The man’s name was Leander Scylding, the current Grand Champion of the duelling circuit of Bantamoor’s famous Burning Colosseum. He was tall and lean, with a sort of physical presence that was striking and dashing—that is, until he opened his mouth. Though his immaculately coiffed inky black hair, polished and oiled to an eye-catching sheen, and angular, aristocratic features that bordered on fey, made him certainly a pretty enough sort to look upon, his ever-present hauteur and supercilious sneering gave him a repulsive quality that was only overcome by the most admirably determined sort of opportunistic groupies. The women who bore up under his condescension and unrelenting vainglory with a hollow, pretty smile, focused on the riches and connections riding the trail of his rising star could put within their reach, had nothing but Ardrea’s most heartfelt respect, as they had Dorothea’s, though the latter was less likely to ever admit it.

That was the only reason she felt even slightly conflicted about what they were about today. Otherwise, there would be nothing but uncomplicated and unbound glee at the idea of what would most likely transpire in their wake. The man’s boorish and unearned arrogance would have been grating enough, though easily out of sight, and therefore out of mind; however, he had made the mistake of mouthing off about the various members of their company, the Warriors of Light, whom he had failed to bed—which made up their totality—and spreading unsavoury rumours. His clumsy, rude, brutish attempts at flirtation were easy enough to brush off, but their reputation?

For Ardrea, it was safe to say that the moment he came near that aspect of them, he had brought this upon himself.

The fact that when the arena opened tomorrow, Scylding was set to match his spear against their friend, the up-and-coming Casimir Hartigan, and his ever-nimble smallsword, of course had nothing to do with it.

Obviously.

For all that he liked to posture, Scylding was in fact far from beyond reproach, and like many athletes enmeshed in bloodsport, he was deeply superstitious. Sometimes he was known to pick different spears from a rack, using one at a time for one blow each before discarding it, but the man wasn’t a complete idiot. He had skill that couldn’t be denied, did the Grand Champion, but Casimir was vicious, and even a pompous arse like Scylding knew that he had to be on his guard. The Burning Colosseum generally didn’t hold mortal combat matches, and in fact, only to first blood was regulation, but their weapons were live steel, and it was not uncommon for one fighter to kill the other on those sands, so in a very literal sense, the slightest misstep on Scylding’s part would be the death of him. It was for that reason that Scylding, they knew, would take only his main and most favoured spear into the match, believing that it brought him luck that would give him the edge he would desperately need to overcome that raw, brutal killer instinct that no amount of training or skill could produce, and that Casimir possessed in spades.

Dorothea was an adept thief, and Ardrea was a master hunter, and so the process of disguising themselves and slipping into the man’s lodging in his private suite in the Colosseum’s barracks presented exactly zero challenges. It was almost too easy, in fact, and it would have been even easier if Dorothea was willing to rope their designated ‘team mom’ Cassandra, who worked in the Colosseum as their resident healer, into the plot; of course, Dorothea had been against it, citing that Cassandra had only recently managed to gain the position and she didn’t want to jeopardise that for her, and Ardrea agreed, so they were here infiltrating on their own.

It was here that Scylding’s promiscuity aided them, as two unknown women wandering the barracks towards the Grand Champion’s quarters was no longer quite as unfamiliar a sight as it ought to have been; thus, no one asked any questions as they approached the only single occupant apartment in the entire complex.

Of course, the chambers weren’t vacant when they got there, but the man himself was as unconscious as they came, a product of his little-known habit of consuming soporifics the night before a match for which he was particularly nervous—it was perplexing, really, that a man with this perfect storm of being entirely too public and wholly too private had not been taken advantage of in this way sooner. Perhaps it was because the matches of the Burning Colosseum were considered sacrosanct for those born within Republican territories? It mattered not. The holes in security existed all the same, and they summarily exploited them.

Dorothea Gremory, the leader of the Warriors of Light, was the first to spot the man’s longspear in the corner of the room, far from his bed, in a little alcove against the far wall between a wardrobe and the adjacent wall. It was an odd piece, she noted distantly as Dorothea grabbed it surreptitiously from its hiding place, more a glaive than a spear, but it worked well enough for their purposes; Ardrea Crocell, Dorothea’s second-in-command for the adventuring company to the extent that it mattered, nodded, touching her hand to the weapon as she reached deep within herself, that vacant pit created within her through extensive, ritualistic transformative surgery, and pulled forth the knowledge of ‘Acid Surge.’ An ability native to the wretches of the Great Swamp of Gravenmyre, itself a region of the distant continent of Mysidia that rested several months’ sailing to the east, it was a particularly nasty attack that leached integrity from metal, causing no superficial damage even as it rendered finely-worked and expertly-tempered steel as brittle as flint. Of course, she had had it inflicted upon her during the course of her training, and, having experienced the essence of the wretches’ bothersome ability, could pull upon magic to replicate the effect.

Of course, this ability was almost useless in combat, as few monsters used metal weapons and it flatly didn’t work on weapons enhanced through magical means, but it was in her repertoire and thankfully was perfect for this precise situation.

Dorothea repressed a giggle when Ardrea retracted her hand and nodded to tell her companion that she was done without speaking; moments later, it was as though nothing had happened, and they slipped out of the room, taking an exit-only shortcut that slipped them out into the night air of the Republic of Bantamoor.

The next morning, disguises set aside, Dorothea, Ardrea, and the rest were all together in the stands to watch Casimir’s bout against the Grand Champion. The Galeborn Zarya Caduceus Castracani sat beside her lover, the drahn Mami of the Threefold Tomoe, and their gazes were a study in contrasts; blue-eyed Zarya, ever the sporting type, watched with a particular sanguine anticipation, while Mami’s white gaze was some mixture between disinterest and genuine irritation—which was far from an uncommon sight for her, but noteworthy all the same. Ophelia Hexennacht, a rune fencer from the fallen kingdom of Vlindrel, far to the north, and thus looking, though not feeling, like a hume, possessed, as usual, an entirely inscrutable expression, and the murderous aura that radiated from her at all times seemed no more agitated than was typical. Though they were equally as indecipherable as her countenance and posture, Ardrea liked to think that Ophelia’s captivating crimson eyes reflected such sentiments.

