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Owner	Pose
Marigold	CASTLE BERN      Total confusion. <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Guinivere says, "Yes, quite. It is. Thank you. I... Shanna, what is i--" <Q-Conversation> Nobunaga says, "Very important." <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Guinivere transmits headset-fumbling a bit. There's a sharp panicked exchange just on the edge of audibility. <Q-Conversation> Roland says, "If you can't get a little sentimental about brothers and pets...Is something wrong? What's going on?" <Q-Conversation> Nobunaga says, "--That doesn't sound good. I'm getting ready." <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Shanna squawks, "GALLE'S ATTACKING BRUNNYA! I think he's-- is he betraying--" Melady, probably, is the source of an off-mic shriek of something like exasperation. <Q-Conversation> Flamel Parsons says, "--?!?!" <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Shanna says, "Oh um Roy says we have to go *right now* I--" <Q-Conversation> Flamel Parsons says, "Going!!" <Q-Conversation> Nobunaga says, "Ahaha, that's better news than I could have hoped!" <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Shanna says, "Okay bye see you!!" over Melady saying something like 'fucking straightened him out'.      Bern has been an unfairly peaceful and beautiful land, from the end of the Scouring up until thirty minutes ago. Even from your arrival-point at the nearest forest-hidden Warpgate three or four miles away, the howls and thunder-crack of battle are audible.      It's late evening or early night, and the soaring wyvern-knights ought to blend in against the darkening sky, but instead ruddy firelight highlights their wings from below. Blood drips down from their lances like a thin rain as they circle for another pass against their own countrymen, and lightning from the anima mages among Brunnya's troops crackles from the earth up to the sky to retaliate. Black smoke from the burning fringes of the adjoining capital city complete the ghoulish man-made storm.      What used to be an occupied meadow, straight ahead, is now an open path strewn loosely with corpses all in Bern's red armor; debris of a panicked fighting retreat, one heroically traitorous wyvern-and-rider fallen among them for every three or four villainously loyal foot-soldiers. In the eastward distance you can even spot the liquid-shadow-rotting corpse of a single war-dragon, so many lances broken off in its body that it looks like a thicket.
Marigold	Most of the Lycian League has rushed ahead to seize the opening. Princess Guinivere and other noncombatants are likely somewhere sheltered, but here at the Warpgate, there's only Melady and Thea with their wyvern-and-pegasus steeds, both sweat-matted and bloodied already, and both whisked into adrenaline tension white-knuckling their respective reins. "You! Finally, they're-- they're in already, tried to talk sense--" "We've got room for three! One with me, two with her! If you can't move fast, we'll take you to the castle. Sort it out and get on!" "Saint protect us I can't believe he's..." "Melady did you see--" "No I didn't see Shanna. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that other dragon--" "Don't. She'll make it, she's..." "Yeah. Come on, steady, Tryffin. I need to get back in there. I need to."      From the air, or on your own approach, you can see Galle's forces fighting a likely-losing struggle to keep Brunnya's away from Castle Bern by controlling the bridges over its stately moat. The tactically sharper you are, the surer you can be that their maneuver won't last long; Roy surely realized as much, which is why he sprung as he did. Already, the wyvern-knights yielding in places exposes you to stray bolts of lightning and whickering arrows on approach; Melady and Thea don't dare get near the Bernish fliers even now, but their caution isn't tested.      Castle Bern is more a palace than a fortress, as Guinivere had said. It has a higher wall and fortified center inside a lower wall with estate-like buildings. The low wall has been smashed open by a great force- by magic or by Fae, it's hard to guess. There, where Roy's army has set up their rear guard to avoid being encircled, Melady and Thea begin descending; the high castle still has archers on its walls to deter fliers, and they're twang-zip fired on haphazardly even while approaching this close.      Across the two bridges over the moat, terrified maidservants and manservants are fleeing the low castle like sailors from a sinking ship; not that the bloody field or scorched city are much safer. For the time being, they're lucky enough to pass unmolested by either side. Anyone approaching by foot can't avoid pressing past them, wide-eyed and pale-faced.
Flamel Parsons	"I'll get there! Go without me, better if I'm solo!" Flamel's already taking off. "Do not *wait* for me do not *back me up*, if you have an ounce of resentment in you towards me, then put it all into neglecting me,I'm just going..."     His voice fades out. He's already out of earshot. He's moving so fast with his levitation, slowly building up momentum over Bern's rolling hills, he hasn't even bothered with invisibility. Arrows flying above...     Flamel's eyes dart to his sides as he closes on the walls.     Metal-clad forms make loud GONG noises as telekinesis launches slam them against ramparts, discharging huge amounts of psychic distress payload; all the fear they felt in their final moments, built up in now-dying brain-matter, make for telepathic bombs of psychic disorientation, enough to hopefully sway arrows or drive the archers away for a moment. This isn't how a Psychonaut is meant to operate, but right now, with fractions of seconds being the difference between the world enduring and the world ending, he can't afford to do Paladins-style tactics.     <Parsons, approaching rear guard!> He beams directly at the men. <Split, path down the middle! The rest of us are coming! We're here for the front line!> He rolls his momentum straight through unless halted. Every second counts. Go. Go, with no hesitation, no halting. One moment of opportunity dangles in view and he cannot afford to leave it un-grasped. His eyes are wide, manic. He didn't have time to put on tactical gear. His tie isn't even on. And given the chance to save the world from the apocalypse, and an open field to build momentum, he won't stop until he's stopped by force or by structure.     A massive pulse of clairvoyance. No effort to hide himself this time. The wave of light is visible to all, and it feeds back a coarse radar feed of emotional context in Castle Bern. That'll get him a path, a target, a lay of the land, surely.
Nobunaga	The second Nobunaga has arrived, she flips out her cape, then draws it back in; a Nobbu Tank occupies the space she had briefly obscured, as gormless as any Nobbu *ever* looks. Sparing the riders space for someone else who could use it, she instead hops onto the back of the little treaded vehicle, grabs on to one of the shoulder guns with one hand and points with the other, "After them! Go!"     Nobu!?     Though the soldier still seems rather confused by the chaos it's already been summoned into, it does put the pedal to the medal, tearing off through the killing field in a plume of dust stirred up by the tank tracks.     "You beautiful, headstrong, courageous moron!" the warlord calls out as she beholds the result of Galle's offensive, "Are you playing the distraction on purpose or was this your final attempt to die as a warrior?"     Getting closer to the lower castle has her guide her chauffeur offroad to avoid the crowds without having to slow down too much; though she does eventually ditch the Nobbu Tank and proceed somewhat slower by air via hanging off the underside of a freshly summoned Nobbu UFO as it eeooeeooeeoos through the darkening sky.     An arrow wizzes uncomfortably close. Another clangs off the Nobbu UFO's hull. Nobunaga's gaze is pulled from the unfolding battle to the castle she's approaching.     "Nuisance."     That will be a problem for her and for *everyone* else too. She shifts her grip to dangle one-handed, gesturing with the other in a wave that conjures a spread of matchlock rifles in flickers of golden sparks. With a rattle of gunfire, they discharge into the battlements below. Right after, Nobunaga releases and drops to the parapet herself. Nobunaga already has her sword drawn, surrounding herself with a dozen fresh guns the moment she lands.     It'll slow her down, but she reasons that cleaning up the parapets will give the others the advantage of pushing deeper into the castle without being harassed from behind.
Angela	Roland, on the other hand, is intent on being particularly stealthy. He avoids fights or helping allies alike. He's wearing a servant's uniform, his weapons hidden away in the pocket dimension as he inches his way across battlefield, hoping to slink his way via the drawbridge, and blend in with the fleeing servants except in the sense that he's moving inward. He is accustomed to moving through a crowd, even a terrified one like this, and he pays them no mind as he twists and contorts his body to engage with minimal conflict with the people moving in the right direction. He has been engaged in so much teamwork lately he has almost forgotten what it means to work alone. He'll avoid fights when eh can, but he's ready to summon a knife to shank anybody who looks at him too keenly. Meanwhile, Love has a different idea entirely! She is her draconic form and is schmooving across the way to try and meet up with Galle's forces of all people in order to support him? Love doesn't exactly have a tactical mind. The power of love and hatred tell her, though, that when former bad guy turns good guy you have to be there to support them or the bad guy is going to either drain their energy and make them evil again or just kill them. And Love is too fond of the treacherously heroic to let that happen easy!
Odette Raskins	There was supposed to be more time, wasn't there? Considering how rarely things went according to plan in the past, however, Odette's not feeling too surprised at having to rush the approach to Bern. If anything, she's pleasantly surprised by the fact that Galle's turned on Brunnya at all rather than the surprise being something far more horrendous. With staff slung across her back and her gear spread through her belt and medical case, the EMT arrives in her Company uniform while running up to meet Melady and Thea. she takes out some bandages first to get the most obvious wounds wrapped up for them and their mounts, and then she switches to her staff to utilize some of the healing magic she's learned from Lucius to supplement that. "I'll get on with Miss Melady, then. If we see Miss Shanna on the way, I'll take care of her. She'll be okay, don't worry." She assures, trying to keep her own frightened thoughts from taking over even while she's starting to climb aboard the wyvern. "And if anyone else gets hurt, just make sure to get somewhere safe, and I'll come to you!" There's a lot of people she isn't seeing here, but she keeps telling herself they'll be okay. Drawing her pistol, she makes sure to keep herself stable upon Melady's mount once they're in the air. She's scoping out the area as best she can, calling out any archers and mages she sees on the way in. She even warns Melady when she's about to fire at them before doing so, praying that whomever she actually hits will drag themselves away instead of bleeding out. Once they've landed, Odette makes for the front lines right away. Rather than trying to slow anyone down for treatment, she instead utilizes the staff for healing magic to take full advantage of its speed over her usual treatment methods. Plus, it helps to have something long to wave in the air whenever there's a free moment. She's attached a blue and white cloth to it to make it easier to see, waving it especially hard to try directing the flow of servants away from the battle. "This way! You can get out over here, just don't push! Help each other out!"
Riku Asakura	Riku arrives with the rest of the otherworlders at a scene that is already bloody.  Despite it not being the first time he's seen a pitched battle, or the blood and death that it causes, it still causes him to pause for a moment.  Privileged as he was to not deal with constant war at his home, this certainly shakes him for a moment before he shakes his head.   Whatever good fortune that blessed them with this opportunity to push into Castle Bern, they can't waste it.  Riku looks up at Melady and Thea.  "It's fine, I can fly myself there," Riku says, and pulls out the Fusion Riser.  They likely wouldn't get a warning inside the castle, so he has to transform now to make sure he's ready to fight. "I go!" he says, pulling out a capsule.  Activating the Ultra Capsule, he summons an image of a giant of light.  He slides this into a capsule holder as he draws a second capsule.  "You go!" Activating this capsule, a giant of darkness appears on the opposite side of him.  This too is slid into the holder.  "Here we go!" He draws the Fusion Riser down each capsule, scanning each one before pulling the Fusion Riser into the air.  "It's time to get ready!" he states before pulling the Riser over his chest and shouting, "GEEEEEEEED!"  As he shouts this, white and blue flames pour out from him as he clenches his hands on either side of him. FUSION RISE! ULTRAMAN ULTRAMAN BELIAL ULTRAMAN GEED PRIMITIVE Riku is gone, and in his place is Ultraman Geed.  However, because of the battle and their need to catch up with the rest of the League, he doesn't grow to a giant, because they also need to get into a castle.   He stays normal size, but immediately jumps into the air, following Melady and Thea to catch up with the path of destruction that Roy and his group had made.   "Please be okay..." he says to himself, worried about Roy and the rest of the League.  Battles were known for killing people mindlessly.
Lilian Rook	'You! Finally, they're-- they're in already, tried to talk sense--'     Lilian hasn't studied strategy to the same extent as a prince or general, but she can grasp this situation within seconds of rushing out of the Gate. The only thing that delays her comprehension is the very slight doubt that it would be Galle; that it could be Brunnya that tries to save Zephiel from himself. Returning Melady's near-panic with a grim, lips-parted stare, Lilian says, "I could understand him, but his men, too? How did he . . ."     The cacophany of war finally penetrates the haze of shock, and Lilian flinches from the sound ringing in her ears. The reek of smoke and flame is mercifully stronger than blood and corpses from this far. Scrunching her eyes shut, she holds her breath, shakes her head, and exhales back out hard. "Are they looking to be martyrs, or are they really trying to take his head?" she wonders aloud, quietly aghast. "Surely it can't be for . . ." Us. ". . . What an obstinate man."     'We've got room for three! One with me, two with her! If you can't move fast, we'll take you to the castle. Sort it out and get on!'     "I'll meet you there." says Lilian. Predicting danger from Guinivere's tone, she's already fully armoured; she doesn't have to so much adjust her gear before taking off. If Roy is already so far ahead, she just doesn't care to nag the others to form a sensible arrangement; she has to be there.     --------     Avoiding altitude, Lilian mixes magic-assisted leaps into her adrenaline-pounding sprint instead, moving at breakneck speed through the charnel corridor left by Galle's last ditch chance at redemption. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears the entire way. Her blood feels too hot in her veins to take a more efficient route. Moving any less intensely like this feels unbearable. If anything, the rapid ground approach is to burn an excess of anxious energy before she has to draw steel.     It's for naught, though. The lake of bodies surrounding the mountain of one, skewered in a hundred places by Bern's finest, takes her breath away. 'Two hundred and forty dragons' flashes through her mind, and she runs so as not to be sick.     --------     This is the one and only time that Lilian Rook cannot feel strongly about the Help. The sting of sympathy works its way under her armour, but it's all but drowned out by the castle in sight; the seat of Bern, the end of the war, and the place they will all have to finally confront Zephiel. Terrified faces pass by on either side as a human current, undifferentiated, blurry and screaming. 'Two hundred and forty dragons' mutes everything even that into a dull roar.     --------     Lilian's sword clears her scabbard when the first arrow is fired her way. The latter is tossed into a bloody ditch, and the former is used to swat it away. Haphazardly fired arrows aren't a meaningful threat to her at long range, so long as she pays attention. A few more projectiles suffer a similar fate before she closes with the high wall of the citadel. Gathering up her magic for a second and a half, Lilian crosses the intervening distance on an enormous, sharply upward arc, kicking once off the wall for a slight adjustment in direction to flatten her trajectory upwards.
Lilian Rook	Only once she reaches that high vantage does she scan for any sign of the Lycian League's forced below. If all of their combat troops are committed, they shouldn't be too hard to spot, even in a battle of this scale.     Taking a moment to clear the rampart around her, she stops at the edge to charge up a different spell, releasing a flurry of incandescent bolts that blossom into a wide scatter and then sharply vector towards high concentrations of magic; harassing fire more than anything, but putting pressure on the anima mages on the ground for a few seconds while loudly advertising her presence to the Wyvern Knights; for whatever Galle might do with that signal.     Then, third, Lilian sprints in the direction of a gatehouse. Any. The closest she can reach.
