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Rita Ma      It's a beautiful, sunny day, and the Union Busan is in chaos.

     Far below, something churns the water white with thrashing limbs. The garden dome which the artificial warpgate opens into is largely deserted, but past the glass, people sprint to shelter points with children clutched in their arms, and Harpoonists with their needle-guns sprint the opposite way.

     By dint of collective experience or the established disaster plans, screams are remarkably sparse. There is instead a terrified hush, punctuated by the vast groaning of metal as something unseen makes the city-ship lurch. A vast tentacle snakes up the side of a residential 'skyscraper' in the distance, is fired upon from a dozen angles, and grudgingly retreats with minor wounds.

     A middle-aged man in a windbreaker, clearly scared but tight-jawed, waves you towards a side hallway. "Oh, thank goodness. You really did- I mean, go! It's not leaving the water, you'll have to suit up!" Some of you will, anyway. There's nothing stopping the aquatically-adept among you from jumping overboard right now, except the temptation of free gear.

     Those who do follow the man's hurried instructions to the armory arrive at about the same time as Bota Ma, who looks disheveled and slightly out of breath. He's immediately jamming an air cartridge into his sword and pulling on a brown diving suit- other suits are available for those who need them, with custom-shaped ones for Tamamo, Shimmer, and Kale, along with spare pneumatic needle-guns lining the walls. "Glad you could make it. I think it's trying to break the keel. Have any of you seen Kana?"

     "She's in the water," says a blue-haired woman, suiting up in the same hurried fashion.
     "But her suit-"
     "She went in five minutes ago, Bota. No suit."

     Bota makes a strangled noise that contains half an expletive and sprints out the door with a rebreather in hand, heading for a railing he can jump off of into the water below. "Wait! Your helmet!! ... Dammit."
Rita Ma      The ocean is probably a close approximation of Hell.

     In general, really, but especially right now.

     Beneath the surface, the Union Busan's three intertwined hulls cast a vast shadow into the deep and its propellers sound like pitch-shifted helicopter blades. Candy's mines- brought into existence before their creation by Cantio's time manipulation, if necessary- are scattered all around, some broken, most spent.

     "A hundred meters" was conservative. Kraken is nearly as large as the city. Its contours are hard to make out through the haze of bubbles created by its thrashing, but if you squint, you can make out a childishly hideous reimagining of a squid. Its tentacles, far too many of them, are as thick as redwoods and slice through the water like whips. Its arrowhead-shaped green-and-yellow body has frills and tubes never imagined by nature, and is adorned with six alien eyes, each moving independently. Already the hull's metal shows deep gouges, nearly punching through.

     Kana stands, upside-down, on the Union Busan's underside as if it were solid ground. She is a flurry of blades, nearly impossible to track; every time Kraken tries to slam a tentacle into the hull, she's there, stinging its limbs and driving it back.

     She fights like she's possessed. Her skin is nearly blue. Bota rushes towards her with the rebreather.
Cantio Cantio is one of those that needs to suit up, but at least she's used ot it from doing this once before already. As she's suiting up, she hears the potential bad news, notices Bota's missing helmet, then snags an extra helmet and tucks it under her arm. "I'll make sure he gets this." She reassures the middle-aged man with a quick nod, bunching up her hair into a ponytail under her own helmet before moving to dive into the water herself.

Even before hitting the water, she's already considering how to approach the Kraken. There's not enough time to plot out a complicated strategy with the precarious situations all over the goddamn place, though, so she resorts to the more direct method that would best suit an Elite:

Just going in a straight line towards her goal and hoping for the best. Spotting Kana and Bota on the underside of the Union Busan, she preps her sword handle with one hand while twisting the helmet around in the other, struggling a bit to figure out how to keep it from filling up with water even as she has to figure out how to actually get it on Bota's head.

"Mister Ma! Miss Kana! Got an extra here, so get to the surface as soon as you can and we'll cover you!" She shouts through her own helmet, gesturing with her sword handle as it starts assembling itself from multitudes of smaller pieces.
Kale Hearthward This is the East Wind. It was Kale's prize from the first Secundus resonance surge - a vehicle he pulled a little bit of tech or resources from every territory he held in order to have built. Outwardly, it's a VTOL the size of a large helicopter - inwardly, it's a fully equipped military hospital with enough space to hold a small town's worth of people or supplies, plus a few other amenities.

What it doesn't have is any weapons systems. That's because Kale, riding on top of it, *is* the weapons system.

"Metaphor, and anyone else aboard, we'll take a pass over the main deck, might want to jump off there," calls Kale as the East Wind flies in. "Everyone else, brace yourself. The seas are about to get rough."

He's already started precasting, his hands a flurry of activity as he ties winds into literal knots, and once they're within range he fires it off, throwing the angry ball of shimmering air off into the clouds - and starts casting again.

A storm starts brewing. It's not natural, by any means. It's hand hand crafted, and fine tuned, and powerful. A tailwind starts blowing - pushing the Union Busan away from the Kraken, ramping up steadily till it's blowing as fast as the ship can take it.

The East Wind flits about the ship - the wind mage perched atop it adjusting and controlling his creation, keeping the winds contained abovedecks so that the storm doesn't knock anyone or anything off, and trying to reduce the air pressure in the front of the Union Busan to push it forward even faster.
Redshift Operators     Some time before the group gets there, amidst their rush to make it through an adjacent gate system, a certain precognitive ninja shudders, a chill going through her whole body. Only her elaborate cybernetic arm is perfectly, absolutely still.

"Oh god."
"WD?"
"The future. It is... *fraught*. Such a great potential for death."
"Abstractly? Or..."
"Tangibly. I'm not sure what to do."

"Focus on the objective. Focus on the future where they're accomplished. Then give us directions to get there."
"...Alright. But be careful. This is... far more than we've dealt with before."
"WD? Is this you being you, or is this...?"
"It is serious. More than you can imagine."

    They've swapped to a regionally-appropriate loadout. Generalized suit thrusters are exchanged for water-borne pressure packs. An assault rifle is swapped for a heavy repeating harpoon gun. The hard-light katana and their standard survival outer gear remains; some things are timeless. But when they get here, they don't rush to strike immediately. They leap overboard with the others, but the tactical leader is deferring to the precognitive in their maneuvers.

    Before her eyes, she can see a thousand futures of death. Phantom images of the Union Busan smashed to shreds, its harpoonist forces decimated far below what might let them reach the Queen's domain. Her mind races to avoid it.
Metaphor Metaphor hitched a ride with her coworker to show up here. She's practically unresponsive on the way over, a place in one of the wards cleared as she checks and re-checks packed equipment. It's an affair somewhere between panicked and solemn; hands fly through rote motion, and attempts at interaction by crew or otherwise are dismissed or outright ignored.

As the ship approaches the Union Busan and the Kraken becomes somewhat visible, she's standing at the mouth of any open bay, fingers on her ever-present white duffel's strap tapping a rhythm, watching everything go down. A white hardsuit has been donned, a rounded, bulky protective affair with crosses proudly emblazoned on the chest. She visibly steels herself. Something is muttered under her breath, inaudible over the rushing wind.

<J-IC-Scene> A gruff man says, after scrabbling for a radio: "It's on the crane! Front deck, middle ship, past the garden!"

A streak of white and teal tears down from the starship above. Half a ton of plastic and steel, set to impact an encroaching tentacle onto the crane; a trajectory set to land out of the water even if aimed poorly. There's no manuever, no dedicated stance, no general planning for this practically suicidal strike; just terminal velocity and surprise. Perhaps a poor idea for the integrity of herself and the ship itself, but that won't stop her.
Petra Soroka     "Flight resources are the primary thing we don't have in abundance. Even amongst the Elites we have on-site, it's just myself, Hearthward, Ishirou, and Cantio, that I know of, and we don't have much storage space with us. If you can be a good girl for a little while, we'd welcome Ekanashma air support."

    For maybe the first time ever, Petra's excited to bring the Kana on a mission.

<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Um." Her radio crackles, she clears her throat, and continues with an attempt at a more professional tone, "Is the harpoon available for me to attach to the--S1?"
<J-IC-Scene> A gruff man says, after scrabbling for a radio: "It's on the crane! Front deck, middle ship, past the garden!"

    The Ekanamsha--the S1--exits the warpgate with energy and inertia that immediately drains to a crawl in the garden dome. Hovering just above the ground, engines turned to minimum power, the mech carefully and gently (as much as it can be) navigates through the garden, doing as little damage to the plants in the cramped space as possible. Rita should have something nice to come back to.

    The S1 roars back to full power once outside, beelining to the crane where the harpoon is held. Freezing the Kana in midair beside it, Petra clambers out of the hatch with frantic energy, bouncing on her toes while she affixes the harpoon to the cannon, pulling finger-width woven metal cords from a compartment on the outside of the hull. As thin as they are, Petra seems confident that they'll hold up to Kraken's strength, given that they're made of the same alloy as the S1's hull.

    With the harpoon thoroughly attached, the mech lifts back off the ship, positioning itself over the churning water. Inside, Petra runs a shaking hand through her hair, already damp with sweat. Excitement, not fear. Finally, a *meaningful* role, that only she can fill.

    The cannon takes aim, and with a roar of fire and sound, the oversized harpoon is driven down into the water and the Kraken's body with as much firepower as Petra can pump into it.

    If the harpoon lodges in Kraken's body, the S1 freezes, affixed in the air like a pin driven into clay, wires straining between the near-immovable force of the mech and the overwhelming strength of the leviathan.
Stanley Padgett     Stanley had seen plenty of the Busan in his time dashing around the hull, so he's... he's sort of ready for the mess that's going on here. But boy howdy, is it intimidating being face to squid with this... thing. And this is what Rita is... Her destiny? is the thought that trickles through Stanley's head, as he adjusts the seals on his suit, takes a breath, and then calls up Mercutio. The massive Persona is even obliging to meet the theme tonight, a Navy poncho hanging where a cape might usually be. "...no time like the present." Hopefully he won't be going into the water, if he didn't need to. Safety third.

    But he's going to join the rest of the landborne people on his way out to the prow of the Busan's center hull. "Point me in a direction, please!" Though he doesn't have to look... too far to see the massive tentacle draped over the ship, trying to crush the crane with weight and heft and SIZE. Well we can't have that. Stanley plants his feet to brace himself as Mercutio manifests, levels the ghostly flintlock in its hand, and blasts the tentacle with corrosive magical energies. "A Pox! A Pox upon you!"
Ishirou Ishirou hits the deck of the Union Busan, and from the large area, he can see he almost immediately gets what's going on the moment he's there.  He waves off the man about suits.  "I'll go help her Bota, just get there as fast as you can!" he says, running towards the side.  Before he goes overboard.

POD drops on his head.  There is a flash as the armored undersuit of the R.E.S.C.U.E. Unit appears.  It can work as part of the suit on its own, but today he will need the outer parts to work.  He leaps over the edge...

And out from several subspace pocket portals come small robots.  They unfold around Ishirou and transform.  One is a more mechanical suit.  It's more of an exoframe around the inner R.E.S.C.U.E. Suit.  The other robots connect and form a strange configuration that immediately dives into the water.  

It sort of looks like the ariel unit's humanoid mode, but has a sleeker form, looking for underwater movement and mobility over the lift needed for flight in the air.  Its smaller profile and water-dynamic body make it easier to fight in the ocean.  Switching his sensors over to sonar and the non-optical sight he sends out 'options'.

These options hover around targets, like Hibiki and Lilian, helping them with either their aim or power.  He spins to the right, opening up with a barrage of torpedoes.  Both to clear the way for others and to also keep the massive sea monster in check while they coordinate their offensives.  Already, Ishirou is sending out signals to try and keep their sensors on the same length, once more forming an area network.
Tamamo     Tamamo has no reason not to take up Kale's offer of transport. Rather, the quick ride over offers a convenient time for her to hand both him and Metaphor, and anyone else who rides with them, a stack of sunburst-patterned paper talismans. They've been coated in something clear and shiny, but probably still won't be very durable against ocean currents.

    Quickly, she explains their purpose. "The beasts of these seas are burned by sunlight, which will be emitted should you place one of these against their bodies. These ones," she gestures to a variant pattern, "may be applied to the side of a weapon to similar effect. Against those without particular vulnerabilities, there will be no harm, be assured. It is not a forceful explosion, though the deeper waters limit the range the light can easily reach, all the same."

    She hops off rather than stay aboard, herself. There's plenty she could be doing up here, but seeing deeply into the water -- it's difficult. That's not, normally, the Sun's territory. Sun, Moon, and Sea are separate domains.

    Though she brought her own wetsuit and appropriate containers, transferring those to a proper diving suit still takes a bit of time and hassle. Having to work underwater is, too, though she's prepared as best she can for the occasion. Hopefully, someone down there will have something she can hitch herself to to help her get around. There's only so far that a seer's prediction and blessings of luck will get her in avoiding squiddy tentacles in the water.

    "Miss Kana, there you -- oh, she is without a suit. She cannot hear, can she? Oh, dear."

    As long as she has the underside of the city-ship to use to propel herself, it's not so bad. Tamamo climbs -- or, depending on one's perspective, scampers, upside-down -- in Kana's direction, arriving well behind Bota, but with a health charm in hand. Unlike the paper talismans, this one, retrieved from one of the canisters she strapped to the outside of her suit, is in the form of a beaded bracelet. It looks like the kind of thing someone might pick up as a souvenir while touring temples, but the effects are significantly more dramatic, whether it's worn or held.

