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Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	'The Siberian Operation'. It has no name, because it appears on no documents, and likely never will. Not officially. Even a clandestine operation is at least acknowledged with something suitably impenetrable, just so it can be referred to by high officers in the know, but this doesn't seem to be the sort. This is a man's mission. The personal crusade of he and his followers, aged soldiers all, which will never see a desk.     It's a private airfield where you meet, small and out of the way in the sub-taiga countryside, on some irrelevant stretch of land bought from some long evacuated charter porter for cheap and re-cleared some years ago. Hidden by tall, dark pines from most sides, it amounts to little more than a habitation outpost, a weatherproof hangar, and several stretches of lines asphalt, cracked by winter and repaired every summer, with a single wire launch catapult and two landing pads for helicopters. Enough to smell of fresh sealant and old oil, but seeing too little use to keep wild grass more than a few meters from the old wire fences.     Even near the end of the summer, it's brisk enough outside for short sleeves to be uncomfortable. It isn't loud enough to be somewhere so rural. It's almost a shock when you first hear a singular bird chirp, after half an hour of waiting in the middle of a sunny day. No feathered kin responds to its call. Only the lonely chirping of a grasshopper, somewhere in the long grass.     The man you meet there is Commander Volkov, formerly of redacted, now part of the G.D.F redacted. Along with him are twenty two men that have known and followed him through several promotions spanning almost sixty years, though you wouldn't know it by looking at any of them. From the moment you lay eyes on them on the almost vacant runway in the sparse taiga countryside, you can tell each one is clearly a veteran of war, beginning to reach the expiration date of their service.     Strong, robust, straight-backed men of discipline and resolve, with faces lined and hair and stubble salted with the improbably slow, yet inexorable onset of age. In a few more years, the growing aches in their joints and the gradual fatigue in their muscles, will become a liability in the field, despite their best efforts to push the limits of their fitness, but at least for now, they are able to stand tall in full battle dress, grey fatigues almost invisible under layers of hard plates, gear harnesses, and censor equipment patterned in shades of arctic camouflage, a great backpack and electromagnetic battle rifle to each man. Lined up by the pair of dated helicopters ready for you, packing away cards, letters, dog tags, they wave or salute in turn as you arrive.     Volkov himself looks as if he could be perhaps fifty five. One visible scar above the neck looks like shrapnel, one more looks like an animal wound, and one more looks to be a leftover from a surgical removal. Ugly things that ruin the symmetry of hairlines, top to brow to facial. He greets you with gratitude, considerable strength still left in full arm shakes. Though he is easily a full foot taller than Lilian and at least twice her weight, he gives her the greeting gesture of an equal officer.
Lilian Rook	"They were right to tell me that I would not be disappointed." he says after the initial exchange. He has the slight rasp of a chain smoker's twilight years. "I am glad you understand. And I am glad to see that we might look to the west of Europe for allies once again." Lilian smiles in return with only the corner of her mouth. Her own outfit is distinctly the opposite colour to blend into the snow, and severely under-armoured by comparison, but she's also the only one completely without a helmet, and carrying a sword. "Don't get too sentimental, commander. What would it say about me if I left someone with your background to run at a Level Dragon on your own? The least I could do is bring some ablative bodies." He laughs.     "Is that it?" he asks, glancing over her shoulder to the undisguised black hilt. "You should understand that I did my research when I looked into who might be receptive to this kind of call. You have the Extinguisher classification, but even I do not have the clearance to access the particulars. But I do know you use a special weapon that the ublyudok hate." She replies "It is. But don't assume I can carry you all the way to the finish line on it. I know this has to be an unsanctioned operation. You must've funded it out of pocket. So your intelligence on this is concerningly poor. Especially with this level of enemy, knowing their abilities, and choosing tactically advantageous matches, is of paramount importance." Volkov only replies enigmatically "Aye, but I know this white whale."     You're offered space on either of the transports, though they don't seem to want everyone to ride in the same one, for purposes of eggs and baskets. The craft are more or less modern by contemporary standards, but obviously old and repeatedly refurbished here, well-loved as far as helicraft go, and probably privately owned projects. The frames audibly creak and ping in the changing temperature, under the droning of rotors. Even with the doors properly closed, at low altitude, you can feel the air changing as you ride north.     Too much. When it comes time to circle and set down, the ground outside is covered with at least a foot of snow. The ground is frozen solid beneath it, and black pines are piled under the groaning weight of a full winter's precipitation. A flat lake would have poured through an old and broken down concrete dam nearby, if it weren't frozen solid. Though it is stating the obvious, Lilian checks her coordinates to be doubly sure, and says "Even if we're in Siberia, it's still only August." She's met with taciturn nods from the increasingly grim-faced soldiers while the choppers find clear patches of frost-coated rocks to hover over, requiring a short descent by cable ladder.     It isn't hard to guess how unnatural the light snowfall is here. The drifts on the ground grow increasingly heavier towards the north, the patterns of their unblemished white surface lightly brushed in an eastwards swirl, as if persistently dragged towards a central point by constant, low winds. Steel grey clouds hang heavy in the air, weak rays of sunlight still visible to the south, but quickly drowned out in the northward direction, leaving the barren landscape permanently cast under a late night darkness, though there isn't a single rumble of thunder to be heard.
Lilian Rook	It's easy to understand how a nuclear facility could be here 'without existing'. The final coordinates are just as in the middle of nowhere as the private runway had been, though the snowed-in complex extends over considerably more area, connected to the hydroelectric dam on both sides. Old fences have caved in under the weight of accumulated drifts over many years. Open areas have cracked down to the rebar with the expansion of ice in their fissures. The transport vehicles still left in the yards have frozen solid to the tarmac. Supply crates are encased shells of glassy ice several inches thick. Industrialist concrete buildings, designed to be as generic as possible, unidentifiable to a satellite for being bare of even a radio mast, have largely caved in. Much of the damage is due to weather and age, but many of the great potholes and husked structures, including the dam, were obviously once the victims of significant violence.     One of the massive steam stacks has been crumpled in like a tin can. Chunks of lead sheeting and graphite lie scattered like marbles for a mile around. A section of supply yard has turned itself inside out from underground, metallic, hexagonal obelisks twenty feet tall littered around a gaping hole into a dark abyss. The dam itself has been split down the middle as if bitten into by a colossal axe, down two thirds of its front. The whole area reads as lightly radioactive, though only a few chest x-rays' worth for now.     The storm that tore this place apart is not one that came and left just like that. Approaching the facility marked on analogue maps on foot, the four squads of soldiers begin navigating around certain trenches of snow as if by instinct, or more likely, memory. Those new to the scene are liable to begin stumbling upon things buried in the drifts. Discarded helmets. Empty rifles and machine guns. Jumbles of bones slumped in broken body armour. Trenches and potholes literally filled with shell casings. The hulks of gutted armoured fighting vehicles. The far-flung remains of crashed drones. Bits of missile casings. All of it all but lost to decades of snow, entire mass graves encased in almost solid blocks of glistening ice, should one feel the morbid urge to dig.     Towards the nuclear facility, the wreckage quickly becomes a tangle of spent military forces, and the frozen bones and blood of the enemy. Lifeless corpses of four-legged creatures are entombed alongside human remains, blackened by fire and riddled with holes, laid out in broad, jumbled piles. The skeletonized remains of unidentifiable things lie together with the bones of men, rusted knives embedded in their spines in exchange for the scythe-limbs embedded in broken ribs.     Hulking hills of blue-bloodied carapace have decayed away to the point one can see briefcase-sized uranium slugs settled into them, surrounded by small fields of broken personal equipment, drenched in the cyan stains of viscera owed to bullet and bayonet wounds on their undersides. Gelatinous bits and pieces, preserved in ice, lie strewn around blackened craters and burned, perfectly straight trenches. A solid three kilometers is nothing but a massive charnel field     What must be the main reactor building looks as if some enormous, blackened tree had grown out of it, lifted high up on tangled roots like a swamp mangrove, and then been abruptly terminated at the base of its trunk, ripped off by a hurricane wind, leaving only the weave of its supports behind. They still reek of a certain amount of crackling radiation, and lie at the epicentre of the unseasonable, perpetual winter zone.
Forte	There's a call to defeat a powerful threat. Forte responds. That is about the long and short of it. Is he responding for the opportunity to face down a powerful threat? To take on a difficult mission? Or is he responding solely for the simple sake of responding - seeking self-definition by action, any action? The reasoning is not quite clear, even to Forte himself. They're brought to an empty field to wait for half an hour. Forte simply hovers there, silently, no sign of annoyance, curiosity, or other emotion crossing his face, as though he has infinite patience. Throughout introductions, Forte doesn't speak unless spoken to, and even then answers questions with the minimum amount of communication. "Forte." "The Watch." "Because you put an alert out." Responses like that. After that, he remains mostly in the background - taking a corner seat in whatever transport is offered, eyes shifting slightly to examine the war-torn scenery that passes by. A few minutes after the group passes into the irradiated area, and then once every few minutes after that, a scan line passes down Forte's body, traveling vertically from his head to his feet and then vanishing. It's brief and small - like a VCR that has its vertical tracking just a bit off; just a little bit of visual glitching. Forte himself doesn't seem bothered, or to have even noticed.
Gawain	Arriving at the private airfield, Gawain is already equipped in full armor. He's not too worried about the cold affecting it, as his sword is sheathed at his side for one. When he approaches Commander Volkov with the others, after Lilian speaks, he nods. "You likely already know, but I am Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun, Warden of the Paladins. This must be a very dear mission to you. Do not worry, for we will do our best to accomplish it tonight." He takes the least-full chopper, knowing Tamamo will go with Lilian and the like, and taps at his knees briefly before being quiet. A Dragon, huh? He's slain dragons. But something tells him this won't be like Vortigern at all. When they touch down, he shivers briefly, but pushes past it into the cold. He sticks near one of the squads of soldiers, as he walks. They can fight, but they're likely to take casualties if he doesn't help them out. Instead, he spreads his senses outwards, looking for sources of 'magic' and to pinpoint where they are. Hopefully, such a thing helps them detect the Antegent, but he's aware it might not do anything at all. Hopefully it helps give him a direction! <"Tamamo, I must ask of you a favor. Could you summon more sunlight when the fight begins? Otherwise, I will be at a disadvantage.">
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Answer the prayer     Phrase that differently. >Arthur: Take quest THE SIBERIAN OPERATION     Arthur is here. No armor adorns him, but his god tier robes are lined inside with fur and somehow seem to thrum with more magely nature than usual -- as if he's tuned them to optimal magical conductivity. They might be just a little bit fancier in the look and feel today.     Arthur's usual shenanigans are still on display. He still does his best, of course, to barrage Volkov's no-doubt heavily-scarred hand with a series of coolkid handshake maneuvers that boggle the mind. But he seems to be kept at a constant wary tension level. Lilian hasn't ever really talked up a threat this bad before -- and it's one that exceeds all the Antegent that Arthur's fought until now. He seems to play that Nintendo DS on the way mostly to keep his mind off this, and when they arrive... >Arthur: Exit helicopter     Arthur clambers out slowly, checking around and sweeping his eyes over the environment. They press on towards the objective, and eventually he finds those bones along the way. Those awful, awful corpses. He immediately looks off his game the minute he sees a corpse. "Jegus. Let's find this thing fast. This is your White Whale huh? What's it look like, at least?" Working on focusing on the task at hand, you know! "I'm ready to rumble and all, but we need to know where we goin' so we can get there and it can't get us." They come upon the reactor building itself. "Don't tell me it's in there, with all that nuke shit. It's not awake, right? Urgh... Guess this is part of the secret-keeping. Can't be that bad if it's indoors, I guess..." Is that it? Arthur makes sure to cue up RADIATION RESISTANCE before diving into the spot for all this, if they've gotten to the right place.     Oh right, and of course, during the walk, he has something particular for Strawberry Princess. "Keep ahold of this one, wouldja?" He asks, handing off something small, with a lime-green blinking light and a soft "bip! bip! bip!" noise. "KEEP AHOLD of this thing for me, would ya?" He intends something, it would seem.
Tamamo	Tamamo arrives together with Lilian, wearing that English tailored coat she's become fond of, and will stick with her for the ride over (as Gawain surmised). Chills, as ever, disagree with her. The increasing, notably unsummery weather bothers her all the more. The observed sun rather weakly reaches their destination.     Though she has a particular reason (apart from anything to do with who else is here) for taking on this task, she says little on the way over, trusting that her reputation has either preceded her or is not yet of consequence. A three-tailed fox-woman in the company of certain individuals is fairly easily identified. "I wish to see, for myself, the further depths of danger that the enemy presents," is what she's willing to say aloud. That might be misleading.     Speaking to her radio, "Oh, of course, sir Gawain. I would prefer a great deal more natural warmth, for myself. Make good use of the light, and I shall trust in your strength."     When they land, her first priority, after being helped down to the frozen ground, is to reach out with all senses, to find and, with some luck, partially, understand what's not yet visible. The mirror floating beside her is an effective conduit for simple spells of detection, and no less effective as the arcane constructions spelled out by muttered word and gesture and intuitive push of unseen forces grow more and more complex. 'Radiation,' as a concept, she knows well enough. Heat and cold are not at all difficult. Finding the sources of things, life and motion and magic, that's more immediately important. Each addition to her array of augmented senses is intended to better answer those questions, 'what caused this,' 'where is it,' 'how is it happening,' and so on.     Protective talismans hanging from her wrists grow warm. They'll be sizzling, at the least, before the time here is through.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry arrives at the initial private airfield in atypical fashion: a small black jet of an unfamiliar, vaguely modern design. She comes down the foldout airstair alone, but given the pair of people in dorky white labcoats briefly visible through the door behind her, it isn't terribly hard to guess the craft's provenance- the Project must've given her a ride so she doesn't waste her wand's fuel flying.      Also atypical: her outfit. In grave situations like this, she usually comes already in costume. For now, though, she's taken the chance to bundle up warm: extra-thick hoodie, mittens, a nice little scarf. Her magical wand is tucked away in a black duffel bag slung jauntily over one shoulder, and her breath fogs the air with little puffs of vapor as she breathes through an anxious smile.      The overall effect is almost comical. Some organization has gone to great trouble to deliver you a slouching, awkwardly tall, hoodie-bedecked zoomer with no perceptible qualifications except the ugly scar on the side of her head. She sits through the Russian's introductions with zoned-out patience, her eyes tracing the sky out of a dogfighter's long habit. Something about it doesn't feel right.      She makes a pleasant, if retiring, companion on the transport ride. Though visibly depleted and anxious, she's got a painfully sincere uplifting word for everyone. "Thank you for coming. It makes me feel- less worried. You know?" "It always touches my heart, to see this many people be so brave. Please be careful too." Even the old soldiers might be roused to smile a little.      The three-kilometer long charnel path visibly jars her. The monster corpses don't scare her, but the first time she steps on frozen human remains beneath the snow, she stops dead for five or ten seconds. Her eyes are staring, unfocused, through the mess of bones as if to find something behind them. Her mouth is slightly open. There's no sound, but a visible puff of exhaled vapor as she lets out a long, hitching breath.      After that, she follows in the soldiers' footprints and stares straight out at the horizon, only walking where they've already tread. Arthur's interruption momentarily brings her out of her reverie; she palms the blinking green thing, then stuffs it into her duffelbag after a moment's thought. "Oh! Thank you, Arthur. I'll- take good care of it. I promise."      His DS starts flashing a green notification light. She's Streetpassed him. Her most recent game shows as 'Nintendogs'.
