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Lilian Rook     Sometimes, the fight isn't for anything in particular. Sometimes the danger is only the lesser of two options, as best as one can guess. Even when the war is won, there are still battles to be had, and those ones, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, are the ones soldiers are most afraid of dying in. Sometimes you've already gotten everything you could, bloody tooth and nail, and now you just have to pay the devil the tab.

    Such is the case with this outrageously shitty idea (Lilian actually calls it that: an outrageously shitty idea). James Bond had made a deal with what apparently counts as a 'dragon' in this world, for the information that had lead people to the west coast of the former United States, as part of his personal (shared) crusade against the orchestrators of the attack on the colony of Caelton. Unwilling to trade anything up front, he had bargained with the dragon to bring it back the metaphorical head of any Antegent it desired --intended to be 'the one that got away' to a creature that fought in the Onslaught. He had promised himself as collateral if he failed to uphold the bargain in good faith. The dragon, somehow intuiting his lack of attachment to his own life, had threatened to destroy his precious queen and country instead. Not even Lilian could just leave that disastrous consequence on someone else's unprepared shoulders (even if it is their fault). So here we are.

    'Here' being a relatively nondescript part of the tiny isle of Canna, fifty kilometers off the coast of the Scottish mainland, but itself barely a few kilometers across; one could jog from one end to the other in fifteen minutes. It is a rare thing to see green grass, white sand, and blue water on this planet anymore, but here it seems only to be due to the island's utter irrelevance to civilization; the eastern island is little more than a ghost of couple of churches, a disused guest house, a collapsed post office, and a barely extant castle ruin of one floor that will still stand for a few centuries more.

    Though even out here, on a tiny island where nobody lives, there are signs of severe battle damage, with fifty year old bones half-buried in green craters between patchwork grass and glass meadows and broken hills, there has simply been no holistic attempt by any Antegent to convert the territory. Its deformities --sourceless yellow fires, chunks of earth turned to jagged crystal, standing pools of cyan mercury-- are scattered wide and purely the aftermath of fighting. That makes it a surprising place for an Antegent to not just escape to, but to ostensibly hide out for all this time.

    A small mercy is that, in this situation, arrivals already know where they're going, and can approach at their discretion. Lilian's scouting around has given them an exact pinpoint, and the location of a tall, yellow-brown hill, which is able to overlook a strangle triangle of three small creeks running through a lushly green meadow littered with countless hundreds of glacial stones, shortly running off to the rocky beach and the ocean. In between those intersecting waterways, the ancient white boulders are heaped densely on the ground, and planted in amongst them are thirteen shapes arranged in a perfect circle, each of increasing size as they go counter-clockwise.

    Each one is like a slab of metal with the gloss and exterior texture of a bleached bone, tall and irregularly semi-rectangular, wedged into the ground and ostensibly fractured all over, revealing silvery veins in the cracks. Logically, 'twelve o'clock' must be where the smallest and tallest examples stand alongside each other, but trying to follow them with the eye just ends up sending one's gaze in circles forever, constantly perceiving a smooth increase in height, like a famous optical illusion involving a ring of stairs that only go up.
Lilian Rook     It's kind of tough to believe this is an Antegent, rather than some bizarre artifact of their presence left behind, but Lilian guarantees it. She also cautions "Remember that this thing did get away from the Unconquered One. Even if it were purely a case of a terrible matchup, that means it still has to be considerably powerful."
Arthur Lowell >==>

    Arthur arrives in a rocketing rush, at the vantage point. He stops high above it, standing atop his broom like it's a surfboard. "Yeah, I GOTCHA. Haven't met an ANTEGENT that couldn't GRUESOME ME HARD for real." Arthur rambles over the radio as he limbers one arm up. "STONEHENGE here ain't lookin' so ACTIVE though. Fucks with my EYES a lot though."

>Arthur: Strife?

    "Fucking how, my dude." Arthur mutters to nobody in particular.

>Arthur: Okay, try to decode the space magic and find the Antegent-body

    That's more like it. Does this thing have some kind of space-magic encoded into it? Pulsing his geometric magics into his body, Arthur tries to build up a massive, highly impactful complex of geometry-magic-disrupting enchantments, something meant to tear apart folded spaces and slice through unusual shapetypes. Both hands flicker black, white, and green as he clenches into two fists. Then he dives hard, rushing to the circle.

    He plans to impact right in the middle, palms down, discharging the massive enchantment-system. He hopes it'll absolutely obliterate as much of the unusual space-magic on this thing as he can -- or simply rip apart the metal. At least give them a better idea of what this thing is all about.
Rita Ma      Despite the lush and almost idyllic appearance of the island, Rita is wisely dressed no fancier than usual: knee-length pleated skirt, cropped jacket, white blouse. She remembered what everyone's here for, even if the scenery almost makes her forget.

     Standing on the beach, she takes a moment just to drink it all in with her eyes. "It is pretty, isn't it? Sand and grass and trees like this. I never thought... seeing real land would give me feelings like these. But I guess humans know where they belong, even if they've never seen it before. After all these months, it never stops feeling right."

     Her eyes scrunch shut to burn the memory in. A little steadying breath leaves her. When they open again, they're more focused. "Sorry. That was kind of a weird thing to say. I'm ready!"

     Rita makes her way through the island interior mostly uneventfully, though she makes the dumb mistake of poking one of those flames with her finger after staring at it in amazement. Of course she yelps and yanks her hand back, then acts sheepish and tries to play it off.

     When she crests the yellow-brown hill and finally spots Lilian in person, she freezes with eyes wide. It isn't until Lilian makes eye contact with her that Rita's posture and expression slacken in relief, having recognized something in her gaze. "Ms. Rook!!!" It's alarming how quickly she closes the distance, kicking up little sprays of grass and dirt. Her little arms wrap tightly around Lilian's abdomen on impact.

     "You're back. You're really back. It's you... I was so scared. I thought... you wouldn't be the same again, after all that. Thank you."

     It takes her embarrassingly long to finally disentangle herself, even with the dormant Antegent looming right in front of them.
Forte There is a powerful foe with a known location. Forte, essentially, can't not go.

"Understood, I'll employ caution," he says, simply to Lilian.

And so cautiously, carefully, and stealthily, Forte observes the thing - trying to divine some sort of... something. This sort of genus loci(?) isn't something he's terribly familiar with.

"..."

Best to be extremely cautious, then. "Battlechip slot in. Chargeshot X, execute," he intones, as he brings up his left hand - which morphs into an arm cannon. "Let's see..." With the long range weapon activated, he takes aim - sighting for the significant parts of the distortion, and firing a shot or three - trying to hit some part of it that'll hurt.
Ishirou Ishirou showed up for the fight, and knowing it was probably going to be brutal, he made sure to finish the last bit of tune-ups on the armor.  Right now, he's sitting inside of it, with the head and chest open as he punches in some data, and tries to correct some misaligned things.  However, after a moment, the inside lighting of the power armor turns green.  

"Huh.  Hey Lilian, I think I roughed out the edges in this thing finally.  We'd be able to finally give this thing its full paces in a test run after I recover from this fight...haha.."  Despite the nervousness of what's about to happen, Ishirou's in good cheer.  

He smiles a lot when he sees Rita hug Lilian.  He's glad that she's back and happy that they could reconcile.  He remembers the memories he saw of that fight, and how miserable Lilian was.  He gives a small wave, as he starts the power armor up.

He closes the power armor around himself.  Drills form on each hand and armor adjusts for hyperspeed drilling than flight.  The initial fighting is likely going to be underground, so if he can scan it and get information back to people, and face it where it's likely not expecting opposition, that'd be an advantage.  

He dives into the ground a moment later, humanoid mode was going to be difficult to hold in this, so he opted for rider mode while drilling like this.  He moves around, attempting to use both scanning techniques and special radar missiles to try and get more data on the monster before it could fully awaken to fight back.

Any data he gets immediately is uploaded to others to see.
James Bond It was a terrible idea. But it had to be done. Not doing it would cost this world something new. Something precious. It would have thrown that thing to people who find them and kill them before they can grow.

     Bond is lost in thought 'here.' After an exhale, blue-grey tendrils blow past him. Bond's dressed in combat gear. Fatigues, vest, sidearm, knife. He's got a high-powered rifle with him, too, as well as the standard-issue watch. There are a few other effects.

     He doesn't come right along with the others. The reason is related to his means of transportation. An attack helicopter, loaded down with missiles and two rotary cannons. A sleek, angular thing, meant to baffle electronic early-warning systems with its materials and shape.

     He'd gotten out to stretch his legs. "I'll see you there," he eventually says when Lilian begins leading the others, flicking the spent cigarette away. The canopy closes overhead, the rotors spin.

     Bond is an expert pilot. Strafing along the perimeter of the hill, those guns warm up. A second later there is a near-contiguous line of bullets, each slightly smaller than a railroad spike yet all traveling so quickly that they may as well be molten by the sight of them.

     In controlled bursts timed for the benefit and safety of the others, Bond opens up on the pillars, prioritizing those that Arthur is trying to tear open.
Kirishima Kirishima isn't a stranger to shitty ideas. She's not a stranger to having no idea at all, either, so joining in on an opportunity to aid even a shitty one is still about average for her current track record. The fact that Lilian's the person that put out the call certainly doesn't have anything to do with that, of course (it does), nor does the opportunity to face something even a dragon wants dead pique her curiosity (it very does).

Despite the powerful temptation, however, Kirishima does not arrive by simply appearing atop one of boulders. Instead, she just walks towards the hill overlooking them and the creeks like a normal person for once. She's clad as usual in her bright white ninja outfit with the billowing scarf and the half-face mask that keeps her mouth and nose obscured for that little bit of extra mystery.

She also looks somewhat confused as her eyes clearly follow that circle of boulders for way too long.

"It's... A pile of boulders. Is our target beneath that mound? Like some kind of hibernating giant?" Kirishima asks while stroking her chin, leaving her other hand free to do hand seals that might actually just be flexibility exercises. Someone skilled in pen twirling might also notice something familiar about those movements as well.

