FV – Chapter 72

Missing Future

On another timeline, distantly in the future, a desperate project had begun in order to salvage all hope.  On that timeline, Axln had just sent both Velvet and then even Mheridz, her own daughter, distantly into the past.

Axln knew this had been a plan for them for quite a long time now, but her hesitation had brought them to this.  Lyun.. was now dead, that was an incident which had hit her incredibly hard.. and it still was.  The two of them had been through these troubled times as vanguard for so long, since before they were their children’s current ages.  Everything had been difficult, but they had endured.  Now, however, she was truly alone.  The people who remained on the other side were no longer in her reach without Lyun around, not while she was stuck on this side.  She would thus even remain on this one world her whole life too, her travels were over.  Of the people on this side, her daughter was now gone too.  Having effectively agreed to sending her daughter to a timeline which would offer only death as a reward.. Axln simply could not spare the courage to face her husband with the news, either.  Her sister.. Xwyhr had long disappeared after being expelled from the academy, even before Mheridz was born.  There was no evidence, but it was safe enough to assume Xwyhr had died, much like Ezhyrae all that time ago.  Death was rather rampant in society now, it really was only inevitable at this point.

Axln took her sanctuary aboard the citadel, the only escape that had yet remained to her.  It was possibly the most protected place in the world, untouchable by all of the outside threats.  However, she knew it wasn’t any long term solution, the place simply wasn’t stocked with the resources to survive in for very long, especially if the surface was completely overwhelmed.  It was then, as such, even hiding here would simply be a slow and painful death.  This is why she knew such was not a sanctuary she could hide in for long, she needed to make use of what she could to improve her odds.. by any measure left available to her.  Knowing this, she went to find Luna, her only remaining confidant in the whole world.

“Hello inheritor.  Was your excursion successful?”  “We’ve lost Lyun, so things have gone really bad.  I just guided Mheridz over to the foundry, got her setup with everything she would need to get established in the past.  Velvet should be doing the same thing.  Both of them are gone then too.”  “That is unfortunate.  Would you like a battle update situation?”  “Is it more bad news, or is there anything good this time?”  “I assume this would count as bad news.  The enemy has appeared again near the academy in vast numbers.  One of them has been identified as a high class target.  Reports from our forces have classified its ability as one which can manipulate outcomes by influencing probability.”  “So it’s capable of making us unlucky.  Considering how things look so far, I fail to see how that changes anything.”  Luna’s news just felt like the most obvious outcome of events at this point, according to Axln.  Having bad luck was simply everything staying constant.

“How would you like to proceed?”  “Might as well do the same thing as always.  Send me down to the front lines, I’ll work to deal with it somehow.  If there is a safe opportunity, as always, take it out.”  Luna nodded an acknowledgement, leaving Axln to prepare for a rift.  Soon, she was down there confronting the battalion of her enemy, feeling as much into much of anything as Luna probably was.  She quite honestly felt broken, simply going through the motions at this point.  She attacked the nearest with a dust claw strike.. only to miss as an ashen dune happened to slide open at that point to have her fall in.  She at least got their attention, which was a great start.  When they turned to attack her, she simply set up a shadow barrier, an act which was designed to unmake them with dark elementals.  However, something in her design messed up, with the shadows instead breaking down the distance between it and her, the strike then landing even more defiantly.  The impact sent her flying, leaving her considerably dazed in the effort and rather uncoordinated, which for the most part left her simply open for a follow-up strike.

It was at this point, so completely uncoordinated and alone, that she missed Lyun more than anything else at all.  She really could use some help right about now from her lifelong friend.

However, at the very least, being thrown wide did offer the citadel a decided opening.  Luna calibrated the trajectory for a major strike, infusing a high capacity of elements into it.  Firing such a strike however caused a sudden system overload, the thing buckling suddenly under the intense pressure.. as unlikely as such an outcome would have been.  The sudden burst caught the engines in a bad way, sending the citadel off course.  At that same time, it also sent the firing trajectory off course too, the shot thus missing it’s target.  Instead, the overwhelming energy burst was sent slightly in a new direction.. directly at the academy itself.  The huge burst detonated, taking out a massive swath of the academy.. including entire archives.  Meanwhile, with an engine failure, the citadel was in a crash course, the entire structure meteoring to the ground without any safe control.

When Axln managed to recover from her daze, her foes suddenly keeping their distance, she managed to take account of what had just happened.  The citadel.. was now lost.. the massive burst on impact from the citadel rending it to an explosive ruin that would have either ripped apart everyone inside, or consumed them in the elemental carnage.  Even surviving such, it had crashed in the open void, the ashen leaking inside.  Anyone alive would soon perish in the void itself.  Luna.. was also dead.. but that wasn’t all.  The academy was ablaze with the same elemental carnage as the citadel, the strike wreaking havoc on everything.  She knew her husband would have been hard at work in the archives at this point, and everything from the ashen through the archives was now simply a crater, visible even from where she stood.  That.. that was it, every last person she still cared about.. was gone.  She was now completely alone.

She could hear chaos whispering to her again, louder than ever before.  What exactly was she even fighting for then?  It was a good question, she was now out of things to fight for, she really didn’t care anymore at all.  Sure, there were still outposts of civilizations to protect, but places like that were beyond her, she wouldn’t even matter in their defense, and.. she really couldn’t care less.  Even her own well-being, well.. if she escaped her current circumstances, she had nowhere left to go.  Didn’t she fear death?  Actually.. no.  Maybe, death would be a mercy after all.  All of her pain could finally end.  There was nothing here for her anymore anyway.  Then, did that mean she was surrendering to chaos?  Well, from her perspective, chaos had won, there was nothing else to do now but accept it.  If she was so willing to surrender, chaos would then be willing to offer her one of two outcomes.  The first would be the death she seems willing to accept, where all the pain went away.  The second however would be her submission to chaos, letting chaos consume her.  Doing so, the pain might not go away, but she will no longer be alone.  Becoming consumed by chaos means being invested into chaos, brought into the fold of chaos, it would give her new purpose.

Axln however didn’t see the point of new purpose, not after everything she had lost.  Chaos could see that such losses mattered to her design, and regrettably most of such losses were not within the purview of chaos to provide.  However, there was one notable exception.  The one named Lyun, the one who was also of chaos.  That one could still be recovered, and could also be brought into chaos’s fold.  If Axln would submit to chaos, she would be returned to Lyun as well.  That shocked Axln, wasn’t Lyun dead?  Of course, Lyun might appear far away, but she wasn’t quite out of reach yet, there was still a way to save her.  Did Axln want the power to save Lyun?  That question hit with a magnitude that made the citadel’s last strike appear feeble in comparison.  She had felt everything, everyone.. was lost to her.  There was nothing left within her own power that could save anyone.  However, if there was a way, no matter how steep the costs, could she really turn such a gift away?  Was her pride so steep that she was so willing to simply die alone, turning away her last opportunity to make a difference?

It was a smooth and complete victory in the making.  Chaos had finally broken Axln’s will, she had submitted.

The collection of fiends broke away, providing a path for the greatest one present to approach her directly.  With the last of her defenses down, she could feel a link to her entire existence matching her to the fiend before her, tethered through her ashen arm.  She held out the same arm, making contact with the void matter of the fiend, being drawn into it.  Everything around her vanished as she felt awashed with temporal chaos, everything around her appearing white, everything about her appearing white.  She knew she was back in the temporal plane once again, but she didn’t feel the same at all.  In fact, she didn’t exactly feel at all, not in the same way as she used to.  Such was not the way of chaos, and she had become one of chaos.  Things happened there, though there were no clear signs exactly what, simply that stuff happened.  Having been of a principled design, the changes were going to take some getting used to.  Chaos then made an offer yet again.  The process was simply a matter of course at this point, but there was no point taking her out of action when there was still plenty to do.  Of course, one such thing was to ensure Lyun played a part in the process too, such a key component would make everything much easier for Axln.  Axln was already within the fold of chaos, already opened to the might of chaos, she could call upon it’s aid at any time, much as any other in the fold.

Axln then found herself back upon the ashen dunes, surrounded by the lesser chaos from before.  The greater one which had taken her in was nowhere to be seen, but Axln knew exactly where it was.  Such a fiend.. a friend.. had become a part of her, had ensured she was melded into chaos, it’s power was her own.  That.. that was even more novel, it was like having true control over fate, at long last, as she could outright manipulate probability itself.  It felt all too perfect for her, a priceless gift that would lead to one even more invaluable.  She simply needed to recover Lyun, that was all that was left to her.  Lyun however was not here, Lyun perished as Rosa, so she needed to go to her to accomplish anything.  Normally, passage to the other principled plane would have been beyond her, but chaos walked freely through the temporal plane, switching between both sides was now completely in her own power.

Kori stepped forth in the frozen fields of Aestus once again, all of her frost protection absolutely neglected.  In truth, the place had maybe become a bit too warm for her tastes, her chaotic composition being considerably colder than her surroundings.  She took a moment to consider the circumstances of this particular plane.  Rosa would have been left in Drew’s care, with both Tristine and Sophie there to weep over the loss.  Holi would be around, but she always was.  Unfortunately though, none of them would understand her any longer, they had been left behind as principles.  All of them would mourn the principles Rosa had left behind, not letting the chaos that remains have any opportunity.  Of course, such chaos mattered far more than the wasted principles, so that was going to be a problem.  More of a problem was how Hypertech was designed to keep out dark matter.. such as herself.  Well, chaos had warned her that the pain wasn’t going to stop so suddenly, this too was inevitable.

“Oh.. Kori?  Is that you over there?  It’s really hard to tell in all this blasted cold.”  “Hello Tristine.  Sorry, it seems the barrier is acting up maybe, it’s sort of in my way.  Could you provide me with an opening, please?”  “Oh, sure.  Really though, I thought you were gone to the other side, that we weren’t going to see you again.”  “Well, things happened, there really is quite a lot to talk about.  I don’t suppose I could see Rosa again though?”  “Oh, sure, we’ve set up an area in Drew’s office for that, just go check there.”  “Thank you, you’ve been so very helpful.”  Tristine had her back turned while Kori just walked in, the rush of heat really being disturbing.  Kori had honestly hoped to deal with things without making a scene, but the amount of energy here really was making her feel uncomfortable.  Such a feeling grew worse when her exit closed up behind her.

“Tristine, what are you doing?  That’s not the real Kori.”  “Oh come on, Holi, don’t be like that.  I couldn’t be any more real than this.”  “Readings of this apparition indicate a full composition of absolute zero, the same as any DMA.  The temperature here is declining swiftly.”  “I suspect you’re not happy that I disabled any holo device I had on hand, they really were getting uncomfortable.  This stupid arm is already plenty to work with, but I’ll at least continue to work with it in Rosa’s memory.”  “The arm.. isn’t absolute zero at all, it’s authentic!”  “Like I told you, I’m Kori.”  “I’ve alerted Drew that Kori has been taken by the enemy and is currently attempting an invasion.  Tristine, we need to drive her off.”  “Wait, are you trying to tell me that you’re suddenly standing against me?  Are you serious?”  Holi didn’t look like she was joking, though maybe Kori couldn’t blame her.  Of course, chaos had been their life-long enemy, a presence that was only there to wipe out all principles.  Seeing things from the other side though, Kori could see why.  Everything of principles was honestly becoming outright annoying.  No wonder chaos had said that only Lyun could be saved, those of principle were in fact beyond salvation.

This fact stung home no better when her left shoulder took a blow from Tristine’s ionic rifle.  She had just been shot at.. by Tristine.  The swath of energy really hurt, and not in the way any physical wound should have, though it did also leave emotional scars.  Her foes had become her friends, and her friends had become her foes.  However, nothing was going to get in her way of saving Lyun.  If the people of this world were going to try, if the people of this world were going to turn on her, then she would deny them as the principles they are.  Tristine’s next round failed, ill fortune finally having woven its way around fate, though Tristine’s perseverance would ensure such would not last.  Taking advantage of the opening, Kori rushed Tristine with her left arm, pinning the girl against a nearby wall.  Quickly, the thermal integrity of the girl was lost, freezing her completely into ice.  In another moment, that ice shattered, and Tristine was no more.

Kori could feel the entire place move around her, aiming down upon her, and she knew right away what had happened.  Holi had just connected into the entire defense grid, and was aiming everything they had at her.  That would have been a major problem.. if it weren’t for the fact that, in the end, Holi was her creation.  Finally opting to use a holo again, Kori went into Holi’s main controls and activated a virus program, overloading the entire system.  Adding a touch of bad luck, the nanite colony went stiff almost instantly.  As Holi had also committed override controls over all of the system defenses, that also took the entire network down with her, disabling the entire security system.  Kori however made sure that some of the program remained, having Holi able to break administrative access to all of aerospace’s network too could actually do wonders for having her friends get in there too.  Further a virus through ATALS towards other colonies, it would be a complete takeover.  Actually, she was in quite the position to turn this whole war right around, even using her new ability to break down the defenses in the other principled plane.  She was the turning point in everything, the one who could end this war instantly in chaos’s favour.  However, before she would be so kind, she wanted her friend secured first.  Lyun was far more important.  Driven to such, she made her way into the office, not even considering being nice about it.  Doors in her way shattered to the frost of her presence.  Quickly along the way, she thus found Sophie suddenly, quivering in fear without any weapon handy.

“Kori..?  You.. you’re not Kori though.”  “You have no way to defend yourself, get out of my way or else…”  “Why, why?  She’s dead, but you won’t even let us mourn her?  Why are you doing this?”  “She’s of chaos, and I’m taking her back with me.  Now get out of my way.”  “She’s my sister, the second that I’ve lost now, why are you being so cruel?”  “If you feel she’s dead, then there is nothing left to lose, right?”  “No, no, please go away!”  This was probably the roughest part for Kori, as Sophie was possibly the one person still alive that Kori knew longer than anyone.  Sophie wasn’t even a threat, but she was still blocking the way.  It was a sure sign of the truth chaos had offered her, there was no salvation for the principled from her anymore, the only one she could save was Rosa.  Kori was through the passage soon after that realization, walking over the shattered dust of Sophie’s remains.  From there, she finally arrived at Drew’s office, and opened the door.

“Well, I suppose there’s pretty much nothing that would compel you to stop now, is there?”  “No, there isn’t.”  “Well, I’m afraid that I’m certain Rosa would want me to do what I could to stop you.”  “You wouldn’t even stand a chance.”  “No, no I guess not.  But before you bring HyperTech crashing down, I’ve got no choice but to go down with it.  Maybe I’ll be so lucky as to leave you with a lasting wound that would provide someone else an opportunity.”  “I doubt it, luck is my domain.”  “You underestimate the resolve it takes to run a company.  You underestimate how much I’ve put into this place, how much work I’ve accomplished.  I guess Rosa never let you know, but you aren’t the only robotics expert here.  Activate override, detonation authorized.”  Drew’s life’s work was not just his company, even if that was all Kori had ever seen.  Drew had spent ages working on countless robots of his own, small mechanized marvels with their own distinct interfaces, stuff Kori had no control over.  Such was also wired into the entire structure, separate to the interface Holi had commanded, and was committed to even running from the conduit’s power core far below.  That same core.. was now primed to explode.  HyperTech would have a funeral by pyre, not frost.  There was nothing luck could do against such a design of fate, it was simply another inevitability.

However, Kori’s dominion existed over more than simply fortune, she also commanded time.  As the onset of the explosion began without any other warning, the wash of flame incinerating everything around her, time halted.  The room she was in however had already become a ruin, the entire thing a misshapen mess.  Travelling along floating platforms, she searched desperately for Rosa.. but could not find her.  Wait, had she been outwitted, had Rosa been relocated in all the delays?  Maybe she should have enacted frozen time much sooner, and not provided them any opportunity.  However, it was too late now for such doubts.  Scour as she could, the remaining layout of the structure provided her with no answers.  Drew had successfully taken Rosa away from Kori.  It wasn’t simply that, such an explosive departure had successfully drained her of a lot of her chaotic composition, she wasn’t feeling so good right now.  She made her way back out to the more-forgiving cold, letting time resume from a safe distance as Hypertech finished it’s collapse.  The principled had taken her one last hope away from her.

Wait, no, they hadn’t.  Such was only true in this timeline, she had even sent the two daughters back in time to reforge events and pave an opening.  Actually, that would be to her advantage, if the plan had worked out properly.  With the knowledge of chaos, she knew that removing the book might not have left open the first temporal passage, but it would have also ensured a timeline where Lyun would still have the blessing of chaos without being in a position where they could form a proper defense.  As soon as the book was out of the picture, both daughters would have disappeared, thus revoking any advantage the world would have against chaos.  If she were to then follow the same passage, potentially aiming at a point much farther along, she would find herself in a period that knew nothing of chaos.  She could then bring Lyun to her side, then herself rip open the passage to her allies, leading chaos to an ultimate victory with Lyun at her side.  In fact, tracing along that same timeline, she even found a very specific time which seemed to rend her command over misfortune at its greatest, one which chaos would have a need of her there.  She knew nothing about what would be occurring at that time when she arrived beyond that, but it was an opportunity she could scarce afford to discard.

The area around Kori shifted to a pure white, as she targeted the time period where those present were pressuring the citadel for a solution against misfortune.  From such, the future collided with the present day, the chaos-infused Axln left open to begin her work in earnest.