Tony Stark	"Ablative bodies... Isn't a very kind way to refer to the rest of your team, Rook." Tony Stark calls as he strides up to the Last Ride Brigade, dressed down to a black collared shirt, a silver tie that flaps in the wind as he approaches, hands jammed into the pockets of his charcoal slacks. "You gather this many hard boiled operators one mission from retirement and you're begging for the cliche." He smirks towards the team and Lilian. Behind him, one red-and-gold Iron Man armor marches, flanked by a dozen of the cut down Iron Legion drones in mechanical lockstep. "Gentlemen. Dame Rook. It will be a pleasure working with you." JARVIS announces from the lead suit, the twelve drones saluting crisply. From the transport ramp, Tony adjusts his tie. "Told you I'd bring the bodies." <ONE FULL PAGE LAYOUT LATER> The Model 42 joins Tony as soon as the team disembarks from the ramp, opening in the back with retracting plates for him to step in. The twelve Legion drones lift into the sky, spreading out in a search pattern to canvas the area with more physical scanners, seismic analysis, and threat analysis. "Volkov, was it?" Tony asks conversationally as his helmet's HUD populates and wakes up from automatic mode. "How did you draw the short lot? Since Lilian respects this, I can only assume it's a big league threat. Please don't tell me your Avengers wear grey-white drab." He sighs performatively. "It'd never sell an action figure."
Lilian Rook	Gawain's assertion is met with a grim nod from more than one man. When the men have descended from the aircraft, which quite quickly leave to a safe distance, he rejoin the knight, and replies with "This is a mission to put the souls of many fallen comrades to rest. While there is still strength left in these bodies, we cannot escape that duty."     He sounds like he means that in a traditional sense. One rife with a special kind of meaning that comes only from soldiers who serve in times of great need, rather than for steady pay and prestige. His statement may be less figurative than he believes. The moment Tamamo begins looking around after dustoff, the myriad ways that this place is Wrong strike her all at once.     To every one of her senses, this is a cursed battlefield. A place of regrets and grudges and dark emotions, worse than any crow-scavenged slaughtering field of the warring states, too haunted to be picked clean by human scavengers. Every bit of her is assailed with the malign shivers of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ghosts, hanging so thick in the air that the multitude may as well be a single, monolithic fog. Yet, no individual spirit is recognizable. No shape or name or consciousness is clear enough to be intelligible. It's all smeared together in a haze of death. Ghosts that are here and yet aren't. The mass grave feels far too fresh. Though it's supposedly forty years old, it feels as if the fallen had passed only yesterday.     Furthermore, the wrongful 'weather' appears to be the remnant of some old, very large spell or ritual, which should have frayed and worn out decades ago, yet still exists in a state of zombie-like stasis, long run out of power, yet unable to fully scatter and die away. The closer to the dam and reactor, the more intense the feeling of inappropriate 'stagnancy' is. It's very much a feeling that it might all resume at any minute. The storm might brew again. The lake might boil and overflow. The dead might rise from the grave and fight once more.     There is a very large, very severe, very unnatural disturbance here. It cannot be merely the scarred aftermath of some singular calamity. There is an open, existential wound on the land here. It is beyond 'salted earth'. The reactor going critical and poisoning the land would have been preferable. The root-like Antegent remains at its center feel like shrapnel lodged in it, the continuity of the events around it ready to bleed freshly at the slighted disturbance.     The nature of this irregularity feels Important.
Lilian Rook	Tony's mass scanning gets a crystal clear picture of the battlefield that once was. Some massive convergence of antegent had formed at the base of the cliff that the dam occupies, and climbed up over the top. Patterns of movement indicate that thousands of individual entities had assembled from perhaps hundreds of miles, piling into a singular trench and poured into the lake area like water.     There is literally too much data on the sheer variety of their corpses to compile all at once, though there are a dozen 'common strains' that lie dead in vast numbers, and two stand-out superorganisms. One of them is a torn, frozen, gooey sort of flayed mass that oozes exo-energy, surrounded by a perfectly circular, perfectly clear space. The other is a many-limbed armoured behemoth he can't find a head or a tail to, only superficially damaged by hundreds of heavy weapons strikes, almost drowned in its own blood by mysterious means.     The south side looks like it was hit with a massed assault from a gigantic use of military force. There wasn't a fighting retreat from the facility, but rather, an almost suicidal assault on the same spot at the same time, from a strategy that amounts to pouring every available man into the strike, in an all-or-nothing gamble. What must be hundreds of aerial passes have gone over this area, some of them drops, some of them airstrikes. It looks as if, somehow, they pushed all the way up to the fences themselves, and managed to infiltrate the compound in small numbers. The heavy armour was never able to push beyond the southernmost lake edge, making for a half-kilometer no-man's land where both sides had suffered the same exaggerated casualty count as the most ill-conceived WWI trench charge.     Notably, there are no signs of any strikes from especially long-ranged artillery or cruise missiles. Nothing was able to fire into the area from over the horizon at all. Perhaps due to the storm. Deep penetrations of the complex find that it had probably been sabotaged by hand. Blown with charges by small teams, maybe. There's so much shielding, meant to be impervious to reconnaissance scans, and give off no energy signature, that it's hard to tell for sure, but it wasn't cracked from the outside. The 'roots' seem to go all the way down to the main turbines, specifically into the flow of superheated water that would generate electricity, and even into the core itself. The only remaining point of interest seems to be the skeleton of a large, non-human, non-antegent creature, crashed in the hangar yard, accompanied by a single human body and many dead enemies, roughly at the center of a massive lightning strike.     All of this tactical information feels Important.
Lilian Rook	"I inform you, with mixed feelings, that no lots were drawn." Volkov says to Tony. "This is a place we once knew. A battlefield that we are returning to, of our own volition. Our leaders say they have more important things to concern themselves with than these remains. We here disagree. It is a thing that needs to be done, even if we had no chance of success. With you here, I believe we have as fair a shot as any."     "The Dame Commander is well-advised to take this seriously. Though the classification did not exist at the time, I agree fully that it should be coded posthumously. A disaster that cannot be measured in force of arms, or in blood spilled to quell it. Though we are better armed and learned than ever, in this modern day, there are things out there, that were and there are, which can only be met by a certain few, and fortune alongside them. We will need your wits and your good luck as much as your strength." he says.     To Arthur, he points to the mess of terminated root-structures rising from the shattered nuclear complex. "This enemy, this Povtoryayushchiysya Koshmar--" He says it specifically as a proper noun. A name he's given it, perhaps. "--is defeated, but it is not dead. A weed, burnt to the soil, but its roots remain. Even out here, it calls to unfortunate souls. They arrive here, and they are drowned in it. Each hopeless man it devours, it regains a little of its strength. It is deemed that it will take many years to become worthy of fully destroying, but we cannot go into our graves knowing that it still lives. Not for all the men who cannot rest."     He grunts. "That is not mere poetry. We cannot know every detail, but those who end up here 'enter' it, and disappear. The beast is not the bones you see before you. The tip of an iceberg. Its totality is Elsewhere. A place we cannot see or reach, without also 'entering' it. Its burrow, where it lives in torpor, living out its own death over and over again, dreaming that it might find a way that it might have survived."     his Russian dialogue also feels Important.
Forte	"Defeated, but not dead..." repeats Forte, seeming to come to life finally. "Povtoryayushchiysya Koshmar..." "... If it dreams of seeking out its own survival and victory, it seems that the answer is a simple one." "We either prove to it that it does not even have a chance of victory in its literal dreams..." Forte raises an arm, pointing at the facility. "... Or we find these roots, and delete them. Down to the very last bit. This is true for any source of infection." His arm drops. The floating navi turns, regarding Volkov. "The question becomes, then, how to get to... 'elsewhere'. Assuming we are not to march straight into the main entrance like so many other damned lost souls."
Arthur Lowell	>==>     Arthur is a bit taken aback by the intensity of the curse, the profound feeling of incomplete work done here, and the general sense that all of this, whatever it is, represents a sustained, ongoing failure to complete what was started or the antegent failing to concede that it was finished. He grits his teeth. "I bet it's weird time shit." He mutters. >Arthur: Can you fuck around with that old fraying spell minigame?     Arthur can't help but recognize the magical baleful influence as he presses in. Importantly, he identifies the spell -- or, no, at least he identifies that there is one. Arthur is an expert in the supplying of power to mechanisms both magical and mechanical. He reaches out with his spiritual supply and sees if he can juice it up in some way that would allow him to navigate it. A bunker meant to be secure, metaphorically, can be more easily navigated when its blast doors and airlocks have power, and Arthur tries to see if he can apply the same principle to the spell. >Arthur: Use Space Analysis on "Elsewhere"     He also seeks the space beyond this space. There was an Elsewhere -- capital E. This tactical approach perhaps speaks of an effort to breach an alternate space by hand. So, can Arthur find this alternate space? Can he check the folds and twists of space and see if he can identify somewhere and somehow to advantageously access Elsewhere and face the totality of this entity in some easier way? A thorough geometric analysis should do the trick.
Tony Stark	"Then I'm sad to say, Commander, that this isn't a proper suicide mission." Stark jaws, helmeted face impassive even while his tone clearly indicates cavalier joking. A pan of the area - and the aggregated data that populates every item and path, labels too small to read that expand and blow up into depth-based models. All 'the same'. All strange. JARVIS elucidates aloud: "The Antegent seem to have concentrated their number along specific trench-lines, while resistance struck perpendicular for a massed break-through. Were I to synthesize a guess: While the conventional forces fought a ground war, the Antegent acted like a cardiovascular system - combat forms and maintenance forms failing to maintain the superentity's physical homeostasis." The worrying readings, the method of attack - 'drowning' the creature - that was used used, the pulse of exoenergy, and the forboding name all click, as Iron Man full-body turns towards the Russian commander. "So you're saying this 'Dragon' is in a *coma*?" "Literally: 'recurring nightmare'." JARVIS asides. "Yes, thank you for the language lesson." Tony deadpans. "Lowell, can you suss out the connection between here-and-there? I agree with him." Thumbing to Forte. "I'd rather not waltz in to church wearing my sunday best to see if God will strike me down with thunder."
Gawain	Gawain, sticking with his squad, frowns at the lesson. "Comatose...hopefully, we can find an entrance. If we do, allow me to take the road of distracting it, should it be able to sense us. As long as there is sunlight, I can survive almost anything." He watches Arthur carefully from a distance, trying to see if he finds the entrance, while looking thoughtfully up at the Antegent 'weed'. "I assume trying to befriend you would go as poorly as last time, huh?" He chuckles softly to himself, the knight trying to figure out what to do next. He turns to the squad captain of the one he's piggybacking on as they approach. "What's your plan, as far as you can share it? My goal is to make sure you survive the night victorious, and cooperation is appreciated."
Tamamo	"As he said," Tamamo adds, after commander Volkov, "there is little poetry in this. This land suffers a curse far worse than any laid by mere bloodshed, no matter how grand the scale. There is the impression of thousands of spirits, though I cannot distinguish them, whether that is the fault of a lack of self, or some malady placed upon them by the same curse. It is a far more serious matter than the slain left without the ferryman's fee. The flow of... rather, the sense of timing is also strange. There is none of the aging, the decay, the settling of bone and sediment that should come with time, the quieting of forgotten places. All is held as if on the far edge of life and death, readied to be brought back to violence with a sufficient spark."     Her hands come away from the mirror, done with her search, for the moment. "The land is wounded, and the Antegent is the obvious source. It should be no surprise, perhaps, that that one so mar the planet in its death throes as they do corrupt it in more vigorous life."     Arthur gets onto space matters. That's his strong suit. "If you could find the shape of the path from here to elsewhere, Mr. Lowell, it might prove useful to find some aspect of its space outside the main entrance. It is the difference between the main gate and the unbarred window, do you see? I would feel more comfortable piercing the dragon's heart than trying to navigate its teeth, I should think."     Though that's not the only means they have of fighting the problem. "What of the portion of the enemy that *is* here? Can we not destroy the roots with which it clutches to the land, that it might fall away into that other place, and cease its feeding?" She begins gathering and sorting through a number of talismans from inside her coat, bundled and strung paper strips with scrawls of black and red ink. "And perhaps, if we were to make this land too inhospitable, it might wake itself out of desperation, and come to fight us on our own terms. Would this not be preferable, should we manage it? It will take some time--less with some assistance, but if I may spread these focuses throughout the area, I might enact such a counter-ritual. I would need to cover a great portion of the space, and then have such time as needed to call upon that essence of myself. It would be simple, in some respects, but neither swift nor easy."
Lilian Rook	Volkov considers Tony's turn of phase, then nods his head in agreement. "Yes. That is a fine way of imagining it." He taps his head. "Its brain is damaged. It cannot move or think, or fight, but it has a pulse. It has some reflexes. Someone in a coma might wake up at any minute, and slip away as easily."     "It is Cipher-class." he says to Tamamo. "It is a monster that exists in patterns and signals as much as flesh and bone. Living thought, or a living code. It will not die completely until the last of those signals is terminated." He adopts an ugly grimace when she mentions the dead. "It knew it. Somewhere deep in these bones, I knew it. These men, our comrades, cannot be free of this war while that thing still draws breath. Let us end their battle, and put this long nightmare to bed."     The squad captain Gawain is following, one of four, shakes his head slowly, putting on and sealing his helmet as they approach. Noticeably, it doesn't have a real visor or eye-holes, but only small cameras set into a solid faceplate. "Don't talk to it." he says. "You'll start thinking of it like a person, or at least an animal. You may as well be talking to the storm. Or a heap of shit. Our plan is to follow the call to where all the others disappeared, and tear out its stomach from the inside. It was killed once, with enough force. We will kill it again with more."     This might just be a viable approach.     It's actually Lilian who puts forward an answer on the subject of the 'roots'. She does, after all, sit through lectures and labs on this kind of thing. "If we burned out every last trace of it, it'd probably die, but there's no chance we could get away with it without it reacting to us. Antegent have been known to recover from the verge of death through these kinds of coma mechanisms before. They don't undergo any kind of recovery process without some kind of automatic defense. The higher level types usually resemble something 'designed' rather than evolved or animalistic. We can make it our goal, but I doubt it'd be easier."     Arthur mostly seems to confirm her estimate. The distortion he senses is almost completely aligned to the bounds of the nuclear plant. Specifically, the man-made construction. It conforms quite neatly to the furthest pieces of things that human hands once wrought. Simply approaching it closely enough would take them there, but there seem to be 'deeper', more 'direct' gashes in space around the intended doors and gates of the facility, as if they were low points into which more 'stuff' had settled naturally.     This is slightly Important.