    If Kana won't immediately accept it, she passes it to Bota and gestures, more or less clearly, from it to Kana and to her wrist.
Tamamo     The more immediately important (in her mind) task handled, Tamamo then undertakes the outwardly bizarre task of drawing with what can't really be chalk, despite its appearance, a series of whole and broken lines at right angles and neat diagonals, on the ship's underside. The circle in the center has to be large enough for someone to sit in it.

    "A moment, please."

    She needs to do at least this much to properly channel between the heavens and the seas.
Candy            Candy is used to the suits, by now. Once he slips into it, a heavy backpack with a large impeller appears overtop, abruptly and without fanfare. There is a large carbine connected to it by cable. A water cannon.

     There's no time for words. Once he's suited up, Candy heads into Hell, leaving behind a playing card slipped carefully between the racks of suits. He descends past one of his spent mines, feeling a small measure of satisfaction and gratitude. Kraken is hopelessly large.

     As light gradually struggles more to penetrate the waves, moreso with the bubbles from its thrashing, Candy takes a steadying breath. Brute force is something he's good at--but not underwater. The water cannon is powerful, yes, but...

Focusss more on helping the othersss.

*Yeah. I think that's the way. I need a minute to think.*

     So he gets it.

Time stops. Kana's over there, standing upside-down on the underside to the city. Lines of disturbed water criss-cross frozen before her face, a mask of concentrated, determined hatred. Bota close by, Tamamo behind. Harpoonists--the real ones--can hold their breaths for a long time. But even she's been at this for a while. Candy swims over to Bota, frozen, rebreather in hand. He pushes, hands on the small of the Harpoonist's back. Tamamo, frozen with her health charm in hand, gets a gentle tap on the shoulder--not that she'd notice it yet--then the same treatment. He then swims around Bota, taking up a spot near Kana. His brow furrows in concentration.

    *How do I make one of them... sword things?*
A canister of gas. Simply done.

     Time resumes.

-Bota crosses the distance to Kana almost instantaneously. Tamamo arrives a split second later, after feeling a tap on her shoulder.
-A current of water violently kicks up in his wake.
-Beside the both of them is Candy, giving a thumbs-up.
-Two spare air canisters appear before them, floating lazily in the water. Neither of them are wearing helmets. He doubts they read lips. So with the moment he has, Candy draws a thumb across his throat, then nods towards Kraken proper, then the tentacles. 'How do we kill it, when it has so many?'
Hibiki Tachibana     >It's Kraken.

    It took the first move.

    Hibiki exits the artificial Warpgate at a dead sprint, teeth grit and strained breath pushing through them, into the same exact site that was so peaceful just a week before. There's no shouting panic, which the ones responsible for drafting plans of action can be thanked for, but the state of things is still enough to make her stomach turn a bit.

    Maybe because, now that it's actually happening, even though the situation is much less bleak than back then, she can't help but compare it in her mind to the first attack she saw on Rita's world. Or maybe it's the possibility of that that's getting to her. More than it should, perhaps.

    Though that's exactly why she doesn't slow down for an instant, not even when the call for suits is sent out. "I don't need one!" The reason why is very obvious, after she shouts back at the top of her lungs.

    "Balwisyall nescell Gungnir tron!"

    Hibiki leaps the railing right as she's overcome with a golden light, and by the time she breaks the water, she's clad in her Symphogear - and as the Kana (the S1!) fires its harpoon from above it, a now-gauntlet clad hand reaches out to grip onto the tether of the heavy projectile as it roars past. An easy way to get one-way acceleration towards the Kraken.

    She can see plenty of things in the few moments before it makes contact. The state of the ship's underbelly...the terrifying silhouette of the beast itself, against the dark depths...and Kana. The person, who had been keeping this thing at bay down here all this time.

    All of that is just that much more reason she uses the momentum from the harpoon shot to release at the last moment, and right behind it, slam a metal boot into the back of it to make /sure/ it's lodged in there.
Sleek Shimmer     Shimmer's not sure whether or not she could handle a serious underwater fight without that suit, even if she technically CAN swim fairly well the way normal people do or animals do, the trouble of respiring qi instead of actual air while in the middle of combat...

    Yeah. She'll take the suit.

    And once it's donned, she wastes no time at all diving overboard and- well, plunges headfirst into the water, trying a variety of different swimming strokes until she settles into a half-assed freestyling.

    She's well aware that trying to seek out the main body amidst all those tentacles is folly. But she doesn't need to fight this thing FAIR AND SQUARE like a martial artist would.

    It's a giant monster. So, of course, everything goes!

    As soon as she gets up next to one of those gigantic, tree-trunk-wide tentacles, she reaches out with both hands, nails extending into claws, and aims to strike those claws DEEP into the rubbery flesh so that thrashing won't easily dislodge her.

    Such minor injuries are a trifle to something that big, sure. But that's not how she plans on making this thing suffer.

    If she can get a solid grip on the thing and deliver any sort of wound, then both of her hands begin to glow with swirling might, spiritual vortexes that draw in motes of light from the water... and, they will do something much, MUCH worse to the Kraken.

    Those vortexes tear at its vast lifeforce like a vacuum puncturing a balloon. They tear at the flesh within the tentacle too, ripping it free in a process of cruel disassembly that's agonizing, like being repeatedly scraped to the bone by a hundred razors.
Lilian Rook     It really couldn't do them the courtesy of waiting a few more days. This is nearly the worst possible time for it. If Lilian were slightly more suspicious than she already is, she'd seriously consider the possibility that the beast knew, somehow. As things are, she only suspects it a little.

    Lilian doesn't even make the pretense of showing up dressed for the upper deck this time. Speed is everything, and she has all of it. There's barely a chance for anyone to glimpse her university uniform still on before it's falling out of thin air and crumpling on the floor next to an empty diving suit locker, along with the loose clatter of her discarded bag, half-emptied.

    The water next to Tamamo hisses, screeches, as bubbles of steam boil away in glittering ribbons from the anti-thermodynamic release of heat. The space from the bunrei to Candelario is tightly inscribed at swordpoint, with the amply available fresh sacrificial blood as ink, small spikes of some unknown mineral driven into its perimeter at twelve points, carved with inscriptions that defy visual comprehension, the same was at Secundus, and Luna. Kana, Bota, Tamamo, and possibly Candy, perceive events beyond its boundary both slowly and in real time.

    For the bunrei and dynamiter, little changes, though Bota and Kana feel as if their bodies move a little slowly, under resistance, as well, as the dynamics of relativity intensify like the water itself, in the drag of their faster movements, without affecting slow and measured action. Lilian, suited, in knelt in middle of it. The rasping of her breath comes out through an attached breather, without the helmet (currently folded against her back), but she has a spare for Kana as well. And more importantly . . .

    "You're a little scary, you know that, Kana?" Lilian gasps, without actually saying. "You've burnt pretty much all the oxygen in all of your tissues. I'm amazed you're still conscious. But reinforcements have arrived. And I need you to do something in particular." She gestures around, at the tentacles that only seem to move at a crawl for those few, sparks and churning bubbles standing like slowly melting ice sculptures.

    "Stop. Take a breath. Recover. There's three or so minutes, from our perspective, before--" she points to a tentacle tip, gradually closing in on the edge of the circle. "--that crosses the threshold. Sorry, but you can't fight and kill it from in here. This will only accelerate the respiration and cooling rate of your body. Please use it for its intended purpose. Breathe. Get your heart rate back. Get suited. Then we'll all break at your word."
Rita Ma      Kale's attempt at moving the Union Busan doesn't get it away from Kraken- but it does force Kraken to snake more tentacles out of the water to hold onto the ship, making it more vulnerable to surface fire from the other Harpoonists.

     When Stanley and Metaphor ensure that Petra successfully gets the anchoring harpoon in it- and Hibiki ensures it goes in deep- that proves to be an ugly combo with the wind. The Union Busan tries to drag it forward, but the harpoon holds it in place, and gouges a furrow into its flesh in the process. Even if the Ekanamsha is immovable, though, the wire isn't unbreakable: it starts to groan and fray dangerously.

     Kana's posture slackens and her frenzied dance ends when she realizes backup has finally arrived. Bota gets the rebreather on her after a moment of bewilderment at Candy translocating him, then gratefully accepts the helmet from Cantio while Kana takes a deep, shuddering breath. Even if Bota anxiously sticks to her side with a hand on her shoulder, Kana is alert enough to grab for the talisman and slip it onto her wrist. The color slowly starts returning to her skin.

     Bota taps helmets together with Tamamo just long enough to say "Thank you. She'll be fine. She just needs-" Kana grips her swords hard enough that the creaking handles can be heard underwater and slowly straightens back up. "... a minute."

     Lilian gives them several. Bota is visibly bewildered by the new physics, and takes a few moments of staring at the slowly-encroaching tentacle before he grasps it. Kana, on the other hand, knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Beleaguered, she still manages to give Lilian a raised eyebrow and the impression of a very small pout around the rebreather. Only 'a little'?

     In response to Candy's unspoken question of how to kill it, Bota grimaces, then shrugs helplessly. Kana knows, though, even in her convalescent state: she taps her own head with one of her blades gingerly. That's how. She takes both of his canisters a moment later, ejecting her sword's spent ones.
Rita Ma      The main obstacle to killing Kraken becomes rapidly apparent to Ishirou, Shimmer, and the others mounting a direct attack, if it wasn't intuitive before. Any credible attack can break its skin, and it's reasonably vulnerable to more exotic forms of damage, but there's just so much of it- flesh, blood, vital essence- that it barely seems to register losing a little. It isn't clear that the thing feels pain at all.

     So when it flails at you, it does so in something like irritation. Tentacles whip through the water fast enough to cause buffeting currents on near-misses; the frothed-white water obscures followup blows, making them harder to dodge.

     Even those up on the deck are in danger: its tentacles scrape and scourge over whatever topside surfaces it can reach, scattering shrapnel and toppling cranes and (thankfully-evacuated) makeshift structures. Another pair of tentacles reach for the immobile Ekanamsha, trying to grab it and crush it where it is- or drag it under, if it disengages the anchoring.
Redshift Operators     A dark future seeps through precognition, and is discarded.

    In an awful outcome, the beast lashes through the vortexes that Sleek Shimmer wrought, crashing into the Union Buson. In an awful outcome, the beast rips through layers of hull, imperiling the ship.

    In an awful outcome, a phantom image of Candy is slammed aside by tentacles, his aid denied by the lashings of the city-sized beast. It could kill Kana. It could even kill Bota.

    But that's not what this story is about.

"Giant! The tentacles! Force them into the vortexes!"
"I'll get them."
"Neutron! Tentacle approaching Candy, pin it!"
"Yeah. Taking the shot."

    The giant surges forward, power-armor shrieking, shoulder-checking a tentacle directly into Shimmer's vortexes, and simultaneously clearing the way for the astronaut with their heavy marksman rifle to send a wide, long bolt deep into another of the monster's tentacles, giving Candy, Bota, and Kana clearance to make the handoff of gas supplies.

    One dark future down. Who knows how many more yet to kill?
Kale Hearthward It's working! Somewhat!

At least, it'd be working a lot better if it weren't for those tentacles - one of which he narrowly avoids. "Can't we do something about those?"

"Well, you've got a drill, right?" comes the response from one of his pilots.

"... Oh, right! Activate Breathlink!"

"Finally. Breathprint authenticated. Standing by for Sylphian Drive kickstart..."
"Kickstarting from tank 1, turbine activation confirmed. Center Stage circuit on. Switching to Breathlink inflow in three, two..."

A stream of sparkling air flows from Kale's beak, getting sucked in by vents on the roof of the craft. He breathes a little bit heavier, as if something's taxing his lungs. "Go, already," he says, with a bit of effort.

"Kale vitals confirmed stable. Routing Breathlink power to Periactus circuit."

The nose of the craft sparkles, and reconfigures. It twists around, and around, elongating and forming a gigantic drill.

Kale takes a deep breath. "RAMMING SPEED!"

The craft dips down, and then flies at one of the tentacles holding the ship in place...!
Cantio "Lilian? Oh, perfect. You can-" Before Cantio can finish her thought as she sees Lilian approaching, Lilian has already provided the opportunity for Kana and Bota to recover, and it's one less thing on Cantio's mind as she braces that fully-formed sword in front of herself to contend with tentacle.

"Good thinking. I'll hit it from above, then. It's like you said last time: We've got plenty of people that can fight here, but not enough fliers." As those tentacles start whipping about at a more rapid pace, Cantio doesn't waste more time in her regular state and instead just opts to power up immediately. A pillar of light explodes into existence around her, clearly magical in nature, and it dissipates just in time to reveal that she's... Upside down?

Taking a page out of a certain friend of Hibiki's book, Cantio's opted to combine offense into her defense, flipping herself around during the transformation (in reality, letting it flip her around after getting struck instead of just eating the hit directly) to use the tentacles' own momentum to drive her blade into them. Yanking her sword out of the fleshy tendril, she turns to Lilian, Kana, and Bota.

"Just don't get yourselves killed down here, or she'll be upset!" She shouts in something between encouragement and an order before kicking off the tentacle to launch herself up and out of the water, spinning in her ascent to throw a whole mess of gleaming sword bits from around her.