Ardrea’s attention swept back to her Dorothea, who possessed a mind sharp as a stiletto with a tongue to match, and wondered what she was staring at in so aquiline a fashion with her sharp, exacting emerald gaze in the brief instants before the hawker announced the contestants making their ways onto the sands.

Leander Scylding was there as always, tossing his coiffed and voluminous oiled hair to one side and giving what he surely thought was a winning smile, to which his groupies fawned as if on cue. Ardrea admired their dedication and resolve, if not the means to which they put those qualities; but today was different. From the opposite side of the blood-sands came their friend and ally, and Casimir Hartigan was everything that his opponent was not. His lips were painted a bright, gentle blue, and his mauve eyes were accented in lavender hues, his electric purple hair tumbling just past his shoulders; he was slender where Scylding was broad, effeminate where Scylding was stereotypically masculine, and while the Grand Champion’s gaze was clouded with bravado, Casimir’s stare could feasibly draw blood. When Scylding’s lips peeled away in an approximation of a smile or a condescending sneer, it was insufferable, while Casimir’s upturned lips were reminiscent of the gentle, artful arc of a garotte wire.

Scylding wore an open doublet with a white tunic free underneath, his trousers tight and his shoes more like slippers, thin and with good purchase on the sand. Casimir, however, was dressed impeccably, the perfect image of a nimble, highborn duellist, bearing a cavalier’s shoulder-cape and a pair of boots with substantial heels, perplexingly enough; what similarities did exist between the two contenders acted less as unison and more as juxtaposition, highlighting Casimir, hard and bitter and somewhat aloof, as a predator, ruthless and cold-blooded and disinclined to miss even half a chance to tear the Grand Champion’s throat out with his teeth.

“Welcome, citizens of Bantamoor, to the Burning Colosseum! And boy, do we have a show in store for you today! In the east where the sun rises, issuing the challenge—the Bloody Nightingale himself, Casimir Hartigan!” At the hawker’s prompting, a modest cheer went up for their friend, though more prevalent was the audible dissent. Few knew the defender beyond the ring, and fewer still condemned his lifestyle, and so he was a bit of a crowd favourite. Speaking of which… “And in the west where the sun sets, you all know him, many of you love him, the current and reigning Grand Champion and Bantamoor’s favourite son—the one, the only, Leander Scylding!”

The cheering that came from the stands was deafening.

“Now we shall see if our Grand Champion remains at the top of his game, or if this upstart challenger can snatch the title from his complacent hands! Let the blood feed the fires!”

The cheering intensified, and a concussive wave blew through the spectators at the sheer force of it.

“Fighters, take up arms!”

A scantily-clad woman came from Leander’s entryway, bringing with her his favourite longspear. He grabbed it, swept dramatically into a bow, and pressed his lips against her hand with a wink, at which she giggled as though on cue. The crowd’s reaction was a combination of laughing, cheering, and wolf-whistling.

In contrast, there was no one who came up to hand Casimir his sword, as, ever-paranoid, he trusted none but himself with its care, maintenance, and transport; he reached beneath his cavalier’s cape and drew forth his fine Rhiannon Blackwood-custom smallsword, its gilded and elaborate basket hilt glimmering in the sunlight, followed by the lustrous silvery sheen of its blade. He settled from that draw into an engarde, still smiling, though now with an edge of mockery as Leander rose and turned to face him. Casimir smirked. “Are you quite done?”

“Verily. I shall not tarry a moment longer to send a villainous urchin like yourself back to the abyss from whence you crawled!” Leander cried in answer.

The crowd cheered, but to Ardrea, and indeed, the rest of the Warriors of Light, it was clear that Leander had inadvertently struck a nerve; Casimir’s veneer of merriment dropped, and in its place was solemn severity overtop the seething fury they saw coiling and building within him. It was at this point that Ardrea began to wonder whether or not sabotaging the Champion was overkill, but quickly dismissed it; sabotaging his spear was revenge for the Warriors of Light, while his death would be Casimir’s retribution. Twofold poetic justice.

When Leander slipped into his low battle-stance, the hawker waited the span of three restful heartbeats, and then cried, “Begin!”

Casimir didn’t immediately charge Leander, and Leander, obviously banking on the lowborn savagery narrative, had no plans to strike the first blow; after a faltering moment of shock, Leander began to make his way into pacing around Casimir, while Casimir kept his sword raised, the point on target as his eyes fixated on it, and in turn, Casimir responded in kind, the two of them circling each other like the spokes of a wheel around an invisible hub.

The Bloody Nightingale’s stare was unerring, meeting the Grand Champion’s without hesitation or fear. After a few moments of tense, silent circling, where even the audience seemed to be holding their collective breath, the simple mind-game seemed to trigger upon Scylding’s fraught nerves, causing his composure to break first.

The spear shot towards Casimir at half the speed of an adder’s lunge, but Casimir, seeing it in the Champion’s eyes before Scylding made his first move, was already dancing just out of the way, stepping forth and slamming a foot down on the shaft of the spear. He then ducked out of the way before the Grand Champion used his spearman strength to throw him off balance, leaving the Champion to raise his spear and swing it horizontally, like a partisan.

A hair and no more could pass in the space between Casimir’s nose and the spear-point as he bent backwards to evade.

He bent back up, but Scylding moved in and slammed the now exposed butt of his spear into Casimir’s chest, staggering him. He turned the spear end over end to bring the point now again to bear, thrusting once more to catch the Bloody Nightingale as he recovered.

Casimir dodged the first thrust, but immediately after it came another. Then another. Then another. The Grand Champion’s spear was a blur, and all their friend could do was dodge and weave while giving an ilm of ground at a time.

In a change of tactic, he ducked beneath the spear, going low to the ground and sweeping with his leg; Scylding’s legs weren’t caught in it, but the sand that sprayed forth would have hit the Grand Champion’s eyes had he not immediately retreated.

An ordinary fighter would be shaken; for Casimir, it was only a reminder that Scylding didn’t buy his way into becoming Grand Champion. Thusly reassured, the Bloody Nightingale, now having his opponent’s measure, approached to begin his attack. Casimir tended to use one combination that almost invariably tipped the scales in his favour, his “Fourfold Flourish,” as he named it; Scylding saw that he was approaching, and struck for his head, a favourite of his as it made the bleeding clear, and if it hit, would summarily win him the bout.