Lilian Rook	However, he doesn't detect a pocket space or nicely described sub-dimension. It wouldn't be as simple as hopping into an extradimensional battlefield through a gate. The problem seems to only be partially his wheelhouse. The best reference he has, in terms of his spatial and geometry expertise, is that of a hypercube. The intangible presence of the slain monster's Wrongness contracts 'inwards' and vanishes when it reaches a point beyond the sensible understanding of 3d space. It's mostly a black box from the outside, for that reason.     The cold, lifeless thunderhead above, though, is definitely magic. As in, that thing humans use and Antegent cannot. Jolting it with some extra energy causes the clouds to begin sluggishly stirring. A faint, chill breeze brushes around him. He can see a flicker of lightning play out in eerie slow motion, as if 'playing out the rest of the conjured storm' were something very heavy, or stuck, that he has to push forward.     This is probably Important.     Both Lilian and Volkov need a moment to analyze what Tamamo is putting down. "If you think you could drag it out here, it might be better than us walking right into the place it probably wants us to be." Lilian concludes. "Though, maybe we appear inside a stone and are torn to pieces." Volkov shrugs. "But the odds of that must be lower than those of appearing on the tip of its tongue, should we engage on its own terms." He scratches his chin. "But I remember this place well. I dream of it every night. I will tell you where."     This is probably a viable approach.
Tony Stark	Tamamo requests an accurate map - which Tony has, thanks to the penetration mapping of the area by his Legion drones. Adjusting so Tamamo has the best view, the suited Stark extends a hand, palm up. The emitter lens placed into the hand glows a cold blue as the air begins to fill with first light, then discrete hovering 'particles'. The voxels of holographic data swirl and settle like a snow-globe with pulses of definition falling into the hovering map like weathering rains of detail-granting definition. As the suit fills in the data from the drones, the back of the suit opens up, Tony swinging out to walk besides the Model Forty-Four. He rolls his shoulder, pressing his fingers into the creation of light and figures. "There was... a strange corpse in this area." He touches the map, placing a yellow dot where the unknown corpse had appeared. "Oh, by the way, you can interact with the map and add things to it. There's enough exoenergetical reactions I couldn't possibly venture a guess at. For '''some reason''', while the concentrations of antegent subform corpses are represented by seas of red pixels whose density creates deeper shades, there is tastefully no locations of fallen humans and merely labels suggesting 'where they had been' and battle lines.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry lays her duffel bag down in the snow, unzips it, and starts rifling through its contents. "Safer to draw it out than cut it off, Tamamo. It's- in a chrysalis now, right? Trying to make itself right. If we blow up the 'roots', that might strand it somewhere else for good. Or it might just keep growing, and someday come back and be really really bad. You can't leave these things to fester like that."      She pulls out her pretty crystal-tipped wand, its black Reignition reactor as sprawling and tumorous as ever (or perhaps a little moreso), and flips a couple of switches on the side. It isn't powered on- she's saving that for the proper fight- but its screen is still intermittently flickering a timer at 00:00.      "Alright. Arthur, can I please get a boost? I'd rather not start the timer, you know, until I have to." She holds the wand out to him, fingers extended so he can interlace his with her grasp, and pulls a cell phone out of her pocket with the other.      When he lends her some energy, a hundred invisible specks of awareness radiate out from her and flit over the snowdrifts, feeding a jigsaw of scattered sensory information back into her mind. She flits into the air with him (if he'll come along) to snap some birds'-eye-view photos of the area, but they aren't her real source of information. She hastily MS-Paints on more details that couldn't really be grasped by the human eye from that distance. Despite her visible discomfort, she doesn't shy away from displaying the locations of the human corpses now. It's For The Mission. so she has to push through it.      Carefully swooping back down with Arthur still (hopefully) in tow, she touches down in the snow next to Tony and Tamamo, flashing them the scribbled on photo. "Hey, I got- oh, that's perfect. Mind if I touch that up with some details, Mr. Stark?" She gives him a very slightly strained smile.
Forte	"Interactable holograms... interesting technology." Forte reaches out to touch it. "I'd like to get a closer look at this point here. I'm assuming you pinch to zoom, as you would a-" He stops. The area of the map that his fingers have touched has vanished. The map data there is just gone. Slowly, he withdraws his hand and takes a step back. "Someone else should interact with it."
Tony Stark	"Not at all, Princess." Tony shrugs, gesturing at the map. "Go right ahead." Forte leaves a hole in his map. The independent-for-now suit helmet turns to focus on the point, a few passes turning the hole into a best-fit blur... But that data doesn't come back. Tony pats Forte on the shoulder. "Try the voice commands, champ."
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry removes the stylus from her phone and artistically paints on a few dots and shapes in pretty colors. After a moment's thought (and a few nagging pangs of OCD compulsion), she scribbles to complete the Forte-erased chunk in a sort of impressionistic style, significantly touching up Tony Stark's fatfinger finger-painting.      "I think that's everything," she says quietly, still looking a bit off-kilter. 'Everything', here, mostly means all the dead bodies.
Tamamo	<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Ah, but for the geomancy... might someone supply me with a very detailed map?" <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "So long as I may use it to indicate a set of points to those assembled, any material will serve. Ah, but do include the elevation and the locations of the slain, if possible." <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "The form of the earth is the most important, but for these purposes, the lines that matter may be marred, warped by the gravity of their suffering... ah, but any explanation may prove to meander. I shall do as best as I am able with what we have, but I thank you for any assistance."     There are plenty of things that Tamamo could say about the situation, but Volkov doesn't need any more help from her to understand just how terrible this is. Just the phrase 'trapped souls' about covers it, as a Wrongness of such degree that it should never occur, that it never need occur, and that only a horrifically Wrong thing could make it possible to occur. Perhaps it's better, even, if she doesn't stretch the awareness of others to the necessary extent that they can appreciate how much better a mass slaughter of the innocent would have been than what actually happened here. And so, she focuses on the work at hand.     Lilian and Volkov seem to approve well enough of her plan, and Tony and Strawberry are filling in a map. She waits until they're largely done, including a last-moment deletion and restoration, before she starts drawing lines around it, curving and spiraling, crossing, forming an intricate series of interlocking and self-similar shapes that would look too perfect to be artwork, were it not for all the irregularities that, based on how carefully she added each one, must have been done on purpose. The perfect geometry is warped as if mapped against a warped space that she can see, but not effectively show, pulling the orbital lines this way and that.     It's not hard to guess the reason for this, as she'd already said.     "To each of these points, where the lines intersect... here, and here... here... and to each of these." Each one is pointed to, every additional point marked by another tick, so every joining of two or more curves becomes an objective marker. She pulls out the thick sheaf of talismans. "Might your comrades assist, command Volkov? Or perhaps your armored suits, Mr. Stark? Ah, but one must be careful. No particular skill is necessary to merely place the talisman upon the ground at the marked location, but they *are* made of paper." They looks, and feel, like very old paper. They're only very slightly tougher than they look.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Use ENERGY BONUS     Arthur's form surges with light. The surface of his body becomes electrified and the wellspring opens up for Strawberry Princess. A quick drift to her side lets her get easy access! It's also something he can leverage for the weird storm. Can he push through any more here? What would that do? "Might as well be talking to the storm." He mutters. "Huhhhh..." He pushes more energy. More ENERGY BONUS should do this. More and more energy on-tap should help, right? >Arthur: She wants to draw it out, so get the storm ready to do it     Arthur looks to what Tamamo is doing. "You're doin' that draw-out stuff, right? Shit, keep that up, I think I've found an older trigger to pull. Looks like something ran out of power before it could kill this bastard, maybe I can power it up and bring it down on this son of a bitch." He explains, as his body gleams with more and more flickering weird lights. "Otherwise we're just diving in through these doors and shit."
Forte	Forte takes a stack of the talismans in hand. He is making a point of handling them with care. "At the spots indicated, right?" He says, glancing at the map, being careful to look with his eyes and not his hands. Once his locations are confirmed and he's plotted out a route, he takes off. There's no jet-burst of wind or heat (or on the other end of the coin swirls of ambient magic) or even any stirring besides the slight displacement of air and the fluttering of his cloak as he travels, he just... goes, as if his personal acceleration is something that just spontaneously happens. He flies series of low arcs, speeding up on ascent and slowing to a halt on the descent, carefully placing a talisman on the ground at the indicated spot before taking off again to the next point.
Lilian Rook	Checking on Tony's mapping, Volkov doesn't even look around him to check the map's veracity. He only indicates the extraneous crash point and the unidentified corpse, and grunts "Solomonari." When Tamamo lays out her plan, he concludes "We should take it on our terms, when we have been given this opportunity. Not its own." He uses hand motions to bring over his soldiers and have them each take their allotment of talismans, then he transmits the map data to each of them, where they break up and head to the indicated points to help set up the circle. "Do not take it as rudeness when I say that I hope you know what you are doing." He adds, before moving away himself.     The 'halted' storm remains receptive to 'more energy', but it doesn't seem to be a lack of energy leaving it like that. The full completion of the spell is stopped by some kind of inertia. Energy is needed to overcome that mysterious resistance and see it through to its end. It definitely matches the terrain, meaning it absolutely should be there.     When all of the talismans are properly placed, and Volkov calls his men back, he pings the map to indicate the very southern side of the lake, just where the river begins to feed into it, frozen in the modern day. He radios "Be no further than this line when you begin. No matter what happens, I should not say that any further north is wise to be near. Imagine that the battle still rages around you. Where would you be? What would you be doing?" His own men take his advance. "Whenever you are ready, we are."
Tamamo	The talismans really don't look like much. Anyone who's seen some late-20th-cen East Asian horror movies has probably seen them plastered over something. That may be intentional, as they're particularly fragile magical items, right up until the moment they activate. And even then, 'tearing the paper' is a frequently effective counter.     Once they're all placed, though, Tamamo looks around, orienting herself against the map, and waits a moment, as if to feel which way a current of disturbed lakewater pushes against her. She moves with the unseen tug, tall geta sandals keeping above the snow and frozen mud, arms wrapped around herself for warmth, but moving with a purpose, even if there's nothing especially interesting about the spot at which she stops. It's appropriately central, yet not in the center. It's the center of the not-center, the secondary focus, the place outside the origin of the curse, the root-like structure, with the most influence on its surroundings.     "Lilian, please stay with me, would you? I respect the commander's concerns, but I must be within the space to finish it. I know you can keep me safely away from harm."     Tamamo glows. That happens, sometimes. 'Light Aspect,' Arthur once said. She'd put it a different way, and the important distinction now is that it's a very, very warm glow. The snow melts around her, the ground beneath it thaws, the mud hardens once more, and she carefully lowers herself to dry, hard earth, kneels, and begins to write. The ink from her brush flows directly onto the ground, then burns into it, filling it with lines like molten metal. The design is as archaic, arcane and esoteric as any could ask for, but she had said that this part was simple. It's a purification spell, powered by the metaphysical (rather than physical but notably distant) strength of the Sun, though that's quite a simplification. It's not an attempt to interact with the Antegent, directly, at all. They are, after all, quite alien, as far as she's concerned, and making up new magic on the spot is rather less reliable.     Instead, specifically, this is a spell that interacts only indirectly. The Antegent has chosen to interface with 'the world Tamamo knows' by means of trapping and feeding on the dead. By preventing the dead from approaching, by wresting their spiritual essence away from the edges of the trap, by cleaning away all trace of their grudge, by sanctifying the ground in the opposite direction that it had been corrupted by death and curses, Tamamo is trying to make an environment exactly opposite, in all known and meaningful respects, to what the elsewhere-monster requires for its recovery, not stopping at 'ceasing to bring it more food,' but by surrounding it in a palpable field of 'food (The Dead) cannot exist.'     Time is on her side, here. Her resistances against background radiation will hold out for far longer than it takes to repeatedly reinforce her ritual field, up to the point that, if the entrance is so easy to enter, it begins to infect that Elsewhere. It will only be slow at the start.
Gawain	As Tamamo sets up her plan, Gawain smiles. "A good plan! I'll play the role of 'tank', as those MMOs say!" Another joke, trying to diffuse the situation, as he heads forward with the soldiers, hoping to keep casualties to a minimum by taking aggro for them. Once everyone's in position, Gawain speaks. He keeps his senses heightened for the beast, trying to find exactly when it appears so he can be ready, before radio-ing to the Elites. <"Once the sun is up...well, let's hope it doesn't have much besides pure physical force. I won't be able to deal with mental afflictions via my Numeral of the Saint."> "Ready!"
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: You need to kickstart it. Bring in the Big One >Arthur: Dangerous to bring it all in, could get hit by any Antegent nearby >Arthur: You should use the big one for SP! >Arthur: Get a Gate as a compromise imo     Arthur needs to fix the *inertia*. That means a huge kick of energy to spark the fire, to turn over the engine. Contemplating it extensively in a conflicted way, he comes to a conclusion. The others are preparing a wide effort, and so Arthur will prepare one too.     While the setup efforts are underway, he sets up something himself. Maintaining his wellspring for Strawberry Princess's benefit, he begins working on something else, something more: A rather large spirograph tracing just above the clouds. Shining green lines arc, visible up in the sky. A Gate large enough that something *very* large could find its way through. He can't afford to bring it into orbit around this Earth, there's too many Antegent that could possibly make a home out of it. But if he needs to bring out all the big guns, he can at least compromise, one that should allow a good fraction of a huge power boost through. The Gate is slowly readied. >[S] Arthur: Summon the LOSAF Directed Energy System
Forte	Forte, returning from his trip, descends to a halt approximately back where he was standing before. "If you're the tank..." < <AUTONAVI SLOT IN> > VAR__SWORD F - EXECUTE AREA_STEAL F - LOADING "I suppose that makes me the damage dealer," he says, dryly, as twin energy blades sprout from his wrists. "Once it's down, just get out of my way... I'll make sure it's not just dead, but *gone*."
Tony Stark	Tony, whose total suggestion for this remains 'lol dunno fire a huge science gun at it' -- and, failing that, the appearance of Arthur summoning his own large magic science gun to shoot at the problem -- has little to contribute beyond his good looks and excellent taste in armor systems. What's a paranoid battle-anxious bezosoid to do? Stepping back into his armor as the map floats freely in the air, the armor system expands-and-contracts a single time, little flaps and greebles extending as the suit runs a full action check. "Well, Commander, you've blown your window for ominous setup or making sure everyone's coming out of retirement for one last ride. We'll just have to get everyone back to base so you can do it right later." Surprisingly gentle comes Tony's verison of a gallows humor pep talk. "Right. Everyone ready?" Asks the guy with no active role.
