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Lilian Rook	Returning with Arman takes only slightly less time than getting to him did. Scarcely enough to calm down, decompress, and focus on the much more troublesome immediate future, after such proximity to Mat' Prizrakov for some, and the Tree of Completion for others. Lilian's 'divination' along the way occupies much of it, and is hardly any more helpful, though what little she mentions grows increasingly clear and increasingly grim as time begins to cut down to the wire. The fact that she's working around the increasingly insistent probabilistic thread that she should be leaving someone in the lion's jaws to get everyone else out of this is pricklingly implicit, even if left unsaid.     Touchdown happens in the late afternoon. Arman rides with Bond in the VTOL, talks little, and braces himself up at the sight of the mountain from its ordinary snowy side first, falling silent; forlorn, if determined, upon settling. Rita's recruited demon has largely recovered from its wounds incurred in the previous battle, though it grows increasingly restless without blood to slake its appetite; a delicate edge to walk until it will have its best chance. For reasons currently unknown, the villagers previously stopping about their business between brick hut, rusty GDF outpost, and irrigated fields, are nowhere to be seen, as are many machines.     You arrive back at the peak to rendezvous with Oreshnika as promised, only to shortly realize their end destination. The cluster of old housing derived from better-kept military prefab station of yesteryear, recent home of Ai-Mökö, is now overflowing with men and women, stirring about within the fencing, bags packed to bursting, and no small number of them armed in carefully dusted-off and reassembled decades old GDF-issue gear. The compound has been surrounded with the rickety ghosts of fifty year old armoured technicals and last-gen automated anti-Antegent defenses.     They know. They've been told. That much is obvious. Anyone can tell that they'd be a short-lived obstacle for NAZCA at even its current strength, but the complete lack of restless fear, for the first time, makes evident the sheer number of veterans here. Despite the charmingly silly setup of this tiny oasis, you'd guess that everyone over thirty five has a weapon.     Nika herself rushes to the door as you return, and bravely takes four whole steps outside to meet her brother. For a second, it looks as if she's about to run up and hug him, but she comes stiffly short, staring at him expectantly. Arman is the first to relent, coming up to her close enough to put his arms down over her shoulders.     "I'm sorry. I should have come before. I-"     "Is she coming too?"     ". . . Yes. But not with us. You understand--"     "That's not fair. That's not fair you promised. You promised when you     "I did, and I'm keeping it. Once we're all out of here, I'll take you to . . . her."     "Okay."     "I need you to do one thing first."     "Okay."     "You know where your staff is, yes?"     "Yes."     "I need you to get it, and then listen carefully to me. You can do that?"     "Okay."     "Thank you. I love you."     "Okay."     "I love you too."     Ishirou's tacnet is pinged with Arman's signal. A handshake request. It's nearly current.
Lilian Rook	At this point, Lilian is able to roughly indicate where the approach routes NAZCA's team is taking are, given only a couple of hours until sunset, where they will launch their attack in the dark, as projected. Arthur is required to begin the teleportation immediately; whether or not to bring anything more than the cluster of destitute, stranded survivors is up to him.     Otherwise, the opposite peak, looking down on the sunny mountainside, is considered the point of no return; if NAZCA arrives there, they'll simply be able to rain hell on the entire settlement. Two flanking routes to either side of it, and a third circling around the sunset side to flank the old outpost, are easily illuminated by Tamamo's early efforts, though there's only a few miles of territory before those routes dive into the dark and foreboding no-man's land pooled between the peaks; more forbidding than ever, given the half-living God-Antegent's near proximity. It's all snow, ice, and bare rock, just about at the minimum inside range of Saggitarius; little to work with to prepare a field, especially given twelve or so attackers.     Lilian remains with Nika at the comms post at the peak, for a short while. She requests privacy, and claims she'll be out five minutes before the operation commences. She is quick to remind only one thing: "Remember. All we have to do is leave. Cover Lowell. And protect everything we can. The more Nika has here, the more she has to stay for, the better off we'll be when it comes time for us to deal with the Tree of Completion."
Trudy Grimm	Trudy took her spot in the back of the VTOL again for the trip back. As she did on the trip down, the witch has spent the entire time rolling bone fragments through an intensely cursed, sickly green array of interlocking runic circles. Arman was advised to keep his distance at one point, though he likely already had no intention of getting close to something so clearly hazardous.     After landing, she disembarks, raising a hand and calling out, "Mister Ishirou!" No doubt expecting him to be flying his RESCUE unit. She waits patiently for him to heed her call, producing a leather sack from her shadow.     "Before you go, take this," Raising a hand, she wags a finger with a shark-toothed smile. Her other hand pulls a multi-pointed, black-stained bone caltrop from the bag to show him, "Don't touch them. Especially the pointy bits."     The object is dropped back in, ready for him to take, "It's heavily cursed. Should give NAZCA some trouble-- drop them along the routes Miss Rook defined."     Whether anyone else was actually on board with her proposal of cursing NAZCA's agents to rot to pieces or not, Trudy's going to seize every edge she can. And if it's heinous-- well, she's wretched for a reason.     With her little present handed over, the witch whirls in place and thrusts a hand up in a wave, "Nika, hello again!"     But a greeting is about all she has time for. She has her own parts to play, and hurries along to join up with Arthur.
Ishirou	Ishirou starts setting up the Tacnet immediately.  This is going to be very...very hard.  Even with everything set up in their favor, even with having the advantage of the terrain...nothing is guaranteed.  When he gets the connection from Arman's signal, he lets it through while also establishing a broader net.  He gives Lilian control, so she can tell us where things are going to come from.  He gives Nika a wave as he lands, but is almost gone again by the time she gets back. Trudy asks him to wait to give him something, and once he has it flies off.  The first thing that he does is starts setting up bombs in areas of the mountains, with the expressed purpose of causing avalanches on the sides facing away.  If they need to buy time, then he will try and force every minute.  Making the terrain as difficult as possible is one way to do that.   These are set up along paths, and backup ones are set along alternative paths, should they change their directions.  The spike traps given to him by Trudy are dropped where indicated, and he tries to make sure they're hidden by snow.  Ishirou also sets up chaff grenades, aiming to be able to remotely set them off to help scramble their signals, smoke grenades to make the dangerous terrain even more dangerous, and scanning beacons to help tell him where they are when they do come for more accurate attacks. The last thing he does is set up at least one more spike trap on the peak that would spell their doom should they take it.  He also sets up EMP grenades, various traps, and more chaff grenades.  If they do get there, he's going to buy every second he can by making it as hard as possible to use it for as long as he can.  When he can get as much of this done as he can, he flies back to rest before the battle. They're going to need every edge, but despite resting he's still scanning.  He's still waiting, he wants to know the moment they come into any range he can sense.
Tamamo	Tamamo spends part of the time heading back over doing her own divinations, though she can do that much better while in proximity to where she's heading. From a distance, it's easier for her to read the battle to come by checking the forward-trailing threads of the futures of those in the same helicopter. Lilian she trusts to herself, but Arman is a new face. What might they be concerned about, regarding him, for the next few hours?     Hopefully little.     When they land, Tamamo affords the girl who comes to meet them a smile, and, "As promised, Nika, we have returned. These people... has everyone from the village gathered, and prepared to leave? Is there much they were unable to bring, and would leave behind?" There's the buildings themselves, of course, but the better packed they are, the less they're risking, if they can't take absolutely everything.     And on that note, Tamamo has to confer with Arthur. "Mr. Lowell, I believe my efforts may be best focused on supplementing your own. Between the two of us, might we succeed in translocating even the buildings, as well?" The conversation between the siblings is more than a little concerning. "The more that we can preserve, the better. They would not, I hope, spite us by destroying empty buildings, while we still stand here. Those as focused upon their priorities as those men tend to regard such actions as weakness, after all." She only sounds about 95% convinced.
James Bond	Bond has little to say to Arman. Call it affected stoicism, singular focus, or just the oppressive air of a mounting sense of expectation--the awareness of the implied ticking clock.      Landing as near as possible to the rendezvous point, he watches silently as Nika and Arman reunite and exchange a few words, then turns blue eyes full of unspoken worry towards the opposite peak, in the distance. His jaw sets, as his mind turns over how best to handle that problem.      It won't do any good to think about getting over there. A rifle wouldn't help either--if they make it there at all, we're done for. So what about eliminating the advantage of moving at night?      He does have something for that. Even if it only lasts for a moment. Bond heads over to one of the villagers manning the anti-Antegent weaponry. "How quickly can you point this," he asks, "Once you have visual confirmation? These men are fast."
Cantio	Greetings from Cantio are short when the group comes back together with their target to return to Nika's village. She knows they're on a tight timetable, and she needs to make sure all her things are prepared for battle long before they even get there. Drones are checked, swords are assembled, and various smaller devices are assembled on the off chance Cantio might need to throw out some speakers that are also laser land mines. There's a small moment of ease in her chest, though, when she sees that reunion between Nika and Arman. It doesn't quite make her forget what they're up against, but it does steel Cantio's resolve as to just how much needs to be done to get through the coming battle with as few casualties as possible. It's not until she sees the veterans-turned-villagers-turned-militia, though, that the grim reality of the situation really becomes apparent, especially in light of what Lilian had implied far earlier about what might be needed to secure an escape. Sparing no expense for once, Cantio's preparation time is spent recalibrating her prototype flying devices, originally meant for residential and civilian work, into speedier combat-ready devices. It's not for herself, though, but for any of the villagers willing to trust her when she's presenting them with the candy-purple hoops. For those that do, she provides rather straightforward directions on how to use them: "Legs straight to ascend, legs bent to descend, tilt for speed. They'll probably have snipers ready to pick off fliers, so try not to go too high unless you absolutely have to. They're sturdy enough to take a good hit or two, so don't be afraid to break them if it means surviving." She doesn't mention anything about payment. No time for that right now.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Get enough juice to teleport both sites     Literally no. Arthur's a god, but he's not a deus ex machina, he's got lots of limits and teleporting *one* entire location in the middle of a spatially-fucked monsterscape like this world was already pushing them *bad*.     Do you think he's got enough in the tank for two? No fucking way. He'd have to go to Tamamo for a hundred extra suns. He'd have to go to Trudy to pull him back after his clock strikes the worst midnight. He'd have to get Cantio to invent a dozen new theoretical fields. Even still, he'd probably not leave this mountainside. Or at least he'd leave it in a fancy box, bare, no flag to drape over it.     But Arman accepted that without calling his self-sacrificing push, his bluff. He'll get through. Maybe the man realized the truth. Maybe Arthur was just that convincing. Doesn't matter. He's here one way or another. >Arthur: Begin your teleportation     Arthur's planted pylons of his own. He can't even get close to replicating the Rivets, but he can use the rough shape of them in space to understand the best way to plant a boundary in this world. He's expecting *harsh* geometric scrambling again, and this time he intends to defend against it. He's marked the boundary of the area with these crystaline jade pylons, strange crystaline constructions that look almost "low-poly", linking them together with a central one atop Nika's residence.     It's a few hours until sunset. But you might not be able to tell shortly. Arthur's kickstarting a sun atop the central pylon. Irresponsible punkish behavior doesn't mean a total disregard for safety. A buffer of energy, no less than twelve failsafe spellcircles, and redundant pylons all throughout the boundary, all try to reinforce this effort, and provide all sorts of linkages that the magically-inclined (or at least metaphysically powerful) can connect to. >Arthur: Give the strats     "WHAT UP, GIRLS." He rambles at Trudy and Tamamo as they arrive and make their own offers. "It's ya boy ARTHUR LOWELL BACK AT IT AGAIN WITH THE TELEPORTATION." He takes a long, deep breath. "I'm aiming to land the buildings, yeah. That, and a good chunk of the ecosystem here." He puts a hand up. "Yeah, I know, pushing it too hard. It's gonna be bad. That's on me, let me deal with those consequences. Tamamo, these things are gonna be using a sun-magic buffer. I'm *good* at suns, but you're *great* at suns. Refine 'em with that solar magic and we're gonna make it through. Try managing the flow of power near frontlines too."     He does a funny little head-tilt at the other. "Trudy, these things cast a hell of a shadow with the inner refraction and the solar light, I'm trying to hook that shit up with your shadow-ports. Boost distribution with that. Keep 'em reinforced too, the bone works as good as the crystal, maybe even better."     He's starting to flick green spirographs around his hands. "The both of you got top-level magic that *isn't* fucked up by that geo-scrambling, and decent magic-sensing and analysis. Find anyone popping one of those scramblers and scramble *them*, violently if you can do it. Otherwise I'm gonna be bleeding out on these fancy pillars before we make it ten feet away. Get it?" >Arthur: Start the process     The pylons hum with energy and light. "Might bleed out anyway. That's the fourth thing I'm gonna need. Not sure how much bandwidth I've got here, even if you both pitch in heavy on the power. If I die hero-wise, it's permanent. Do whatever you got that stops it from happening, you know, within reason and all."