"I can't say I've ever fought the ground before, but... I suppose there's a first time for everything." She comments, then raises an eyebrow when Rita makes herself known. "Ah, a friend of Lilian's? Greetings! Kirishima, leader of the S... IFAS." She smiles softly behind the mask, and her tone even takes on that of someone less aggressive-ninja and more kindly-secretary. "Are you going to be alright out here?"

Afterwards, she turns her attention to Ishirou and his power armor, still looking confused as she looks from him to that optical illusion and follows it again and again and again. It's not until he, Arthur, Forte, and Bond start firing on it that she finally realizes what's happening, and her hands come together.

"... I understand now! Our target is hiding within... There!" Her hands start moving rapidly as a pair of frogs appear on her shoulders, and they fire off a matching pair of fireballs at the rectangular things to get the ninja's offensive started!
Rita Ma      When she finally pulls away from the emotional embrace, Rita startles at the various flashy attacks happening in the background. "Oh! I should be helping too, shouldn't I? Ah..." She rummages in her satchel for a moment, then pulls out something wrapped in a red-stained handkerchief. It looks distressingly like a tooth. It looks even more distressingly not quite like a human tooth.

     If one looks really closely, it matches Rita's, but she isn't missing one.

     She bends down to put it in the soil point-first, then stomps it into the ground with her heel, burying it a little bit deeper. Then she gives a sheepish, self-conscious smile to her friend. "Sorry about this, Ms. Rook. It's... it might be a little ugly, okay? What's about to happen. But with so much on the line, I figured I really shouldn't take any chances."

     A funny-looking hand-sized hexapod, black and with glowy blue lights along its sides, pulls itself out of the ground near the buried tooth and skitters towards the monoliths. A few others follow it a moment later. Together, they cling to one of the pillars and explode, likely not accomplishing much.

     A new batch start to dig themselves out of the ground, these ones terrier-sized, accompanied by more siblings of the original size. Rita stares off into the distance, her eyes locked impassively on the pillars, but her face betrays that she's bracing herself for scathing disapproval.

     Of course Lilian would recognize it. It's the Cycle of Tears.

     "Same rules as last time. I promise."
Tamamo     Tamamo has chosen to be here at the same place as Lilian, though she hasn't gone quite as far as insisting on following her scouting. Still, she needs to have a certain understanding of the area in order to work her more detail-oriented geomancy, which means, at minimum, working over a map together. Not taking full advantage of the Antegent's presently dormant nature to set up a series of traps simply wouldn't make sense, though there's not yet a need to explain what any of those traps are.

    In fact, most of them aren't really 'traps' so much as 'arcane ammunition caches,' for ease of use in adjusting their group tactics as the battle progresses.

    Rita gets a somewhat absent-minded smile from Tamamo on approach, the reason for her words only clicking through in Tamamo's mind a moment later. Oh. Yes. Well, she'll just look away while they get through that very understandable reunion. She won't even cough for attention until something like 'exactly what Arthur's doing' happens.

    There's no immediate attack from Tamamo. She'd like that geometry worked out, herself, and it's very likely about to change. She takes this moment to do a little future reading, not looking for 'what happens next' but 'what happens along the fortunate path.'
Staren     Staren shows up! Flying, dressed in a white military-style coat with a cloak over it. (Sensors show she's actually a robot, though.) She looks very carefully over the island for anything odd before her eyes find the circle of stones, and... she double-checks it, reflexively, before she realizes what's happening and pulls her eyes away.

    She's certainly *considering* calling in some tactical nukes... but ultimately decides not to. Still, apparently this thing is giving them the opening swing. Well, maybe it's worth a shot? Who knows if it works on Antegent... but let's find out!

<"If you're any kind of embodied spirit or supernatural good or evil being..."> Staren looks around, and gives Tamamo and Kirishima a shrug, <"Stay out of the blast.">

    Staren flies up to where she can get a clear shot, and holds up her hand. Her clothes and hair billow dramatically. A staff warps into her hand.

    It looks like a magitech device that sure is made to look like a magical girl wand. It's pink with gold and jade bits and a copper section near the middle, and the head of the staff, above a couple of diamond-studded rings, is a goddamn golden STAR with fire opals set in the center of either face. Elegant circuit traces run down the shaft to connect to the various gems and the copper section.

     Staren shifts her 'stance' in the air, holding the staff as if she's making a thrusting attack in the direction of the circle of stones. An aura of electric-blue light shines softly where Staren's hands touch the staff, and motes of similar-colored energy are sucked into the staff from around Staren, traveling through wires into the diamonds and lighting them up like a progress bar. Staren takes a deep breath.

    The glow drains out of the diamonds and into the fire opals over a split second, and then Staren's clothes billow out behind her as if from a backblast as A BIG FUCKOFF BEAM OF PURE WHITE LIGHT slightly wider than Staren is tall shoots out, straight for the 'stone circle', the edges of the beam flickering and pulsing as over the course of five seconds before it fades, with no apparent collateral damage to normal grass or anything. But did it do anything to the Antegent...? Staren waits to see, tensely, curiously.
Tamamo CACHES:

    Scattered around the island, usually near to where a talisman with sun motifs in red ink scrawled over yellow paper is stuck to something, there are the supplies Tamamo has left 'just in case.' Their contents are varied, but include blessings of luck and healing (to be applied to people), curses of draining and disruptive maladies (to be applied to weapons), and explosives of ice, fire, wind and lightning (to be applied to the Antegent). This being such a large operation, with a dragon's ire at stake, she's brought out quite a lot of material.
Lilian Rook <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "It's strange that one would go dormant away from human civilization, with no targets, and showing no signs of moving."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "For forty years."

    "Yes, I see it too." Lilian says to Arthur upon his arrival. "That means it's nothing harmful. It just . . . is that way, somehow." She greets Ishirou with a vague wave, her attention still focused on the ring of artifacts without binoculars. "Good to hear, because you couldn't have picked a better time." A double affirmative green blinklight flashes on Bond's pilot radio display. Lilian's concentration is just briefly disrupted by the Paladins rookie, saying "K-Kirishima, please pay attention. Do you see those thirteen monoliths?" And then she's really interrupted by Rita appearing. Tacklehugged at stupendous speed, Lilian sways back with a gasp of "Rita--!" and then finds her feet again by throwing her weight forward and clapping her arms around Rita's shoulders. "There you are! I hope you-- You got my letter, didn't you? Haha, maybe I should have said something in person too. But I wasn't really certain how to go about it, so, please forgive me." Lilian is resolved to the fact that it will take a while to extract herself from that girl's hugs in particular.

    When all is said, done, and ready, Arthur is the one to answer everyone's question first. When he rockets into the middle of the circle by himself, directly attacking blindly-presumed 'space magic', a few things happen. First and foremost is that the heap of ancient rocks tumbles to pieces all on its own. The slabs list, the earth churns, and the water from the creeks sloshes and ripples. Then an invisible pulse of something that feels like a rollercoaster suddenly stopping washes across the entire area. Things start going weirdly wrong from there

    Forte's energy cannon fires what should be fairly true at a number of large, stationary objects, and the energy splashes mostly on their sides and corners, heating up bright splotches to incandescent intensity, and missing their original mark. Kirishima's fireballs glide flatly over the slab she was aiming for and hit one behind it, immediately turning it the colour of freshly poured steel, and seemingly not much else. Staren's magical beam seems to bend just slightly, casting long shadows from the tall, flat pillars, and heating their inward faces orange-white.

    Bond feels the attack helicopter list just before he fires, giving him time to correct course and wrangle the gun back into position. A storm of autocannon bullets pound straight into two of the larger slabs, puncturing all the way through and spraying silvery dust out through the exit holes. All of his instrumentation is now slightly wrong. The lift and thrust of the helicopter are slightly desynchronized. Rita's minions are likewise unaffected, the explosions eating away tiny bites and leaving glowing pockmarks, but she can naturally feel something like her buoyancy changing within her body. Ishirou's sensors determine that he, himself, has lost a few hundredths of gravity, both in relation to the Earth and in relation to his individual atoms.
Lilian Rook     This is enough to get a reprisal. All thirteen monoliths begin simultaneously emitting the same, slightly pitch-shifted sound, like the drone of an electric chainsaw, and yank themselves out of the ground in quick succession, now deciding to fly through the air under their own power. The way in which they had been shattered is deceptive; these lines are merely seams at which each monolith comes apart and rotates every individual piece of itself, into a sleek and angular form that bristles with geometric spines, ranging from two to fourteen in number.

    The moment they've changed shape, they explosively accelerate in all directions, scattering into the air and zigzagging around on impossible hairpin turns. The disturbance intensifies behind them like a supersonic wake. Small pieces of rock and glass are blown free, achieve extremely high speeds, and don't ever come back down to Earth, presenting a random, undirected projectile hazard to everyone around. The boulders are still wobbling around unsteadily, unable to settle down. The grass in the meadow is standing up straight from tip to root.

    Ishirou's scans, reading their growing energy signatures, tell him that all thirteen of them are, collectively, 'the Antegent', in so many different bodies. It also verifies what he's already seeing: that the strange material that comprises them is both quickly self-repairing, sucking all its individual fragments back into the wounds, and that it has a miniscule specific heat but seemingly no melting point, meaning it will get very hot very fast, stay that way, and take very little damage from it. Tamamo's future sight sees the version of events where everyone is very lucky; one where each individual piece is not a superheated hellbeam, and is shot down one at a time, torn up into little silvery bone fragments, that don't put themselves back together again. This future is not very long from now, but it portends what is going to happen: in that vision, most of the nearby terrain has pulled itself apart and floated up into the air, becoming a terrestrial asteroid field over a deep --actually way too deep?-- chasm.
Ishirou The shrapnel tears through the ground he was in, causing the unprepared Ishirou to get repeatedly trashed underground.  Thankfully the extra armor and subsystem redundancy helps keep the man himself from being completely trashed.  He breaks the surface and there is a glimmer of light, as he moves from drills to flight systems, and takes flight.