Seeing the tentacles flailing all about the deck, Cantio has an easy time identifying what targets to aim for: All of them. Splitting her sword apart further until all of its pieces are scattered around her like a swarm of glowing fireflies in the sky, she channels a ludicrous amount of magical energy through them to blast an unreasonable amount of lasers at the tentacles, aiming to rip them apart from multiple points at once.

Thanks to the warnings, she's purposely trying to avoid cutting any of those limbs off. Instead, she's purposely trying to get the Kraken to feel all of those shots, for all of that pain to linger, and for it to know that they came from the floating target above the water's surface, moving steadily away from the Union Busan while surrounded by so many gleaming lights.
Ishirou Ishirou can barely pull the R.E.S.C.U.E. Unit far enough away.  The pure force of the tentacles running near him is enough to damage the armor, but only insignificantly.  Gel is deployed in the sections where the armor is dented, sealing it so that it doesn't implode as he goes deeper.  A Grenade that goes over the side for him is grabbed before it even hits the water, is dragged deeper inside straight to him, and connected to his weapon systems.  

Thanks, Metaphor!

The 'Options' fly out again, away from Lilian and Hibiki and towards Cantio and Candy.  They hover, aiming to provide support for their own weapons and provide guidance through data upload to make their attacks more accurate.  Ishirou, on the other hand, isn't heading toward the surface.

Under the water, he dives deeper, trying to find the central mass of the creature and start scanning it in greater detail.  He looks for weaknesses in its biology, weaknesses in its nature, anything he can find to help give them an edge, and to avoid its retreating.  It might be too massive to move traditionally...but he has an idea.

He throws the grenade from Metaphor toward it and uses his electromagnetic force tricks to launch it toward one of its eyes.  He forces it to not immediately explode, but rather try and dig as far as he can...and THEN detonate the mixture.  Trying to spread that vital poison at a very dangerous point.  He follows it up by launching bits of metal gathered up on the way down, aiming to launch its own destruction at it.  
Candy      Candy smiles at Lilian and Tamamo, during the breather she managed to give them. He's worked with the two of them together during a lot of dire situations. None have been quite as daunting as this one, but even in the face of something so massive it's good to have people nearby that you know and trust.

     The breather is over, before long. He makes a brief salute upwards, when Neutron's marksmanship makes itself known.

     Kana asks for a cable. She has it. A thick, durable spool of industrial strength steel cable, with some sort of fiber inlay that glistens in the dim light of the water. All around, Kraken's tentacles thrash, and hold onto the ship, at once resisting Kale's efforts and deterring everyone from getting at its body. Even the hardest, deepest strikes don't seem to bother it--

Sssay that again.
*We can hit it as hard as we want, and all it does is get more pissed off. It's like... it knows we're hurting it, but only kinda-sorta.*
Ssso take advantage of it.
*Holy shit. Of course.*

<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Spreading out damage with random attacks isn't going to get us anywhere. Hack down its offensive appendages first, but don't try to whack them to the last; that'll cause it to run away and regenerate. Lower its attack power to the point is has to focus on us. We'll target the eyes as well, but not so much that it'll lash out blindly and strike the Busan instead of us."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Ishirou and anyone else able; scan and locate vital organs and physiological weakpoints while we fight. Once we've whittled down the tentacles, we'll mount a massive combined strike on a limited couple of areas to penetrate deep into its biomass and cause focused internal damage. Cripple it quickly, before it can pull out."

    It's the perfect way to help whittle down on the tentacles, and help with what Kana means to do. Other Candies begin to appear in the water. Some with spears, some with imitation gas-swords, some with replicas of his water cannon. Each one of them has something off about him. Maybe a gap tooth, or a miscoloration on the suit, or the hair isn't long enough behind the helmet. What does it matter to Kraken, who sees them all as food? As irritants?

     The illusory Candies attempt to draw its ire away from the others, through suicidal proximity to the tentacles, virtually begging their attention. Candy hopes, between the hold it's forced to maintain on the Busan, and his own efforts, it's enough to help whittle them down enough to carry out Lilian's plan. They 'die' easily. Hopefully, easily enough for it to think it still has the upper hand, distractingly enough that it doesn't notice the real work being done on its mass.
Stanley Padgett     That tentacle smashes into Stanley, and there's a puff of dust and mist where the young man was, crushed into- No that's not Stanley, but it could have been. He's now standing 10 feet to the right of that position, gasping in surprise. That was too close.

    Stanley is suddenly not where he was a moment ago.
    He's at Metaphor's side, grabbing the caustics he was promised.
        He's grabbing a length of cable from the base of the crane.
            He's rushing into the water, carrying the cable.

    The water is unfamiliar, but the newness is vital. Rushing through his veins is the challenge ahead of him... as he charges into the fray. There's Candy and Lilian and Candy and Kana and Candy and- right don't get distracted. He tugs hard on the rest of the cable, and then hands it off to Kana...

    And then he starts to join Candy in that Chicanery, his rapier flashing with digital green mist in the water, as he starts jabbing that blade as hard as he can, to make sure those toxins are being delivered into Kraken.
Metaphor The woman smashes down and off the tentacle, deflecting directly down onto the deck below in a plume of shrapnel. The impact itself is felt through the boat, the flesh and superstructure of the crane deforming and providing a stunned target for the Kana; and yet, it doesn't even look like her suit took a scratch. Metal on metal screeches as she skids across the ground, her footing perfectly maintained despite her weight gouging the plating, cloak dramatically fluttering behind her. If anywhere were nearby, they'd hear a few words of reassurance yelled to herself. Just megafauna. Done this before.

The doctor pulls out of the slide and breaks into a sprint towards Stanley, every footstep resonating through the already-shaking ship. Amidst the glitter of metal dust in the air, she hoiks a beaker filled with a viscous fluid towards the fencer, with the full assumption that he'll find a way to grab it out of the air before impact. He's competent, after all. She knows they all are. And he executes perfectly, snatching it delicately out of the middle of its arc. It's a strong paralysis agent; it's up to him to be the vector. Her hands shift into a blur, then, grabbing tubes and flasks and tools from her bag, and in just a few seconds a silver canister has been filled, primed, and tossed off the side of the boat. Force multiplication.

At this point, the tentacles have started sweeping across the deck, but as one drags towards her she just grits her metaphorical teeth and braces. Once more, she's knocked across the deck with the terrible sounds of damaged infrastructure; but once more, she simply does not budge from that planted stance. And as it carries her across the floor, an arm extended to keep her at enough of a length from the tentacle to manipulate, she reaches back and SLAMS Tamamo's talisman against its flesh. Light radiates. Flesh sizzles. But will it hold?

Regardless of the result, her arms go back into that blur after the strike, the sounds of dangerous reactions and small amounts of toxic smoke trailing behind her. Refills, contingencies, alternate choices. She can't let them down. Don't think, act.
Petra Soroka     Petra pumps her fist in victory when the harpoon lodges in Kraken's flesh with Hibiki's help, then is thrown forwards in her seat as the wire is pulled taut. She sits back up, pushing strands of hair out of her face, and taps through a few menus on the munitions monitor beside her. With a smooth mechanical whir and clunk, explosive shells are swapped out for phosphorous bombs in the S1's main cannon.

    Seeing the wires fray is alarming to Petra, primarily for a shitty reason. The harpoon trick is big, dramatic, and marks the S1 as a major player on the battlefield. If it snaps, so quickly....

    Thankfully, Petra's choice in how to prevent this is also one that, not *entirely* coincidentally, aids her teammates. She primes one of the S1's sidearms, a smooth, harmless-looking tube of white metal, and aims it at the spot that Ishirou marked for binding. With a near silent *thwip*, a thin sabot projectile pierces through the water and embeds into Kraken's skin, fizzing out faint white particles into the surrounding water.

    Abruptly, the flesh within a radius of the projectile begins tearing, limited to a speed far below what the rest of the city-sized creature thrashes around with. Tearing ligaments slow Kraken down marginally before its force detaches them completely.

    Meanwhile, Petra is being grappled by tentacles. Unfortunately, the colossal tentacles only crunch down on the shell of her mech, and in a panic as her viewscreens start to fail, Petra flails the heavy turret of the S1 around as a melee weapon. Batting away the tentacles is made more effective by the point-blank release of phosphorous bombs, coating them with fire that sticks to the skin and burns above or below water.
Tamamo     "Thank you, Lilian." Tamamo is certainly grateful for the time, getting herself set up. The time bubble keeps out the tentacles for the moment, even if the shockwaves from her perch are keeping Tamamo in indefinite peril. If those could be kept away a bit longer, tha would certainly be nice, but she can't exactly count on it. It's massive, and fighting like this on her own, underwater, would be a truly terrible idea.

    But, since she's here -- no, because Lilian is here, Tamamo is keeping to her plan. Her own circle is finished, the eight trigrams forming part of the array, and seats herself in the middle of it, looking 'up' into the depths of the ocean, toward Kraken. "That was a name, and not a title, was it not...?" Well, that doesn't really matter right now.

    "Hibiki," Tamamo calls out, "at the count of three, dodge to your right. One... two..."

    Glancing in the direction of a chalked symbol of water on one side, Tamamo calmly finishes with "three," at the same moment as a tentacle would whip through Hibiki's position from behind.

    "Forward, now, but be swift. At the count of five, kick forward. One... two..."

    Once the timing is established, she can dispense with the counting, leaving more breath for other things. Her curses still need time to prepare.
Sleek Shimmer     Sleek Shimmer manages to keep her grip on the tentacle even as it lashes about this way and that trying to dislodge her. Pain lances through her limbs and body as she's forced against the water resistance far beyond what's comfortable or safe, and it's as good as being pummeled by bricks across her whole body at its worst. But her body is strengthened by the might of Earth, and doesn't break so easily.

    Bruise though, oh there's plenty of that going on.

    Still, through all of it, she has only managed to inflict serious injury on the one tentacle.

    Her eyes go rather wide at the realization that even her trump card, which she's reluctant to reveal and is determined to only use directly against those deserving of the agony, has so little affect on the monster. The only good target is the main body mass.

    Shimmer briefly closes her eyes and takes a deep breath from the oxygen supplied by the suit. Her form flickers and glows, then seems to implode-flicker-streak in a direction as space is twisted and collapses in on itself.

    She reappears with a SHWOOF and a displacement shockwave much further down in the depths where she senses the creature's great mass. And once she's down there, the young woman draws her hand back. It begins to sizzle and crackle with a controlled electrical discharge. How this is occuring without her shocking herself is anyone's guess, but the currents stay largely contained. After about ten seconds preparing, her hand now contains a mighty, compressed thunderstorm, hundreds of bolts raging and screaming and boiling bits of water.

    And the foxgirl simply plunges that clawed hand forward and into the creature with everything she's got, aiming to discharge the great shock into its INNARDS.
Lilian Rook <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Spreading out damage with random attacks isn't going to get us anywhere. Hack down its offensive appendages first, but don't try to whack them to the last; that'll cause it to run away and regenerate. Lower its attack power to the point is has to focus on us. We'll target the eyes as well, but not so much that it'll lash out blindly and strike the Busan instead of us."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Ishirou and anyone else able; scan and locate vital organs and physiological weakpoints while we fight. Once we've whittled down the tentacles, we'll mount a massive combined strike on a limited couple of areas to penetrate deep into its biomass and cause focused internal damage. Cripple it quickly, before it can pull out."

    "Fine. A little scarier than me. It's a relative quantity." Lilian says back to Kana. "I'll trust your own expertise in how you and Bota handle this. My tactical oversight is for the Paladins only, technically speaking. But I'd appreciate if you kept the strategy in mind, and . . . I'd appreciate it even more if you don't die." She pauses for a second, looking at the back of her hand, trembling faintly from a mixture of adrenaline, worry, and deep-seated hatred of the Other. She clenches it shut, holding her breath for ten, to still it. The rest of her face gives the impression of a wry smile at Cantio's words, for a moment. "The purpose of destroying the Queen is to survive. So every step along the way is in the name of survival. I'm sure you know that well enough."

    Lilian can't wear all of the Lady in Black while still in her diving suit, but the water churns in glass-ripple interfering microcurrents around her as black matter and gold light weave together into undifferentiated mass over the important parts. Shoulders, wrists, upper arms, thighs, shins, feet. Extremities she'll want to be sure she can defend herself with in an emergency, and which don't have to bend (the crossguard will have to do for her fingers). Neck guards for good measure. A subtle golden glow spreads under the collar.

    §A suit puncture isn't going to kill me at this depth. My body can handle this depth for a while; a bit deeper too. If it's badly ruptured, I'll have to retreat the long way. Given the distance, that'll burn quite a lot. I can't risk doing that more than once. Air is more important. If the breather cuts out or comes loose, I won't necessarly have a lungful at the time. Not much magic will be helpful underwater; we're moving too fast to deploy any arrays, and the attacks won't transmit well. I might as well save it for maneuvering. The drag is going to slow me down too much to flank it, and I can't rely on speed-to-power techniques. Tamamo's talismans will do the trick for drawn cuts, at least. I'll have to approach directly.§
Lilian Rook     Lilian accepts a talisman from Tamamo with practised ease, chanting something under her breath and wrapping it to Night Mist as she takes it up again, red etchings washing sunset gold. Nodding towards the others, Lilian braces against the underside of the hull, crouches low enough to press her hand to the oxidized steel, and vanishes with a dull, percussive 'whumph', a streak of gliding bubbles, and a bending reverberation through the plating.