Petra Soroka	Petra rides the balaur back to the village, clinging to Rita just a little bit more tightly than she did on the trip over. She's as solemn as anyone has seen her, quiet during the flight and shaking a little from more than just the cold.     Once back at the outpost, Petra gives Nika a shaky smile after her reunion with her brother--it's meant to come across as confident, but very much does not. Glancing over at the assembling villagers, the first thought that bubbles up into Petra's head is hoping that she can help make sure the fight doesn't reach them. That causes her to hesitate, pausing in the middle of doing her preparations on the Kana. Petra turns the feeling over in her mind and holds onto it for a bit, feeling more than a little bit proud.     The Kana is readied, and Petra--is completely unconfident in what to do with it. She resolves this by opening her mouth and addressing whoever happens to be nearby, which includes at least most of the Elites besides Lilian, Tamamo, and Arthur.     "Okay. Um. So I can carry maybe, two or three people in the Ekanamsha, to position us somewhere that we can fight better. I-it's got armor and everything, and you can snipe out of the bottom, or... drop bombs, or whatever. I think it should be pretty much fine against *snipers* targeting it, just not... heavy weaponry. So. You know. If anyone thinks that's a good idea, or has a different idea...."     Petra is radiating anxiety, desperately trying to maintain her cool and looking for someone to tell her what to do. Her hands fidget between being shoved in the pockets of her jacket, and crossed against her chest, the revolver never leaving her grip.
Rita Ma	Rita slides off the balaur's back and crunches into the snow. Whatever joy she could spare for the sentiment of the family reunion, it's drowned when she lays eyes on the armed veterans. She sidles up next to one of the older men, a concern like heartbreak on her face.      "You don't have to..." she starts to say, eyes already averted. But she can't finish the sentence. She's seen desperate, outmatched people willing to die for their communities before. Has there ever been anything she could say to change their minds? Should she, even?      "... Thank you. We'll try to make sure we don't need you."      When Bond's done with his present schemes, Rita anxiously tugs at his sleeve. "Mr. Bond. You're good with guns, aren't you? Do you think you could do some hunting for me? I'll need... well, it'd help a lot. For me trapping the mountainside."      As she climbs back up onto the balaur- and motions for Bond to follow her onto it, should he accept- she gives Petra a thin, weary smile. "I wouldn't be much use in your mech, Ms. Petra. I need to be down there on the ground. But I know you'll be a big help for other people. Please... try to stay safe, okay?"      It's unspoken why she's worried about Petra, specifically, out of everyone here.
Tamamo	What Tamamo sees in Arman's future causes her to spare him another glance, and to Nika, but she politely refrains from commenting.     At Petra's mention of sniping, Tamamo glances toward Bond. He's the handiest with a gun, here, isn't he? Or would that be Lilian? She doesn't know enough about the art to properly compare, but enough to know that she can't fulfill the same role. Bombs... maybe, if it weren't so important for her to stay in the center.     Trudy asks for a spyglass. "Oh, if you require a mirror to see further, I am sure I have a spare." Tamamo reaches into her sleeves and procures one. It's more of a palm mirror than a hand mirror, but if one only needs something at the level of a spyglass, then it should be good enough. Except for the part where there's no set of curved lenses to bring far-away images closer.     "Merely hold this, and focus upon that which you wish to see. Ah, it will work a bit better if you focus upon a person, and possess anything of theirs." It will, as she says, do exactly that. Hardly anything works as well for it as blood, but Tamamo doesn't feel the need to mention that part.     Arthur speaks of his needs and limits. "Of course, I shall provide such as I am able, Mr. Lowell. I shall prepare the ground, first, and then, myself." The latter step will be explained later.     Magecraft. Magic circles. Sacred geometry. The unification of the underlying shape and veins of the world and an artificial construction built over them, a reshaping by summed knowledge and skillful effort, not so different from arranging a mountain into a tower to reach the heavens, leaving the mark of the builder upon the surface of the world.     It's something she knows very well how to do, and it'll all come undone if those 'scramblers' reach it. Without knowing the nature of the knife, her defenses may as well be just the paper they're drawn on. In the time before then, the talismans she lays will help Arthur charge up, by shifting the energy flow and drawing more deeply and heavily from the surroundings, wasting less of it into the air. There's a growing hum in the air, as she works, but it fades again. A glow, lines traced through sky and earth, but they fade, too. The most efficient circuits aren't the most showy.     She hasn't yet drawn on 'herself' as a source.
Trudy Grimm	"You've been quite busy already," Trudy comments, looking up at the pylon and nascent sun atop Nika's house. Her eyes swing sidelong towards Arthur, "So you'd like me to link these cairns through the void, then? Using bone as a transmission line, hmm~..."     After some time thinking, she claps her hands once and keeps them together, "It's completely crazy, I'm on board." Her voiced request for a spyglass of some sort is met by Tamamo, and she stares cluelessly at the little mirror while the bunrei explains how it is used. Once things click, the empty-headed expression becomes a wide shark-toothed smile, "Oh, thank you, this will do perfectly."     Her shadow expands, producing a rod of interwoven femurs. As this rises, Trudy leans back against it, being lifted aloft when a foothold emerges beneath her feet. A pair of bony hands grip her waist to hold her steady while the constuct scales Nika's house from the exterior like some nightmare centipede made out of skeleton arms.     At its apex, she pulls forth the Grimoire and from it, draws out the Gateway rune Uruz. Nauthiz, the Rune of Shadow, is drawn forth as well, and the pair are thrust down into a runic circle orbiting her feet.     As the witch does this, the fractal shadows cast by the jade pillar atop Nika's house turn to a darker shade of black. Skeletal arms reach out of the void, clinging to the crystalline surface.     She holds out the mirror Tamamo provided to her, fixating on the crystals placed by Arthur-- while touching one of them. One by one, the pillars' shadows deepen, grow, and, begin extruding skeletal arms to cradle their respective crystals.     Shortly after making contact, energies are shared through a braided network of bone threaded across the void.     Trudy isn't *done* though. As she reinforces the pillars and works on energy distribution, her free hand lifts. Above her palm, the now-familiar Death Rune draws itself into being, the mark of Eiwaz flickering like sickly green flame. It's most telling for those who can see the pillars-- the shadows that her Skelecables emerge from are getting bigger.
Lilian Rook	The way the villagers look at Rita indicates full well that they'd never believe they don't have to do anything. Though she is still a stranger here, whatever happened in her absence, they recieve her with a new sense of inarticulable Knowing. Even Petra, for the first and possibly only time, is mistaken as someone who shares some kind of bond, and hardened soldiers in their forties, picking up their swords over their plowshares for the first time in years, nod to her as she passes. Unfortunately, they confirm for Bond that they themselves can't operate The Archer; it's something only the 'Angel' can do.     Lilian returns at exactly the promised time; no later and no earlier. Radioing out, she outlines foremost "Nika is staying indoors. With Tsyrenov. He'll be connected to our comms; she won't. It's imperative they neither be approached nor interrupted; please refrain from sending communications to Oreshnika directly. And please refrain from . . . talking to her about this later. Focus on defending the area and preserving your own lives over eliminating enemy combatants. One of you isn't worth any number of them."     The scant hours remaining before contact imminent are uneventful. Tension rises and falls, building in anticipation and giving way to the soothing mental noise of labour. Those remaining near to the mountain even have the benefit of watching wildlife go by as they work. It rises once again, when the last rays of the sun disappear ten minutes ago, and the night creeps on without anything more than the sound of a snowy owl near the outpost. The stars would be beautifully visible, were it not for Arthur's artificial sun polluting the night vista, beckoning the enemy from miles upon miles away. Perhaps that's why they're late enough to sweat over.     Contact is established from beyond visual range, as it so often is in the modern day. One of Ishirou's scanning beacons picks up encrypted traffic out of the night. Cracking it tells him that's a streaming set of coordinates. He can only assume it's being replied to by laser, so that the return signal can't be intercepted. The coordinates themselves are updating far too fast to be NAZCA's ground operatives though. Calculating the speed they must be moving at suggests an aircraft.     There's barely enough time to say anything before a pair of tiny stars flare over the horizon and fly straight towards Arthur's sun-battery. Bond recognizes them by sight, even though they reflect any sensor data but heat profile, as missiles, fired in advance of a high speed ground approach. Maybe NAZCA's evac craft, planned to extract them by now? The missiles are well out of range to actually hit Arthur, aimed high as they are, but Lilian calls out straight away "Incoming! Take them down!" with tremendous urgency.     The approaching craft are only visually confirmable, stealthed even harder than Bond's VTOL is, but Rita from a high enough point should be able to spot them with the naked eye, or Petra through the Kana's optics. It's natural to brace for the twenty seconds or so it'll take them to pass overhead, but that's also when contact is made with Trudy's traps and Ishirou's grenades along the flanking route to the side of the settlement; five profiles, waylaid by a blast and sudden avalanche and a flood of smoke, no doubt unaware of the cursed caltrops until they begin searching for further traps shortly.     ETA two minutes, at this rate. New contacts are appearing on a one minute delay. Not nearly enough time for Arthur. The way they're spread out roughly matches Lilian's projections, and confirms that they're going to try and climb the adjacent peak to oppress the Elites from on high, while their flanking team moves in to secure Oreshnika.     There is no radio contact.