Lilian Rook	The effort to neutralize the perversion of space and time here is successful. There is too much time and too little impediment not to be. The effect is one of turning the hypercube inside out. Of slamming the edge of the world and flipping it over, standing on what was previously the underside of the table. What was hidden, what was Elsewhere is forced into existence all at once, and with it, all of you are forced into it as well, in all its glorious terror.     It is exactly as Volkov had said. Whether he meant it poetically or not, here and now, now and then, the battle is not over. The dead do not rest because they are still fighting. The Antegent does not die because it has not yet been killed. You are surrounded, sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and terror, by what has been going on, on this spot, over and over and over again for forty years, in a place that doesn't exist and a time that already happened.     --But to understand the sheer enormity of what has happened, it is necessary to describe it in great detail. As every single facet of a major battle has been resurrected here in painstaking detail, from every individual face to every individual bullet fired, any or even every factor of the reborn conflict could be a factor in the anomaly that swallows everything. Perhaps even all of it might be.     Every human, and every Antegent, here is already long dead, yet they play out the exact role that lead up to their end without fail. All alien forms and eldritch abilities, and all human tactics and strategies, are applied at such a large scale that the environment itself is warped and restructured by them, and needs to be noted more specifically than the snowy lakeside you'd seen. The function and role of each force present has enormous strategic weight on this, the site of a tactical massacre, and could make or break things with any given interaction, now all too pressingly your concern.     Next, the threat needs to be catalogued and understood to be survived for long, for the danger to yourselves is very, very real. Maybe, perhaps even countered in some way. Long-dead allies must at least be noted to draw any conclusions from how they prevailed once before. The totality of what has been forced out of the land, extracted from its bloody wound like an old bullet, is so much bigger than any one person -- even any one Elite -- that only by seeing and knowing the place of all the pieces, can one make informed decisions about how to use any of it to their advantage. Maybe changing the tide. Maybe discovering a more important pattern.     However, the fundamental fact at the core of it is exactly what Lilian says; her first hoarse, half-strangled words upon seeing it herself. "Nothing with this kind of power would do all of this unless it were important. Bringing back its dead allies to kill us isn't good enough; if it already lost this battle before, we could do nothing and it'd only replay its own death."     A dry swallow. The frantic search of eyes over the overwhelming assault of the scene. "Like the Commander said, this is a Cipher-class ability, at an extremely high level. The manipulation of information. Patterns. Something encoded into the battlefield. It's still alive because it hasn't allowed this to 'finish happening' yet. Because we're here, it might be able to change how it happened. And because we lack this ability, I don't know what the consequences are if *we* change what happened. Be careful."     This sounds very Important.
Lilian Rook	THE ONSLAUGHT:     The snowfield has gone from a chilling graveyard, to a vision of hell.     The permanent, lifeless thunderhead that hung above, like a dormant volcano, is the epicenter of a raging storm of biblical proportions. The sky is pitch black for the miles of evil clouds massed above; itself a midnight without stars. The wind rages so ferociously that it becomes an endless, inescapable scream, howling away without any sign of respite. Lightning forks and flashes above with such constancy that the flickering light is enough to see by alone, though it makes the snowy landscape blaze searing white, liable to render one blind without goggles. The sound of thunder roars without pause, sounding like the rumble of an all-night artillery barrage from a more archaic war. Lightning ceaselessly hitting the ground adds to the illusion, blasting down over and over, three or more bolts glassing the ground at any given split second.     What isn't lightning making landfall is a hellish carpet of earth-shaking fire, to the north and south. On one end, it is an endless inferno of exploding shells and flash-melted terrain, surrounded by bonfires of corpses that have caught fire sheerly from nearby heat. On the other, it is a sea of flashing guns and blazing exhaust, crackling, booming, shrieking, competing with the storm as if both are trying to drown out the other, and filling the air with so many streaking tracers and fiery rocket lines that the breaks between the lightning are still like being on a well-lit evening street. Both sides are, perhaps, just as bad as the other. The surface of the lake churns under the sonic violence, and its surface physically steams under the heat of fire passing over it.     Even outside of the way the unnaturally frigid air claws at your lungs, it's almost impossible to breathe for the stench of charcoal, ozone, and heavy metal fumes. Blood and gore is almost undetectable on the palate; there almost isn't time for it to spill in the chaos around you. There is no place for the dying to lie in the fields, nor for the wounded to be dragged back by their comrades. It only takes a single glimpse of the battlefield to realize that the only fate that awaits one here, human and antegent alike, is either being torn to ribbons in an instant, or carbonized on the spot.
Lilian Rook	THE LAST HOPE:     Beside you must be at least a thousand-strong force of former Russia's finest, stretching along a battle line that encircles the entire lake, almost horizon to horizon. You're practically packed in with them. Shoulder to shoulder, lost in a crush of swarming bodies, mostly passing ahead of you to push the line forward, clambering over embankments set up by combat engineers twenty minutes ago and already burnt to crisps. A moment's hesitation means being swept along in a living tide, unable to find space to cover and maneuver, shielded by the flesh and blood of the men ahead in lieu of any defensible position in this suicidal killing field.     Soldiers in unfamiliar fatigues, wearing patches you don't recognize, placed only by the flag stenciled onto the ceramics of tactical suits that seem to barely matter. Hundreds of units share little uniformity between them, cobbled together out of many different ethnic regions, and armed and outfitted in variations of weapons and uniforms that can only be due to a supply chain that is simply unable to outfit every soldier with the newest technology. Some of the men, and even women, you see are so young that they can only be desperate volunteers that have picked up the rifles of yesteryear, reclaimed from the bodies of the soldiers that fell before them, several times over. Even the freshest amongst them are so gaunt and haggard and pale-faced that they look like walking ghosts, awake, perhaps fighting, for days, running sheerly on adrenaline, fear, and fury.     The fact that you stand out so greatly amongst them is barely noticed. Their hollow eyes scarcely have the attention to spare for a sidelong glance at you as they rush past. The scream of jet engines overhead heralds the crash of chunks of plate metal hitting the ground, springing up into fortified positions of heavy cover that signal the assault to surge ahead, running headlong over corpses so thick on the ground that they can be sprinted across without one being slowed down by the snow. The heat of so many freshly dead bodies has created a meltwater swamp, dyed almost completely red with blood, thick and soupy where one's boots can't find enough wreckage to stand above it.     But the bodies aren't all human. Moving ahead, past the wrecks of the previous round of beach head drops, the swamp turns violet with the mix of blue and indigo added to the read. Slick chitin and living metal creates slippery and treacherous terrain, rife with spines and claws that tear more than one leg open with a slight misstep. Where passes from the airforce can't deploy enough artificial cover, pileups of soldiers take temporary refuge behind the bloodied heaps of dead monsters, scarcely two of them alike, but at least heavy enough to absorb incoming fire for a time, and slow down the living carpet of 'smaller' creatures crashing against the assault line, equally heedless to their own deaths, giving men time to stand atop the pile and rain fire down on them.
Lilian Rook	THE ENEMY:     Directly ahead of you, the enemy army is equally as overwhelming in number, if not moreso. The lakeside, the cliff, the ruined facility; all of them are a writhing carpet of black and white and blue and violet bodies. Raking claws, bristling spines, whipping tendrils, flashing bioluminescence.     Swarms of quadrupedal monsters race across the open ground, large as horses, hurling themselves thirty meters into ranks of soldiers and extending impossibly folded limbs to carve through bodies and heavy armour alike, blasted out of the air or gunned down in the field in turn, en masse, by fire so thick that it can't possibly miss. Excessively tall and ghastly thin silhouettes march forward in swaying lines, popping lights emanating from their faceless heads and firing lancing rays of energy that cause the ground to explode and bodies to disintegrate, trading fire with snipers and battle tanks that pick off their limbs to stumble them and blow off their upper bodies. Lumbering multipeds shield themselves behind joined front limbs of heavy armour, stopping to spew masses of fluorescent acid over wide swathes of territory, targeted with prejudice by missile strikes and artillery.     Arrowhead-shaped masses of translucent metal and screaming organic vents shriek through the air like miniature jet fighters, dive bombing the ranks to physically bisect unfortunate squads and rise back into the air, carrying away screaming soldiers who are likely to be put out of their misery by anti-air fire as anything else. High-flying tentacled shadows spray the ground with writhing darts that shoot wiry tendrils in every direction, snagging and pulling in everything they can, before blowing up in domes of white hot fire. Floating blobs of pulsating soft matter advance inexorably under massed gunfire, protected by fields of flickering energy, some eventually giving out under the pressure and allowing the soft organism behind it to be torn to pieces, others holding firm long enough for the floater to reach the main line, and emit an invisible pulse of energy that causes ranks of soldiers to collapse in screaming fits, turning their guns on themselves in mass suicides.
Lilian Rook	THE TITANS:     Two specific titans stand out amongst them. One seems to be a highly 'evolved' version of the levitating blobs, shaped with the curled, top-heavy contours of a foetus, looking like blown glass, housing an entire hanging garden of blue-black vegetation inside a domed 'cranium'. It is at the center of a maelstrom of heavy combined arms fire, blocking out everything that can be thrown at it, inside its impregnable field. Nictitating 'eyes' around its circumference blink open, causing the AFVs and airdropped bulkheads to be pulled to millions of swirling pieces wherever they gaze. Other times, they stare into ranks of approaching soldiers, constricting their pupils, and causing the front line to turn on the line behind them, only to be shot dead by their comrades behind them without hesitation, having already seen this trick repeat itself over and over again. It is holding its ground completely, but quickly being surrounded, lacking the ability to actually kill everything being thrown at it.     The other is a six-legged palindrome of a monster, without discernible front or flank, clad in meters of thick black carapace, and tall enough to rise above the battle, crushing smaller beasts below its massive footfalls. Its central body is barely visible beyond the monolithic cover of its leg-plating; if it were to draw all its legs together, it'd form a completely sealed bunker. It weathers the attack with purely physical might, making short charges into the ranks that come too close to it, which have no choice but to flee backwards or be crushed. From the gaps between its legs, it releases long, diffuse columns of total incineration, leaving nothing but charred, conical trenches where it spews fire from shielded maws. A specialized tank that is the size of a multi-storey building is rolling up against it, aiming to meet it in a head-on confrontation.     However, on humanity's side, there are figures who stand out in this charnel mayhem as well. There are three men who take to the air, wearing only the barest trappings of military allegiance, otherwise clad in thick, furred cloaks wrapped around them in many layers, masks pulled down over their faces, to ward against the wind and the cold of flight. Each of them sits astride the back of a gargantuan beast only passingly similar to a sea serpent, possessed of wickedly clawed lower legs, but otherwise almost all swollen muscle, beating demon-wings, and perversely decadent golden scales, all of them sprouting multiple heads from the same shoulders; two of them are three-headed monsters, and the largest has seven. Their faces are altogether hideous, being mostly distended maws of bristling teeth, but their riders have worked glittering golden bridles into them anyways, which they use to guide the airborne monsters.     It is the three of them that both create and control the storm. They themselves are the epicenter of the dark and terrible hurricane. They call the winds with terrible shrieks, send down the snow with the thunderclaps of their wings, summon the lightning with the gnashing and snapping of their sparking jaws, and send down javelins of ice and hail with the sweep of their tails. Each of their heads seems capable of vomiting great, horrible gouts of napalm-like fire, making them terrible weapons in their own right. Their scales easily shrug off attacks from both the grounded and airborne antegent fodder. Their riders appear to strike down the flying antegent that attempt to approach them with their own storm magic.
Lilian Rook	THE DRAGON:     The three sorcerers are engaged with what can only be the prime Antegent itself. It rises hundreds of feet into the air from its roots deep in the reactor core, splitting the sky with its image, and parting the storm around its head, creating a hemispherical vacuum in the tearing clouds. It doesn't look like the tree one might be forgiven for imagining it, from its remains. It looks like, if anything, a partially melted human body with its legs removed; a humanoid torso that terminates into a dangling, slug-like bottom, pale and grey, stained with red at its head and tail, supported by two arms that are exactly where they should be, but extend and extend and *extend* down to the ground, where its hands split into dozens of ultra-long fingers, which split into even more branches themselves, plunging deep into the earth and forming the 'roots' you'd seen earlier.     It looks as if it'd climbed over the cliff with those arms, and then intentionally taken root here. Perhaps usually dragging itself. But it's upright here. A living building with a house-sized swamp-corpse at its head, oversized, infant-like head and everything, blind and featureless save for an oversized bloodstained mouth. The thing screams like a siren. Non-stop. Audible even over everything else, as a constant, grating, maddening undertone. The army won't even fire at it. The odd missile or shell that flies wide is instantly destroyed by the hideous creature twisting its neck around however many degrees it has to in order to spit some kind of liquid stream from its throat and skewer it with clockwork precision.     The three riders appear to be trying to hold its attention as much as they are trying to kill it. Their mounts dogfight with the stationary monster, evading sprays of high-velocity fluid as best they are able, their riders having to heal the grievous, corrosive injuries with magic where they are struck. The grotesque thing soars through the air merely by flexing its elbows, its arms being so long that it is equivalent to flying. It is somehow able to dodge and intercept not only fiery breath from up to sixteen heads at once, but even spit down the lightning from above, as if it knows it's coming in advance. It's neck-breakingly fast, even nauseating to watch.     It is also growing more powerful with time. The sorcerers are constantly applying and reapplying all manner of Slavic hexes and curses as fast as they can to weaken it, but the choice of the reactor's tainted and boiling water supply must have been intentional on the Antegent's part. It's deriving something from it. Not nuclear power, obviously. But something. A geometric web of faint golden lines runs through the ground, barely shining through the water.. A tremendous Green Spirograph hangs in the sky, barely shining through the clouds. The first thing Lilian does is instantaneously spirit Tamamo far, far away from that no-man's land.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Remember Skaia     Piles of bodies. Running and blood. Choking air. Screaming metal above. Screaming men below. Pain and filth coat everything. Arthur remembers Skaia -- the Battlefield. This does not match its size. That doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. That makes it scarier.     There is no refuge here. No space that is unoccupied.     Arthur breathes deep. He has been here for five seconds, and already he wants to cry. It has been a long time since he was unable to feel the tempting tug of Expiration in his mind. It was comforting in its own way. Here, even at his greatest, he would die. Godhood wouldn't save him. It'd make it worse.     Can't find God in the trenches. He wouldn't survive.     The Antegent onslaught is like a tide. There is a thousand times more biodiversity than the Carapacian mutants. There are a hundred thousand times more bodies than the Derse loyalists. What Arthur barely survived with the help of over forty powerful Elites at the height of the Union and Confederacy collaboration, he is now asked to win victory against with the help of a half-dozen. He has to hope that storm those three mages are whipping up will sustain through the energy. That tipping the scales with power is enough. It won't be enough, and on some level Arthur knows that.     This is an impossibility. This much fear could obliterate reason.     "Weren't kidding about this danger." He whispers. He brandishes his broom. A heavy key is slammed into a mechanism and turned hard. Around him, a half-dozen text entry fields input passwords. Authorizations are accepted. Safeties are released.                -------------------------------------------------                               |   ACTIVE   |    DANGER    |      CRITICAL       |                             | ---------- | ------------ | ------------------- |                             |            |              |                     |                             | ********** | ************ | ******************* |                             |            |              |                     |                              -------------------------------------------------                     Deep breaths. This might be the big one, Art. This might be the one that keeps you from Expiring. If it is, you better make it count. You better see every dying face and feel every synaptic spark of pain. You better be all the hero you can be, before you can't anymore. >Arthur: Strife
Arthur Lowell	---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |                KING BROOM SYSTEM                |                          | |              SETTINGS AND FUNCTION              | [X] POSITRON THRUST      | |                                                 |                          | |                                                 | ------------------------ | |                     ,gM00@M~'                   |                          | |                  _g000~                         | [ ] PURGE TO NEXT        | |                 p000'                           |     ROCKET STAGE         | |                p00P                             |                          | |        _f     j00F        _pg00000&g_           | ------------------------ | |       _#      000       p000000000000&,         |                          | |       0f      008      0000@~`     ~M00&        | [X] BLACK PROTOCOL       | |      j0      j00f     000~            ~M&       |                          | |      00      J00f    j0F                "&      | ------------------------ | |      00c      00f    40       __         ^Y     |                          | |      00&      #00    4f   _p00000&g       ^     | THRUSTER MODES           | |      #00       #0&   4I  g0M~~~M0000g           |                          | |       000       "00g  # #^       "0000g         | [ ] DASH                 | |       "000,       `~@*-|ag,        "000g        | [ ] CRUISE               | |        "000&,        p'l  ~0&g      ^000        | [ ] CHARGE               | |          M000&g,_,gg0' J6   M0&       00&       | [ ] SPRINT               | |           ^M000000M~   4#    #0&      400       | [ ] ESCAPE VELOCITY      | |    `          `~`      #0     00f      00       | [X] UNSTOPPABLE FORCE    | |     #,                j08     00&      00       | [ ] PLAID                | |      0g             _g00'     00&      08       | [ ] UP A GODDAMN NOTCH   | |       M0p,_      _gM000'     j00f      0        | [ ] LET'S DO THIS SHIT   | |        "00000MM000000@       #00      j'        |                          | |          "M0000000@~        j00F      !         | ------------------------ | |               ``           p000      '          |                          | |                          _g00@                  | BLENDER MODES            | |                        ,g000'                   |                          | |                   .qgM00MP^                     | [ ] STIR                 | |                                                 | [ ] CHOP                 | |                                                 | [ ] MIX                  | |                                                 | [ ] PUREE                | |                                                 | [ ] LIQUIFY              | |               WARP RELEASE CODES                | [ ] CRUSH ICE            | | ----------------------------------------------- | [ ] CRUSH BONES          | |   ACTIVE   |    DANGER    |      CRITICAL       | [ ] RIP/TEAR             | | ---------- | ------------ | ------------------- | [ ] ATOMIC DISASSEMBLY   | |            |              |                     | [X] ANNIHILATION         | | ********** | ************ | ******************* | [ ] LET'S END THIS SHIT  | |            |              |                     |                          | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------     Arthur pulls the ripcord. The metal screams. So does the man. If he can ascend through the thicket of aerial enemies high enough, he can reach the Spirograph, complete the Gate, and call down the starlight onto Strawberry Princess and onto the storm.