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FV – Chapter 71

Event Horizon

The three girls got their chance to recompose themselves, then began their preparations for their newest objective.  Considering that all three girls knew how easy it was to get lost in that maze, they each prepared for it to be a very long journey.

“Hey, sis, packing to go somewhere?  You wouldn’t be trying to resolve everything on your own, would you?  Gosh, I think Jhez is available, you could…”  “I’m not bringing him, sorry.  This won’t be some simple date or anything, and I’m going to need him here to keep things in order.  After all, you.. my dear sister.. are very good at getting distracted from your work.  He’s possibly my only hope at making sure you actually contribute around here.  I’m seriously counting on you guys getting this place up and running before I return, and a quick look here around shows that such is going to be quite the tall order.”  “Ah, this place is junk anyway, the citadel would be more fun.”  “Ezhyrae’s reputation would take a hit if she lost a place like this, especially to lazy hands.  That in turn would really work against the academy’s standing, something we’ve been working so hard for.  As such, if you were found at fault for this.. why.. the academy would be in their rights to ask for due compensation, and let me tell you I wouldn’t feel like lending you support for letting my friend down.  As a result, just think of all the after-class community support you would be signed up for.. instead of all the parties you keep going to.  Why, it’s almost too tragic to think about.”  Xwyhr grumbled as she ran off, feeling generally outmaneuvered by Axln.  Lyun caught the grumbling Xwyhr pass by as she entered, generally perplexed at how the girl had been so skillfully told off.

“I feel like I’m losing my touch, pretty much everyone knows I’m going off to do something.”  “Was it really supposed to be that much of a secret?”  “No, but I got used to people not knowing anyway.”  “That probably just means you’re opening up to others more, that’s all.  It’s a good thing, really.”  “Yeah, but this place is still a wreck and I already feel guilty having to drag you away from it.  You’re probably the best instrumentation expert I know.”  “Well, I’m not exactly against the idea of going out to get other stuff done either.  Remember, I might be good at this stuff, but it isn’t exactly my passion.  However, exploring stuff, I believe that was one of your passions, and you did say I’m the only one with half an idea on what we’re even looking for.  A proper balance of all this stuff is important, and helping you here is probably a great use of my time.”  “Passions, huh?  Well, if I find any creative project here for an aspiring arts student, I’ll let you know.  I’m supposed to become a teacher someday, so it would suck to not think of the students too.”  “Yeah, you’re not exactly going into my field, so you shouldn’t worry about that.  However, if you’re going to teach history, you might as well make history first, right?  Besides, on another angle, I have to think of you as the employee of my family’s company, one I’m going to apparently have plenty of management responsibilities in.”  “Maybe at head office, but Drew is still going to be the one my field office would report to.  So.. I believe it is best to say that you’re not exactly going into my.. field?”  “Ha, ha, very funny.”  Axln still understood that the base idea was that she couldn’t put any expectations on Lyun, the girl would apply her own responsibilities as she saw fit.  If Axln needed help, Lyun understood her options and had still decided to go with Axln.  Such was entirely Lyun’s choice, that was the end of the matter.

“Okay, I got my coat.”  “I swear, that thing seems to never be about keeping warm and instead seems to be a weapon’s rack.”  “Well, I guess you aren’t completely wrong, though it does offer a lot of protection too.”  “Why though?  We aren’t expecting any trouble.”  “Because Luna isn’t around, and I know that place has a built-in defense network that almost seems to have a mind of its own.  That secret home has remained secret all this time for a good reason, because the place is really good at keeping people from it.  You are, again, trying to defy the laws of chance, so I really don’t think it’s in our best interest to simply assume that we’re going to get lucky here.  Just because you were fine every other time does not mean you’re going to be fine this time.”  Mheridz had a point which Axln could admit to despising.  This world resorted to chance far too frequently, and the risks here were far too great for them to not be prepared to get unlucky.  However, at this point, both Axln and Lyun realized that they had lost track of where they had most recently placed their own weapons.  In such consideration though, did that even matter?  In all considerations, their chaos-infused gift augmented by their power gear alone supplied them with a superior form of power.  Lyun even realized just how far that idea took her, as she had always originally depended on instruments for everything.. not her gift.  Even her crimsonian wings were superior to what her instruments offered in that area.  Axln, meanwhile, Axln was even more remarkable, especially with a gift that could probably just hack any of the defenses that got in their way.  Instruments were nothing compared to the prowess they possessed.

Having completed all of their arrangements, the three departed from the wreckage and made their way back to the citadel’s main entrance.  The entrance had been properly locked.. and refused to open.  Meanwhile, Axln tried to override the protection, but there was no response.  It wasn’t as if it wasn’t responding properly.. so much as it wasn’t working at all.  Forcing their way in was a bit too much out of the question, the force required either being not enough or far too much.  They needed to get in, they didn’t want to wreck the place instead.  There were already enough repairs to worry about.  However, there was one remaining obvious option.  A rift passage still worked to get into the rift room, though it wouldn’t work in any other destination.. and the only one who could do that was Axln herself.  Axln then could go inside, hopefully get stuff working again, then meet them back outside.  Except for Axln’s concern that this was going to require field repair work.. which was certainly not a part of her skillset.. it seemed as if this would be a simple enough obstacle to deal with.  The hardest part would be how bored Lyun and Mheridz were about to get while waiting.

Axln arrived in the interior of the rift room, finding everything absolutely pitch black.  Making use of her circle though, she adopted some high-quality dark vision, assisted by using her gift to negate the shadows in the room.  Already, she could feel that Mheridz might have had a possibly too good impression of the place, things had already gone into the realms of being unfortunate.  The place outright seemed uninviting right now.. although it felt keenly as if everything was set up so that she was the only one capable of being present.  Since she wasn’t certain if that was the citadel getting defensive or if it was a simple act of bad luck, she wasn’t sure which evil to blame for this one, but she didn’t like her options.  However, considering how long it took her to simply find the door going out of the rift room itself, she knew she didn’t like her circumstances either.  Facing a maze under these conditions would be perplexing, so she made sure to use her dust gift to induct her own trance state, improving upon her thought process too.  The door was locked, but this one wasn’t as reinforced, so her cybernetic arm got it open reasonably easily.  However, she really wasn’t liking how it required so many direct things only she could do.  Even so, this was a technician’s job, or the instrumental version of the same idea.  Clearly, as soon as she found a way to solve all of this, she would quickly realize that this was the point clearly designed for Lyun, and now everything would start to suck in that way instead.

It was at this point though that she realized she really wasn’t giving her third member a fair hearing either.  Mheridz’s specialty was in lightning, something which would be really useful right now for providing light.  Sure, it was technically less skilled at visible light than her shadow gift, but it would have been a great compliment to work from.  Those lightning pets the girl had actually stuck around, a constant if dim source of light.  Reversing elements didn’t have stable effects like that, so maybe the girl really would be rather handy around here.  If she ended up figuring out a way to get the door open, but couldn’t turn on the lights, she would certainly have to look into that.  For now though, she needed to ensure she at least did not get lost.  However, it didn’t take her long for her to conclude that such was exactly what she managed to accomplish, long familiar with what that would feel like in this place.  There was however a part of her that felt right at home.. one she knew to be her chaotic side.  This, she didn’t like, this hall favoured chaos, not principles, but it wasn’t itself made of chaos.  Due to such, she wasn’t exactly immune to such a chaotic effect, like she would be from regular chaos.

「This place is true chaos in it’s most realized form, it’s remarkable.  To think that a person made something this chaotic, that someone of principle could capture something this pristine, people really can be impressive.」  Axln was certain that whoever had created this monster had to be a mad genius, completely out of their mind.  「Such was the same title the one you call Lyun had recently given you, by the way.  Mad genius.  Connecting principles to have one learn from the other, it was seen the same way.」  Being compared to such madness hurt, but she was certain to at least establish the distinction.  This madness was one to unmake, not to revel in, she would overcome it in that way.  「There is no certainty that the forces at play here are all working against you, by the way.  Something about the design appears to be working for you.  This is rendered clear by watching the fluctuations of chance at play right now.  Typically, everything is steady, but right now there are dramatic shifts fighting for dominance.  There is much more here than is easily noticed.」  That made it sound like she had walked into a probability war, which might be why absolutely nothing is making sense right now.  The only thing obvious was that her circumstances weren’t good.. not at all.

On matters of escape, her only recourse would be a shift to the other moon, the only thing that could possibly pierce these walls.  She didn’t even have other options.  Velvet had even warned about such a shift too close to the moon.. she was pretty much on the surface level.  If she needed to escape that way, she would be stuck recovering from burns for a while, which would be a lot of time lost.  Instead, she pressed forwards, determined to see this to a resolution.  After all, if probability was always at hand, then she just needed to keep going until she was graced with a lucky streak, it was bound to happen eventually.  Fueled with such determination, she pressed on until such eventuality finally came to pass.  After all of her wanderings, she found herself finally in a room which might prove useful, the healing lab that they had been at before.  Of course, this place was supposedly not far from the rift room, so she had probably taken quite the long route instead.  Even so, this room had some interesting stuff, it would be a great place to check out.

Of course, the room itself was still pretty dark.  It had a bunch of instruments scattered everywhere, but none of them had been designed to produce light elements for sight.  However, amidst all the otherwise darkness, she could see a faint purple haze on the far opposite side of the room, a sight which thus instantly drew her attention.  She made her way up to that part, clearing away space in the process.  Something about this felt.. familiar.  She reached the area that was faintly glowing, the area sparked to life, revealing another layer of the room beyond.  She had been here before, her original trip to the citadel…  The new enclosed section of the room lit up faintly in a red glow as a response to her presence, with a panel of the wall shifting to greet her, the same control and display showing up once again.  Once again, the same visual of a golden sphere appeared upon it.  Clearly, she was familiar too.  Well, if the thing wanted to help, then she was in need of some help for once, maybe it would be willing to be useful.

A scrawl of script appeared over the screen, none of it visibly in the typical script of this side.  However, with her circlet handy, she was capable of identifying it, it was all in the old scripts, and she was still capable of translating.  After reviewing the message left to her, she knew for certain she was in the right place.  The screen spoke of the place’s main drive having malfunctioned, and was not available.  It appeared that at some point, the main weapon had overloaded, causing obsidian crystallization in the core unit.  It was informative, but it wasn’t exactly good news.  However, the system also reported that .. some type of power had been reconnected recently due to.. fluxuations in .. something.  Certain titles for things weren’t even familiar to her, but it implied that she could reroute power through this alternate source and get things going again.  Sure, the system made it sound like such a power source might not have been available for a tremendously long time, but that’s really what backups were good for, when the unexpected happens.  A few quick motions, and she could tell things were starting to work once again.  Even the lights came back on.. though it only included the bright red haze, not the actually good lights.  Suspiciously enough though, she could hear a faint crackle.. sort like an electrical surge or.. a distant intense lightning storm.  Such was faintly alarming, but such would also be Mheridz’s forte, so it was probably something Mheridz could deal with easily enough.

Caught distracted by her surroundings, Axln almost missed a powerful feeling of a much more dramatic threat suddenly pressing upon her.  A familiar haze started to gather at her vision, the same feeling which came in a flood of chaos.  Being a bit of chaos herself, she had the opportunity to resist it, but without many options to do so.  Fighting against it directly would also submit herself to the flood of chaos, which would itself be especially dangerous.  However, she found that she also had the option to.. retreat?  That would certainly be a costly venture too, but doing so would enable her capture and seal a portion of herself against such a threat, disconnecting herself in the process until the threat passed.  Considering that such was a wash of chaos, that could be an especially favourable solution, as it would also disconnect Lyun from such repercussions, a backup plan with which she could salvage things from.  In considerations of where to hide that most suited her, while it felt as if the threat was filling most present from her left arm, she decided that the best retreat would be into the form of her right arm, as she could meld her chaos to her gift to allow that arm to capture the fragments of her personal chaos, using the existence of her cybernetic arm as a protective seal for herself.

Such was the last train of thought captured by the entity of their mutual chaos, before all presence of Axln suddenly explicitly disappeared.

“The door is open, how much longer do you think…”  「All contact with the one you call Axln has ended, and the person matching them is no longer present in the connection.」  Lyun instantly started fearing the worst, worried that Axln might have.. died.  「There is no confirmation of death, as death itself would have been its own message.  Instead, there is simply nothing.  The most recent idea was a concern of an impending threat, one that she would have to flee from, but without signs of clarity on the details of such a threat.  A concern that was discovered was that a flood of chaos was involved, where recently before that there were some observations of a natural chaos amassing in the area.  What remains certain is that the situation demands an immediate response, both in an attempt to salvage the connection and to ensure that any such threat found does not cause further concerns.」  “Are you okay, you look really pale suddenly.”  “Something really bad just happened to Axln, we have to go save her.  I think Axln just tripped some kind of trap set by chaos, and things have gotten out of control.”  “Well, no use standing around here then, let’s go find her.”  Mheridz was in the door even faster than Lyun, though they weren’t able to travel very far.  Very quickly, they found themselves confronted by one of those supposed defense barriers the place had handy at all times.

“See?  I called it, didn’t I?  Right when we really didn’t want them.  Hold on, I can get this thing down quick.”  Velvet pulled out a couple of instruments she had previously used to manipulate the same defense network, eventually providing a passage through that particular barrier in reward of her efforts.  Quickly ahead though, they found themselves at yet another barrier of the same.  “This is stupid, we can’t just keep stopping to deal with defenses, we need a faster route.  You know what, hells, forget being nice about going in.  Axln’s on the line right now.”  Lyun called upon her chaos to shift the principles of everything around her.  In doing so, the sparks of the structure flickered.. and then kept going strong.  After all, the old defensive network was running strong again, after around a thousand years.  This model was designed upon the Terran Mythos itself, running from the same principles in a cross-world form.  Even shifting the world’s principles had no effect on such defenses as a result, in all consideration such only made things harder.  Now they would have to rely on what little technology they had on hand to deal with everything.  Lyun had plenty of conversions between the two, but Mheridz’s selection was far more inferior.  Of course, that also included her options for barrier piercing tech, such simply wasn’t a thing she had on hand.  Seeing things go wrong, Lyun ended the shift, trying of her own volition to start calming down.

“Lyun..”  “I know, I know, don’t panic.  Really didn’t expect that counter though, but that’s leaving me feeling really uncomfortable.  That was supposed to be my best resource, especially because I honestly feel more comfortable using technology than instrumentation.”  “I know, and that’s fine.  If you need it to do your thing, go ahead.  However, I need instrumentation to deal with this problem.  Think of it this way, I’m practically like mom at this point, she’s better with instrumentation too.  We’re going to have to team up for this one, in order to find her.  I hope you don’t mind lending me a hand?”  “Not a problem, you open us a path, I’ll try to figure out where we need to go.”  “Knowing her, if she’s capable, she would be looking for you, too.  Lead the way and I’ll follow.”  Mheridz wasn’t being artificially understanding of Lyun, she was being genuine.  This Lyun could do it, even if she might not have grown used to holding back such panic yet.  Even so, Mheridz wasn’t exactly used to working with others either.  This would thus become a learning experience for them both, as they search to uncover what had just happened.

However, neither were aware that the key to uncovering such answers did not lay in the past, but in the future.  Even Mheridz, who had herself come from such a future, was herself ignorant of this potential threat.

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FV – Chapter 70

Final Moments

The longer Axln sat through the ongoing speculation for the matter, the more confident she got in her chosen approach.  Sure, she wasn’t certain regarding how knowing fate was needed would matter, but it was the most glaring solution she could think of.

“I don’t know how elemental land is doing, but it looks like our crew here is getting worn out again.  Might we adjourn this for a while more before getting back to the problem.”  “Drew, I worry that if we call things here, we will have to bring things to a permanent closure.  Lyun and I really can’t keep this going forever, we might instead need to take what has been discussed and look for answers more locally.  If we’re really running out of time, I table the suggestion that everyone takes an opportunity for any closing conversation before the connection becomes forever broken.  If people want to break with a snack for that period, that’s reasonable, there might even be merit for arranging private conversations too, as it seems even Mheridz and Velvet had taken an interest in that area.  Lyun and I however will need to sit down somewhere else.  We’ll still keep that thing going, but someone else should keep the instrument on.”  Drew went quiet as he realized that his words may have resulted in a motion for Axln to bring everything towards a closure.  Considering how magnificent this connection was, it would really be unfortunate that such could never again be repeated.

There was quite a lot of closure needed in the process as well.  The two who could call themselves each the sisters to the pair had a lot to speak upon for lifestyles of being a sister, especially after learning that they each had a subtle connection to the other’s sister for quite some time.  Once Sophie and Xwyrh were finished, Drew and Jhez had quite the volume to speak upon with each other too, especially since they had only just learned they would both one day become fathers under mutual terms.  Even Tristine and Ezhyrae had volumes to speak upon about abstract creations, considering the similarity between each of their studies, which each called upon new inspirations to bring them ahead of the current curve.  Tristine needed novel new ideas for technical designs which could make a conduit like her shine, while Ezhyrae needed her own inspiration to yield innovation before the foundry which could merit her own new title, hopefully in a way which applied her study of ersatz.  Tristine and Ezhyrae each then spoke volumes of the legacy brought out by Holi and Luna, the unsated marvels of each, superseding the potential of their own community, likewise remaining untapped and yet related to the interests of Ezhyrae and Tristine.  Velvet and Mheridz were last to close everything off, though neither of them had very much more to say.