The first cut—zwerchhau. The Grand Champion’s attack came and Casimir’s smallsword caught it just below the spearhead in such a way that Scylding needed to move to avoid it. The hit didn’t land, but Casimir was far from finished; he brought the spear around and to the ground. Scylding sacrificed his distance.

The second cut—redoublement. He baited Scylding’s diagonal upswing with a feint, and then dashed for his stomach. The Grand Champion saw this and dodged out of the way at the last moment, thus sacrificing his footing.

The third cut—remise. He tilted his sword and lunged, and while the Grand Champion managed to retract his spear to critical distance to use the head to deflect the smaller weapon’s hit, the moment the smallsword’s point made contact with the spearhead, their sabotage paid dividends, the metal shattering with the sound of shearing in a shower of hot sparks. Scylding managed to lash his head back to defeat the undeterred lunge, but it sent him into a stagger, sacrificing his balance.

The fourth cut, the finale—reprise. With a flourish, Casimir returned to engarde, and then lashed forth with a viper’s speed; the sword struck true, its original target revealed, burying itself up to nearly the hilt in the Grand Champion’s larynx and bursting out the other end in a spraying shower of blood.

Within the span of an inhale, the Grand Champion had gone from an advantageous retreat to having his throat impaled on Casimir’s sword, his head and body twitching as his spine severed and his lungs began to fill.

Scylding, his eyes wide with shock and mortal horror, coughed, and red splashed onto the victor’s face, who took it without so much as a flinch. Casimir slid the sword free of his opponent’s neck and out to the side, tossing the blood from it while his other hand retrieved a handkerchief, wiping what remained from the metal before returning it to its scabbard. With that support gone, the Grand Champion fell to his knees and then bonelessly onto his face, spurts of blood gushing from the wound and onto the sands.

The crowd was speechless.

“Uh… G-give it up for…” the hawker began, audibly flustered and clearly astonished, “…Casimir Hartigan, our new Grand Champion!”

The sound that came next, if bottled, could have levelled a battlefield with its intensity.

Dorothea turned to Ardrea, and they embraced each other, overcome with glee that their project had indeed borne fruit, heedless of the eyes of the other three members of their company that were fixed upon them, alight with suspicion.

“Okay, spill.”

Ardrea noted absently that at least Zarya had the wherewithal to wait until they were back home before launching into her tirade; doubly so for waiting until they were in the War Room, which was, incidentally, the name Mami had chosen to give it. Some sort of sentimental value the name had.

The Warriors of Light, thanks to both Cassandra and Dorothea with all of their side-jobs, were lodged in a large manse outside of the sprawling expanse of Bantamoor proper, far from the stench and clamour of the foundries and refineries. It was fully-furnished and had an oddly utilitarian opulence to it that fit them. Mami, their white mage, was sat at the long round wooden table in the centre of the War Room, flipping absently through a tome of esoteric magic that Ardrea recognised and knew the raven-haired drahn had already finished, possibly more than once; Dorothea was reclined on the sofa to the side, curled up in a manner reminiscent of a feline, as though the lightly-tanned, wavy-haired brunette expected to be rendered in portraiture given her pose, and while Zarya stood, blue-haired, tall, strong and incensed, against the chalkboard opposite the floor-to-ceiling windows, Ardrea standing just apart from her, with the span of the table though not its physical presence between them, black-haired Ophelia’s compelling blend of soft curves and hard muscle was leaned up against the wall in the far corner, in the darkest part of the room furthest removed from the sunlight streaming through the windows, silent, vigilant, and at the moment, ever so slightly judgemental.

Of course, given the subject matter and the fact that Ophelia always seemed to just know what they did, it was hardly surprising.

“What is there to spill?” Dorothea whined with an air of aristocratic irritation. “The man talked shit about us, trying to damage our rep. And he paid the price for it. So now when other people are getting ready to talk shit about us, they’ll point to the late Leander Scylding, and say ‘he thought he was powerful enough to badmouth them without consequences, and we all know where it got him.’ It’s just basic thugonomics.”

Zarya turned and stared, open-mouthed, at Dorothea. “Basic what?”

Dorothea shrugged. “Basic thugonomics.”

“No, I heard what you said. What the fuck is ‘thugonomics,’ and how did you hear about it?”

“In order: first, it is the study and practise of being a, and I quote, ‘boss-ass bitch,’ and second, the person who taught me both sets of words is Mami,” Dorothea explained patiently.

“One, I was thoroughly inebriated at the time—I still believe it’s a crime against nature for something so sweet to get you drunk so fast, by the way, and it was a dirty trick of you to give it to me knowing that to be the case—and two, hearing you use both of those phrases without so much as a hint of self-awareness has given me sufficient cause to regret anew the course my life has taken, that it has resulted in hearing you use those phrases unironically,” Mami replied blithely without looking up from her book.

“…Okay, putting that thoroughly aside for the moment,” Zarya began at length, “do you mean to tell me that you, Dorothea, and you, Ardrea, snuck into the dormitories and sabotaged the Grand Champion the night before his match against Casimir?”

“No, but only because ‘meaning’ to tell you implies a chance of failure,” Dorothea returned. “We’re unambiguously saying that’s what we did.”

“Indeed,” Ardrea interjected. “I believe the phrase is ‘talk shit, get hit?’”

The bang as Mami’s head hit the table, and the repeated banging that followed, ensured that no one missed the muttered, “What is my life right now…?”

“I can’t believe you two!” Zarya erupted. “The Burning Colosseum is virtually sacrosanct to the culture of Bantamoor! You’ve pulled off some questionable stunts in the past, but this is thoroughly beyond the pale!”

“I’m confused. How, exactly, is any of this in any way out of character for us?” Ardrea asked, cocking her head and brushing several locks of voluminous fuchsia hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear.

“I cannot help but be struck by how thoroughly disingenuous your moral outrage sounds in the face of the large pot of winnings you drew in off of bets on the match, Zarya,” Ophelia smoothly cut in. “How much was it this time? I heard the betting odds were one hundred eighty three to one in favour of the Grand Champion.”

“…Th-the odds when I put my stake down were two hundred fifty-six to one,” Zarya admitted.

“So, you come away with two hundred fifty-six gil to every single gil you put on Casimir, coming away with how much gil?” the rune fencer prompted further. “Because, while I am certainly no expert, given the sizeable chunk I saw you putting down as a stake, my arithmetic brings me to somewhere on the order of twenty million.”