    Even in the underwater twilight and chaotic water turbulence, Lilian alone stands out agains the dark with the bright glow of her blessed sword. Like a tiny sun, faint but stubborn, under the waves, streaking this way and that.

    The arc it paints, hewing down over her head into the side of a tentacle that blows just past her, and spinning end over end twice more without the ground to absorb it. The chain of interlocking circles it drags along the long side of a second stabbing limb she leaps away from, bloodily whirling down its titanic length. The direct line where she kicks from its side and leaps to another. The burst of sunlit sparks where she somehow parries the brunt of a crushing strike, knocking the gargantuan tentacle to the side. The quick darting flashes where it strikes back and forth at the two around her, replacing it.

    She's headed straight towards Kraken. Getting closer on purpose. Giving herself less time to react and less room to maneuver. Plunging deeper into the water. A straight line from where she'd come, so the thrashing monster doesn't snake right past and hit Tamamo behind.
Hibiki Tachibana     For a brief moment, a part of Hibiki feels validated in her spur-of-the-moment harpoon idea. If she wasn't deep underwater and the Kana (the mech) was still above the surface, she'd feel tempted to give Petra a thumbs up. It'll have to wait, though. Potentially for quite a while.

    Now that the high-speed entry has been moved past, she can take in just how /massive/ this thing is from up close. In the sense that being this close makes it hard to take in the raw scale. As big as a city...if not more. It's a little daunting even for her, for a second - before those massive tentacles writhe and lash and beat about.

    To large to avoid completely. Using her leverage to push away and spin back through the water avoids a direct blow from one, just for the rushing currents to sweep her up and offset her; which means the next actually does impact her head-on, sending her careening out of control into another one. Past the winces of pain, past the darkness that comes with being under the ocean, she can see so many more of them still reaching up towards the Busan, the Kana, and plenty more besides.

    And, she can hear Tamamo's voice. Bracing herself, she forces herself to remain still for the three seconds asked of her, and then fires a burn of her Symphogear's thrusters intense enough that it flash-heats the liquid behidn her. After a blink of surprise, watching the space she was in get completely swept through, she nods in silent understanding. One, two...three...four...

    She kicks ahead at the count of five, to weave out of the way of and then intercept another appendage close to its root. A fist rears itself back--

    And she slams it into it, the sudden motion used to try and sink her arm in up to the shoulder. Inside, the mechanical gauntlet morphs and shifts, gaining bulk and armoring past the shoulder, and trading out its normal mechanisms for an oversized turbine. One that begins spinning, tearing apart flesh around it as it roars into a blur.

    And then, in a split-second hammering of internal machinery, it and all the force it's built up is punched forward in an imitation of a pilebunker, releasing an explosion of raw kinetic force at less than point blank. One that'll attempt to entirely /blow it apart/ from inside entirely, to sever the rest of the tentacle from the Kraken by destroying the base of it, with enough behind it that even the ocean water around her is clear away for the briefest of moments.

    "Tentacles...! Got it!"
Rita Ma      Kale and Cantio hammering on the surface tentacles slowly loosens Kraken's grip, prying it away from its prey- not to mention turning several of its horrible, squiggle-pupiled eyes towards the appetizing new flying targets. They do make a convincing argument.

     So do Candy's illusions, occupying yet more of the tentacles with victoriously swatting them- just as he'd hoped, the beast doesn't seem to notice or care that it's being whittled down. Petra burns and shreds a few, though not to the point of outright destroying any.

     Pinpointing its vital organs is hard- exactly because it's so huge, scanning has a tough time piercing its interior. But Ishirou's tech is good enough. He finds that its brains are too distributed to be a kill-spot, and naturally it doesn't have anything by way of lungs, but it does have a single, huge heart buried in the exact center of its body/head. It's one hell of a hard target, but that's the best he's going to get.

     His and Stanley's poison, meanwhile, is effective in the sense that Kraken has no special resistance, but ineffective in the sense that it's like a bee stinging a human- the affected limb slows, grows clumsier. However potent the poison, a lethal dose for this thing must be measured in gallons at least.

     Rather than exaggerating the weaknesses of its type, Kraken is less susceptible to sunlight than its lesser kin were- the mundane daylight seems to only irritate it. But, as Metaphor finds, Tamamo's talismans do still work their magic: its flesh angrily blisters, burning red and sloughing off around the charm.

     Shimmer's hand breaches Kraken's skin, but even if she buried her arm into it up to the shoulder, those would still be 'superficial' burns by comparison to its sheer mass; its flesh nearby sizzles and bubbles, but it still barely takes heed.

     Hibiki and Lilian strike true, too- the former scores various tentacles with her sunlight-empowered blade, then the latter's punch cavitates and mangles a weakened limb, and for the first time, one of them hangs fully limp and useless, barely still attached.
Rita Ma      Thanks to all the group's efforts, though, Kraken's grip on the Busan has slackened, and it hasn't yet been able to free itself from the harpoon. That's about to come to a head.

     By the time the time bubble dissipates, Kana's signing something to Bota. He nods. They each take one end of the cable Candy and Stanley provided. Bota, jetting off with his air-powered sword, throws his end into the Union Busan's massive propellers. Kana, practically soaring through the water, breaches the surface, wall-runs up the city-ship's side with the cable in hand, and vaults over the Kana to loop it around the harpoon line.

     Then she drops back down to throw her end into the Busan's propellers, too. And as they grind on, the loop tightens, and Kraken- realizing too late- is dragged by the harpoon right into them. It's like a vast meat grinder.

     When it comes out the other side, the water is pink with a thousand gallons of blood. Gouged-out tentacle chunks drift down into the abyss. Pulsing organs are exposed by the huge spiraling cuts on its body. The monster makes a noise like a scream- KREEEEEEE!- sending a pulsing shockwave through the water that could rattle one's bones.

     But now the Kraken is freed from its impalement, the line severed in the butchering. It starts to sink into the abyss, slowly receding past the point where it's safe for humans to tread. As it does, its nozzles point upwards- it fires laser-like lances of pressurized water up at the Union Busan, gouging the ship's hull. Cargo falls out of breached spaces, forming a falling hazard to anyone below the ship- along with a few dozen unfortunate passengers, and some of Candy's electrical mines.
Ishirou The R.E.S.C.U.E. rolls trying to bank away from the retaliation from the thrashing monster.  It's harder to move underwater than in the air, even with all of the advantages he's managed to take on.  Too much like soup, too much resistance...but he's got to keep fighting.  The thing he can ID in the center is the heart.  The only organ that couldn't be decentralized.  The brain, sure, the lungs, definitely...but not the heart!

He sends out what he can to the others, but already it's too late.  It's sinking, and not even his ability to work in the water will be enough.  He moves his Options again, back towards Hibiki and Lilian.  That's all the spare brain power he has right now, trying to figure out a way this thing dies, without anyone else dying...

Ishirou takes a breath.  He can only keep this up for so long, and if they can't do it he'll sink.  But...the soupiness of this place, and his own ability to hold things /MIGHT/ just be enough.

He dives, fast as he can manage.  Trying to get under the monster, or as close as he can.  He'll spin out, switching to humanoid mode, and hold both hands out.  

>>Depth exceeding tolerances, please pull up.<<

The strain on the internals is already there, he can feel it pressing, but all he can do is push back.  He doesn't need to hold it forever, he needs to hold it up just for a few seconds.  Enough to give his friends the moment they need to kill it.  Then he'll have to count on them to get him out of here.  

Every ounce of power the R.E.S.C.U.E. Unit has, he pushes into the electromagnetic systems, trying to push up against the creature.  He combines that with an attempt to drive into the creature's brain...trying to override its desire to fall to try and swim up...just a little.  Anything and everything he can do to make it stay up high enough to die.  

>>Structural Damage Detected.  Safe Depth Tolerances Exceeded.<<
Candy      For as long as Rita, Kana and Bota have been alive, the water has been many things. Humans still need it to live, now even more than when there was land. It brings food, and purified of its salt, it serves the equally vital role of potable sustenance.

     But water can also be a terrible, terrifying thing, when thought of in the context of the ocean. Monsters some as big as Kraken, many smaller--lurk within the vast expanse of water on the planet, waiting, watching with their awful, hungry eyes and mouths full of teeth. At least one of them is smart enough to know the manner of transgression, the horrid violation committed when its kin tear human flesh apart. To them, water holds no terror, no reason to fear the shadows cast by ancient, submerged leavings of a bygone era.

     Indeed--as pressurized water lances past him, Candy feels his life flashing before his eyes, avoiding them only by temporal chicanery that wears him down. It's like running a marathon, where the ground grows steadily steeper and steeper. Sweat trickles down his temples.

Let's see how you like it, motherfucker.

     The heavy form of one of his own inactive mines bangs into his head. He swears--but when this monster dies, then it won't go without knowing a taste of what it's like, to be betrayed by the very thing that keeps it alive.

     He holds down the trigger on his water cannon just as time stops. It takes a lot to do it this much, this often. But it has to be done. The impeller on his heavy backpack is frozen, water behind him pinched into a sharp funnel. He can't go much deeper, without it being unsafe. But holding the bleeding Kraken where it is, he can get a lot done in the time he has. Candy is thorough. He makes several patrols, swimming until his limbs burn and his fingers ache from holding the heavy trigger down.

     Time resumes.

-The water in a wide hemisphere around Kraken is violently disturbed, even as its own pressurized lances fly.
-Something like a watery pincushion forms within that hemisphere. Much smaller, but very capable of inflicting harm.

    Candy's bolts are necessarily much smaller, but they are plentiful and they are rapid, angrily swarming Kraken like ants enveloping an elephant.
Kale Hearthward Yes! It's still working! A bit at a time, get the ship free, push it away. All they need is to put in some more distance. Some more distance, and all the people on the Union Busan are safe. And-

Water lances out, tearing into the ship.

The... Kraken has a ranged attack. From his perch, Kale watches it tear into the hull, and people start tumbling down-

---

Kale's been busy. This was what he'd been training for. This was what he had picked for his new life, no longer as an imperial bruiser, someone focused on hurting people, but as disaster response - someone focused on helping people.

In theory, it was the same sort of drive behind it - protecting some subset of people, just reactively instead of aggressively. In practice, it was turning out to be different. Soldiers were easy to interact with - you just killed them, and that was that. If they argued about it or took issue with it, you just killed them harder. People, civilians specifically, had opinions of their own, and acted irrationally, and you weren't allowed to just smack them around till they agreed with you.

And over the last week, he'd been dealing with that from, to borrow someone else's phrase, the ground up. It was one thing to draw up evacuation plans and preparations in the isolation of his small bedroom suite aboard the East Wind - it was something else entirely to go aboard the Union Busan and go belowdecks to where the people actually were, and sell them on the plans and the procedures he'd drawn up.

It'd been a learning experience. It'd been more than a bit painful, at least as far as hits to his ego. He'd had to several times stop himself, swallow his pride, and not get into a shouting match.

---

And now, despite everything they were trying, despite how hard they were fighting, people were dying. Despite how much effort he'd been putting in, despite how much he cared, people were still dying.

"Hyper-oxygenate."

"Are you - are you sure, you're pretty worn out already-"

"I didn't stutter."

The flow of power on the East Wind reverses, the sparkling air no longer flowing out of Kale but into him. He's no longer become the battery of this system - he's become it's output point.

"These people..." Kale holds his arms out to the sides. "Are under my protection."

The winds move and alter. The weather system here becomes hyper-localized. There's a long, thin storm, curving and stretching out like a wall, between the Kraken and the ship, with Kale and his ship floating in the eye.

"You will no longer so much as touch them for as long as I draw breath."
Petra Soroka     Petra sees the cable loop around the harpoon wire attached to the S1, and with a brief flash of insight, realizes what she needs to do for this to work. For Kraken to be pulled into the propellers, it needs to not be fixed in place by the S1.

    So Petra disengages the speed-limiters locking the S1 in place, right before the cable snaps tight. The sudden acceleration of being released throws Kraken deeper into the propellers, but alongside it, the S1 is thrown down into the water at breakneck speeds.

    Hitting the surface is like slamming into concrete, and metal groans and squeals around Petra as she's thrown down into the control panel, forehead cracking against metal. She clutches at it and whines, screwing her eyes shut with the effort of suppressing the surge of nausea. Gasping in shallow breaths, Petra pulls her hand away from her head and is transfixed by the smear of bright red across her palm.

    The moment of fascination is shattered when water tears through the bottom of the Union Busan with a boom. Petra presses her hand into her overall legs, then dazedly presses it back against the swelling bump, planting an obvious, bloody handprint in the middle of her forehead.

    The S1 isn't designed for water combat, and its viewscreen fuzz with blurry water as she struggles to fight against the tide to take flight again. Her route to freedom is given to her by Metaphor, who throws a repairing grenade at the battered turret. With offensive capabilities back fully online, Petra decides to take a page out of her own book, and utilize the cannon's recoil to propel the mech out of the water.

    She rotates the S1 to face *down*, turret pointed into the murky depth to track the pink trail of blood. Overpressurizing the cannon with all the donated energy surging through it, Petra fires an explosive shell at the retreating Kraken, the recoil pushing the S1 free of the water.