Swapping to humanoid mode, he completes the scan.  He takes flight, they can't use heat weapons, and kinetic will only slow down the process.  Alright fine, lets...try this!

With POD-assisted aid, he finds spots across the multi-part monster and starts targeting attacks.  Instead of missiles, guns, or lasers, instead elemental attacks are used.  Balls of ice are thrown like meteors, aiming to smash across the surfaces of the thing, aiming to try and cause explosions of ice and spikes to both to weaken the surface of it, but also limit its mobility.  

This is followed by an attempted biohack, to reinforce the elemental debuffing, attempting to cause internal contradictions in its alien biology, and attempting to force a more terrain one, which should just reinforce the fact that he just froze it with ice to being more effective.  
Kirishima <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Oh, dear."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Oh that's not good."
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Do not heat them, please! It will not be most helpful."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Yeah, they have /no/ melting point."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "God, that was probably the first thing the Red Dragon did, wasn't it?"
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Yeah, it defintely makes sense, it was match up, but...yeah this thing is powerful."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Lilian, updating tactical data."

With her perspective seemingly warping as the attacks start to fly, Kirishima holds off on firing further until she can confirm visuals on whatever it is that they're shooting. She can easily tell that many things are wrong with what she's seeing, though, and trusting her gut might very well be more reliable than trusting her eyes in this instance. How else can she explain what she's seeing?

"Monsters on one side, warping monoliths on the other... Is this what these Antegent are like on your world, Lilian?" She asks, not yet realizing that Rita's minions are something else entirely despite being able to at least tell that they're allies in this matter.

Warping monoliths become flying monoliths, and monoliths become self-rearranging fliers in their own right despite their size. With Ishirou's scans confirming that this is indeed the Antegent that they're pursuing in the form of those self-propelled structures, Kirishima closes her eyes momentarily even as they begin their unpredictable and wild attack on all comers.

With fire being identified as a do-not-use, meanwhile, Kirishima adjusts her strategy easily enough. A few hand seals later, and the frogs disperse with the scent of gunpowder fading not too long after them. Instead, she charges forward while reaching into her outfit, withdrawing a pair of sickles connected by a chain.

"No fire? Very well... I will contend with them with my own steel, then!" Kirishima shouts with utter confidence as she darts about beneath the slabs, both to try drawing their attention towards a close range target as well as determining which one might be the easiest to separate from the others. Once she picks one out, she flings one end of the chain upwards, aiming to wrap it around those moving segments to try binding it and yanking it down to the earth.
James Bond The dash is awash in anomalies--as the VERTICAL SPEED needle is topped out, the LOW RPM light is paradoxically on. "Come on, damn it!" His fist beats impotently at the instruments panel, hands making adjustments to try and compensate for the Antegent's influence on the vehicle.

     What starts as a minute correction quickly turns into a dangerously close brush with the ground, the helicopter's tail rotor scraping chunks of hill and flinging clods of earth as it passes.

     Heat won't work. There's something that might--on his person--but to bring it out before he's tried everything else would be playing his trump card too soon.

If we bring something back, stop the dragon... I'll be thanked for my service and then fired. If we don't... I won't even have a lie to live.

     Shrapnel beats against the canopy, leaving tiny spiderweb cracks in its surface. Adjusting for the desynhronised lift, Bond waits for a swarm of flying pillar fragments to zigzag... not directly over, but close to him. He guns the lift.

Won't catch the damn things with the cannons. Too fast. Too erratic. But.

     One tense half-second later, and the chopper jerks upwards, blades being used as extremely ill-advised weapons to try and hack apart or otherwise deform the fragments as they pass.
Forte The counterattack comes. The answer to "What is the minimum safe distance" turns out to be "Wrong question".

Forte brings his arms up, trying to shield himself from the incoming barrage of rocks and debris - there's too much. He can protect his face, but he can't shield his whole body - nor can he do much effectively like this. "Gah-"

"- Autonavi slot in, Prohibiton C-" he quickly calls, trying to get the system command out quickly. "Execute!"

Under assault on all sides by the barrage, he takes a deep breath.

"                                     NO.                                     "

On one level, it's pure sound. One loud shout, sonic reverberations that still the air and extend outwards from Forte in all directions. But on a deeper level, it's not just sound. It's rejection. Negative psychic energy. The concept of, on a whole level, denial and refusal and repudiation. The force of it extends past the one syllable phrase to take up all of the mental and emotional space around it, like the air inside of a popping balloon.

It's this that he then turns on the antegent full force - going from defense to offense smoothly as he takes off after it, getting within range of whichever piece of it is nearest at the time, and coming up as close to it as he can, and...

"                                     NO.                                     "
Arthur Lowell >==>

    Arthur's right in the middle of things when it all explodes. An effort to dodge goes almost entirely wrong, and he's got brutal slashes along his body before he even finishes trying to blast off with his broom. Their inertialess turns slam into him and leave searing slasheslong before he can manage to figure out what's going on.

>Arthur: Get ahold of the twisty space!

    Inertialess turns are working with exotic geometry for sure. His rocket rush turns to a portal rush, trying to redirect his motion and momentum using rapid portals. His gamer UI, clearly visible, is a ring of thirteen rapidly-spinning dots on a sphere, and the annoying, screeching repetition of [MISSILE ALERT] while he accelerates harder and harder to outpace the beams.

>Arthur: Okay, you can't shmup these guys. Chaff time!!

    He starts leaving behind a kind of chaff. Popping Gates to the arctic north to yank huge amounts of water vapor on request might help. What will also help is the fields of micro black-holes, enchanted to exert their no influence on the allies here, but to hopefully force inopportune slingshot maneuvers and keep the targets wary of being trapped in event horizons for easy kills.
Tamamo     Any chance of creating a space-oriented solution to the problem is essentially destroyed by the way the battle immediately develops. Giving up on that route, Tamamo relays the most important information as quickly as she can. "Oh, dear. Do not heat them, please! It will not be most helpful."

    After a short bit, spent with shrapnel impacting her prepared wards, Tamamo adds, "I have prepared freezing curses, among the others. That will not be enough to destroy this enemy, however, I do expect. They must be torn apart."

    She doesn't have to go and find the caches, herself -- amidst worries that they won't last, as the ground comes apart -- because she still has her own supplies, safely stashed inside her sleeves.

    "And the first is Arbuda. Fitting, perhaps, if yours was a way of stealing fuel and fire, down to the land. Though I will not take time to defend the Buddha's name, the same punishment applies. Can you break, if you do not melt?"

    Her vision suggested taking them one at a time, but first, she throws the cursing talismans, each carrying the design of the hell of freezing blisters, at all those that were already heated, in an attempt to stall whatever they might be using that energy to do. Visibly, it's more like explosions of ice, though it's not true ice so much as masses of specifically aspected mana that rapidly suck away heat while tugging Fate-threads in destructive directions.
Staren     That... heated them up?! The heating thing is soon clearly a problem. Staren warps the staff away, and tries to dodge the improvised projectiles. Still, several graze her, tearing through clothes and her skin. Light washes over her as she drops her disguise, revealing a feminine humanoid robot painted metallic red -- and already with some huge scratches across her body where the debris hit.

    She cna't use energy weapons, and she's not sure she wants to get close up for swords -- assuming the energy fields that make them super-cutting don't also get turned into heat, somehow.

    Staren tries to fly far enough away to get even a bare moment to aim, using I4's scan data and a stream of warped-in drones to pinpoint and track the monolith pieces, calculating ahead where she has to shoot...

    A heavy-looking anti-tank rifle warps into her hands, with little stabilizing gets and such as with robotic precision she aims where the computer says a monolith will be, and fires -- the round itself isn't a slug, but a superhard metal shell filled with rocket fuel that propels itself ever-faster to impact a target *very* hard!
Rita Ma      As the Antegent rises out of the ground, Rita's hair is fluttering and her eyes are wide. One hand comes up to cover her face. "The pillars!! They're-" But words fail her. There's nothing she could say that describes the spectacle better than seeing it.

     The torrent of shrapnel comes a moment later. Rita's yelp of pain tugs sharply at the heartstrings as pieces of rock and glass embed themselves in her arm and side. Her minions' growing numbers are cut down abruptly by the storm, before starting to resurge. The terrier-sized geode-haxapods are more common among their number now, and some that were cut down have reincarnated at the size of wolves, but with the fragmented Antegent's pieces so fast and so far away there's not much they can do but huddle down near their master.

     Rita herself ducks behind a tree to shelter from the worst of it, unravels the layer of tentacles that had appeared to be her skin, and scrapes the embedded shrapnel off with a grimace before re-weaving herself.

     Right. We don't want to let it get hot, but cold won't kill it on its own. Mr. Forte, Miss- I don't know her name, and Ms. Staren all heated it up really badly. First things first...

     Rita ducks out from behind the tree and aims a finger at the brightest, hottest piece of the Antegent she can find. In a fraction of a second, her arm 'mutates' from the elbow down to adopt a gnarled texture and aquamarine tint. A thin beam of blue energy flashes out from her altered hand, crystallizing snow from the air's moisture in passing and draining the heat from where it strikes.

     Thanks, Mr. Spears. Thanks, Nessie. But that won't be enough by itself. ... The Cycle isn't doing anything for me right now. I always hate this, but with something right here to feed on...!

     Her arm morphs back, and a half-dozen tentacles unravel from around her body. They strike out to pierce through her own minions- which show a fearless lack of resistance- and drain some kind of ethereal glowy blue energy from them and back into her own body in impatient gulps. This time both of her hands are raised. A pure white glow, bright enough to cast second shadows from the trees in full daylight, radiates out from beneath her skin.