Tamamo	A great many things happen at once. Tamamo attempts to focus on as many *important* matters as she can. She speaks, and her voice is carried over the usual frequencies. These are words that may be helpful to others. Lilian has seen to her own safety, and for this, Tamamo is far less immediatelyl concerned, no matter the massive destruction, the repeated death, the carnage and the mindless--but no, it's not mindless, is it? Except in the way that 'words' are mindless. She speaks.     "'Cipher-class.'" Her words are low, oddly calm, and have a subtle rhythm. "A code, an encrypted message, a pattern. The enemy is not the flesh, but the pattern, the idea, and the information. An idea fears neither sword nor cannon. This one still grows, but to where? To become what? Into what form does it seek completion?"     She takes in the variety of enemies, searching for the pattern. "Clumps of flesh, encased in protective fields, floating. A fetal form, still protected. The small body of an infant, if only compared to its head, it screams after the vulnerability of birth, it vomits, it thrashes, it struggles for life. And also, this one, it sets down roots. What does it seek from tainted water? What *idea* does the cipher show in its scream? Oh, if only I were a musician, I would know the sound's destruction." This describes the primary problem, as well as one of the next two biggest problems, and a host of other ones.     Those are hardly the only issues, and the solution is not yet evident. "The arrowheads carry the men aloft, but to what end? Whither does it seek to take them?" It's awfully inefficient as a method of killing them, if that's all it is, especially compared to bombs, tentacles, and unfolding blade-arms.     "Where are those who came most late? Into what position have they been added?" Finally addressing someone in particular, "Commander Volkov, can you recognize them? Can you see the piece of the pattern to which those consumed most recently have been added? From there we may glimpse its conclusion."     She continues, again speaking to all, "Be certain. This is not a battle. Do not be led astray. This is a nightmare made manifest. This is a curse."     Curses are her business, and the groundwork of the blessed purification, the counter-curse, has already been laid. It should work perfectly well on the humans in the battle, but for the Antegent, this is far from likely. She doesn't yet know why the dead were necessary to its pattern, but she knows they were, and that leaves clear what should be done--but not the 'when.' "If the spirits are freed from this tragedy, will their opponents cease to be? Will the pattern begin to collapse, or will it reach some other conclusion?"     Tamamo is left with many questions, and few ways to answer them, except to look, to hope others can see what she has yet to find, and to pull the trigger on that one ritual she's already set up. She hesitates, but even as she does nothing, the ritual is already active, as it had to be for it to be noticed by the opponent, and its exorcising effect will inevitably free the ghosts, regardless, unless efforts are made to disrupt her field of talismans. The living could accomplish such a disruption easily, but for those affected by the field, it would be a colossal effort.
Forte	Forte just... takes in everything, for a few precious seconds. He's not certain he can see a clear path to get to the reactor and the dragon at the center of all of this. Not right now. Not with the air full of other combatants and anti-air fire and - - Well, there's more pressing matters. Figuring out if this plan will even work at all, which is not something that should be tested for the first time when he's point blank right up against the dragon. And so he reaches out, comparing against his memory of a few minutes ago, before they all got drawn into this... finding something that's changed. Something small. A tree, a plant, a rock - something that's different between the past of five minutes ago and the present of forty years ago. And then he tries to eat it. Not... literally eat. Forte is an unfortunate combination of data-absorbing technology - the experimental GetAbility.bat program written by a programming genius that has yet to be recreated since, and mashed-up data and subroutines from dozens of cyberspace's toughest, most gluttonously insatiable virii (which are distressingly common). It's a bottomless stomach paired with unusually sharp teeth. Typically, it's held back, at least somewhat, so that Forte doesn't empty out entire public libraries on a daily basis. Now, he lets it loose - lets his data-based vampiric hunger reach out through his glowing hands, seeking what it can grip onto and pull into himself. This battlefield, this battle, isn't real... it's all information (or a dream) about a battle long ago. It should work. Forte's black-hole nature should start removing elements altogether... hopefully.
Gawain	As they step onto the battlefield, Gawain's armor and sword are at the ready. It's hard to breathe. A swamp of blood and gore painted red. Many monsters, two titans, and a dragon. His knightly instincts are at the ready, and as he spots one of those titans, he has some thoughts. At the very least, the incinerating fire is likely the best he can deal with without some mechanism of flight. First, to actually get towards that multi-story battletank. Gawain leaps into the air, trying to get over the swamp, a flick of his wrist setting Galatine alight to allow it to cut through any flying monsters that try to rip him apart. He's trying his hardest to avoid anything that messes with minds, as that's something he has no innate protection towards. Instead... As he lands, Gawain moves into a blurry dash through blood-coated snow, attempting to get even closer towards that tank (but not all the way there, as he does not want to be melted yet), and hopefully, figure out something important about the titan based on positioning and range of burning death hell. Specifically: If he lured it correctly, could it set another titan - or even the dragon - on fire? If the latter, perhaps it could be used advantageously.
Tony Stark	As people get ready and raring to go, Tony slides out a metallic briefcase, clearly a second suit. "I hope I brought enough to share with the whole class." He sighs, with a grim flippancy to his tone. Tony checks his watch as the briefcase, set on the floor, expands upward in a flow of nail-sized plates, expanding and interlocking into a humanoid shape. In the air, a hovering container-ship with large 'vooom'-ing repulsor engines and the blue-white nu-corporate aesthetic of the Avengers swings down. Side bays open to reveal an army of skeletal Legion drones and dome-topped gunbots. REALITY QUAKES, THE SKIES ASUNDER Stark flies up joined with the physical armor he arrived in, the twin Iron men splitting up once both reach the sky. The vision of the titans is enough for Tony to start off on, while his second suit begins leading the swarm of drones and flying Legion support units that descend on the meat grinder battles. "Bastion, how bad is it?" Stark asks, climbing into the flight canopy in Arthur's screaming wake. Uncharacteristically paused, the war AI responds after a moment: "Extremely suboptimal." "New York bad?" Tony asks, dodging around an aerial form and spinning through a twinned blast in return before resuming his climb. If Arthur had to make it, Tony would make sure he got there. Hovering before the transport as the drones try to alleviate pressure on every front, Bastion's deadpan is somehow grim. "Confirming: "New York Bad." The egregious CGI montage battle pornography is beyond the audience's ability to appreciate, for their souls have long since been deadened to the spectacle of violence.
Strawberry Princess	Any levelheaded ratiocination about patterns or alternate dimensions or a dreaming past flees Strawberry's head when that first breath of blood and death and fire hits her lungs. This isn't quite "real"; not in a traditional sense. But the parts of her brain that lurch into action now, overriding her shellshocked conscious mind, don't know that. I am being 12 years old in London, fighting dozens of a monster that will not die. I am being 17 in Argentina, losing too much blood to something made of tinsel and wire. I am being 23 in Russia-      Her hands move on their own accord as glassy-eyed soldiers crush around her; they flip switches on her crystal-tipped wand, spark it to a shuddering kind of life. In the deafening roar of battle, she can't hear its grinding boot-up sequence; against the lightning-lit snow, she can barely see the buttons she's supposed to press. It's all reflex anyway.      Reflex, too, catapults her into the third dimension on wings of white glitter and wraps her body in pastel pink-and-yellow regalia; steers her to twist out of the plunging path of one of the great arrow-jets, and draws her pistol to put a half-dozen rounds into its back as it passes. The first conscious thoughts that creep back into her awareness are still disjointed in time, past and present blurring together under the influence of adrenaline.      Where's Blueberry? (Dead for eight years.) Blackberry? (Haven't seen her in five.) Lilian? (Nowhere to be found.) Okay. Only Princess in play. Who has a plan? (Arthur's doing something in the sky...) On him.      Strawberry takes a spiraling, harrowing path upwards, swiftly catching up with Tony and Arthur as if she were a vulture riding an ultra-fast thermal. She is an appallingly effective air superiority unit. Whether it's the jet propulsion of the arrow-creatures, the lazy levitation of the seemingly psychic jellyfish, or something stranger and bespoke, she intuitively lines herself up to place bullets (or, if those prove insufficient, controlled flashes of the Annihilator Beam) in the exact trajectories they can't juke to avoid, while minimizing their threat to herself.      If her efforts are successful, the aggregate effect is to create a cylindrical no-fly zone, straight up, for Arthur to ascend along. A red carpet- less metaphorically a blue one, as alien blood or fine ash rain down from above with each engagement.
Lilian Rook	Several things happen all at once, as a group of high level Elites makes contact with the first Dragon-level Antegent ability of their careers. Lilian does her level best to analyze what she can for those seeking answers. Even as the local expert, trained the most in this world's history of conflict, with many long hours of classes and simulators, she struggles to put together the pieces here.     "We've seen in the present that it was originally rooted there." she says to Tamamo, having to use the radio even only a few feet away to be heard clearly. Somehow, the soundscape doesn't pierce or even burst the ears as it should, but still utterly consumes the noise of the individual that enters the air. "Tapping into that scuttled reactor must have been part of its original strategy. Antegent don't and can't use magic, so it's not drawing power from the Earth. The core is probably still active, even if it's been flooded. Looking at that thing, I wouldn't be surprised if it just thrives on decay. Or maybe some exotic energy? Maybe it's ensuring it can't be bombed too hard? Or it might have even seen its death coming. We don't know enough yet." She shakes her head at the rest. "Who knows. Sheer cruelty maybe. Or that's the best they can do after diving; not all of them are built equal."     Volkov is no stranger not just to the battlefield, but this *specific* battlefield. He and his diehard loyalists have already flipped down and sealed their helmets, white armour already splashed red up to the waist. Hand signals and broadcast lights on their HUDs are all they need to spring into action, spreading out so that they aren't susceptible to area attacks, finding cover they remember survives the fight for a while, and beginning their attack. Their modern, post-Onslaught rifles have a fairly distinct report and flash, making them relatively easy to pick out on the battlefield if one looks.     They're also considerably more effective than the older generations of weapons, not to mention their many years of experience since then, and dense trails of glowing bullets quickly begin ripping down the charging cannon fodder in the immediate area, securing a sort of bulkhead. Haggard soldiers of old, walking ghosts, quickly flood to fill the area, those engineers amongst them silently, automatically, deploying bundles of cable, sensor boxes, folding barricades, digging up shallow trenches, and slapping down old-model automatic guns, rapidly establishing a forward command post without thinking. A pair of armoured vehicles rumble to the fore across plastic bridges laid down, turning their sides to the enemy, and blasting away with their topside cannons.     "Not from here." he radios to Tamamo. "It may be impossible to find them in this. They may already be dead. Food for that nightmare's roots." There's a grim pause on the local tactical broadband. "It's stronger than before. Larger, and faster. It was not able to hold off the Solomonari before. Not for so long."     Even in this space of bounded hell, Tamamo can still feel that her divine ritual is active, however she can see no trace of its corners or its sacred lines and circles here. Though the two are co-spatial, they cannot be contemporaneous. Perhaps the field drawn by this creature separates the design too greatly. Or perhaps . . . no, it must be, that here in this place and time, these people are *alive*. Not cursed ghosts. Not yet.