“Nineteen million two hundred thousand,” Zarya sighed. “You’ve made your point.”

“Have I?” Ophelia asked, quirking a brow. “I do not begrudge you all your merriment, but it is so very perplexing how you southrons seem so talented in standing tall and firm on such infinitesimal quantities of ground. In Vlindrel, it would be customary to thank someone who did you such a great service in sparing you having to forfeit your seventy five thousand gil stake.”

Zarya huffed. “Fine. Thanks, guys.”

“Seventy five thousand?” Dorothea asked incredulously.

“Well, of course,” Zarya shrugged. “I could absorb the loss from my share of our coffers, and it’s boring to bet when the odds are thoroughly in your favour, yaah?”

“You know, you could always just, I don’t know, not bet exorbitant sums of money on contests that are regularly fixed?” Mami sighed, sitting up and closing her book slowly, putting it to the side on the table. “Just a thought?”

Zarya looked affronted at that. “And disrespect my heritage?! Why, I would never be able to show my face in the Maelstrom again!”

“Such a tragedy…” Mami said, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

“See? You get it!”

Mami threw her hands up in exasperation. “Fuck it. I tried. You all saw!”

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter,” lamented Zarya. “With an upset that big, there’s not going to be much sport in betting on the Colosseum matches. No one’s going to be betting big for a while now, and that completely sucks the fun out of it…”

“Not to mention, all the high-rollers are more fixed on the outcome of Maelnaulde’s upcoming tourney,” Dorothea remarked. “One of Chancellor Berghan’s aides approached me this morning. We’ve been invited to represent Bantamoor when that happens in two weeks’ time. I’m thinking of turning the offer down flatly, as I think we have better things to be doing with our time than being game pieces on the politics board, but I didn’t want to make a decision like that unilaterally.”

“Agreed,” Zarya nodded.

Ophelia grunted her assent.

Ardrea, however, noticed the fact that Mami was incredibly and visibly hesitant to voice her opinion—which was, coming from Mami of the Threefold Tomoe, quite thoroughly alarming. Worse, she looked anxious about it. “Mami? What’s wrong?”

Mami’s white eyes snapped from her hands in her lap to Ardrea, and then back again. She shook her head almost violently, sending silky black hair flying to and fro. “It’s…it’s nothing.”

Dorothea’s insouciance instantaneously dissipated. She put her feet on the ground and stood, walking over to Mami and kneeling beside her chair. “Come on, Mami. You can tell us.”

“I got another one of those letters this morning,” Mami sighed, reaching into her satchel that hung off the back of her chair and pulling forth an immaculate, fine black envelope, edged in gold filigree and sealed in red wax that seemed to be made from crushed and powdered rubies. “I haven’t read it yet, but given the timing, it can’t be a coincidence.”

The mood of the room turned grave. Everyone knew about the letters Mami received from time to time, always just before a significant event, always with warnings or advice, stated invariably in the most cryptic ways possible such that they rarely made complete sense except in retrospect. The phrasing only ever told them exactly how much they needed to know to act in a way that made the rest make sense later, after all, after the chips fell. These letters always came in the same black-and-gold stationery, the staggering expense of such readily apparent; yet, there was no signature, magical or mundane, and the letters always appeared in Mami’s path, usually by the nightstand on her side of the bed she shared with Zarya, with no sign of how it had gotten there, and they had yet to be successful in observing the phenomenon directly given the seemingly random frequency with which they were delivered. That another one should appear…

Mami was correct, and they all knew it. Simple coincidence was an impossibility here.

Dorothea took the envelope from Mami primly, palming a letter opener and breaking the blank wax seal—there was, of course, no stamp. Thus opened, she slipped the stiff missive, a sable card seemingly cut from the cloth of night, which itself fit perfectly into the envelope, no folds needed, out of said envelope.

A few tense moments were spent as she rapidly scanned the contents, spidery characters written in livid red as always, and Dorothea’s eyes went wide with shock. “This is…significantly less roundabout than the others. It’s still unmistakably from the same hand—the penmanship and the ink are identical—but I can actually tell what it’s saying for once…”

“Unusual, certainly, but not unwelcome, I should think,” Ophelia noted. “Unless, of course, its clarity is meant to entrap us. ‘It is the open book that must be read with the most caution and care,’ as we say in my homeland. The most skilled of deceivers are the ones who know when to tell the truth, and how to most effectively mislead in so doing.”

“Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, Ophelia, but that doesn’t seem to be this person’s m.o.,” Dorothea replied as she stood, her eyes shifting to read through it again. “And this letter seems to follow the same pattern as the previous ones—just in a less opaque manner. Not to the point of full transparency, just that now I have at least an inkling of its message. Ardrea, my love, if you would?”

Ardrea nodded, walking up to Dorothea and taking the small sheet of heavy black stock her lover proffered, clearing her throat as she began to dictate the contents of the missive. “Keep this close, my dearest friend. Another player has joined the game. Tired as you are of my intervention. Such a thing, I suppose I can understand. Unlike my other missives, I’d advise you to heed my words. Maelnaulde is quite lovely this time of year. I look forward to our first meeting. Yours, M.”

“What does it mean?” Zarya asked, her brow furrowed in consternation.

“It means, my friends, that it looks like our plans have changed,” Dorothea announced. “Something very important to our friend Mami is in the Principality of Maelnaulde, and if we don’t play ball, it will remain beyond her grasp, possibly forever. So, we’re going to play this elusive benefactor’s game. I hope I can speak honestly for all of you when I tell Berghan that the Warriors of Light will be representing the Republic of Bantamoor after all.”

Katsumi… How do I know that name…?

If Mami were to put a name to her state of mind at that precise moment, it would be ‘profound disquiet.’ As soon as she read the missive itself after Dorothea handed it back to her, the name popped into her head and would not leave. She knew the name was important, and any doubts she might have once had about the decision to participate in the tourney were rendered null by its knowledge, but to the best of her recollection, she knew no one by that name. Some part of her insisted on slotting the knowledge of that name in the same space her little sister’s name occupied, an association that, for reasons to which she was not privy, was proving impossible to uncouple.

Homura.