Petra Soroka	There's one thing Petra can't get out of her mind while hurrying to battle-- a dozen things, really, from melancholic stewing on the fate of children when they grow up, to thoughts of Iðunn and Zephiel, and Iðunn and Fae and Guinivere-- but one sentence in particular said in the radio just minutes before. <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Guinivere says, "Certainly. Sophia's said she has a 'bad feeling' about today, so tomorrow evening is likely the best time."     There's no saying that tomorrow would be better, given the opportunity they have today, and it's not like Petra could insist that the army wait either way. But, squeezing her eyes shut as she readies to leave, Petra tries to project Cassandra-esque sympathy towards Sophia for what's sure to come, bracing to meet ill fate head-on. "Saint protect us I can't believe he's..."     "--Such a *fucking* drama queen!" Petra finishes Melady's sentence with an exasperated gasp, heart pounding already from her first step through the warpgate. She yanks her mirror locket off her neck, preparing to smash it on the ground. Grumbling, "Someone should've told *him* to wait until tomorrow. Two years, but noooo."     Even with Galle's support, a full frontal assault just reads as a horrible idea to Petra. Baiting the entire army into a slog of wrestling through the castle guard step by step just gives Zephiel the perfect opportunity to drop a dragon in the middle of his own courtyard for the sake of mutually assured destruction-- surely, Zephiel would *enjoy* the chance to tactically bring down the castle.     That's why, after the Beauty of Ash slices a two mile path from warpgate to castle at ear-splitting pace, it shatters at the impact of its own shockwave on the other side. Landing on the ground running, catching the cloud of glass in the compact case in the palm of her hand, she collapses from a giant target to a small one in a violent instant, slipping by the archers on the parapets while they're distracted by the dramatics of Love and Nobunaga.     She's dropped into the crowd of fleeing civilians, separate from the army that's breaking down the walls of their home. Banking on the momentary emotional instability caused by her being blonde, self-assuredly armed, and wearing red, gold, and black, Petra grabs one of the maids' shoulders to turn her towards her in the chaos.     "Hey-- do you know where anyone's still trapped inside?"     For all the talk of the castle's future in the radio, the moment Petra saw the battlefield, she became certain that the structure won't survive the day. If she's pointed towards a door, she'll hopefully clear it for the staff to escape before it's inevitably brought down on them, and open another path to penetrate the castle itself to aim towards Zephiel.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine wishes she'd had time to get a horse. The MCRD keeps a stable of horses trained and acclimated for monster-hunting, in part out of rangerly tradition and in part for the very practical purpose of long pursuits over ground too uneven for wheeled vehicles. Unfortunately for Maddie, she was well away from that stable when the call came in.     Instead, she's had to settle for a heavy-duty offroad bike. Oh, the indignity! Almost *nobody* can look seriously dangerous on a bicycle. But it's faster than running, especially with her exceptional strength and coordination. Two spears - Maltet and Drogrung - cross over her back, which gives her a sort of windmill silhouette. She rushes downfield toward the castle at high speed, pushing the cycle's frame and mechanisms to the limit.     On the way over, she mentally reminds herself why she's here. Maybe it's a few minutes outside of direct fighting but in close proximity to Maltet, but she finds her thoughts turning to the fragmentary page Angela retrieved from the weapon, the glimpse into Barigan's experience of the Scouring. Into the world of 'might as well'.     It's a world Madeleine knows intimately, after a fashion. She quit the Excrucian war-for-nothing before she quit believing in it, and the process of welcoming the world they despised (and its multiversal cousins) into her heart has been a long one. A process driven by 'might as well', by the plain fact that the sun *will* rise over a new day tomorrow, and it's just good sense to be ready to face it.     Barigan's words echo in her mind: "If saving humanity doesn't fix me, will anything?" At long last, she thinks she might have an answer to that biting question. The answer is, 'no'.     No, there's no promise that anything can 'fix' people like Barigan, like Madeleine Cadrasteia. 'Maybe,' Maddie thinks to herself, 'that's how it's supposed to be for people like us.' But 'maybe,' she adds, 'that's fine.' There is still joy and meaning to be found, on a long van ride in search of a foul-mouthed Mothman, on a space station of impossible children, on the laughing face of the oldest nine-year-old you'll ever meet. Those moments, those places, those people; all the good in a life doesn't need to outweigh the bad. To embrace life is to embrace good and bad alike.     The world is wrong, and the world is beautiful.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine is so up in her feelings that she nearly crashes into a large chunk of smashed castle wall, and only doesn't by leaping free of the bicycle, which left unguided quickly becomes a twisted wreck amidst the debris. Turning the emergency dismount into a modestly-cool forward flip, she lands among the Lycian League and looks immediately for Roy, her bow at the ready and Maltet on her back. "We're here!"
Desire Stars	EARLIER      Ace Ukiyo looks out over the Tokyo skyline from the balcony of his penthouse suite. A blimp lazily floats by with an LCD screen playing an ad for an upcoming movie he's starring in. Below it, his smiling face looks down on arterial streets in brief flashes, advertising a new line of cologne. The real Ace can't spare a smile like that for the golden denarius that has followed him from one life to the next. A soft splatter on his dress shoe distracts him from his rumination--a chill that wasn't there before draws his attention to a wet spot just under his nose. He pockets the denarius, runs his index over the spot and frowns at the smear of red that he sees.     The ring of his DGP-issued, hardened phone pulls him away from examining it any further.     --- NOW     Two Kamen Riders arrive to help take advantage of the chaos. Geats is in the new armor he revealed against Galle as a trump card; Na-Go is in the Beat and Armed Propeller armors. Both of them take wing with Melady and Thea, alongside them rather than astride their mounts--Na-Go under the power of her propeller, Geats in the four-tailed, four-legged variant of the Boost Mark II armor.     Na-Go, by now used to the awkwardness of fighting airborne and one-handed, returns fire against the archers much less clumsily than she might have some months ago. Arcs of crackling lightning and chest-sized chunks of splintering ice rain down suppressively, and she eases up or guns the throttle in quick bursts to either dip below an arrow or shred it with the propeller.     Geats, meanwhile, doesn't land with Neon, Melady and Thea right away. Before he's comfortable joining them, he first darts through the air to check what defenses the castle still has to bring against the ground forces. It's decidedly more of a palace, but anything that hasn't yet been exhausted, and critically, could be turned against Bern, is something to call out, if not to utilize himself.
Marigold	"He's not beautiful and he's not courageous and why don't you date him if you love him so much?!" says Melady to Nobunaga. "He's just--" Ah, Petra gives her the words. "Such a drama queen!! Ugh, and he probably thinks he was smart for not saying a fucking word to us..."      "Thanks," Thea tells Odette tensely. "I saw her pegasus..." But not her? There's no time to elaborate, but that can't be good.      Flamel's emotional radar-pulse of Castle Bern: expanding concentric shells of fretful mortal panic from the servants, Roy's jittery worry in the low castle's courtyard, little sparks of hopeful-desperate light from the Lycian League, bewildered determination and creeping doubt from the guards in the high castle, and in the very center more of those awful war-dragons and--      Traitors upon traitors. The wretches all see me for their foe at last. No matter: remember yourself, Zephiel. This day was always coming.      At the ground floor's center, behind walls and wards, King Zephiel steels himself. His heart beats only a little faster, for the din of battle that reaches him.      The pale-faced scullery maid Petra grips blinks twice and tries to squirm away before she parses the question, then hastily nods, and finally finds her tongue: "U-um, the-- the kitchen, down below! Don't know if anyone got out of the kitchen! And the inner sanctum, I heard they were barring the doors...!" She hastily points down in a basement-y direction at the bottom of one of the inner high castle's walls. There's no immediate door, but with a little digging or careful demolition...      At Lilian's great magical signal, and Love's approach, the traitorous wyvern-riders start to pull back from over the town to strictly guard the moat and prevent the castle-invading forces from being encircled. It's hard to pick out Galle from among them, if indeed he's still in charge, but one of the ex-pegasus-rider lieutenants who got away last time wheels around in a panic at Love: "Thank the Saint you came-- H-hey, wait, don't beam me!"      Most of Roy's army is in evidence in the courtyard or just beyond, Lilian and the others soon find. Rutger is splashing the blood of archers down the high castle's walls to help Nobunaga lessen Na-Go's defensive burden, having run straight up a parapet; Ace can pitch in at taking care of the maybe-dozen left who can menace the low castle's courtyard, but the high castle's walls also have a few ballistae, wound but unstaffed in the panic.      A few others have likely found tenuous ways to infiltrate, but the best obvious entrance to the high castle is a gatehouse ahead where Echidna and Dieck strain to lift a heavy silvered portcullis (several dents testify to attempts to cut through). Cornered-rat-like guardsmen with spears on the other side look like they'd like to jab through the portcullis's holes, but Lugh anxiously keeps them at bay with puffs of fire.      "Here, take the other side!" Echidna barks at Lilian, and anyone else eager to lift. "Sure they shouldn't help lift yours?" "Any! Just, hahh, any side!" Just beyond, there's still winding corridors packed full of not-quite-terrified-enough-to-surrender Bernish soldiers like a swarming anthill, but that's a problem for the moment after.
Marigold	Just around the corner of a now-empty building that was surely a servants' quarters, Shanna's dead pegasus lies in a heap, arrows sticking out of it and generally mangled via collision with the ground. The girl herself is taking shallow breaths and holding an arm over her several-times-punctured abdomen while Roy anxiously holds pressure with linen bandages and tries to get her to drink a vulnerary.      Fae shelters the two of them from further arrow-pelting with her back. The ones that strike her don't draw blood, but they do make her softly whimper.      "I'm sorry, Fae. Just a little longer... Lucius, where's Lucius...!"      "I'm fine! I'll... auhhh... I'll live, so just... the Princess said you'll need the Fire Emblem, you've got to go..."      He looks up at Madeleine (and maybe Odette) with pleadingly anxious hope.
Riku Asakura	As Geed gets closer to the castle, he, too, has to compete with archers.  He tries to avoid arrows, and to his credit, being small was probably a good call at this point.  He's harder to hit, but there are just so many arrows!  He deploys a barrier to protect himself from the front, but he has to touch down in the castle eventually, and that's not going to protect him there.   He summons the GEED CLAW and quickly draws two fingers along its bottom to draw out its power.  Then, he brings the claw up above his head before firing a beam from the inside of the claw into the sky.   "DIFFUSION SHOWER!" The sky fills with light, but these points of light are energy bolts, waiting to be released.  With a wave of the claw, the light starts to rain down on the archers trying to shoot him and the League, aiming to turn the tide back in their favor. Eventually, he lands by the Echidna and Dieck.   'Here, take the other side!' While Echidna might have been yelling at Lilian, Geed immediately throws himself to the other side of the portcullis and uses his enhanced strength to lift the gate so they can get people through.  "Don't we need someone to flip a switch on the other side?" he asks Echidna and Dieck.  He's not too familiar with castle construction.
Angela	Roland was planning on slipping in to quietly do his dirty work but he wasn't expecting Petra to drop down basically right by him while he's taking the same route to slink in. He blinks twice, having not exactly informed Petra of his own plans, but ultimately it seems like ... Petra is trying to clear out a path for the staff? Petra gave an out for the agents at Lobcorp once upon a time, he thinks as he watches her while blended in with the fleeing workers, but he'd recognize that voice anywhere no matter what uniform she's wearing. Petra has always been talking this whole bloody adventure about how awful it is they even have to fight Zephiel, how awful it is that they seem to be careening to accepting him as the world's enemy and to prove him right about how the whole world was always going to turn on him and prove itself to be full of mongrels. And frankly, Roland finds it difficult to disagree with the man himself. The people he's gotten to know here, sure they're real, sure they exist, sure they're all various kinds of incredible in small or huge ways. But that's not the world. The world will shiv you in the back the moment you relax. This is this, that is that, it's a rule Zephiel seems to have grown to understand despite having never stepped foot even once in The City, and Roland can't help but wonder if Angela even succeeds--if she'll ever truly find a place that isn't The City that she can feel welcome in. There's plenty of miraculous worlds out there, but to stay in those paradises--isn't always a comfortable thing. Roland reveals himself to Petra, by moving into her line of sight. "Hey. You said you wanted to ... Flip the script here, right? Like, you're looking for a way to not just prove Zephiel right, right?" It feels crazy to even suggest it. "Is your plan to help get those trapped people out? Or you got another idea? I'll help, just tell me what you need me for." Secretly, Roland has been looking for someone to prove him wrong too. It's why he can't possibly match Zephiel's conviction, even if he is empathetic to the ideology. MEANWHILE Love's mouth is opening and slightly glowing when she is asked to not beam someone in the face. This doesn't usually happen. Usually people just scream, attack her, or don't need to be laser beamed anyway. "Well... Two wrongs don't make a right, I suppose! They make a left! How may I help you? Are you being plagued by a dark miasma?" She leans forward, intending to grab the lieutenant gently by the arm by her mouth and fling him on top of her head. "It's hard to tell which are your friends or not, can you tell me who I SHOULD be beaming? That way, only bad guys will get beamed and maybe Melady will stop being so unhappy about Galle." If this guy points her at people to beam. She... GONNA BEAM EM!
Madeleine Cadrasteia	"I'm fine! I'll... auhhh... I'll live, so just... the Princess said you'll need the Fire Emblem, you've got to go..."     "I'll carry the Emblem," Maddie says, holding out a hand. "I don't know if we should separate it too far from the Blade... Galle didn't have the benefit of Sophia's foresight, so who knows where Iðunn is. Roy, I'll cover you as we move in." She secures the Fire Emblem in a buckled pouch on her belt and readies her bow again.     There's not a ton Maddie can do against massed archers, so she has to count on Geed's screen and the others on the walls to protect the young lord. Bernish foot soldiers, however, she picks off one by one with well-placed arrows. "I don't like having to fight through all these guards," she opines aloud to Roy, "but we can't afford to rush ahead and get caught without the rest."     As the pair approaches the embattled gatehouse, Madeleine breathes out a cloud of thick mist that rushes past Echidna, Dieck, and the others at the portcullis. Passing through the gaps in the bars, wisps become snapping jaws as the pack of ice-carved wolves materialize on the *inside* of the barricade to keep the already-hesitant spearmen fully at bay.
Nobunaga	"You have a good sword today!" Nobunaga shouts once she's noticed Rutger in the melee on the walls.     Once she gets a moment of not being shot at, the warlord lifts her sword overhead. In response, the Nobbu soldiers start emerging. As usual, they come from places not currently being observed. Empty doorways, overturned barrels and crates, dark corners, climbing out of the courtyard well. All basic infantry with a small handful of sword-specialists. The riflenobbu scale the walls using the inside accessways, leading with bayonet-fixed rifles while the Nobbusengumi form the rear-guard in pairs.     "Support Rutger and secure the walls!" Nobunaga barks. Bringing her sword down, she flips it around and slides it into the saya at her hip. Turning slightly towards the swordswoman, she nods once, "They'll do as you say. I'll assist the advance!"     Some running and acrobatics later...     Nobunaga tumbles in amidst the group wrestling with the heavy portcullis. Quickly, the warlord assesses the situation while recovering her feet; and opts to help Lugh out in keeping the Bernish troops from stabbing Riku or Echidna though the gate while they lift it. To that end: Nobunaga produces a single Nobbu from within her cape sets it down, and pats it on top of its big poofy hat.     "Well, go ahead."     The creature turns to look up at her, clutching a round and flat ceramic tea kettle in both hands. The Nobu? it emits sounds more like a 'Can I really?' than a 'Do I have to?' When Nobunaga nods, the Nobbu thrusts the kettle it's holding up over its head with an excited, NOBU!     Nobbu are small creatures for how effective they can be. Ultraman Geed and Echidna only have to get the gate some 40cm off the ground before the Nobbu dashes forward and under the gate, in amidst the legs of Bernish troops. There's a triumphant Nobu-no! and followed immediately by an explosion and a burst of thick blackpowder smoke and ceramic shrapnel.
Flamel Parsons	If you're near Flamel, you can hear the leaking telepathic output. Something about this has tripped his 'programming', his 'function', his 'purpose'. <Breaking the toxic thought-pattern, the spiraling history-pattern-- You don't get a second chance and you don't get guarantees about the first. You have to keep moving forward. You have to take the one rare opportunity and act on it. You have to or you'll die. You take the opportunity or you'll die. The compulsion to stop the apocalypse is the same as the urge to survive. You're going to die. You're going to die if you don't move forward. Move or die. Act or die. Come on, come on, go...!>     He could stop and lift the portcullis. But his focus would never permit. Geed will be better for that anyway. He ascends the walls invisibly with rapid levitation and fast platforming. He tears across the ramparts he tried to clear, he dives into the inner castle without hesitation. Never stopping unless stopped.     He is invisibly headed for the War-Dragons. The amount of psychic energy he is going to pour into their skulls is going to be such that a normal human would never be able to string two coherently uncharitable thoughts together in sequence for the rest of their lives unless they were given heavy Psychonaut rehab.     ---     The Director shouts to his men, as they tear open ancient filing cabinets and pull ancient records to harvest for emotional energy.     Piles of redacted reports and dense burn-after-reading folders recording the operations forcing the minds of men working under Valentin Savitsky to listen to dissenter Vasily Arkhipov while rogue psychics bomb them with depth charges.     Ancient psychic artifacts used for amplifying the inner merits and manipulating the memories of Stanislav Petrov to see the rogue ICBM as a false signal, while Psychonaut aerokinetics disable it in mid-air.     Memory-video evidence of pushing Klaus Fuchs to the brink of despair at the thought of global death counts to force him to leak critical data and create standoffs rather than universal conquering.     The Parsons Institute *is* the moments of historical jolting and near-miss opportunism. Flamel *is* the crashing grind of history's gears struggling to engage everything necessary to brake before the chasm.     ---     Flamel lands, and makes a beeline to his targets; he will try to evade every soldier and guard and staff-member and just plant palms on the backs of the heads of the War-Dragons before they take shape. Dark magic makes them unreadable, it makes them difficult to manipulate. It doesn't stop the core function of the Project MYSTIC device in correcting the apocalyptic course of history by way of massive psychic payload applied in terrible precision, because if it does, the world is in tremendous danger. Hopefully the ballistae are going to handle the worst of the bad outcomes from this.