Lilian Rook	Gawain makes his way over the battlefield as best he can. It seems he may be the most stand-out 'superhuman' here. There are no knights on the field but he, and technically, Lilian. Three incredibly mighty sorcerers astride flying horrors, of myths outside his country, and the countless walking dead, with no shades between. As long as he doesn't approach certain sections of the frontline, he appears to be out of range of the Messenger and Delusion types. Closing in on the battle of physical titans, he sees that the troops are, despite its intimidating presence, doing an able job of staying just out of its range and retreating while suffering few casualties.     They are clearly leading it into a direct confrontation with the super-tank, even more absurdly enormous up close, and enclosing it from all sides. Despite the apparent mismatch, he can assume that said vehicular behemoth once won this clash. Certainly though, the Antegent fortress --designated Immaculate/Aversary by Volkov's records-- seems to either have no care for its brethren, or literally can't sense them. If he were to push it back into their lines somehow, it'd cause great damage to their densely packed numbers.     He encounters Complications. Namely, as soon as he takes to the air, he is assaulted by waves of flying monsters. A wave of Galatine's fire turns several to flaming crisps, careening off in various directions and shrieking with the grating chill of old dive bombers, but as they do, he feels ominous, prickling, stabbing pains all over his body, like countless needles shallowly puncturing his skin. When the sword itself slices through several of them, though, he lands safely, then experiences a flash of agonizing pain, pulsing through his body in what feels like a wave of random flashes.     The monsters he'd just bisected, falling from the air, ansi glitch. That's likely the best way that anyone could think to describe it. Visual errors that feel sickening to look at. Blocky flickers of red and black static, like the death of an evil screen monitor. A sharp, harsh hiss of white noise. A moment later, they're back in one piece, in the place they were several seconds ago, and streaking through the air again. The pain ceases hitting him, but he can feel numerous raw wounds under his armour. He gets the ill-boding sense that, were he much less tough, he'd have died already.     It's semi-similar for Tony's drones. It's be an incomprehensible mess, were Bastion not keeping tabs. He gets a non-stop feed of real time updates as several of them blink off the radar from enemy attacks, and some right on their own. An ongoing killfeed lists numerous Beast class Antegent and several Spirit class felled within a minute of operation and combined fire. However, multiple life signs spaz out on the monitor, causing inexplicable electronic flickers and shortly after, the drone that'd eliminated them reports enormous damage, and frequently shuts down on the spot.     Tactical analysis paints a bizarre but consistent picture. Technical diagnostics report no cause of failure whatsoever, nor any intrusion or irregularity in Bastion's software. The only common element is thus: the drones are fine after firing bullets and missiles, but suffer damaging malfunctions immediately after a good fraction of their uses of microwave weapons, and fully half of their repulsor attacks. Antegent killed by those two vectors don't seem to *stay* dead.
Lilian Rook	Strawberry taking to the air finds that she can easily outmaneuver the flying Antegent individually, or in coordinated squadrons; though lethally fast and aggressive, they don't possess a true sense of aerial combat. Her highly developed sense for aerial tacticals brings up subtle red flags to her. It doesn't feel like fighting enemies that really *know* how to dogfight. A step up from avoiding tracking shots, a step down from avoiding other mahous in training. It feels sort of like fighting an improvising enemy. No, an enemy with damaged flight?     Again, bullets into the motive organs of these enemies causes them to bleed and crash, or else spiral and be obliterated by anti-air fire immediately. But the moment she employs the beam directly against a tougher example, though annihilated immediately, the ash cloud crackles offensively, and she feels a scorching impact diffuse itself across her whole shimmer aura. It feels like something had just tried to take a chunk of mass out of her, broken into thousands of small, random areas, blocked only by her aura, and still only partially. Painful scrapes all over, abrading her costume, or mysteriously under it.     Arthur's gate should not be here, but it is. The power that flows from it fills Strawberry with a connected stream of operational energy, filling up her timer, yet seemingly passes right through the storm, non-interacting as if completely out of phase. However, what it *does* interact with, is the 'Solomonari' that Volkov mentioned. The fur-cloaked and masked men atop slavering golden winged serpents. He seeks *them* soak up the power, and the intensity of their barrage intensifies significantly. The storm conjured by them begins to expand and pick up. The winds make it harder and harder for everything else to fly. Lightning bolts thunder downwards at twice the rate as before. Tamamo feels the slew of hexes being thrown down grow incrementally in power. The primary Antegent's bloodcurdling racket changes in pitch and timbre, and its pattern of evasive movement begins to slow, forcing the omnidirectional blurring spasm of its blind head, bloody maw, and boneless neck, into a posture mostly of blasting down endless attacks with intercepting black spittle.     The Antegent struck down by the Solomonari, regardless of attack type, seem to cause no feedback. Not to them, and not to Arthur. One of the riders of the three-headed monstrosities makes his way over to Strawberry and Arthur through the storm. Raising his staff, he bellows a single, untranslatable word, and the winds and hail buffeting the two suddenly alleviate; they gain immunity to the storm, and thus increased aerial superiority. He enters the cleared zone created by Strawberry, and the three heads of his nightmare steed scream fire in all directions, scything down a reinforcing wave in the seemingly endless onslaught. "Where did you come from?" he somehow shouts over the thunder and lightning. "How many reinforcements? I must know!"     Seeing the clear zone, Lilian takes to the air herself once she has guaranteed Tamamo is safe. Unlimbering her own rifle, she blows through a score of ground troops, then turns to the aerial fighters, unleashing a wave of black and red fire magic. Anyone watching can see several of those antegent distort faintly, and approximately *half* their injuries reverse themselves, though most crash regardless. Lilian reels as dozens of minor burns blacken pieces of her suit, and a streak of her face turns red.
Lilian Rook	Forte finds no shortage of things that have *changed*, but, at first, nothing that seems like an incongruity. Nothing that couldn't have been there, and then altered in the intervening time. It takes him a while to finally stumble across a wave of unbloodied footsteps near to the lake, where few corpses have fallen, and trails of black casings at odds with the brass ones littered around like grass. Absorbing the data, he--     CLASS: CIPHER / LEVEL: DRAGON -- Navsegda Prizrak     Execute: As long as the user is not killed, revert to state up to ||USER LIMIT: 4 SECONDS|| ago and replay one interaction. Cannot re-execute until user has exceeded original time of reversion. Cannot state-revert overlapping a previous execution.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Surge     He crashes through the storm, rising to the Gate. Around him... piano keys, drifting in the air, finally aligned with the Gate now that he's near enough thanks to the others helping him get there. Arthur Lowell stands astride his broom, and his fingers dance. Let there be light. Let spires of crystal and skies of metal dance in the heaven and let them bring light as has never been known before. The LOSAF Directed Energy Weapon peeks into this world, fueling the Gate to breach it. Only a tiny fraction is consumed. Light pours through from uncountable metal plates and innumerable crystal spires. The LOSAF Directed Energy Weapon unleashes itself on the battlefield. >Arthur: Aim for Solomonari     The light pours over them, turning their immediate vicinity into a flood of available magic. It locks on and provides a bottomless pool of mana, offering up more and more whenever there's demand. But that is only a fraction. Arthur depends on the overflow. He turns about, shifting his aim and his focus as he stabilizes in the storm. >Arthur: How many reinforcements?     "Thirty and drones!" He shouts. "All we could get!" >Arthur: Aim for Strawberry Princess     "That beam can remove anything, right? *Anything?*" Comes a soft voice, from within the light. Music. Notes. "This thing's too big for me. Too much. Wrong class, I don't got the raw *destruction* power of a Princess-class player. Only time I got through this kind of hell last time, it was dozens of Elites and sixteen top-level players, and I don't got that now. I really, really gotta depend on you for this one, okay? 'Cause I can't do this. So... will you please, *please* help me get through this one?"     Every ounce of oferflow energy from the LOSAF Directed Energy Weapon is immediately funneled into Strawberry Princess. It's only what can fit through one Gate, but it's magical energy, pure and condensed, produced by a magical engine the size of a small planet. "I know you never open up the throttle. Meltdowns, and radiation, and shit like that. But this one time, I really need the pedal to the metal."                            +----------------------+                                                      |    DUO FRAYMOTIF     |                                                      | -------------------- |                                                      |                      |                                                      |  TONAL ANNIHILATION  |                                                      |                      |                                                      +----------------------+                               "I'm countin' on you to save me, Strawberry Princess. Please."     For some reason, he feels like those words are a key that turn a lock.
Forte	There. There's something that shouldn't be here. The footsteps, and the black casings... ... As he lays a glowing hand on the casings, taking them in, his system pings - GetAbility.bat, with its original function intact, interprets what Forte absorbs and processes it, gaining a new defensive ability, likely sourced directly from the dragon. This will undoubtedly come in handy, later. The process, however, immediately confirms something - or, rather, deconfirms it. This is reality, not some sort of dream or datascape... or, at least, if it is, it's operating on some higher level than Forte can interact with and thus is effectively reality to him. So this isn't just a projected dream or something else. That it's able to alter such is... more than worrying. The magnitude of what's being dealt with sinks in for Forte, finally, causing him a moment of pause. So. Bullet casings, and footprints. Why is it leaving bullet casings and footprints here? What part of the timeline gets altered by it leaving bullet casing and footprints? He stares at the altered artifacts for a few moments longer... "... Oh. I'm an idiot," he says to himself, quietly. He starts following the footprints, picking up speed as he skims across the ground. He shouldn't be wondering why bullet casings and footprints have been left here... ... He should be looking for *what left them*.
Lilian Rook	Regathering her breath, Lilian responds to pings for her status. "I'm not hurt badly. It's fine." she breathes out. "I'm-- this feels familiar. That-- that 'counterattack'. That kind of damage though --I think . . . it'll get worse, if you trigger it more." There are little hitches and skips in her radio transmissions. "It's no wonder that --nobody else could win." A deep breath, and one hundred rounds of automatic fire later.     "Let's-- check what we know. I-- Gawain and I. We both used different kinds of fire magic. There was a --small-- 'counterattack'. But his sword --it got him then, but not when I used my rifle. The blade is worse than the fire. That's . . ." Upon the suggestion of it being Galatine's nature, she flashes the red light. "There's no-- these things don't have any concept of holy and unholy --good and evil. It can't be kinetic energy. Bullets work. Swords don't." An analytical pause, audible reload and four sustained bursts.     "The beam was worse than the flames. The repulsors were worse than the microwaves. The field effects are --fine. Magic enters here. These people aren't dead. Everything here is real --not simulated. Actions occur physically. But those ones un-occur, partially or fully. They're --corrected? Disconnected. Effect decoheres from cause and the user triggers tThat automatic damage. I think --I'm guessing, but that feels right. It's . . ."     She's asked about sympathetic magic. Reaffirming the Antegent cannot use magic. "They don't. It can't be that kind of thing --sympathetic that is. That automatic attack --it can't be a resonating connection. We're already *inside* its domain. If it worked that way, we'd be connected at all times --it could just scrub us instantly like that. It can't be a sympathy mechanism, because like this, we're all 'touching it' at all times."     Tony asks about energy transfer. "The reactor's flooded --it won't explode if we just shoot it. Even that thing though-- it can't be extending its roots into the core itself-- it's still too hot, and this isn't an Immaculate type. It's soaking in the radioactive water. Drinking corium." Arthur, however, has something to say that obviously leaves some kind of mark on her. She goes dead silent for several seconds.     'Maybe it's not 'swords don't'. Maybe it's 'swords didn't', or 'swords won't'. This thing's got a time-tangle. *Have* to bet that it's only got one trick up its sleeve and we're seeing it from a lot of angles. If this thing is running *more* options, we're dead already.'     "Arthur is . . . I think that 'feels' closer to right. Less wrong."     Forte goes chasing those tracks. This is easier said than done. Doing so requires that he make his way to the front lines, and then cross them. Shortly, he is in the way of countless flying projectiles and blasts. Organic spikes and stranglers, mass-flaying rays, psychic tearing and implosions, even exotic flashes that scramble his data --but also the increasingly real danger of friendly fire. The lines to the rear aren't carefully aiming; the carpet of enemies is far too thick to care, and the amount of firepower turning midnight into morning is necessary just to keep up a crawling advance. There's a point at which he needs to make his way through a hellscape of creeping explosions, and keep low under hails of gunfire choking the air so thickly that there's no space to dodge between bullets, even if he could.
Lilian Rook	Even without triggering that awful 'counterattack' Lilian named, the battlefield itself is a *suicidal* threat to venture into alone. Even along this much less traveled side path, of no real tactical value. All statistical odds point to him dying repeatedly --so it's a very, *very* good thing he has just obtained the means to call for high volumes of retries. Even if feels nauseously 'wrong' to do so.     Advancing this way takes him closer to the Antegent --he knows its name somehow, what the Russians called, it --that program flash of Navsegda Prizrak in his processor-- that anyone should want to go. Not close enough to really menace it, but to a sheltered, rocky rise by the once-frozen lake, now melted by ambient heat of gunfire and bodies, where it flows into the river that feeds into the reactor. In the cover of that rock is an especially grim sight.     A score of bodies, outfitted similarly to Volkov his men. Or what's left of them anyways. The rocky cove is painted red as if someone had thrown a bucket all around it, where mangled corpses are strewn as white and red lumps across the ground and slumped against the walls. It looks as if . . . something had 'subtracted' ten kilos of mass from them, in random chunks throughout their volume. Like . . . bad sectors in a hard drive. Of course the effects are as fatal as they are gruesome. Between them is a device large and heavy enough that it must have been transported between two people, anchored into the ground. There's an electronic keypad, flashing and beeping. It says ARMED: FIRE SIGNAL READY. It is, evidently from even a quick scan, a bomb. A very, very big bomb. It's be trivial for Forte to detonate it. All he'd have to do is look for the detonator, or hypothetically just push the button and kill himself. It was all ready to fire too, when these men died. No, given their wounds, they weren't killed by combat Antegent. They must have done . . .     The bomb has been detonated before. It's safe to assume that Forte doing so will flay him to pieces just like those men. Brave souls they were, resourceful and quick, but their plan was doomed from the start. They had no way of knowing.
Tony Stark	The overall battle is difficult for Tony to track even for a genius. Causality is nonsense with cause and effect mildly unlinked. His more advanced drones equipped with more directed energy type weapons start winking out of existance in recoil fire, while the more conventional types keep blasting. He wins and loses a hundred fights in heartbeats. The numbers will only matter to him hours later. This is why he didn't put dollar signs next to anything. Accountants were sanity. With Bastion managing the Stark Droneswarm, spare Legion units begin riding idle energy weapon platforms like jousting horses to literally grapple with the the flying forms. Tactics shift. Volkov's forces get the bulk of the conventional fire support, giving them as much focus to retain their hypereffective mark for as long as possible. MEANWHILE: Joining Arthur in his ascent, Tony lingers with the storm-wizards long enough to become blessed by them, and then hanging in the air and... "Proving causality. Proving... Everything in order? A mathematical proof!" Tony smirks, hovering in the storm for cover. "And they said it'd never come up in a real situation." Tony said that. At the time. Opening up a widebeam band, Stark's suit begins beaming 'Loss Proofs' via brute force towards the Antegent. There was no possible way that her shots would backfire the way they did, the math didn't work. The fact that he was spam-proving that magic *was* real escapes him in the potentially futile input fever.
