now slowly creeping forward.

The lull in the battle gives Utena and Pesca a moment to breathe, and they sure are taking it. They are both looking at each other, breathing heavily—and not in the excited way Utena sometimes does, but rather sheer exhaustion. Come to think of it, I'm not that far behind them, not in physical exhaustion, but my magical reserves are low. It's not quite at crisis levels yet for me, but for them...

Taking a long look up and down Pesca's body, Utena chuckles, "Heh, you look like ass." I don't know for sure what exhaustion even looks like in Roboko, but looking up at her now, she's taken some damage. It's mostly cosmetic, but even that's a far cry from the nearly untouched state she's maintained throughout the majority of the fight. That's either the result of exhaustion in her, too, or the part of her I'm holding in my hands is more important than I'd hoped.

Pesca replies, "You're not looking much better. Hah... we need a new plan." Utena responds with an 'agreed', then has her onyx shielding minion fully unravel and enclose the both of them. At that moment, Azul bursts out of the ice encasing her towards them, the ice shattering into thousands of small shards, each of which follow behind, aside, or in front of her.

"Where are Lococo and Leberblume? I don't have confidence that this will protect us from the latter, and I know it won't from the former." Having long since exhausted my existing supply of air mines in the immediate area, I set about forming several more, including one right in Azul's path. However, the moment I start, chunks of ice fly straight through where they begin to form, displacing the air and stopping their formation entirely.

"Leberblume is well contained, and I'm slowing down Lococo enough that we won't have to worry about her for several minutes yet. So, new plan: What can we do to increase our longevity? I'm pretty sure the things that are controlling them are providing them a deep well of external energy, and meanwhile we're nearly on our last legs. If you have any extra energy laying around," for some reason, Pesca pauses here, "I'd be able to handle converting it into something we can actually use."

"Extra energy, huh...?" As Utena ponders the question, Azul begins to assault the shell shielding them, going as far as attempting to crush it under the weight of a ton of ice. "...Yeah, that could work. I'm thinking I could make minions out of any plants I could find, then have those find new plants and animate those, too, and so on and so forth. It'll be a bit slow going, since we're in the city, and were on the edge of all the destruction you caused over there—"

"Oi, you know most of that wasn't me," Pesca interrupts. "Solar power..." Apparently realizing that her attempts to get at them are hopeless, she pivots and starts accelerating towards me. Before I could even think to take defensive measures, Utena's three spiny nearly-black orbs—she's had them floating ambiguously around me for about a minute now, and I would have been explicitly conscious of that fact if I were paying attention—start revolving around me in shifting, tilting orbits. I levitate myself off the ground a few meters to accommodate them, and they follow me up.

After thinking for a moment, she continues, "Yeah, you'll need a lot of them to have an appreciable impact, but the chain reaction you described should result in enough. I was initially thinking that I could leech some energy out of those three, uh, hairy sphere things you have, which might still be useful for a more immediate pick-me-up." Azul stops in front of the revolving balls of death and falls motionless facing towards me, perhaps contemplating her next move.

"Oh nonononono, that's not gonna work. I don't think it's possible to get at anything inside one without popping it, which would release everything at once. At this stage, that would be... Anyways, let me seal up that wound for you." Suddenly, Azul sends about a quarter of the ice shards floating around her at me. A lot of them are eaten by the orbs, but a lot also get through.

Just as it seems like they're about to reach my body, they disappear. An aura of magic, so weak and diffuse that I didn't even notice it until now, suddenly evaporates, disappearing entirely. I—what was that? Even from the little time that I got to study it, I recognize it as Roboko's magic, though definitely in a different form than what I've seen from her yet. When did she learn to do that, and why hasn't she used it before now? Did she learn, eve, or was this done entirely subconsciously?

My thoughts are interrupted by a second wave of ice shards. My magic falls into any and all of the paths with the air flowing the fastest away from me. Most of the shards get deflected away, but, due to the limited time at my disposal, plenty manage to reach my body, leaving shallow cuts all over as they pass. I hiss as pain blooms all over my body, all surface deep but still sharp.

At that moment, Utena and Pesca emerge from the now closing onyx shell. Azul immediately turns her attention back to them and rushes to engage. The three orbs cease their rotation and follow, presumably to return to Utena. As Azul flies across the battlefield, Utena creates a minion that resembles a human-sized dragonfly, which promptly begins to fly off.