Lilian Rook	'Thank the Saint you came-- H-hey, wait, don't beam me!'     "God only knows what you were planning if we didn't you madmen!" Lilian shouts into the sky at the top of her lungs in the few seconds she can spare. Her frantic searching is short-lived; seeing Roy's forces in the courtyard is both a relief and a faintly terrifying propellant onwards.     <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Raskins! With Roy! Shanna needs treatment and Lucius is occupied!"     Where is he? There's no time to look. All she can do is push on as quickly as superhumanly possible. Every second she wastes is a chance for something to happen to him; to happen to Shanna, or Roy, or Fae, or anyone else; and every second she saves is another roll of the die averted.     It's a familiar feeling. Her work in the Paladins seldom takes Lilian to battlefields anymore, but the tightope of haste and carelessness is one she's accustomed to walking on one. 'The best way to keep my subordinates alive is to win before anything can go wrong' is an old comrade, even if thrusts with unresolvable tension. [ansi(243,    'Here, take the other side!')]     Lilian doesn't stop to absorb the bickering. She follows the first instruction she gets, rushing to Dieck's side and doubling the force on the gate in a heartbeat.     'Don't we need someone to flip a switch on the other side?'     "What? No. Put those bars through the wheels to be sure. They lock." She's barely said it before she must have jumped back down the other side. She hits the ground with enough noise to intimidate, even before standing up from her knees, clad in black armour, legs splashed with fresh blood up to the knee from the run, heavy sword drawn and in hand. "Direct everyone inside now! Everyone! We can't keep getting shot-at out here!" Lilian calls up to Dieck and Echidna, where her voice can echo up the wall, already striding into the hall with purpose before she looks head.     §Ah. This sucks.§     The thoughts running through her head when she scans the first line of soldiers go along those lines, but never make it to her face.     §I knew there'd obviously be a lot of troops on the inside, but I was hoping to take them in small groups. I really don't want to wear myself out on these numbers before we even get to him. I can't take a careful pace with Brunnya's army at our backs, but slaughtering my way through his troops is . . .§     For just a second, Lilian squeezes her eyes shut. Her hand finds the side of her face, gauntlet pressing over one side. She focuses everything she can spare on blaring mental noise-- anything that works-- over the memory that shoots through the forefront of her mind; one previously inert, washed away by the Storm, lain dormant, and suddenly charged with searing voltage by the high-adrenaline situation.     §Fuck you Zephiel. You and your baby fox.§     Lilian steadies herself with a few shallow breaths, unable to draw one all the way in. Being distracted any more than a moment is asking the enemy to take a free shot at her; and that isn't the sort of general unit she is.
Lilian Rook	Lilian advances, drawing Winter Crow and flicking the array by a half-rotation in the same motion. Moving at a brisk stride, not quite breaking into a jog, she fires nearly randomly in the direction of the enemy, emptying her weapon in repeating cycles so close together that it presents the serious danger of overheating. The metallic clomp of her footsteps punctuates each reload, two at a time at most.     Each shot, fired into walls and floors, corresponds to a violent explosion; far from safe individually indoors, much less carpeted into overlapping pressure waves, but choking corridors with smoke and flame and human bodies being tosses this way and that is a morale-breaking tactic she considers worth the incidental splash risk to herself. The soldiers don't need to know that she can't do this all day.     Then, she ploughs headlong into her own alchemical smoke, advancing at the same pace, inexorably pushing forward through the tested ranks. Where one will suffice, a vicious kick or hilt blow puts down the soldiers that come close enough to see in the haze. Where it won't, her sword flashes up from her side to cleave through weapons, helmets, gorgets, and gauntlets, splitting flesh where bravery or desperation compels it. In the smoke, each clash can only be very small, and happen in the blink of an eye; a test of reactions that Lilian can always win until it dissipates; which isn't nearly half the time it'd take to reach her destination.     She is, ultimately, very much depending on the others to reach her in the couple of minutes she has control of; being encircled in the corridors would be very, very bad.
Odette Raskins	"Pegasus, but no Shanna..." Thea's info puts a pit in Odette's chest as her mind goes straight to the worst case scenario, especially without elaboration. It's something else to keep an eye out for on the flight in, but not seeing Shanna anywhere on the ground nor a rider-less pegasus the entire time just makes the feeling worse. It's not until she's on the ground and in the castle grounds proper that the feeling in her chest settles a little even with Shanna's partner looking far too gone to save even at a glance. The worry is still there, but Odette's focus maintains as she hurries over towards Roy and Fae. Seeing those arrows bouncing off Fae's wings, the EMT yanks a small white cylinder out of her pocket and glances up and over at where the arrows are coming from. She yelps lightly as an arrow nicks her ear, jerks herself sideways with a briefly panicked screech, then whips the flashbang grenade where the arrows are coming from to discourage further shots before hurrying under the cover of Fae. "Ah... Thanks, Fae! Good job, Roy!" Pushing down the swell of pride in her chest to keep herself focused on the task at hand, Odette slides a little before landing in a kneeling position besides Roy and Shanna. There's a little flick and a brief noise of moving liquid as she flicks an injector out of her pocket and jabs it into Shanna to give her a quick hit of painkillers and stabilizers so she doesn't die right on the spot. "You'll be alright, Shanna. Let's get these closed up, and..." The medical case opens up, and she's working with both pre-filled syringes and healing magic from the staff. "Can you still feel your legs? We gotta get you out of here." She asks while alternating between chemical and magical healing to stop Shanna from bleeding and patch up the wounds. It's not a complete treatment by far, but it's enough that she probably won't die without getting shot again first. "Roy, I can take her from here. Go with Madeleine and the others, and..." She takes a second to remember to breathe, stopping her hands from shaking before strapping the staff to her back so she can help or haul Shanna up depending on how walking-capable she is. "... And keep up what you're doing. Fae, can you keep helping Roy? I'll be joining you all in a minute, so don't get too hurt!" Hearing that Lucius' whereabouts are currently unknown does put another worried pit in Odette's stomach, but she has to make sure Shanna's out of harm's way first before she hurries back to join the others. It's only after getting Shanna to safety, then, that she'll finally head back into the fray, hurrying to rejoin the main force.
Petra Soroka	It's always so unnerving, if ideologically necessary, to condense the faceless masses fleeing a disaster into a voice and warm skin contact. Petra breaks eye contact by nodding, then lets the girl go, turning away and drawing her Silver sword. The morphmetal blade splits and shatters into an orbiting halo of metal spines, aimed towards the direction the maid pointed. "Like, you're looking for a way to not just prove Zephiel right, right?"     "Ha! Yeah, as if." Petra scoffs bleakly when Roland reveals himself, but she can't even properly disagree, even if the phrasing brushes her the wrong way. "I don't think I of all people have much business proving him wrong."     The flechettes spread out into a cloud, then slam into the dirt at an angle, burying themselves in a scatterplot circle aimed towards the basement. "I just think it's too unfair. I think it's awful to see how... horrible luck and shitty people and baseline stewing atmospheric evil all coagulate together into one guy to turn him into the fucking pyre that the world can change itself on. You don't seriously see me as an *optimist*, do you?" Petra says it to Roland as if the answer's obvious, even though it's much more complicated than that.     "In the end, it's impossible to change the minds of two people who have no reason to believe in anything but each other. I won't do Zephiel the indignity of trying to prove him wrong at the end of everything. But I can't stand not getting any closure."     The Silver buried in the ground whirrs to life, linked together in an intricate web of motors and cables that spins the entire net of blades around in a circle like a drill, churning up the earth into a tunnel of dirt diagonally down. With the excess Silver, she forms a shovel, handing it off to Roland to clear the loose dirt out.     "So we've gotta get to that motherfucker before there's a billion dragons blasting fire everywhere, or it'll be impossible to have a conversation. If he's gonna die, he'll at least know that the war's crucible scorched the substrate of the earth enough that it *did* get better."     "Also, yes, we're freeing the trapped civilians. Sue me." What a thing to get defensive about.     Tucked away between a storehouse and the exterior wall, it takes a couple minutes to grind and clear the dirt away to burrow down a story. Love's busy beaming people, so Petra looks around for Fae for help, and finds the lump of her shape shielding Roy and Shanna. She's about to call out, before an arrow strikes Fae from up high, and she sucks in a grimace. "Fae-! Ah--"
Petra Soroka	Petra snaps together the transteam gun and its rifle attachment, rushing through it while the blaring plastic noises rapidly increase her risk of getting spotted. Peeking through the scope, she fires several explosive blasts of energy up where the arrows' trajectory came for Fae, hoping to either knock the offending archers out, or at least draw their attention, before diving into the carved out tunnel down to the kitchens.     The Silver 'drill teeth' reconsolidate into her sword as she slides down the tunnel she and Roland make, dropping down into the kitchen with a shower of dirt and rocks. Brushing herself off to the presumed shock and fear of the cooking staff, Petra points up with her sword at the hunched-height tunnel upwards.     "That way leads to the outer wall closest to the city. Staying in the castle won't be safe for much longer."     Then it's up the stairs inside, rushing through the interior of the castle as far as she can make it. The melee of guards that Lilian pierced directly into the center of ends up pincered when Petra slides out of a servants' door behind them. The spear formation is angled the wrong way to pincushion her approach from the rear, so she takes advantage of the surprise to dive into close range with her Silver in razorblade orbit around her, sword replaced with Fourth Match Flame to spit out arcs of fire pressuring them to break ranks.
Desire Stars	There's precious little time to waste, and Geats has only the faintest idea of where Flamel is--near 'the war dragons,' generally. These weapons are an advantage which become less tenable to use the longer he hesitates, however, and so-- REVOLVE ON!     Back on two legs, Geats is a red-orange blur between the bound ballistae. Adjusting one to aim it unearths long-buried memories; his hands know what to do even if the construction differs here and there from what was contemporary to that denarius in his pocket. From the other end of the balliste, it must seem as if a vengeful spirit haunts the battlements. Flashes of red-orange dance between the bound weapons in vanishingly short bursts, and the rev of the armor's engine howls across the field with each. As quickly as it began, it's over--Flamel will have to figure the rest out on his own.     Geats leaps over the battlements and slides down the wall, hitting the ground running to regroup with Na-Go as the both of them pour in to regroup with Lilian.     Na-Go's music is the first hint that one of them is nearby. Lilian can feel the reassuring thrum of the percussion and bass before the rest of the march. Her explosive advance is subtly made more affordable, in terms of the energy it costs to maintain. She still can't do it forever, but much like carrying something heavy with two sets of hands, it's easier.     In the same vein, Lilian's demoralizing strategy is backed up by Na-Go. Her grip choked all the way up to the 'blade' of the Beat Axe, she uses its flying-v to catch weapons, alternating between push kicks, sweeps, and surprise swipes of the Armed Propeller. What was an unwieldy weapon that took confidence to bear through ungainly angles is, in her hands, now a trusted companion. The blades dig red-hot scores into walls and floors as she spins them up to flash-parry or shred would-be reprisals, projectile or otherwise.
Angela	Roland wasn't known for his speechcraft at any point in his life. So long as the meaning he's going for is broadly coming across, he'll take that as a win, because he's kind of not entirely sure what he's getting at either beyond a deep emotional desperate need that he barely understands as anything besides 'something else'. Roland gives a bit of a hapless shrug at first. "I don't think you're an optimist, Petra. You don't gotta worry about that. But I don't think that means you're the wrong person to convince him of anything." He rubs at his neck, "I've heard the story a lot coming up through this war, and it was like--there was no true loyalty, right? It was always because someone was in a position where they had to by the rules of monarchy. Or they were scheming ministers. Or peasants right? The mass? But you're all about true loyalty. Even against the world. Right?" ''I won't do Zephiel the indignity of trying to prove him wrong at the end.'' Roland hesitates. And then he cracks a sad little smile. "Yeah," He says. "I guess it's kind of selfish to try to think we can just say the words or do the acts that changes someone's view based on their own whole life." He nods to himself. Yeah. He shouldn't insult them, hoisting up his own hopes upon them. The bodies will be on the floor at the end or they won't. He doesn't actually have to worry because in the end, he'd rather be respectful and professional in his dealings. He's already seen the price of flying off the handle. "Hope he can find some comfort in that, if it comes to that." ''Yes, we're freeing the trapped civilians. Sue me.'' "Nah, that's always been a refreshing change of pace." He slides down after Petra, apparently slick enough on his feet that he can at least keep pace. ''Staying in the castle won't be safe for much longer.'' "The invading army won't hunt you down, they've got enough on their plate." Roland says, as if he's one of the locals. "Good luck, and keep your loved ones safe." Now that they're moving deeper inside, Roland summons a pair of knives, swishing through guards and soldiers--though he doesn't hunt down those that flee. He isn't in the mindset foir that kind of pure Fixer cruelty infested practicality. He's focused more on covering anyone trying to get at Petra than going for maximum carnage.
Marigold	"You have a good sword today!"      "I do," Rutger lies, almost smiling. It's a beat-to-shit chipped Bernish saber that's going to break in half before the day is done. Durandal is on her, but it's still sheathed.      But spiritually it's true. She's at peace. She might be the only person in a ten-mile radius who is. Rutger said, once, that if she became skilled enough to cut the Kingdom of Bern in half with one stroke, she'd do it and then give up the sword forever. Spilling blood down the castle walls during attempted regicide may be the closest she'll ever get.      She's never commanded before, but with the little soldiers, she'll give it a shot: "You, sweep left. You, sweep right. Clear the other parapets for Galle. Then find a way down."      With the gate raised-- "Hup, thanks- Echidna, look out!" just before Echidna and Dieck prune the heads off menacing spears in tandem, and the former unslings Armads from her back to sacreligiously prop the portcullis open until Riku can jam the mechanism-- the second obstacle is the soldiers.      Not as many as there could be. Too many for Galle's betrayal to be a complete surprise. That's kind of the worst number.      "A-alright," Roy says to Madeleine, and moves to take the Emblem out of the Blade, but Shanna lifts a bloodied hand to stop him. "Nnh-- c-c'mon, Roy... if Iðunn is here, or she comes back, then... you know that's a bad idea." "I don't want to leave--" "Odette's here. Don't, ghh, be stupid, okay? Madeleine, just... look out for him," Shanna insists. Roy still looks uneasy, but he can't argue against both Shanna and Odette once the latter begins her tending. He nods, then steps away to follow in Lilian's trail with Madeleine's ice-wolves to guard him, Blade still clutched close.      "Aa----ooau--uu!" Fae croons in cheery-droopy fashion, first at Odette for the praise and then at Petra for taking care of the archers. She trundles over, a little late to help with the digging- her stubby little arms would be almost uniquely terrible for it, anyway- but she eagerly sticks her long neck down the hole after Petra to see where she's gone. "Oh, thank goodness you've-- WHAT IS THAT?!" "Saint help us is that a dragon?!" "Ohhh, the stories are true--" "Aw, but it's kind of..." "N-not one step closer, beast!" "Au--uu!"      The servants stuck in the firelit basement-kitchen look at Fae (or her head, at least) with horror. She cranes her head down, 'protects' Petra and Roland by chomp-ing through the spear of one of the few guards down there, crunch-crunches the wood, and then 'ptoo' spits the metal spearhead back out.      That poor guard looks paralyzed with fright as she beams at Roland and Petra, self-satisfied at disarming the Bad Man. The other couple of downstairs guards, already strongly considering surrender after the dramatic entrance, throw down their weapons on the spot. One of the younger cooks takes it upon himself to venture to pet Fae's head though, and she makes another little noise of crooning delight before politely withdrawing, letting the servants escape to daylight. "My goodness. And I heard they were ferocious beasts..." "Well, ah, um, thank you, young miss! If you two need me to put in a good word with Brunnya..."
Marigold	The high castle's interior is, if you get a moment to catch a breath and gauge your surroundings, unexpectedly spare. There are lightened squares on the walls where tapestries surely once hung, since torn down. In Etruria, and even in the low castle, there were carpets; here in the seat of power the stone floors are bare, and there is nothing to sop up the blood.      Panic has a hard time spreading through sharp corners and closed doors. The guards make several rallies; often backed up by a mage-lieutenant hurling lightning down a narrow corridor, or makeshift ramparts of overturned tables, or a disciplined three-deep formation of spears-over-bucklers. More and more weight condenses behind the Lycian League's forceful push, though.      Echidna and Dieck are alongside Lilian from the start; Petra, Roland, Madeleine, Roy, Odette, Na-Go, and Geats pile in as the push goes. Rutger falls in last from the battlements above, already drenched nearly head-to-toe in blood and serene of expression.      Finally the advance comes to the 'inner sanctum': eerie white magical light flows up from the ground along grooves cut in the stone, presenting a reinforced wall within the castle, and the light spirals in along those grooves into a pair of heavy gilded doors with an empty Fire Emblem-sized socket at their very center.      A pair of cloaked figures are there before the door; Iðunn's "un-men", war-dragons in thin human guise.      Flamel is already there with his hands on the backs of their heads, making them hesitate in their transformations for just a hair.      Rutger is upon the first one with Durandal, quick as thought; she severs hand from dragonstone in the first eyeblink, head from neck in the second, and left-and-right halves of the body from each other in the third, rending it apart just as protective scales try to erupt along its skin. It falls to the ground in a half-shifted heap.      The other one hesitates from Flamel's assault just slightly less, and Echidna pitches Armads at its head in the same breath, but it's already transforming as the Divine Axe sticks in its skull. "Damn it! Look out, the ceiling's going to--"      Its wings of fire breach through the high castle's ceiling with a dreadful "KREEEEE!", stone and shingle crumbling everywhere just as Petra feared. Echidna's rushing in to reclaim her axe and strike another blow, and Rutger's wheeling on it with Durandal in hand, but so long as it can obstruct the final door with its body it's buying time for Brunnya...      "Uhhh, I don't think I'm being 'plagued by a miasma'? I-- damn it-- right there! There! Beam there!!" the ex-pegasus-knight on Love's back yells, pointing right at the pyrotechnical breach in the castle's roof. "That's the bad guys! Sic 'em! Uh, I mean, fire!!"