    It doesn't actually work. Recoil doesn't work that way.
Cantio Drawing the Kraken's attention away from the Union Busan appears to be a success, and identifying its heart means there's now a clear target for Cantio to aim for once the tentacles are dealt with. Better yet, it gets drawn into the giant ship's propellers, getting shredded in multiple places and losing so many tentacles that Cantio isn't particularly surprised when starts sinking deeper in an attempt to escape. She's about to dive down after it, too, when she notices something odd in the water.

By the time she realizes the water is forming into a laser to punch right up through the surface of the water, she barely has enough time to defend against it. The water lance smashes right into Cantio and her reformed sword, launching her higher into the air and sending her spiraling out of control for several moments before she finally catches herself with a wheezing groan at the impact.

"That's... What kind of attack was that? I didn't think water could be so..." Despite the sizable dent in her armor threatening to puncture right into her gut, she's actually looking rather impressed and excited. She holds a hand against the side of her head, mostly to whisper into a microphone and to hide the fact that she's doing it at all. "Future project: Water cannon."

The more pressing concern, of course, is making sure the Kraken doesn't escape. There's a  rather obvious danger to the Union Busan as well, though, and Cantio can... Actually, she can be in two places at once. Splitting off a clone of herself (Thief), she catches her clone's arm and hurls her over to the Union Busan before diving towards the water once more.

Spotting the Kraken relatively easily thanks to all that blood loss, Cantio dives deeper into the water, pausing only briefly to glance at the syringe launched into her before realizing that it's Metaphor's doing. Feeling that surge of strength pulsing in her shortly after, it's pretty easy to put two and two together, and she offers the doctor a brief salute before diving again.

Cantio's straining somewhat to fight off the ill-effects of experiencing so much deep sea pressure at once. Seeing Ishirou trying to get underneath the thing, though, forces her to keep diving further, perhaps out of some misplaced ego or something. Whatever the case is, she turns her sword into less of a proper sword and more of a lance in shape.

Lights explode out from the back of her armor as she speeds up in her descent, driving that laser-imbued swordlance as deep into the Kraken as she can without losing her grip. Once she can't push it in any further, the swordlance starts blasting sonic waves into the Kraken from that same tip, aimed to bludgeon the hell out of it with sonic blasts coming right from inside the creature.

Thief!Cantio, meanwhile, lands on the breached ship and starts rushing about trying to... Watch Kale? She sees him focusing his powers on defending the ship and, more importantly, its people, and she can't help but let out an approving chuckle at the sight. "We won't take long, so hold out until then!" She calls out to Kale, then resumes leaping from place to place and rebounding off walls to catch passengers here, pulling them out of the water there, and relying almost entirely on that wind wall to cover her and those that still need saving.
Sleek Shimmer     Being underwater, Sleek Shimmer cannot curse... not traditionally. She can spiritually send messages over the shared bands, but if she COULD curse at how little that attack seems to have done, she would've. As the creature tears away she waves her arm to wring out the feeling of numbness inflicted from that technique and gazes down at the vast bulk of the creature as it dives to deeper waters. She is already near the limits of what she feels comfortable experiencing... going further is risky.

    She's almost taken entirely by surprise by the PULVERIZING SHOCKWAVES that move through the water. She attempts to juke away and, as a result, only loses about HALF A LEG, the flesh and bone pulverized to pulp and turning into liquidy gibbets and muck.

    That would be a fatal wound for far too many. As it is, Shimmer flounders in the water for a precious few seconds before gathering her composure and focus.

    White energy begins to flow from the wound and take a rough leg shape... but the process is interrupted by another WATER LANCE coming straight at her. This time she reacts in time, holding a hand out and opening the spiritual vortexes from earlier. This time the vortex opens wider, sucking in water and dispersing the kinetic energy propelling the blast. She pulls in all of that energy, pushed nearly to the limit. Her spiritual sea cannot absorb any more!

    Seeing the syringe near her though, recognizing it's from an ally... Shimmer grabs it and jabs herself with it without hesitation.

    With a surge of energy and a silvery-white flash her leg reforms, new flesh woven from overflowing life energy, a process made far smoother by the medicine.

    Then something STRANGE happens. Shimmer's body takes on a curious glow, and her skin tone shifts to match that of the kraken's flesh. At the same time a wave of new color spreads through her hair, until it is deep blue.

    She raises a hand and the oceans begin to churn and swirl around her, drawn into a tighter and tighter vortex centered around her fist. It begins to take on a rippling brilliance eerily similar to the Water Lance Shimmer had absorbed...

    With a focused motion, Shimmer PUNCHES that vortex forwards and the water before her takes on a life of its own, streaming down towards the Kraken like the Fist of the Sea God, a shockwave that's easily twice Shimmer's height.
Tamamo     Tamamo counts at a steady pace, like keeping meter. "One, two, three, four -- Candelario, forward in six. One, two... back on seven. Lilian, in three and five, from one, two..."

    The shocks still reach her, shaking her position, but it's nothing like what's happening elsewhere. Lilian is making sure of that, and Tamamo trusts her to keep this position safe. As long as she stays where she is, she can easily see the threads that tie each person and event together. She barely has to pluck them to get things moving to the rhythm in her mind. With just a slight alteration, it becomes that much simpler, and she can call out each step of the dance as it relates to each of her allies. Whether they can make the steps in time is still up to them, of course. She's not stopping Kraken from attacking.

    Not yet.

    "Miss Kana, you may still catch it. Will you? I will direct."
    'I trust you.'
    "Very good. On my count, then..."

    So long as she's wearing the bracelet, it's easy for Tamamo to know exactly where Kana is. The threads between them are strong, if only because of that, and it makes it all the easier for her to direct motion into the depths, despite the fact that Tamamo cannot, in fact, see what's happening with her eyes. Knowing the closeness is enough, seeing the snarls of violence in the immediate future, and smoothing them out from moment to moment, navigating the tangles and calling out each necessary warning in words easier to understand than any she could use for what it's like to manipulate Fate with one's own hands.

    Of course, she expects Kana to strike at this beast. How deeply she can dig with a blade isn't the most important point, but that she does attack. Desires for destruction only strengthens a curse, just as hatred may transform into one. It's not a pleasant sort of magic, but that's why she doesn't explain it. Tamamo would rather not have to say just how very good she is at honing malice into a wedge she is. And against that wedge, she'll supply the hammer.

    The bracelet gives the focal point, as good as Tamamo being present in the depths, herself. Kana's own desires provide the direction, there where Tamamo's eyes cannot reach. Her curses fully prepared, there's barely a sparkle of light, in the circle around where Tamamo sits, to mark their passage. Whispered words aren't picked up by any mic, having purposefully muted hers. Only her own ears should capture each word, but the world, the sea, and Kraken will still hear them, even without understanding.

    "Forsaken by the light, devil of the depths, to sink is to dream forevermore. No warmth awaits you, for the nature of Winter's sea is a frozen ending. Rest, and never awaken."

    It moves like a poison, but it isn't really one. There's no chemical makeup to a curse, even if it can fill the body like black sludge. There's no difference in the meaning of death between a large creature and a small one.

    Its heart may take a bit longer to turn into a block of ice than a smaller creature's would, still.
Metaphor The talisman burns away rapidly, but the damage has been done, and as the Kraken recedes Metaphor gratefully takes the breathing room. Standing amidst the debris and the bubbling skin, she slows, and then stands practically entirely still for a few seconds. ECG slows down. She does not breathe, not in a standard way, but a drive spins down slightly. Her thoughts clear, waters unclouding, and one bubbles to the surface: This is how hard it is?

There's no time for further thought, though. The assault must be kept up. We're destroying it. From under her cloak, she draws a syringe gun: simple in design, with a rotating drum that she begins rapidly filling. Syringes are drawn from beakers while they're almost midair, juggling storage and sharps and grenade casing alike. She's practiced. She's made for this. She's fixing it.

All at once then, projectiles fly, shimmering multicolored chemistry streaking towards her contemporaries. Yellow sharp to fencer. He's incredible at keeping it away. Yellow sharp to artillery. Her blasts are beautiful. Blue tube overboard. He's breathing hard. Blue tube overboard. She's getting crushed. Silver foam to tank. Plating is creaking. Blue gas to ship. Salbutamol for the oxygen drive - breathe easy, Kale. Health monitor orange. She knows she can save them.

The dervish of projectiles is halted as a pressure cutter tears through the crane above her, the deep metal groan almost lost amidst the rest of the ship suddenly breaching. She doesn't see it coming. Like a hammer, a nail, and a thin wall, the crane smashes her through the floor - and then some. Through one deck, two - water breaks her fall, but that means a breach, right? Sunlight filters into the belowdecks for a brief moment before the crane tangles and crushes the top deck, the mass of metal blocking off an exit.

She remains standing.

Ship is sinking. Repairs. Support out, fix the vessel. More grenades - beakers clatter within, a label professes SMART FOAM 60u. She'll patch breaches so that those abovedecks can get shots off - and to keep the civilians alive. Solutions.
Stanley Padgett     The water LANCES upwards at the Busan. But it cannot touch Stanley Padget. Plates and bulkheads fall from the Busan. But they cannot touch Stanley Padgett. Cargo tumbles out, great massive containers falling to the depths of the ocean... but they cannot touch Stanley Padgett.
    Each time something gets close, Stanley is simply no longer there. Each time a piece of debris lashes out to drag Stanley to the depths, it's an after image.

    The syringe tossed from Metaphor falls into the water near him, and he's there in an instant, shoving the injector into his hip, and letting... well, whatever that was it felt like 12 cans of Creature all at the same time.

    The Kraken is sundered. The heart is exposed. The time is now.

    Stanley tosses the empty syringe away, checks the seal on his helmet, and then... Mercutio flashes into place around his body, a great ghostly image of his Fool Heart glimmering in the dark. Make a difference for others. Stanley grips his rapier, takes a deep breath of recirculated air... and lunges.

    Others might be going for massive strikes, battering blows, or others. But no. Stanley and Mercutio dart forward. There are feints to get around the other's attacks. Flickers in the water, ghostly images of the Fool and the Fool Who Follows blinking around to get just the right angle... And then like a rocket, powered by hope and fear, Mercutio DIVES into the depths, straight into the heart of Kraken, looking to make a deep, paralyzing cut, buoyed by faith and Metaphor's toxins.
Lilian Rook     Halfway to Kraken measured by the length of its tentacles, hacking away at the side of another headed for Tamamo behind her, Lilian recognizes what Kana and Bota are up to as soon as the first cable is placed. Diving low and flattening her whole body under the sweep of another tentacle, scraping over the blat of her blade and her crossed forearm behind it, Lilian spirals downwards from the force, into the path of a hefty downwards strike, and--

                -----[stop]-----
    "Okay Kana--" Lilian mutters under her breath. Columns of roiling whitewater glow in the pool of light cast by her sword in the abyss, stuck to and trailing away from the mass of gnarled hooks and suckers like diorama clouds. She has only to reorient her body in the water to brace her feet against it, kicking off for the added momentum necessary to get deeper a second time.
                -----[start]-----

    --is somehow suddenly too deep to strike. Kraken is reeled in moments later, and a great explosion of blood and gore above tints the faded sky-light in its colour from below. Lilian speaks to herself as if finishing a sentence "--maybe more than a little bit."

    Still, even maimed and mangled, Kraken is built for the ocean and Lilian is not. The enormous beast has only to push the water twice and surge right past her to deeper below. Lilian's choice of trajectory means she's still close. Possibly the closest. Almost a precognitive move, given the way the monster goes to range. Ishirou's options have to chase her down, but the opening created gives them time. Lilian kicks out in one direction and stabilizes a leg in the other, turning herself downwards, and continues to accelerate.

    The world reorients itself her her mind's eye such that she is falling towards it by gravity, even though it is only propulsive magic keeping her momentum up.

    §Breathe deep. Knee up. toe down. Arms together, elbows forward. You are falling from above, like a stroke of lightning, like a falling star. Feel the heat against your skin. Soak it in, channel it into your heart, and from there, into your arms, your fingers, your blade. Extend it upwards as it builds; don't allow it to spread outwards. A descending column. Like a stroke of lightning, like a falling star.§

    Night Mist is clasped hand over hand above her head, tip pointed back just so to catch the the remnant light. The radiant glow within it amplifies of its own accord, sheathing the entire black blade in a sheen of bright and still flame. Hissing into her breather, Lilian says the words aloud to focus; a mnemonic chant. "Cleasanna--"
Lilian Rook     Kraken stops, turns, and convulses. Lilian's eyes go wide. A steel-slicing blast of water, instantly lethal, pierces straight into-- empty space and the Union Busan behind it, with Lilian 'falling' past it. A second beam slices-- just over and past her head, where she accelerates again. A third punches-- a hole in the cargo hold. A fourth slashes-- along the belly of the ship and sparks dissipate into the water where she was. The brightness of her sword builds with each moment. "--Lili Dubha--"

    The falling cargo is catching up. Thousands of tons of heavy equipment, first, its sheer inertia and density easily beating out the water. She spins loosely out of the shadow of a container, ready to crush her, and slams her boots against its side instead. Running along its side, picking up speed, Lilian leaps as it accelerates past her, to the next, and then the next, charging headlong towards the singular point the options indicate, ignoring the stress on her suit, until she has matched speed with the debris. From the last, she resumes 'freefall', and the 'flame' held around her blade becomes a streak behind her. "Lann Réalta Reathata!"