A not so human-sized Pesca clone suddenly pops out of the earth below it, landing on its back and hitching a ride. At a brief questioning look from Utena, Pesca explains, "Each of your minions will need to be near one of my Pantano dolls so that I can extract energy from it. I'll need to use that clone to make more on-site."

The moment Azul begins to engage with them, bombarding them with ice, I notice Berserga beginning to get close. Shoot, I forgot to keep her occupied while I was occupied myself. I begin to form an air mine in her path, but, once again, a chunk of ice sails right through it—whoa! I dive down to the ground, narrowly avoiding a large, sharp icicle aimed at my center of mass.

My right eyelid begins to involuntarily twitch, probably in reflection of my fuming anger. I start to amplify a wall of wind in a straight line, aimed directly at her. Please, please let her try to interrupt this one, I want to see her fail.

To my chagrin, she doesn't try intercept at all and is unceremoniously hit with a fast-moving wall of air, carrying her off into the distance. Good, now that that has happened, I can intercept Berserga, who is just about to reach them. I form an air mine in front of her but, just as it finishes forming, a chunk of ice flies in from afar and passes right through it, instantly setting it off. What. The. Fuck.

It's not like it didn't work—the air mine still went off and sent Berserga flying—but the sheer audacity of it has me gritting my teeth. I prepare a strong downwelling at where Azul will be, hoping to slam her into the ground, but she suddenly redirects before I'm even halfway done—right toward a mound of earth, one with a strangely laid out interior, several Pesca clones surrounding it, and Nemo inside.

Before I can wind anything up, several massive icicles crash down over the area. Parts of the earth mound collapse in on themselves at the force; a fast-moving shadow darts out of one of the new holes. Several of the Pesca clones are reduced to rubble, while several more have significant amounts of rock knocked off of them.

"Leberblume incoming!" Pesca shouts. A shadow races up to them alarmingly quickly, but, when it gets close, Utena lashes out at it with her raw, purple aura-y magic. Meanwhile, Azul lands on the ground and immediately launches off, her trajectory leading back to where she was before I blew her away. I prepare a wall of wind right in her path, set to blow her way off course—

In a flash, a massive chunk of ice is totally surrounding her, and on the exact same trajectory to boot. The wall of wind hits, but it's so massive that its course barely budges. Ice, now that I'm paying attention to its composition, is a lot less structurally sound than rock; paths involving it cracking are much easier to find. So, I actualize all of them, mostly out of spite, but partially out of a hope that I can get her with a blast of air while she's unprotected.

It works, the massive chunk of ice surrounding her shatters into a million pieces. However, it almost immediately reforms back into a single solid mass. I tried to stop it when I realized what was happening, but the ice seemed to adjust perfectly to whatever path I subjected it to. I suppose it's to be expected—obviously trying to fight direct control with my not so direct ability wasn't going work out—but the continuation of a seeming pattern of failure still stings.

Azul, and the mass of ice surrounding her, come crashing down directly in the center of the fighting, forcing everyone engaged at close range to jump back or, in the case of Pesca, dive underground. Shards of ice break off the mass, being immediately replaced by further growth, and fling themselves at Utena, who skillfully dodges and redirects. Fingers of ice grow into the ground, displacing the earth and aiming themselves at Pesca. She notices and sends waves of pressure through the earth to crush them, and a lot of crushing does happen, but their growth continues unabated.

Pesca pops out of the ground, shouting, "Ice growing underground! Be careful—" She's cut off by an icicle aimed at her, which she narrowly avoids, sustaining a cut across her arm. She puts up a slanted slab of earth to cover her, which also serves to make Nemo, who was on that section of ground before it was raised, to completely miss her shadow lance. Nemo responds, her shadow shifting under the slab, but—

Pesca manages to catch her with her nodes—safely, since for some reason her parasite doesn't seem to be able to interact with anything except Nemo while she's in her shadow state—and send the shadow streaming towards one of her nearby clones. As she comes pouring out the other end, Nemo attempts to nail the clone with a shadowy spear, then quickly throws herself back into the fray.