James Bond	"<Then the Angel will have to do,>" Bond answers in Russian with a shrug. "<Whatever the rest of you have, just promise me you'll be ready to use it, because we're going up against men who use the same weapon I do.>" They can tell that he doesn't mean 'guns' or even 'stealth.' "<Putting one against another means whoever thinks faster on his feet is the one that lives-->"      Even someone who's been through what Bond has knows that it takes a certain type of person to tug at one's sleeves. It's easier for him, these days, to muster the kind of warmth one ought to have, when one's sleeve is tugged. He expects it's either a village child that's wandered off, or...      "Hello, Rita," he says with a smile that betrays the tension in the air. "I could, certainly." The carbine clipped to his uniform isn't exactly a hunting rifle, but it should surely do the trick anyway. He nods, then follows her and climbs astride the balaur with her.      In those scant hours they have, Bond assists her. As a way of passing the time, he even clues her in to what he's doing--showing how to look for signs of an animal's passage, be they visual, or olfactory, or even the rare sound. He doesn't bother telling which plants are edible--but he does show her which ones to avoid. The suppressor he has doesn't make the carbine much quieter--they rarely do--but anything is better than nothing.      When Rita is satisfied that she's done enough preparation, he naturally accompanies her back.      It starts up with two missiles. Something he doesn't have an answer for. Someone else will. He, however, races for the VTOL while they fly towards Arthur's sun. The intent isn't to pilot it, but to retrieve something. A briefcase, bulky and metal. He unlatches it hurriedly, unpacking several components and running them, tucked under his arm, to the nearest defensive line of veterans.      A mortar is assembled--but the payload is far from what would be expected. Launched over the area surrounding the opposite peak, a bright, slow burning flare provides the heat for a small balloon, while a second, timed charge detonates and sends reflective metal chaff through the air. The area surrounding the approach to the peak is suddenly as bright as day, with only the lines of trees and other foliage to break up sight lines.      "One of you get me a rifle," he says, unclipping the carbine. No good at this range. "The rest of you, let them have it."
Ishirou	Ishirou, near the time sunset, comes slips back into the flight component of the RESCUE.  He takes a breath, he's afraid, he's nervous, he's not sure if they can pull this off, but...well he still knows he has to.  Before he has time to take off, missiles are coming! Ishirou doesn't get time to scan for the VTOLs, instead waiting for Petra to tag them so he fires a barrage of machine gun fire from the RESCUE to try and kill the missile before they become a threat.  Immediately, he starts launching, flying straight up as the machine switches into fighter mode.   Ishirou doesn't go up, instead keeping low to the ground, but because he's basically playing mine sweeper, he aims missiles.  His shots are aimed to fall in areas where traps are not, aiming to try and force them into trapped routes.   The moment he gets that they're getting too close, he sets off the charge on the mountains themselves, aiming to send tons of snow down on those members that he can.  Every minute matters...every minute matters!
Cantio	"Are they even close enough to hit anything...?" Cantio asks herself at Lilian's warning to handle the missiles and approaching craft, but that's directed more at the missile launches themselves rather than the threat presented by where they came from. Knowing that things are finally starting, she turns to those villagers that took her offered equipment, then waves at them to get further into the village and away from the projected approach vectors. "I can heal you if you're injured, so focus on not dying. As long as you're alive, get somewhere safe and hold out until we're finished here. Trust in our abilities." After trying to encourage the veteran villagers once more, Cantio splits a knight-armored clone out from herself and sends that one over to join up with Arthur and provide him with an extra body on the defense while Cantio herself takes a look at the contact data coming in. There's a delay, but it's good enough for what she needs: Confirming where they're actually coming from. Heading towards one of the flanking routes, she tosses her sword forward as it breaks apart into dozens of smaller pieces that float beside her, gleaming in the light of Arthur's artifical sun. Once she's about a minute or so away from where those contacts were coming from, seh takes a deep breath to brace herself. "... Gonna hurt. So stupid. But if they're going to hide..." She mutters to herself quietly, then raises her hands out in front of her with the handle on one side and her fingers pinched together in the other. She starts waving at each side not unlike a conductor as the glowing pieces of her sword start firing lasers in the direction of those coming in from the flanking path. Does she know where they are? Not accurately. Does she need to? Not for her plan. Rather than trying to hit anyone specifically, Cantio's just hurling massive swaths of lasers forward, trying to flush them out of any cover they might have among the trees on the way through sheer volume and also by blasting through that very cover before they can really make use of any of it. Like Ishirou, it's not so much about destroying any one of the NAZCA, but about slowing their approach, making it more difficult, and buying more time for their own mission to succeed.
Rita Ma	Rita leans forward and gently pats the restless balaur's neck en route to the mountainside. "Soon," she says. "Please be patient, okay?" She has big 'dad who claims he hates cats' energy towards all the monsters she takes, sooner or later: obedience eventually creates affection, even if compelled.      Even though it's a crucial part of a life-and-death operation, she starts to treat the hunting trip as- well, a hunting trip. She giddily points out wildlife even when it's too small to be worth shooting, pesters him with survival-irrelevant questions about the scenic flora, and generally relaxes into the idyllic scenery.      It's easy to forget what they're doing, and forget where they are, and forget what she is, up until she's stacking corpses from marten to bear in a heap like firewood. And they are firewood, in a sense.      "Thanks, Mr. Bond," she says, as she heaves the dozenth body onto the pile. Her smile is falling, fading to something bittersweet. "This was really nice. And you've been a huge help. But if you didn't do anything else, you should... you should go, now. I know you've seen me before, but it won't be pretty. And someone has to keep them from reaching the peak."      The balaur will take him back before returning to her side. She isn't coming with.      Her preparations take the form of invisible organic ribbons and tripwires spanning between rocks and trees that morph into 'the most disruptive thing possible' when touched. They take the form of organic clusters of guided chitinous missiles that pierce armor and transmute the flesh within to ash. They take the form of a driving, crushing rainstorm that turns the mountainside to slush and mud and cuts visibility to knife-fighting range.      When that explosion goes off and causes a wet avalanche, Rita stalks through the treetops towards it, invisible save for the raindrops that splash against her skin and ever-so-faintly suggest her shape. When she'd fought Nazca before, she hadn't shown them that.
Petra Soroka	"But I know you'll be a big help for other people."     No one gets in the Kana, or suggests a better idea to Petra.     Without anyone telling her what to do, Petra spends the majority of the few hours of intermission pretending she has something important to do inside the cockpit of her mech. Calibrations, or scanning, or... it's too embarrassing to take bags of trash out of it, actually. So she just sits in the pilot's seat, vacantly staring at the viewscreens monitoring the environment outside, her leg bouncing up and down.     Petra is snapped out of her fugue by Ishirou's warning about the missiles, and instantly starts the Kana rising off the ground, hovering just high enough to be properly airborne. The low grumble of its idling engines flares into a roar, and its massive metal legs fold up into its body to put more distance between itself and the ground.     Tucked beneath the spherical turret, a second, smaller barrel extrudes from the hull, and Petra nervously lines it up ahead of the missiles to intercept their path... and within moments, the auto-calculation systems of the Kana's computers lock on to the missiles and prepare a leading shot in her place. Petra sighs, and considers that maybe it's better that no one else came with her. She apathetically presses a button with the pad of her finger, and two small pellets, bristling with tiny metal hooks, fire out and intercept the missiles, and with a pulse of energy, the missiles slow from their rocket-propelled pace to a casual run, giving Ishirou enough time to shoot them out of the air before they arrive.     Immediately after firing, Petra breathes deep and grits her teeth, ascending to match the enemy VTOLs as quickly as possible, blasting the ground beneath the mech with a sudden expulsion of heat and exhaust. Seeming to block them as if the Kana was a physical wall to the approaching crafts, Petra tries to make herself as unavoidable a target as possible, sick panic barely suppressed by adrenaline. She levels the Kana's turret at the VTOL in front, and prepares to fire a matter-disintegration round at it--before chickening out and swapping to a typical explosive.
Tamamo	'It's imperative they neither be approached nor interrupted; please refrain from sending communications to Oreshnika directly.'     Traces of unease cross Tamamo's face before vanishing. "Yes, it seems that it may be necessary to merely trust him to handle this matter." It's said confidently, despite the soft wording.     'Incoming! Take them down!'     Tamamo only looks long enough to see that someone else will handle that matter. She doesn't have the speed to reach the missiles before they get close, at which point she could only make them explode further from their targets. While better than nothing, it's better for her to handle something only she can do.     'I'm *good* at suns, but you're *great* at suns. Refine 'em with that solar magic and we're gonna make it through.'     ...when the last rays of the sun disappear ten minutes ago, and the night creeps on...     Calling it 'solar magic' isn't quite right, though she doesn't correct him. She uses magecraft for lots of things but, when it comes to the Sun, even if it's set, even if night has claimed the mountains, and even if every tick of the clock and beat of a heart's pulse tells that the day's hours are ended, Tamamo simply is. It's not a transformation. Even if it looks like one, it's the opposite. It's an uncovering of something that was already there. By allowing herself to nakedly be, the Pale-Gold Face is present in all the ways that matter.     Just as one star, implausibly held close to earth, was a tempting target for the approaching agents, the appearance of a second, a figure like a flame-haired fox-woman in its center, can't help but be another. This, however, their geometry-breaking techniques won't find the same purchase against, even if they reach her. Controlling the flow of energy to enter her own orbit, to be added to with her own essence, tapping into that vast well hidden by the thickness of the planet yet simultaneously present, and sending it upward to empower and join with the brightening star above her, this is all-radiating energy and all-binding force. There are no lines to cut.     With that brighter light, the shadows are all the darker and more stark where they're cast.     The words Tamamo says are quiet, and only meant for one ear to hear.
Trudy Grimm	As the sun sets and plunges most of the valley into darkness, shapes begin writhing in the shadows cast around Arthur's pillars. Trudy closes her fingers around the Eiwaz rune, then thrusts it into the runic circle at her feet, causing the magic shape to pulse for an instant.     Her eyes lift to the incoming missiles-- not something she can contend with. Not until people are on the ground.     Speaking of.     The roiling shadows around the scattered pylons erupt, pouring forth skeletal soldiers. Generic troops armed with medieval weapons. Bows, swords, axes. At each pillar, accompanying the basic warriors, one of Trudy's more iconic Cute Friends also appears.     Here, the Black Knight, hauling his greatsword up onto his shoulder, glowing green smoke leaking from the visor of his helmet. There, the Samurai Brothers, one with his o-Dachi, the other with his yumi, march with their bony subordinates. Over there, the Doctor adjusts his gloves, powdered herbs sifting through the holes in his beaked mask. Over here, the Soldiers recruited near the urban center, still in their Russian Army uniforms, rack the slides of their weapons as they slip into the treeline. At another site, the armor-clad Space Trooper hunches forward, letting out a hissing scream while the launchers on his back slide forward into place. The tiny voice of his armor's Text-To-Speech speaker declaring in a static-laced monotone, "It's Boning Time."     As NAZCA's forces start entering the valley, it is this fleshless army and these towering lieutenants they encounter amidst the trees. Soldiers who do not fear death against warriors who have already seen it, laughed, and got back up on the whims of a sorceress.     Trudy doesn't think for a moment that these ultra-specialist NAZCA agents will actually die to her minions. But anything that buys them time is worth sacrificing a few un-lives.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Endure missiles     No need. The incoming strike is quickly intercepted by Petra, thank god. The outgoing shots are targeted. The incoming charge is barraged with measures to stall and ready an ambush. For Arthur himself, the only important part is to try to make some limited countermeasures for the incoming fire. The best he can do is start trying to invert the sun's gravity. With Tamamo handling the sun's, well, sun-ness, he can focus on changing the way it affects space, trying to make its anti-gravity strong enough to pull away further missiles, and to avoid disruption from faster projectiles.     It takes up about two of those countermeasure spellcircles he made earlier, which lock into place around the sun dramatically, taking on heavy black markings. Down to ten at the start, but one hopes it'll blunt that line of sabotage.