    Lilian challenges the limit of where it is safe to dive, just so she can get as close as possible, before her sword finally comes down. Underwater, the final motion causes the water to cavitate and collapse behind her with the sound of a small bomb. The bottom is blown out with a bulletesque narrowing tunnel following her, where the water pressure lags behind. The release of energy on contact causes the abyss to briefly illuminate all of Kraken's body, like a stroke of lightning. The impact hits Kraken as if a hundred Lilians had landed the same overlapping blow at the same indivisible instant; enough for the thunderous shock to visibly ripple through so much soft flesh, the explosive sound reaching all the way to the surface, like a falling star.

    What to do after is something to worry about later. Plunging into the heart of the abyss in search of the hellish beast within is something a knight would do.
Hibiki Tachibana     Recoiling back through the water after her attack, Hibiki is able to watch Bota and Kana's plan come to fruition - she hadn't even considered using the Busan itself for something like that. And just how can Kana move like that, anyway!? It's actually crazy to see in motion, and she fully understands why she said what she said back at the meeting. Scary.

    It'd be too much to hope for even this to put the Kraken down though. There's a moment where she's awed, seeing the behemoth get shredded apart...and an even larger one, when it's still /alive/ afterwards. "Wha--" Her mouth falls slack (only not flooded instantly for the same reason she can function in space), and she doesn't even get to finish that before the shockwave ripples through the ocean and gets her to momentarily double over with the body-wracking jolting.

    It's trying to get away...!? If it does, then...

    All at once, she tenses up her frame, and kicks ahead with her fist reared back. Not to punch, immediately - but that upsized gauntlet, thrusters emerging out past the elbow, is fired full blast in combination with her Symphogear's inherent boosters to help her accelerate forward. As she goes, the pistons in her boots eject forwards and slam back to produce smaller kinetic bursts, further speeding her after the beast in rapid bursts.

    While fighting underwater is possible, Gungnir isn't designed to be able to handle the kind of depths this thing is trying to sink into. Metal strains and threatens to crumple inwards, and the intense pressure from all directions starts beating at her body. All the same, she goes and goes, closing in until--

    Rather than going for the head and the heart, she dives around to link up with Ishirou. "You didn't...ugh...listen to anything Red Dwarf said, did you?" The irony isn't lost on her, as she angles up beside him and braces both hands up against the Kraken's massive body alongside him. "Someone would have to come and drag...your butt up out of this after this anyway, you know. And probably mine, too...!"

    Hibiki isn't going to just push up against that much weight, though. Even for her, it's too much, she both lacks the raw thruster power Ishirou does while also having no point of leverage swimming about. Which is why the oversized gauntlet shifts back to its normal state, as she clenches her fist and rears it back. Her fist tightens as the pilebunker within pries itself as far back as possible on its own...

    And she punches. Boom. Another eruption of raw force pummeled straight into it.
    The other hand comes back, and slams into the flesh as hard as possible before doing the same. Boom.
    And a third, delivered so fast that the disturbed water from the first blow is still roaring around them. Boom. A fourth, a fifth, a seventh, a tenth, a fifteenth, twentieth, thirtieth...

    Each one backed by the one-two of her armor delivering a second strike behind each attack, and arms moving fast enough to blur, Hibiki is going to do her part to take at least some of the strain off of Ishirou's suicidal task - by hitting the thing so hard and so fast, over and over and over again, to create 'lift' from below in its own right.

    A frankly absurd amount of it that's going to leave her Symphogear crying afterwards.
Redshift Operators     Another dark future gushes into ballast tanks, through bulkheads, through the gaps in engine rooms.

    There's one thing that White Dwarf knows deeply, and it is *magical fucking curses*. She actually knows nothing about them, but in the dark future she sees, she recognizes that somehow, Tamamo's curse didn't manage to take properly. A temperature management? Alterations of circulation to manage coldness, created through its life in the darkest depths? Whatever it was, it doesn't matter.

    That's not what this story is about.

    With Ishirou's scans and recognizing Tamamo's denial-of-heat's faltered effect in the dark future, she can rush to make it a brighter one in the present. "Giant, launch me!" She demands, hooking a leg around him. "RD, cryo grenade!"

    With one of those grenades in hand, she surges towards the heart of the creature, enduring intense shockwaves that batter and barrage her body, depositing a cryo grenade on... not the heart, no, but a cluster of adjacent muscles and sacs surely essential in some strange way to stopping Tamamo's curse. With perfect timing and a sudden kick off, she leaves a once-seemingly-harmless chunk of flesh frozen, and just barely manages to turn one of those water-jets into a glancing shot with a careful blade deflection rather than get impaled by the "beam".

    That's about all the dark futures she can manage at this rate. She's running out of precognitive focus.
Rita Ma      Ishirou can't stop tens of thousands of tons of flesh from descending, but by straining and tugging at the Kraken's nerves to disrupt its swimming, he can slow it just perceptibly. One huge, yellow, squiggle-pupilled eye turns downwards to glare at him in dim recognition. Kale's storm denies it the satisfaction of a parting shot- at the Union Busan, at least.

     Candy's water jets pinprick the Kraken's flesh all around; Shimmer's punch and Petra's explosive shell crush and tear at its body. Cantio's blade does much the same, from the inside. Stanley's blade finds its heart, and paralysis of the cardiac muscle is logically fatal. With Metaphor's help, pencil-sized needles continue streaking down from the ship to lodge in Kraken's skin, bleeding it dry by ounces.

     Kana descends under Tamamo's instructions, using the air jets on her twin blades to slip and twist around the beast's still-thrashing tentacles. An elegantly savage pirouetting blow rips into the already-deep propeller gouges, mirroring their original twisting cuts. Each one begins to freeze over immediately, spreading that lethal chill within: Tamamo couldn't have found a bitterer heart to wield her curse.

     Lilian lays its body open with her blow, perforated flesh torn aside. She bares the heart's muscle, showing how its pulses slow and stop. The water turns opaque crimson.

     Then its eyes, lolled off to every side before, all snap to focus on the party in unity, shining with an unwholesome gleam through the cloud. The heart quivers on the edge of death, then audibly beats again.
Rita Ma      'How dare you?'

     The voice is not spoken, but it is heard, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere. Kraken was aimless and unfocused before. It isn't now. Its remaining arms lunge to seize everyone within reach; six ultra-pressure valves aim and fire those laser-like water jets on mobility-restricted targets.

     'I've been patient.'

     Still gripping whoever it could seize, it abandons its retreat and swoops back towards the Union Busan, trying to leave the slower swimmers behind.

     'Have I not?'

     Its tentacles seize the ship's side. It starts to haul itself up onto deck, crushing swathes of the superstructure under its bulk. Deck guns fire on it and the sun burns its guts, but it feels no pain. In turn, it fires its cutting jets on opportunity, endangering anyone still surface-side.

     'When you reject my mercies, corner my pawns...'

     Its jagged beak reaches out for the command deck of the central ship. Its bulk carelessly threatens to crush the artificial warpgate.

     'Why should I not spite you?'
Kale Hearthward The warpgate.

Kale moves. Laser-focused water lances out at the spot he was standing a moment ago - he barely notices it.

The warpgate is... how they're going to get the injured out. Get fresh supplies in. Get repair materials in. Coordinate everything they need to bring the fight to the Queen. He doesn't have time to second-guess how important it might be, he only has time to act.

He leaves the ship behind - there's not enough time to explain to his pilot. He can move faster than it on his own, anyway. He flies across the decks, zeroing in on the point, drawing and raising his sword...

He perches on top of the warpgate, and raises Periactus, already mid-transformation. If the Kraken is unstoppably coming down, he'll just have to drill a tunnel up through it.
Stanley Padgett     This is a disaster. Stanley saw the hit land. He could feel the creature's shudders in the water as all of those attacks rained down on the heart of Kraken. And still it lumbers. Still it moves.

    The Fool is battered in the water and cast aside for the beast to make a final thrashing assault on the Busan, and still, the Elites must flounder on to stop it. Padgett twists around in the sea to reorient himself in the water, and then starts to make his ascent, flashing from piece of debris to piece of debris until he can reach... the sundered deck of the Busan. He staggers, catches his footing, and then lashes out again, stutter-stepping until he can find a spot of purchase. Something to sink his poisons into.

    Mercutio manifests again, and seemingly the pair of them come to the same conclusion.
    "I'll make assurance double sure, and take a bond of fate!"
    "Thou shalt not live."

    Both Mercutio and Stanley draw their flintlocks, and start firing toxic volleys into the sides of the beast.
Ishirou Ishirou can just barely do the minimum needed to keep the creature from going too low.  It's barely anything, but he refuses...he refuses to let this monster get away.  It needs to die so they can protect this world and the Multiverse at large.  Ishirou wants Rita to be able to come back home..! These... /monsters/ prevented that!  

Then it speaks.  Not directly, but in a way that he understands.  A primal thing?  Was he just imagining it..?  It's hard to tell, but he forces himself forward.  The jets of water spraying down at him like a laser cut through the outer layers of the R.E.S.C.U.E. Unit.  

>>Stress to structure increasing.  Please rise!<<

It was at this point the creature surfaces with all speed.  Ishirou starts to sink down slowly, but...no..!  His friend needs a home to return to..!  "DETATCH THE BROKEN PARTS...RELEASE THE BLADDERS...SURFACE NOW!" he shouts, the unit reacting, thanks to POD.  

Right on the creature's ass Ishirou is rising, the damaged parts being ejected.  Near the surface, the Rescue unit ejects the rest of the SEA unit, and the FLIGHT unit connects.  Every bone in Ishirou's body is raddling right now, everything in his body hurts from the strain.  He swings free, and electromagnetic grabbers grab the syringe from Metaphor.  The autoinjector is placed into his thigh.  

There is a burst of speed from the R.E.S.C.U.E. Unit, as he dives bombs the Kraken.  Every single remaining weapon fires.  Missiles fly down toward its back, and energy blasts fire from the front aiming to pepper it.  Heat bombs aim across its back.  Ishirou spins mid-air and back down again for another dive bomb.  But this time he aims for where Kale is.  He's just mashing every ordinance he can muster, aiming to burn away as much of it as he can.  

Through the brief connection, he speaks back to the creature.  'You don't belong here.  To hell with your patience!  This is /Rita's/ home and she'll get it back!'
Hibiki Tachibana     As long as Kraken is slowed enough to let everyone else strike at the heart, that's enough for her. In an ideal world, the thing goes limp and lifeless into the depths, Ishirou and Hibiki pry each other from out underneath this thing, they'd maybe get yelled at by Lilian, and things can progress towards the final showdown without any more harassment to the Union Busan. That is not the timeline that happened in.

    This is the one where every single one of those eyes show an intelligence that they didn't before, and she pauses in her barrage of blows to look up at and meet one of them. The voice in her head stuns her still in place for a moment, which is exactly a moment long enough for one of the appendages to seize her and crush her in its grip. "Ghah--!"

    Pieces of Gungnir break and shatter, weakened from the extreme depth, and more besides is blasted and sheared away by high-pressure water jets. With how little options she has but to brace and power through it, she's holding on entirely on the Symphogear's actual defensive functions more than any physical armor. By the time she's hauled up with Kraken as it surfaces, she's panting for air and missing a considerable portion of it.

    "Don't think..." Hibiki coughs out, before straining to free one arm, and then the other. It...no, the only one who could be maneuvering their 'pawn' like this, is going to cause untold damage to the Union Busan and its people unless something is done. And she's not going to just sit back and not do anything about it. Not when...

    "...I'm going to let you hurt anyone else just because of /SPITE!/" Through little more than raw strength, she digs her grip in and uses that to force the hold loose enough to pull herself out - and then maintains that same grip as she goes to fall away down towards the Busan's deck, dragging the tentacle behind her. Underwater, she didn't have any sort of way to ground herself in place, and had to resort to just hitting as hard as she could.

    On solid ground again - as close as it gets here - all of undamaged pistons in her leg armoring can eject themselves backwards and embed into it for stability. And with a yell at the top of her lungs, and all the effort and every bit of might she can muster, she redoubles her hold on the limb and /pulls/. Pulls hard enough to strain the limb, and stop the rest of its body from going anywhere without doing anything about her.

    She won't let it get any farther towards the command deck, or any other residents. Or, just as importantly, go anywhere as it's blasted and attacked from all angles by everybody else.
Cantio The Kraken communicates with them. Although Cantio can't hear it speaking with anything resembling a mouth, she can hear it speaking to her through her mind. She swerves out of the way of the arm that comes at her, but the followup blast from the water lance puts out enough raw force that the reverberation shock her to her core in conjunction with the terrible ocean pressure starting to really kick in and make staying down this far unbearable.

Even without a direct hit, the force of all that still shears off several chunks of Cantio's armor. Worse yet, the Kraken is far more maneuverable in its own element! In the past, Cantio would be absolutely screwed in this situation without any way of stopping the creature.

After hearing what the Kraken says, she also can't help but feel a slight bit of sympathy for its reasons for doing all of this (based on her reading way too much into things).  "You're doing what you think is best for your people. There's nothing wrong with doing right by them, and I can't blame you if that is the case." She speaks, not at any particularly loud volume, but just talkign normally inside her helmet.

If it can hear her, great. If it can't, she can only hope nobody else does. "That doesn't mean we can roll over and let you kill us, either, though. They have their own people to protect, and I have..."