     The beam of light that fires from her hands- really hundreds of parallel beams, like a sideways rain of energy- is eerily soundless. Collectively they impact part of the Antegent like a cannonball, a kinetic hammerblow without heat or friction.

     The essence-draining accelerates in the second after it's fired, replenishing Rita's stores of energy by reducing a number of her minions to ash. There's an accompanying noticeable hiccup in the steady stream of new subservient Antegent tearing their way free of the earth. Despite the nature of the Cycle, those she's consumed don't respawn.
Lilian Rook     Unfortunately, while the ice attacks seem to be a good idea, not only is Ishirou finding that landing mass-based attacks with gradually dissolved gravity is rather difficult, the Antegent's pieces are much too quick to hit cleanly with a chunk of ice. Even if they're quite large, the stop, pivot, climb, dive, and even reverse with obnoxious disregard to inertia. It's when he attempts to biohack one that it suddenly stops in place, turns toward(?) him, and its chainsaw buzzing sound suddenly escalates through the range of motor, turbine, hornet, and bullet, into a shrieking whine that runs back along his connection and pierces his brain, threatening to knock him out in flight.

    Trying to attack them from the ground is also incredibly difficult for Kirishima. They seldom swoop low enough to be within her reach, and when they do, it's for merely a fraction of a second. Their sheer speed makes certain the glancing blows she lands dig deep and tear free violently, showering her with bits of silver shrapnel, but they seem to have no especial care for her existence.

    James Bond crashes the helicopter blades right into one from beneath, and the impact both obliterates the enemy and his aircraft's rotors in the same impact. A hail of jagged chunks erupts into the air with an explosive whine and not all of it is the enemy. At least that's one down.

    The CENSOR blast from Forte doesn't have any direction, mass, nor particular care for space or range. The momentary sharp halt in all of the Antegent's motions buys Tamamo's talismans time to catch up, inflicting little damage, but rapidly sucking all the light and colour out of those dangerously superheated points. It's also enough time for Arthur to begin linking together opportunistic gates, dousing those who are too far with deluges of freezing icewater and seeding the area with obstacles that serve as a resistive mesh of warped space.

    Lilian's sustained gunfire from the ground, unsuccessful for a short while as her sights lie and her bullets skim away, takes the opportunity to set, lock, and fire a four-way crossup of goldblack 'magical' beams, slicing through one of the Antegent that ended up waylaid by Forte, Tamamo, and both of Arthur's traps all at the same time, dividing it into eight, then sixteen pieces with a flurry of high-intensity sweeping slashes. The pieces glow white hot, but the shredding faux-kinetic damage does the job fine.

    Staren's anti-tank round blasts a hole through another, sending it into a predictable spiral, just before Rita's essence rain tears a fourth into a cloud of glittery silver dust, and sweeps down to catch Staren's target-- and then moments after Staren's target explodes, all of its fragments freeze in the air, drift weightlessly, and are snapped back together in a single, incredibly loud instant. Pieces of the three destroyed links are integrated into it as well, tripling its spines from three to nine and doubling its size-- and speed.
Lilian Rook     Having actually lost some of their own --some of itself?-- the Antegent's random hornet buzzing changes completely from there. There's a second where each of them swivels to 'face' each other unit in the system, rapidly pitch-shifting their chainsaw buzz like ten people talking over each other at the same time, and then they scatter in unison.

    The distortive wash that has permeated the surroundings is compounded by a second, much stronger wave, like being caught in a sonic boom. Everyone's weight halves. The ground begins to crumble apart, lighter elements floating up into the air and gradually accreting around the micro black holes. Stones tumble weightlessly --but dangerously not without mass-- in a slowly accelerating vortex. Projectiles bend more harshly. Physical motions are harder to coordinate-- weight and mass and inertia being gradually changed each second make it easy to trip and even easier to miss. The air is getting thin and hard to breathe. And that allows the Antegent to move faster.

    Now, it's begun actively targeting enemies. Arthur is chased by two on his tail. The tips of their radiating geometry shimme with hazy vibration, and then he is shot with scores, then hundreds, of tiny, frictionless, and outrageously fast organic metal fragments, moving far too quickly to dodge reactively. Another, larger one with ten spines turns on James Bond, hovers in place, and starts tearing into his chopper with several times that volume of fire, almost like a near-invisible silver wind is dissolving it.

    Several dive dangerously low over the ground, looking to crash into Kirishima, Rita, Tamamo, and Lilian, with dizzyingly rapid back and forth strikes from all of their blind spots, easily able to slice someone in half with just the sharp edges of their shapes. Forte, Ishirou, and Staren are caught in a crossfire of multiple Antegent-pieces --the heavier, slower, better armed ones-- playing hovering fire support and drowning them in beams of that 'silver wind', while the lighter, faster ones attempt to tackle them right from the air and skewer them at supersonic speed.

    Each second that goes by, one has to re-acclimate all of their fine motor control again. Each second that goes by, the Antegent get faster. Worse still, one of them just arbitrarily brought itself back to life, and the remaining damaged one has fully regenerated too, without knowing why or what the pattern is. And even worse, those who are successfully shot find that each micro-sliver of metal embedded in them accelerates the gravitational unbinding within them. That is to say, they become lighter, floatier, weaker, and begin to feel as if they might fall apart. Dissolve like smoke. Melt into the universe and become everything they aren't.
James Bond      "Cover your ears," says Bond over the radio. Tamamo's assessment is similar to Bond's--if heat won't work, then they'll need to be broken apart. The rotors of the helicopter were his first thought. Surely, whatever heat might come from the friction of the blades would be worth the risk, for the impact they'd have. But the impact of the fragments upon the blades can't be undone.

    Already low to the ground from his near miss, Bond doesn't have far to go when the vehicle starts losing altitude. It is still perilously dangerous, for the effect of the Antegent's field upon the controls and the narrow breadth of time to make the necessary adjustments. His hands are a blur across the instrument panel, and he manages most of it in time.

    The issue is that the first step always involves changing the angle of the blades. There are none, as Bond realizes when he sees them falling in uneven lengths, flung in different directions after having snapped off upon contact with the Antegent. The helicopter is not only losing ground, it's being disintegrated by the ten-spined fragment.

    He clears the helicopter earlier than he would've liked, hitting the ground hard as it's disintegrated to shreds so utterly that not even the smoking engine remains. His jumpsuit is matted to his body in two places by his own blood, where the Antegent pierced through him. Adrenaline forces him into a roll as he lands, overpowering the screaming of his muscles.

    His body doesn't feel 'his.' The influence over gravity is alien to him, his gait uneven as he breaks into a run for one of Tamamo's red-marked caches. Stones, clods of earth, blades of grass all lift up, as the Antegent gets even faster. It's gaining on him.

    A curse of draining. Clutching the charm tightly, Bond holds up his watch and adjusts the dial.

     From behind the watch, there is a shrill, piercing sound that's uncomfortable to listen to. In front of the watch, that sound is amplified to an unbearable extent. It was designed as a go-loud exfiltration method. 'Make' an exit by shaking portions of the structure apart with vibrations from the sound. Theoretically, it'd make a debilitating weapon.

     Bond puts theory into practice and sweeps it across the pursuing shard of the Antegent, attempting to combine Tamamo's draining curse with the extreme vibrtions to crack it apart.
Ishirou The feedback from the creature hits back along that connection, it scrambles across Ishirou's mind and he loses consciousness.  The machine drops from the sky, and only reorients itself because of programs put into it based on this situation, allowing the POD to take basic control to avoid dying.  

It hard lands on the ground in humanoid mode, enough to jar Ishirou awake.  "What..?" he asked confused, only for it to rain space alien lasers that /hurt/ but in unimaginable ways.  It's hilariously bad, feeling less real and incredibly more ethereal.  It scares him for a very real moment, he can already feel his gravity change...like he was not really human...or a person and something else.

He hates this a lot.

He hates this so much that he takes off, trying to recalculate his thruster output to not throw him off the island and in another timezone.  What options does he have..?  Wait, it focused on him when he...

That's it, he doesn't want him fighting it inside of itself.  That means there is a way to hurt it.  In fact, its rhyme or reason for its regeneration doesn't make sense...maybe he can try and overload it?  Once more, an attempt at biohacking occurs, which might be a terrible idea, but he instead attempts to try and just start smashing things from the inside.
Kirishima Pulling down one of the Antegent's parts proves to be much harder than expected, and cutting them up ends up being easier in comparison. It gives Kirishima some ideas on how to proceed, but the shower of silvery sparks does dissuade her from looking too closely at where she's hitting. Without knowing for sure how they function, however, she can only guess based on what she's hearing over the radio.

Instead of trying to force the segments onto their level, Kirishima instead proposes countering their attacks. Although she doesn't elaborate just yet, she does start adjusting her weaponry to fit the situation again. Instead of using the chain and twin sickles again to try and wrangle one of the machines down, she wedges one of the weapons into the ground while maintaining a firm hold of the second.

As expected (sort of), the Antegent pieces start flitting around once more, looking to carve right through everyone. As one of them charges Kirishima, she holds her position along with one end of the chain sickle wrapped around her arm while the other is pushed deeper into the dirt with a foot. She waits until the last moment as the piece is nearly upon her before finally leaping towards it, letting the chainsaw shear into that chain-wrapped arm and wincing at the screech of metal getting carved up along with part of her arm.

Her resilience and speed, however, allow Kirishima to gamble a bit on that. As she gets over the chainsaw piece, she slams that same chain-wrapped fist down to try and hold it taut against the Antegent segment, as if trying to tangle it up with that chain. As she does so, her leg comes down in a downwards kick to aid in her entangling maneuver. It's flashy looking, for sure, but is brute force and speed really going to be enough?
Arthur Lowell >==>

    Arthur takes those shots. He can feel that gravitational unbinding. It surges through his body, fucking up his gravity and leaving his rockets sputtering. Grunting with pain, he cuts all thrust and goes weightless. His health vial is plummeting. His head hurts. His laser-focus starts now.