“Are you two done yet?”  “Not yet, mom.  Velvet seems to think you have a plan, because you sound like you have a plan.  I would have to agree with her.  Where are we going?”  “Sorry, but you’re going to have to stay here.  It seems even Luna can’t provide directions to where I need to go, and I know you absolutely have no idea either.  Only Lyun can help with this one.”  Axln was starting to wonder if letting Mheridz actively conspire might have been a poor decision.  “I heard my name, what am I missing?”  “Hey mom, can you tell Kori.. Axln there to not be so uptight?”  “Wait, since when did I get nominated to be a mom?”  “You know it’s going to happen, you know we’re blood related, what else am I to call you in that case?  Your age might fit it more, but we’re certainly not sisters.”  “Okay, I did miss a lot.  Axln, what’s going on?”  Lyun did know she was supposed to be a mom one day, she just had gotten used to Velvet just calling her by name.  The subtle references were building a very different impression for her.

“Our two future daughters here are apparently getting a bit future aware as we get closer to a grand conclusion.  Their role in everything really is coming to an end, though.  You and I will have to take it from here.”  “So you have figured something out.  You had seemed rather preoccupied in thought during our assumed break, I could tell something was up.  I’m guessing you just wanted to hold the matter for when we would be free to move.”  “Pretty much.  I mean, I don’t have much concrete, only a theory, so I don’t want to get people’s hopes up.  However, we’re running out of time, and there was nothing better, so I think we’re going to have to at least work with what we have.”  Axln’s plan was no secret to Lyun, at least the existence of one wasn’t.  What was also obvious was how there was something she didn’t want to speak about the details right now, potentially due to the present company.

“You know what, this is stupid.  I thought it was just me, but you’re doing this to Mheridz too.  She’s right, we need to do something to be there for you, so that you don’t just be so foolish when we’ve succeeded.  You’ve changed, improved, you’re like living heroes.. but you’re still willing to leave us behind.  I know why I can’t go, I can’t get there.  Why can’t she go?”  “You’ve both done enough, we can…”  “No, no, and wrong.  We’ve given up our chance of a future, set our very lives to end, all tied to this one success.  Don’t you think it’s exactly where we need to be, to be there in accomplishment to what we gave up everything to achieve?  What in the world are you planning that you think merits keeping us away from that?”  “Look, I know this is important for you both, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring you to the room that the legendary book had been originally hidden away would…”  “Shit!  You’re going there!  To hell with everything, please bring Mheridz!  I know, you’re thinking this is some conspiring angle for like that whole surender deal, but that idea is junk now.  Even so, finding that book’s hiding spot.. it would mean a lot.  Everything had always been about that stupid book, dealing with that stupid book sounds like the greatest way to go out.  Come on, this is our last chance, please?”  Velvet sounded pretty desperate, really driving home a lot of guilt on Axln.  The guilt wasn’t only sitting on Axln either, even Mheridz was shocked to find her partner fighting so hard for her.

“Axln, let’s just bring Mheridz with us.  Even if she can’t help, she won’t hurt either.  They both deserve this.”  “To hell with it, fine.  Mheridz is really good at brainstorming, maybe she will be handy if we can’t figure out what we find there.”  Lyun even knew she wouldn’t be quite up to speed with the brainstorming planning Axln goes through, so such was an actually viable excuse.  Even so, at this point, Lyun would have still been compelled to support at this point even without such a handy excuse available.  “Great, I’m glad I managed to get you two convinced over there, it would be the least I could do.  I mean, I know you both would be looking into stuff, then making your way back to this side.  However, in all consideration, if you really are making the last move.. this might be the end of the road for me.  If you accomplish everything before returning to this side, this will be the last chance for me to talk to not only Mheridz, but either of you.  My initial role was to keep you both from the book, but it seems my final one was to secure Mherdiz’s path to it.  Mheridz, you’ve got things from here, go bring our life’s mission to its success.  Kori, when you get back here, Holi will have everything I’ll be passing forward.  Mom.. thanks for pulling through, for staying strong this time, for not letting go.  I know that your conviction here is going to make all of the difference, things are going to be alright.  When you meet my successor.. actually, I probably have nothing to say there, you already know.  Give them the future I could only dream of.”  Velvet could hardly speak through her final words, the incident audibly getting to her.  The tears were also rather contagious for everyone around.

“Velvet, thank you.  If I don’t see you again…”  “Hey, come on, you obviously will.  If it isn’t any time soon, then certainly you’ll find yourself with a much younger version to deal with.  And hey, even if time would have shifted enough that said young one isn’t exactly me, but some other young one of slightly different genetics, that’s okay too.  She.. maybe even he.. will get the future then that I’ve worked so hard to form, and so they’ll be pretty close to the same thing, right?  So yeah, I’ll make sure everything is ready for you too.  We’ve already started dismantling your giant lens, by the way, though at this rate we’re practically left to dumping everything on the moon.  Make sure you’re careful about that on the way back, the stuff is still outright radiant with stored energy still.  It’s pretty harmful for a person, though not deadly.. not as deadly as it would be for any DMAs at least.”  “True, though that’s probably going to do wonders for cleaning up any remaining chaos.  All that ambient ultraviolet energy is just going to make it outright dissolve, but could leave some nasty sunburns even with mild exposure.  We should probably be fine with returning via citadel anyway.”  “Uh, maybe, but I hope you would at least come and check up on things here first, especially if I am gone.  If you’re ready to keep Kori in the air, your wings should be enough to handle things, Epsilon isn’t hard to find.  Oh, and yeah, I’ll be moving from Omega to Epsilon, your crew would be far more understanding than the people of aerospace, hopefully with Holi’s help.  Best wishes for a swift success, you three.”  Lyun was surprised when Velvet suddenly ended the call with such words, though she felt she could understand.  Such farewells were getting very difficult, the girl simply couldn’t keep going.  However, Lyun really didn’t want things to end with just that, she really wanted a much better final farewell.  If she couldn’t get her wish.. well.. at least she was determined to pay such intents forward.  Whatever new Velvet the future would hold, Lyun would pay such feelings forward then.

“Wow, Velvet is actually really good at expressing herself, I’ve never been half that skilled.  I knew she was quick to panic, but this.. that’s a talent worth respect.  Considering her words though, she has a really good point.  At any time during this process, I could simply just disappear, even without warning.  Rather than find myself with a missed opportunity, I might want to instead take from Velvet’s fine example.  Of course, I have nothing I will have the chance to arrange for you, not unless there is more time to do so.  Lyun, you’ve already been to my office, pretty much everything you might need is there.  Specifically, there is a letter in the desk which I’ve so carefully tried to produce in the otherworldly script, so that you two are the only ones who could read it.  I know, my reproduction is terrible, but your future selves were capable of reading such scripts, so I’m certain you’ll figure it out too.  The letter is easy to identify as it is marked with the same sigil as.. my family’s.”  Mheridz tugged at her bracelet at that point uncomfortably, a forgotten aspect of the future both Axln and Lyun had let slip past their thoughts in the time since.  Axln at least had no problem with that family tradition, feeling it would be a proper symbol to use going forward at the academy.. maybe even during future concerts.  Lyun too, realizing Velvet would be with such a bracelet too, felt that her future family business might be in more of a need of fancy branding.. at least maybe in her arts and music division.

“Mheridz I’m sorry for almost turning you away from this.”  “Oh mom, I can tell why you almost did, but I’m thankful you aren’t.  Velvet is right, I need to see this through.  It would be way better to spend my final instant knowing I did it, instead of just waiting around and vanishing unexpectedly.  It.. it’s a shame that Velvet is probably going to have no choice but to confront that herself.  Maybe.. maybe we shouldn’t keep her waiting overly long then, that would just be awful to the girl.  What do we need to get in order before we’re on our way?”  “I think the first order of business would be to compose ourselves, all three of us are quite the emotional wreck.  Lyun, you probably look the worst of us all, not going to lie.  You and Velvet.. really take this emotional stuff pretty rough.  However, I think Mheridz and I could do with a bit of time too.  We can’t rush such a thing, tackling this without a composed head is really going to add problems for us, mostly because we’ve got that maze to look forward to again.”  Axln and Mheridz might have been handling things with a visual composure, but that certainly wasn’t how either of them felt.  Lyun however wore her emotions on her face.. and down her cheeks, the girl not even composed enough to find her own voice.  It was all too obvious that having the chance to calm down would be the most important first step in this process.

“When we consider preparation, consider that all three of us are really set for dealing with a chaotic spook, but we’re not quite so ready for more mundane ventures like finding secret rooms in giant structures.  We’ll need to see what can be gathered together for that.”  “You don’t want to bring Luna either?”  “Luna doesn’t know the way, such a secret was even kept from her.  Meanwhile, the siege-mantle still needs a lot of work, and really it would just be easier with everyone else out of the way.  Luna will be staying here, along with the members of the academy, and basically all of the staff behind either.  I mean, if this doesn’t work out, we’re going to need a way out of here so that we can return to Ruixse.  In that case, I would prefer us to be ready for that eventuality.”  Axln might have almost left Mheridz behind, but her plan wasn’t to have left Mheridz idle.  She would be invested into this plan, and would have needed someone working on their backup plan.  As is, at the very least, she would probably send Mheridz as a messenger to report their failure, getting things coordinated here while they checked in on the other side with the same report.  This plan still worked out.

“So, in the matter of preparation, what is our plan once inside the citadel?”  “Lyun is the only one who has reached the room in question, though for that reason.. it might be very difficult to return there too.  Neither of us were feeling very clear-headed at the time, and we did have plenty of patrols to worry about as well.”  “I have reports of the patrols you found, even in a round of disposal.  However, none of them even could account for their own location, so that hardly helps at all.  Actually, I suspect Lyun would be intimately familiar with the last report we had before her sudden success.”  “Oh right, her ex.  Where is that guy anyway?”  “Velvet and I were even talking about the two esteemed exes, which was a great chance to hear about the jerk trying to swoon my mom.  Mom never talked about him, of course, something you would probably understand.  I honestly never met the guy, because he sort of perished before I was born.  It seemed that was something which had still managed to play out, one of the foes there taking out his assigned fighter while you both fought moon-sides.  It was interesting, because the warden in question had also fallen to the same causes.  I matched reports too, discovering that the warden couldn’t even outlive a simple pilot.  Velvet was still of like mind to myself, I don’t think I like your ex, but quite honestly neither guy deserved such a death.  Technically, there are a line of people who deserve that impression though, so.. I hope you’re willing to arrange for those funerals.”  In other words, Mheridz was implying that Axln would not have access to any additional guides.  It was probably for the best at that, additional guides would get in the way, Lyun would have struggled with that particular instance.. though it was also difficult to hear about the losses too.

Nick and Zxyd, both of those two guys had sort of been a thorn at their side through the process, right around when Kori and Lyun had broken up with them.  Of course, both guys had been working for the two esteemed daughters, who were both suddenly not so thorny.  Before that though.. both guys had been important to them.  It seemed this trial would come with constant loss of lives, first from Fiona and Yhzia, now from Nick and Zxyd, and soon Velvet and Mheridz would be gone too.  At best, they would have to ensure that there were no further losses, that no one else would perish here, there were far too many lost as things stood.  The losses of their past, present, and future would all come together in this one final act, and it was a burden enough that they wouldn’t want to add any further weight to it.  Axln wasn’t even certain how much time might remain before chaos would simply make another move, making use of the legendary secret in order to assert dominance.  In all accounts, if she was right in her beliefs, chaos would only have to exert the influence of probability upon the will of the world itself in order for everything to go wrong, and that there would be no way such a will could defend itself at present.

While the hand of chaos was no longer in play, they would have to act before such tranquility suddenly ended.  Quite certainly, this whole monumental moment was pivotal to the entire process, there would be no coming back from something like this, even though none of them yet understood how true that was.

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FV – Chapter 69

Parental Bonds

The conversation had endured quite the pretense, but there was still the need to bring everything back again to the original purpose.  There was still the need to resolve what sort of weakness would be standing out between worlds, so that they could finally be done with this threat.

Of course, the whole thing couldn’t even fit in a single sitting, so such a side of the meeting would have to be reserved for after everyone had gotten the chance to sleep on it.  Fortunately, running off of their active chaos in a fueled presence, both girls could even sleep with the thing going, they just needed to stay close to it.  Of course, the rift needed to be kept open too, it had some kind of failsafe built into it for some reason that required someone there active to keep it open, so the process could be managed in shifts.  However, as their chaos was already taking a role here, neither Lyun nor Axln could assign themselves to a time-suspended sleep shift, so they had to sleep much like anyone else.  It was then left to everyone to pitch in to ensure that the gate could be sustained while everyone could get some proper rest.

As such, there came a point where Mheridz herself had been assigned to the role of sustaining the gate for the others.  Such still felt weird for her, as she had generally excluded herself through the process.  Such might have been a grand experience for most people, but she could see this more as a final end to her life’s mission.  Such conversations would be more appropriate for those who would persist beyond her mission.  Of course though, as it fit her mission, she still had paid attention.. in the off-chance she heard anything that matched Axln’s initial concerns.  Some vague concept that would be in line with the aforementioned weakness that chaos was ready to exploit.  Of course, nothing had stood out that seemed relatable, even through all of that conversation.  Sustaining her diligence, she spent her idle time brainstorming what she knew for any hint of an answer.

“You mumble in thought just like Kori does.”  “Wait, is someone there?”  “Holi, which also means I don’t really sleep.  Kori was my original creator, the one who wrote the script of my creation.  As such, I’ve been very close to her the entire time, and I’m aware of her many quirks.  Considering that it seems you’re supposed to be her daughter, I can hear the resemblance.”  “Ah, well, she’s not my real mom.”  “An Axln is your real mom, maybe not exactly that Axln.  That fact alone still makes you blood-related, and I hear blood matters more there than it does here.”  “Not when it comes to family, it wouldn’t be any different.”  “Well, I’ve seen how close Rosa and Sophie are, and they are tied together by blood and little else.  It sounds like Axln and Xwyhr have quite the blood ties too.  They got so close simply by the kinship of such blood ties, even without having experiences together, as there was plenty else to bind them.  Your foolish rejection of such then makes no sense, even with all the psychological profiles I’ve accumulated.”  Holi might be an artificial being, but even Mheridz could tell Holi could still think like a person.  However, Holi couldn’t think like Mheridz, Holi just didn’t understand her personal situation, there was no way she would have a proper comparison.

“You’re foolishness is honestly so much like Velvet here.”  “Wait, Vael?  She’s there?”  “Not on Epsilon, but I’m at many places at once, one of them is still assigned to watch over Velvet.  Ah, true, you two would have been going through all of this stuff together.. but you would not have once ever in your entire lifetime met your partner in crime.  I could arrange it, you know.  Velvet isn’t even sleeping right now, she got her rest a long time ago.  Would you care for such an opportunity?”  “I.. I might, actually.  Could you be so kind?”  “It appears Velvet is as up to the idea as you are, though she’s much louder about it.  It will take some time for Velvet to arrive, though I guess waiting has been your task as things stand, waiting a bit more shouldn’t be asking for much.”  “Ye-yeah, that’s fine.”  Holi went silent, giving Mheridz the opportunity to collect her thoughts.  Velvet, she would actually get to meet Velvet?  Unlike the others, this was her chance to connect with her alternate who would only hold their life’s mission, this meeting was completely different.  The wait time thus provided her a chance to compose herself and collect her thoughts, wondering  exactly how a young Lyun would be like.

“Hey Mary!  You there?”  “Oh hells, you are loud.  Quiet down, people are sleeping here.”  “Well, people are sleeping here too.”  “So could you maybe be so considerate, thanks?  Sheesh, so this is the Vael I’ve been supposed to work with.”  “Hey, it’s Velvet, not Vael.”  “And I’m Mheridz, not Mary, if you would be so kind.  Sheesh, not even your mother is like this, did you get this from that, Drew, or something?”  “Dad?  He is quite authoritative, but I don’t see how that has to do with anything.  Besides, you wouldn’t know dad.. that Drew is not my father.”  “Huh, so we do have some of the same perspectives going on here.  Has to be a matter of upbringing.  Then how about this, what do you think of the new.. what were their names again.. the new Kori and Rosa?”  “They changed.. a lot.  Right around when things stopped making sense, they became something pretty cool.  Rosa.. I still don’t think of her as mom, though.. if that’s what you’re getting at.  Rosa.. she’s.. just too cool to be my mom now.”  “So becoming better than the mom you knew is enough for her to stop being the same person?”  “What?  I guess no, I just don’t think I can be allowed to think of her as mom.  Seriously, she’s younger than me, you know that, right?”  Velvet was even starting to get loud again, encouraging a bit more shushing and silence before Mheridz would continue.