Right. None of these people really are hers, are they? They're all her friend's people, her family, but that's still enough for Cantio. Closing her eyes, she abruptly disappears from the Kraken's grip, reappearing besides Thief!Cantio who's still in the middle of aiding those that fell from the initial blasts. Noting the original's visible fatigue and busted up armor, the thief moves to join in the fight, but she's stopped by the original and directed to continue grabbing and healing whoever she can.

Spotting the Kraken on board again, Cantio grabs one of her clone's purple-metal knives, then leaps over to the command deck where the Kraken's once against moving to wreck the whole structure. Trying to destroy it with another burst of sonic waves didn't seem to completely work last time, but its open beak gives her somewhere else to aim.

She leaps right at its beak, then hurls her knife right in. With any luck, she'll actually manage to get it in there without getting her arm chewed off, and then she uses it like a conduit for her light magic. The knife explodes into a storm of steel fragments and lasers, swirling around like a miniature tornado centered entirely on/within the Kraken.
Sleek Shimmer     The last thing Shimmer was expecting was for the great sea beast to GAIN AN AWARENESS and act with focused intent. The moment she senses that voice her intuition starts SCREAMING 'danger' and her whole body tenses.

    Moments afterward, her WHOLE BODY is put under the horrible squeeze. Bones crack and the air's squeezed right from her lungs in a matter of seconds.

    It's not long until there's just a red fox sailing through the air after slipping free of the creature's grip, only to come crashing down into the waters and surface. If left alone for a bit she'll come to and begin treading water and trying to make her way back towards the Union Basan, but it's a struggle to stay above water every bit of the way. Her limbs have no strength after a massive regeneration effort...
Redshift Operators     A dark future is flooding in, rising up beyond untreadable heights, drowning and chilled.

    A future where the motions of the vast creature simply annihilate Candy is seen. That, especially, is beyond acceptable. A fellow member of the watch, a fellow freedom fighter, a fellow understander of time's nuances... no, that's certainly too dark a future.

    That's not what this story is about, after all.

    White Dwarf is still battered, still overwhelmed, but her future-phantoms swarm the man in the water, trying to find the right path forward. Brute-force, they solve potential after potential, until the one tentacle that threatens him is narrowed down, and cut down. There's no visual sign of it, and maybe it won't be possible to know what her intentions were, but rushing to cut the horrid, boneless muscles of the creature, she can blunt its strike just enough to not leave Candy fully disabled, deep underwater.

    This, of course, leaves her vulnerable instead. Thank goodness for Red Giant, surging between her and one of those tentacles, enduring the bulk of the strikes and resulting in the both of them being tossed up onto the deck as it climbs.

    The precognitive ninja sees a future in total clarity. But she doesn't need precognition for this one. "That voice... it's trying to cut the evacuation route!!" And thank god someone else already got ahead of that, because, bruised and battered, tumbling and wounded, no part of the Redshift Operators has the remaining strength to intercede.
Candy      Candy can hear the voice. He knows who it is. He knew, the instant he'd seen those eyes focus on him. He hopes the owner can hear him, too.

     "This world is a goddamn graveyard because of you. You and your little family of idiot thieves." A tentacle that should've seized him holds him for only a fraction of a second before he is gone. Moved, back to the ship. To the room where he'd donned the suit.

     "And you have the nerve to talk about mercy." The armor is off of him. The water cannon is discarded. "Talk that shit now while you can, motherfucker."

     Candy's passage out onto the maindeck is fraught with shaking. The ship groans beneath Kraken's bulk. Debris and supplies alike batter him on his way. Bruised in places, exhausted, muscles screaming, he continues. He finds himself standing before the mauled and bleeding thing, hauling a heavy machine gun with a pan magazine. As the gun bounces on its strap, he shuffles a deck of cards with one hand.

     "There's not gonna be any for you," he pants. The deck goes, first. Some of the cards fly *through* the beast, aiming where Ishirou and Lilian had indicated to coordinate efforts. They cut like steel. Others conjure pressurized water, and others lash with crescents of flame.

     The roar of the machine gun, bucking in Candy's hands, overwhelms his furious shout, but the muzzle flash only serves to illuminate his snarl of rage. This thing, and its master, are keeping Rita from being close to people that she loves and who love her. It is responsible for an atmosphere of terror--while the fake Harpoonists and the wealthy press down from one angle, the monsters press from the other. It, and its ilk, have squeezed the humanity of this world so flat that scarcely a nation's worth of them remain. Candy can't imagine how much someone like Kana hates it--but he has enough of his own.

     His breathing is ragged, but the deck isn't spent yet, still flying seemingly of its own accord. New spells. Water boils, and flame sears, from inside the monster's flesh. He is screaming something, some invective, until his voice gives out.
Lilian Rook     It takes Lilian herself four full seconds to absorb the enormous recoil of her strike, diffuse most of it out into Kraken's body, clear her ears of the echoing thunderclap and residual ringing, heave in another breath once her diaphragm uncompresses with the rest of her insides, blink off the shock of light, and wrench Night Mist free, trailing an elegant paint-slash of heartsblood, so she can softly kick away and drift free. "You know . . . slaying the dragon in its lair to defend the village actually feels pretty good." she says, thoughtlessly over the radio, then laughs, gently.

    And Kraken stirs to life, surging right past her. The sheer speed of its menacing advance sends her tumbling through the water. Nearly right into a slicing jet. She blinks away, catches her shoulder against the side of a spearing tentacle, rolls down its length and bounces free, steps over another and blinks once more past a blast, burning deep into her reserves to keep up. The water steams, boils, glitters odd and alien colours around her, where her armour glows with heat.

    And then when that voice speaks into her mind, Lilian hears her its echo in her own. She is in the ocean, near Busan. She is at Sapient Heuristics. She is at Indus. She is at Tartarus. She is home. She is in the ocean, and she is in Hell.

    'How dare you?'
    'You can't do that, XXXXXXXXXX!'

    'I've been patient.'
    'You pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and now this is what you get.'

    'Have I not?'
    'Why do you have to make this so hard?!'

    'When you reject my mercies, corner my pawns...'
    'You know full fucking well what you've done! I told you --I told you all-- again and again and again and AGAIN not to do it! I begged you not to make it my problem! And you all took that as a sign of weakness and you went at me like a swarm of fucking pirahnas!'

    'Why should I not spite you?'
    'You let me get to this point, so you play this game to the end!'

    Even though she knows where it's coming from; who it's coming from; Lilian claps her hands over her ears as Leviathan passes, squeezing her eyes shut and holding her breath, desperately trying not to foul the rebreather.

    §What do I say to it? What can I say? What would even help? It can't think like a human. It's a monster, right? It only thinks that way, that it can kill all these people, because it is one. Is that how it sounds? Am I a monster? Do I think the same way? That's how I sound. Isn't it? But it's not wrong. I'm not wrong! Those were my honest feelings! Some of them still are! So what's wrong with it? That thing is wrong! I'm not wrong! What is everyone else going to think though?! What do I do about--?!§

    Lilian's eyes open wide, when the screams of 'warpgate' come through her radio.

    §Right. Right, I don't need to think about that. I have a duty to stop it, and a reason to do. Protecting innocent people from the dragon. I can't freak out here. I'd be a pathetic excuse for a knight if I did.§
Lilian Rook     The warpgate deck flashes colours that don't exist, but could. Like a tiny strike of pinpoint lightning, the epicenter hisses with contrails of glittering night-coloured vapour. A small scorch mark glows as if irradiated, leaving the molten impression of a handful of footprints. Lilian stands in the middle. The diving suit has somehow charred itself while still wet, burnt and peeling from her skin, rapidly being filled in with new armour. The extant plates glow like freshly forged iron, a few shades off the end of the red spectrum.

    She should have picked any other place to be than 'in the way', but that's where she is. There's no possible way she can halt the giant Leviathan's advance, but her sword is slammed into its beaked maw and her armoured heels are peeling up the deck anyways as she strains every last muscle and vents every last drop of her magical energy behind her to slow it down, even just a little, throwing everything in with Hibiki.

    Embers of black-gold energy swirl around her; a circle is around her free hand, planted against the back of her blade, and the monstrosity through it. Accelerated time exsanguinates Kraken from the inside out, burning rapidly through the last beats even the Queen can wring from it, spilling the remaining blood from its tissues, burning up its oxygen.

    Lilian says something, and it is as if two of her is speaking at once; one with the laboured and ragged intensity of heroic effort, roughing the edges of her accent, and the other with a strange, wordless, soundless, bleedingly raw sincerity that plays its tidal forces on the heart. §Trying and failing to <show mercy/be a better person/treat others with dignity> isn't the same thing as letting people <choose how you'll hurt them/how much you'll hate them/make it easier for you>! If you don't understand humans at all, don't bother! Don't even beg for mercy in the end!§

    "Cleasa o'Skye ~ Scriosadh Fola!"

    Yelling at the top of her lungs, Lilian drives Night Mist as deep as it'll go, and for no further reason than spite; than defiance; than staking out 'these people matter, this act of mine matters, you cannot take it from me'; she hurls a single stinging strike down the sympathetic arcane link between the Queen and Kraken. A blow with no purpose but to bloody an invincible monster, somewhere halfway across the world, for an inconsequential time, just to stare that monster in the eye and make it flinch. And by proxy, a different monster entirely.
Petra Soroka     The bottled repair that Metaphor lobbed at the S1 clears up the rattled viewscreen, as well. Bobbing in the water like a sitting duck after... something went wrong, after the roiling heat clouding the water around the barrel dissipates, Petra has a crystal clear view of a pinpoint of light shining in the abyss.

    Breath held, her part in the fight seeming to be over, Petra leans in, captivated. The knight, slaying the monster. A streak of light cutting through the darkness, colliding with Kraken with such *awe-inspiringly* confident force that Petra gasps even before the shockwave reaches her, booming and rattling the cabin.

    It's breathtaking. It's so dazzling. It's so, so, unfair.

    Why does she have to hate her? Which one of them is "she", which one is "her"? God, it's so easy for Petra to nod when Lilian gives her commands, to play support and watch her perform. It would be so easy to buckle, and apologize, and beg for guidance.

    But then what would she be? A shadow of a person, wagging her tail when given orders, never having any reason to speak and no one ever having any reason to listen to her.

    In the wake of Lilian's attack, Petra stares so intently at the viewscren that her vision unfocuses, awe burning away into irritation at the former's presence.

    Then she's hit by a pillar of water that could punch through steel.

    The S1 is launched out of the water, finally, metal crumpling from the impact. The gurgling jets flare back to life, stabilizing the mech in the air while Petra gasps for breath, the wind knocked out of her. Kraken climbs onto the deck of the Union Busan, and she glares at it through her screens with displaced, profoundly unheroic anger.

    Back in its element, the S1 rises into the air, positioning itself over top the rampaging Kraken. The mech tilts forwards, leveling the turret downwards. It'll only make Petra feel worse in the long run, but she has to do it, doesn't she?

    The S1 charges downwards, jet flame and smoke streaming behind it, and when it collides with the Kraken's head, an explosive shell detonates at point-blank range, knocking it downwards and backwards, into the depths.
Metaphor Repairs. Canisters impact shorn metal, and a glinting foam suddenly bursts and fills the immediate region, hardening into a metallic foam that will protect against pressure - starship and naval ship breaches one and the same. Metaphor directs any civilian workers out of the area, shouting in sentence-fragment orders that this area will hold. She's confident. She refuses to not be confident. This is just another breach. The air inside grows heavy with the scent of surfactant, and it's probably not great to breathe -

    -until another water jet pierces through from below. The deck receives fresh air once more, and she continues to lob the metal foam - until a status indicator flashes red. Depths. Can't let them down. Death. A waveform picks up in speed. And suddenly she's plunged down through one of the holes cut in the hull, an oxygen-fed jetpack propelling her in a trajectory towards the grenadier. Her cut through the water is strange - like she's moving through something far less resistant. Hard to slow, but not exactly fast. Her trajectory aligns with his, and no matter where he's ending up, she's plowing her way through to it.

Her syringe gun, her grenades - water doesn't play nice with them. Need manual intervention. Shimmer will be handled. He's - her mind blanks for just a fraction of a second as Candy's battered form draws into visual range, and she absentmindedly tosses an autoinjector (yellow) which Ishirou snatches as he screams past. And with a silent drive click, she continues tailing her target.

There's a certain intimacy forced by the medium of manually administering medications I should have distributed beforehand into people. Her gleaming white shape, a floodlight cutting through the depths, a hand grabbing for an anchor wherever is closest on Candy's body. She pulls herself closer - force of limb far greater than force of jetpack, and stares at him for just a moment.

The reverie is breached by her suddenly jamming an autoinjector (red) into his thigh. Painkillers spread out, everything dulls, but just a little. Just enough to keep pushing forward like the rest of us. She drifts away, slightly.

Past that, she's probably going the same way he is. Preventative measures. Attacking civilians. Who grabbed Shimmer? Travel, movement, kill that thing where it stands.

Metaphor breaches the water. Metaphor takes aim at the Kraken's exposed innards. And Metaphor, with a prodigial throw, launches a single head-sized chemical payload directly into them.

Solving it.

Upon Shimmer surfacing, she's already kicking over to the sopping beast - a moment's hesitation at the shape, but quickly cradled under an arm and stuck with a needle (pale blue) as she makes her way back to the ship.