Madeleine Cadrasteia	It really only takes one person's disagreement with Roy to convince Madeleine that separating the Emblem and the Blade even by a few *feet* might be unwise. So she sticks double-close to Roy, almost fighting back to back at points. As the Lycian League moves into the castle, inch by bloody inch, she transforms Drogrung into a spear and whistles to signal her wolves forward.     The pack rushes ahead into the clouds of alchemical smoke, hunting by smell and hearing, dragging men to the ground. Madeleine herself pounces like a raptor one moment, only to return to Roy's side the next. She doesn't need to kill all these soldiers. She just needs to see them out of the way and keep Roy in fighting shape.     ---     The dragons, though, *those* she needs to kill. After tackling Roy out of the way of cascading stonework when one manages to transform, she helps the lord to his feet and reads the room while recovering her cast-aside bow. Drogrung won't be as effective as Maltet here, but she'll need the Divine Weapon to have a chance of helping against Iðunn, or if she's forced to cross blades with King Zephiel personally. She aims for the war-dragon's eyes; without an unlikely clear shot she may not blind it, but anything to keep the creature on the defensive. Even a single moment bought for Rutger or Echidna could be enough...
Odette Raskins	Once Odette's finished treating Shanna, she makes sure to leave her with an extra blood pack and a roll of bandages should she or someone else need it. After that, she rejoins the Lycian League's charge deeper into the high castle. "Steady... We've got this. Holler if you need a hand!" Odette calls out between advances through waves of guards, swapping from healing duty to running interference with strategic gunshots to create openings for her allies. She's not above snatching gear from the fallen guards, either, taking a helmet from here and some bracers from there for a little bit of extra padding. Her focus is still on healing first and foremost, of course, and with the staff on her back and an extra from the floor in hand, she's able to do what she knows best with the added benefit of not having to actually slow people down. It might suck later once she has to re-treat their wounds to make sure they heal properly, but that's a problem for future everyone. Rutger's bloody arrival, meanwhile, has her freaking out for a second, but that settles down once she realizes it's mostly other people's blood. Upon reaching the inner sanctum, the EMT hangs back a bit as the faster members of the group go after the cloaked figures. She's looking for an opportunity to run intereference, although doing so against a full-sized dragon means having to be a little more clever than just shooting it wildly. Taking a cue from Madeleine, she takes aim at the transformed dragon and squeezes off a few shots, but misses the eye between the crumbling stone and sweeping fire forcing her to dive for cover when she isn't losing her footing. "Darn it... Gotta keep it from thrashing so much!" Irritated as she misses another shot for the eye, Odette scurries around behind the rubble of a broken pillar. Hoping it'll provide her enough cover and a place to hide at least somewhat from the crumbling stone, she reaches into her medical case in the hopes of feeling something useful in there. Finding a bottle full of extra-strength sedatives, she briefly considers filling up a syringe for a measured dosage  before remembering she doesn't have the luxury of caring about an overdose right now. Thus, she loosens the cork on the sedative bottle, she waits for the dragon to open its mouth for another scream or burst of flame or whatever, and then she pitches it right in, aiming for the inside of its mouth.
Petra Soroka	"Saint help us is that a dragon?!"     With the threats in the kitchen disarmed by Fae's helpful little cromch, Petra can afford to linger in the room for a moment safely. For evacuation's sake, it probably wouldn't do to imply that the tunnel up and out of the castle has a waiting draconic maw on the other end, but more than that-- it's like what Roland said. Petra can't help but view every action taken today through the eyes of history, and if the world is to exist after Zephiel's cleansing, it's to exist alongside Fae.     There might only be a few dozen people cowering down here, but there's only a few thousand in total who will ever be this close to this world-alteringly historical battle. So, to preemptively hijack the retrospective memory of today, placing her hands on the background jukebox to momentarily wrench it to a gentler tune, Petra stops, scratches Fae's feathery chubby cheek, and gives her a little kiss on the nose where all the civilians and guards can see.     "Good job Fae, thank you. I'll see you soon, okay? Be careful about backing up with your butt sticking out." . . .     For a little while, it's just her and Roland until she can carve through to meet up with Lilian. With the final confrontation so near, but still probably a bloody hour away, Petra's need to talk about the upwell of feelings is too much to suppress, and Roland is more engaged in the topic than she would've expected. "I guess it's kind of selfish to try to think we can just say the words or do the acts that changes someone's view based on their own whole life."     "It's all just about love, in the end." Petra sighs, and then scoffs at herself for sounding so sappy right after insisting that she's not an optimist. "The whole world shrinks down and reflects through the pupil into a tiny little image on your optical nerve. From an internal point of view, 'love' is as big as the entire world."     There's a scuffle of swordfighting and tome-blasts around a corner, and then Petra continues the thought as if it hadn't happened. "I mean-- like, this isn't really something I could say to basically anyone else, but you know about Lilian, and Ange. If it really was inevitable for the Blooms to cause the final apocalypse, and they wanted to make that happen, maybe *I'd* be 'I only hope to be the last one to die in her jaws'-type posting about it." She puts a little bit of performative Zephiel-echoing growl on the quote, then coughs.     "... I can't really argue against Zephiel. I didn't argue when it was Angela, and she was willing to accept dooming the world for her own peace, and I waged a war to make it happen. I'm a bit of a hypocrite, but it's only after 'accepting' the apocalypse, every time, that I can find it in me to want to make the world better anyways. Maybe there really isn't any other way Iðunn could tolerate living."
Petra Soroka	Fourth Match Flame sizzles and pops with the fluid remnants of fighting through the corridors of the castle by the time Petra rejoins with Lilian and the rest of the forewards-advancing group, and they reach the inner sanctum. The echo of smoke tinged with copper and burnt hair clings to her, but the EGO sword itself glows brighter and hotter the closer they get. "Damn it! Look out, the ceiling's going to--"     "Shit-!"     Petra did predict this, but there's kind of fuck all she can do about it! When the war dragon tears through the structure of the building around them, Petra's Silver balloons up into a shield overhead that the rubble rains down onto.     The first gout of flame splits off either side of the barrier, leaving it blackened with soot, and Petra clicks her tongue as she formulates a plan. She would've preferred to use the destabilization in the castle walls caused by the dragon's arrival to make a route *over* the door to the inner sanctum, but reinforced as the walls are, there's no way through but with the Fire Emblem, and that means through the dragon too.     "Roy!" Petra finds her way to his side as quickly as she can, protective Silver streaking through the air like paint to follow her. Fourth Match Flame rises up, tip pointing directly forwards past the dragon. "We've gotta get you there. Stay close to me."     Petra doesn't have any of the dragonslaying weapons on her, besides a few carefully folded sheets of Apocalypse. Instead, she'll bodyguard Roy, as a high mobility unit to boost him in a pair and charge straight towards the objective. "The back legs can't kick forwards very well! So we're going underneath!"     Darting ahead, and dragging Roy behind, Petra shields them from the debris as best she can with the Silver until the bulk of the dragon's body itself is overhead. Then she's relying on her instinctual precognition to guess where the dragon's massive talons are about to move a split second ahead of time, trying to clear the distance to the door while the rest take the dragon head on.
Nobunaga	> "You, sweep left. You, sweep right. Clear the other parapets for Galle. Then find a way down."     The group of Nobbu to Rutger's left salute with a little chorus of Nobu!, then whirl about and dash off. Similarly, the Nobbu to her right do the same towards the right, Nobu! Nobu!. Just as the warlord promised, the strange little soldiers do just as Rutger asks of them. It's bloody, noisy work. When Rutger moves onward to the upper castle, the Nobbu stay behind to guard the lower castle's parapets from being re-taken, securing an escape route.     Some Nobbu directly overseeing the civilian evacuation have exchanged their uniform hats for hard hats, wielding whistles and glowing batons to try and direct the exodus of into something less resembling a panicked stampede. ...     Within the upper castle, Nobunaga has called forth her more recognizable minions. At one point, a corridor blocked off by soldiers and a wizard is filled with a gout of flames fired from Chacha's bare forearms. At another, the ghastly armored samurai Oni Musashi slams into a formation of shields and spears, completely without any care for his own survival, scattering them with his bulk and strength and unhinged, roaring laughter. ... > KREEEEE!     "Bring it down!" Nobunaga roars. Petra is moving Roy ahead; Echidna and Rutger are already moving in. Nobunaga steps forward and plants her foot, lifting her sword in a point. Rifles materialize around her, letting off a volley of gunfire at the beast's head before Echidna gets there; in an effort to blind it and make her recovery of Armads less troublesome.     "It's just another fake!" Nagayoshi declares. His own stance shifts, slamming his back foot down with his legs wide apart. The grip on his spear shifts and he draws it back one-handed, braced in the crook of thumb and forefinger in his kote-covered leading hand, "Bind it, blind it, bleed it dry!" The lunge cracks the oddly bare palatial stone floor where he was standing. In three swift bounds, he leaps and angles his weapon downward-- into the dragon-man's right foot, in an effort to pin it in place with his spear while the others work it over.     Chacha, who is a small woman with fire powers and is not at all suited to battle a fire wyrm, keeps her distance while Nobunaga and Nagayoshi join the fray. Her attention is rather divided between the fight and the utterly barren state of the palace itself. It suits Zephiel to have no care or connection to the usual fineries of a castle, but what would he have done with what was already here? Was it liquidated to help fund Bern's war effort? Chacha touches a finger to her lips as she considers it.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's eyes are manic and gleaming; trails of purplish off-white draw lines a bit too long in the space where his eyes move. When the second dragon gets its chance to transform, the whirling around to face it matches not its motion but its intention. He is seeing telepathy and clairvoyance, not light. <Take it down.> That Fire Emblem socket... he'd never be able to get through that right now.     However, there is something he *can* do.     Generally-speaking, it's impossible to get into these guys' minds in what could be understood as a 'productive' way. Dark magic is impenetrable to traditional fine Psychonautry, and the best Flamel can do is dump psychic energy into the skull. After all, he doesn't have the necessary access to get to more substantial focus. Normally.     Flamel's coordination with Echidna is surreal. He is invading her mind to know her moves before she does, and to work ahead of them without delays. Mostly in service of getting that gap in the skull clear, that axe reclaimed, so that he can rush it himself. If he can wrench the axe free, he'll toss it to her, but he's more interested in the wound. Lines of light in the air as he whirls around and-- Hardens his hand into a chop-like configuration. Uh oh.     The expression on his face is totally unmoving as he tries to slam his hand straight through the gap and get at the dragon's brain. Fine telepathy and psychonautry doesn't work on them, only brute-force psychic energy. But what if you can get your hand in there, at the neurons directly? Flamel isn't just a telepath, he's an *expert of the psychic sciences*, which makes him deeply familiar with unconventional brain anatomy. He's going to try to get in there and do what might later be described in reports as 'transcranial digital stimulation pseudotelepathy'; slamming his fingers into the thin band of the primary motor cortex, and digging fingers in at the regions responsible for tensing the legs in particular configurations.     Given a dragon's general endurance, this would normally actually not be especially useful. However, his goal is any hostile telepath's goal: Force the target to do something self-destructive. Such as, for example, instantly and painfully smashing headfirst into the divine barrier sealed by the Fire Emblem, a presumably anti-dragon relic, hopefully with the sort of explosive results to launch the beast clear of the entrance.
Riku Asakura	'What? No. Put those bars through the wheels to be sure. They lock.' Geed doesn't know much about castle fortification and theory.  When Lilian points out the bars and the wheels, Geed nods to her.  The moment they get the door up and ready to be secured.  He goes for the bars and puts one through the wheel to lock it into place the moment he can.  Right after that, he's right behind Lilian, aiming to back her up.   While she's brutal and deadly, Ultraman Geed is less sure of himself.  The fine line of fighting monsters and fighting humans is a tricky one for him.  However, he does fight, aiming to make sure her back is safe, and punching and striking anyone who tries to sneak up on her or flank her.   Once they get to the inner sanctum, it's... too quiet.  He doesn't like that one bit.  However, it's the reveal of the two dragons that makes things complicated.  One goes down thanks to teamwork, but the second transforms and fires his fire breath into the ceiling.  This attempt to drop the roof on them would be easier if not for Geed himself. Geed grows, aiming to get above the others and use his body to brace against the falling debris and cover the others.  The second thing he does is summon the Geed claw again, aiming to strike the dragon, aiming to put the claw at its neck, trying to force the head up and away from the rest of the group before they could kill it.  Geed doesn't doubt their ability to do this, which is why he's making sure they can before they're all firebreathed to death.
Angela	Roland has an alarming amount of feelings about hatred towards an unfair and cruel world, devotion to loved ones that may be enemies of that world, and the idea that forging a better future means melting the present down so it can be reforged. He is a quiet guy or rather despite how talkative he is, he keeps his darker thoughts to himself in the same way you don't unsheath a sword and start swinging it around amongst polite company or fire into a crowd. He, too, believes that love is the a world in of itself and sometimes the wrong world is destroyed. A Grade Nine Fixer can talk and kill at the same time if it's Roland. His techniques are not so different from the Index's in the sense that it feels like there's a flow to every move heading into the other. He shifts from knife to gun to sword, banishing and summoning weapons as if it was a normal part of his walk. "Yeah I guess I've got a good idea on the type of people Lilian and Angela are now." Roland admits. "Before, I just knew my wife liked her. One of my old work partners too. I guess I didn't really think much about it at first because, well, at a distance Lilian just looked like any other high grade Fixer. But she isn't just that. And Angela isn't really like anyone else in The City either, makes sense she barely lives there, but they both have a knack for pulling you out of the habits the world hoisted upon you." He looks at his bloodied hands unhappily for a moment. "...To be honest, a few years ago I would've said 'what about all the good honest people' whom you'd be burning? But now ... Well, they feel like hostages, shoved front and center so that nothing can change, so nothing ever changes." He shakes his hands off. "But eventually it's intolerable and you gotta do something just to ... I don't know ... feel like you're a person at all. The perfect solution that hurts nobody seems impossible, the search is like looking for... well... I would've said a dragon, but maybe not the best mythical entity to use right now." He smiles grimly. "I learned I'm desperate too, the way I lived before just intolerable." He is quiet for a moment and then adds, "People like that tend to die with heroes' blades in their gut." He doesn't overtly state that he expects those blades to eventually find their way to his. He stays near Roy, covering him while Petra drags him, the assassin taking the role of a bodyguard for a time. He did smile at Fae making a statement though. Ptoo. Love's life is a lot easier. She is pointed to shoot a laser somewhere and so she opens her mouth and fires a massive purple laser blast out of her mouth towards the breach. It is simple, she doesn't think too much about it, and she is the happiest monster in Elibe right now. "Where else? Where else??" She asks excitedly.
Lilian Rook	Tight-packed, indoors, room-to-room fighting isn't exactly where Lilian hoped she would be, but pushing forwards against a consolidated guard instead of dealing with scattered forces all over is better for her than it is bad.     The best she can do against the mages is to react to every spike of magical energy she can feel ahead and take cover behind a corner or hit the deck; but it works. Lacking the ability to solidly break down a rampart bristling with spears, even an improvised one, the most she can do is climb over them and turn those spears away from the front for her allies; bit it works. Disciplined spearmen in tight quarters make it far more difficult to attack the ends of their weapons as-is the standard counter for wielding a sword of her size; but she still can.     As Dieck and Echidna surge ahead, and as Rutger joins them, as Petra bursts in from the pincering flank and Roland with her, Lilian's thoughts are given a moment to waver from inexorable forward momentum, and to contemplate why she isn't doing the same.     §This is the heart of Bern. Everyone here is a diehard loyalist to the king that wants to kill them. I've gone on a thousand times about what it means to have the end of the world at stake; not just to the others, but even to Bramimond, too. Even Petra knows it isn't possible to lead Zephiel back into the light by now. Galle has finally admitted it too. So what's the point of 'this'?§     §However I deal with them doesn't make a difference save how much it wears me out. I've already used most of my ammo, some of my magic, and my armour is dinged up from trying. Anyone I don't kill will won't have time to get out of the way of the others, and I've never wanted to stop them. What's waiting for them if they do? It'd be improbable for no one I've ever wounded to have died later because of it, wouldn't it? The trail here has been soaked with blood at every step of the way. I'm going to have to keep wading knee-deep through it to Zephiel, and I still can't think of any way it isn't his or the whole world's at the end.§     §I can hardly remember the point of being this way anymore. No one will remember. They'd be right to feel contempt if they did. All I've accomplished with this is getting shot and stabbed and blasted a dozen times along the way. What evil is there to give in to? What could I possibly do here, without death and without giving up? I know exactly what I'm marching to. And still . . .§     --------     Echidna and Rutger had the right idea. That's exactly when she should have done the same thing as them. She never had any issue killing them when they were dragons, so why was the moment Flamel bought them all still not enough for her?     'We've gotta get you there. Stay close to me.'     <Take it down.>     Lilian comes to her senses at the prospect of Armads telekinetically flying past her. It only takes her a second to grasp what Flamel is up to. That much is ample warning to hit the wall with the full bend of her knees right at the moment the dragon's head whips past and ram her sword through its throat, where she knows the flames to take shape, using its own momentum; the substitute for not being able to build up any indoors.