“Don’t think I’m not familiar with your circumstances, Axln is also younger than me.  I also haven’t been considering her as my mother either.”  “Well, yeah, this is a completely new timeline, my real mom is dead.”  “So what is Rosa to you?”  “Rosa is.. is.. uh.. Rosa?”  “You’re evading the question.”  “Well, how am I supposed to know?  How would… Wait, you wouldn’t know either, that’s why you’re asking me.  Kori did mind games like that too, I’m on to you.”  “Wait, so you’re saying I’m a lot like Kori?”  “No, Kori at least talks normally.. though I guess she’s really good at talking that way too.  Kori is just good at talking, especially this Kori.”  “Well, no wonder we failed to get anything done around those two, I was working with a fool.”  “Hey!  That’s not fair!  I totally had things under control until those two became awesome.  It was even your fault they got the book in the first place.”  “You still didn’t stick to mother’s plan very well, probably didn’t remember it half as well as you needed to.”  “Well, if you stuck to the plan, you were the only one.  Those two certainly didn’t stick to it.”  Mheridz was finding this sudden argument with Velvet to be all too natural, feeling like she was getting along in a sudden conflict that matched their parents far too frequently.  In fact, it was a trait Mheridz was certainly hoping for.

“Well, how did they learn so much about what was going on?  There were countless little things about the future that occurred, I’m certain someone was leaking information.  Would that have been you?”  “What?!  Don’t go pinning that on me, that’s completely unreasonable!”  “Ah, you sure you didn’t have those occasional moments where you let things slip by?”  “Damn it, she kept throwing her life on the line over and over again, there is no way I could stand to lose my mom like that a second time.”  “Your mom?  But I thought she wasn’t your real mom.”  “She.. well.. I guess.. she isn’t exactly not my mom either.  Shit, it’s complicated.”  “Not your mom, but basically your mom, just a younger version of mom.  Completely related by blood and everything, right?”  “Well, yeah, I guess.  I mean, she’s younger.. but right now she’s feeling so much beyond me, sort of like I’m the one who suddenly lost years of experience.  This version seems to be even beyond the mom I lost.  This one.. stood up to the terms that killed mom.. and outshone her.”  “Well, then maybe we both need to start keeping up, right?  Neither of us have much time left, we need to show them how much we care about them, right?  After all, we’re both pretty upset with how much each mother seemed so distant always, that’s going to have to be a lesson we share before we go, so that they remember it for our successors.”  Mheridz sighed, her brainstorming with Velvet having resolved the matter with that.

It was fortunate that Velvet really was as prone to panicking as Mheridz had heard, as it delivered the right exposition to information for Mheridz.  It had really honestly been easier for Mheridz to get her kin in this mission to admit it before she did.  Successor, which would be another her.. which implied that this Axln was just another Axln.  That itself connected to mean that Axln was then also just another version of her mom.. but that didn’t make her blood relation any different.  The two of them would simply have to open up to the fact that they needed to recognize the terms of their blood ties to both women.  At this point, continued refusal to do so might actually be just as foolish as Holi had claimed it had been.

“Hey!  Stop that!”  “What?  I’m not doing anything.”  “Oh, not you.  Holi.. as in the visible form of Holi.. she’s visibly mocking me right now.”  “I don’t hear anything.”  “Oh, she isn’t making a sound, but she really doesn’t have to.  She would have heard this entire conversation too.”  “Ah well, she was calling us fools earlier.”  “Seriously, she’s always like that.  You’re lucky you never had to deal with a Holi there.”  “True, I think the closest thing here would be Luna, who is currently nowhere around.  She’s far more matter-of-fact than clever wit.”  “Seriously, lucky you.”  “Hey, Luna is boring, I would love to have a Holi like that around to speak with.”  Velvet and Mheridz fell into casual conversation from that point, simply taking the opportunity to investigate each other’s lives in the process, an individual version of the same meeting that the others had recently just experienced.  Holi really was listening to the whole thing too, taking record of the conversation in case Kori might find use for it one day.  In fact, such an encounter would be priceless to share with the aforementioned siblings one day too, once they had grown up, making it fortunate that the instrument used for communication was also capable of holding records.

“Mheridz, who are you even talking to?”  “Oh, sorry mom, it’s just Velvet.”  “Wait, what did you call…?”  “Well, she didn’t like being called Vael, so I stopped.  I fail to see how that’s surprising.”  “That’s not what.. you know what, nevermind.  I assume that Velvet has grouped up with the others then, so we might as well include her in the entire process.”  “Ah, we were remarking on that too, considering the two of us have held quite the study of our shared enemy’s vision.  However, we came up with nothing new.  At the very least, we should both be ready for that turn of the task at hand.  Do you want me to get the others?  You still seem to be waking up a bit.”  “I’m not used to sleeping in active time, it doesn’t feel right anymore.  Keeping a flow of chaos going the whole time probably didn’t help.”  “Yeah, so you look after yourself, I’ll go get the others.  Velvet, can you get the people on that side too?  You know, when you stop giggling.  It really wasn’t that funny.”  Axln suspected she missed the joke before walking in on Mheridz, devoting her attention to simply waking up while sustaining the connection.  Velvet on the other side couldn’t even voice a reply through her giggling, wandering away to alert the others as she composed herself.  Velvet however hadn’t needed to do much more than send a message through the ship’s console, so she was back rather quickly.  By that point, Lyun had arrived of her own volition, having not fared much better than Axln.  Lyun then swapped out with Axln, allowing Axln to get them both something to snack upon to get them restored and refreshed.

“I can see why the other world uses coffee, I could probably go for some right about now.”  “Oh, hey mom.”  “Velvet!  I didn’t expect you would be there.”  “I got called over by Holi, something about needing to meet Mheridz.”  “Oh, I guess that would have been interesting.  Learn anything new?”  “Well, I just learned that your side there is so undeveloped so as to not have coffee.”  “You didn’t know that already?”  “No, I did, sorry.  I guess you didn’t hear me sipping some delicious coffee and… Hey!  I was still drinking that!  Holi, where are you taking my coffee!”  “Velvet?”  “Sorry, I’m back.  It seems there isn’t coffee to be had here either.”  Lyun still wasn’t in the mood for Velvet’s antics, this sudden reminder of how off she felt not being the warmest of impressions.  She didn’t even notice the casual reference in the process.  Even the process of making adjustments to Axln’s arm first thing in the morning, a point the girl had apparently been constantly forgetting about, hadn’t come up until it caused problems while waking up.  Lyun could recall her being originally blamed for forgetting such a detail, but the recent neglect would be all Axln’s fault.  Mheridz however walked into the discussion about half-way through, passing both Axln and Lyun some fresh brewed tea in the process while doing her best to stifle a giggle at the exchange.  That had been quite an exchange to witness.  Soon after that, they were joined with a gathering of the previous groups in another shared meeting, but this time with Mheridz and Velvet taking part as well.

“Are we sure the problem isn’t something so simple as fundamental design?  Science versus magic?”  “Drew, it’s not magic.  Elemental.  There is a refined and established premise behind it.”  Drew and Jhez lead the conjecture, leader and teacher.  “Elementals, energy, Rosa always made the two seem interchangeable.  Heck, her ability makes the two interchangeable.”  “Maybe then it’s more in instrumentation and .. what was it again.. technology?  Even with Lyun, it looks like the stuff needs to be swapped out to play its own roles.”  Tristine could remember the equipment Ezhyrae was talking about, it certainly was a distant comparison.  “As someone unfamiliar with both, I think you’re just poking at familiarities too heavily.  Take a box, throw in a battery, wire it to do something, stuff happens.  That seems pretty similar in both cases, just with a different styled power source causing different outputs.”  “So are we then going back to blaming elementals?  Honestly, this is why I hate meetings, just running around in circles getting nowhere ever.  Are we just going to waste another round of discussion and have to yet again sleep on it?”  Sophie couldn’t blame Xwyhr for such an outburst, things really weren’t going very well in all of this.

“Well, I can see I missed nothing then, even showing up late.  People are just poking fun at things that stand out for them in their daily lives, without thinking like the enemy.  DMAs, dark matter anomalies, they don’t give two shits about how power works, they would rather it doesn’t.”  “True, the voidspawn don’t exactly favour instrumentation or the elements, they are actually more disinterested in it.  However, might it be that our power source is itself void-like?”  “You use dark matter as a power source?  Okay, now that’s cool.”  “Well, no, I guess not.  We just use the void to make elements stronger.”  “Yeah, so that’s totally the wrong track, just right there.  Their composition makes your stuff stronger, I see that as the opposite of a weakness.  Oh yeah, and they supposedly fear black holes.  I hear you guys don’t have those.. or at least haven’t observed records of them.  After all, you proved the stuff could happen at least, ripping holes in time-space and all.  Meanwhile, we get to weaponize the sun here.  You guys have that too, right?”  “I wonder, we do have one sun fewer than you do though.”  “Ah, you think Proma counts for something?  I’m not sure what it would count for.”  Velvet pondered Mheridz’s idea, really not seeing the most minor of stars in their system as having held that much meaning.

“Actually, from my own research, Yhndaeqi had another sun, but it was lost a long time ago.  My estimates on planetary history show that the loss of the sun would have occurred around when the original Ruixse perished.  So.. that’s not exactly a cause, more of an effect.  The star would have been lost to chaos because of a vulnerability, it didn’t cause the vulnerability by not being there.”  “Scientifically, considering the absolute zero composition held by chaos, I can see no difference between both solar ambiences either.  Velvet is probably right, this has nothing to do with how our stuff actually works, it would be something else entirely.”  Axln was coming to the same idea as Lyun, they were completely in the wrong area here, remarking upon principles as if chaos would command such stuff.  Stuff like that would be closer to even true chaos, something primitive chaos was too hesitant to touch, so this really was distant from their goal.

“Yeah, that doesn’t make sense either.  Everyone there is making a big scene of your kind of dark matter playing on the moon, and you said elements come from that one sun.. so how did a victory blow up a sun?”  “It was probably targeted by a lot of void generated in their victory, that’s all.  Several of the planets in this star cluster perished too, so that one just probably vanished completely.”  “Oh, so it was probably just an accident then.  Well, that sucks.. and here I thought we had taken taxing losses.”  “I wouldn’t expect it to be so much an accident as just the accumulation of ability.”  “Fair, so not exactly.. chance but more of just being fate.”  “No, not really, fate doesn’t exist.”  “Ah well, if that’s just a dead end, what else could it be?”  Velvet and Mheridz turned to speculate upon other ideas, pondering exactly what might be the secret hidden in this puzzle.

While the discussion was going on, Jhez knocked over one of the few books remaining that had been scattered precariously in distinct locations of the room, yet another sign of his cluttered thoughts.  Axln couldn’t even blame him, not this time, even their thoughts were in a clutter right now and there honestly wasn’t a better place to put stuff like that either.  The chances of having such stuff fall over was immeasurably high, even if it was more surprising the stuff hadn’t simply spontaneously combusted during the chaos of misfortune.  Axln was thankful that the efforts she needed to employ to deal with such a problem was only needed once, the other side not having endured such a chaotic sprawl of misfortune.  Even at the mention of the word, fate, she knew it was that which blessed her in only needing to take action once.  Maligned chance of such deprived randomness couldn’t work in a place where people could take charge of their own fates with consistent principles.

Axln burst to attention, awake greater than even the tea had left her.  Could that be it?  Even with the book picked up, the present clutter, Axln recalled yet another book she had glanced upon previously.  That was.. it was titled ‘Unrestrained Destiny, Chains Unbound’.  It had even spoken of the world’s fate being unbound, the world finally set free.  However, that particular book would still be back in the academy, and it would be lost in yet another clutter of books.  She suspected that particular book would have held what they needed.. a book she had even skipped over back then even under the same mindset.  Well, back then, she was worrying about her current problems, matters such as fate weren’t on her mind.  Velvet however.. Velvet was really good at being random like this.  It would definitely be a lead, that was fairly obvious.

Axln tried to remember everything she could about that book, turning up considerable blanks in the process.  This sucked, they would have to go on a merry chase in order to obtain that book to uncover the secrets they needed.  Well, that wouldn’t be the first time, she still recalled her galavanting experience through the citadel in search of yet another book.. which may have actually held a similar design.  Most notably, from what she could remember of that book, was the only part that stood out, the label attached to it.  Something about that label simply seemed familiar to the writing within the self-same book.  Even the design of the cover.. actually, was it the same?  The two were then very likely related.  It was definitely something worth looking into, especially since the citadel was actually here.  She would need to bring Lyun though, who had been to that same room at the same time.

Sure, Axln had a lot of confidence that fate was what mattered here, but it wouldn’t be so simple.  There was something that would remain between her and fate’s acquisition, something which would make this far more clear.

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FV – Chapter 68

Ephemeral Duality

With everything resolved on one front, the two girls bid their farewells before switching back to the other front.  Back at Izheelq once again, the two girls individually made their descent from orbit in their own individual ways.

Axln touched down on the ground first, her rift having been the quickest solution.  She was not only on stable ground, she was actually back inside the rift room of the citadel.  A quick review spelled out that she hadn’t missed much that she hadn’t expected from Lyun’s report of things before setting off to find Mheridz.  The rift instrument was still down, though that was supposedly the easiest expectation, the thing would be inoperable for no fewer than days, if not worse.  There was no intent that things would endure quite that long, so it wasn’t fruitful to worry about such at all.  Instead, she turned her attention to everything else ongoing.  The citadel as a whole looked to have gotten back up to normal operations once again.. which also prevented her from finding gaps to rift through to reach wherever the others would be right now.  With a bit of wandering, she eventually encountered an Ersatz who guided her over to the workspace Mheridz had been using for healing.  There, she found Lyun already having a conversation with Ezhyrae, the woman having recovered in the meanwhile.  Mheridz caught wind of Axln scowling in the doorway, surmising that there was some disappointment in Lyun having arrived first.

“She became surprisingly quick, didn’t she?”  “Surprising.. yeah.  Did she share any stories about what we just did on the other side yet?”  “She said things have been taken care of, so you two could focus on things here.  How long do you expect things to have been contained on that side?”  “At least twenty generations, unless something unexpected happens.  Of course, if things go wrong here, it could be even less.  If things go quite well here, it might be a lot longer.”  “Wait, generations?  Then…”  “Yeah, something about a principle projection cannon, more like a planetary satellite inferno.  She did some cross-world weaving to build a lens four times bigger than the moon.  Pretty much turned that to gather solar might mixed with thermite intensity and…  Yeah, none of those things remained.”  “Well, don’t worry, I suspect that was just the easy part.  We started getting a lot of sightings of voidspawn around here too, but they’ve grown rather timid.  Whatever you did to fix things here did more than just restore our good fortune, you’ve broken our enemy’s will.”  “Both sides would have lost contact with the temporal plane, but this side got to witness why.  The other side was lost and confused at the disconnect.. but now remains silent.  Apparently, not only has the temporal plane gone into lockdown though, they’ve also driven to disconnect for now entirely.  Rosa’s demonstration had been enough to show that they need not watch further, there would be no primitive chaos survivors on either principled fields.  The ones here then are thus simply waiting to be eliminated.”  Mheridz was visibly impressed, having never considered that Axln could have ever made this day come at last.

“Want to join me on a scouting party, so that we could finish off what remains?  This was your fight in the beginning, you might as well be around to finish it.  Then you would get to rest at last, right?”  “Uh, yeah, right.  Sure, I guess, things are already going quite well here.  Drew and Xwyhr both recovered, by the way, but they are currently sleeping.  Lyun it seems was saying she would help with any of the repairs she had walked away to as well, and everyone else would be soon returning to their fallen siege-mantle.  Luna it seemed had already been assigned to handle repairs there, she’s already out with a bunch of the local ersatz, with several more due to follow once people are healthy enough here to return.  If you had been a few moments later, that might have already happened, so we can expect to return to such a tranquility.”  “Lyun’s going to follow them, hopefully after making sure the citadel is locked down.  The place is a fortress though, so there wouldn’t be any threat to worry about here.  When we’re done then, we should go meet up with them.”  “Are you going to let Lyun at least know before we go what you’re doing?”  “Oh, I passed her the idea quickly, she understands.  Something about leaving me to finish up my uncompleted work, while she looks after anything which might distract me in the process.  Also, about being careful.”  “Ah, the irony, it’s always that one who seems to never know what careful means while you yourself proceed with minimized risks.”  “People surprise you, never just assume they won’t change.”  Axln sounded caught in reflection to Mheridz there, though it was a message Mheridz could certainly respect.  Axln however did need to have her arm repaired before she left, something one of the simple ersatz had helped her with, the same one who was also offering to guide them out.  Of course, she didn’t feel as if the results were that good, and she would certainly be asking Lyun for better repairs later, but it would do for now.  She was thus still reflecting upon such a conversation as it would relate to Lyun while they both made the remaining stretch out the main entrance, leaving their guide behind once again.

“You might have a point, even in your case, you have certainly surprised me.  To think that all of this would finally be ending, and all within this very timeline.  We had asked for your surrender, and you never did, instead you turned everything around and achieved what should have been impossible.  Certainly, this isn’t time to rest just yet, the two of us being still present means that there remains a chance that history could still repeat itself.  However, I believe even I’m fine with giving this timeline its chance at redemption.  Velvet would be even less resistive, so you no longer have anyone asking for your surrender.  Of course, while we remain, the chances our request would be required remains too, so I would ask that you keep such a time travelling option at least on your mind.  Meanwhile, I’ll keep in my mind the potential this timeline might finally bring forward.  Fair trade, right?”  Mheridz sounded like that admission took a lot for her to complete, the girl was outright admitting to being possibly wrong over all this time.  Axln was certain it was genetic, admitting one was wrong was just difficult for the family.  As such, she was similarly awkward in trying to form a decent reply, just nodding her acceptance silently still in deep thought.