Mami shook her head, and with a great effort, brought herself back to the now. Yes, the training yard, on the grounds of the manse. It was mid-afternoon, and for some moronic reason, maybe a bet, she couldn’t remember, Ardrea, blue mage extraordinaire, stood facing Ophelia, with Dorothea positioned between them. The Vlindreli, her jet black hair pinned in a utilitarian chignon, held her longsword at the ready, while the Zanthian gripped her paired shamshirs in a languid stance that Mami knew from experience would swap into lethal grace without so much as a breath of warning, her fuchsia hair secured behind her in the traditional battle-braid of the myrmidon caste of the Empire of Zanthe.

Sparring, then, and with live steel, considering that was all these two trained with, and given the situation, she surmised it might fit the dual purpose of dusting off their two strongest melee fighters ahead of when they had to leave to reach the Principality in time for the tournament. Understandable. And in Dorothea’s hand was an iron coin, an old denomination that had since been replaced with the gil, and as such had no value beyond being a collector’s item, an interesting curio—a benign oddity.

Dorothea flipped the coin high into the air and stepped away, making sure to remain out of both of the combatants’ spaces as she quickly made her way over to the bench, where Mami sat with a book open and forgotten in her lap, Zarya, a corsair and thus touting an overlarge flintlock, standing next to her and watching intently.

The match began when the coin hit the floor. No words were exchanged, no one particularly keen on splitting the sepulchral silence that settled, tense and almost thrumming. Ardrea glared hazel-hued death, her brown skin contrasting with her vivid magenta tattoos that marked her as a future member of Zanthe’s deadly Immortals, and the the light and somewhat foppish royal blue clothes she wore did nothing to dull the razor’s edge of the training and prowess that came with such a heritage. Ophelia’s crimson stared back, impassive, unflinching, unimpressed, ivory skin and foreign countenance unmoving and unaffected, as though the outcome of the battle had already been written in the stars, and all that remained was to give form to the predestined end.

The clink of the iron coin was small, almost unnoticeable, but it rang true like a gong.

The clash that immediately followed was thunderous. Ophelia’s longsword was stopped on Ardrea’s left shamshir, while Ardrea’s right shamshir collided against a wall of force several ilms from Ophelia’s neck.

The two backed away from each other, circling as Casimir and the late Scylding had done in the arena earlier. In the time it would have taken to blink, Ardrea was upon Ophelia again, striking three times with each sword in alternation, and while Mami would not have had time to even take a breath with the speed of the attack, Ophelia’s longsword was there every time, moving from one parry to the next without pause or hesitation, resolute.

When the sixth hit landed, there was not so much as a pause before the odd, feral energies that Mami had come to associate with Zanthian blue magic surged, a quartet of luminous purple beams blasting forth at point blank range at Ophelia. Death Ray, a spell native to the evil eye, a species of solitary anamorph aberrations that made their homes in the darkest, most forgotten corners of the earth, Mami’s brain supplied, and one of the more immediately deadly attacks in the abominations’ arsenal. All four of them hit their targets dead-on, but while Ophelia was repelled, she did not fall. Instead, she changed her grip on her longsword as Ardrea closed to attack again, weaving into the blue mage’s critical zone and grabbing her arms to hold her in place while the rune fencer planted a knee into Ardrea’s now overextended torso.

Stunned and breathless, Ardrea staggered back while bluish-silver light surged to coat Ophelia’s blade. A diagonal up-slash, followed by an arcing down-slash, almost faster than the eye could see, made up the components of the Sickle Moon weaponskill that followed, the light leaving Ardrea to skid back, hit directly, smoking and singed, but ultimately unharmed. Her form glistened with an argent lustre in the immediate aftermath, as the effect she used to protect herself was expended. Metallic Body, a spell learned from the malformed garthrim, massive malicious carcinoid monsters with thick black carapaces and beady ruby-red eyes that stood upright and tall as a galdjent, engineered through means of sorcery most foul to serve as shock troops in an ancient war waged by a long-fallen empire, presumably one of the many undermined by their own hubris and destroyed by flippantly tampering with one too many dangerous magics they didn’t understand.

And, of course, these grotesqueries were only found above water on the twisted beaches of southern Mysidia, where the ground was opaque black glass instead of sand.

“Clever casting,” said Ophelia with a curt nod.

Ardrea smiled grimly as she secured her footing. “You’ve seen nothing yet.”

“Then you ought to show me, before I decide to take exception to your flippancy.”

“Don’t threaten a girl with a good time.”

And now they’re flirting. Brilliant. It wasn’t as though Mami herself was innocent of the insinuations being made—two sexually active couples, both comprised of two switches, and one unattached party member who was sexually dominant tended to mean that Ophelia and her sexual prowess was in high demand—but rather, she was still uncomfortable with people flirting in front of her. It was a holdover from when Homura, her beautiful, perfect little sister, would attract entirely the wrong attention, and she, back when she was still Haruhi, would do her duty as the older sibling and cut in behind the scenes to shield her sister from what the kind of people whose attention she attracted would do to her given half the chance, she knew, but it was still an involuntary response, and what with Homura already being in the forefront of her mind, this Katsumi business, and the fact that she could not dislodge from her mind the distinct impression that her leader knew more about her situation than she did, she had had quite enough.

It was as though her body moved on its own, closing the book and leaving it behind on the bench as she got up and walked away, muttering a halfhearted and vague excuse, needing to put distance, any distance, between herself and the overflow from the dam that held back her more…unpleasant memories. She didn’t know where she needed to go—in fact, she knew she had to go nowhere in particular, so long as it was away from the past, from the sister she had left behind to fend for herself, the baby sister she had sacrificed so much and more to protect…only to falter and fall short, in the end. Intellectually, she knew she could not outrun the guilt. In her heart, however, she believed that was no excuse for her to not at least try. For science, of course.

There was always a certain profound sense of liberation in roaming the halls of the manse aimlessly, looking to just be anywhere, and it was no different here, but now it was soured with the walls of her composure, supported by the exterior pressure of everyone around her, falling away and collapsing. She detested crying. She had done all she could to cull her habits of unnecessary crying out of herself, stopped crying when angry or frustrated, even when she was sad, but when no one was around and it all surged up against her, pulling her under like this? It was like a riptide: she was utterly unequal to the task of resisting it, no matter how fervently she wished it were otherwise.