Desire Stars	Na-Go and Geats both look up to see the crumbling ceiling the larger chunks of falling debris are blasted apart into less dangerous pieces by Geat's laser pistol, but Na-Go, thinking quickly, has a different idea.                              Set! POWERED BUILDER!                                   Replacing the simple harness on her greaves, the industrial caution-striped heavy plates of the Powered Builder armor are flash-forged in place by a suite of robotic manipulator arms, spot welders and impact wrenches. No sooner do the Beat Axe and Armed Propeller vanish than does the burdensome, half-construction-equipment, half-heavy-weaponry Gigant Blaster drop into her waiting hands.     "We don't have time for this--"     So she builds a workaround. Shooting past the dragon, she braces the ceiling with scaffolding, heavy steel pilings and patch-job mortar to catch what's knocked loose, all as the pretext for a new addition to the castle--brick, mortar, fine flooring, supports and all, a short hallway which leads around the dragon and into the same room it guards. A few people will have time to use it before the dragon notices--and by then, hopefully, it should already be down.
Marigold	"Aa--ouuu--mrrrgl," Fae says to Petra's praise and little smooch, although that last bit probably isn't a real dragon-language word. She gives a little cheek-lick before waddle-backing out!      - - - -      You've come a long way since that first dragon setting fire to Juteaux, a year and a half ago. Having four times the dragon-slaying weapons on hand helps; so does experience.      "I hope you know what you're doing-!" Echidna barks at Flamel, but she falls in with his psychic teamwork. When the dragon clumsily lurches under his command, it headbutts the magical door hard enough to shake the room- with Echidna's back slammed against the door too, and Armads driven into its skull to the depth of the axe's blade too.      It squeals and thrashes, flinging Echidna off-- Dieck tries to catch her, forgetting they're the same size-- and whips the room with its fiery tail despite the awful wound on its forehead, lurching with the impacts from Love and Geed. Riku wrenches its head upwards as terrible fire starts to bubble up from its maw; Lilian's blade lances the fire from its neck before it can wrench its head back down, and...      In all the din of flame and claw and falling stone, Roy forgets himself. He's pale, bangs sticking to his forehead around the noble circlet. Maybe he remembers Juteaux a little too well.      "R-right!! Sorry!" he jolts out, startled by Petra, and scampers forward towards the safety of Na-Go's sheltered side-passage with the Blade clutched in both arms. Roland's vigilance, Madeleine's spear, and Petra's silver will have to protect him. His eyes squeeze shut when masonry clangs against the metal shield overhead, and when the dragon's rumbling shriek shakes his bones, opening just in time to slide under an errant lash of flame... Clink. *Eeeeeee...*      ... and touch the Fire Emblem in the Blade's handguard to the door beyond. The white coursing magic that sealed the stone walls of the bunker-like inner sanctum flares softly, and then fades away, leaving the double doors to swing inwards of their own accord.      There's still a dragon in the way, of course. What Bernish soldiers remain are regrouping behind you to prevent retreat, shouted orders oozing lone survivors back into half-functioning sprear formations.      "Hit it again! Just-- argh, swoop down! Bring us closer!" the Ilian-defector-turned-Bernish-traitor astride Love is barking at her with an emphatically pointed spear. She sounds terrified, but if Galle's rebels can't help you carry the day here, worse fates than getting torched by a dragon await her.      She may not have the chance to do much, though. Echidna is running up some of Na-Go's buttressing to get her axe back one more time as Lilian and Geed hold the dragon still- "Thanks, ladies!"-, and Rutger has the same idea, doling out a hamstring-cut alongside Nagayoshi pinning its leg before wall-running up with Durandal in hand, and...      Maybe this is how the Heroes felt. With everyone working together, just one isn't so bad, anymore.      With the dragon immobilized, Durandal and Armads can take off its head like a pair of shears.
Marigold	Around its now-oozing-black corpse, the hallway beyond is ominously bleak. Roy swallows, briefly transfixed by something about its atmosphere, and glances back at you with a trusting smile before heading in.      Once this would have been an ornate vestibule before the throne room. Now it's defaced, stripped to the bare gray stone by Zephiel. Maybe its gold did fund the war machine, as Chacha wonders, but it's not as though Bern is short of gold everywhere else. Did he tear out the luxuries of his own sanctum on a pragmatic whim, or in a rage?      "I think this is it," Roy breathes, at the end of the hallway. The doors here aren't magic, and they have no lock. Once there were gemstones inlaid in them. Now the empty sockets stare. For a moment, Roy thinks of Sigrun.      Then he opens them.
Marigold	Beyond, King Zephiel in heavy armor rises with the brilliant light of hard disdain in his eyes, not from a throne of gold but from one of stripped-down basalt. The walls here are blackened, where he must have used his divine weapon Eckesachs' lightning to deface etchings of his ancestor Hartmut. The room is cold and ill-lit. Even though it's vast and empty, easily forty feet from you to the throne, it somehow feels cramped.      It might take a moment to even register the two dozen pale-and-frightened praetorian guards holding ceremonial fauchards to ward off your advance. Their gold-traced armor is the only luxury this room contains.      "So," he says, with leaden venom, and for a long crackling second it seems like that might be the only prelude to explosive violence. The royal guard adjust their grips on their weapons. But his royal scepter remains a scepter, and not the great blade Eckesachs, for just a moment longer.      "... Two years ago, I told you all: leave this world, or be ground to pulp beneath Bern's heel." His eyes land particularly, for a moment, on Lilian, Madeleine, and Ace. "You've wriggled further than I would have thought. A matter of no consequence at all."      "You, defenders of a world where the strong enslave and devour the weak, come drooling to my door to plead your case before the great judge: Violence. Come and take the verdict that you crave! I had hoped to die in Iðunn's jaws at the end of the world, but you fight me now to claim that honor."      Roy, for a moment, weakly finds words under his withering glare. "... I never understood where you find your certainty. If you can't believe in humanity, how do you believe in yourself?"      "What a pitiable idea. Knowledge is certainty. I am a worm that knows its own insignificance and a pig that knows its squalor. Now, you who worship only power--"      It's hard to parse the motion unless you understand King Zephiel quite well.      Eckesachs transforms from a scepter to a blade, and he sweeps it in a crackling stroke, beheading all twelve of his own guard in one slice and carrying through as a lash of lightning towards you that can crumble stone.      There's a thunderclap, and the sound of a dozen bodies and a gallon of blood hitting the floor all at once. He advances ploddingly down the steps from his throne and through the spreading red puddle.      "--behold your greater beast."
Flamel Parsons	Flamel pulls himself away from the oozing corpse. There's a moment where he seems to consciously reload his brain, exhale heavily, and restore his proper speaking patterns. "Thanks." He mutters to Echidna and Lilian, grateful for the collaboration. Petra gets a glance. "That'll hold? Good, we, we need more forces coming through." This won't be enough, is what he means.     He's on into the vestibule. "This is it." He's whispering under his breath, agreeing with Roy. "The regime change. What we've pinned our hopes on." The door is opening, and Flamel is readying himself. "Guinivere is depending on you." He whips his hand aside fast, flicking the gray matter of the war-dragon away in a single motion. "I'm depending on you." He pulls his stained jacket off, wipes the rest off with it, and tosses it aside too. "*History* is depending on you, Roy." He rolls up his sleeves and adjusts his sunglasses. "Remember. Remember what you're fighting for. Remember every single one of those minds. The thousands and tens of thousands and the millions of people whose mundane, small, unheroic lives are in your hands, and pushing you forward."     His words are spreading from Roy once the door opens. "Everything that happens from here on out is just playing out the conclusions those millions already came to. So live up to it, or we die here."     The door opens, and...
Riku Asakura	Ultraman Geed does his best to hold the dragon's head up, working with Lilian to make sure that the creature can NOT breath fire on them.  He endures the tail strikes, as sparks rain down from his body.  He grunts in pain, but he does not yield in preventing that head from coming down... he doesn't want his friends and allies to be swallowed up in the dragon's fire. The head of the dragon goes flying, thanks to the legendary weapons and their wielders.  He remembers the times he had to fight a dragon, and... well, working with a group of coordinated people really does make these creatures seem easier.  Doing it on his own is just far too tough a fight, and of course it'd be way messier and longer. Of course, he can't help but look at the door; behind it was Zephiel.  The king of this land, and the man who had judged humanity as not worth living.  The door itself just feels looming and larger than it actually is... but... "Standing around doing nothing won't get us anywhere..." he says to himself and walks forward with the others to push the door open and step inside.   The room was stripped bare of all its fineries.  No gold or gems or anything like that.  He was sure most kings in this kind of age would decorate their throne rooms up, but he supposes Zephiel had thrown away such fineries for his aesthetic life choices.  The royal guard stands between them and him, but even them he talks to... or perhaps at them.   'I had hoped to die in Iðunn's jaws at the end of the world, but you fight me now to claim that honor.' He wants to die; Geed can not understand someone like Zephiel.  Wanting to kill all of humanity, rejecting the world as it stands, and claiming that they only worshiped power... how do you respond to someone like this?  Ultraman Geed can not grit his teeth because he doesn't have those, but his hands clench at his sides.   The scepter changes into a blade.  Somehow, Geed's instincts kick in, and he moves toward the front.  Zephiel is too fast for him to save his guards, who are struck by the lash of lightning, their heads flying off.  Their blood coated the room, and their images burned into the mind of Geed forever.  Instead, he does the only thing he can do.   Protect his allies. He immediately raises a barrier, aiming to challenge the lightning.  Barrier and lightning collide, as the barrier holds the force of the blow back.  Geed puts energy into it, trying to force the blast away so that nobody else has to deal with the blow.  This will give others time to get around it and get at Zephiel.  Geed has no words to give Zephiel, a man whose mind has been made up years ago, and whose every answer to everything they might say today is violence. Instead, he aims to protect those whom he cares for in a denouncement of Zephiel's idea that they only worship power.  That no goodness exists in man at all.  The barrier, under strain, cracks, and then gives out, bursting through Ultraman Geed.  Causing a burst of white energy to shoot out the back of the Ultraman and drop him to the ground.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's spherical psi-shield is fast enough for the impact, but not strong enough. Both fingers tremble with the effort of trying to stick to his temples. The thunderclap strike has him on his knees instantly, and the gasp of both effort and awe takes his breath out of him. That's a divine weapon, that's *the* divine weapon. The blade of the hero, capable of changing history. The Binding Blade might have been what was used to wish for its outcome, but Eckesachs was the one to cut Hartmut's path to it, and in Zephiel's hands, it would have been the one to do the same.     "CAN'T... HOLD...!" He's shouting desperately. "SOMEONE... PLEASE...!" Freeing one hand from his temple, he slams its palm into the ground and pulses a wave of psychic force. The shattered brains of the dead dozen that Zephiel steps over effortlessly are psychic relays, and Flamel overloads and burns out the last of their neurons to extract every mundane experience, every moment of fear and aggression and shame sadness and joy, into spear-like bolts to try to slice up at him, trying to fill his path with the palty psychic shreds of Society he's able to summon in this place defined by the greater beast.     ---     Someone picks up a red phone.     ---     <She still thinks about it.> His voice in telepathy is clear, though, calm like still water. <The fox cub that you'd found. I have to behold this instead. I have to struggle or die. I have to scream and writhe in the soil because beautiful things can only be built on top of soil. I wish so badly that you would stop, and I could take my friends into the pain you have, and we could behold a fox cub instead, and make things right. I want that so badly I feel like I'm drowning for the lack of it.>     Flamel's shield is cracking and his whole body is consumed by a scream. Geed slams that barrier into place before it gives way, and Flamel gasps as he lurches forward, dispelling the shield. His palms are pressed against the bare stone, panting for breath. "W... we need...!" He can barely think.     So why is his telepathy still so clear? <That won't happen. It's the dream that psychics invent. The mind is greater than matter, but history is greater than any of us. You wouldn't ever do that because we wouldn't ever either. History has already changed. Maybe when Galle turned on you. Maybe when Guinivere left. Maybe history already changed when Hartmut spared Iðunn. And now we wait to see who it decided to kill. Everything is already in motion to where it'll go, and the best we can do is try not to be dead when it gets there.>     ---     "But I still hate this." The Director's hand tightens around the corded red bakelite phone as he paces his command center. Flickering screens show Geed's struggling back. "I hate this." He repeats. "There's a gentler beast I should be seeing. And it already feels like dying, to see this one instead."     ---
Nobunaga	Chacha absolutely refuses to move past the oozing carcass of the false dragon. It isn't that she's a proper royal lady whose combat outfit even includes silken finery. Rather, as others move past her, she makes use of her powers to start burning the dragon corpse away. It'll take her a while, but her goal is clearly to make sure that Getting Out won't be hindered by a giant dead lizard just in case it matters.     Sword in hand, Nobunaga advances. Directly to her right and two steps back is Nogayoshi. Once Roy enters the throne room, the colossal samurai immediately enters after him, steps to his right, and plants his spear on the stonework floor with a noticeable *thunk*. Nobunaga breaks to the left, framing Roy between the two of them. > "...defenders of a world where the strong enslave and devour the weak..."     "To wallow in an act of barbarity yourself and then issue the blame for it on all of mankind..." Nobunaga lifts her free hand to her chin, eyes closing in thought, "The sort of audacious boldness I've come to expect." > "I had hoped to die in Iðunn's jaws at the end of the world, but you fight me now to claim that honor."     "Hmm hmm hmm~..." Her head tilts forward a touch with the shoulder-shakes of her laughter.     Zephiel lashes out. His guards fall; Roy finds himself without threat to react to. Instead, briefly, his vision of Zephiel is obstructed by a veritable wall of white lacquered metal, splattered with blood. After a heartbeat or so, Nagayoshi Mori slouches forward, braced on his spear. What couldn't be blocked by Geed's barrier has carved into his chestplate in a horrendous crimson gash lined with jagged, scorched metal. Despite the blood in his mouth, the warrior grins, "Ghahaha..! You won't find it..." Mori takes another step forward. Finding his strength again, in spite of (because of?) the blood loss, his helmet snaps forward and he points with his spear, "...so easy!"     "You are so eager to kill yourself and take everything with you," Nobunaga speaks up. Eyes still closed, she tilts her head back and swings her sword aside, then slides it into the syaa at her hip, "*Force* is not the lesson you require." Embers flicker to life, swirling around her, erupting into a flaming whirlwind from which steps the taller, bodysuit-clad, flame-haired Demon King.     She plants the saya of her katana on the floor as one might do with a cane such that the metal reinforcement cap strikes near where Flamel is recovering, "Get up. You have a job to do."
Angela	"Are you scared?" Love asks suddenly, as if suddenly seeing the soldier riding her as someone who might need a magical girl lesson of the day. "Don't worry, I'm actually a magical girl!" She is asked to fire more lasers but there is a problem, Love can shoot her mouth beam as many times as she wants but there's a bit of a cooldown because she has to do a whole chant every time. She doesn't literally have to do the whole speech with her voice but she still has to go through it all with her heart. "I'll protect you!" She decides, settling for taking another breath and spewing out a flurry of glowing cartoon patterned stars. These are not quite as powerful as her finishing move, and it is a bit unorthodox to keep fighting after the finishing move didn't clinch the deal, but the tremors of a young girl soldier's heart is worth fudging the rules a little bit. Zephiel's throne room is probably not a place for children's media so Love stays behind to guard the rear and continue shooting a variety of beams based on what this random soldier tells her to do. Roland pushes ahead. "That's the guy huh...?" Roland says in the tone of 'this the job?' but he doesn't have his usual mask on to obscure the unhappy grimace he's wearing. He looks to Flamel, further unhappy. "HEY hey hey, I'm sure he gets all that already." He looks to Roy. "Look, you won't be blamed or cursed. You aren't bound by that blade, you still got a heart, don't you? It's carried you this far, hasn't it?" He doesn't know Zephiel well, or rather doesn't know his techniques. As the man beheads twelve other men, he is too slow to avoid the electricity pushing on and scorching into his body. He stumbles down into a crouch and blows smoke out of his mouth and spits blood to the side. It probably would've been worse if twelve royal guards hadn't taken the brunt of the strike. "Huh.." He says. "We were just talkin' 'bout that. Was she quoting you?" He slowly gets back up to his feet. "You remind me of Murdoch." He obviously knows his way around a sword. Roland thinks of his granny, telling him he had no natural talent like Argalia, that he wasn't as unnaturally strong like Gebura, that he wouldn't be able to protect Angelica because Angelica would always be stronger than him. Some part of him will always think he weakened her and that is why she died even after they took blows for one another as partners. But then, he had hoped to leave this life behind, didn't he? Before him is a man they would have called Color. Maybe something like The Golden End, he thinks distantly, as his hands do their work. He darts forward, summoning his Atelier Logic shotgun in his hand, firing a couple shots towards Zephiel's sword arm to try and throw off future strikes from that sword. The only way he ever held off Argalia in a duel was by pissing him off first, by being real damn annoying. As he moves closer the shotgun vanishes as he summons the Old Boys Workshop hammer (large) into his hand and just chucks it for Zephiel's forehead. He can't see Idunn the same way Zephiel can, he realizes, he's a married man. And his wife wasn't a world devouring dragon. But he would, he would, just for one chance to see her again. But ultimately, the fate of the world is moot. He is already a dead man, almost Zephiel's favorite kind if his spirit wasn't lingering for his one last job, but he can't argue the world is kinder, he doesn't believe that. He can't argue there are still people who deserve to live happy lives, because only the smallest remaining piece of his heart can still say that. "Kill me if you can." Roland tells Zephiel, softly, utterly sincere and utterly only for him. "Least one world will be better for it."