>Arthur: Figure out which one to shoot at

    No can do. Arthur aims, still suffering the barrage, but can't tell the difference between them, aside from that odd size.

>Arthur: Get them all at once

    His grip shifts on his broom, as if he's going to blast shots in shotgun sprays, but they won't cluster enough to get obliterated all at once. No option. The barrage slams into him more, and more.

>Arthur: Track the circle

    Arthur focuses on the strange spatial effect. One larger than the next, larger than the next, larger than the next. This Antegent is a spiral, in multidimensional intersections. Some are dead, or rather, some parts are wounded. Where are they in the spiral? Can he ascend outside, or close inside? If he does that, could he strike at the wound that exists in the body?

    He tries to lock on to the two adjacent the "wound" in the "spiral", and snipe with a massive blast of pure space-warping gravity at unbelievably high speed. Maybe he can make it flinch and get off his ass.
Tamamo     Tamamo's ability to maneuver in zero-g is existant, but entirely dependent, as it turns out, on her mirror. Its positioning in space 'holds' based on whether she wishes it to do so, rather than on whether she, herself, is standing on solid ground. That's what saves her, as she leaps to avoid the strafing attack, and finds herself going much too high. The mirror flips up above her, she touches a hand, rotates, plants her feet upon it, then dives back down. Not quite quickly enough to avoid another incoming, but her wards hadn't quite failed. The heavy, temporary, previously prepared ones do, now, at even the glancing blow, after all the stress she's placed on them, shattering with the look of illusionary glass, as well as the sound of it.

    But for that moment in which she trusts her magic to deflect the attack, rather than move herself to dodge it, Tamamo can focus on her opponent. If it comes close to her, then she is also close to it. A scattering of talismans drift in the destroyed, fading pieces of her shielding, being only that that were not scooped up by the attacking pillar. They don't immediately explode, unlike the others. They're still there when her feet touch ground, near Lilian.

    Quickly she scatters a new area of warding, trying to buy Lilian time, as well as herself. Then, she reaches out for the connection in her planted talismans.

    Any connection is a relationship.

    "To exist together is to feel the pull of gravity, the weight of one upon another. You may try to retain your distance, but you cannot harm another without contact. Show me, now, the shape of your future, will you not?"

    It had only been a glimpse, before. Now she looks for the way each body interacts with each other, the unseen supports that exist between them, that one cannot be removed for the others remaining. It might be a tangle without any reason. It might be perfectly, radially symmetrical, simple every angle. It cannot be undone, she knows, and it will resist its destruction, she also knows.

    She can hardly see the threads of the others, from here, but where they contact the Antegent's in some significant fashion, she might.
Forte There's more sharp edges. Forte can deal with that. It's just pain.

The rest, though... the feeling of weightlessness. The feeling of dissolving, of coming apart. Of losing oneself...

th ==========================
|| >CMD                    || /* My terms are simple: Promise to love me, no
|| NAVI OS V0.8.4 BETA     || matter what. Promise to render all others in
|| SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL      || interesting times. And I will take you in, and
|| > LOAD CROSS.BAT        || love you, and see to your every need, forever.*/
|| STARTING CROSS.BAT      || LAUNCH(mooncell.url, 'Forte', '########')
|| LOADING CROSSSYSTEM.MDF || import moondata.mdf
|| CONTEXTUAL DATA FOUND   || insert into self where corrupt(
|| APPLYING MOON CROSS     ||     select * from moondata.main )
=============================

Forte glows blue and white - and starts to fill back in again. It's not perfect, and not permanent - but it is enough to last.

And right now - he has to deal with the antegent, which has started splintering into deadly pieces. "Gotta take it all in at once, then..." he says, holding out a glowing red hand towards the nearest chunk.
Rita Ma      Rita re-wraps her body as soon as possible, retracting the feading tentacles. She heaves a sigh of mixed relief and exhaustion when her radiant blast destroys one- and then, immediately, jolts back alert with eyes wide as they resurrect and reassemble. "Ah-!! But we got them, didn't we?! We did everything right!"

     Her gaze darts from side to side in an obvious panic, trying and halfway failing to track the accelerating shards. Of course her own monsters are too slow to dodge them; they're ripped apart, spilling blood like water to halfway quench the hostile Antegent's heat. (Their numbers have almost replenished by now; a handful have grown to nearly the size of a man after four incarnations, vaguely bipedal with scything upper limbs.)

     I need a second to think. What went wrong the last time? We killed more than one at once, and they used each others' pieces to reassemble. Tamamo's saying that too. But if we're only destroying one piece at a time, will we be really able to survive that long? What can I do?

     On the first pass, she leaps out of a shard's plunging path handily. On the second, faster flyby, she just manages to narrowly lean out of the way, losing a bit off her bangs in the process. The third doesn't give her a chance: it passes clean through her chest, instantly killing- wait, no, how long has that Rita been a tentacle decoy?

     The real Rita shimmers into view just as she fires a halo-shaped pulse of time-distorting light at the passing Antegent. Its speed is immediately cut to a tenth of its prior velocity, and before it can get away she hits it with another, and another, and another, until it's practically frozen in place despite its speed. She slaps one of Tamamo's chilling talismans onto it to make it cool enough to touch, and then- with a rueful glance over at the rest of the party- she unfurls her false skin into a dozen swaying tentacles.

     The same trick I used on Lilian back then; hopefully it'll work better against something that's only 'really fast'. Everyone else is mostly focusing on the one with the nine barbs. That's smart. If I can do this, it'll be a big help to them. But if I'm wrong, I'll have ruined all their efforts. ... Ergh. I'll just have to trust myself, I guess.

     Her tentacles, sharper and harder than steel, stab into the time-dilated fragment's surface in rapid sequence. They start to do the same thing to it that they did to her own minions: draining out whatever passes for a 'life force' and corroding its substance so it can't be usefully healed or reconstituted at all.
Staren     Yay, it worked!

    Oh no, it un-worked!

    Staren's frown is, at least, not shown to the enemy -- maybe she should really make this body's face able to make expressions with the disguise off -- but it seems like they're going frustratingly in circles. Discussing with Lilian how to find this thing's weaknesses, she sends everything she's gathered so far off to the lab to ask the AI how to most effectively TAKE THIS THING DOWN. Maybe it will spot something they couldn't see on account of being busy fighting, and then Lilian can do her... thing...

    It gets worse. A 'mist' of fine particles tear into her. She activates a forcefield fast enough to blunt it, but not stop it, and finds that her... handling... is off? It's like when her old body swap tech went wrong except it's *constantly getting worse*. Or like a vehicle that keeps changing handling. She feels like she might disappear. Not good...

    So, after seeing that Forte and Bond have used sound weapons to decent effect, Staren decides: I'MMA DO THAT.

    She's been constantly summoning new drones to the field -- she doesn't have to aim them precisely as long as they get here -- to replace the ones that get knocked out, so there is ample recording of sensor data for whatever the heck Bond just did. SONIC ATTACK, DRAIN, CURSE, elements and magical and physical emanations are analyzed and matched to 'close enough' pieces of magi-tech, assembled at Staren's request into something Staren can put on her gun.

    She warps in an underbarrel device, a couple of times the size of her fist, with gem-inset plates connected by rapidly-soldered wires running to a conical protrusion that vaguely gives the idea of 'raygun'.

    "Please work..." Staren mutters under her breath, affixing it in place on the rifle barrel while zipping around trying not to get MORE monolith pieces through her, and flips a switch, the whine of charging electronics surrounding her, and then she zooms towards the closest monolith, aims in its general direction, and--

    *BWOMMMMMM*

    There's an electric-blue flash of energy and then a cone of opressive, draining sound sweeps over the monolith, trying to shake it apart and weaken it both physically and magically!
Lilian Rook     The attempt to biohack the Antegent isn't all that much more successful than it was the first time. The main difference Ishirou finds is that the 'data' he's sorting through now is actually organized, as the Antegent is apparently 'awake' in some sense, communicating between all its flying 'limbs' with shared senses. Senses he doesn't actually have, albeit. That whining invades his mind twice as loud as before.

    Overloading its regeneration causes minute fluctuations in mass that sends one of the Antegent that'd shot him careening into one of Arthur's black holes, being torn to pieces by tidal force, and then pouring itself back out the other side somehow, reassembling with the dust of its fallen twins, half-built, for most of the expected raw material having already been used by the first resurrection. It also has the problem of the miniscule 'bullets' lodged in Ishirou and his airframe tearing themselves free all over again to rejoin the thing that'd fired them.

    Kirishima's trade is successful in something extremely important: taking one right out of the air and burying it in the hillside. The speed of impact deforms its entire body like a crumple zone, but also turns it red hot with sizzling heat where it melts the dirt on all sides and halfway passes into the un-densified earth, putting her at immense risk along with it.

    Lilian catches another one of the ground attack Antegent from above, declining to allow it to go fast for a little while, so she can accelerate at it from above and ram the full length of Night Mist through it. Her target screams with the cadence of an overheated bone saw, visibly charring dark black around the contact of the blade. A direct request comes through for her to use the information from Tamamo to figure out the resurrection gimmick before it's too late. When Tamamo herself arrives and starts protectively warding her, she holds the flier viciously pinned, crouched low in the blindspot of its firing limbs, and squeezes her eyes shut, her brow twitching, and the corner of her lip bleeding.

<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "One at a time? That helps."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "The less unknown the faster this will go."

    James Bond's choice of attack is wildly effective against his chosen target; even when breaking physics, the physical dynamics of everything going on are balanced on razor thin margins of tolerances, and draining all the strength out of the two 'gunships' babysitting his position, hunting him to the cache waiting for him to show himself again, before blasting them with destructive resonance, causes both to dramatically explode into thousands of humming fragments.