She was unsure of when she had collapsed to the marble floor, tucked in the corner of one of the manse’s labyrinthine corridors, wracked with tears and painful sobs. In truth, there was part of her that was more chagrined than anything that this was where she was right now, and over something so fundamentally innocuous as two people who she knew slept together on more than one occasion flirting with each other. It was so stupid that that of all things caused her to break down. No, worse than stupid.

Pathetic.

A presence plopped down next to her with a soft grunt, and while she didn’t need to look to see who it was, she looked anyways. Sure enough, there was the ever-glamourous sex icon of Bantamoor, the endlessly flirtacious coquette of a woman who had taken being informed of the phrase ‘be gay, do crime’ from Mami’s old life as Haruhi and built an entire brand out of it, the person who was technically her boss, Dorothea Gremory. Her long, wavy brown hair that framed her fine-featured, heart-shaped face was the colour of mulled cocoa, and her eyes, large but seeming less open and more coy, glinted from time to time like the gemstones they shared a hue with, but other times simply glittered with mirth and mischief. Not for the first time, Mami wondered how one person could be so consistently bedecked in so much jewelry—multiple bracelets, chokers, rings, and earrings, many of them gold and all of them crusted in precious stones—and never end up looking even the slightest bit gaudy or overdone.

And of course, Dorothea was never seen without her choice of clothing that Mami’s cultural upbringing would call tomboyish, but on her, looked nothing short of provocative. Her white poet’s blouse had ruffled cuffs, and the ruffled neckline dipped just low enough to reveal the lack of any sort of undergarments around her chest, the support being handled by her outer garment that was equal parts corset and waistcoat, while her form-fitting pants and thigh-high black boots left nothing to the imagination.

“Is there something particularly fascinating about how I’m dressed?” Dorothea asked, a playful glint in her eye. “Before you ask, no, I haven’t done anything different today.”

“I know that, idiot,” Mami sighed. “I’m more wondering how you pull that off without looking like a slattern.”

“Mystique, dear, and a lot of it,” Dorothea replied. “Turns out you can wear whatever the fuck you want, if you know how to wear it right. If you make it clear through your bearing, attitude, and actions that commenting on your clothes is something only an idiot would do, not because you’ll do them bodily harm, but because there’s nothing wrong with how you’re clothed, you can walk down the street in a burlap sack without drawing so much as a single comment.”

“…Noted, I guess,” Mami said at length. She threw her head back, looking up at the vaulted ceiling, and let her eyes slide shut.

“But that’s not what’s really bugging you, is it?” Dorothea remarked.

And that right there was by far the least attractive thing about the scholar who led the Warriors of Light: she was entirely too perceptive.

“No, it isn’t,” Mami sighed.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly,” Mami replied. “But when isn’t that the case?”

“As always, I won’t push you on it,” came Dorothea’s assurance.

“Shouldn’t Zarya be asking me this?” Mami asked.

“She wanted to, certainly,” Dorothea admitted. “I told her to sit tight, and that I’d handle it. Someone needs to keep an eye on the other two, after all—I don’t fancy having to make arrangements for yet more renovation, even if that nearly twenty million gil payday Zarya drew in went to pay for it. Rest assured, she’ll say her piece for you later. She really cares about you, you know—it’s heartwarming.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of knowing everything, Dorothea?”

“…I beg your pardon?”

Mami turned to look directly at Dorothea. “Then beg, because I know I didn’t stutter. Doesn’t it ever get tiring, being able to look at a person and see all those little secrets they think safe within their heads, even those they’ve forgotten—or perhaps, even those they themselves never even knew?”

Comprehension dawned in the scholar’s eyes. “Ah. I see. This is about the letter, isn’t it?”

“It’s not just the letter. It’s about how no one seems to tell me anything,” Mami groaned. “Least of all you! Do you have any idea what it’s like to have everyone around you seem to know you and everything going on around you better than you feel you could ever hope to?! Do you have even the slightest inkling of how that might feel?”

“Admittedly, I don’t,” Dorothea said. “But I do know a thing or two about people holding things that you value, things and people and relationships you consider precious to you, so far over your head that you can’t hope to reach unless they deign to lower it into your grasp. I know what it is to be forced into powerlessness, to be paralysed and unable to act, to save those you love, those who mean the world to you—and sometimes, even yourself. Your situation, I can only imagine, is even more frustrating, because even the sword you know to be hanging above your head remains out of your sight, but never out of mind.”

Mami didn’t exactly know what to say to that. “Ugh! Do you have any idea how infuriating you are to be mad at?!”

Dorothea shrugged with a smirk, leaning in and pressing a kiss against Mami’s cheek. “I think I have the general gist. Now, do you want to continue trying to be angry with me, or do you want me to tell you what I know?”

“Just tell me, you impossible woman.”

“Never. Call me that again.” Dorothea’s tone lashed scourge-like through the space between them, her expression and aura turning murderous so suddenly that Mami physically recoiled in the corner at its abrupt vehemence.

“O-okay…”

“Good!” said Dorothea, once again all rakish smiles and coquettish cheer. “So, first, the good news. I now know who’s been sending you all these letters. She actually signed the note, so I can’t really take any credit for the discovery. If the situation was any less potentially dire, I think I’d be more than a little miffed for her taking all the fun out of the game by just up and telling me. As it stands, I’m just embarrassed it took her spelling it out for me to suss out the truth—at least, as much of the truth as she was willing to divulge.”

“And this person is…?”

“…None other than Mercédès Charlotte Lucerne, Prince of Maelnaulde,” Dorothea revealed with an implied but obvious flourish.

Mami blinked a few times, incredulous. “That makes no sense. I’ve never met the woman in my life.”

“Be that as it may, she seems to be intimately aware of the goings-on in your life,” the scholar remarked. “And moreover, she wishes to fix that problem you just stated. That was an open invitation for you to come with us to Maelnaulde—well, with an added veiled threat to sweeten the deal, but I get the feeling that’s just how our dear prince is as a general matter. As to what that threat is… You mentioned you had a sister?”

“Yeah, I did,” Mami replied, leashing the surge of worry, guilt, and sadness that mixed and muddled together in her chest. “Homura.”

“Well, I think she found something relating to her. Homura, I mean,” Dorothea posited. “She strikes me as the type to go directly for the throat when she wants something, and there’s nothing better to hold over your head to get you to comply with her demand to meet you, phrased as an invitation though it might be.”