Odette Raskins	"If they keep sending out dragons at this rate, the whole castle might end up collapsing!" Yelping as the dragon continues thrashing about in that fight against nearly everyone in the room, Odette's not in any rush to get closer to it as she instead focuses on not getting crushed underfoot while keeping an eye on where all her allies are. It mostly involves running around and diving for cover when its flames or tail comes too close for comfort. One of those tail slams in particular even takes the EMT off her feet as she's clipped by it, but a well-timed tuck and roll means she's just knocked around and into a wall with several bruises instead of actually breaking something. She's still winded from the impact, but it buys her some precious time to recover and take stock of who else might be more hurt than she is. Echidna and Dieck get some immediate attention following that crash into the wall and the toss, too, as Odette hurries to join them shortly after that ill-conceived catch. "Easy now! I got you, I got you... There!" A jab with some painkillers, a shine of light healing magic from a staff she picked up off the floor, and (she hopes) they're good to keep going. Soon, the dragon goes down, and Odette does a once over to make sure nobody's being left behind before seeing Chacha standing around. The EMT rushes over as though she might actually need protection or aid of some sort, nearly picking her up wholesale before realizing that Chacha's working on the corpse. "... Uh? Good thinking! Er. That way, after you're done!" She says, pointing towards Na-Go's path before hurrying on in. Catching up with everyone else just before the throne room, she finally notices just how bare everything is, and a confused noise comes out of her while piecing things together. "Isn't this supposed to be a... The main room? It's so empty and not... Castle-y." She murmurs, shivering suddenly and hunching over with her hands on her thighs to keep herself upright. She needs a moment to get past that adrenaline crash, hand already going into her case to take out an energy drink while approaching the door with a slow nod at Roy. "It is. Everything we've been fighting for is right... Right here. One more. We've got this." Odette says and chugs the whole can down with another loud shiver, then smacks her cheeks to keep herself focused as Roy opens the door. She feels a tightness in her chest as she remembers that she hasn't seen Lucius this entire time.  That just makes it more important that she does her best here, so she can see him later with her head held high.
Odette Raskins	Upon passing the entrance to the throne room, Odette sees King Zephiel. She still feels a twinge of dread hitting her when she does, intimidated as she often is by the presence of someone stronger and greater than she is. She doesn't even notice his guards until the moment they actually adjust their grips and move at all, but she doesn't flinch when they do. She doesn't even flinch when he starts speaking despite her usual reactions to this and lesser things happening. "You, defenders... before the great judge: Violence." "I hate it. I hate violence always being the answer. I hate that every... Everywhere something's going wrong, it's always the final answer to whatever's going on." Gripping her staff tightly in one hand and the firearm in the other, Odette breathes in slowly as she watches Zephiel, actually holding eye contact even if he's not looking at her at all. "I really wish we could've met earlier somehow, or th.. That there was another answer. I know there isn't, but..." Her hands are shaking, she doesn't have anything to finish that thought with, and her gaze remains firmly on Zephiel while Eckesachs transforms. She nearly misses the fact that he's about to swing it as focused as she is on holding even one-way eye contact, but the energy drink is already starting to kick in once she realizes he's attacking. Dropping onto her side with an unceremonious thud, the EMT covers her head with her arm as the sound of thunder washes over her, cowering briefly before realizing that Ultraman's covered her, and that Zephiel's guards have already fallen. Was that Rutger? No, that was Zephiel's own swing. She only lets herself stare at the bodies for a moment in horror before forcing her attention on the commencing battle. She saw Ultraman fall to the ground earlier, and that's enough to get her moving instead of freaking out. "Got you, Riku!" She calls out as she sprints and slides over to him, firing off a quick shot at Zephiel. She knows a single bullet won't be enough to stop him, but that's never been Odette's focus in these kinds of fights. She just needs to buy time for her allies, to try and distract him so someone else can capitalize or cover for her on healing duty. One of those healing injectors gets jabbed right into Ultraman's leg with the telltale hiss of chemicals going in, and then the staff goes up with another glow of healing magic.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine is at Roy's right hand, spear raised as the door opens, ready to pitch again into the fray - but on the other side there is no immediate resistance, startling her enough that she stumbles to a halt. Her eyes set on Zephiel as the king speaks.     One eyelid twitches in contempt as his eyes trace across those he's met before. 'Defenders of the world' is cause enough for a moment's reflection - how strange, to find herself on *this* side of such a war. She knows she ought speak here - not to convince Zephiel of his errors, or of anything at all, but rather to bolster the young lord at her side.     "We're here to prove," she says, eyes turning to Roy, "that his way is not the only. That a world can have a second chance, and that people can seize that chance and make things *right*."     Then Madeleine turns her focus inward, reaches her spirit into her heart, feels for the bleak, bottomless well of hatred she knows to be there, grasps for its power, with which she will pluck this idiot king from the world like a grape off the vine--     --but at the bottom of the well, fingers scrape dry stone. She laughs, just for a moment, at a joke only she can get: when she most desires the full power of an Excrucian, when she most has a good reason to use it, it has left her. Of course it would.     It has left her with only her wits, her will, her weapons - and her friends. As Zephiel beheads his last human companions in the world, Madeleine's eyes sweep across Dieck, Echidna, Rutger, Roy... she takes a deep breath, and it's time to move.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	A stray bolt of lightning lances toward Roy, and Madeleine steps forward to intercept. Drogrung's nature may make *it* vulnerable to Eckesach's power, and Maltet is too fragile now to block such an attack, but she herself is neither human nor dragon, neither holy nor unholy, but in fact nothing whatsoever. Her body will be burned, and it is - but the divine will powering the assault, the *intent to kill*, has nothing to grab hold of. Staggered but still standing, she takes a relieved breath as first Flamel, then Geed throw up their energy shields.     She knows, of course, that she can't pull that off for a whole battle's worth of Eckesachs's lightning - eventually her nervous system will give out, if nothing else. And although Drogrung may be able to pierce whatever defenses Zephiel is afforded by his Divine Weapon, it also would suffer greatly from taking a serious blow in return. This is going to come down to who strikes first, and how hard.     The right move, then, is a focus on defense. Zephiel is no doubt a brilliant swordsman, but he also has *some* limit to his attention, focus, and breadth of vision. Madeleine might only need a moment's lapse in the same to capitalize. With Drogrung in hand and Maltet on her back she slinks backward, hoping to get lost in the visual noise of a dozen Elites-and-company in lieu of any appreciable cover in the chamber. She watches Zephiel like a hawk, learning on the fly his movements and stances and the timing of his attacks both physical and magical...
Flamel Parsons	Flamel puts a hand around Nobunaga's saya, struggling to his feet. His teeth are gritting and his grip is trembling. "I know..." He's panting, exhaustedly. A glance to Madeleine, as he catches stray thoughts from her inner monologue. "Was *really* hoping you had some left in the tank right about now." He manages to gasp. "Had a whole, hahhh, whole thing where I was going to reveal some past conspiratorial manipulations and..." He shakes his head, finally pushing to his feet. "I'll be fine." He assures Nobunaga, tone tensely, hurriedly grateful. "Don't worry about me." She of all people might best know how history works in this moment, after all, though Flamel shouldn't say things like that.     He braces near the Ultraman's ankle, firming up his cover. Invisibility won't help in a thunderstorm. His psychosomatic heart is pounding in his ears. His survival instinct tells him to run, over and over...
Petra Soroka	"R-right!! Sorry!"     The dragon comes down with a tooth-rattling thud, butchered by the teamwork of the others. Petra stands with Roy at the door, breathing heavily, with her protective Silver completing its journey after it's already unlocked, incidentally black-slicked from warding off the dragon along the way. The hallway beyond looms, and for a moment, it's her and Roy contemplating it.     She'd read a book, months back, about the transitioning function of art in society over the centuries. The concept of 'aura', it'd been called, the sublime beauty that artistic masterpieces invoke, that the architectural wonders of ancient palaces and their hallways lined with statues converted that insubstantial power into tangible power. The 'King' of Bern is a subject that only exists in the minds of the people because of the trappings of aesthetic beauty inherited through a long incestuous tradition of scepters and gold passed down by Hartmut.     Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar went on at length about Caesar's shivering, mortal body, that he remembers how human Caesar was when he begged for a hand to help him escape from a river's current. Gold is the costume that disguises humans as being anything besides what they are: Petra can imagine how bitterly and cynically Zephiel must have turned the slavish sway of wealth to his advantage years ago, when goading the bloodthirsty horde of his kingdom on to war with him as their leader. She can imagine how the years dragged on and his tolerance wore thinner, and the limits tested and strained, clawing at the walls of his gilded cage to strike iron.     And the war sustained itself anyways. With its head flayed down to bare bones, the transcendence of great art and tradition and patriotism that at least provides a feeble exculpation for the eager swelling of men's souls to the cause of conquest, the Bernish machine kept devouring the rest of the continent. And without the costume of a god, Zephiel found himself as the best among them anyways.     Roy turns to her and smiles; she squeezes his shoulder. "I think I might need to rely on you a little bit for this part." Isn't it so interesting that the one territory on this whole continent that Petra hasn't set foot in is Pherae? "Everything that happens from here on out is just playing out the conclusions those millions already came to."     "The only thing that a million people can unilaterally agree on is wanting their dull tomorrows to be identical to their tiny yesterdays. I guess we're here to make sure of that, so for the sake of my sanity, I've gotta believe that's worth it." "So,"     "So," Petra murmurs back, too quietly to be heard and not trying to. In the moment of confrontation, she's sharply aware that Zephiel hasn't spent a fraction as much time thinking about her as she has of him, unlikely to even remember her. It just feels a little embarrassing, to be here standing on the side of the heroes, nakedly invisible among them, imagining parasocial closure that can never bridge the gap.
Petra Soroka	"I had hoped to die in Iðunn's jaws at the end of the world, but you fight me now to claim that honor."     But still, it's like she told Roland. No matter what, she can't tolerate not saying anything, to at least button up the narrative of King Zephiel of Bern in her mind.     "I'm human too." Grip on her sword, her thumb slides across the hilt restlessly, friction that makes sparks. "Regrettably. I was born with pigs, and grew up around them for most of my life, and turned out like them in the way that you're forced to."     "I already told you what changed for me." Lilian, she said last time they met, directly comparing her to Iðunn. "Ever since then, I've tried to consider myself like a project to prove humanity's ability to become different than they are. If I couldn't, then I'd lie down with the rest of humanity and die when their time finally comes. But if I could, then that's a *thesis*, that's *proof*! That every other human has not just, like, the ability, but the *responsibility* to change too!"     Petra sighs and lowers the sword that she'd been getting more worked up with waving around for emphasis. "And I think I've done alright. Do you really think humans are unable to learn to be different? Dragons spend hundreds of years growing up to learn how to be. Even you didn't have to turn out this way. I know you didn't, Guinivere knows you didn't."     "So I guess, let me ask you, do you think Iðunn is happier wiping out a humanity she hates, or living with a humanity that's worth loving? And more importantly, as the greatest among them...."     "... Do you think Iðunn loves you?"     Twelve royal guards hit the floor in sync, and obviously Petra couldn't care less about them. Trusting in Geed's barrier to shield her, Petra whips Fourth Match Flame out in an arc of fire, flickering to skip past the electric shockwave, planting her footsteps in the pool of blood around Zephiel, sword upraised to his.     Utterly overwhelmed in any contest of strength, Petra's precognition turns the swordfight into a dance, placing herself to meet him and respond in the most inconvenient position at each step. If she actually knew how to predict Zephiel's behaviors, then they wouldn't have to have this fight at all, not like this-- but her psychic subconscious openly receives every signal of intent the same as it runs through his nerves to his muscles, and her conscious mind tries to receive everything else.
Desire Stars	The lightning slams into Flamel's shield, then strains Geed's severely. The two Kamen Riders behind it act quickly. Na-Go flips her Desire Driver, swapping the positions of the Beat and Powered Builder armors, the belt calling out--                                   REVOLVE ON!                                   --as now her greaves are the multicolored Beat armor, with electric blue subwoofers, and her breastplate and bracers are now the bulky, caution-striped Powered Builder half. She snaps a small hammer figure into the port at the Powered Builder's front, which calls forth a heavy, two-handed metallic blue hammer with one end of its head encircled in black-yellow caution stripes.     She raps the weighted butt of the haft against the ground, and the subwoofers on her greaves thrum to life, piping an urgent, pressing anthem into the air. The melody makes one light on their feet, more agile and fast in an effort to blitz and overwhelm Zephiel. She kicks the butt and flows the momentum into an overhead smash into the ground, sending a furrow of uneven earth straight towards Zephiel's footing.     "The nations and villages you've burnt," says Geats, standing still. The roar of his armor momentarily fills the air, and then he's gone, a streak of red fading fast from his current location, leading to--just far enough beyond Zephiel's peripheral to force him to look if he wants to track his position visually. "The ones you knocked over, *and* the ones you bought out--"     The snap kick is fast and fueled with terrible force, enough to sound a crack like a gunshot should it be parried rather than dodged. And, like a gunshot, it zips awfully, even in a near miss. "Do you think none of that was an offering at the altar of violence?" In his usual form, Geats fought with the experienced patience of a master, and perhaps some showmanly swagger thrown in to coax an amateur into seeing an opening that isn't there. It isn't here--much like it wasn't on Galle's first meeting, Geats knows he isn't dealing with a rank-and-file soldier or an amateur of any sort. He is instead relentless, using the reach of his legs to counter the reach of Zephiel's sword, weaving under the blows fast enough to come back up with a parry or reprisal for the next.     "Did you think you're not a supplicant," he says, sparks flying and heat exploding outwards from a wrist deflection only someone with lifetimes of experience could dare to make, "Only because you moved the pieces history put before you? That can't be it." A blink-and-miss it feint, committed enough to seem real until the last minute foot switch into hook kick, red-hot claws on his boot sending blistering heat dangerously close to Zephiel's eyes, "Maybe you think that you're excused, because of 'knowledge?'"      *I can't change you by force. But if I understand you... the next world won't have any need for a Zephiel.*
Lilian Rook	The thought enters her mind.     Lilian had once taken the Lycian League to be much too small, then much too large, to mirror the band of eight heroes, but she had since come to wonder who once traveled, camped, fought, and died alongside them, leaving only their empty places in the annals of history. The feeling she gets, as nearly a dozen apprentice dragonslayers come together, not as 'desperate', but as passably close to 'efficient', is that they must have walked far enough down the heroes' path to be able to glimpse its end on the horizon.     That they must have fought a little like this; almost without words, without need, moving in tandem as the hands at the world-correcting machinery that the Divine Weapons had set in motion. That perhaps their campaign trail looked not-dissimilar to this, with allies turned enemies and foes turned friends, littered with see-you-soons and last goodbyes. And so, as the dragon collapses and melts away, and the last doors are battered down, Lilian thinks about death.     Since Bramimond, or perhaps since the 'Storm', that hazy image of 'death' which had followed her from one end of Elibe to the other had finally begun to coalesce. Having given her all to protect barely more than thirty people to the end of their voyage, always dreading the day that one slips overboard and vanishes into the tide of war, barely half of them could walk the road to the throne room. She had pried Lucius and Raigh from death's jaws, but Hector would be taken some day soon, and Armads would inevitably take its due from Echidna too. Douglas was dead, Cecilia had been maimed for life, and were it not the need for wielders, Forblaze would never push her back into battle, just as Sue would have turned back with Fir and her father.     The way they all walked was paved with the corpses of Etrurian rebels, Kutolah riders, Ilian pegasus knights, and the soldiers of every nation on the continent; even Bernish wyvern knights, as of today. The way they had walked had taken Fae, Igrene, and Sofia from their home and devastated the Djute tribe, even as it had purged the nobility of Lycia and destroyed slavery in Ilia. Where they had trod through Ilia, a hundred families lost their daughters, and yet the way of life that demanded that they fight had come to end over Sigrun's body, still alive as a stubborn footnote to her life's conclusion.     The man who had protected Zephiel in his childhood lay dead by their hands. Galle had traded his arm for the skies, just as the old dragon had thrown his stone away for his conscience. For their cowardice and evil, the likes of Wagner and Leygance would be better remembered than Narcian, who had failed to die, and he, much more than the nameless bones of the lonely dragon who had withered away in that frozen cave. That Brunnya might yet soon follow, added to the list of names that Lilian will never read, etched on monuments that will only be built when 'Bern', too, has died, is only the natural extension of the same, continuous motion that began when she set out from that first campfire with Roy.     Even the divine weapons, should they survive what comes next, will hardly last any longer. Should Iðunn be impossible to reach, then Fae will be all that is left of the entirety of a world-spanning people, and will grow up without them. Should the Binding Blade prove necessary, they might trade the Demon named 'spring' for a winter unseen since the Scouring. At worst, it would be Elibe dying on its own terms, and not Zephiel's.