    Lilian calls out "Left!" a moment later, and before Bond's eyes, the debris field snap-coalesces where his leftmost attacker was, raising its spine count to nineteen. It flexes and bristles like a bladed flower with a buzzing howl, and then does to 'everything within ten meters of him' what happened to the helicopter, sweeping a cone of death at him. The ground crumbles and rapidly floats away under his feet, the slivers unbinding the earth he's standing on and adding their cumulative kinetic energy together until it's flying all over the place. He might even fall and break his legs before he takes fatal damage.
Lilian Rook     Arthur's gravity beam corkscrews one target into a hideous burnt twist of silver origami, which starts un-crumpling itself before his eyes. The one it snipes beyond is blown inside out, turned into a mile long smear of flaming particulate, then reverses in direction and fuses itself back into a glowing hot whole. "It's not adjacent!" Lilian calls out with the new information. "It is ordering, you were right! But it's not a linear sequence! Powers? Orders? Exponents? A few loops around the spiral. Counter-clockwise though, definitely! Aim at whichever one seems bigger!"

    Easier said than done. The attacker superheated by gravitic stress hovers in place, vibrating like an overpressurized boiler, and then blasts itself at him at such high speed that it just looks like a molten laser beam shot through the sky.

    Unfortunately, things can still get worse. The ground is breaking apart in such tremendous quantities that there is no grass remaining for a mile, the lightest dirt now high in the sky as progressively larger and larger clods and boulders are heaved out of the ground and set to cluttering up space. Harder to fly. Harder to shoot. Harder to see. There are now steep drops down randomly appearing chasms off spontaneous cliffsides into jagged and steep-walled pits of bedrock, gradually turning the battlefield into something like an antlion trap.

    It seems that the Antegent has started to figure their enemy out, too, because when Staren fires the enormous sound cannon, rather than seeing the same success as the others, his target instantly shifts all of its momentum a hundred and seventy degrees and zips right behind one of the larger floating chunks of earth, using it as cover to absorb the blast. Using Arthur's black holes, now clogged with heavy amounts of floating mass and making obvious clear zones around them, it sligshots back around and passes Staren multiple times, aiming to break her in half on its sharpened 'wings' two dozen times in six seconds.

    Rita's time-slow is outside the axis of interaction that the Antegent can apparently deal with anyways. One tenth of its speed is still 'too fast', but being repeatedly stacked under the same effect, it ends up functionally frozen in front of her. When it is pierced and drained, Lilian calls out "Wait, not that one--!", but it doesn't matter; it crumbles to charcoal around Rita's tentacles, and becomes inert dust-- not entirely dissimilar to the one pinned by Night Mist, though not the same.

    Forte's target of an already disabled copy, currently re-binding itself, works to dissolve it completely beyond the point that there is anything left at all to put back together. At the moment he succeeds, it's like he'd just walked up to an active particle accelerator and drilled a hole in it, blasting him with a sun-bright stream of red-white light aimed to punch right through him and intersect with a flier above him, now turning and firing. Just the raw energy adds no additional mass, but the recipient now glows so hot it's hard to look at, and all of its projectiles cause miniature explosions where they land.
Lilian Rook     Strays rake over Tamamo's wards. Several more swivel and convene. It's like they know the moment she begins touching the threads of 'fate' like that.

    At first, she briefly perceives a spiral of some other mathematical model's golden ratio, geometrically expanding in such a way that it overlaps itself several times, repeatedly filling in its own gaps until it achieves a kind of spirographic symmetry, until it naturally expands through an exponent that doesn't exist in any system she knows. Peering deeper and deeper, working backwards through the spiral, unwinding and unraveling it, she finds its geometric locus; its gravitational median; its core of binding energy. And there she sees a bright and terrible shard of !red light, burning into the eyes she has to see the weave, blistering the fingers she has to touch the threads, lodged in its heart like shrapnel. A nightmare radiance that washes all relationships the colour of fresh blood and destroys all sense of gravity, all sense of near and far, all sense of now and then, and refuses to relinquish the Divine Secret within any more than a black hole relinquishes light. It--

    Lilian reaches out and grabs Tamamo's wrist. The vision abruptly vanishes. Tamamo doesn't feel like she understands it at all, but the numbers jump right into her head. 'Four. Nine. Five. One. Six. Twelve. Thirteen.'

    ABILITY GET: §çæ¶ - - -TARNISHED HEAVENSHARD
Staren     "Tch!" Staren's fancy new toy is foiled by TERRAIN. Her attempt to dodge is off due to the handling, but a forcefield comes up, those 'wings' battering through it, and the remaining strikes cutting into Staren, chopping armor and leaving a wound 'bleeding' oil, but not enough to break her in half!

    Getting close to me was a mistake...!

    If someone shouts out the order, Staren hesitates for a split-second, trying to coordinate the timing of her attack with the others, but otherwise she just hopes that disintigration can't be resurrected from:

    Staren shifts the gun to her off-hand, while holding out her right hand, almost touching the monolith that just attacked her. On her right arm appears a black, cylindrical assembly with a thick golden ring with a spike through it at the base, capped by metal on the end around her wrist. A slim copper cylinder is slotted in, and from it, wires run here and there around the device, connecting to embedded bits of jade and black tourmalines according to some rules of magic circuitry which aren't immediately apparent.

    Staren spreads her fingers and at the same time as she fires the cursed soundgun again, the whole assembly glows an ominous red -- in the light cast by it, Staren's colors seem to temporarily change, her main body black, trim gold, and her eyes red -- but, more importantly, the techno-wizard imitation of Forte's abilities reaches out almost hungrily for data -- matter -- to swallow up and destroy. It can't pull itself back together if parts of it are just gone, right?
Ishirou The feeling of more of them screaming and causing the flight armor to fall again was bad, what was worse is the moment he gained senses again, he was feeling the shards imbedded in him and the armor from the FIRST attack tear out of him, and flying back to the part of the creature that was reforming.  Ishirou screams, fighting through the pain when some pain killers are shot into his body to make sure he doesn't spin out.

Regaining control before he crashes again, he pulls up.  Everything he's trying isn't working...it's like he's just simply not large enough to move this thing in the field he should be a master at.  It's seemingly unable to be properly scanned...and he doesn't have clairvoyance or time sight so that's right out.  This makes predicting this thing impossible.  

Tamamo starts reading out numbers...so how does he ID the heads..?  Maybe he can detect where that energy is and try and predict it from there?  

No that'd require him to see the future...so he'd have to go off of Tamamo's directions.  So he waits, and when he sees an opening or something he can ID as the right head, he fires a blast of cold laser at it, trying to freeze it.
James Bond      Left.

     Bond sweeps the screeching watch in that direction. Quickly. Not quickly enough. Earth is being erased from beneath him. Every purchase he finds is evaporated a moment after--hands clutch disappearing root networks, his knife sticks into a vanishing earthen wall.

     Falling, faster than he can climb. Debris--shredded plant matter, long-buried stones, the bones of dead animals--whips around him like a storm, tearing his jumpsuit and marking angry red wounds where they pass.

     Before the horizon disappears completely, before he can no longer see the world above this alarmingly expanding chasm, Bond adjusts his watch again. A sharp, three-prounged tip whips from his wrist. It's buried in one of the few trees on this grassy island, currently floating thanks to the antegent. Outside the scope of its notice--for now.

     But it doesn't pull Bond up so much as pull the tree closer to the chasm. He's struck by the very thing he thought would save him, bashed in the head as his arms weakly cling to the uprooted thing.

     His ears ring, his vision is fuzzy.

Get up. Get up!

     With his own sense of balance, his relation to gravity, and his injuries, he shouldn't be able to. But James Bond runs up the length of the floating battlefield debris, grenade in hand. It's disintegrating almost as fast as he can run up its length. By the time he reaches the root complex, there's scarcely an inch left to stand on. He leaps.

     Dazed, bloodied, hair matted to his head with sweat, Bond hurls the grenade as he rises. It goes off. No shrapnel. A shower of liquid, sprayed from a nozzle, foams up into dense, restrictive paste upon exposure to the air, that rains down upon the nineteen-spined shard. With every passing moment, the foam grows heavier, more restrictive, more solid.

     The watch screeches again, Bond attempting to smash this one into powder, as well--but another one of those grenades is cooked in his other hand, thrown at the last minute, in an attempt to pre-empt reformation with more of that movement-impeding foam.
Forte There!

Forte's hand, glowing red with the twin intermingled power of the brightest programming and the darkest viral forces, deletes one - well, deletes the physical form. The energy is now concentrated in another one, which is less good, but still a net win.

Less of a net win is the spear of energy that blasts through him - Moon Cross fills in the gap a moment later, but there's only so much that can be fixed with filler data, much like you can't build a house out of nothing but drywall.

Rita's having more luck. He switches tactics - breaking off from his assault to go over towards her, taking up a defensive position nearby her.
"Just focus on taking them down," he barks at her - maybe a bit more brusquely than he'd intended - and he starts doing what he can to clear space around her - using the psychic rejection and viral assimilation in tandem to redirect attacks or delete bits of flying debris.
Kirishima Kirishima lets out a satisfied noise as her strategy to use the Antegent piece's speed and relative fragility against itself works wonders in getting it down to the ground. "Perfect! Just as planned... Now for-"

Her confidence comes a bit too soon, perhaps, as she relays the good news to her allies and notices the increasing heat just a bit too late. With her foot still on top of the mass, Kirishima gets burnt rather badly as the thing gets hot enough to melt the dirt with mere proximity alone, and there's the stench of burnt metal and flesh before the ninja can get herself away from the reddening machine.

"I've brought one down! But it's.. Getting hotter? It's melting the ground!" She warns her allies while rolling to a stop, still observing the machine while starting to move her hands again for another seal of sorts. "Perhaps getting close to it isn't the answer if they're learning this fast... I'll just have to destroy them before it can escape!"

As Kirishima tries leaps forward again, however, the crumbling terrain and her recent burn injuries combine to create quite the problem. She lands neatly in one of those newly opened and terribly jagged chasms, only barely catching herself from falling deeper into it by slamming her hands and good leg against those spiked walls.