The two of them confronted a couple of fiends who really put up very little resistance, the pair dealing with the threat without even putting up a sweat.  Of course, most of the whole thing was simply Axln’s doing, Mheridz had simply kept them occupied so that Axln could obliterate them.  Mheridz recalled the studies she held diligently of her mother’s fieldwork.. this was nothing close to the same.  The ferocity of efficiency Axln was exhibiting was making it seem like these lessers wouldn’t even naturally be a threat, dealing with each of them in a single calculated strike.  Her mother was a vanguard of their defense, this Axln was more a heroic legend of impossible potential.  Mheridz could still remember all the times she had tried to deal with such a woman, an act which seemed outright foolhardy at this point.  Mheridz had been unable to stop chaos, chaos had been unable to stop this woman.  As a result, what hopes did she have?  In fact, if she was forced to go back in time due to any unexpected failure, Mheridz was certain she would try to shape this same outcome.. only making sure there would be enough extra strength to deal with whatever obstacle still remained.  There was absolutely nothing Mheridz could achieve at this point that Axln simply couldn’t do better.  Even so, she was still proud to have played a hand in this shining glory beyond the ages.

Axln quickly adopted a routine of slaughter, rending fiends after fiends without remorse, leaving Mheridz with little to do in turn.  Such didn’t matter to her, not really.  She was getting to witness the end of despair, given the chance to behold the greatness that would come from such anguish.  All of Mheridz’s torment, it had all been for this, and it was ever so worth it.  To be of the bloodline of heroes.. she really had started quite the path to greatness.  Mheridz however was still uncertain what sort of life her successor would have, having to live with the blood of heroes in a future captured in tranquility.  She could only hope it was much better than her own upbringing, even if it was a huge reputation to stand up to.  Maybe this time.. maybe she wouldn’t be alone.  Actually, considering this inclusion, getting to actually go around doing this sort of thing with Axln.. instead of being left behind to only study it.. she didn’t expect a life of solidarity either.  Then, as their last fiend fell, Mheridz wiped her eyes as they witnessed the resolution of a lifelong dream and the ending of a lifelong nightmare.

“I’m.. I’m still here.”  “I suspected that might happen.  We’re not done yet.”  “What else might be left?”  “I’ve still been charged with a responsibility, one that involves discovering Ruixse’s hidden weakness.  Until I accomplish that, the threat has not been resolved.  Our enemy is gone, but they might still return without that final accomplishment.  However, I suspect this might be a bit much for me to do alone.  We should return to the others, and seek a solution in complete unity.”  Mheridz gave no doubt for Axln’s claim, far beyond certain that Axln had an understanding of everything that vastly exceeded her own.  However, that then brought her attention around to what would then still be left to accomplish.  Having resolved that Axln’s understanding exceeded her own, her confidence was all too shattered in her ability to share anything that would be relevant.

“I guess.. but even that might be unlikely.  After all, if such is beyond your own understanding, then I’m uncertain how much more our world could offer you for brainstorming.  Compared to you, compared to your cross-world knowledge.. embodied with chaos.. there is only so much our world could offer you.”  “My word, that’s brilliant.  Mheridz, you’re a genius!”  “I.. I what?”  “When one world isn’t enough, use two.  We can even make this work, because we’ve proven we can.  There is still plenty of vagrant chaos left, we just need to bring people together and maybe collect some sparse added resources.  Yeah, this should actually be fine.”  Mheridz was suddenly even more uncertain of her own understanding and even more aware of Axln’s impressive understanding over everything.  Trusting that things would become more obvious, Mheridz followed Axln over to the crash site of the academy’s siege-mantle, finding everyone had indeed arrived as expected.

“Lyun, I need your help with something.  I’ve got a plan that would let us plan a plan.”  “A.. what?  My head hurts.  Too much planning.  What are we doing this for anyway?  Was cleaning up chaos too much work?”  “Oh, no, that’s done, it wasn’t even hard.  Mheridz could have probably done everything else on her own, they really didn’t put up a fight at all.”  “Oh, so you’re saying I sort of overdid everything.. well…”  “Hey, I’m not saying anything like that.  It was a brilliant idea, and I think we could continue to make use of it.”  “We.. what?  I know we agreed to explain stuff, but you’re really not being clear at all.”  “Exactly, things aren’t very clear right now, so we need to amass all of our information in one spot.  To depend on everyone, you know?”  “No, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”  “Okay, fine, maybe it would just be easier to show you what I mean.”  Axln dragged Lyun off from her craft repairs, searching next for Luna who would also be needed for her master plan.  Mheridz meanwhile was left stuttering her unspoken objections, certain that none of the work they had just done would have been nearly as simple with just her alone.  Not only taking much longer, she was certain the only reason the fiends didn’t put up a real fight was because they were each obliterated in a single strike.  At least Mheridz understood why, the mass concentration of elementals returning here provided plenty of might to unmake the void remnants scattered around, but tapping into that natural might still remained a bit too complicated for her alone, not without chaos which could shape such stuff.

Mheridz however couldn’t give any claim for understanding where Axln might be going with everything now.  She was even still having problems wrapping her head around what might be the terms of success still required.  Heck, she was still wrapping her head around the idea that success might be so close.  Of course, there would be plenty else for the people who remained to work upon, even after she faded from this timeline, the broken siege-mantle was a clear sign of such beginnings.  However, such would itself only be a matter of time too, one of the ersatz taking Lyun’s place in administering repairs.  Mheridz wasn’t skilled at such repair work herself, so she turned to leave such efforts to those better skilled in the field, turning to figure out where Axln had rushed off to.  She eventually found Axln and Lyun working with Luna on some strange instrument she couldn’t quite place.  It looked like the siege-mantle’s communication gear, though it already had some of the citadel’s stuff hooked into it.  Her best assumption was that this would be used to establish a connection with Ruixse, but for what purpose?  At best, it would be a call to the academy, because she highly doubted they would have concerns with the foundry.  Even so, there would be easier ways to accomplish such a purpose, solutions which wouldn’t require such anomalies.

What Mheridz did not know was that the citadel equipment installed contained an intricate combination of terran mythos artifacts along with key components of a rift assembly.  The aspiration of this goal had existed long before any of them, originating from a world from another part of the Atrieyn Cosmic Layer.  Luna however knew where all of the parts which existed from such past projects had been stored, and had offered them to the inheritor when it sounded like such parts would comply perfectly with the self-same goal.  There was even a subtle part of the barely animated ersatz that felt aspiration in this moment of realization, a fragment of an essence it hadn’t held for generations.  After all, this was not a communication link that would return to the world they left behind, it would be a meeting of the minds that had not been reached since the dawn of the instrumentation era.

“So, next I’m going to need you to weave that interworld logic thing you did on the other side while I breach chaos with a rift that resolves into another breach of interworld logic on the other side, bypassing temporal interference with chaos.. mostly because the temporal side is locked tight.  This gate can open clean, but we would need information equipment to broadcast through such a link.  Luna fortunately has plenty of terran-styled information equipment.. stuff that just happened to be sitting around the citadel for some reason, so we don’t need to worry about having something that could safely pass through such a gateway.  This equipment seems to be really good at breaching rifts beyond our plane too, even though I can’t find any record of instrumentation in that field.  Clearly though, it was made for Luna, even has that crescent moon mark on it that matches her hairpin.  Things couldn’t have been set up for this any better.”  Axln sounded proud, even though she remained the only one certain of what exactly was going on.  Lyun was wondering if Axln had landed a head injury while away, as whatever was going on sounded outright insane.  Worse, it sounded like a slightly creative insanity, a mad genius project which really was nothing like Axln.  Even so, Axln had gone along with Lyun’s previous project, so she was going to give Axln’s a chance too.

Lyun however stumbled when the suspended time hit, not having expected that to be part of the equation.  She needed to do all of her stuff in suspended time?  Mheridz was also visibly surprised, but kept her distance, knowing better than to get in the way of the experts.  Lyun rebuilt her mixed principle design, even though there were no sure signs of it while time was suspended.  With such a thing completed, Axln turned on the instrument.. which did nothing in suspended time.. and then injected a rift into the rift’s design, wrapping chaos around the non-existent design with the same influence that she would use to open a gate to this side of the world.  With the combination of principles, there was only one possible source that could lead to this destination.. and the outcome was suspended in a principle of passage.  Axln then cut the time suspension, causing the rift device to come to life, stabilizing the rift already created for it by its own principles.  However, because the passage was practically ethereal, there was no visible passage for this rift.  Axln then revised the functionality of the communication instruments with her own gift, having it make use of the rift provided to pass through communication in a very specific wave form.

“Hello?  I wasn’t expecting any open links in this design, especially coming from the surface of the moon.  Who exactly is this?”  “By the divine, is that Holi?”  “Oh, wow, Rosa.. I thought you were currently absent from this side.”  “Oh, uh, actually, I am.  Also, I’m technically Lyun right now, which gets even more complicated with this cross-world communication.”  “Actually, that makes sense.  You sound very similar to Rosa.. but not exactly so.  I recall you would be an elf there as well, so your genetic strands are decidedly distinct.  Knowing how you two are together, I suspect Kori is with you.. but also going by another name?”  “Oh, yeah, she seems to be working to make sure this thing stays stable, from what I can tell.  Here, her name is Axln.”  “Very well.  Considering that Axln, there, would be especially familiar with the routines needed to establish communication with me, I can tell why she would have reached out to me specifically.  However, I doubt she was so inclined to only end such an outreach with just that.  Would you want me to forward this communication link to others who might be interested in hearing from you both?”  “Oh, wow!  Yes please!”  Holi seemed to understand the plan even more than Lyun did, though Lyun was quite loving where things were going.  Lyun didn’t miss that this was an underlying portion of Axln’s personality that had just shined out, the need to breach the distance between people and worlds, to reach out in a social manner.  Everything they had done had just yielded what was needed to make such a thing happen, after all.

“I heard some shouting over here, did anything go wrong?”  “Oh, Xwyhr, quite the opposite.  It seems your sister has finally taken to your example, reaching out to people of her own accord.”  “I feel my example got lost somewhere before it became official.  My way was much more impulsive, and not always following the rules.”  “Yeah.. yeah, that.  Absolutely unexpected, breaking every rule of reality in the process.  Seems we’re going to have an absolutely unplanned social gathering, right here and now.”  “We.. what?  Okay, do go on.  I totally want in on this, whatever this is.”  “Then maybe you could bring Jhez and Ezhyrae, they would love to check this out too.  Once in a lifetime experience and everything.”  Xwyhr ran off to quickly complete Lyun’s request, as her interest peaked.  However, while the girl was still gone, Holi completed her side of the process.

“This is Epsilon, reading you clearly.”  “Sophie, don’t be a stick in the mud.  Just because you’re a ship captain right now doesn’t mean you can’t relax once in a while.”  “Wow, Kori?”  “Axln, as I am on this side.  Lyun is here too, not going by Rosa either.”  “Shit, so you’re calling from the fantasy world or something.”  “Yeah, I never did like that name, considering that side is basically this side’s fantasy world.  But yes, that’s the basic idea.  Anyway, I was hoping you could gather the others for a bit of a meeting.  I suspect we’re going to need some of HyperTech’s insight here to get everything resolved.. but at this point I think it’s novel enough to simply introduce one set of our friends to the other before we even get started.”  Sophie was then promptly off to ensure a gathering on Epsilon for Axln’s cross-world meeting.  By this point though, the other sister had already accomplished her side of the gathering process.

“Axln, that voice.. it used the accent of the Terran Mythos.  Who were you talking with?”  “My word, this is going to blow your historian mind, Jhez.  We’re going to be holding a meeting here across two moons, and I’m not talking about Hyxeelq.  We’ve got a once in a lifetime connection with the terran side right here and now.  Hold on a bit though, they’re still gathering people for this one, things have been moving rather quickly.”  “By the divine, that’s remarkable.  You will certainly have to explain to me what you did, but I expect making use of such innovation would have priority over explaining it.  If the parts used for this process have no use afterwards, I do hope you’re willing to have the entire thing delivered to the archives.. it would become a priceless artifact of the ages.”  “Ask Ezhyrae, we’re using her communication equipment.  Well, part of it is her’s, the rest is.. I guess mine?  You can have my part at least, I see no problem with that.”  Jhez was almost bursting from his contained excitement at Axln’s news, this proximity to a lifelong dream made real becoming almost too much for the guy.  Even so, his thoughts jumbling into a clustered mess, Jhez voiced no further inquiries while waiting.

Eventually, Sophie managed to return with Drew and Tristine, sparking the beginning of a long conversation spanning worlds.  Introductions evolved into stories and a plentitude of idle chat, going over so many distinct ideas and inquiries between both worlds.  Of course, as a result, most of the discussion revolved around the two girls, with plenty of initial confusion as people remained uncertain at when to use one name or the other.  Of course, both girls had a solution to that problem, it was the same one they had painted over this enter experience.  The world to the name, so stuff they did on this side got the names of this side, while stuff they did on that side got the name of that side.  Of course, when it came time to consider them as a person, the facts that were mutual to both sides, that’s when there was unresolved uncertainty.  Both parties simply opted to refer to each by the name they had always used, at least being familiar with the reference when it changed for the other party.

Moments quickly spanned hours as the conversation appeared unending.  With this being possibly the only chance for such a cross-world venture for the people involved, there was so much everyone wanted to accomplish with the opportunity.

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FV – Chapter 67

Scorched Earth

Kori gradually stirred awake, taking account of the medical nature of her surroundings.  A quick surveillance across all of her surroundings had her spotting Rosa and Velvet talking not far away, she had a pretty good idea what she might have missed.

“Kori!  You’re up!”  “Thanks to you, I’m guessing.  Couldn’t help but rush out to pick me up, straight out of your own sickbed, then bring me to this side and carry me over to Velvet’s battlecruiser.”  “Well, yes, of course.  Mheridz wasn’t going to do anything, she just said you would be fine.”  “Ah, well, she wasn’t wrong.”  “Says the girl who had to recover at medbay.”  “According to the medical report, I wasn’t doing badly at all.  I expect the only problems I had when you found me was being excessively tired and in need of repairs to my arm.  I also expect you totally ignored such repairs and never noticed.”  “I uh.. Maybe.  Getting you to a safe place was far more important!”  “I also expect you had nothing to fight on that side, and only had to resort to holding a defense once you reached this side.”  “Maybe.. but switching over was Mheridz’s idea!”  “Well, it wasn’t as if she would have seen the situation, she would have been taking care of actually important problems.  You should have taken account of the situation and came up to your own decisions.”   “Oh sure, I’ll start being better at planning once you learn to be more creative.”  “Ah, well.. about that…”  Rosa was flustered at this onslaught of critique from Kori, a fluster which started to grow into frustration.  Kori herself was still in a daze, taking account once again to the exact terms that had caused her to even lose consciousness.

“I would have you know that I actually did some repairs to support the healing instruments there too.  Mheridz had things in order before I left, but leaving you to sleep there any longer would have been outright stupid and inconsiderate.  I’m certainly not going to do nothing at all for you when there is an opportunity to actually help you.  All things considered, I still don’t see it as a dumb decision either.  Like Mheridz said, we would have things to clean up here, and we certainly do.  I know I was out of commission as you busted your butt out there, but I can darn well show you that I can carry my own weight.  Here, watch, you get things in order and I’ll go show our enemy a thing or two about what I can do out there, maybe then…”  “Shut up, please!  You’re both getting carried away here, and I’m sorry but I’m getting the worst feelings of deja vou here.  This is a really really bad scene we’re painting here, and I would really hate to revisit it.  In all considerations, I simply couldn’t take it.  Kori, please, fix this somehow.”  Rosa stopped her angry rant at Velvet’s sudden outburst, of all things.  Rosa had not expected Velvet to suddenly get set off so explosively, but the girl was outright pale as a ghost and visibly panicking with uncertainty.

“Ah, I see what you mean.  Yeah, Mheridz told me that story.. I can see the similarities here.  Rosa being away from the action, I get left shouldering too much of the burden, she shows up eager to make up for the lost opportunities.  Yeah, that’s exactly the same way Rosa had died.”  “I.. what?”  “Velvet’s timeline, that’s the basic circumstances behind your death.  Because you’re always one to go flying off the hook when provoked like that.”  “I don’t think I was alone this time, I got to see the wake of your own work.  What in the hells did you unleash?”  Kori took the opportunity to go over the details of her efforts while Rosa had been left to recover, leaving Rosa to go pure scarlet.  Velvet wasn’t even fairing much better, such certainly wasn’t something she would have expected Kori to resort to.  “So you opened a black hole on the moon and forced it into the temporal plane?”  “Uh, yeah, basically.  I quite honestly hadn’t expected such a dramatic reaction from a spanning rift, but I had to.. how did you put it.. get creative.”  “Black holes are dangerous and life threatening.  That world doesn’t even know black holes, so I don’t even know what such a disaster of a failing rift would have ensued.”  “Apparently it wrecked massive destruction in the temporal plane.”  “Hells, no kidding, such probably is destruction no matter where you put it.  We had agreed that there would be no sacrifices, that includes you, by the way!”  It was Kori’s turn to feel a bit flustered and offended by Rosa’s critique, herself determined to be in the right there because she had been as careful as she could have been, given the circumstances.