“You think she knows something about Homura…? But…that’s impossible…”

“Apparently not,” Dorothea pronounced primly.

“But…if Homura’s in some sort of danger, we have to go now! We have to…” Mami grabbed her head, her thoughts suddenly whipping themselves into a whirling torrent, scattering cognition, making it impossible to string a progression together with the fragments shifting from moment to moment as they were. She couldn’t even properly parse a fragment before it fractalled itself into nonexistence, winking away as another snapped into place and the cycle repeated over and over and over with her thoughts and the whirling and Homura and her little sister and oh fuck what if she’s already dead what if it’s already too late what if she failed again weak worthless cowardly idiotic foolish…

Dorothea’s arms crushed her head into the hume woman’s deceptively large bust, and the contact was immediately grounding, soothing what remained into some semblance of calm and sense and order. The fractals became rational, snapping into place, qualitative, quantitative, linear, exponential, parabolic… The gentle hushing and the constant, reassuring circular motion on her back certainly helped.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll go to Maelnaulde. We’ll meet the prince, figure out what she wants, and deal with the situation from there. We’ll figure this out, and we’ll pull through. So have some faith in us, hmm?” Dorothea soothed. “Nakama, right? We’ve got your back, now and forever. Don’t ever doubt that.”

“Your pronunciation is awful, and you’re awful for using it,” Mami chuckled, emotionally drained but relieved, feeling somehow cleansed—not fully, of course, but enough for now. “But thank you, Dorothea. You’re kind of the best.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Don’t fucking ruin this moment, or I swear, I will cut you.”

“Fair enough,” Dorothea chuckled. “Now, I think it’s time we made our way back, lest we worry the others. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Mami admitted. “Yeah, I’m feeling better. And you’re right. Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Dorothea said, standing and helping Mami to her feet. “You know that you’re a valued member of this team, right? And more than that, you’re a valued friend to all of us. To me. Whatever happens, I want you to promise me you won’t lose sight of that.”

“I promise.”

Two training areas would ordinarily be seen as an unnecessary extravagance, and rightly so; yet, Mami found herself grateful for it. The other yard was for melee sparring, and with the nature of some of their abilities, it simply hadn’t been practical to stock permanent training dummies there, and portable ones were wholly insufficient; ordinarily, this second yard with effigies galore was used for target practise or spell practise, and indeed, despite some of their proclivities towards hitting each other with swords and spears and the like, they all had cause to make use of that particular utility.

Tonight, however, Mami had need of these training tools for an alternative purpose.

She never usually resorted to this sort of thing; she had been piss-poor at jūdō as Haruhi—in rather stark contrast to Homura, who had always been naturally brilliant with any martial art that wasn’t kyūdō, and with an especially exceptional aptitude for kendō to the point where she had been in the running for the captaincy before they…parted ways—and that ineptitude translated in full to her life as Mami of the Threefold Tomoe. But that was possibly the furthest thing from her mind in that moment; right then, her only concern was burning off the festering restless energy inside of her by hitting something. Over and over.

Her knuckles had long since gone numb. There was only the dull, thudding impact of her fist against the dummy, again and again, pulsing in a rhythm that, while staggering and dramatically inconsistent, was nonetheless quite thoroughly satisfying for specifically her purposes. Like this, she could imagine the leering faces of every sleazy thug that had ever stared lasciviously at an oblivious Homura, imagine repaying them a hundredfold for the price they had exacted from her in order to stay away from her sister. She could forget the feeling of inadequacy that surged whenever Homura’s unflinching, almost expressionless resolution felled another opponent in the ring, another match or tournament won, the knowledge that Homura could take care of herself with the hidden strength her small, slight form seemed to produce out of nowhere, and so no longer had need of her. She could clear away the bruising on her body, the violation between her legs, the used, skin-crawling feeling in the aftermath, the sheer and pervasive uncleanliness, with images of raw, brutal, violent retribution.

She could ignore the possibility that it had all been for nothing—that perhaps, ultimately, in sacrificing as much as she had to protect Homura, the best she had managed to do had only delayed the inevitable.

“You know, I’ve seen less effective ways of painting a dummy red.”

Zarya.

“I mean, not many, of course, but they definitely exist…”

Mami missed her next hit, overextending and stumbling forward. She caught herself, and turned around to face her lover. “What are you talking about?!”

There she was. Zarya. Wonderful, patient, endlessly understanding Zarya. What the Galeborn saw in her, she had long since accepted she would never understand. Zarya, wild and untameable as the sea itself, whose cobalt eyes were fixed meaningfully on Mami’s hands.

Looking at them, surprise was her first reaction. She had long since split her knuckles, and was probably lucky she hadn’t managed to give herself a fracture. And now that she was no longer hitting things, as the adrenaline abated, she became intimately aware of the sudden flaring throbbing in her hands that she had ignored, that now exerted their vindictive rage against her for not stopping an hour ago, when they had first started begging. “Ow!”

“Ow indeed,” Zarya parroted, bemused, as she reached out and gently took Mami’s hands in her own, scrutinising the damage. “Field medicine is an essential part to any Galeborn’s upbringing in the Maelstrom, so do you need me to take a look at these, maybe bandage them up a bit so they don’t fester? While you explain to me what you were doing?”

“It’s nothing,” Mami sighed.

Zarya arched a brow. “Really, now? Because it looked like you were committing to a self-study course in pugilism via the School of Hard Knocks. Now, I know you’re precocious and a genius, and I love that about you, so I can’t help but wonder how you missed that self-mortification is a rather advanced technique in that tradition. Even I know that it’s typically smarter to learn to walk before you try to run with such things.”

“I’m fine,” Mami snapped, the image of Homura’s concern that had to go unanswered even as it pushed her beloved little sister away causing her to lash out, jerking her hands out of Zarya’s as she winced with the sudden shooting pain.

Zarya crossed her arms over her chest. “Mami, if this is about this morning, we can talk about this. I know you wanted to be alone earlier, and Dorothea told me that that was best, but I really want to…”

“I said I’m fine, damn it!” Mami practically yelled.

Zarya’s arched brow softened. “Mami, love… What’s wrong? This isn’t like you.”

“Really?!” Mami laughed mirthlessly, bitterly. “How so, pray tell?”