Lilian Rook	She thinks about Zephiel, too. In the moments before breaching the throne room, she thinks about him more than after she lays eyes on the man himself; that he had pronounced the death of Elibe years ago, and the future was only so malleable as to still leave her room to choose between 'of all its people' or 'everything else'; and even then, only by the edge of her sword. And from there, a little fox that had died for going against its nature and trusting him instead.     '... Two years ago, I told you all: leave this world, or be ground to pulp beneath Bern's heel.'     Where Lilian had hoped to be struck with brilliant insight at the very last second, she enters the throne room thinking about death; of people, nations, and eras. Where she had expected the feat of following the eight heroes all the way to the end to fill her with renewed determination, she can hardly see the throne in front of her for the shades of all the people who are gone, as if they could crowd a room with their absence. When she tries to think of 'after all this', how the war will finally unravel itself in retrospect, with all the time in the world to make sense of it, she sees it riddled with holes, left by those who can no longer speak of what they saw.     For an instant, she imagines that Bramimond must have felt the same way; and that, perhaps, they saw little difference in throwing awy most of what was left after that.     That moment is ended, on the instinctive level of spinal reflex and primeval nerves, by the clap of thunder and flash of lightning that scrubs the throne room clean of its last traces of gold. Completely overwhelmed by the dark vortex of her own introspection, Lilian still moves to put her sword between her and it, jolted into motion by instincts that howl 'danger' and 'fight'. The moment is ended on the more conscious level, though, by--     '<She still thinks about it.>'     'I am a worm that knows its own insignificance and a pig that knows its squalor.'     As Zephiel strides down the steps to the throne, Lilian gathers her breath, focuses her gaze, steels her mind, and gives up on thinking of any greater purpose to anything she says.     "You once told me that the way I spoke to you was looking for your respect while clearly not even respecting myself, and that it was an insult to us both." There's no real meaning to any of it. Not to give Zephiel closure, or to clear her own conscious; not even to make him feel much of anything, much less dig in a handhold to convince him. The words are as the space between them: something Lilian must unavoidably cross over for either of them to settle anything at all. "I remember it making me so angry and upset, because you were right and I couldn't think of a way that you weren't." None of those things were ever seen by anyone else. They were only single exchange of letters. An abortive attempt to understand him that recoiled away when she realized that she already did.     "So wash your mouth of that insult right now. Don't do it right back. Worms are worms and pigs are pigs; knowing and not-knowing changes nothing about them at all and we'd never know the difference if they did." She must have intuited the shadow of what she means to say next, because her breath comes short and hot, split evenly by the edge of the sword settling before her face.     '... Do you think Iðunn loves you?'     "When I told her that I wished the world had been kinder to her, she looked me in the eyes and told me 'all is well'. She said that my world is wintered, and that here too, 'there will come spring'; because you; we, all set in motion. So neither she nor I care how humiliated you feel by the disgrace of wearing a crown."
Lilian Rook	Her feet move. Her hands don't communicate to her forebrain where her sword is going to go, but her arms raise it all the same. The world blurs forward. Blood splashes up to her knees. Bone crunches underfoot. She kicks away the corpse of a royal guard without seeing it. Her conscious mind, for one more moment, is fully occupied with the need to get through the last of the words still unsaid between them, and until she has shouted it at the top of her lungs, there is only Zephiel, Ekesachs, Night Mist, herself, and how the fourth can apply the third to the first.     The two converge in the moment where her heel shatters a dead man's skull, a low half-circle sweep from her sword sprays a screen of fresh blood into the air between them and streaks into his the armpit gap in his armour, and her voice echoes in her ears as, "Stop wallowing, pick your 'greater beast', be it, and stay that way!"
Marigold	"I hate it. I hate violence always being the answer..."      "Then run," the King tells Odette. He is royal; she is common; they are enemies, and yet, he speaks without contempt. There's only wary sympathy. "And if your hate is true, may you someday find the mettle to do as I." <She still thinks about it.> <The fox cub that you'd found.> <I have to struggle or die. I have to scream and writhe in the soil because beautiful things can only be built on top of soil. I wish so badly that you would stop...>      Zephiel is not impenetrable to mental contact. He is only immovable by it. His lips jerk as he stands in the blood of his own soldiers, and something guilty stirs in the core of him, but the core is not the only part of a man, and it is not the part that grips a sword. <Guinivere didn't throw the fox away? ... No. Of course Father would lie about that,> that very small part of him thinks. <Did she ever really hate me? How much more did he lie about?> <Better that it died before it birthed more cubs to suffer, then,> the rest of him answers Flamel without hesitation. <I do not relish that the gentle must die, but I shall sweep aside victim and victor both.      The puddle of blood ripples. He's not standing there anymore. He's lunged.      CRUNCH. Eckesachs, a greatsword held in one hand like a saber, slams into the last of Geed's shield like a pane of glass. CRUNCH, maiming either Flamel, whatever defends Flamel, or the stone foundation where Flamel stood. He is swift without hurry, methodical without fatigue. CRUNCH, a backswing at Odette as her bullet pings his silvered armor. CRUNCH, into Nagayoshi's chest or through his weapon. And the next...      "You remind me of Murdoch."      "The kindest man I ever knew," Zephiel says unsentimentally, about a ruthless general you killed. Maybe that's another condemnation of his circumstances. Or maybe Murdoch used to be kinder.      "Kill me if you can. Least one world will be better for it."      Zephiel does not respond in words, but his hard-bright eyes understand. He is a kind man. His armored fist meets Roland's hammer with a CLANG, and the next stroke of Eckesachs goes for Roland's neck.      "I'd hoped to meet vermin who knew they were vermin. If you think me a hypocrite, then you are vermin too ignorant to even justify yourselves," he says, failing to pick Madeleine and Nobunaga out of the crowd. "Die in silence. I care not what you think your lives are."      From there the battle blurs into a kind of storm. Zephiel is an expert at keeping a dozen opponents unbalanced so you can't all press the attack at once, and terribly swift enough that this means he need 'only' defend himself from two or three angles at once.      It's hard to imagine Hartmut his better. Did the dragons fear his ancestor, at the end?
Marigold	Armor does not stop the lightning that crackles at the Divine Weapon's edge, and reach is no advantage aganst its lashing lightning either. To take a straight blow from Eckesachs is to be terribly maimed or die. To dodge means that the castle disintegrates further; every two or three seconds Zephiel carves a new gulch into the stonework, taking some hint of catharsis finally from ripping apart the castle he must have always despised.      He isn't even getting short of breath by the time that moonlight begins shining through the holes in the ceiling. Ending human lives gives him no glee, but the first time a chunk of the roof nearly falls onto him, he takes one short pause to look up and laugh in relief at the night sky like a man freed from prison.      "Look at it!" he breathes. Didn't someone say that before the Scouring, there were more stars? "A maggot-eaten sky." Still, his lips smile.      Then he's ducking Ace's kick as a skim across his cheekbone, fading back to contest Ace's kicking reach with electrical edge-arcs, half-understanding Petra's evasion after two clashes and trying to hedge her out with threatened shoulder-checks and unpredictable floor-gouged stone shrapnel.      "Words between dead men have no meaning. But I'll say it once more," he says to Geats, back-handing a slash against a weakened two-story-high wall to topple it towards the Rider like a felled tree. CRUNCH. "What's to be built atop your bones."      "The world is war," he spins up in the close-in press. "War has always been its highest court! Who has the power of the sword, has final power over life and death. So the greedy and the vile will always rule. A wolf that will not murder starves, and even trees smother saplings in their shade. And we humans--"      His boot stamps on one of his dead guards, mid-pivot to fend off another kick.      "--we who murder and rape and steal, fathers who kill their sons and nations ruled by slavers, we have failed to surpass the beasts. Dragons, alone, were nobler. They were strong enough to master nature, and wise enough to not crave greater strength. They knew no war, until we savages forced them to it!"      "And now... hahh... now, finally, the highest court finds us unworthy, for all we sought to master it. Look at how I prepared the world for Iðunn! My army of traitors, cravens, and cowards... if mankind deserved to live, I could never have destroyed it."      "Peace," he says, at last, calming from his vehemence to a simmer. "Peace will be built atop your bones. You fight for a future of everlasting blood. And I, for a world wiped clean."      As if to illustrate it, he grips his sword in both hands and swings it with a yell towards the greatest concentration of Elites he can, and the great arc of lightning cast off its edge crashes another heap of the castle in on itself with a rumble like an earthquake.
Marigold	"Hahhh. Humanity had a thousand years to change!" he answers, with another crackling back-stroke to fend off Petra. "And how many more thousands would you give them? When should the blade fall? The worthless babble of a coward. What sign of hope is there for man at all?"      Lilian rushes in, blade going for his under-arm; he fails to blink as blood spatters against his eyes and clamps his arm against the rising blow, pinning Night Mist to his side. Eckesachs locks Night Mist's hilt too, starting to electrocute them both in the impasse. His composure is slightly fraying, but that's only made him more vehement; his teeth grit when she speaks of crowns.      "Like Guinivere," he says plainly, when she beseeches him to stop wallowing. "You can't stand to see your worthlessness reflected in me, can you? If we are alike, and I despise myself, what right have you to feel pride, is that it?"      "... Do you think Iðunn loves you?"      He fully winces for the first time, then, eyes looking from Lilian to Petra as they cut him deeper than a sword.      "I hope with all my love for her that she does not."      "... They're right," Roy says, and Zephiel whips his attention around, but the boy is already out of breath and ragged just from dodging masonry and hiding behind others from lightning. "There is a sign of hope, that humanity can change. Zephiel, it's you. That the world could make someone... someone who yearns for peace so badly... why weren't you born until now?"      But he knows that won't convince him. And Zephiel is already finding some cutting retort when Roy draws the Binding Blade, taking on a low stance. He can't swing it, lacking the conviction to kill here; but Zephiel can't know, and with a roar of alarm he drops the blade-lock and lunges to seize it from him.
Riku Asakura	Zephiel's blade cuts through the barrier, dropping Geed to the ground.  The Ultraman lies there, too injured to get up immediately, before Odette comes to the rescue with her medical knowledge and healing abilities.  Geed pushes himself to his arms and knees, looking towards Odette.  Nodding to her, he turns back to Zephiel.   When the swing for Odette comes, Geed doesn't think twice for the second time that day.  But this time.... FUSION RISE! ULTRAMAN ZERO FATHER OF ULTRA ULTRAMAN GEED MAGNIFICENT Up in a flash is a new form of Ultraman Geed, a combination of silver, blue, and red.  He also has giant horns on his head and two large spiked shoulder pads.  The Geed Claw is in his hands, as he aims to turn the blade aimed at Odette away from her.  This time, however, Geed has something burning in his heart. '...fathers who kill their sons...' Geed knows that isn't just something humanity has done.  His own father comes to mind, who created him to perform some sort of scheme to get back at the Land of Light.  But...  It was humanity that gave him everything he has today.  How different would he have been if he had not met Moa?  Or Laiha?   "Stop it!" he cries out, but does not stop himself.  He puts himself in the way of Roy, aiming to stop him from getting the Binding Blade.  The Geed claw aims to strike across the chest of Zephiel.  "Stop doing this to yourself.  You're hurting yourself going on like this," Geed follows it up with a shoulder check, aiming to try and push him away.   "Maybe my words won't reach you, and I think that is very sad... but there is hope in humanity.  People that love, and live.  It isn't about domination and killing.  People can change, and they can choose to make a world better for those who come after.  You could have chosen to do that too." Geed pushes, trying to swing the claw again, aiming to keep trying to push Zephiel back. Each attack aims to draw his focus.  Keep Zephiel focused on himself.  He doesn't know if someone could say something to stop this fight, or if it'd come down to violence like Zephiel said.  He can't help but feel sorry for this man, who could only see the ugliness in the people around him.
Nobunaga	When Flamel uses her sword's saya to stand up, Nobunaga draws the blade free, leaving the scabbard with him while he steadies himself, "You wage a war of conviction against a man who has given up so thoroughly that he believes all the world to be as worthless as he is. There is no way to 'fix' such a pathetic creature. One who has so thoroughly surrendered to existence must be culled." Striding forward into the melee, she adds over her shoulder, "Recall the interior of my soul. I may have need of you to incinerate his mind."     Nagayoshi doesn't last long in the fight. His style relies on unrestrained brutality and raw power, easily taken apart by a foe who doesn't succumb to his blood-soaked intimidation and with the might to resist his brute force. It isn't long before the towering samurai is slumped against a wall in a pool of his own blood, still laughing, still trying to move, but his destroyed body just won't respond.     Nobunaga, a swordswoman with more finesse, knows how to back off when Zephiel presses the offensive, using his pursuit to bait him into others' strike range, feinting, and capitalizing on openings with the sudden appearance of clusters of rifles at unpredictable angles. > "You can't stand to see your worthlessness reflected in me, can you?"     "Fool," Nobunaga barks amidst her bladework, "There is no excuse a dead man could have to compare himself to the Demon King. I have no words to waste on sickly dogs who bare their fangs." > "...That the world could make someone... someone who yearns for peace so badly... why weren't you born until now?"     The harsh deflection of a particular sword blow sends her skidding back in a flare of crimson cape. Immediately her posture shifts, driving her sword into the stonework. Roy pulls out the Binding Blade; Zephiel lunges for him-- for the sword. Nobunaga gestures. A rifle materializes, vertical, and rams its stock downward towards the center of the mad king's back. Without wasting an instant, the weapon spins around and discharges.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine finds few openings presenting themselves in Zephiel's thrashing offense; what *would* leave an ordinary swordsman exposed, Eckesachs covers, and Madeleine knows she can't take another bolt head-on even as her wound from the first ceases to weep. Even the falling stonework seems to cooperate with his maneuvers.     "Dragons, alone, were nobler. They were strong enough to master nature, and wise enough to not crave greater strength. They knew no war, until we savages forced them to it!"     "That's not true!" Madeleine shouts over the din. "They can, they do live in peace *together*! The smile on Fae's face when she plays with Lugh is proof enough that there is *hope*! Two worlds can live as one!"     When Roy draws the Blade, when Zephiel's focus is on the young lord, *then* is the time to strike. Madeleine pounces through the chaos, coming in over Geats's shoulder with not Drogrung in hand but *Maltet*. The Divine Weapon she was entrusted with has power enough, she can only hope, for one final duel with its cousin.
Flamel Parsons	CRUNCH.     That's the sound of Flamel, suffering a massive blow straight to the head. Replicant biomass tears away, exposing rock, and Flamel is knocked *hard* into the side wall. His sunglasses clatter. Psychosomatic death starts to kick in, and only the most rapid psychic maneuver freezes the mental liability before he thinks himself to death. It won't hold for more than a few seconds. But Odette is busy. What could he do? What could...     He...     Has rushed Odette. Plunged a hand onto -- no, into, her head. When his closed fist pulls out of it, the fingers are wrapped around--     --- UPE-1351: On Your Feet Classification: ANU-2 Containment Protocol: User may hold the UPE freely for the duration of one work-shift, but may not sit or recline for more than ten seconds. Description: UPE-1351 is visualized as a work obligation. The current instance appears to be a clock-in card for workers at the Pacifica Northwest Fullbear Memorial Hospital dated to 1983. A concentration of motivational and focus-related energies, while held, this UPE prevents the holder from experiencing any psychological effect that would terminate consciousness. Physical effects may still apply.     ---     Flamel clutches the UPE to his chest, gasping. He pushes off her shoulder, teeth gritted and eyes manic, launching up, bouncing off Geed's head and--     --- UPE-1729: Dad's Gift Classification: ANA-1 Containment Protocol: Uncontained. Description: This format of concentrated inherited psychic energy conveys psionic payloads that have been refined by multiple generations of holders, having been transferred through guardianship. Often this takes the form of a package or container; the most recent example is an envelope postmarked to March of 2017, addressed to a Galaxy Market branch location. The container may be torn or opened once per user, to generate a mobile damage-preventing barrier lasting 11.4 seconds.     ---     --arcs in the air, ripping an envelope in half and letting the bolts scatter when they strike long strips of Galaxy-Market-branded packaging that surround him in a sphere, and he--     --- UPE-1582: The Terrible Crack of the Matchlock Class: SHD-4 Containment Protocol: Regular panmedia audio sweeps to limit infohazard exposure Description: ...Known to create impacts imitating both early bullet holes and 18th-century artillery near the last living individual to have heard the sound or been exposed to a sufficient dense description... UPE-829: Rejection Rejection Class: PRS-3 Containment Protocol: Prevent exposure to any surfaces above 99% incident light reflected that are not observation devices such as eyes or cameras. Description: ...Mirror or similar tool, such as a hand mirror, standard furnishing mirror, incorrectly-configured smartphone, or excessively-polished silverware. An operator may bend or shatter the mirror to produce a multiplied kinetic impulse (approx. 20,000% to up to 90,000%) on materials visible through the reflection... UPE-202: Physics Miscalculation Class: SHD-4 Containment Protocol: 'Numbers-Jar' rated for type A neonumerological threat. Description: ...type of geometric shape manifesting as a 'glitch', such that a distance measured from the outside to the inside will be significantly greater than a distance measured from the inside to the outside as a reversed vector...     ---     --speaks something into the fractured lens of a broken camera, which shatters instantly; massive explosions near Zephiel go off, like artillery were targeting him, a noise like a cracking rifle mixed with shattering glass, yet somehow the shockwaves are less harmful outside of Zephiel's surroundings. It's his *words* that are most getting to Flamel. And...