Lilian Rook	The Kana's inertial inhibiting round ekes out ahead of the missile launch. The Kana is closer. The remaining distance both projectiles have to cover is slim, but as Ishirou finds them, almost hovering in space, kicking out enormous quantities of rocket exhaust going nowhere, he has only to strafe a single length of fire to hit both. They detonate immediately; and then his outgoing signal fizzles, and the RESCUE's power flow is interrupted.     There is no pair of grand fireballs in the sky. Where the missiles burst, the sky cracks into a thousand jagged, iridescent shards, slid just past one another, as if reassembled by hand, in two enormous spheres. Two agents had sacrificed their scramblers to screw them in place of an explosive charge under the nose cone. Had they struck the artificial sun, Arthur, Tamamo, Trudy, and all of their magical efforts, would have been effected. The entire teleport would have been a wash.     Moments later, the screech of jets passes overhead. Real fighters. Capable of intercontinental travel, probably. They split and peel off in opposite directions, so they can't be engaged at the same time, and turn back for another pass. One drops altitude a hair below the other, and the Kana's explosive shell flies straight overhead. The twin flames accelerate towards the village, and another pair are fired. The missile lights only travel a short distance before splintering apart, spraying uncountable submunitions into the civilian center. If the Elites have intercepting capabilities they'll target something else and overload them.     The submunitions in freefall rapidly begin to curve in flight. As Arthur adjusts the gravity well, the bomblets are sucked right in. A belt of munitions forms, spiralling around the manmade sun, and then fizzles out of existence in the heat.     Rita's trap triggers at the same time Trudy summons her troops. Rain begins pouring down the mountainside. It'd be nice if she could hear a scream or smell blood from that distance to guarantee anything else, but the localized storm is already causing ice to slide down from the adjacent peaks, crushing slopes and burying valleys and paths. The air cover is forced to bank wide to hit the pylons; Tamamo's flare is so hot that they can't get tone with anything, and so the attack craft strafe the undead forces with autocannons blazing, firing indiscriminately into the mass of soldiers to delay them, and looking to strike their sources.     Stalking through the dissolving snow and slick rocks, Rita finds one of the teams on the south side of the peak that the battle plan has designated the critical point. It's hard to see much of anything, until Bond's flare turns night into day. Five are accounted for; more than would be reasonable to try to fight alone, though one is down behind a rock and visibly welding some kind of emergency prosthetic to his freshly cauterized knee stump in a hurry. There's a moment of chaotic back and forth where the leader, only distinguishable by the stripe on his helmet to her, argues with another squad about 'the rain' that is only happening to them. Coincidentally, she can spot Bond from this location.
Lilian Rook	On the flanking side, Cantio is able to blind fire into the mountainside. The reprisal is, of course, swift and brutal. A spray of return fire from so far away that she can't really see it begins shooting her laser bits out of the air, off-coloured cold rays converging in on her and blasting her with most of a squad's worth of Enlightened-grade firepower like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon, given only eerie silence instead of dramatic sound effects.     The third squad, north of the Point, ceases its movement, according to what sensors are still up. A pair of man-portable missiles hit the air; one swerves for Bond's chaff flare, and another for Tamamo. The latter is interrupted by Lilian's return, sliced neatly out of the air and caught before hitting the ground, but briefly giving away the firing location. A short while later, five at once climb from a completely different area, near the base of the mountain, and these ones ignore both, weaving through the air like living snakes. They converge infallibly on the Kana and the RESCUE, whilst two miss and go wide, only to curve around the village mountain and swerve low under Arthur's sun, aiming to hit him from behind, and another to pick off Trudy.     The fifth is a decoy, sent at Bond from on high, where it'll be visible and targeted with greater ease. It's just Rita, and then Lilian, who can feel the psychic signature, faint as it is, inherent in each missile. Some link or glimmer that enables them to weave around cover and intercepting fire to strike. The south side team is fighting through the rain to place snipers, where they can hit Trudy from two angles, leery of something she's already done.
Ishirou	The RESCUE unit's power fluctuates.  Weapon systems go down, as well as some systems.  This causes some distress to Ishirou, who is forced to ground the unit to try and purge the current core being used, slam another one into the unit, and reboot it.  This causes the RESCUE to go offline for a moment.   Moments later, It flies again, but now is the target of missile attacks.  He notices a LOT of different missiles going off, with the jets...hmm.  The air can't be ignored, and they won't be ignored.  Rita is obviously more than capable of keeping the ground units distracted long enough... He takes a breath, "Overcharge the IBMIS, wide area grab.." he says, attempting to reach out.  The fired missiles are grabbed, electromagnetic force aiming to wrap around them as they near their targets, trying to halt them in the air.  More missiles fire from the back of the RESCUE, and are immediately grabbed by the IBMIS.   This makes him a sitting target, putting all of this effort into this, even with him overpowering the system...but that's the point.  To make himself unignorable, which means they're open to either revealing or shooting him down.  "Targeting the flying targets.  Release all missiles on my command to target them." "Now!" he says, and the missiles turn around on a dime, each one targeting one of the fighters sent at them and launching.  The IBMIS attempts to correct as they fly.  They're more protected against direct hacking, so lets...instead, attempt to overwhelm them with numbers.
James Bond	Bond adjusts the sights on a high-powered sniper rifle passed to him by one of the veterans, shouldering it and setting his jaw. Well-lit no-mans-land sweeps across the glass, trees and foliage in stark contrast against artificial light, shadows crawling across the ground. There.      The moment he sees the familiar figures of NAZCA agents, he aims for center of mass and squeezes the trigger. It's probably too much to expect they'll be gone from that, even landing his shot groupings. He remembers all too well how durable they are--inhumanly so--but pinning them down should be enough.      The hiss of an oncoming missile draws his attention sharply away from the scope, looking up and leaning the rifle against one of the Antegent-killing weapons to level his wristwatch at it. "Americans and missiles," he says, twisting the bezel. A shrill sonic weapon is activated, attempting to rattle and vibrate the missile's internals out of place and send it off-course. "You can practically set your watch by it."
Cantio	Getting fired on is well within Cantio's expectations right about now. She's not expecting to dodge all of them, of course, and she's already mentally prepared herself for having to shrug off a lot of pain today. The cold rays are actually a bit of a novel thing for her to really experience first hand, but she can't indulge in her curiosity with so much at stake. Instead, she'll have to settle with whatever little data she can recover from her destroyed bits sometime later and focus more on surviving this right now. Blocking a shot with her forearm as she swings herself past one of countless volleys that just narrowly avoid perforating her, Cantio dips behind a tree briefly to shake off some of that pain and channeling some heaing magic into herself before relaying her findings to the crew. <J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "I have contact over here, too! No clear sightings yet, but they're revealing themselves instead of trying to sneak on by now." There's little doubt in her mind that they'll resume the advance if she delays too long in responding, so Cantio doesn't spend too much time behind that tree before she moves again. After muttering something about funding to herself, Cantio lets several dozen more of those sword bits fall out of her attache case. They expand quickly to their full size, still about as small as a finger, then start swarming out from behind her chosen cover tree. Most of them begin rushing forward and firing in the general direction of the NAZCA agents targeting Cantio, utilizing sheer area coverage to compensate for not having their exact positions at first. Rather than firing lasers like before, though, the sword bits are instead firing sonic blasts from their tips, partially to rattle and pulverize the soldiers in their suits as well as creating even more noise around them to make it easier to suss out their positions. Cantio herself even floats above the tree and ascends rapidly to fire her own lasers from back at those agents they can pick out from long-range, but she doesn't leave the general area around that tree just yet even with as high as she's going. That isn't all of the bits, of course, and those that aren't firing at the troopers are instead wedging themselves into the terrain between herself and them. They still give off faint electrical and magical signals from their sheer presence in the ground, but they aren't actually doing anything just yet.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Fondly regard spaghettification     You're thinking of black holes, not suns. Those are basically opposites. Anyway, it's nice, it's fondly regarded. So fondly, in fact, that Arthur, attention split between the front lines and the magic, barely notices the incoming missile until it's right on his ass. A man like him is smart enough to have incoming missile alerts in a time like this, but not fast enough to act on them.     The blast slams through a rapid gravitational barrier, shocking up and down his body, leaving spotty bruises up his arms, his shoulders, and his chest, while he screams. "My ass is getting the AIR-RAID TREATMENT, how are they fucking doing this?! I'm next to an ENTIRE SUN, that's like TEN MILLION FLARE!" <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, in a hushed voice, "Mr. Bond! Those missiles are being guided by someone. I think it's someone in the team north of the mountain." >Arthur: Get countermeasures, buy time until someone can stop the guidance!!     "Fuckin' christ, someone's manual-guiding these? HATE IT." He plunges his fists into another pair of pre-prepared spellcircles, rich with magical energy and power, and then slams each into another pair, consuming four in one go. "SOMEONE BEAT THEIR ASS." He calls out urgently, burning spellcircles ten through seven to rapidly fragment and fracture the geometry immediately around him in ways that should be too complex for any other missiles to get through. "I'm running out of OPTIONS and I can't get SPARE FOCUS!"     He's back to powering his teleportation, takling on Tamamo's powerful, surging energy and spreading out through the proxy link that Trudy has been summoning skeletons through. Ironic, isn't it, that shadow magic and sun magic probably have an affinity? No, not ironic, that's not the word. "Outrageously powerful", that's the one.     There's a countdown, now, a meter filling in tac-feeds and magical senses and intuitiions. Once every pylon goes over a particular threshold of solar energy, it'll convert to geometric energy all at once and rip a chunk of this lovely ecosystem to somewhere else.
Cantio	Knight Cantio, meanwhile, continues loitering by Arthur's teleporting magic space. She looks anxious, but she's still standing for some reason that Cantio Prime hasn't explained yet. She doesn't even get out her phone to record the bits of things getting torn up and teleported.
Trudy Grimm	From her tall perch, Trudy can direct her undead forces as they spread out around the pillars Arthur tasked her with. However, it isn't lost on her that this also makes her supremely exposed. NAZCA's prowess with snipers hasn't gone forgotten, given how much of a concern they were in the previous encounter.     Quickly, she issues commands to her scattered lieutenant, the Greater Undead who tower over the rank-file skeletons pouring out of her patches of void. Giving them some objectives should enable some measure of autonomy, in case--     --A missile dives under Arthur's artificial sun and arcs up straight at her back. The bony creature she rides twists, intercepting the munition with a large hand made out of several dozen smaller hands. The explosion knocks the witch from her perch, though her fall is arrested by lower tiers of arms and hands that eventually deposit her on the ground even as the uppermost works of the Bone Beast smolders.     At ground level, the witch removes her singed (and agitated) fur coat, dropping it into her shadow. She doesn't want to have to repair it again; the weasels are still upset about last time. Likewise, the beheaded bone-a-pede recedes whence it came. What emerges from Trudy's shadow in its place is her crow, still covered in somewhat ragged feathers.     Trudy scurries into the space beneath where those initial two missiles exploded. Using the light of the artificial sun, she searches for a suitable piece of wreckage to ferry back to Tamamo in the talons of her reanimated crow.     Afield, the necromancer's forces begin separating out towards specific objectives.     The Black Knight and his cohort move towards the mountain-base artillery position, marching through streaks of cannonfire.     The Soldiers in the trees start taking shots at aircraft, using the forest as cover.     While advancing on the north peak, the bow-wielding Samurai whirls in place and looses an arrow the size of a spear at one of the jets passing overhead.     The Space Trooper's jetpack ignites, a thrust-propelled jump hurling him into the flight path of a strafing aircraft. As he gets alarmingly closer to the cockpit window, the light of the flare overhead casts some light through his normally opaque space suit helmet, casting hints of the fleshless skull behind the glass.     The Doctor seems content to remain where he is, protecting the pillar he and his minions were called up alongside.