Cradled under her left arm, specifically, as she appears to have lost the other during the fight. It's sticking out of her duffel, but there's wear showing across her - how long has she been this beat up?
Tamamo     From her perch below the craft, the shaking and thrashing continues, but Tamamo holds on. She can see that she won't be hit. That's what the future holds. She does, beside that, trust that she'll be protected. It would be stranger for her not to be. However, she still has to leave. With Kraken returning, that's what's required for her to follow the safe lines forward.

    She doesn't have anything like Kana's mobility underwater. Tamamo's no harpoonist herself, the most that she can say being that she's at home on the beach, and a swimmer of very ordinary profiency. The diving suit makes that somewhat more difficult, but here she's again saved by her ability to climb up the side of the ship, rather than simply trust to the water. Up and over and back onto the deck, finding far easier going without the water's resistance, even while carrying some extra weight.

    She takes off the helmet, dropping it to the side and taking a salt-filled breath. She pops open another of the canisters at her side, and pulls out a set of talismans that really wouldn't have worked underwater. Why did she even bring this? The flimsy paper wouldn't last a moment, but it's perfectly suitable up here.

    "Hah... hahh. Truly, you have the mind of a queen. Is it your failing that you were born to the wrong world, or the wrong era? You might have found peers in another, and then you would have sought to kill each other, to bleed lands and people both, in precisely the same manner. Rather than live with defeat, you would rather the painful end of spiteful vengeance."

    Curses of freezing hells flutter out into the air in paper form, striking thrashing tentacles, cutting deeply, stopping blood and breaking nerves. That's important, arrayed as they are to just barely stop each strike before it can land at some vulnerable point on the Union Busan, but it's not the main focus.

    "Why should you not choose the manner of your ending, even so loathsome as you are? This is the natural result of war. I cannot fault your pride. No, I can only tell you--"

    Tamamo is the focus, shining with blessed sunlight, and carrying it with the words she speaks. She has the force of gravity on her side, though it's a gravity that affects minds and actions, not mass. She draws it in to herself, demanding eyes be seared in a directed blaze. That attention is focused on the hanging, unfinished statement, and from there, into the word of final rejection that ends it.

                                     "Die."                                    
Metaphor As the payload arcs towards the Kraken, anyone with keen enough eyesight and a focus in its area might notice a small seal stuck to the side. The detonation is gigantic, enough to be a serious hazard to the eardrums of anyone nearby, but the blinding light that emanates alongside it is probably not just the chemical force multiplication.
Rita Ma      Kana only fought like she was possessed. The Kraken is possessed, in a very literal sense. Petra blows most of its brains out, Kale tunnels clean through a chamber of its heart, Cantio mangles and burns what could be called its 'face', Candy burns it from inside out, Hibiki stops it from squirming away through all of that.

     It still struggles and strains to throw its bulk against the ship's critical infrastructure. What's left of its beak grazes against the command deck's windows. The voice, despite Kraken's imminent death, sounds only mildly annoyed.

     "Thou shalt not live."
     "I am an eternal being."

     "You don't belong here."
     "Look around you, insect."

     "...I'm going to let you hurt anyone else just because of /SPITE!/"
     "What do you call your pointless struggles?"

     "The world is a goddamned graveyard because of you."
     "I offered peace..."

     "That doesn't mean we can roll over and let you kill us..."
     "... You chose death."

     "This is the natural result of war."
     "What conceit, to think this war."

     "If you don't understand humans at all, don't bother!"
     "Ghhh." Satisfyingly, the Queen did feel that blow. Then, with the reddish glimmer in Kraken's eyes fading, she 'sighs' in the manner of bitter smugness. "At least I was human, once."

     Then, with Tamamo's word and its accumulated injuries, Kraken's heart stops for the last time. The possessing presence that kept it moving departs. It slides backwards off the Busan's deck, towards the ocean. A few tentacles cling on out of bitter reflex; Bota, emerging from the water to hop-sprint-scramble up the ship's side, severs one to send its ruined body tumbling back into the sea.

     Kana, following a second behind him, grabs a chunk of severed tentacle, and lands on the deck near the rest of the party. Water drizzles off her- she never did get to put on a suit. She's still a bit out of breath.

     "A lot of damage. Not a lot of casualties. I'd say that's good, overall." "We were going to overhaul it anyway." "How are all of you holding up?"

     Almost absentmindedly, Kana drops the hundred-pound slab of Kraken meat on the deck and pokes it with her foot. "You know what to do with that."
Candy      "I'm up," says Candy. He's exhausted. Wealth of magical reserves doesn't mean wealth of physical reserves--far from it. All that swimming, throwing, shouting, has left him in need of some rest.

     "Don't worry, Bota. I'll be fine, after some rest. Gonna take care of that. Then go see Boss about patching the place up. Then... the canned food, I think." He nods. Leaning on something solid the whole way, he disappears below deck to find a place to sit or lie down for a while.
Ishirou Ishirou moves to land but becomes unsteady at the last bit.  The R.E.S.C.U.E. unit drops the last bit and lands in a slight mess.  The outer exoframe unfolds and Ishirou hits the deck.  Slowly, pulling himself up from the deck and bracing himself against something heavy.  

He breathes out heavily, pushing himself beyond measure in that, thanks to all of the forces arrayed against him.  He groans and hangs his head back.  

"I'm...tired.." he admits, "Body strained...what about you?" he asks towards both Bota and Kana...the latter of which was fighting without a suit.  
Metaphor An arm grabs the edge of the top deck - followed shortly by the rest of Metaphor. Shimmer has been tucked into her bag alongside her other arm, freeing her up to manage a one-handed climb up one of the severed cables still attached to a tentacle on the ship. She slowly rises, water sloughing, holding almost perfectly still at the edge of the deck. She looms.

<J-IC-Scene> Bota says, "We won't know how many casualties for a while. The ship's a big place. But you're a doctor, right? I can take you to the hospital, help the wounded as they come in."

She still remains still for a moment. She's torn apart. The tension has slowed - but only the acceleration. One second. Two seconds. Five seconds.

She suddenly reaches back into her bag, grabs, and jams her detached arm back into her socket, before starting a slow, heavy stride aimlessly further from the edge.

    "Ma. Acquire corpses as well. Won't stay dead. Fixable. Gives experience. Right."

And with that, she breaks back into that flurry - syringes are suddenly procured and jammed into the injured nearby, pinpricks of relief, wounds stitching themselves closed far faster than a medication has any right to allow.
Hibiki Tachibana     The Kraken finally goes still, after all of that. When its gargantuan body goes limp, Hibiki's own finally gives out as well, her grip loosening on the rubbery appendage's flesh and allowing it to slip free as she drops to her hands and knees. For quite literally the first time since this started, she's able to just get her breath back. The only thing on her mind is how glad she is that, especially with Lilian standing in its way on the other side, it wasn't allowed to push further.

    ...No, there's still one other thing. As Bota makes the slice that sends the thing sloughing off into the sea to be claimed by the depths, she closes her eyes and lets herself turn and roll onto her back.

    "...I don't know what I'd call it..." Hibiki admits to someone who isn't listening anymore. "...But this isn't because I...hate you."

    Only after that does she throw an arm up towards Bota and Kana, then limply let it fall back down, as what remains of her Symphogear vanishes and puts her back in her undamaged casualwear. Won't do anything about all the bruises and more, though. "Nothing I haven't been through before...ugh. Thanks for everything you did, before we could get here..."
Tamamo     Tamamo goes to find Lilian after the dead beast slides back into the sea, so she can fuss over her and meticulously check her for injuries. While a pristine suit would normally indicate such, that's only if bruises aren't counted, so they're going to have to get to the dressing room to check. Tamamo needs to take hers off, anyway.
Stanley Padgett     At some point, Stanley had simply fallen over on the deck of the Busan, looking up at the sky. The diving suit was battered and torn in places, but he was... overall okay. And he was just about to sorta just... leave, until Metaphor starts issuing orders.

    He sighs, limbers himself up to a stand like only a teenager can, and then sort of wanders over towards the Doctor's position, holding still for Metaphor to do her thing before he leaves.
Metaphor Two small beakers, labelled "TAKE WITH FOOD OR MIX INTO DRINK IF DESIRED. 5u" are thrust at Stanley as he approaches, before she disengages her suit's helmet and swaps it for a beret from her bag. She looks him up and down, before pointing some scanner at him, waiting, and then giving a nod. "Thank you for all your help out there. You shouldn't- right, the aches should subside. Take care out there."

She stares at the readouts for a few more seconds, before her ECG hitches. "...apologies you have to deal with this while. Young. You're doing a fantastic job." She rubs the back of her neck as she turns and walks off to whatever direction Candy fell over in, offering him a similar set of beakers.
Stanley Padgett     Stan takes the vials, smiles wanely, and then nods. "...thanks for everything out there, Doc. You saved all of us."

    And with that, he takes out his cell phone, seems to swish it around to get service, and then... the more magically inclined out there will see a ghostly blue bus door open up in front of him. He steps inside, and vanishes, as the door closes behind him, and a distant diesel engine revs and fades.
Rita Ma      Bota puts on a winning, beleaguered smile for Candy. "You're a real trooper, you know." Before Candy can disappear, he puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "You can take a break. A few days, or however long. Nobody could blame you." With a little wince as he touches his own arm: "I'll probably need to."

     "I'm mostly okay," Bota says to Ishirou. "I didn't get hurt badly, but I can tell I'm gonna be sore for a while. Kana's..." She's already leaning on one of her swords like it's a cane. "Fighting without air makes you feel like you're on fire. I'm going to spend a week in bed," she says with bland confidence. "But I'm not hurt."

     Bota's eyes climb his forehead when Metaphor responds. "The dead? Are you sure?" Seeing her super-medicine at work quells his disbelief, though. "Right. I'll... go tell the emergency workers, and then start diving for bodies." He breaks off into a brisk jog towards an access hallway, only limping slightly.

<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "But I think, and it's just a observation based on what I've scanned...that she might be able to gleam things from those infected."
<J-IC-Scene> Bota says, "That's... really no good, if it's true. I hope it isn't."
<J-IC-Scene> Kana says, "Strictly, he's infected. Just asymptomatic. So is Rita, sort of."
<J-IC-Scene> Metaphor says, "Infection is a problem. Bring me to the medical wing. I'll figure it out."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Asymptomatic? Huh.."

     Once Bota's left, Kana says off-handedly to Ishirou: "It's a special case. Their mother had the Fish Disease. He and Rita were born with it. The symptoms are because the body rejects the new cells- but they're all new. So, asymptomatic."
Lilian Rook     'At least I was human, once.'

    Lilian flinches. "Eat shit." she says to nobody in particular. "That won't work." It takes her a few seconds to finally take another breath. Her hand rubs against her face, then falls away. She turns back towards the deck. "It really is just spite for you."

    When Bota and Kana return to the deck, Lilian faces them gladly. Her diving suit is visibly peeled open by heat, but given Kraken had no such weapon, she looks more or less uninjured. Lowering her blood-soaked sword, the runoff already pooling around her feet, Lilian flicks her rebreather up away from her face like a helmet visor, clenches a fist, and raises it up and out to her side, recognizable as a congratulatory salute even without the romantic context. "I'm alive, and they're dead. What else is there to speak of?" she replies to Bota, smiling just a little, and subtly radiating pride.

    "Protecting this many people, having someone's home at my back and the abyss in front; it's very different. I understand more of why you can fight so hard, Kana." She pauses for thought, though briefly. "I know we agreed that the only point of fighting is to survive. But it still feels good. To be more like a-- Well, more like . . ." She taps her shoulder, where a tattoo might go. "A Harpoonist, rather than--" She gestures towards the upper deck. "A harpoonist. Not for the glory or the challenge or anything like that; it's just . . . Right. It's what I want to be." A beat. "So, please don't make any assumptions about my battle readiness by it."

    Then Tamamo is all over her. The first thing Lilian does is turn and hug her, squeezing chin to shoulder and chest to chest. The second thing she does is to take the Bunrei's hand in hers, gently lift it between them, and say warmly, "But coming back to my Lady helps~ Don't worry. I could protect you from another one, if need be~"
Rita Ma      Kana takes a moment to think, shifting her weight from her sword to leaning on a dented wall. It's better support. "Satisfaction is fine," she finally judges. "So long as it's after, and not during. Reward, not motivation."

     Another pause. She looks off at the ocean, the sunlight reflected off the waves as framed by Kraken's trail of crumpled metal. "But I'm not sure that's why I fight."

     She looks briefly startled by the sudden embrace between the two women, but then- with a look of wise understanding- puts on an ever-so-slight smile and goes back to her seagazing.

     "You're such good friends."
Ishirou Pauses and realization comes over him. "Oh...oh." He says with a sigh. It's not impossible, but it...would make more sense now.
Metaphor Right before Metaphor descends belowdecks with Bota, she turns to stare at the now-speaking Lilian, putting a face to a voice for the first time since she got here. An ECG goes flat, for a few seconds. But hearing the speech and seeing Tamamo fawning over her, she visibly relaxes, but only a little. Only a little. She turns and follows her guide, cloak fluttering dramatically. Shouldn't it still be damp?

There will not be rest tonight. She will remain in the medical wards, fixing the dead and the living, until there is either no more to fix or someone eventually manages to pry her away for long enough to sit down - and she does not stand back up for the next twelve hours.