"How troubling... So this is why these things are feared so much in this world!" Gasping through the pain, Kirishima focuses for a moment before grappling hook'ing her way out of that chasm, launching herself into the air above the grounded thing once again. Like before, her hands are already moving rapidly to form those seals from before.

"One more time... Flame Seal Number Eighty Eight: Eradication's Lament!" As those hand seals come to a stop, numerous talismans appear in Kirishima's hands. She flings them down at the red hot Antegent segment, then launches her grappling hook towards a more distant clump of dirt to pull herself away. On impact, the oddly stiff talismans explode in succession rather than all at once.

Those with particular sensitive noses may notice the scent of motor oil coming from that explosion.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Aim at whichever one seems bigger!

    "They're all bigger!!" He yells, to Lilian, or maybe himself?

>Arthur: Count on sequence

    Arthur's trying to assess the sequence. That's when the beam comes after him. The shimmering gravitational field around him is the only thing that saves him from being pulped and ashed instantly by the beam, as he has enough time to strengthen it but not enough time to get out of the way. Trying to rendezook his foes still left him getting lanced hard in the sky. The enemy is starting to bring the ground up to him too, making it impossible for him to maneuver very well out of the way of this!

<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo mutters, "Four-nine-five-one-six-twelve-thirteen--"

>Arthur: Enter in the cheat code

    While the beam blasts against his body, an eye pops open. He darts its gaze around, and breaks into a rocket rush. He doesn't need to maneuver around the terrain if he can portal around and through it. He just needs to count them, note them... And project his magic. Space magic blasts that seem to do nothing on their own.

    They leave Gate enchantments on the bodies of the Stonehenge monoliths. If struck the right way, an attack from the right angle at the right target should lance through the others. If Arthur can get a good look at the spiral, his hope is that the impacts, sprayed wildly and without enough precision to really clear the field, will leave a chance for someone else to.
Tamamo     Tamamo mutters the numbers more rapidly than she can read them, straining to retain information she doesn't understand. She was right. There was an ordering, implied by the structure with which each piece supports the other. There had to be, if there was a way to bring them down. There had to be a first, and a second, and on until the thirteenth, or there would be no means by which the future of their fall could exist, at all. Might there be more than one? No, and it doesn't matter. It's a kind of symmetry, but the ways in which it isn't don't need to be examined. She takes her single answer with her, unable to comprehend the whole, in a way that worse than badly unnerves her.

    She's skilled in hiding that kind of thing, but she doesn't hide it, this time. She only keeps moving, halting herself from halting. She badly wants to lean on Lilian's support, to move to do so, but she can't. She needs to be a support. She needs to maintain her failing wards, hard shields keeping just a small area of ground intact, protecting herself and Lilian from the attracks provoked by her meddling with truths hidden. She can't keep looking. She isn't looking. Lilian already grabbed her wrist, and it vanished.

    That already happened. Her wards haven't quite broken. Almost, yes, but not yet. The future's not behind her yet.

    "Lilian, did you see it? Did you hear it? If you have, then go." She has little left to give, but a blessing of good fortune, always. She can transfer that much, easily, hand to hand. Skin to skin is always close enough -- but she already said her piece about gravity.
Rita Ma      Rita's gleeful satisfaction at having successfully drained one of the Antegent's bodies to death is swiftly cut short by the battlefield getting even worse. The Cycle is of limited use in a maelstrom like this despite their ever-growing numbers; unable to keep up with the horrifying velocities involved, they serve now mainly as eyes and ears and shed their blood to cool the opposing Antegent off.

     For Rita herself, safety is more of a concern. Even invisibility won't protect her much in a hazard zone this dense. There are tradeoffs to be made between offense, defense, and secrecy; begrudgingly she chooses defense, unraveling her human disguise to reveal the girl in the blue dress underneath. Her tentacles swing her between floating obstacles at speeds too high and maneuvers too disorienting for the human brain to adequately process, playing a game of centimeters with the red-hot lasers, omnipresent shrapnel, and hypervelocity ramming maneuvers.

     It's working, somehow. Her alien blue eye flicks to track a dozen different threats at harrowing speed; her body knows exactly how to move before her brain has a say, and by trusting in it completely she's able to endure unscathed. But it can't go on like this forever. Time isn't on their side.

     So when her ally swoops in, she looks to him with immense relief. "Mr. Forte!!"

     Immediately she trusts in his protection, switching her body back from automatic to manual and landing back on the pitted and torn-up ground. "Four, nine, five, one, six, twelve, thirteen. That's the ones that are left- in that order, like Ms. Tamamo said."

     Under his protection, she's able to start weaving invisible tentacle-traps between the various pieces of floating debris, charged with that same time-slowing energy and plastered with more of Tamamo's freezing talismans. Any of the Antegent-bodies that strike them will be slowed to a crawl for just a moment- long enough for her to check their number against the order, and drain them like before if they're the next target in sequence.

     One by one, that ought to check the boxes.
Lilian Rook     Exactly like Staren had just seen with Forte, obliterating the physical shell of one of the Antegent-forms blasts her in return with all of its escaping energy, which flies straight into a second receptacle and doubles up on its internal power, superheating it into a glowing red 'elite enemy' and giving it the double speed and explosive shot templates, which are immediately used against her. Bond is fighting to buy time; each flight-form he detonates into hypersonic dust and shrapnel comes right back together and resumes chasing him. He catches one mid-regeneration (repair? coalescence?), but even then, it's quickly grinding through the glue, being compressed into more exotic and compact states under the immense quasi-gravitational binding energy inherent in the Antegent.

    Kirishima's explosion digs her chosen target free of the hill, but it was about to escape anyways. It collapses under Lilian, holding fast onto Tamamo as their spit of land goes drifting away. Her pinned target accelerates out from under her sword as it becomes lighter than light and faster than fast, tearing itself partially in half, and stopping and spinning on a dime to blast the pair's wards point blank. Kirishima's target skips from the ground like a crashing UFO, flaming and deformed, splashing against the side of an enormous levitating boulder, which is annihilated by the impact. The Antegent comes back, the earth doesn't.

    They're moving so fast now that the air friction is starting make them glow. Shrieking, buzzing, incandescent shapes zigzagging in and out of one's vision too fast to keep track of. Half a dozen shooting stars tearing so freely through space that they look like thrice their number. Molten hot slivers chase Arthur, Ishirou, and focus on Staren and Forte from multiple angles, blowing up from the vapourizing energy of their meteoric impact. Lightweights zip down to grass-cutting height, like multi-thousand degree blades, hunting down Rita and Kirishima with nearly infinite maneuverability. One breaks through Tamamo's wards, and requires Lilian's face to face reactive intervention to send it away, burning her just from the radiant heat experienced over several seconds all at once. "Yeah. Got it. Just stay safe, Tamamo." she says, and disappears.

    Forte's ability to cover Rita is strained to the limit. There's so much incoming from all sides so fast that it's taxing his deletion throughput even when he gets all of it. But that cover is critically necessary to allow her work to keep going. Ishirou's freezing rays are far easier to land than the chunks of ice, briefly slowing and cooling the enemy, causing them to fracture under thermal stress, for several seconds of vulnerability each. Long enough to target and tag them with gates, linked in sequence.

    Things have reached the point where even the boulders spiraling over the island's skies are starting to come apart. The feeling of 'lightness', of being 'unbound', has gone beyond merely the sense of one's weight upon the Earth, and penetrated so deeply that it's like one's body is ready to start coming apart. Like their cells aren't stuck together. Like their mind isn't stuck to their body. Like their thoughts aren't stuck to their mind. A rapid, terrifying depressurization, where earthly things lose a critical substrate or law that they need to exist, and begin dispersing into patternless nothing. The Cycle mobs that have been absorbing fire so far are the canaries in the mines, unraveling from the tips of their limbs as they were made of gorey --and yet strangely beautiful-- liquid thread.
Lilian Rook     The Antegent that catch the web, of course, obliterate it immediately, but they are still slowed to a subsonic speed for a few precious seconds. The linked gates have already set them up in order. Rita's tentacles pierce through and cause those closest to her to crumble to lifeless ash. Scattered blasts from Arthur that find their slowed targets warp through his entire daisy chain of gates to impact targets in the right sequence rather than the one in which they were struck.

    Lilian drops out of the air to instantly multisect an Antegent too far from Rita, and fire a warping temporal disjoint through Arthur's entire gate sequence to disintegrate another in black-gold static. Ice lasers, sonic blasts, curses and talismans, bombs and fireballs, whirl around in the eddies and vortices created between the micro black holes, now the only points in space with meaningful solidity and definition, and are re-stitched through the line of enemies.

    Number four. Number nine. Number five. Number one. Number six. Number twelve. Number thirteen. Some of those are now part of others, some have had others amalgamated to them; it requires uncanny recall, manipulation of fortune, or ample extra time, to keep track of which is which at this point, since the number of weapon-spines is no longer reliable. One failure would risk a single Antegent with the speed and power of all thirteen in one, which would be beyond disastrous under these existing conditions. There is a moment where Tamamo can even feel everyone delicately brush the edges of that future on the way past, terrible as it is.

    But the last buzzing killer is shot down, disintegrated, and drained of its essence, before it manages to escape; though it does turn to the horizon and accelerate quite rapidly all at once, it's still within range of Arthur's Tamamo-talisman-tagged gate while under Rita's time slow, and killable by firing into any of the others. And when it goes, that sickening sense of depressurization, depersonalization, derealization, goes with it. The miniature orbital field of millions of tons of rock and dirt and plant and water all goes crashing back down to the surface a few seconds later, accelerating at exactly 9.81m/s^2; a danger in of itself, given that includes practically everyone else.