Rita Ma	Five agents. Even with one wounded, fighting three before had been dicey enough. The faint smell of blood has Rita gripping her tree-perch hard enough to splinter the bark, but not even that can convince her to engage alone.      But she has ways of not engaging, and ways of not being alone.      She only has to raise her hand to the sky, the rain silhouetting some ugly balaur-derived mutation that will never properly be seen, to call down a lightning bolt from the dark rainclouds. It strikes the man with the injured leg just after Bond starts firing, incandescently backlighting his targets.      The awful organic 'missile racks' she'd reconstituted the flesh of wildlife into erupt a moment later. Hard white-blue shapes, like off-color bone arrowheads, trace dozens of curving energy trails across the sky: ascend, reorient, and plunge back down. They're most densely focused on the near group, but a handful pepper Cantio's assailants and the north missile group too.      Each one explodes into sharp chitinous shrapnel on impact with a body or the ground, and the shrapnel leaves horrible carbonizing wounds where it touches flesh. The missile explosions are purposefully 'walked' from one side of the group to the other, though- an attempt to force the agents into still-untriggered Mat' Prizrak tripwires, in the process of evading.      Prolonging her invisibility like this feels like holding her breath, but that's far from the only reason it's agonizing. If I can just wear them down for long enough, eventually it's a sure thing. But the longer I take, the less I can help anyone else. Is it really okay to just trust that they'll be fine?      Not for the first time, she sympathizes with how the balaur must feel.
Tamamo	It's difficult to even make out that Tamamo is speaking, low and quiet as it is, and not picked up over the radio. She pauses, and speaks again, holding some conversation while her burning light is siphoned through orbital mechanics in miniature to join the sun Arthur's using as a power source. Despite the difficulty of seeing through that light, it's still visible when something in her bearing relaxes. A sense of relief ripples outward, short-lived flares arcing at the ghostly surface of incandescence when the motion reaches from core to edge.     It's difficult for unprotected shadows to exist near her, but Trudy's crow is allowed safe passage. By the time it reaches her, Tamamo has already begun weaving her curse, glowing like threads in the air where her nails scrape words into an immaterial surface. Each character is folded together, interlinking and pulsing in purposefully tangled form as it awaits something solid to which to attach, and thereby become real. The missile fragment is that anchor, the weave pulled over and binding it.     It would be too much to ask for so vague a path to be followed as 'similar weaponry.' Rather, it's the definite fact that this weapon was used, and the likely fact that it passed through many of the same hands as each other weapon used by the NAZCA agents on which Tamamo relies. They can blame their failed attempt to strike her for what happens next.     "Reveal yourselves."     A command of burning madness, to those hiding in cover and guiding their munitions, accompanies the more directly destructive curse of transmuting blood to fire.
Petra Soroka	Petra misses, which is entirely unsurprising. Not only is she mostly untrained with the use of the Kana, but its football-sized rounds don't have the velocity to keep up with a dogfight.     Neither does the Kana itself. It slowly turns in the air to track one of the jets, and slowly accelerates flight to start harassing it, despite Petra's intense physical efforts with the wheel inside the cockpit hoping for a faster response. The only thing she can think to do, in a flying vehicle engaged with combat with other flying vehicles, is to try to force a dogfight, but she's so thoroughly outpaced by the jets that they probably can't even tell she's trying to trail them.     A few seconds of fruitless flight later, and Petra is notified by a polite pop-up window on her viewscreen that a missile has locked on to her location. Petra immediately freaks out, and attempts evasive maneuvers that the Kana is incapable of. The bulky mech tilts in the air, as a result of Petra's abuse on its pilot lever, but the motion ends up looking like a confused tilts of its head instead. Petra squeals and braces herself, spending her last moment before the missile's collision activating the Kana's matter-annihilation cannon, and directing it to the two targets that jump into her mind as imminently threatening her: the missile on her tail, and the location in the north mountain where a psychic supposedly is (psychics are always threatening to Petra).     Even if her desperate shot hits the missile, the resulting explosion is close enough to scorch her mech and send it briefly spiraling. On the other hand, the projectile launched into the mountain will chew a hole into a huge chunk of the terrain, exposing or exploding the group located there.
Lilian Rook	Bond's shot is perfect. A few inches off going straight through the scope, like in the movies. His target shifts so little it's more of a suggestion than something he's sure of. His bullet strikes the hard plating on the side of the enemy's helmet, disintegrating with some of the armour and spewing away. The sniper doesn't flinch. The gear is less impressive than the nerves of absolute steel it'd take to do that. Not just that, but absolute confidence in both exactly what gear Bond would use, and how good his shot would be.     A violet flash, like horizontal lightning. Just after the air behind him explodes from the disrupted missile, negated by his watch, the ground right beneath his weapon explodes soundlessly, turned into a hemispherical crater and a shotgun-equivalent spray of molten hot fragments and toxic gas.     Ishirou is, meanwhile, a prime target for the second sniper, while he's out there setting up his missiles. The reveal seems to be considered worth putting him down, as the second ray streaks from the side of the mountain to hit-- Oh. The ray goes straight through the fuselages of several of his own missiles, lined up in three dimensional only from that one spot. It's enough to make the whole cloud daisy chain. He has a split second to figure out how to get out of there, or how to strike back. No wonder the sniper was willing to reveal himself. They didn't even try to hack him. Not after last time.     Cantio is able to run back to cover. Rapidly healing herself, waist deep in snow cover, she has a little while before the flanking team catches her. Six to one sure as hell isn't great odds, especially with most of the Elites pinned down providing support, or engaged in long range battle. Still, her bits are able to make up for the numerical difference. The pursuit bits race through the trees to pin down the attacking agents, whilst a carpet of traps lies between her and them.     Right up until her electronics crackle viciously with the radioactive pulse that rushes through the forest, and the air shatters into glittering shards of split and rearranged space that scramble her signals. They know. Of course they know. They know about everything they've been shown already, and they've prepared. A beam slices straight through the tree at her back, simply guessing and aiming low. Optics streak out of the dark to her left and right; silent, save for the landing crunch of heavy boots. Soldiers materialize out of the shadows flanking her, glowing rifles shouldered and already in position to execute her at point blank. They were already moving into the traps. They've rehearsed this.     Rita's lightning strike hits her target directly. The man convulses, and his scream is the first sound they've externally made since night fell. He rolls down the slope, arc welder disappearing into the running water. The other four raise rifles and form up back to back instantaneously, pointing weapons out in all directions and touching their visors simultaneously. When the balaur flies overhead, they hold position; the first time the other group attacked it, it flamethrowered them well enough that this one has decided not to risk it until it can actually see them through the clouds. But they still can't see Rita. They can infer her presence by the ostensible appearance of her mount, but not pin her down.
Lilian Rook	So the geiger counters break, this time. Four hands punch waist triggers at the same time, and Rita is so closely at the overlapping intersection of so many maximum strength pulses that the effect is instant, crippling, human-fatal radiation poisoning. The trees peel their bark. The stones glow soft blue. They'd already guessed she wasn't magic; she hadn't been affected by anything before. But the balaur is a monster with a heart and lungs and cells, and so is she. It does nothing to stop the missiles from landing, forcing them to scatter and take cover from the projectiles gouging armour and damaging equipment, but the proteins are so denatured that the carbonizing payload can't reach the flesh inside; that, or it's hitting even more cybernetics than the last group.     A second wave of missiles tracks in on Arthur. After the first had hit him directly, they'd somehow already confirmed the splash and sent another round; this time all five are poised to converge from all directions and incapacitate him instantly, as a decisive, decapitating blow. They fall into his geometric maze instead, spiraling madly through space and colliding into one another where he uses up his defensive measures. His teleportation is bought more time. But no doubt they're already moving to the next of umpteen stratagems. They haven't slowed their flanking maneuver. They're about to beat the black knight and company to the chokepoint, and move into the village perimeter, just before Petra's shot of blind panic vapourizes the natural pass. The north team is forced to a cold stop.      The missile is partially disintegrated along one side, and its volatile fuels mix and explode, knocking the Kana down. The firing jet pitches up at a completely insane G-force --Petra recognizes it from her pilot days as something that should kill the pilot-- and flips around to orient on her. Target lock pings the Kana's sensors. An undermounted railgun pours fire into her from above, driving her mech down into the valley. Shot after shot walks in on the cockpit, rather than trying to hit the leg control or turret motor. It aggressively pursues, burning through its ammo stores in a single sustained burst, focusing on her until the Kana is torn to shreds around her and she's ejected as a bloody spray on the--     Sound that makes no noise; words that have no language; a question without form, feelings without substance, and an answer without an answerer vibrate through the air around her, and echo through her brain. She can't understand it. The others won't either, though it's even easier to 'hear' outside. The air glitters beautifully around the jet, like snowflakes and fireflies. It is summarily struck by lightning. The thunder is so loud it rattles Petra's bones and squeezes the air from her lungs in the cockpit. The bolt hadn't come from anywhere but all around. The craft plunges out of the sky, trailing flames and black smoke. The radio crackles. Arman's voice. "How much longer? The noise outside is scaring her. I don't know how long I can talk poor Nika through this."
Lilian Rook	The remaining fighter climbs to higher altitude. Well out of range of the soldiers in the trees. The undead charging the north team are far away enough from Arthur's sun that another wave of cluster bombs can be fired by leading ahead of them, and that can be done on high. An arrow skewers the wing, but lodges in god knows what structure and remains mostly stable, as long as it holds. The space trooper catches up just as the black knight is zeroed, blocking out the pilot's view with the grim visage of a skull. The next instant, the canopy hisses, and pulls back, destabilizing the craft into a wild spin. The pilot reaches up over the alarm-blaring instrumentation, slams the adjustment lever on his seat to drop him low, and fires a beam-sidearm at the space trooper from close up, shooting rapidly under the partially open canopy as if from the window of a car, as the tail spins around to smash the undead.     The north team, meanwhile, is shooting at the black knight and company across the trench made by Petra. Given the benefit of cover from the soldiers in the trees, they have a commanding advantage. Even the six of them in a loose line are able to output such tremendous amounts of fire that the north valley constantly flickers brighter than the night's partial day. Strobing rays slice along undead ranks, gunning them down with only brief pauses to vent waste energy from the entrenched gunners. Grenades are hurled into the mass to beat them back where they form up. One of the snipers fires on the black knight, aiming down to slag him through the knee. It looks like they'll just run Trudy out of troops before she can approach them at this rate     Then Tamamo curses them. The soldiers stumble away from their barricade, writhing, staggering, clawing at their gear webbing. The gun line breaks. A couple of them fall into the snow. A command goes out, and the six of them still as their bloodstreams are flooded with something from those embedded injector implants Ishirou scanned before. Two of the scramblers are deployed straight away, on themselves; they can't use missiles or send transmissions, but Tamamo can't curse them from there either. Both snipers aim for her now, acting on updated information. Lilian intercepts one, then the other, reacting to something unreactable. The gunline regathers to fight back the undead while the snipers simply keep focusing on her, pressuring Lilian to defend Tamamo. She draws Winter Crow and fires back, brilliant gold and vantablack crisscrossing with the violet-white, but she can't hit from that distance with a handgun.     "Tamamo! I need to break off and approach! Can you defend yourself for thirty seconds?! We'll never hold out like this!"