Flamel Parsons	--- MYSTIC-002: Flamel Parsons Class: Replicant Containment Protocol: Weekly review from Ethics Department Description: ...Derived from MYSTIC-001, the original antiwar-optimized artificial donor-connectome mindblend has adapted its antiwar motives to replicant indepedent autonomy. In a sense, it has developed a personalized ideological dedication to central liberalism, resulting in extremist psychic phenomena towards politically-neutral sentiments....     ---     "No. You're insane." Flamel calls out. "You lived in so much hate that you never learned that millions of people living these little, mundane, messy, shitty lives *is* love and peace. You want clean and beautiful towers on no foundations and no soil, and now you've gone to war against earth and you think getting dirty proves you're right. The entire world is millions of lost fox cubs, and cruel fathers, and craven coward traitors. And your mind is broken for not seeing the love and the peace in it. You build on dirt. You make tools from filthy wood. You eat what comes out of the soil and the slaughterhouse. It's messy, and sometimes it's even unfair."     "It's peace, and I'll die to see it last another *day* if I have to, before I let someone sweep it away because it was imperfect."     Flamel's maneuvers, bounding around the field, tear psionics directly from his allies as he works, ripping physical manifestations of psychic concepts from the inner depths of the mind. Odette's ability to keep someone moving, Geed's inheritances, Nobunaga's memories of battle, Petra's harsh rejections and reflections, Madeleine's lost ideas of creation's flaws. They're still there within their origin mind, but...     ---     The Director stands in the deepest depths of the Institute, where huge columns of metal, vast webs of cable, titanic accelerators and rotating magnetics, all surge around him. His heart pulses, and lines of light surge in his veins. An old bargain is held to; he must never, ever, ever give up the dream of the Psychogate, and never accept death before then. He is reaching forward, reaching into the Gate and tearing yet another anomaly out of its convulsing surface. For now, they're enhancements to essential functions and combat faculties.     But the Gate is starting to heat up. The machinery is straining. Displays are starting to show stars, now, those maggot-blighted stars Zephiel hates so much.     ---     "Roy!" He's shouting. "You *know* who depends on you!" Like he'd said before they entered the throne room... Surely Roy wouldn't feel the same way about the masses that Flamel does. But surely he feels something. Enough, Flamel hopes, to fight with his whole heart.
Lilian Rook	Any creature that fears death blinks when something attacks its eyes. It'd hadn't been Lilian's conscious decision to aim for them, but something less reasoned that bid her release her grip on a clean fight. The fact that he doesn't react at all tells her what she'd heard him say before, but now absorbs on a more intuitive level, as a deeper truth.     The man doesn't have a survival instinct. Just the will to take as many and as much down with him as possible.     'Like Guinivere,'     "Guinivere loves you. I don't." Lilian hisses in the instant between the jolt against his side and the surging current running her way. She'd be worse off if her sword were made of steel, but she'd be much better off if she could bring herself to let go of it. Instead she grits her teeth, strangles down the pain, and lunges forward, stepping body to body, striking shoulder to chest with no no hope of budging a man of his size.     'You can't stand to see your worthlessness reflected in me, can you?'     "The worthlessness she feels is in being unable to change you." The sidearm leaps from her hip to her hand, jammed into Zephiel's abdomen and fired at muzzle contact that's just as bad for her weapon; until his armour breaks and his organs rupture, or until he releases either the blade or the hilt. This close, backed by competent healers, it's not a trade she can lose the first time.     'If we are alike, and I despise myself, what right have you to feel pride, is that it?'     Lilian drops her smoking weapon from her left hand, slides her left foot forward to catch it against the carry hardpoint, and reaches under Zephiel's arm to clench the blade of her own sword in her gauntleted hand. A split-second grip shift on the hilt pivots it like a fulcrum, pommel abruptly rising at-pace to shatter bone. No longer able to realistically tolerate the lightning, she uses the same split second to kick Zephiel's knee; accomplishing little to nothing, but using him as leverage to wrench her sword back in both hands.     Even as she throws herself backwards, her right hand drops down to join the left on the blade, and swing the sixteen pound sword into the less protected of his side or his head, hooking around Ekesachs and focusing force on the quillion. With no transitional movements out of the murder-stroke, a decisive overcommittment visible to any experienced swordfighter, Lilian evades the counterattack by finally vanishing in Zephiel's presence.     The bloody floor splatters behind him. A clank of metal boot accelerates a hefty chunk of masonry when he turns. Lilian ducks low under it while it blocks his vision, grips Night Mist half-sword, and plunges down at the joint of the knee instead, leveraging the height gap between them.     "If we're alike and despising myself is ridiculous, then you don't have an excuse." says Lilian, in the first pause long enough to breathe she get; even then, she's already affecting a flickering zigzag retreat. "Realizing that you're the only sane person on earth when you thought you were going mad is supposed to make you better than them. It's proof that humans can be sane, and damning of the rest for failing to ever reach it. If you can't aggrandize yourself for that while you're ending the the world then you're not in your right mind."
Lilian Rook	'I hope with all my love for her that she does not.'     Hearing that stings Lilian too. It reflects in her eyes and in the twitch of her lips, but she knows not to let it sink any deeper. She barely needs to saccade that Winter Crow can't fire again; not without catastrophic mechanical failure. She has her work cut out just weaving around the falling rubble, callously using the gore of Zephiel's own loyal men to hydroplane where it suits her and their bodies to stop where needed. The lashing tendrils of electricity aren't something she can parry; she flickers between heaps of fallen stone instead, holding her breath through clouds of dust and pelting shrapnel, because coughing would be worse.     "If you were born a commoner you would think yourself the only man in the world who she could. But because of that crown; that stubborn, damnable crown of yours; you'll never let yourself be anything less than the least deserving of all. Ever the viper amongst wolves with you! The wretched bastard of the earth whose sole redeeming trait is that he only soils his hands with the tools of kings so he may be the last! The one so undeserving of everything the mere presence of gold is nauseating and the loyalty of your people makes them clowns!"     "Even now! In the same breath you revel in your worthlessness, you want to be seen for your humility! Every word you waste on excoriating our hopes is only to drag us down to your level so that you're finally no worse for being king! Everything you've ever said to me has been pleading for exculpation while veiling it as contempt!"     The overwhelming catharsis that radiates from him with every stroke of the hammer to his palace gives her chills. The feeling is enough to know that her feelings are just, and that makes her blood boil in her veins.     "I say it again! Don't beg me to respect you when you can't bring you to respect yourself! Your saint-like misery is just sickening! Your wasting self-dimishment is pitiable! The way you desperately rationalize away every chance you had to change anything only pisses me off! How did the first sane king in a thousand years become a martyr that nobody asked for, to a cause he doesn't even believe in?!"     Lilian sees him lunge for the blade. It's an error, made from misinformation, but he can still take it, and Roy won't get it back. She takes her stance in the moment it affords, so that a flicker of power can gather in her forward-pointed blade.     "Don't speak of war in the midst of your suicide, pretender! Beg my forgiveness or spend your life to bloody my nose; you're no beast in the end!"     She doesn't have time for the names. The first lightning step, with its howling wind and subsonic boom, renders up the stroke against his hand, with flows into whirling slash before him that scatters its children in all directions, jarringly joined to the falling strike that diffuses weight like a crushing waterfall.     It's an error, made from misinformation. She thinks that Roy only needs the right opening to swing the Binding Blade and strike Zephiel down. She isn't prepared to defend herself. Not after expending her stamina and focus to buy him that moment.
Angela	''Least one world will be better for it.'' But why should he fucking care about the world? What has it given him? Why does he owe a better future? Oh, he can tell those wonderful men and woman from the watch who wear red and masks that he wants to fulfill Angelica's wish of a better future for The City and for his own world, but he can't see that dream with his own two eyes. He doesn't see little mind people when he closes his eyes happily managing a deep inner world, he doesn't see a dream of a better tomorrow, all he sees when he closes his eyes is a deep endless black, a black that he envisions will be his eternity when his soul finally realizes he's dead. He's been called vermin his whole life. As his comrades rose to positions of power and prominence, he needed a mask to hide his utter disgust for his world. Even before Angelica died. That oblivion is not what approaches when Zephyr's blade seeks his neck. He is already dead, after all, he is just bound to a book and to service in front of a whole different woman who wants to destroy the world--not for any better imagined reality that people like Zephyr can envision, but because she just wants to LEAVE. "In his kindness he practically threw himself on our swords." Roland isn't a kind man, as blood stains his hands and feet, drenching up to his legs, utterly ruining his socks and seeking between his toes, the same man who quietly admits that everyone would probably be better off dead has no kindness in his eyes. He is a normal man from The City, this amount of blood can't drown him. There's only a dark, cold, and quiet fury. Roland can say a thousand words a minute when they don't have to come from his heart, but he seeks a poet's brevity when he can't do anything but be honest. He's always been terribly at obscuring his true feelings. The blade unfortunately is prevented from reaching neck by a well placed dagger though Zephyr's pure strength, while unable to slice through that neck, is still able to send Roland flying back. Roland twists his body to avoid landing on his back--almost as bad as falling on his face--and he slides back in gore as he stares into this kind man's eyes. The one woman who gave Angelica hope is talking to this man. Roland feels like he has to listen. He already unleashed his fury upon her before in error, so he has since trained his ears to pay more attention when she's speaking.
Angela	''I hope with all my love for her that she does not.'' Angelica never shared her full past with him, but he picked up enough and filled in the blanks. She was a denizen of the Outskirts who was taken in by a Wing along with her brother, one of many houses that wished to forge the ultimate weapon. They were tortured over and over again. And then when she failed to be as ultimate a weapon as they desired, they threw her away. He has to imagine now that what ruined Angelica as a weapon was that she still desired to have attachments to this world. He remembers how she seized him, practically dragging him into a proposal that he hadn't meant to offer. When Zephiel says that he hopes that Idunn does not love him, he thinks of Petra. He thinks how despite everything, she clearly wants to be loved and appreciated by Lilian Rook. That's one keen difference between them. At the end of the day, Lilian, Petra, and Angelica, even the monster in the tower called Angela--they all still wish to be loved. He remembers discussing names, as he summons Durandal into his hands, names for their future. 'Lilian. I want them to be happy, I want them to find at least one person to love them. They'll be okay so long as they find at least one.' 'What if they're a boy?' 'Mm... Then the french version.' 'Kind of weird. She might not appreciate it, we barely know her.' 'Hey, we've got months. Give me time. I'm going to be one of her best friends. And then I'll ask her and Tamamo to be godmothers and we'll talk about all the important things.' 'Sounds like you figured it all out for them.' 'Of course, they'll need them to be the happiest kid in The City. You could come too, you know.' 'Heh, maybe, but I think they'd get tired of my whining.' Roland isn't talented enough to scream as he swings Durandal for that lunging arm of Zephiel's. As memories pull away to the mathematics and structural techniques of murder, all he can do is think about the next twelve options for the next twelve moves. But he is, despite his silence, compelled to say at least one thing. "Won't she be lonely after she destroys the world?" Roland asks, still unable to see her as someone incapable of the feeling.
Odette Raskins	"Then run, And if your hate is true, may you someday find the mettle to do as I." Every fiber of Odette's being is screaming at her to run, to leave this fight to the people with superpowers, magical artifacts, supertech, and everything else in between. Even though two years have passed since she got involved with any of this, she still hasn't been able to silence the voice telling her that she's in over her head and has been since the start of this war. If she was just waiting outside, treating the wounded outside instead of storming the castle alongside everyone here, would there even be a difference in how many people lived or died? "That's exactly why I can't run, not anymore." She replies to the King, briefly trying to sound like she's angrier than she actually is and failing terribly at that. Even though she is angry about all of this, and even though she is terrified at the likelihood that this fight could end with her death long before Zephiel's, neither of those feelings come through in her tone. Instead, she sounds surprisingly calm and lucid about what could happen, not unlike a boxer knowing that they're about to go into a match with their entire career on the line even at a huge disadvantage. "I can't keep waiting for someday. If I don't do this now, when there's so many people fighting for this world, when you're facing everyone down alone like this, then... Then it's never going to happen. I'd never become anything like my heroes. The ones that can change worlds, even if it's killing them to do it. The ones that see a child being hurt, starving, stop everything to take care of them, to feed them, to.. To make a world where a kid like yourself wouldn't have to get hurt so much until your mettle led you to do all of this." Her grip on her staff and her gun steadies, and even her gaze stays fixed on Zephiel. "Nobody would blame you if you ran, King Zephiel. I wouldn't. If I'm ever going to find that mettle, it's right here. I'm looking at it right now, and I need to borrow it." Zephiel lunges, and it takes everything that's stacked in Odette's favor not to get pulverized on the spot. Riku's newest form buys her some precious time to even react at all, just starting to lurch back and away from the King's backswing. The helmet and bracers she had picked up off the floor buy her another fraction of a second for her body to react, to shift her turn ever so slightly so the blade doesn't cleave right through her arm and her head. Even with all of that working in her favor, Odette still gets slammed away from the backswing's power, yelping as she often does while hurtling back and arresting her impact with a roll to protect her head and her staff. She sucks in a pained breath at feeling something cracking in her side, but there's no time to assess that closely right now. Another injector goes in to stave off the pain, knowing that it won't be the last today as she rejoins the battle with gun and staff. "The world is war, And we humans-- we have failed to surpass the beasts." Each swing of Zephiel's blade is one that Odette can't afford to take, and each one is followed by a raising of her staff to heal her allies, or by jabbing a cocktail of healing chemicals into herself or whoever she happens to land nearby. The terror grips her heart every time, but seeing everyone fighting so desperately without backing down even a single step... Even though she could never agree with Zephiel's goals or his reasoning, she can't take her eyes off him. "That's what the world keeps teaching us. There's too much greed to share anything, too much hate to trust anyone being kind, too much work to ever rest, and too much trying to kill us so we need to kill them first. That's what the world taught you, and that's what the world taught me ever since I left home."
Odette Raskins	"That's where the world's wrong. We can be better than that, because we already know what's right as kids. If we have medicine, we share it with someone that's sick. If we have food, we know to share it with someone that's hungry. We know to take care of each other, and even animals know that we'll take care of them if they're hurt, because nobody wants war as our first answer to everything!" "They knew no war, until we savages forced them to it! Humanity had a thousand years to change! What sign of hope is there for man at all?" The lightning coming from Ekesachs blasts apart more of the castle, and Odette's constant scramble to not get caught up by the blasts, the crashing stone, and even the blade itself is getting harder to bear by the second. The minute. How long has this fight been going on? How much of her blood is still blood and not just more chemicals forcing her body to fight past its limits? Even the scavenged helms from the guards won't last forever under such an assault, but she keeps forcing herself back up to her feet, to keep healing her allies until the staff is on the verge of crumbling, and to keep firing until she runs out of ammunition. The rest of her scavenged armor is in pieces and her jacket is shredded, but she still has yet to fall back. "Fae... She's a dragon, and she's older than both of us, but she's still a kid. She's one of the kindest kids I've ever met, and all she wants to do is play and eat and have fun with everyone she loves. And... Yeah, humans were the ones that forced her into knowing war. She's scared of losing her family and friends to it because she already had before. The only reason she's fighting in this war-Ah. Not war the idea, but this..." She squeezes the trigger a few more times, and she knows she's out of ammo. She holsters it, and draws her Trideag longsword finally, but she can barely even hold it before leaning on her staff to take some of the weight off her broken ribs. "This specific one! This war! The one that you're waging for Idunn. She's fighting because she wants to see her family again, because she doesn't want it to all disappear like you do. You told me to run before, but I'd rather die before I let you destroy the world she wants to live in!" Another injector goes in, to numb that pain and force herself through it, to keep fighting even though she knows she'll regret putting so much stuff into her bloodstream later. She sees Zephiel going for Roy, and Odette rushes for the King once more. Gripping her longsword firmly, she lunges at Zephiel, slicing upwards from below once she's close enough as she tries to run interference for Roy and everyone once again. Instead of backing away after that lunging slice, however, the EMT keeps moving forward. The blood buildup in her mouth and lungs tells her that it's now or never. She practically throws herself at him, trying to latch onto an arm, a leg, his midsection, anywhere she can to weigh him down even a little, and to pin the front edge of her blade against the King. "Whatever it takes." She squeezes the trigger near her index finger, holding it down to discharge the intense heat of the SN-13 right it into its cutting edge when it's making the most direct contact it can with the King in a last ditch effort to reach him even through all that silvered armor.