    From the direction of the thirteenth and final crash, a fairly significant fireball rises into the air, like a very small nuclear strike, distinctive cloud and all. And then out of that, a very different kind of fire. An ephemeral streak of phantom un-colour. The tidal corona of a black hole in infrared. The relativistic passage of a primordial comet through a nebula. The last gasp of a distant sun as seen at the right moment. A thin beam of blood-like flame erupts straight up into the sky, breaching the clouds and disappearing into the upper atmosphere. It briefly stops, hovering in place as a teeny tiny fragment of hostile radiance, impossible to really see, too small to hold but too large to imagine, and then banks sharply away, flying at immense speed to the southeast as if inexorably drawn to some inescapable massive point of gravity, visible as a bloodred smear through the underside of the clouds.
Staren     Drat, she'd hoped using the draining curse too would prevent that! The robot body is looking seriously beat up as it tries and fails to dodge the ridiculously-stacked attacks... fortunately, the whole thing is ended soon afterwards. She turns up her thrusters mid-fall and makes sure to get out from under any falling rocks.

    There's an explosion in the distance. <"They didn't... do that before, right? Or could we just not see it? Or is it because we visited London?">

    With flight, and whichever drones didn't get smashed, she zips from ally to ally checking that everyone is okay.
Ishirou Ishirou hits the rider mode on his armor, shifting into a more plane-like mode, aiming to scream out of the dangerous explosion, and only getting hit by some of the fallout.  It's enough to force him to nearly lose control, but forcing himself to make an emergency into the nearby water.  

Moments later, a water gear armor suit pops out of the water and hits the beach.  He rolls onto the beach face up.

"Staren, seriously, they're horror terrors who have like...no consistent form.  Please pay attention to current events."
Staren     Staren sighs. "I mean the... everyone saw it, right? The weird red light zooming off into the distance??"
Tamamo     There's no time to catch one's breath. Up to the very last moment, Tamamo's fighting for her life, or to maintain her own reality. There's a lot that holds her together, but it's not to the level of a black hole. With her wards broken at last, taking unreal blows against her mirror like a shield, her foothold is gone. She's left to fall.

    It's a rush of wind, and of normality, a way in which the world is familiar and understood. It's heady, but enough to let her withdraw another of her blessings, and place it against her own chest. A burst of clear-headed power, like shots of caffeine without the shakes and the crash. That lets her remember what other talismans she still has on hand, and throw her mirror down -- without quite touching it at all -- to form a platform beneath her. She lands, then rolls off again in a flurry of cloth robes, and repeats the maneuver, again and again.

    There's really not much at all left below her. But, more importantly, has to find Lilian everyone, and be sure they're alright.
Lilian Rook     Lilian, under the power of her own flight, is able to descend smoothly to reach Tamamo before the ground and simply catch her so she doesn't have to do all of that platforming. Staring off to the south-east, she consults her memory of how she got out here in the first place, and dry swallows.

    "London." she says. "That's straight towards London."

    "I heard about this. At Arx Zenith. Not in a course. History class. That's . . . That isn't supposed to happen. That's not part of the Antegent we were fighting. That's . . . That's a different one. A famous one. Sealed at the Exclusion Zone impact point, during the last year of the Onslaught. I don't know for sure. It was nearly twenty years before I was even born. But they talked about all six God-class Antegent. Like the Man in the Moon. That's what happens when another Antegent is . . . when it comes into contact with Mors Caelum. The God-class that all but annihilated Europe overnight."
Rita Ma      Rita shouldn't be feeling exhausted. The feeding frenzy of the last couple minutes has charged her to the point where she almost seems to glow passively from within. She's virtually unhurt besides, in no small part thanks to Forte.

     But her muscles ache from exhaustion, and her mind spins from dizzy overstimulation, and her emotions are fully tapped as the adrenaline subsides. There's really nothing to do but re-wrap herself in her human disguise, then collapse to her knees in relief at the distant explosion and take deep ragged breaths.

     "Mr. Forte... thank you. Without you and Ms. Tamamo, we..."

     That thought doesn't reach its conclusion. She looks up, and abruptly realizes that the world's about to fall on top of them. Again, her body takes control; she sprints for the edge of the danger zone at inhuman speed, dropping to a four-legged gallop in places as she weaves around the falling debris.

     Only after the resounding, prolonged crash is over does she take control from her reflexes again, bending over and catching her breath. "Auuuuh, that was so scary! I can't take any more of this. It's over, right? It's really over?"

     Of course just then a final fist-sized rock falls directly on her head. She collapses onto her back and emits a groan that's about two-thirds defeated frustration to one-third pain.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Descend

    Arthur slams into the ground somewhere near where Lilian lands, skidding to a stop on his face as he corrects for the suddenly unfucked space and swerved to evade the falling dangers. When he manages to get back up and brush himself off, he adjusts his sunglasses and watches the light streak off. "You got intel on what that God-class does? I mean--" He looks around at the devastated island. "This thing was hiding out for *how long* again? Could it have come into contact with that Mors Caelum thing way back?"

    He makes a Weird Face, not liking the look of this. "Think that'll wake the bastard back up or something? I don't like that shit." He mutters, tensely. Then makes a short "bluh" sound. "This at least squares shit with the dragon, right? Think the dragon would give us a freebie and explain *that* shit?"
James Bond      What's happening?

     Years, dates, are hard to think of, when thoughts are separate from mind, mind from body. It is hard to say who 'this' even is. Where 'here' is, if it's the right 'here' or the wrong.

     His shoulder holster feels less like an old friend and more like dead weight, 'here.' Nothing had felt as right as what he'd done--but here, shame attempts to smother him like a sickening blanket. The floor of the office is a comfort forbidden to him. If he doesn't look her in the eyes, it'll be even worse. At best... she'll be disappointed. At worst, she'll think that

Everything's coming apart.

     A body crashes to the ground, convulsing. Dry heaving. Rocks pelt it. Sticks pelt it. Clods of earth splat against open wounds. As the mind and the thoughts attach to one another and to the body, hands come up to shield.

     Bond staggers back to his feet, his gait ungainly enough that he's nearly struck by one of the falling boulders. He turns, hurriedly aiming his watch at the fireball. Several pictures, in quick succession, captured on microfilm, before he has to shield his eyes.

     He is dirty. He is bloodied. The consequences of even having made this deal will assuredly come home to roost--this was a mess of his own making. He's gone over her head. That memory... it'll be like then, but maybe worse. There have been concerns, of late. It's easy to hear things, if you know how to listen.

     A picture is one thing. But they can be faked. Were he in the dragon's place, he'd want proof. Ashes, scraped into a plastic container. The earth, disturbed by its influence, into another. Bond grimaces, applying his knife to the edge of one of his lacerations. Burnt skin, where its material form pierced his own. And, finally--something too large to hold.

     Foam, compressed into a shape that is so exotic as to have only come from the consciousness of an Antegent. The equivalent of the fossilized tracks of a long-dead dinosaur. The dragon, whose dreams hold the shapes and forms of other long-dead creatures and plants, of the ancient, primordial earth, may appreciate the similarity.

     It's tucked under one arm. Bond's breathing is ragged. "If it doesn't," says Bond to Arthur, "Don't expect me to make the first offer."
Tamamo     "By 'that,' you mean... 'that'?" Tamamo says to Lilian, in Japanese.

    "Was it something else, sealed within, or do you mean the enemy we faced was not whom we believed it to be? Or do you mean this one touched that 'god'? Could this not have happened?"
Lilian Rook     Once Tamamo is secure, Arthur arrives, and Lilian hears Rita whining in the rubble, Lilian takes in a deep, bracing breath, and calms all at once in the release of it. "Yes. It's okay." she says to Rita. "Take five. You've earned it. We'd really have been in trouble." And then she goes picking through the rubble, seeking Bond, the reason they were all originally hear, talking along the way.

    "Maybe, but I doubt Ddraig Goch knows more than humanity does. Mors Caelum appeared near the western border of Russia, and just went east to west across the continent all day and night, until we finally stopped at London, and the Red Dragon is native to the isles only. If it fought in that operation . . . Well, our records are shit, so maybe." Lilian pronounces its name with a kind of subtly hushed strain usually reserved for a school child having to recite an unfortunately outdated work of literature and being told by the teacher they have to say the slurs out loud. It's utterly out of character for her. "But . . . You're probably right. This has to be a leftover piece. Shrapnel from . . . its existence."

    "Caelum is . . . When it comes to the six God-class Antegent, we're not talking about things you pick up a sword and fight anymore. The concepts don't mesh. You might as well say you're going to fight the sky. A God-class Antegent is a thing that happens to you. Like the Man in the Moon we all just deal with now. The Caelum event involved every Antegent in its path-- a direct route from its initial point of appearance to the London Exclusion Zone. Everything it passed over was sort of . . . it did to other Antegent the kind of thing that Antegent do to humans. But not maliciously. Or even really intentionally. Just by being near it, it was 'reflected in them', and they'd fell in with it. Including the dead ones. Especially the dead ones, actually."

    "Antegent touched by the Caelum event would self-resurrect indefinitely as long as they were within the event's radius. Each time they died and were rebuilt, they'd change, too. They'd sort of 'blend together'. Sharing traits, parameters, behaviours, even eventually physical forms, and getting stronger and deadlier even as they lost their cohesion and fell completely into its conceptual spiral."

    "At the same time, anything that wasn't Antegent, or Antegent made, would lose its coherence. It was like a storm. Or like the moon dragging the tide with it. The closer something was, the more it'd lose all definition and cease to work. Cease to exist. Maybe even become something else. How do you fight an entity like that? A living singularity of physical law. It was really like a God of Antegent."

    "That scar in the sky is the way it is now because that's where the last stand was able to drive it back. Out of 'here' and into 'there', wherever it leads. I think we're all pretty content to leave it like that. Obviously this thing had been touched by the Caelum event. It might have even gone dormant just because it wasn't receiving any commandments." Lilian blinks. "Commands, anymore."

    She finally stops near Bond. "So fuck you and never set us up for something like that again." Lilian sighs. "And I hope you got what you came for. Let's be glad that the original Antegent was just an awful matchup for a mighty dragon, and not already insanely powerful before it was 'touched'."