Ishirou	The shot connects with one of the missiles.  Ishirou can't stop the daisy chain at this point, so he releases them early.  He won't be able to escape the shot, but his scanners DO trace the trajectory.  It allows him to get the second sniper's exact location, and with that, he uses his scanners and prediction systems to try and trace a probable location of the second.   This lands him right near Tamamo and Lilian.  The entire network gets the confirmed location of the sniper that fired on him, and the probable locations (which are updated when they fire). This also helps when the curse goes off, revealing those who were in hiding to ping their locations before they go offline.  "I need a minute, Lilian, I'll cover her.  You do what you need to do.." he says to her.  An OPTION flies off, hovering around Tamamo to provide her assistance.  Another flies to Lilian, aiming to interconnect with her armor to provide flight and some ablative armor.   "Everyone else, locations are on the map, I'll update as I get more info."
James Bond	As expected--the shot doesn't rid the range of the sniper. And, as that sniper surely expected following the explosion of the missile, Bond is already reaching for his weapon. It explodes and lifts him off his feet, toxic gas wafting just briefly enough into his nose to set him coughing, tears welling up at the corners of his eyes as his body screams in accusatory agony.     Gunfire, shouted orders, the Kana's report, the roar of Ishirou's counter-ordnance, power words from Trudy, Arthur's frantic shouting, mystic compulsions from Tamamo and coordination from Lilian are all washed out by the eerie, steady ringing in Bond's ears. Through a haze he wills himself onto his stomach from his back, dimly aware that some part of him is bleeding; that another part distantly felt through the rush of adrenaline has cried out in pain.     He shouldn't be able to get back up after that, but he is--and he knows why. Physiopharm augmentation isn't as spectacularly impactful as what NAZCA uses, but it is subtle enough to sneak past the observer and, in many cases, often the beneficiary. Blood trickles down his temple, but his eyes are locked on a paint-peeling APC, when Ishirou's battle data is overlaid atop his vision.     He is singularly focused on it, sprinting towards it, climbing up the side and whipping his arms across the hatch to fling it open and climb inside. The engine turns over once, twice--and then an aged touch screen console, like the grandfather of the VTOL's controls, flickers unsteadily to life before him. The engine growls, then roars and Bond guns it, six thick-treaded wheels kicking up dirt as it tears down the path into the forest.      As the sounds of the world around him gradually reassert themselves over the ringing in his ears, Bond's cold blue eyes gaze through the shuttered, reinforced windscreen, deftly navigating the aged beast of a vehicle around trees, its grip well-suited to densely packed undergrowth. His fingers tap across menus in Cyrilic until a mounted autocannon freshly loaded with scrounged ammunition swivels attentively to life.      It makes the sniper's life much more difficult, with a concentrated stream of fire that promises to light him up the moment he dares peek from cover, hurled his way as Bond weaves the armored vehicle around trees and climbs it over hills.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Give the bad news     No. >Arthur: At least don't lie     "WRAPPING UP SOON, HOMIE!" Arthur calls out, in a moment of reduced noise. "Ya boy ARTHUR LOWELL 'boutta BUST A WORMHOLE up in this motherfucker FOR REAL." He forces a grin and adjusts his pesterchum-bearing sunglasses. Sweat rolls down the side of his face. He swallows back a choking sound and says, "Tell ya girl to HOLD ON. Her NEW FRIEND ain't about to LET HER DOWN." >Arthur: Rescind the lie. You know it's going to take half an hour more.     "To get it done *safe*, maybe." Arthur mutters. He slams his hands through three spellcircles each, drenching his sleeves in their shining green glow as he extends his arms, then he plants them against the pylon, shaking palms pressed to its glassy low-poly surface. Why did he say it was going to be okay? Why did he, unprompted, obligate himself to experience awful suffering? Someone gave him a tiny amount of pressure and expectations, and he instantly chose to promise something he can't safely deliver. Why?     Just how things are when you're the coolest. He closes his eyes, nodding in gratitude to Armin, because if he hadn't agreed to teleport only the one site, Arthur may well have nearly instantly killed himself attempting this maneuver. Instead, he suffers as he starts to force the solar-to-geometry conversion immediately. Some of those pylons are still under-threshold, unsafe and unstable levels of energy that feed back into him, waste-heat blasting through his arms. He's burned all his spellcircles and only has improvised magic now, but in exchange, he's starting the next, and final, phase of his work.     Here's hoping it's faster than another of the hostile strategies. Because now he's only got his improvised magic to work with, and his focus is occupied entirely with screaming in effort, manually adjusting the conversion rates, and screaming, further, in pain. The boundary where the teleport's going to happen is starting to slowly flicker, a green pulse along a thin, growing circular line.
Rita Ma	From the moment the four agents group up, Rita's on high alert. Something about the way they reach for those buttons in unison, the decisive gravitas of the action, puts goosebumps on her arms. When the earliest pinpricks of light strike her retinas, the first milliseconds of a gasp escape her. Something is wrong. She-                 -----stop-----     -reaches deep for an effective defense, and finds this one, from her taste of Exigent Serenity. For one second, the only 'real' things are Rita and the branch she's perched on. The inverse-square law means distance is a good defense. She can get a lot of that in one second. Kicking off the branch, she soars backwards a few hundred feet while leaving her disguise-wrappings behind as an effigy of herself.                 -----start-----      -seemingly falls to the ground, revealed and silently writhing in agony. They found her tough, last time; she's sure they'll put some effort into making sure her decoy's dead.      'Attack' is all the instruction the balaur needs. That should complicate things further. The real Rita takes the chance to sprint around to a different angle, hidden by the driving rain and trees. Invisibility can't hide the glow building up in her arm- soon, her entire body looks like a lightbulb's filament- so she hides behind a tree instead, her palm pressed against its trunk.      They haven't set off any other tripwires yet. That means, even though she can't see them, that they can't have gone far, especially with the balaur harrying them.      A beam of roiling, blinding, concussive light erupts from her hand, annihilates the tree, and carries on to lance through where the agents were standing a few seconds prior before streaking off into the sky. It can't quite be wide enough to engulf all their possible positions. But it can come close.
Tamamo	'Tamamo! I need to break off and approach! Can you defend yourself for thirty seconds?! We'll never hold out like this!'     "I can hold -- though I cannot give Mr. Lowell the same support, if I am occupied. Is our flame yet great enough?"     'Keep the *others* safe! I'll kick this shit into high gear, ghhhh...'     Tamamo isn't willing to risk relying on healing magic. Even if hers is very good, getting hurt hurts. A lot! And that's assuming it doesn't kill her outright! That leaves her options relatively limited, without the ability to either move far out of the way or reach those shooting at her. Thirty seconds, however, she can somehow manage. She just can't give the same effort to supplying Arthur with constantly increasing boosts of available power while she's doing it. The setup from the first half of the battle, and all their prior preparations, will just have to do.     She can't reach the snipers, but they can reach her. To reach her, they -- or rather, their killing intent and their death-dealing -- must reach through that space she still can reach. While Lilian defends her, Tamamo scatters her talismans, each borne through the air on the heated updraft of her presence, fluttering far and away, then slowing as it finds its place. Space between her and the snipers distorts and rearranges as the barrier takes effect, limited by the need to slot within the greater geometry surrounding her, though amply powered by it, as well. The concentric, eight-sided walls form a shifting maze through which a bullet might travel according to precisely ordered rules that make perfect, intuitive sense only to one with a deep familiarity with ancient poetry from the mainland, while the final wall is invisible, yet solid. It will likely soon shatter, but 'soon' is a relative term.     Knowing her own maze perfectly well, Tamamo can still reach out. The undead not yet within the range of the scramblers receive her blessings first. As strange a match-up as that is, she can do little more than redouble their energy and drive to leap forward.     Tamamo's thoughts turn to Rita, but she cannot tell where the girl is, at all. Safe, hopefully.     Petra is in grave danger -- yet not? Did Nika rescue her? Then that is well.     James is found more quickly, having been recently nearby, and still visible through Ishirou's battlefield networking. A tug on the right threads assists the spray of lead in finding blood. As gruesome a use of blessings as this might be, she's short on a willingness to show mercy for this particular group. The flung talismans won't catch up to the APC nearly as quickly, but will nicely enhance its firepower with more directly-delivered curses of flame once they do reach.
Cantio	Wincing as the crackle shorts out most of her bits, Cantio doesn't have enough time to lay out more with her magic before the agents have already converged on the tree she's been working from. Perhaps it's thanks to sheer luck, then, that she had taken to the sky well ahead of their approach, although that sweeping beam through the tree still clips her leg enough to leave a nasty gash that leaves some blood  (or pixelated whatever) in the snow as she escapes the rest of whatever cover she might have had. The timing is ideal, though, as seeing those soldiers coming out of nowhere beneath her, gives her only a moment to react before they might realize she's up there. That moment is still enough, though, to not get absolutely blasted as she takes advantage of being out of harm's way just in time. This time, she doesn't lay into them with sound waves nor try to skewer them through their heads in a sick display of dual-wielding oversized swords. Instead, she calls on what she had gained from her time with her (surrogate?) older sister, diving right on top of them to grasp onto... Well, anything. It doesn't really matter what she grabs. She just needs to stay close to them long enough that she can force them to age far too rapidly to be natural, to turn what could very well be adults in the prime of their lives into aching middle-aged adults or, even worse, withering seniors. The longer they stay in contact with her, perhaps even trying to grapple with someone that's never shown any inclination of being skilled at unarmed combat, the better for her and the worse for them. She just needs them to take the bait and not run off.
Trudy Grimm	The North Peak objective is effectively neutralized by a wild shot from Petra's mech. The Samurai and their undead cohort pause, seeming to discuss amongst themselves. A decision is reached and the squadron descends what's left of the mountain to reinforce another of Trudy's undead units.     The Black Knight, his armor riddled with dents and holes from weaponsfire, refuses to back down. Skeletons are shattered around him as he ceaselessly advances, his greatsword held vertically before him as a shield, chipped away by NAZCA firearms. His advance only stops when a sniper bolt rips through his armored leg, bringing the great warrior to one knee and embedding his sword in the ground in front of him. He lifts his gaze towards the NAZCA line-- and then above the mountain, past them.     The two Samurai brothers and their soldiers pour down the mountain, one warrior wielding his o-dachi, the other loosing great arrows from his yumi, both surrounded by a fresh wave of charging skeletons. This second charge occurs almost immediately after Tamamo's curse strikes and her command is issued, compounding the problem with fresh undead.     With the remaining jet damaged but out of range now, the Soldiers reprioritize. The leading Soldier looks overhead as a bolt is fired from Lilian's sidearm, raising a hand and gesturing. The entire unit repositions. Before long, the position targeted by the Winter Crow is peppered with rifle fire.     Up in the sky, the Space Trooper clings to the front of the jet when the canopy cracks open and the aircraft pitches into a wild spin. Each energy bolt punches through the Trooper's armor and lances out through his back with streams of sparks and debris. The screaming undead is not dislodged. Digging his hands into the fighter's metal skin, the Trooper lurches forward, slamming his helmet into the canopy window. Empty sockets stare the pilot right in the eye as the trooper's jetpack power source, damaged by the laser pistol, melts through its containment vessel. Upon contact with the chilly atmosphere, the entire mechanism explodes like a satchel charge.     Back near Nika's home and Arthur's artificial star, Trudy's ever-present grin is tainted somehow. Strained. Clearly maintaining her good spirits is taking some considerable effort now. Taking a deep breath, she assesses the situation.     The bone cables are holding. Arthur's pushing himself and needs cover. Tamamo is getting cover from Ishirou while Lilian takes off after...     Turning in place, Trudy casts a look towards one of the pillars, then towards the Mage of Space-- as he gets to work. She pulls up the Grimoire, splitting open its pages until she can generate Uruz-- the Gateway Rune. Planting her feet, the witch thrusts out both hands, the tome hovering between them, and does her best to support Arthur's more intense endeavors.     She has intentionally placed herself between Arthur and the snipers that Lilian just shot at.