“A time rift.. that’s ridiculous, I hope you know that.  Blasting time distortions to appear in many places at once, shouldering everything because you could then do many things at once, you’re being as bad as your sister makes you sound.”  “Hey, I will have to point out that I did get Mheridz’s help.  Our brainstorming did wonders for coming up with a dramatic plan of action.”  “A full out offense, dramatic?  Maybe I do need to show you up here, show you how to actually be careful.  No one is going to die this time, in fact this time I’m going to see about keeping this stupid med bay unused too, this or any other.  No one is going to need it, not if I have my way.”  “People get sick eventually, forever is a long time.”  “I don’t mean forever, but for at least my assault.  Then maybe we can talk about how to actually be careful, avoid sacrifices, and do things properly.”  Rosa still sounded stern, but not nearly as flustered, Kori was actually impressed by how composed Rosa seemed.  However, Kori wasn’t impressed by these unfair comparisons, not considering how she knew that things here couldn’t possibly get as bad.  Everything especially dangerous had already been taken care of, Rosa wouldn’t have any threat quite so challenging to deal with.

“Holi, it’s time to get dramatic.  I need full command over all of our fleets.”  “Right away, ma’am.  Done.”  Rosa nodded to Holi who had made a physical presence there with them.  Velvet had herself gone pale, realizing that administrative access had been claimed once again.  “Rosa, this might be going a bit too far, certainly you can…”  “I am calm, don’t worry.  Sure, I might be a bit new to this planning deal, but I did just make an agreement.  Kori, you’re going to be needed outside, so make sure your ionic drive is recharged.  You might want to recharge your trance inductor drive too, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.  Velvet, could I get your help recalling the entire fleet, we’re retreating.”  Kori almost choked at Rosa’s sudden statement, not certain how to put the stubborn expression to the plan of fleeing.  None of this so far had anything close to a Rosa feeling to it, Kori had no idea what Rosa was up to here.  However, in all considerations, being prepared for anything sounded like a really smart idea right now, so she quickly fled to her own arrangements.

“Rosa, what in the world do you think you’re even doing?”  “Right now?  I’m going to make sure I have enough fuel of my own, I hope you don’t mind.”  “Not that, I mean…”  “I’m taking charge of the situation.  We need to keep everyone safe.”  “Safe, but there is still an enemy to worry about.  We can’t just…”  “Patience, there isn’t any reason to just get all panicked.  Things will happen, we just need to bring order to this chaos.”  Velvet stumbled backwards, Rosa’s resolute expression with unfurled wings really drove quite an intimidating display she had never gotten to witness her entire life.  This was an untempered ferocity she had never seen before.  Velvet rushed to Rosa’s heels, following along as Rosa restocked her own ions and made sure all forces were on retreat.  Standing in the main control room, the crew suddenly uncertain at the spontaneous shift in control broadcasted by high command, she noticed everything was at least going rather smoothly.

“This is Epsilon here, contacting control.  We’re a bit confused at the sudden request to retreat and wondering if we got our orders mixed up here.”  “Hello Sophie, it’s great to hear from you again.”  “Sis!  What are you doing there?”  “Oh, I’m suddenly in charge, that’s all.  Don’t worry, this won’t take long.”  “Wow, nice one.  Even Drew seems to approve here, by the way.  Okay, yeah, we’ll trust you know what you’re doing.”  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, I won’t let you down.”  Sophie disconnected the transmission leaving Rosa with a warm smile.  It was nice to have a family that so openly trusted her to get stuff done.  Velvet meanwhile was starting to feel like a third wheel to the current timeline, with things going even more wildly awry.  She however still could not dispel the underlying dread of the circumstances, that this was still feeling far too much like the foreshadow of Rosa’s demise.  This completely stopped Velvet from sharing in such blind trust, to instead worry how things might go so terribly wrong.

“Perfect, we’ve broken orbit and have fallen far enough from Aluna’s presence.  Begin a broadcast to Kori.  Kori, you’re to make your way to the loading hanger, be ready for dispatch.  End.  Velvet, I need you watching the helm here while we work.”  “I’m not coming too?  I would really rather come too.”  “Wow, spoiled brat much?  Fine whatever.  Grab EMP-safe gear, you’ll need it.  Holi will be following you, but only a small cluster, things will get rough on her if we need an EMP.”  “By.. EMP.. you mean…”  “Well, of course, if you’ve got any instruments handy, those might be useful too.”  “.. and you don’t mean the musical variety.  Well, I did make you promise not to do such stuff on the battlecruiser.”  “Oh, that has nothing to do with it.  Okay, it might have a little to do with it, but there simply is no room here, the battle cruiser is far too small.”  “Sm-smal-..-all!?”  Rosa made her way over to some charts to provide her with a few final calculations, while Velvet rushed to get her own stuff in order.  Nothing here had been lost to Velvet, neither in how Velvet was demonstratively being treated like a child of her own childhood, nor how an elemental shift was going to be a paramount part of Rosa’s plan.  What flew wide from Velvet’s understanding was everything that came before and after.  She still had no idea why they were retreating.. and she had even less about what grand scheme Rosa might be up to.  By the time the two reached the loading hanger, they had found Kori waiting impatiently, having arrived quite a while ago.

“So what exactly are we doing?”  “Patience, things are all according to plan.”  “Maybe, but we had an agreement, being aware of what each other was doing was part of that agreement.”  “Ah, that is true, I shouldn’t forget about that.  Okay, so.. as we know, chaos is no longer impairing any solar arrays from reaching Aestus.  The lights are back on, so maybe it’s time to bring the full scope of galactic might against our foes.. from a safe distance.”  “And we’re doing that by…”  “Remember how you said that an elemental composite of sand and ice could manipulate light elementals that pass through the glass frame?  Even Yhndae’s light remains a formidable presence in an otherwise void.  So we just need a glass lens in an elemental field that captures light and augments it into a controlled form before setting it loose again as standard solar might.  I expect we could even do a heat transfusion to get the fire elementals properly converted to and from light in the entire reaction.  The impact, of course, would be far more heat waste in the reaction, but that’s almost ideal.”  “..and we’re doing this.. why?”  “Chaotic augmentation in a controlled manipulation to process a heat warp into a sunburst.  We’re going to scorch the moon in a thermal reaction.. aimed decidedly away from Aestrus too.”  Kori looked at Rosa as if she was outright.. simply insane.  She knew this idea had absolutely no chance of working, it was outright foolish, but had no idea how to get stubborn Rosa to accept that reality.  Velvet was way ahead of Kori there, being likewise concerned.

Rosa however was gone from the battlecruiser with the end of her briefing, her wings shifting again to boosters once back into open space.  Kori sighed before blinking away in a lightspeed burst out the door, knowing that she would be left to drift in space through much of this as she could only move in bursts.  Velvet got into her chosen fighter, setting up a variety of protective instruments to help out in the event of an.. unexpected EMP.  Of course, keeping a sufficient distance would probably help for her, but that wouldn’t give her much room to jump in if things went decidedly wrong.  She even had instruments to provide a fire elemental alternative for thrust, and an instrumental override for guidance.  Instrumental weaponry and shielding were viably inferior to her technological alternatives, but she could deal in a pinch.  Getting outside, she scanned around for where Rosa and Kori might have rushed ahead to.

“Testing, testing.  This works, right Holi?  It does?  Great!  Okay, so I expect you two can hear me.  I’m going to get in position to begin the shift and start construction.  Velvet should make sure to not be in the line of the lens, you’ll even get a call from control if you are in a bad area.  Kori, we need to be at the sides too, but I’m going to need you to sand everything as I lay out the frost framework for where it should go, mostly so that everything is properly suspended.  I’m going to then invert the frost into heat to cause an instant reaction, capturing everything in a perfect design.  Yes, I know you can’t make sand here, you’ll need to tap into your familiarity and touch it up with some chaos.  Gravitationally produced sand should make enough sense chaotically for it to work.  Yes, I know that statement doesn’t make sense at all, but we are talking chaos here.  Anyway, I’m going to start on our canvas, keep an eye out for it.  Kori, be ready to shift to gravitational movement soon.”  Rosa’s voice faded from the fighter’s broadcast speakers, at least for the time being.  Of course, once the shift occurred, communication would become much harder.  At least she would still be far away enough to transmit back to the battlecruiser, she was a good ten thousand kilometers away.

“It’s time things got hot!  Chaotic me, are you ready!”  「This may be the most alarming self-reference I’ve heard between the two of you.  Chaos has tapped into the connection you just completed successfully, the same effect is reproducible during a chaotic spread, but only within the reach of that same field.」  “Good enough!  Time for some real sculpting, let’s make this lens an artwork to be proud of.  Functional.. but chaotic.”  「In case this matters, there is no voice broadcast occurring at this time.」  “Well, yeah, that would have been embarrassing.  Come on, don’t tell me Kori has never done this sort of thing before!”  「Such would not be wrong, self-discussions have indeed happened before.」  “Great.  And are we close enough to the moon to draw from all that chaos you talked about before?”  「A connection tapping into those reserves has also occurred, you are both ambient in chaos.」  “Good, because there is so much to do and so much to use.  As they say, go big or go home, and everyone seems to have a problem with that second option.”  Rosa braced herself in her position, ready to unleash her shift.  Things were going all according to plan.

Velvet rocked in her vessel, the entire thing suddenly powering down.  She made a dramatic search for the cause of the unexpected failure.. before noticing her instruments activating.  Ten thousand kilometers, a distance that could envelop all of Aestus, Velvet was suddenly far more worried that Kori.. might have been the one wrong here.  Even Velvet had accounted for the idea that a giant lens would have been insufficient to wield enough density to pull off anything close to Rosa’s plan.. but this wasn’t exactly only giant, this was looking planular in construction.  Making use of her instruments, Velvet even witnessed the growing plane of frost spiralling outwards in an all too obvious growth, even from here.  Kori however was close enough to not be aware of the overall size of the shifted field, so she just noticed the spiral of growing frost.  Kori was supposed to set sand to it.. despite all logic valid to this world, scientific or elemental.  Sand was Axln’s thing, not Kori’s.  However, tapping into her chaos, she found a nigh mighty unfurl waiting for her, a deluge of no insignificant might.

「This is a density of chaos that is very threatening to principled control.」  “I know, that’s why I said that I want our own chaos to simply be used as a guide, we need to avoid direct exposure.  A spark that commands a surge, much like that conduit generator.  Avoid overload, while directing all of such chaos so that we can drain the moon as a result.”  「The given flow of drain would be having an imposed impact on all chaos still present on the moon, actively causing collateral drain.」  “I fail to see how that’s a bad thing, we want it all gone anyway.”  「The gates to the temporal are locked, but the chaos within is still watching.  They will be aware of this impact.」  “Still not seeing a problem.  If they’re going to give us all of this stuff to work with, we might as well make use of it all, right?  Anyway, things are progressing, so time to open communications.”  Rosa took a moment to compose herself as chaos progressed the expanse of it’s outreach.  Things were really going slower than she would have normally, but the grand scale design was itself thrilling, she could only be proud of her accomplishments, like a great performance.

“Testing testing, is this thing still on?”  “Shit, Rosa?  How the hell?”  “Oh, hi Velvet.  You caught within all of this too?  Here, I’ll get your engines back online.”  “Backups are running already, how would… Shit!  Everything is on now.. engines and instruments..”  “When one world isn’t enough, use two.  Hold on, I’m trying to get Holi online too, she’s a lot more complicated to build principles for.”  Rosa tapped into further chaos to channel into her shifted domain, causing her shift to layer over itself to half exist and half not, equally.  The chaos of chaos, chaotic by even the perspectives of chaos.  Rosa knew this was just what was called true chaos being properly exhibited, so everything was cool.  Through this, her uninterrupted connection across worlds due to the lockdown of the temporal, she was tapping into so much.  She was outright proud of how well this was really going, undeniably so.

“Rosa, this is kind of weird.  This is starting to really feel like I’m using…”  “The gift?  That’s because you are.  When one world isn’t enough, use two.  I’ve managed to tap into our gifts as well within the shift, you have complete access to both your sand and shadow aspects in addition to your gravitational instrumentation.  A painter can’t paint without the right tools, right?”  “Wait, how much more do we need, this is starting to feel like it’s just going on forever.”  “Of course things won’t go on forever, that would be asking too much.”  “I know, it was just an exaggeration.  Just feels hopeless when it’s a very grand display of wasted effort.”  “Oh come on, stop being so critical.  Seriously, you’re finally working on a plan that isn’t of your own design and suddenly you’re nothing but endless critique.”  “I’m just being honest, a silly lens floating in space won’t amount to anything.”  Kori was feeling decidedly uneasy at Rosa’s dramatics.  She had enough assurance that things were indeed safe.. but her calculations made this entire project look impossible.  The magnification capabilities wouldn’t have enough generation to yield any sort of real impact, making the grand design feel insulting.  Even without such a failure project, weaving worlds like this was remarkable, something which could be much better applied to actually viable solutions.

“Kori, I think I’m starting to see things Rosa’s way here, you might want to lay up for a bit and look at the big picture.  Supposedly, you were always good at missing the big picture, and I’m absolutely certain such is true now.”  “What ‘big picture’ are you talking about?  What are you claiming I’m missing this time?  I’ve checked my calculations repeatedly, I should be missing nothing.”  “According to your calculations, what is the maximum size of the lens?”  “Maximum?  Well.. uh, wouldn’t…”  “Yeah, you’re making assumptions.  As you know, I’m caught in the current bubble of Rosa’s shift, and I’m starting to see why she moved the fleet over fifty thousand kilometers away from the moon.  I’m about ten thousand myself, clearly stepping on Rosa’s canvas here.”  “Fifty thou.. fifty thousand?”  “Okay, yeah, so I wasn’t far from the edge, so it’s only just over ten thousand kilometers away.  You two aren’t making some tiny lens, you’re making something planetary in size, something about four or five times bigger than the moon you’re targeting.  This is going to have some serious gravitational influences…”  Velvet really was still worried, even though she knew Kori was wrong.  Velvet was worried because of what it would take for Kori to be wrong.

“Oh right, gravity.  Kori, can you ensure that your command over gravitational forces negates any gravitational impacts caused by this creation?  It should still be rather light, considering it’s not exactly round, but more safeguards would never hurt.”  “Rosa, how big is this thing going to be?”  “Well, by my calculations, I needed to be at least four times bigger than Aluna.  I’m going to at least start with that, but we could keep going if things look viable enough.  Hey, watch it, you’re slowing down suddenly, I need you to keep up.”  “Keep up.. my word.  Sometimes, you ask too much.”  Rosa’s project was still seeming unbelievable to Kori, even though it was getting harder to doubt.  To think Kori had just finished working with Mheridz to try to think like Rosa in order to project the actions of primitive chaos.  This was instead an applied demonstration that proved that Rosa’s actions far exceeded the chaos of pure chaos, being so unpredictable simply by the nature of being too wild.  Rosa clearly had even her sister beat in that one, an intimidating display of a wild nature that denied all reality.

Velvet continued to watch the growing display as the overall size reached into the thousands.. and then doubled.. and then doubled again.. and then once more.  She could only imagine what this sort of sight would look like from Aestus, a vague crystalline body of a slight ripple, itself looking like a third moon that was somehow wildly.. huge.  It wasn’t glass-like yet, so the overall sand cluster would be casting the most fearful shadow over the entire world.  With that done, she turned her focus to the creation, a spiral of frost shimmering as a flame ignited in a ring around the disc.  However, such was not enough to cause such a massive creation to have a proper heat reaction, Rosa’s plan had seemed to have not accounted for this one.  Of course, it was too big, the heat required for such a massive undertaking would have been substantial.  Even so empowered, there was only so much two girls could accomplish in all of this, some things were simply too much.

“Rosa, your signal would have been received successfully, though I can not establish a connection to other nanites to substantiate that claim.  There is however sufficient evidence to prove that your signal is being processed.”  “Wait, what was her signal?”  “The ring of fire, obviously.”  “No, I mean.. what was it a signal for?”  “Limited resources have detected that ATALS is powering up to fire as requested.  An anomaly is being observed in the system in the process, as the heat being generated by ATALS far exceeds standard estimates in its overall emissions.  The station is not exhibiting dangers with the overall threat, but the heat beam being generated will certainly be itself beyond dangerous.  Estimates yield that the point of impact will exhibit temperatures greater than a thousand degrees.  Recommend clearing the impact zone and path of trajectory.”  Holi made it infinitely clear that Velvet needed to be more than just not in the path of trajectory for this heat beam, she needed to be far away from it.  Making use of the equipment she had handy, she ensured that she was nowhere close to the marked danger zone.  She was especially considerate for the red light from control going away, saying that she was in a safe space.

“A thousand degrees, that’s well within acceptable limits.  Time for some heat calibration.  I need this lens to draw an inverse reaction to the frost, decimating it with a heat that quadruples the overall fire elementals.  Kori, I hope you can help with calibration.. you should find enough chaos on hand to apply as void to manipulate this lens as an instrument.  I’m going to infuse this entire thing with chaos, to give it a complete void layer.  That will provide an augmenter while allowing us to trap in the resulting heat.  Once done, can you work on the back?  I want it ready on that side to trap light, we need this thing fully charged.”  As Rosa sent instructions, all of them could see ATALS outright glowing in its intensity.  This was really going to be a hot take.  Not long after, a surge of thermite flame burst into the lens, the heat rippling heat waves through space.  Even from Velvet’s supposedly safe distance, her alarms went off as the engine overheated.  By the time Velvet got things recovered, she was able to witness the light having been restored as well, Rosa’s creation finally visibly a glass-like lens that glowed with a solar intensity.