Gawain	Well, fighting these things is a *terrible* idea. Gawain sheathes his sword after he lands, with raw wounds, pain, and a lack of effect. He'll have to use raw force, as he grimaces, pain wracking his body. Luckily, he was tough enough to take it. Tony tells Gawain it'd be best for him to cook off the underground lake. Gawain starts blurring forward, away from that tank, and towards the Dragon, specifically the river and the lake. It's going to feel awful and hurt, but he wants to scout ahead again. He can't fire without taking a major risk that could kill him, feed the Antegent, and ruin everything. Gawain's scouting searches for specific information. He wants to find the best firing position for trying to just cook the lake away. He knows his fire could *do it*, but he has no idea what would happen to him. Once there... <"Tamamo, could I get some sunlight? The natural stuff may be what I need to survive any feedback.">
Tamamo	Tamamo watches, looking for answers. In particular, the moment Lilian leaves her, she watches her fly up into the air, strike the enemy, and then reel as if struck, while the enemy regenerate. What Tamamo can't see is what struck her. It's far too mild to call that 'odd.' It's with more than a little, and broadly uncharacteristic, panic that she calls out "Lilian! Are you hurt?" A short, earnest query that comes back with an answer that only somewhat calms her.     She can't afford to lose sight of things just yet. Finding a way to win the battle is still the best route to bringing everyone home safely. It's not as if they could just give up on the souls trapped here, or they wouldn't have charged into the maelstrom when it appeared. Courageous warriors are troublesome, like that. They take worrying risks.     For that matter, it would be dangerous for Tamamo to be... anywhere, really. Here behind the forward line, pushed by the modern soldiers with their modern equipment, momentarily turning this part of the battle in their favor, will just have to do for now. Her ritual is still active, though less visible than expected. That 'it is here' is important.     It's strange. The only conclusion is that 'those here are alive,' though they 'should' be dead. They'd died, but that death had been overturned. Aloud, "Cyclically, something is occurring, unstable, an orbit like a spiral, outwardly directed, to growth and escape. Along each path, if it is to grow, it must consume." Consume what?     The hollow-eyed soldiers. Alive, but repeatedly killed. "Is it the consumption of their spirit?" But... "Why must it take them by pieces? Must they be broken, ere they are swallowed? Has it not done so?" Lines of men shooting themselves, or worse, she's already spotted. "Can it be so simple as 'winning the battle'? No, no, I shall not believe it so. The skein will not turn and draw with ease, but with careful effort."     Though it may be wholly useless, if the not-ghosts around her really are quite alive, for now, then there is something she can do for them, however ephemeral her aid. Withdrawing a fresh stack of talismans, she launches a cloud of them into the air, far more than she's ever really needed to before. They fly out as if pulled by threads, attaching themselves to the armor of the non-modern soldiers ahead of her, the old ones she'd come here to exorcise, filling them with blessings of healing, energy, and clear-headed concentration, like the perfect dream cocktail of pick-me-up drinks for anyone who'd ever pulled a desperate all-nighter.     Others are far enough away she'd need a little time and attention to aim her healing their way, but Gawain's request is something she can entrust to another tool available to her. Her mirror, in particular, needed no other use for the moment, with these others in front to shield her. Upon hearing him, Tamamo directs it to hold high above her, and then wordlessly (but for that which is silently mouthed) shines with bright, impossibly natural sunlight. It reaches like a pillar to the mirror, which angles to catch Gawain like a spotlight.
Forte	Forte abuses the heck out of the timeline to get through the battlefield. It's not a pleasant experience at all. And then, the bomb site. It takes the navi a while to process what he's seeing, and that's only with Lilian helping to prompt him. The people with random... sectors removed... give him pause. He could, *possibly*, survive having a few of those happen to him - but he doubts that the counterattack will happen with just a 'few'. One thing at a time. Forte goes looking for the detonator - if it's on one of the corpses, if it's nearby...
Strawberry Princess	Blood wells up from weird scrapes, on and through Strawberry's body. She learns her lesson the first time: the Annihilator Beam elicits an inevitable and unavoidable backlash when used on these Antegent. (Why? How? Figure that out when you get to it.) There are now two timers running on her; one is the wand's, and one is the bleeding. She stops the second timer by tapping her wand's crystal to the scrape-wound, cauterizing it with a pinprick of searing light, and then checks the status of the first.      04:33      This one time, five minutes doesn't feel like enough.      Arthur solves that, as she floats up beside him. Even with her visor, designed to shield her eyeballs from the flash of the Annihilator Beam, she still instinctively shields her face with her forearm as those gates open and bathe them in magical light. A funny kind of crookedy smile, rueful and teary and proud, creeps over her face as he passes the metaphorical baton to her. Her wand crackles and sparks with the unnatural infusion of energy; the numbers on its display go wild. "Mister Lowell..."      88:88      It isn't necessary this time, but she reaches out and takes his hand anyway. Then she takes his hand again. And again. And again. And again. And one more hand reaches up and covers his eyes, sparing him the view. "You've been so brave," she says, her voice reassuring and marvelling and thrumming with a slight echo. "It'll all be okay. I promise. Together, we can kill anything."      Turning to the Solomonar and Tony Stark, her face still wears that smile, albeit with its forced reassurance fading. "More than thirty," she says simply.
Strawberry Princess	Ghostly limbs are prying their way out of Strawberry's body as she speaks, materializing above her skin and solidifying into entire bodies as they 'exit' her. Each one of them- a half-dozen in total, by the end of it- is the ghost of a seventeen-year-old girl. Their bodies are ethereally pink, like her Shimmer Aura forcefields but spun out into full humanoid shapes. Each one of them wears a mahou's dress and a tiara; each one of them carries a crystal-tipped wand, sans reactor.      Their facial features are too smoothed-over and abstracted to identify, but each has a dramatically broken left arm, and each has a deep gash on the temple where Strawberry's scar would be. The broad wings that are transparent glitter on Strawberry are stylized into solid appendages on them, and no distinction is made between the stuff of their costumes and the stuff of their flesh.      In perfect unison, each of the six ghostly girls swoops down to the ground and grabs a pistol from one of the many fallen soldiers. In perfect unison, each of them spreads their wings and takes to the sky again. Moving into position towards the reactor building and the Dragon-class antegent, they mob down anything in their way in a hail of perfectly-coordinated gunfire, a swarm of piranhas coordinating to strip larger prey to the bone.      They form up at a roughly safe distance around the reactor building, taking cues from the Solomonari for what exactly "safe" is. They're in three pairs of two, forming an equilateral triangle with the installation at the center. One eidolon in each pair levels its wand at the building; the other keeps its pistol drawn, running airspace defense against lesser Antegent and readying to shoot down any of the Dragon-level monster's spit with a quick flare from its wand.      Three unbearable points of light form to illuminate the battlefield, outshining even the lightning flashing above- one at the tip of each "designated shooter" eidolon's wand. Three shrill, thready flywheel-shrieks vie to drown out every other noise, competing with the Antegent's ceaseless scream.      Strawberry's grip tightens (and tightens, and tightens) around Arthur's hand. If the "backlash" applies to what she's about to do to the reactor building, and it applies through her eidolons, then the response to an attack of that magnitude might just kill her. She hasn't lived this long by taking gambles like that. But here, right now... this feels Important.      Sight is erased in a flash of white as the three LOSAF-fueled Annihilator Beams fire simultaneously. Hearing follows a moment later, as a reverberating shockwave rattles the battlefield. The three beams converge- not on the Antegent itself, of course, but on the building from which its root-fingers draw their power. If all goes well, they'll annihilate the entire site right out from under it.
Lilian Rook	Forte reports his findings. Initially, he believes them to have been an original batch of troops whose actions unhappened. "That's-- the counterattack, isn't it? That can't be right. Because that didn't happen back then. It didn't-- have that power before, right? Only here. If there's-- those must be the men who came here and disappeared, right? Or some of them. Those uniforms are new. Post-Onslaught. They stand out. If they're dead though --they weren't resurrected and replayed. Outsiders don't reset. They stayed dead and this thing got stronger."     The bomb is enquired about. Lilian sounds like she's audibly wracking her brains. Starting to run out of energy to think about this at the same time she's trying to dogfight and provide ground support at the same time. "A bomb destroys itself when it goes off. So if the explosion-- the bomb would still be there, if it was countered. But they wouldn't. They caused it. Tony's drones are going down, not him. The drones are-- they fight on their own. Setting off a bomb --the explosion is what kills the enemy, but the cause of the bomb exploding is the users." A brief lull in the fighting. ". . . is there-- something wrong with my radio?"     Gawain's movement is much too fast for the giant Antegent to track or chase. His original plan of leading it back into its own lands won't work that way, so it becomes the historical clash of the tank, the massed forces, and itself, as has been replayed countless times before. The report of the main cannons behind him is skull-numbing. Enough to almost trip him up from the vibration through the ground. The grinding and crashing of metal against carapace, of flames and chattering gunfire and shells, follows him to his destination.     Racing there means plunging into the same hell as Forte. Backed by Tamamo's sunlight, the legendary knight's blessed toughness sees him through without need for resets and glitches, but it's like fire walking; there's no way to avoid being harmed, so going as quickly as possible and neither flinching nor doubling back is the surest way to minimize how badly he's burned. Or in this case, shot and flayed. His best bet for an angle is approximate to that bomb site --the soldiers there had chosen a good tactical location. However, it'll be impossible for him to boil off the whole lake without dealing some damage to the Antegent in the process. Granted, fire magic, for some reason, only half-backfires, but he should be prepared to eat a *lot*.     Tony's legionnaires engaging in physical combat with their foes find their mark without issue. Grapples, tackles, punching, tearing --like bullets, they work as well as they can be expected, and unlike swords, no automatic wrath is incurred. This is unfortunately much less effective than their energy weaponry would have been, but it's something.     Securing Volkov's position begins having a snowballing effect. The Russians succeed in patching into the old tacnet. He must have memorized the codes for forty years --or perhaps they have been seared into his brain ever since. Bastion can pick up on the rapid increase in tactical coherence around the middle spearhead. The Antegent casualties mount while the human casualties decrease. Armoured vehicles form up and begin crawling ahead, spraying anti-infantry fire and high explosives to thin the lines and shield the infantry behind them with their bulk. Aircraft make repeated strafing passes over the line as operators in the back line paint the perimeter with laser targeters.
Lilian Rook	Tamamo's talismans intensify it even further. There's no reprisals for merely increasing the strength of the soldiers. The line to both flanks begins to surge. Antegent 'elite units' crumple under especially lucky shots from fresh and alert snipers. Artillery lands in just the right places. Gaunt zombies running on adrenaline and stimulants work together arm in arm. Something seems to click for Lilian, and this time black sparks coruscate down her arm and throw a forking bolt of searing white lightning, obliterating a rank of those psychic horrors, shearing through their barriers instantly. The lightning *does not* have any effect on her.     Volkov's team rapidly chatters back and forth coordinates --memorized and rehearsed countless times for this moment-- to drop ordnance exactly where they know enemies *will* be. Responding to the most disastrous moments of the battle before they'd happened. Dragging comrades that had died out of the way with their own arms. Picking off specific Antegent burned into their nightmares with rifles, grenades, and rockets, that have advanced 40 years just to kill them. It's working. They're making headway. The enemy line is starting to collapse. Even the giant nightmare is starting to buckle under the redoubled fire on it, and the crashing storm. It howls from repeated missile and air strikes, both sources of fire, and the freed-up spotters, too far away for it to mind control.     Tony's proofs are sound. What happens defies logic, but not description. The feed running through his helmet distorts in real time. Self-correcting. Nothing has accessed his software. His systems are secure. Yet small pieces of critical proofs bug out in a visual sense, turning into error rectangles of red and black static, and blinking out. He could swear he sees the words WRONG INVALID IMPLAUSIBLE ERROR here and there, but it's too quick, and the computer records nothing.     Analyzing it with his STEM brain, there is a pattern to this too. His establishing statements --his a priori-- are under attack. The nuclear material in Strawberry's wand is a given. The reactor is a given. The wand itself is *not*. The magical beam is *not*. Therefore, the fact that an Antegent was vapourized IS NOT. Her gun is plausible. Propellant and lead exist in abundance. The fact that an Antegent was punctured by bullets IS. It's only able to deny the existence of certain things, revising those proofs. Rescinding cause to alter effect.     There is no mention of anything Strawberry has done to affect anything other than Antegent.     Forte finds the detonator without much issue. True to estimate, the corpse's thumb is already holding the button into a depressed position. It's been used. It could be reused if he simply pries it free, resets the cap, and double presses it again. However bad of an idea that may be.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Close your eyes     There is so much happening right now. Revelations of ability -- that Strawberry Princess can do something he's never seen, and that this Antegent can create a hazard, even unintentional, of faulty loops, improper erasure, or even effective causality obliteration, through unthinkable counterattack. But, for a moment, Arthur need not worry; he is busy being saved.     A final chord is struck in the piano keys that float near him. Hands slam down and energy surges. More and more, more fuel, more to donate, more mana on tap. His mouth is agape and his eyelids aren't enough to hold back the light, so it shines through Strawberry Princess's hands just as the light outside might shine through the other way. It's within and without, flashing and flickering as he brings in every ounce of power that he can funnel into a woman whose destructive capacity must be defined and described through entirely theoretical models of particles that don't exist.     Arthur Lowell has no idea what's happening. His eyes are closed and they stay shut in the middle of the most lethal battlefield he's been on in something close to eight years of real-time and several eternities, ready to be eviscerated by violent monsters the minute Strawberry Princess is just a little bit less reliably heroic. Because he said "please save me", and because at the end of the day, he better be what he is: An absolute moron, of the kind who won't and *can't* meaningfully engage with this monster's causal powers, except to enhance one who will.
Lilian Rook	Tamamo's awareness of the state of soldiers she heals grows into a sort of bleary composite. There are holes in it, somehow. But they know things. Amidst all their terror, their rage, their numbed feelings, the immeasurable shock and trauma this environment does to the human brain, the strategies they execute on with almost pure muscle memories, there are things slightly misplaced. They are cognizant of the new arrivals, but don't seem to care; they don't have the time to puzzle at them. Those close to the lake dimly remember the soldiers that passed by with the bomb, and assume they're dead --though this happened long before.     None of them are aware that they have fought and died countless times like this, but all of them share a faint, nameless malaise. An intensity of deja vu bordering on numb existential horror. The primitive, instinctual feeling that they've been on this battlefield for a very long time. A sort of bleak surety that it is even more important that they win than they thought when they first came here. A willingness to sacrifice themselves greater than should normally be on any soldier's mind, with a dulled sense of their own mortality. Occasionally, one simply intuits something about to happen with his gut, without any reason to. They don't remember, but occasionally, random chance conspires to bring something Similar in front of them, and they respond on autopilot.     Tamamo's question to herself is something that Lilian seizes on, after that lightning attack, clearing yet more space for the bolstered assault line to surge into. It's something that makes sense to her after Arthur thinks the bomb may be a paradox, and have caused the slain Antegent to have trapped itself. "I don't-- think so. I don't think it's --it got itself stuck. It wouldn't lure people in if it was trapped. I think it's-- trying this again. It's going to keep trying the same battle forever until-- it won, and because it won, it survived and because it survived, it isn't --dead anymore. These people have been winning this battle every day for-- 40 years, Christ almighty. But it's --gotten stronger, so--"     Then there's twenty seconds chillingly free of any kind of radio error. "Have you thought about it? The way they're fighting. This kind of suicidal behaviours; it's like eusocial swarm; ants that chew the heads off the enemy nest even while their legs are being pulled apart. But most of these aren't even similar to each other. They aren't grinding against the line because they know they're expendable; Antegent don't --can't-- reproduce on Earth, so when these die, they won't be replaced. But they're fighting like this anyways."     "We know our side wins every time at this level of enemy strength, because they have no choice but to win. As long as some humans remain after them, humanity will continue, and so they're willing to die. Look at them. They don't have a future; they can only hope to kill as many Antegent as they can on their way out. So why would the Antegent fight just like them? They aren't backed into a corner at all."     "But the Dragon-class-- doesn't want to --it hasn't accepted death, so --everything here suffers over and --again. You can't destroy --thoughts with cannons."     The Solomonari nods solemnly towards Arthur, mostly only visible for the tip of the antlers affixed to his pagan mask. "We welcome even that. That brings our number to ten. Pray to the powers below that it be enough, that the devil take it if not the storm and fire."