Petra Soroka	The Kana plummets, and Petra frantically flails her hands throughout the cockpit, adjusting jet output and stabilizers as fast as she can to slow its descent. The mech wobbles in the air, losing its fight against gravity a little less each millisecond, until the jet locks onto it. Bullets ping against the exterior plating uncountably fast, the sound deepening as layers of the Kana's shell are dented and torn.     Faster even than the hail of gunfire, Petra's thoughts loop around the same phrase as metal screams and groans around her. I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm going to die. Her spiral, both literal and emotional, is interrupted by the soundless chime. Petra flinches at the sensation even more than she did the gunfire, squeezing her eyes shut and rubbing at her teeth.     It's a moment before she realizes that she's alive, wrenching her eyes open to notice the wreck of the jet. As a precaution, since NAZCA has a habit of refusing to stay down, she launches a projectile at the jet to obliterate it with a flameless explosion mid-air. The Kana rises back into the air, barely high enough above the terrain to be considered an airborne combatant. Petra wipes sweat and tears out of her eyes, then takes a moment to reassess the battlefield, rather than just plunging right back in.     Viewscreens and panoramic cameras give her a grim view of most of her allies' state, and flickering through, Petra's chest tightens up with decision paralysis of who she needs to help, and how she even could, with every instinct screaming for her to hide and lay low. Then on her screen, Cantio is ambushed, outnumbered massively, and a moment later, Rita drops to the ground in front of a squad of operatives. Petra gasps, hesitates, and then veers towards where Rita('s duplicate) is, showering the approaching agents with a blanket of burning phosphorus and smoke.
Lilian Rook	The mechanicals are old, by the standards of the present day, but they're G.D.F classic. The boot-up confirms Bond's theory; that all of this was G.D.F during the Onslaught in the first place, and never made it back home. It's old, but it's rugged and meant to operate in all kinds of alien terrain for a long time, and it's been maintained as well as possible. There's ammo in the hopper, scraped together by the militia, and hydrogen fuel in the tank. The APC goes roaring over the slope, and the first strike from the sniper carves through far too much armour at once, and is ablated away. The passenger side door hangs open, partially molten, but Bond makes it to cover.     Tamamo's talismans find him in the dip. The APC lunges skyward over the next rise with a vengeance. His gut estimates of bullet velocity and drop are bang on, even for him. The recoil seems to counterbalance itself, jerking one way and then right back the other by random chance. The winds of the violent rainstorm still and swerve to favour him. Hellish fireballs erupt where he shoots. The second sniper goes for him as well, but only shears the roof of the troop compartment, by a sudden and fortunate twist of ill gales. The ice allows him to drift the wheels and sweep the turret at the same time. The snipers disappear to relocate, and he just gets them again. The APC will fall apart with a few more hits, but if eh can keep them on the backfoot . . .     The balaur swooping overhead guarantees he has a real shot. Now that they know to expect it, NAZCA is quick to react. The triple spray of flamethrowers, arranged in a wide V, is much harder to deal with than a simple dragon, but they scatter with only a mentally shared warning and dive for cover, rolling behind ancient stone and ablative ice, out of airtight formation but into safety as it passes. One of the agents unslings a shoulder mounted missile, and fires it after the strafing monster. An explosion sounds in the distance; mighty as it is, membranous wings don't outrace futuristic rocket fuel. Rita feels the link abruptly cut.     The others gather up in the firelight and start climbing. Two unholster their sidearms and dispassionately pump several rounds into the decoy Rita's head and chest, overriding her fained writhing with the convulsions of being shot. The chilling sight buys her enough time to blast them with what they actually don't see coming. A scrambler comes out and is immediately obliterated; the beam is unprocessed and barely directed energy, not a spell or construct. She sees two silhouettes vanish into the beam. Two more scatter away at tremendous speed, painting light trails with the shift of their optics from there to here; faster than they'd moved before.     Like with Cantio, two flank her in the blink of an eye. The snow blows up behind them on a lag. The sound reaches her sluggishly. She's aware of the rifles, held close-in and forearm braced to avoid disarming, tilted in to avoid grab or deflection, firing into her back. There must be some difference with 'blue team' from 'red team'. At this distance, there's no way to cleanly evade being shot, especially with radiation sickness, but she only has to survive a short while before burning phosphorus sprays down from above, and the flankers scatter. Burst fire streaks upwards from split directions, hammering the underside of the Kana, threatening to lance right through the cockpit between Petra's legs.
Lilian Rook	The north team snipers are still going at Tamamo. Without the need for careful calibration on a stationary target, their fire is constant and lethal. Faster than anyone could pull a bolt action. She feels a brief pause every eight consecutive shots, but they stagger and overlap their fire with effortless telepathic coordination. They spot for each other as a two-shooter team, probing her barrier and figuring out its laws and functions. They're too busy to get Arthur. However, snap shots come at him from the flank team engaging Cantio now; the close assault agents have her pinned, and updated the marksmen instantaneously via psychic connection. It's just Trudy between him and them.     Cantio herself is in much more trouble. She narrowly escapes death, as the tree is cut right in half, and gets the drop on one of her assailants, but quickly figures out the difference between Red Team's snipers and Blue Team's assaulters. She barely has time to grapple the one before another has cut a full circle around her, maneuvering around his teammate like slicing a corner and blasting her in the side. Number three appears from behind her falling tree cover, shoulder charging at her knees with superhuman augmented strength and speed. Number four swivels at the waist and shoots as she goes over or down with her.     Her grappler-ee snatches his energy knife from his shoulder holster and whirls on her. Given an instant, the whole crowd will have her full of holes, buried under power armoured men, and throat slit or worse. Her best bet is when --§Why oh why do good friends die? Why should I be made to cry? Judgement nigh, from Hell on high; see to that which I deny.§-- one of her gun-wielding attackers shimmers in front of her, glances skywards, utters a single syllable, and is scattered into three separate shearing slipstreams that pulverize him at their exact center, carrying shredded metal and misted blood away with his scream.     Trudy's troops flank the north team's general combatants. Their ability to defend their anti-Tamamo snipers is rapidly pushed to its limit. Rifle bullets land around them from their hyper-speed reactive dodges, and dent power-armoured plates through sheer volume where there is no space, outmatched in firepower by the strobing beams that carve through their tree cover in return, but by far the superior in numbers. The samurai coming down from the other side charge right into the middle of their formation. Knives come out. Jewel steel clashes with tungsten carbide. Flashes of streaking blades, snow bursts from racing footwork, snap shots from sidearms drawn in close combat to gun down encroaching skeletons, all skate back across the chasm side, bunching them up to the snipers as they fight back.     But Ishirou's Option has blinked out of existence with Lilian. He gets a blast of nonsense data and then a termination signal as if it had burnt up in reentry. He had exactly the right idea, because Rita and Petra see both snipers he had scanned and marked tumbling down the mountain nearby, armour damaged and firing blindly into the dark in tactical retreat. Trudy's samurai are joined by Lilian leaping in from above. A couple of snap blasts splash on her Lady in Black, slowed into sparks of starlight, before she cleaves a rifle in half, clashes with a second agent and succeeds at driving him into the mob, and then turns to defend herself from the first, warding off his knife while dodging fire from the rear, taking one to the back. Firing explosive alchemical shots from Winter Crow offhanded at the snipers, she guides the soldiers to pound them with suppressive fire and halt their sniping on Tamamo just as the last barrier breaks.
Lilian Rook	The final jet fires vertical jets below as the pilot slams the cockpit triggers. His gun gushes violet steam and flickering white flames as it overheats, but he closes the cockpit, and manages to catch the plane out of freefall in a feat of Bond-grade piloting. The space trooper still clinging to the hull is a problem, but the G-forces of swerving to fire one missile on Bond's APC, another on Ishirou, and his last on Trudy in one long turn, should be enough to break the troopers fingers and dislodge him.     The trooper explodes first. The aircraft spirals out of control. The pilot frantically hammers the triggers --no response-- then in a moment of eerie lucidity, angles it to crash straight into Tamamo, picking up the slack from the suppressed snipers, as part of one dangerously fluid machine. With the course set, he ejects immediately, disappearing into the night without a chute, but a thirty ton plane at supersonic speed is possibly more deadly than the missile. Lilian doesn't have nearly the firepower to erase an entire plane in the second it'll take to crash. The Kana's ammo won't reach it even if Petra can recover it. Rita just fired her ultimate and took out two agents. Bond doesn't have anything but the sniper rifle that could reach. Ishirou's IBMIS could only slow it down across that much space. Arthur is preoccupied. Trudy and Cantio are too far. Tamamo's last wards are worn down. Nika doesn't even know what's happening; Arman is still lying to her.     §Oh? Do I know you? Are you, perhaps, my pen pal's . . .§     §You don't. But we'd like to know you.§     The plane explosively halts. The nose crushes in backwards through the cockpit. The wings snap off and slash into the mountainside, breaking into a hundred twisted plates. The fuselage warps and splits at its seams, bulging outwards like a flattened bullet, and spraying wiring and small parts like gore. The fuel tanks rupture, and spray tremendous gouts of fire in a starburst of directions. The jet turbines themselves gutter out as the power plant shears in half and dies.     It's stopped against Lilian. Her back is to Tamamo. Her arms are outstretched. Her hands don't make contact. The armour from her fingertips to her shoulders is missing, exposing skin of soft blackness and swirling woad-lines of gold below. Two terrifyingly familiar arms hold the dying jet fighter in place instead.     Several times larger than Lilian's, and that much more able to hold the craft. Skin like black armour and solid void, fine joints of kintsugi gold innards and articulated cold stars. The shadow of something vast is just out of view behind her, reaching forward, but dim and faded; under the surface of water; a half-real figment of a dying sleep-paralysis dream. Four red points and one gold above and off to one side. Enormous fingers crumple steel without touching it by a centimeter, then toss it aside. Lilian drops to her hands and knees. It's time. She knows it is. She counted the seconds. This deep into the battle, her projections finally know the immediate future where she doesn't leave anyone behind, and where none of NAZCA will come with them.     "Arthur! Now!"