“All crew is maneuvering as instructed for the next projected trajectory.”  “Perfect, please let me know when they are safely in the right angle and no less than fifty thousand kilometers away.  Oh, and while you’re there, could you please get Velvet into a safe course?  She’s going to need to be at least fifteen thousand, hopefully twenty thousand.  However, she did make a stern demand that she wanted a front-row seat in all of this, and I’m certainly not going to just send a capable woman like her off to some distant safety when I know she’s fully capable of taking care of herself.  However, don’t say I never warned you.”  Holi was very obviously talking with Rosa, though it was obvious that the conversation was designed for waiting ears.  Velvet knew far too well that it was intended for her to hear this, especially that last part.  In all of the circumstances she was suddenly finding herself in, the familiarity of having Holi practically babysitting her in this insanity, Rosa’s kind gesture of understanding.. of not being dismissive.. such was something Velvet caught too.  This was so much like what Velvet’s mother had done.. except that Velvet was being invited along for the ordeal.  This was where things became entirely unfamiliar.. and why Velvet was infinitely thankful.

With everything finally in position, Rosa worked with Kori to get the entire thing angled correctly towards the moon itself, the fleet waiting safely on the far opposite side.

“Solar projector fully charged and ready to fire.  You two brace yourselves, this is going to be quite the thing.  Principle projector cannon, firing.”  Rosa’s final signal unleashed a torrent of unrivaled elementals which instantly passed through the shifted field and resolved into a natural solar intensity.  It was like unleashing the might of a small sun upon such a little moon.  The massive concentration of ordered principles was overbearing, scourging across the entire surface with an unrelenting fury.  Every single remaining fiend upon the moon perished in that incident, and the temporal plane was abuz in a frenzy of concern.  The lockdown was still strong, but it was as if that attack was aimed at their very plane, the lockdown the only thing keeping them safe from such an attack.. so soon after the last.  Chaos was resolved that it had instigated the wrath of the principled, and it appeared this undiscovered power was far more than chaos could hope to endure.  This side.. this side would have to remain locked for a long time, however long it took for such a great power to fade away.  However, the other.. they might endure not having to wait quite so long.

However, such chaos was not the only ones left in a fluster of concern.  Velvet’s systems had gone completely offline, even though they were just beyond the reach of the shifted field.  That meant that she was pretty stuck, not even having instruments that would help her at this point.  A quick overview, it was as if an energy burst had overloaded everything.. similar to an EMP.  Wait, Rosa had warned her that she had to be ready for an EMP.. that wasn’t even a joke?  Well, her system would take about ten minutes to finish restarting properly, she would have to just get comfortable.  Rosa however was around quickly, visibly giggling out there beyond her fighter.  She however did lend a hand, bracing a holo to the fighter as she lent her own thrust for a bit of an initial cruise, while Velvet waited.  Velvet felt like this was two timeline’s worth of an ‘I told you so’ given in one simple package.

Both Velvet and Kori were left in agreement, Rosa had delivered exactly what she had promised.  A dramatic and complete calculated plan that creatively delivered resolution without leaving anyone open to danger, the med bays completely empty.

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FV – Chapter 66

Lunar Liberation

Lyun eventually awoke to the growing noise of the citadel, the whole place suddenly bursting with activity.  It was at that point that Lyun recalled that she still had responsibilities to attend to, she couldn’t afford to just sit around while everyone else was working so hard.

“Welcome back, inheritor.  Please let me know if there is anything I may do to attend to you, otherwise I have been instructed to ensure that word is brought forward regarding your current status.”  “Oh, hey Luna.  Maybe I should at least know what I’ve missed, so I know what I should be doing?”  “Lady Mheridz has been coordinating everything in the absence of either inheritor, claiming that she has the blood ties to the inheritor and thus is entitled to at least some recognition, especially when there is threat to both inheritors.  Of course, you have the complete capability to override such claims.”  “Well, that has me worried.  What is she up to, then?”  “Mheridz is occupied currently with saving the lives of those found in the crash of the academy’s siege-mantle.  She is the one I’m supposed to report to once you’ve recovered.”  “Wait, what?  Crashed?  Actually, that’s an idea, let’s go see her.  This would probably be much easier that way.”  Luna led the way out the door and through the halls, bringing Lyun to yet another room nearby.  Considering all the ersatz running around, this was obviously why everything had gotten so loud around here.  Inside, she saw what was visibly quite the recovery assembly, several healing instruments scattered everywhere in front of an assembly of other random instruments.  Luna hadn’t actually ever seen this room before, but it held quite the marvel of innovation.  Much more of interest to her though was the people also present, most of which from the academy, many appearing to be in a very critical condition.  Then she noticed Mheridz switching from one room to the next, looking into the matter with absolute diligent care.

“Mheridz, what in the hells happened?”  “Oh, Lyun, you’re up.  Perfect, I need a hand.  We could be doing so much more if one of these stupid units weren’t down, could you look into it and get it working again?”  “Well, yes, but..”  “Perfect, this way.  It’s this thing here, just let me know when it’s fixed, thanks.”  “Could you at least tell me what’s going on while I work?”  “Right, you do get stressed out very easily, and that does get in the way of your results.  However, Mo-.. Axln is looking into everything else, so there is much less to worry about.”  “What else is going on?”  “Voidspawn have taken to a new attack, actually making use of probability itself to engineer stuff going wrong.  There have been numerous failures as a result, a lot more that you’re probably going to have to fix before something else goes terribly wrong.  That’s what caused the crash too, things going terribly wrong.  However, Axln has come up with a few new things that even I can hardly understand.. so now probability is back to normal.  She’s the one who brought word on everything.. and is probably the only one who understands what is going on here.  Just expect everything to be fine, it’s easiest that way right now.”  Lyun kept working on the instrument Mheridz had brought her to while considering their current conversation.  Lyun certainly had not missed Mheridz’s slip-up there, which decidedly was more like Velvet than Mheridz.  Axln had obviously been very busy while Lyun was out of the picture.  However, Mheridz was also wrong, there was another place Lyun could get such answers from.

「Quite simply, chaos had wielded the chaos of chance to engineer widespread disaster, something which had actually worked for a while.  However, chaos can defend itself from chaos, leaving that one capable of enduring misfortune through controlled chaos.  Actually, that one brought an impressive display of true chaos to bear to control the situation, melding chaos and principles together in angles chaos could not hope to explain.」  Okay, so maybe Mheridz really was at least partly right.  Lyun was going to need to get most of this story straight from Axln.  「That one is currently unreachable, having lost consciousness after their victory.  That one is currently safe, for now at least.」  Wait, where exactly are we considering as safe?  「Such would be in a hidden location in the middle of chaotically controlled territory.」  That wasn’t exactly what she would call safe, it sounded more like Axln needed to be recovered too.  See, there was a lot of value in reaching out to her own chaos to get an update of the situation.  Aware of such, she completed her own work before turning to the door.  Right, this place was a maze, she would need a guide to find the rift room.

“I’m going to go check on Axln, I think I can find her easily, and I’m worried that she hasn’t returned yet.  Where’s the rift room again?”  “Oh, it’s really not far away, but there isn’t any point in going there.  The whole thing sort of failed for us.  Remember, I explained before, instruments didn’t exactly like enduring mass misfortune.  Luna says the whole thing is shot, would take a long time to repair, probably even for you.”  “How did you get everyone aboard then?”  “We landed the citadel.. it seems this thing was totally designed to sit in a hole in the ground.  I always thought that area was a landing hanger, but it seems it also makes for the place’s main entryway.”  “That still means I can’t just rift to her though.”  “No, you can’t.. not unless you’re going to start pulling your own tricks out of your hat.  Then again, I seem to recall you do have a few new tricks, it wouldn’t be as if you would just need to walk the distance.  Use those wings you fashioned for yourself, get there far quicker than any of us could hope to.  If you need a way out, consider that we still know little about what the other world is up to since all this happened, it might be important to go check on everything there too.   There, you might find stuff that still works, which would certainly be more helpful than what you find here.  Get things in order there, then return to us here so we can make sure things start working once again.  Just be careful, Axln already figured out that their biggest goal is getting you both, you appearing on the field again will get plenty of their unwanted attention.”  Lyun nodded, accepting Mheridz’s plan.  The girl really was so much like her mother, and Lyun was thankful for having someone create a good plan for her.  After flagging down a passing Ersatz, she found herself with a guide taking her to the main entrance.

Once safely outside, she materialized her wings once again, a process which was starting to feel possibly a bit too natural.  Launching into the air, she quickly turned to get her bearings, even though there really was no landscape for her to base her movement on.  Supposedly the place was a reservoir of elementals, but none of them actually held a physical semblance.  Possibly, this was simply the state that resolved with life as an element, when there was enough balance in elements that no single one had dominion, so none of the usual traits appeared.  There was warmth, but it wasn’t warm.  There was cooling, but it wasn’t really cool.  There was humidity, but it wasn’t really humid.  There was even that touch of wood without a single tree, branch, or even plank.  A brilliance without light, a shroud without darkness.. though, there might be a bit more to that former than the others.  The moon had its own orbit, and from their current position they could behold Yhndae in all of its glory.  Of course, stuff like that did shift the balance slightly, the same was true with the stone presence, that was basically everything they stood upon.  What was reasonably lacking was the void.. which was quite unlike a feeling she had ever experienced as Lyun.  A void of the void.

Such thoughts then prompted concern, realizing what was being claimed there.  The chaos was of the void, having such a lack of void was reason enough for suspicion and concern.  Her arm was the biggest concentration of void around, ashen or otherwise.  She knew the moon was supposed to be rich in the elements, but this was unreal.  What she didn’t know was something Axln had herself forgotten.  Axln had been worried about the lack of elementals that had flooded out by her abyssal strike, but had forgotten that just before that she had been chain reacting several fiends in a burst of a void reaction that inverted into elemental blossoms.  Lyun even found the areas sourcing such a reaction, following the trail of saturation along Axln’s path of carnage.  All along that path, chaos actually kept its distance, both between not noticing the traveller passing through and not wanting to broach the conflux of disaster which had recently swarmed.  Chaos knew their important target was within such a domain, but it was too afraid of the threat possessed by such unabating oblivion to wander inside so hastily.

Eventually, Lyun’s path turned to quite another reveal.  A sense of balance didn’t shatter here, but instead remained a feeling of pure oblivion.. like life was shredded without even leaving a void in its wake.  The entire impression of her surroundings made her feel very nervous, a massive concern in what exactly might have occurred here.  Within such an atmosphere, she even got a further feeling of wrong, the oblivion here having not only removed both elemental and void, which together were presences of order.. but also she could just feel the chaos that was consumed.  She was certainly glad that her chaos brought certainty that Axln was somehow still well, it was the only thing keeping her from falling into a state of worry.  She continued her search through the abyssal fallout until she eventually discovered Axln’s hiding spot.  Axln was, of course, still completely unconscious, curled up against an outcropping stone in a small cave.  Lyun switched everything to scientific law and picked the sleeper up with a holo, making her way to a clearing she felt would be suitable for a return to Aluna.

As she began the shift, she noticed things appeared invariably different.  The usual blanket of the temporal was nowhere to be seen, everything instead shifted to a dark shade far closer to the color of her arm.  「This would be because our passage is being denied into the temporal plane.  We could possibly force our way inside easily enough from this location, but I suspect this attempt was more of a safeguard as a quick effort to protect the temporal.」  Protect the temporal?  Why would…   「The other had just finished an assault of the temporal plane in order to halt their own assault.  Suffice to say that such was successful, especially with an assault that left all primitive chaos concerned that this side could then very easily destroy the entire temporal plane if given the opportunity at a continued assault.  Of course, not only would such an action not be recommended, such is probably not even possible.  The demands for such a process certainly would no longer be reproducible.. but there is no way primitive chaos would remain aware of such.」  She was more than certain that she needed to know what in the world had just happened back there.  She was the one who was supposed to do over-the-top demonstrations, this was not a lesson that others were supposed to pick up from her.

Rosa then resolved her destination, witnessing the sudden absolute chill around her as this moon’s area was far more occupied.  The fiends present turned their attention towards their newest visitors and reacted.  Rosa didn’t even have long enough to learn what sort of reaction her foes might have taken, she didn’t offer them the opportunity.  Ionic bursts surged around her as she called forth a rally of ionic energy exactly to the position of her enemies.  She then called forth another holo and boosted above the lunar surface, drifting once in orbit.  Doing so committed even more attention her way, the chaos below becoming aware of her presence.  At once, all of such chaos reacted, though there was variance in the reaction.  Several of them appeared to lance projectiles of various sorts her way, many of them turned to flee instead.  She evaded the projectiles.. but then found Kori missing.  Kori it seemed had somehow been taken captive in the process, another fiend having somehow brought Kori to it.  That fiend was quick to perish, the ionic beams tearing it apart being only slightly faster than her own sonic-speed dive.  A holo protected Kori from the impact, but several of the other nearby fiends were simply blown away.  Quite obviously, she couldn’t afford to just hover around, she needed to get her defenseless companion into safer surroundings.

“Holi, we’re back.  Kori here needs a place of rest, any chance that could be provided?”  “Oh, welcome back, Rosa.  By my last measures, it was you in need of rest and Kori finding means to secure that.”  “You could say we’ve switched places since then.”  “Oh, hardly.  I’m sure you could fashion yourself a very dutiful saviour, but I would have to seriously doubt Kori would have unleashed unrelenting destruction that would have caused widespread catastrophe.”  “Don’t worry, I want to hear all about that story too.”  “Velvet has been.. Velvet is already gone.”  “Gone?  What happened, where did…”  Rosa was herself cut off along with any reply Holi might have had as the OSIDF field nearby dissipated, revealing a small space fighter that had just made a short-range hyperspace jump with its lightspeed engine.  The airlock unlocked, providing room for boarding.  Rosa made her way inside with Kori, finding herself in a rather cramped space with only Velvet otherwise present.

“Holi gave me directions.”  “Hyperspace jump?  I thought the technology was really poor at doing that in close distances.”  “Ah, well, mostly it currently just sucks at jumps within an atmosphere.  By my time, that problem is fixed, though everyone knows it is Hypertech that came up with that technology.  You’ve changed so much that I’m pretty certain their first release of the product will be even better than I got used to.  Wait, the hell is on your back?”  “Thrusters?  A girl’s got to move around up here somehow, we don’t all have lightspeed gear.”  “Did you OSIDF holo thrusters.. how the.. wait, it has an ionic burst reaction that’s providing momentum.  .. and you have that bleeding off your back.”  “Bleeding.. not exactly.  You should see my wings on the other world.”  “Shit, I don’t know if the biggest reason I can’t think of you as being a younger version of mom is simply because you’re somehow even more.. wow.”  “Wow, huh?  I’ll take that as a compliment.”  “That’s not what I meant!  Forget it, let’s get you back to my battlecruiser.  Omega isn’t very far away.”  “Not far huh?  So there is no reason to just jump back.  Great, because it’s too cramped in here.  You fly her back, I’ll just fly alongside you.”  Rosa stepped out through the airlock before Velvet could complain.  Rosa really did feel like that space was pretty cramped, especially after having gotten used to flying so much.  It felt rather cramped for the wings she had grown used to.

Rosa leapt out the airlock and took flight, looping back around to hover near Velvet’s fighter.  Her timing was good too, the hovering craft had drawn a bit of a crowd of chaos who had come to the conclusion that it wanted to attack the thing.  Rosa blocked the strike with a holo barrier, leaving room for Velvet’s missile volley to pass back in return, decimating the attackers in a thermite blast.  Several others took up the gumption of the same ambitions, prompting the two girls to at least get moving instead of just floating there.  Velvet took to the lead, but with Rosa having no problems keeping up.  Scientifically, it might have been difficult to explain how her smaller ionic engines kept up to the thermite intensity of the space fighter, but that was simply accounted for by her own chaotics.  The ionic stream she left in her wake held an intensity that looked quite similar to the space fighter’s too.. only brighter.  Both of them were also weaponized, Rosa’s ion storm being complimented by Velvet’s thermite missile barrage.  Even so, Rosa knew better than to show off too much, she was already depending on chaos for refueling as things stood.  She needed to get her ionics recharged on Omega too, something Velvet would hopefully be willing to requisition for her.  Well, if not, she would just go visit Epsilon, that option would certainly hold people willing to lend her a technical hand.

“Hello Rosa, welcome to the landing hanger.  I’m possibly the only one on staff who could be here to welcome you, but I expect you would need a guide for entry.  The ship is generally expecting vessels much bigger than just a person, but the landing bay should suffice enough for you.”  “You mean, like the same thing ATALS had?  I don’t suppose I could just follow Velvet through docking, or do I need to find my own spot? ”  “Things are much smaller than ATALS, but that’s the basic idea.  There should be a decent enough opportunity for you to enter through the same docking as Velvet, but you would have to drift without thrust once inside.”  “Yeah, go ahead and ask control there to open the doors for me then, thanks.  I’ll see you inside.”  Holi’s voice vanished as Rosa plotted her own approach.  Keeping on Velvet’s heels, she reached the barrier marking the edge of docking and cut with her thrust.  However, instead of simply drifting, she restructured her design into a wing structure far more similar to the other world’s.  Once through the barrier, embodied by an artificial atmosphere, she used her wings for propulsion to guide herself gracefully into a smooth landing.