Tony Stark	Bastion, a War-AI developed entirely to manage massive droneswarms of dummy bodies, is entirely in his element. Each of the Twenty-Three gain ablative extras that replace themselves. Ammo appears in their hands. Jams are slapped clear of weapons. The conventional-styled drones form a close-air-support swarm that is terrifyingly micromanaged, with the un-paired beam and microwave drones switching to an electronic warfare team that begin Mathematically Proving the success of the assault. Each drone, individually, begins self-proving battle eventualities. Shots that Could Theoretically strike vital spots on Volkov's elite stack are repeatedly disproven as the tiniest changes in the swarm thus posit a new tactical reality. That tactical reality continues tesselating outward in complexity, and at the center is one red-eyed frame. MEANWHILE, TONY: In the storm, Tony fights a war not of beams and blasts and heroic fists. He fights a war of finishing a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle across from a petulant child playing Calvinball and eating the pieces. The focus narrows. Many certainties are given up. >>THEORY: The wand is a 'gun'. Proofs begin stampeding through, entirely focused on a hundred datapoints of corroborating evidence. Comparison-analytics smash the deletions over and over. It has to have an answer. If it must force cause and effect through without 'magic' being taken into account, how does it explain all the 'but it's a gun' data? The pen-walls of proofs mount up. The Antegent will have to show its work.
Lilian Rook	Tony's warring proofs become a hideously complex nonsense nightmare of cascading logical faults. The assertion that Strawberry's WAND can be a GUN is DENIED. MAGIC is something that EXISTS but not the specific brand of the PURIFIER. However, the REACTOR exists, as does it NUCLEAR APPARATUS, because the Antegent is literally standing on one, and depending on the existence and function of nuclear material and nuclear physics. It cannot be denied. The wand as a NUCLEAR ENTITY can be proven to inflict GRIEVOUS NUCLEAR HARM via ENERGETIC REACTION. Therefore the WAND is a NUCLEAR WEAPON. Secondary damage from the reactor is caused by NUCLEAR DETONATION. Thus a NUCLEAR WEAPON is, and was originally, PRESENT and VALID. Q.E.D.     The Eidolons pick up scattered weapons without issue. Forming a lethally well-coordinated squad, their diffuse presence becomes an exponential force multiplier. The bulk of flying Antegent are fighting at the front. Those still patrolling around the main event, attempting to hold back the Solomonari, are few in number, and quickly repulsed by the suddenly very formidable group of aerial combatants. Strawberry has plenty of clear space and time to charge up, behind her screen of otherselves.     The heavy water vapourizes instantly, exploding into a mushroom cloud of semi-toxic steam, flickering with embers of deuterium plasma. A tremendous hole blooms into existence down the entire length of the artificial lake. Concrete, boron, and graphite sublimate in an instant. White hot nuclear fire explodes directly upwards in a glowing blue pillar of cherenkov radiation, as the melting core vents its explosive guts into the Antegent above. The building crumbles into so much ash and debris all at once, then explodes outwards in all directions, going from reinforced structure to violent dust storm in under a second.     Deprived of footing, the shrieking, hideous, bloody-toothed Antegent topples from the air. It screams unholy murder all the way through the long fall to the ground, focusing all of its black bile in a supersonic stream aimed just for the three Elites that had directly participated in the attack. Fast and dense enough to skewer at least one and overpenetrate. Corrosive enough, in an inexplicable non-chemical way, to lethally wound the others with its splash. The move isn't tactical; it radiates the briefly comprehensible sentiment of *spite*.     Long seconds later, it crashes into the smouldering, molten crater. Its 'fingers' are burnt and crushed by the collapsing building. The heat of the ractor sears its house-sized, wrapped corpse-shaped body, causing it to writhe like a salted slug. The backlash isn't entirely avoided; the event is implausible enough that it can be a vector for an attack, but it's diffused across Tony, Arthur, and Strawberry three ways, lessening the impact. Still, it's worse than before. It feels sort of like g-forces, but in a direction that can't be comprehended. As if their bodies had been stretched and pulled and torn across an axis that they can't perceive, for just a moment of heinous, agonizing stress. Hundreds of tiny wounds, randomly scattered around their mass. It might be sheer luck, in conjunction with their durability, that none of them include an instant brain hemorrhage.     The Solomonari let loose a simultaneous battle cry, their voices amplified and carried by the storm, and joined by the unholy shriek of their nightmare steeds. They swoop in as a circling group, descending on the fallen monster and pounding it with concentrated blasts of lightning, streamers of hellfire, bellowed curses and hexes of decay and death. Volkov's spearhead is cutting all the way to the reactor. The operators have its laser coordinates.
Tony Stark	As the Solomnari begin closing down to pound the fallen Antegent, Tony is hit with the improbability-probable backlash. System alerts fill his entire screen. His proof-ing continues unabated. The entire wall of support-math from Tony's suit is directed like a chanted ward. >> PROOF: The Three Affected By The Backblast Are Alive Afterwards. MEANWHILE: Bastion's drone-swarm switches to a far more offensively beamed threat, a proof in brass and high-explosive tipped munitions. >> PROOF: This Kills You, And So You Die Over and over. The Somonari's magic, Strawberry's titanic blast, and above all 'okay, it's a bomb, and so you die' repeated like a priest over an exorcism. Forte's bomb that *did* go off is a singular proof, a data-point. This kills you. You die. A bomb goes off and you die.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry isn't looking at the explosion- she doesn't need to, already watching the fantastical reactor fireball through a dozen pairs of ghostly eyes. She's focused on Arthur, reassuring him with her steady touch; holding one hand over his eyes, holding two more over his ears, holding his hand and arm with a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. Her touch says "you're safe", and it says "everything is okay", and it says "thank you for helping". Those hands can't shield him from the bone-rattling noise of the triplicate Annihilator Beams, but if anything, that's a sign that things are going well.      It's those ghostly eyes that see the stream of supersonic bile first. Strawberry straightens up, fear jolting her spine straight, and tries to say something over the radio- but the abrupt pain of the G-force-like backlash, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, rips it out of her mouth.      Plan B. One of her visible eidolons swoops down next to Lilian, lithobraking from the dive in a way that would break human ankles. Its voice is unfamiliar- clear, gentle, sharp; not hoarse in the least- but the single word it utters might spark recognition.      "Bissotwo."
Gawain	Gawain is in NUKING POSITION - but then Strawberry fires first. He hangs back, as the groups pincer in. He's a bit out of the way - near that bomb - to actually move forward and strike without taxing himself more with those raw wounds, so... Gawain closes his eyes, and begins focusing magical energy into his wounds. He's gonna spend some time healing so that he can take the next hits from the Antegent better, should it do a final cry or something. Once healed, if any of the lesser Antegent start moving in, Gawain moves forth to bodyslam them without his sword, and herd them away from the Russian team so they can get their last hurrah. He doesn't need to fire the nuke, and they've spent their whole lives waiting for this.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Suffer the backlash     Arthur weathers the storm. Attempted obliteration in a causality sense is something he's only loosely familiar with, in the barest hints, and being shaken along the axis of canon itself hurts. God's own design denies his existence, and this is not a weakness of his design, it is a weakness of godhood itself. He shivers, nauseous and pained, and his Health Vial suffers visibly. But Strawberry Princess is keeping him stable, steady; though, admittedly, he's deafened, near-blinded, and backlashed. He nearly loses flight from the sheer sound of the thing.     But the Solomonari have this. Arthur needs to start closing his Gate before the backlash hits LOSAF, or -- god forbid -- any Antegent get off-planet, into it, to threaten it. Just an awful prospect. He has to believe in humans, the mundane, and the plausible; a space-beam fired by God is basically worthless against a being whose very existence denies the Deus Ex Machina. The feed of energy will begin to, slowly, close to Strawberry Princess, the brief moment of infinite pure mana coming to a close.
Lilian Rook	Gawain can bodyslam the Antegent to his heart's content. Brawling with superhuman strength, heavy armour, and sun-bolstered physique, clearing his way through the disoriented mob, scattered by the violence of the explosion, is something he can do with his last burst of strength. The human line charges forward voraciously in his wake, screaming, hollering, emptying weapon after weapon in a blazing fury, with victory within sight, Volkov and his men at the forefront, leading a charge they know they can win, and inspiring the others behind him. Hundreds of troops storm right past Gawain, armoured vehicles mulching his battered quarry beneath their heavy treads.     No, it'd be wrong to say that they seem disoriented just by the explosion. The uniformity of the enemy ranks has broken somewhat. They're scattered and million about. Having trouble holding cohesion. It's odd.     A ways away, Lilian hears Bissotwo, and responds with curiously instantaneous reflex. She appears by Strawberry's side, grabs her with one arm, Arthur with the other, and all three of them disappear just ahead of the horrific, last-ditch spite attack, allowing it to fire uselessly into the clouds, and reappearing at a safer distance.     The Dragon-level Antegent is clearly on its last legs. Heinously durable for something that looks like a giant, blood-soaked maggot, it writhes and screams and fires gout after gout from the scorching hell it's trapped in, retaliating against the waves of magical thunderbolts, zmeu fire, and the focused artillery shells and strafing runs now landing on it in earnest, in futile rage. The infantry break to the edge of the crater, pouring a weight of fire that physically measures in metric tons, hurling all of their remaining explosive munitions in vindictive fury. It's blown to bits, piece by piece, chewed up, ground to pieces, and--     The whole screen glitches. Rippling blocks of rectangular static, blood and night. Fractured and distorted scream-bites garbled into a grating mess. In hitched stopframes, shells fly backwards out of the pit, lightning reappears and jumps back into the clouds, troops glitch backwards bit by bit. The monster rises. With its last breath, at the last possible moment, this CAUSE is REJECTED. Again. Again and again and again until every last human dies.
Lilian Rook	-----[stop]-----     "I know why that feels familiar. That backlash. It's like --just a little like-- when I stress 'That' too much. Abrasions when it grates against the temporal substrate. Cause and effect, right? You piece of shit. But you don't control reality. You resonate with Antegent, not us. Not this world. You can rearrange the causes, but not deny the effect. You can deny causes that didn't exist when you ate it back then, but unless you can, you can only let a losing battle do the work."     Lilian flies over to it, muttering feverishly under her breath. "Those men came to finish you off not because they were 'lured', but because they felt it. In their gut. They knew what was going on. How many times did you reset this before they put you in a coma the first time? Dying at the bottom of that lake for forty years? You've lost, you disgraceful animal. Accept it."     Her scorched boots plant themselves by the creature's head. Its ragged form, bloody and skeletal, is clearly on the verge of death. Just a little more effort will kill it for certain. A tactic of desperation. "Still, if you're reversing time --revising it, rather-- then doesn't the fact I can still stop it prove I'm stronger? Wherever you got this power, I won't permit it to exist. I won't permit mockeries like this to live. It's mine and mine alone."     She takes up her sword. "Swords don't work, but you're not going to die from a sword, are you? You're going to succumb to nothing at all. A consequence without an action. An effect with no cause, right? It've always felt that must be the case, but now we'll find out for real. So I suppose you have my thanks, for letting me take this power even further. Though I'm more thankful for their hard work putting you on death's door like this so I can try it. Now accept that they've outplayed you, and die gracefully, cretin." She swings through. Night Mist cuts effortlessly through the last, bloody tatters of its remaining head and neck structure, severing it completely. She leaps back into the air.                 -----[start]-----     But it won't. Too little, too late. Already so battered and broken, so scorched and withered, without its root of power to draw on, it can't sustain it. The rewind wobbles, stops, and then the creature falls apart. Its splintered bones snap in half, its head flies free of its last fleshy strings, blood erupts from its gaping wounds. Ascending shells descend right back to earth. Furious soldiers unload hell into its dying form. Their vengeance will not be denied. Heaving its last, bitter shriek, the Antegent breaks apart into nothing but meaty pieces, and even those are pulverized into bloody scraps, and those charred into something like coal. When reality flickers again,--
Lilian Rook	The snowy field materializes once again. Decades of apathetic winters. A frozen lake. A leaden sky. Buried remains of old. Blissful, deafening silence. The sting of snowflakes on raw wounds.     The remains of where the Antegent once stood are nowhere to be found. The nuclear power building has disappeared, a crater in the earth filled to the brim with ice and snow, sealed and forgotten. The landscape itself has changed, in subtle ways.     The dead can't be brought back to life. Not like this. But they can, at last, be freed. With the collapse of that nightmare sphere --that bitter snarl in the threads of that battle-- then men who valiantly fought here are no longer the undead. There is no reality in which they still fight. The scope of Tamamo's ritual reaches them, and all at once, the battlefield shines with a mist of radiant gold. Countless damned souls --thousands upon thousands-- rise from their frozen graves, drifting weightlessly from the forgotten, snowy graveyard, and sublimate into the sunlight.     There will be no more repeats. No more resurrections. No using these old soldiers' lives to try and try again. It's over.     Volkov approaches the group as his men shout their wear hurrahs and kneel for their cathartic prayers, removing his helmet in respect. His battle armour is heavily banged up. Blood trickles from his forehead. "I feared I'd never see this day. Worse than failing, I feared that age would take my memory, or take me, first. I couldn't allow these men to be forgotten. I couldn't let that old hell come back to the first generation to know peace. So from the bottom of my heart, I am proud to stand beside you this day."     He spreads the arm not holding his helmet. "Though there is little to see, these lands are open to you. My people's hearts are open to you. I must warn you; not everything you have seen, not everything you have done, can be told. What happened today is best kept between us. But I will have them know what service you have done for us. And in this country, we do not forget service to the people such as yours. Heroes are heroes, no matter where they come from. And you, my friends, are heroes."
Strawberry Princess	As Arthur shuts off the "infinite magic" spigot, the hands gripping him dissolve one by one- the one covering his eyes last, revealing the plain and calm reality of the snowy expanse once again. She's still smiling despite the bruises and petechiae blossoming across her body. "We did it," she says in her soft, hoarse voice. "You were amazing, Mr. Lowell."      She descends alongside him if allowed, her boots touching down in the snow a second before his do. Her wand shuts down, only twenty seconds left on the clock, and her remaining eidolons flicker out of existence like dying lightbulbs. Her hands- her real, solid hands made of meat- reach up to remove her visor, mirroring Volkov's own removed helmet; it only feels respectful. When she says "thank you" to him, it's heartfelt and it's rough, strangled by her too-tight throat.      "I'm sorry... to all of you. That the world put this burden on your shoulders. And I'm- it makes my heart happy, that you could carry it to the finish line." There's the fumbling, heartfelt earnestness of someone who isn't just saying words; someone who really can imagine. But there's also a smile.