Through all of the ice she's throwing at Utena and Pesca, Azul manages to find room to throw five icicles at me in succession. I weave past the first four, then smash the fifth on its side with the back of my hand, destroying it. That last bit was cathartic, but that wave of projectiles brought my attention back to how pissed I am, and why. Finding Berserga, I form one more straight-line gust of wind aimed squarely at her—

A thick wall of ice bursts up from the ground, imposing itself directly between the wind and Berserga. The mass of air crashes into it ineffectually, leaving her untouched, and I suddenly find myself dodging several more icicles. I'm not literally seeing red right now, but it feels like I should be. If she's going to continue to block everything I do, then lets what she can do about this. I bring my hands together softly, making sure the plane between them overlaps Azul—

No, that's not a good idea. Either it works, causes Azul to, uh, take serious damage, and everyone gets mad at me later, or it fails, either further damaging my ego or drawing all of Azul's aggro to me, depending on how much it does. I let my hand fall to my sides. And this isn't even Azul herself's fault, but that of the parasite attached to her. Oh, but I really do want to do it though, despite myself.

Suddenly, Kiwi's magic coalesces around herself, forming into a new set of power armor, and she immediately starts dropping down once again. It's internal structure is completely different, I can tell that much, but thankfully it's still very complicated. I actualize every path with something seeming to go wrong, just like last time. The consequences are certainly louder, and involves lot more steam being outgassed, but the final result—an exposed Kiwi—is still the same.

Turning my attention back, I catch Utena clashing with Nemo three times in quick succession, flashes of dark purple meeting a speeding mass of pitch black. Nemo is temporarily repelled just in time for bladed icy fingers to shoot up from the ground beneath her. Utena manages to dodge, breaking of the tips with her wand and hurling them off to meet incoming icicles, but one does manage to graze her lower leg.

Utena brings her three spikeballs down into the fight, slowly and methodically. The first one drifts towards Azul, breaking and siphoning the ice in the way with ease. This gets Azul to shatter the ice protecting her of her own volition, flying up and out and taking half of the ice shards with her. The second approaches Berserga, dislodging her from continuing to pursue Pesca. Finally, the third floats close to Utena, ready to be moved to intercept anything that comes her way.

Finally! For a while now, she hasn't been using them at all except in a purely passive, defensive capacity, so I'm glad they're being used more proactively now. Sure, she probably didn't want to before because it posed a major risk to the parasitized girls' bodies—ah. She cares too much about them to put them in real danger of death out of convenience, so if she's doing so now, it's because she feels like she absolutely needs to. That... might not be good.

Now that Utena and Pesca are able to catch a breather—relatively speaking, they're still having to deal with a lot being directed at them—I take stock of their condition. It's not great: their breath is coming out quickly now, each have sustained injuries in the past minute or so at a far quicker rate than they were before, and—though I can't tell for them as well as for myself—their magical reserves are running even lower than they were before.

Speaking of, I'm not doing too hot on that front either. I suppose I wasn't being as careful as I could've been to keep my usage low when I was trying to get Azul. Actually, now that I'm looking, my reserves are actually refilling; energy is streaming into Pesca's mini-clone on my head from afar, then being converted into some sort of magic, then being converted further into magic I can use at the interface between me and the clone. It's only a trickle, though, not enough to make a difference any time soon.

Something else catches my eye: Matama, surrounded by Pesca clones harassing her at a safe distance, is slowly but surely making her way towards the fight proper, and will probably reach it within the minute at her current pace. My heart sinks. We're already hanging on by a thread; the addition of yet another opponent might be enough to break it.

At that moment, a bright light washes over the battlefield, emanating from Magenta's body. Through the magic pouring out of her, I notice that her parasite is gone. The air around me seems to get lighter, though I'm pretty sure not literally.

Watching a La Verita—and I'm certain that's what this is—in real time with my new sense is interesting. Her clothes seem to dissolve, being replaced by new ones. First, cloth appears, wrapping around her private parts and crisscrossing up her sides. Then, glass appears all on her body in small plates and threads, weaving itself together into a full length, long-sleeved dress, and in such a way that the glass moves like fabric. It takes on various colors depending on the part of the dress—there's a lot of pink, but also some yellows, greens, blues, and even a bit of black—but quite a bit remains untinted, as well. Finally, a small, silver tiara forms on her head.

The way her magic is arranging itself is equally interesting. It's dispersed all over the place at a low density, appearing to be continually falling into her despite not actually moving. In her immediate vicinity, it surrounds herself in an interesting, spherical pattern that's somehow reminiscent of a lens.

After a few moments, Magenta finally stands up, and the light surrounding her clears.