Ishirou	There is so much to track at once that Ishirou is feeling the pressure.  Missiles are flying again, he can't track and hold, so he switches to firing, aiming to try and blow the missile aiming at him up before it reaches him, though the shrapnel might still hit, that's a secondary afterthought in not wanting to be hit by a missile directly.   The option's junk data is ignored, he knew what was involved in sending it to Lilian, he'll just have to ignore that until the readings make sense again.  Though he does smile a little when the snipers are shooting at shadows and retreating down the mountain.   That gives him just enough time.  He fires another OPTION off, but this one attaches to Arthur himself.  Granting him a boost to his energy and a source of magical power to pull from.  Hopefully, that might take the edge off him killing himself, but he'll probably still find a way to hurt himself heroically.   He thinks that, but Ishirou can't help but respect people who can do that, and despite what he's built he still doesn't feel like he's reached the level of hero they are.  A pretender that can only hold the back line, or support them.   He takes a breath, but then the jet...! All he can do is reach out, all he can do is SLOW it down...he struggles, but the distance is too great.  No..!  No!   When it crashes, held by Lilian who crumples it up and stands over Tamamo he sighs in relief.  But those feelings soon crash down the moment the relief is gone.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Alright, fine, finish it up     Arthur finds his burden a little lighter. As the resistance to the process gives and his screaming abates, for a moment, he glances to Trudy. Then he nods and pushes himself right back to the limit -- now all the more effective with her boosts. He just doesn't even allow the lesser stray snapshots to phase him, staring through the glassy surface of his mechanism and into some cosmic distance only he can see.     He finishes the conversion. Boiled flesh tears away from the pylon as he stumbles back, breathing heavily. Just in time to see what happened. He sees a shape, a certain knightly form he never was privy to, and for a moment, fear gnaws at him. There's a thought that drifts through his mind. It goes something like... >Arthur: You've seen the type of wounds these people have suffered >Arthur: Their wishes in the middle of the apocalypse come from somewhere. >Arthur: Something is bleeding. You can tell, right? >Arthur: You already can barely understand people. >Arthur: This is even farther. Isn't it?     "Yeah. Can't understand." Arthur mutters softly to himself. "Just gotta listen and be kind in the blind way. It has to work out." He turns back to his pylon, clenching charred hands, hands that build an intense geometric payload to kick off the built up energy. "It has to." >Arthur: Teleport the village to Lilian and Nika's chosen destination.     His burned palms slam into the surface with a loud roar of effort. And the shining green circle pings, softly, forming the spirograph in less than a second. And then the village, and everything in range of the pylons, is gone, with a crash of collapsing vacuum so large and so loud that it threatens un-augmented eardrums.
Cantio	A ranged team and a direct assault team. Simple, but effective. Cantio can appreciate NAZCA's organization, at the very least, even if she and they are all still in the middle of trying to kill each other rather gruesomely. Finding that her time powers don't seem to work against them, she goes right back to brute force, finally regaining control of her sword bits as the agents start swarming in on her again. Thankfully, she's got more aid this time. Between Rita's mysterious missiles and Petra's phosphorous rain, she can afford to take advantage of Ishirou's data to launch some of those flying shivs right at the red team without having to try and find them again. With any luck, that'll force them to deal with what's essentially persistently homing knives while she focuses on the blue team in front of her. The second agent shooting at her side has to contend with Cantio swinging the first one in the path of the blast with her own superhuman strength and durability (along with her armor) keeping her from being turned into a pink and purple paste, even if the constant bruising and burning is starting to take a toll. The third one charging at her, meanwhile, is met with those sword pieces forming together to start buzzsawing straight at him in the path of that tackle. The fourth... Did that one just get shredded somehow? Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Cantio takes advantage of what little confusion there may be from that body explosion, calling together the rest of her sword bits into her handle to turn it into some kind of weird... Half donut? Those familiar with audio equipment will recognize it as some kind of speaker, and that's the only hint the flank team might get on what it's for. Even Cantio needs to stuff her ears to protect her eardrums, although all she has on hand is snow and chunks of that one dead agent. That'll have to do, though, as she takes advantage of that crashing noise from Arthur's teleportation of the village and amplifies it all around her, utterly blasting the NAZCA agents in the flanking team with enough ear-rending volume to create a massive shockwave that still manages to shake her to her core even without being in the path of the speakers.
Tamamo	There are rules to barriers. This is necessarily true, and it was to be expected that a determined and intelligent attacker would keep trying until they discovered hers. Tamamo's magecraft is of the opposite alignment as what would allow for safer chaos. It last long enough, but only just. The last several shots slam into final barrier, the invisible panes audibly shattering like glass, rotating into place to show fresh walls, and shattering again. The last shot is slowed, deflected, but not fully. It scrapes past her thigh before embedding in the ground, the residual force pushing her around, spinning on her heel, repositioning her geta to maintain balance in the opposite facing. Her healing charms can handle this, though they don't stop her from hissing. The blaze of light around her, the half-seen spiritual presence of the Pale-Gold Face as connected from the world's reverse side to this space, flickers and eddies.     And then, "...Lilian?"     At the warning, Tamamo drops her ears, placing her hands over them to hold them to her head. The flames composing them may as well be solid to her touch, though continue to dance past where her fingers hold.
Rita Ma	From Petra's high perch she can see 'Rita' dying, squirming on the ground. In the cherenkov-blue light, the decoy's body jerks with the gunshots in a way that's just a little too flexible. Its ventilated insides are an alien blue, not red. But with what Petra knows, that doesn't mean it isn't real.      If Petra looks toward the origin of the brilliant beam, she might be able to see glimpses of white-blue through the trees. That's where the agents dart, their glowing optics tracing lines towards it. If she's lucky, or if she's smart, she might not see more of the real Rita than that.      When the agents flank her, Rita-                 -----stop-----     makes 'herself' and 'the ground' the only real things for one second. That's more than enough un-time to reposition. She'd glimpsed one out of the corner of her eye, and ends the second with her arm looped around where their neck will be.                 -----start-----      -has one in a tentacle-assisted headlock, bending backwards to lift their feet off the ground and use them as a human shield against the other. Starry smoke bleeds off her edges from the second use, and she's even more drained than the tingly-nauseating radiation sickness can account for, but they're three-fifths dealt with. If it's "only" two against one, she isn't in mortal tension anymore.      The Kana's appearance puts that into her instead.      Her eyes go wide. She drops the agent. For more reasons than one, Rita dips behind a tree as the phosphorus bombs come down. For more reasons than one, she feels like throwing up. Her fingers dig into the wood while her heart pounds in her chest.      When the agents run, she doesn't follow. She tries to re-weave the disguise with uncomfortably little tentacle-mass to spare. "Get your face back on," Lilian had said, the first time she'd seen Rita like that. Those words stuck with her: a nakedness so deep she no longer has a face.      It takes her a moment to work up the courage to look out around the tree again, and muster a smile up at the Kana to let Petra know she's okay.
James Bond	A dire, harsh alarm buzz grates against Bond's ears in the cabin of the APC. The interior swims in red, and the touchscreen flickers to a radar sweep with a rapidly approaching red blip. His blue eyes sweep briskly and purposefully across the controls, as trees whip past the windscreen and the speedometer steadily, dangerously climbs.      He finds it. A thermal baffle meant to confuse guided weapons. Labeled and secure, behind a transparent plastic case that's yellowed with age. The button is pressed. All that happens is an urgent flash on the console in Cyrilic: FEED ERROR      "No," Bond growls, in exasperated annoyance, before slamming on the brake and swinging the hatch open. He's up and out by the time he can physically see the missile, rolling from the thickly plated chassis to hit the ground running. The explosion of the jet in the distance is cold comfort, compared to the furious, chest-rattling hiss of the oncoming missile. He leaps, spread eagle through the air.      Heat and shrapnel flirt dangerously with the space near his head. Everything disappears, a split second before the back of his skull meets a chunk of armored APC. He hits the ground with a grunt of effort, standing up in the peaceful location Arthur's brought everyone to.
Petra Soroka	Seeing Rita die turns Petra's stomach, and she claps a hand to her mouth and struggles to hold back the immediate surge of tears and sickness. Even though she wants to look away, the abnormalities of Rita's clone still catch her eye-- Rita would have normal blood! And normal flexibility. So this isn't Rita. Still shaken, Petra can't help but scan the surrounding area to look for the real Rita, and immediately upon finding her, looks literally anywhere else. She made a promise, after all.     Once the fighting pauses, and Rita gives her a reassuring smile, Petra has a strong, uncomfortable awareness of her inability to smile back in the Kana. The mech just observes, giving no indication of whether it noticed or cared about Rita's survival. "Arthur! Now!"     That means it's time to leave! And Petra is currently outside of the bounds of the teleport circle. With Rita successfully aided, and NAZCA's assault focusing on the Kana, Petra hardly needs any more encouragement to retreat. Munitions pound against the outside of the Kana as it ponderously pulls back on its hasty single-minded course towards the swarming operatives, reversing direction to face back towards Arthur and the mech.     Hands reach across membranes of reality, fluidly moving indistinguishably from flesh and skin. They crush the plane-- the plane is crushed, the hands are just the way that humans know how to do that, inextricably linked to and *of* the girl manifesting them. Shadowy suggestions of size, in literal dimensions and in intensity, dwarf the plane that Petra had struggled against effortlessly.     The Kana feels like a toy in comparison. Ironically.     The spark of insecurity that flares up inside Petra is enough to briefly override her instinct to flee. With NAZCA still on her tail, Petra stops the Ekanamsha's flight and grips the turret lever with achingly-tense muscles. All at once, she whips the turret around, swinging its heavy metal barrel like a bat, barely above the ground. A dozen trees crack and are launched backwards with the strike, splinters flying in every direction "behind", where NAZCA could be. With the turret still pointed backwards, Petra fires a matter-annihilation projectile into the cloud of shattered wood.     Flameless, soundless explosions expand spherically around where the missile connects, jumping to every new scrap of former-tree that they touch, indiscriminately expanding across a huge arc in the area where the squad had been. Snow, stone, wood, and metal alike are reduced to dust, with the potential energy vibrating inside all that matter converted violently into kinetics, booming across the landscape.     The Kana *isn't* a toy. It's a *real* weapon, for *real* Elites.     Her irritation vented, Petra hovers back into the circle of pylons, momentum carrying her over the border just before Arthur teleports the group. She tenses her body, and as the teleportation effect hits, the adrenaline starts draining away and the belated terror of everything she just did hits at once.
Lilian Rook	Hurling the entire mountain through space is both unfeasible and also pointless. The people Oreshnika won't leave without, and their little village on the green, is all that's strictly needed; Lilian had discussed this with Arthur and Trudy when setting the pylons, Arman indoors, and Tamamo when picking the destination. A disc-shaped slice of the Urals disappears. Briefly, it occupies no spatial coordinates at all.     The last thing anyone hears come from the mountainside, over the howling wind and pouring rain, the scattered gunfire and the clashing of steel, is the rumbling roar of incoming jetcraft. Not fighters. Heavier. Bigger. Military-grade carry planes. The radio crackles. Ishirou's comms interception relays a few words:     "Visual confirmed on exfil point. Stand by for reinforcement; black team is on site with Jormungandr. It's your lucky day boys; command approved deployment of the F--" Then the roar of collapsing vacuum. The audio sensor software peaks out.     The coordinates are precise enough that the transplanted village doesn't have to fall. The impact of earth on earth rumbles violenty underfoot, but accounts for a few feet of drop, deeply gouging the ground that was there first. The reason for the precision is obvious; this is a place many have been before. The ghastly mists of the coast are thrown back on all sides, repulsed into towering walls that many have seen before. The odd spike of bizmuth crystal stabs through the Ural stone here and there.     With the rumbling settled underfoot, the pop of equalizing pressure hitting the ears, one could simply walk to the edge of town now. Lilian pulls herself up by Tamamo, otherwise alone once more, her arms plated as they should be. She herself takes a walk to the limits of the transplanted peak, climbing up to the comms outpost, where the Elites had viewed the sunrise before, and peering over a gentle cliff, densely wooded with maple, plum, and bamboo, overlooking the gentle sounds of the ocean.     "I never thought I'd be so happy to have spent so much time on a civil charity project. It's wonderful that we can introduce those two to each other so quickly. Thank you, Arthur. You really are a great friend to girls like us."