“Wings now, really?”  “I know, they suit me so much better, don’t they.  It sucks that there is no atmosphere in space, I could have made use of them instead.  Then again ionic thrusters are much faster, so both options really have their own places.  Even so, an elemental shift with wind elemental boosting is still pretty fast, and that works with wings.”  “Please don’t shift us to elementals on the battlecruiser, there is no telling how much would go wrong if you did so.”  “Thermite engine would push an elemental reaction making itself inert.  Computer systems would go completely offline, which would suspend most services.  Oh, and the place would start venting our atmosphere.”  “Like I said, please don’t shift us over to elementals.”  “Yeah, yeah, I know.  I’m even pretty sure I know which places this floating rock could endure a shift, but I still won’t.  Where did Kori go?”  “Holi had personally gone to get her guided away, so I expect she’s part way to med bay by now.  Is there any unexpected needs she would require?”  “Oh, no, I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t forgotten.  Trust Holi to always be on things, right?”  Velvet scoffed again, leaving Rosa to ponder if she stepped on something unexpected there herself.

“Ah, whatever.  There isn’t any point in not talking about the future anymore anyway, the same stuff just won’t happen.  But yeah, the Rosa I knew always trusted Holi to be on things, including babysitting.  Growing up, I was in her care more than anyone else’s, though it was only the supervision of a spare cluster in all reality.  As a child, we never got along.  However, I still grew to count on her to bring stories of what mother was up to.  She had several other stories to share too, which was a decent enough exchange.  As an adult though, we became much closer, herself always on hand to help out with the stuff I had gotten myself involved in, but I still knew she was just assigned to keep a watch on me.  I’ll give you, I got along with that Holi much more than this one too, but the reasons why are pretty obvious.  My biggest regret coming here was always that I never learned how to fashion something like that for myself, I’ve never had my own Holi that was always on things, not for this timeline.  You never understand how much you count on something until you lose it.”  Velvet sighed, not mentioning that she knew there were far more important things at hand than such idle comforts.  The two of them made their way to the med bay, going over what little had changed in Rosa’s absence.  It really was a lot of nothing, though there came a point when the enemy became seemingly confused or something, no longer working together in joint attacks.  Even so, the numbers of their enemy still appeared endless, leaving plenty more work to accomplish in order to get the moon back under control.  The good news at least was that the heat filter that had been applied at some point had apparently failed unexpectedly, leaving the world to already begin to recover.  It had happened around the moment that spawned the DMA confusion, so it was suspected that the two were related.

Whatever might have caused the sudden shift for their foes, things were at least on the right track for getting better.  They still needed to sweep up the remaining enemies, but it was quite a step in the right direction.

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FV – Chapter 65

Endless Misfortune

Axln focused her attention towards the direction of the moon’s bleak landscape that held the most enemy resistance, divesting herself from most other fronts.  As she applied pressure in that given direction, she noticed that her enemy had become similarly focused.

By this point, her unending assault of draining her enemies was really taking its toll, and her split investment in multiple locations was no longer paying back its dues.  It would be a gamble, but she was absolutely certain that her objective laid in her current path.  Knowing this, she would just need to invest herself completely in it.  So resolved, Axln discarded her entire time rift design, leaving only her one self present without the protection of frozen time.  The curse of misfortune was even eager to stand in and take its own toll.. exactly she might have hoped for.  Of course, this still wasn’t perfect circumstances, her first act once time resumed was to simply trip forward as a dizzy spell caught up to her, the haze of chaos taking its own toll.  Even upon landing, she took a number of injuries from her foe’s sudden assault, having even missed the attacks in the process.  Her defenses were completely lacking.. but there was nothing she could do about that.  If she couldn’t do anything about her defenses, it was time to invest everything into an outright offense.

As one of the fiends tried to lash out at her, Axln instead lashed out at it, using shadows of her gift to crush the space it occupied.  Her augmenter however failed.. so she made use of her own chaos as an augmenter.  Being chaos augmented, the shadows abstracted in form, devastating a random formation of area that happened to by chance exclude her enemy.  Right, this was again the original problem, even during a full offence.. trying to attack with undependable weaponry was more than just a little difficult.  Her own instruments were outright failing, a fact that made even her right arm go rather stiff.  The stupid kyumu stuff probably needed a replacement.. or a refill.. or something.  Lyun would know, at least, such was her field.  Refilling would be easy for the girl at least, considering her own chaotic quirk could be used to easily do so.  Replacements.. well.. the moon wasn’t even dusted over in the same ashen dust as the planet held, this one supposedly being instead rich with elementals.  Right, such ashen dust was of the void, something not normally found here.. normally…

Of course, right now, with chaos having taken up such a form.. there was a near endless supply of void present right now, an outright blessing in disguise.  How very unfortunate.. for their void enemies.  Axln caught another fiend trying to lash out at her, leaving her to turn her attention towards this opportunity.  Rather than pushing her gift to be augmented by her instruments.. or even her own chaos.. she instead pressed her gift directly into the void of her enemies, compelling that void to react to it in the same way void should always.  Of course, her enemies were pretty ashen, something which brought very little reaction to the gift.  However, that wasn’t exactly unfortunate, it was simply factual.  Misfortune still had to play a role, to make things worse.  So, instead of doing nothing, the void composite holding her gift reacted and shattered, breaking down as it tried and failed to do anything with the elements projected through it.  Of course, this would happen sometimes with instrumentation, dangerous reactions when kyumu that was far too low failed to yield a result.  It was rare, but very unfortunate when such voids simply shattered as the weaker factor.  Such was even an outcome Axln had witnessed now a few times with some of Lyun’s work, a concept of the void that was rather.. unfortunate.

Three more fiends approached her, and all three were invited to the same cause, shattering once they got in range for her to attempt augmentation through them.  Thinking about it, her first kill against such a fiend had actually occurred in this very same way, a void reaction that had torn it apart.  Typically, their kills had simply been by having the void of the fiend’s form fade into a state more made of diffused elementals, but that one time had been an abrupt void reaction.. the only time it had ever happened.  It was possibly then very unlikely to occur, something rather unfortunate when it did happen.. at least from the perspective of the fiend affected.  Such a reaction made such kills all the more easier to accomplish.  In fact, it seemed pretty reliable, being the most plausible unfortunate result of such an action.. possibly the only valid strange effect.  She recalled too that the reaction was dispersing vast quantities of life elements around her, saturated elementals of an almost dangerous quantity.  However, the abundance of the void around here was making that actually difficult to realize.  It did explain why another four fiends though simply fizzled away spontaneously though, their void composition overwhelmed by the elemental fumes by absolute chance.  Still, she had her own arm to worry about, so she promptly pressed the opening before something more could go wrong.  She had unfortunately not been aware that the obsidian density of her arm actually protected her from the same dangers, but it wasn’t as if having more excuses to press forward might have exactly been working against her.

She then approached yet another fiend, this one blasting waves of force in her direction that kept her at a distance.  Getting caught in such a wave, she found herself thrown into some nearby rocks, one of them piercing her right arm in a pretty bad way.  She could get that fixed of course, but she would need to mess with healing to get such to work.. and not only was she worried that misfortune would have such a thing go wrong.. but she was also certain that the complicated design wouldn’t resolve quite so well without a skilled practitioner of such arts.  She needed Lyun for that, so she would be down an arm for now.  Repairs would be simple at least.. especially in comparison to their other instrumental problems.  She didn’t even need such an artificial design for a focus, she was already making use of her enemies for that purpose.  She knew that using others as a focus was usually impossible, even that using oneself as a focus was apparently a really bad idea.. but it wasn’t as if her enemy was a living being, it was effectively a homunculi that possessed an inanimate glob.  Globs appear to be perfectly decent foci, though her current resource was being very resistant for that purpose.  She was pretty certain this one was all too eager to keep her away, so that she didn’t bring cursed order upon it to have it shatter abruptly in a fountain of principle.

Even so, she’d already figured out a new favourite trick for this problem.  Spanning even an instant in her own perspective, she froze time, set a rift, duplicated herself near her enemy, then restored time while only leaving the version of herself beside her enemy.  She was then close enough to enfuse her gift into this fiend too, which itself shattered.  Yup, who needed time travel when rifts in the space/time continuum were way more fun.  Okay, sure, this wasn’t something she would be capable of forever, she could only do it with all of such chaotic support, but that just implied it would remain in her memories a far more novel experience than time travel had ever been.  Spotting yet another fiend, not even wanting to see what this one would try to do to her, she simply caused another timerift and shattered that one too.  From there though she could see a veritable army standing before her, all gathering in an obvious defiance and defense.  She instead laughed at this mockery, seeing the irony that a temporal being wouldn’t realize that concepts such as distance currently held little bearing for her.  She time-rifted into the middle, shattering the fiend nearest to her.  Several others simply charged at her, attempting to overwhelm her.  Ah, so that might not have been the one being defended, of course her enemy wouldn’t use such a straightforward structure.  All signs of a defense were even lost as her enemy outright visibly panicked, the onslaught of destruction she brought having compelled her enemy into a full on offense.

As she shattered one more fiend, several hundred more swarmed upon her.  Of course, the immediately obvious weakness of her current process was that she could only make use of one foci at a time, so getting swarmed was more than she could handle.  However, it wasn’t as if the pile of them reached her, yet another timerift having once again saved the day.  Her escape was well in the air above another fiend, one which she came down upon with more shattering focus before vanishing away once again.  It was by this point that her own ideas caught up to her.  If she used the same timerift approach to have multiple presences each hold their own foci, and then unleash at the same time as the timerift ended, she could join multiple areas with a failing rift.. that happened to include multiple of the fiends at once.  She could even encourage the rift to fail.. more misfortune of the gift.  She didn’t even know if this side was aware of the fictional concept of telefragging, and that wasn’t exactly what she was doing, but fragmenting her enemy with a failed teleportation rift was outright close enough, especially if she conjoined all of their spaces in the process into one as she let herself resolve into a single space.

The entire process was done in the blink of an eye, though it didn’t resolve quite as easily as she might have estimated.  In fact, this was almost a Lyun-level of an oops-moment.  It was due to this experiment that Axln learned that rifting over multiple spaces that were forced joined and then torn apart actually ripped-wide a space between.  She’d grown used to such spaces leading to the temporal plane, but this one very obviously went somewhere else.  It also looked very.. very dangerous.  Her own composition was capable of dealing with temporal might.. but not this.  The fiends were a clear demonstration of such, several others in the area being ripped apart in the process.  Neither chaos nor the void could survive through that gateway, it was like staring into the abyss.  Of course, there were very possibly more places where things could exist than even the few she had learned about, there could be any number of others out there.  However, this one was not for her.  Such a sudden black hole gateway could even cause cataclysmic destruction too, she needed to do something with it.  However, with the gate so exposed, and several chaos so suddenly slain, she noticed a similar gate not far away.. a mighty fiend trying to hold on while carnage ripped around it.

Axln then turned an act of insanity into an even greater insanity, opening a rift that spanned from her position to that distant gateway, repeating the same process.  This in turn rippled that smaller gateway over the abyssal gates, having that gate consume it.  With such done, she instantly turned to the fiend trying to hold on to this wrath of power, shattering it and ending its gate.  With that, neither gate remained.  However, she knew exactly what she had done, she had brought carnage of such an abyss directly into the temporal plane.  Forget trying to throw principles in there, the place at least knew gates, that was certainly one it would have quite the time with.  The structure of such an abyss had its own principles too, something that was catastrophically failing before being sent through as a simple act of misfortune.  Such an abyss had been left beside the fiend engineering their misfortune, an act which would only further destabilize the gateway before it would simply ephemerally collapse.  At that point, it was just a question how much the infinity of the temporal could endure the destructiveness of such an abyssal.  It certainly was not a question for those of a principled nature, she knew better than to look into that abyss.  However, there was still that part of her that was almost pale with concern.

「That.. that was an outright demonstration of how much the primitive should not feel superior to others.  That alternate.. that unknown.. it shows just how much more there is beyond our small infinite single domain.  Whatever that was called into the temporal lasted but the eternity of an instance and has visited the temporal with more destruction than could be possible.  That was not at all chaotic, or principled, only oblivion.  No wonder that one is so concerned with the endurance of the veil, the sorts that could be found beyond could be like this or even not.  Even chaos could fall if the veil does not stand.  The loss of the veil endangers everything.」  On the matters of standing, that was an idea which Axln was finding incredibly difficult for herself.  She couldn’t even figure out the complete list of what might be exhausting her right now, there were more than just a few things she could think of.  Most of them, she didn’t even want to think about right now, that was alone one of the things possibly exhausting her.

「Do not worry, the presence of misfortune is rapidly vanishing.  The primitive had realized too that such was only offering principles that actively worked against them, something which was alone causing reason for hesitation.. and then the one causing such was pulled away from the temporal into that unknown domain.  The primitive have no knowledge of what had just happened, only that their presence had invited a threat to the temporal itself.  The collective hive mind is considering the notion that a continued assault on the principled could instead bring great peril to the entire temporal, even more of the occurrence they had just witnessed.  It had never occurred to them that an assault on the principled could place the temporal in grave danger, a truth that no chaos might have known before then.  True chaos is the balance of order and chaos, something which has appeared to bring perfection.. but it now seems that the opposite is also similarly inverted.  Dangers to the balance could outright destroy both order and chaos.  Primitive chaos is currently uncertain how to proceed, but it is certain that they will proceed in primitive chaos.」  Meaning, the chaos would be taking this news impulsively.  With their home in danger, the gates to chaos would probably be firmly closed.. but that would trap all the void chaos here.  Actually, Axln knew there remained one gate through the temporal, her own.  The remaining chaos would be surging her in order to attain a way to escape, all in absolute panic.  Worse, the remaining chaos would be cut off from their hive mind, as the gates remained so heavily closed.  That would drive even more impulse and desperation.

「It does get worse than that too.  The gates are locked, but chaos does not stay restless.  Your chaos is learned, but that still provides awareness of the process for the unlearned.  Chaos is still aware of a weakness of the principled by instinct, at least according to the will of the world, and once it discovers the terms of such awareness.. it will seek to employ it from the safety of its own domain, leaving the threat of the world to destroy itself and thus relieve chaos of its newest threat.  Such is the path of self-preservation.」  That would make sense too, chaos could simply invest into whatever weakness actually existed in Ruixse to ensure that the world ended itself.  That was even more true, because Ruixse.. the actual will of the world itself.. that was also in the temporal plane with them.  Eventually, such a will would be found, and then chaos could attempt to make use of the will’s own resources to impress its own weakness.  As long as such a will was vulnerable, things could still go wrong.  As the two worlds were basically bound in parallel, ending one could at least do something to influence the other.  Ruixse had already perished once, so Aestus might not simply die in the process.  She knew, however, that something would certainly go wrong for it, and that was not a planet that needed conditions any harsher than they already were.  If things were worse, Aestus might not remain capable of sustaining life any longer.

Quite certainly though, she was more worried about Aestus’ fate for Rosa’s sake than her own.  To her, that was much more Rosa’s planet now, not as much her’s.  That instead made her even more concerned about saving the planet that was truly her own, one which would certainly be completely lost in the process.  Lyun hopefully was up to giving her such, not just because of concerns in the fate of Aestus, but also because Lyun still had a life here ahead of her.  Axln knew such was true of herself in reverse, her life as Kori was still its own importance.  She was still determined to not give up on being a conduit, that just accepting her life as Axln alone was like admitting that humans really were just better.  She was certain that her life ahead as Kori would only pave the way to better her own life as Axln, so she certainly had nothing she was willing to give up on.  If she could resolve that one goal, that overarching reason for the will of the world having called for their help in the first place.. then she could finally protect both worlds from the threat of chaos at long last.

Axln still took the opportunity to blend in with her surroundings, desperate for a chance to recover what she had spent.  She felt considerably drained at that point, like her proximity to the abyss had devoured some of her in the process.  Her stamina was pretty drained, but it had also been heavily used.  However, even her chaos had been heavily drained, that one exposure having been hungry for such a presence.  She knew some of her was lost, but likewise knew with absolution that nothing that was lost was something which couldn’t heal, this wasn’t like losing an arm or anything.  Of course, her arm was an absolute wreck at this point, in need of some serious repairs.  Still, the fact she did this with one arm gone felt like yet another bragging point.  However, with her gift running so low, her general elemental makeup running low, and her chaos running low.. there was absolutely nothing to have her stand out amidst the decimated landscape.  She just hoped that the amount of elemental she had just managed to obliterate wouldn’t rend a bleak future unto itself.. since the foundry was still going to be dependent on these reserves until the void phase ended.  Well, Mheridz had possibly endured far worse, with constant chaotic uprisings.. so maybe things would be alright after all.

It was such pleasant dreamy thoughts that finally let Axln fall asleep, curled up in a corner of the decimated landscape.  There was still so much to do.. but for now she had claimed enough progress to be deserving of a bit of respite, the rest she could leave to her future self to deal with.

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