“No, I’m not playing that game with you. This is too important,” Zarya replied. “You’re particular and you can be irritable, but lashing out like that isn’t your style, especially not where we’re—where I’m—concerned.”

“Well, maybe you just don’t have as good of a read on me as you think you do, then!”

“Am I interrupting something?”

Both of them whirled around at the baritone that just rang out across the yard. Sure enough, leaning there against the arching threshold that provided ingress to the yard from the adjacent corridors, with a smirk on his feminine face that died spectacularly before cresting his cheeks, was none other than Casimir Hartigan. “I mean, I apologise if I am, but I couldn’t help but notice with your angelic tones shrieking through this section of the manse.”

“What the fuck are you doing here, Mirrie?!” Mami spat

Casimir’s eyes glinted in annoyance at the nickname, but it faded just as quickly, leaving behind only his immaculate composure. He shrugged. “Well, if you must know, princess, I came to find Dorothea. I could have killed Scylding myself, of course, but it’d be rude to fail to recognise aid that is tendered freely all the same with gratitude. I also could have sent a messenger, but this sort of thing requires a more personal touch. I was just surprised. I didn’t know that the Warriors of Light were in the business of breeding harpies.”

“We’re not,” she growled.

He cocked his head, eyes glittering with equal parts malice and mirth. “Banshees, then? That shrill screeching was very distinctive, after all. Knowing Dorothea, she probably already has the license to keep such monsters on her grounds.”

Mami saw red, stalking past Zarya to the man who watched her with a feigned supercilious sneer, though his eyes declared he was prepared to shed blood; Mami was more than happy to respond in kind. “You really need to learn when to shut your fucking mouth, Mirrie.”

“And who’s going to teach me, hmm? You? Spare me,” Casimir scoffed. “I’ve seen kittens with more impressive left jabs.”

“GLA—!”

“Stop it, both of you,” Zarya snapped, stepping in between them, the hard look in her eye causing Mami to begrudgingly halt casting her Glare spell.

“I must protest, Zarya, old friend!” Casimir declared with mock offence. “However am I responsible for coming under threat of any variety, magical or mundane?!”

“You didn’t have the decency to die in the gutter you were born to, that’s how,” Mami shot back. “But at least you had the decency to kill your whore of a mother before she had to deal with your reptilian ass.”

“Oh, how very mature, referencing my mother in such a fashion,” Casimir replied, his stance shifting subtly to reveal what his voice didn’t—his steadily rising ire. “And tell me, then, what kind of a hole did you crawl out of, then, hmm? Your family must be so proud.”

“Say what you want about my parents, but you leave my sister the fuck out of it!”

“Or what, hmm?” Casimir taunted, shifting his face forward to display his faux-affable expression, so overdone that it was clearly mocking. “Going to scream at me some more? It seems like that’s all you’re good for, really—all flash, no fury.”

“You will still your fucking tongue or I will rip it out of your fucking throat, and happily strangle you with it!” Mami spat, enraged and jabbing a finger into his sternum.

“And what do you care about your sister, hm? I don’t see her anywhere, so you must not have wanted her around, obviously. Or was it she who didn’t want you around?”

“Flash!”

A bright light burst into existence directly in Casimir’s eyes, blinding him with an almost physical force, causing him to stagger. “The fuck is your problem?!”

“You, you unbearable ass!” Mami cried. “My sister’s in fucking danger, possibly dead, and here I am, listening to you bitch and bitch and bitch at me! I’m fucking sick of it!”

Casimir looked stricken for a fraction of a second, putting his hands up and chuckling uneasily. “Well, good luck with that, because that sounds like a whole lot of not my business! So if you could just, you know, direct me to Dorothea, I’ll…”

“You’ll stay put right there until I tell you you can move, or so help me, Casimir, I will make your head explode like an overripe melon,” Zarya threatened, her voice low and deathly serious as she pulled forth her pistol and levelled it between his eyebrows, point-blank. The precise clicking of the percussion hammer being cocked was profoundly unsettling. “And I know for a fact that you cannot put the three hundred paces you’ll need between you and me for me to have a chance of missing the shot before I pull the trigger.”

Casimir sighed, resigned to his situation, and moreover, knowing better than to test Zarya’s patience. “Aye aye, captain.”

She nodded at him curtly, before turning back to the white mage, and Mami swore that locking eyes with her was like getting into a staring contest with a sea serpent. “Now, explain what you meant. From the beginning, if you please.”

Knowing full well that it wasn’t a request, Mami huffed. “Dorothea managed to unravel the message from the letter. The person who’s been sending me these notes is the prince of Maelnaulde, Mercédès Lucerne. She wants to meet me, and she’s holding my sister hostage to get me to comply. I didn’t even know my sister was here, Zarya! I could go there and she could be dead, and I wouldn’t know until I got there! I thought I’d know, you know, if she…if she died, but there’s no knowledge there, and I can’t stop worrying, and it’s driving me mad! I… I don’t know what to do…!”

“Um, I know I’m on thin ice here, but I do have a quick question, potentially relevant,” Casimir piped up, hands still raised in the universal gesture of surrender in recognition of the gun a breath away from his forehead. “I heard through the grapevine that you all are on your way to participate in the prince’s wedding tourney, and it just so happens that I’ve kind of always wanted to break into the Silvern Basilica. Not to rob it blind, you see—okay, well, yes, to rob it blind, but not primarily to nick everything not nailed down, more to see if I could, really. Now, if this is really so important, and since, in light of recent events—great score, by the way, excellent racket, couldn’t have done it better myself—I won’t have any fights in the arena for a while yet, I could travel with you guys and take the opportunity to do what I do best, see what I can find out about this whole mess. Pro bono, of course.”

Zarya looked to Mami, a question in her gaze, to which Mami responded affirmatively. Nodding, Zarya lifted the gun from its bead on the new Grand Champion’s head, who looked for all the world to be as unflappable and composed as ever. Still, Mami had a wonder.

“What’s your angle?” she asked.

“Well, unlike you, princess, I’m not exactly prized for my winning personality,” Casimir explained, a harsh tone in his voice. “You see, I’m fully aware I’m a venomous little shit with a forked tongue. So I have to make myself worth keeping around in other ways. Making myself useful like this is one of them. By the by, I genuinely meant that, Zarya. I heard about the score. Twenty million. That’s some great work.”

“Thanks,” Zarya replied sardonically. “Fleecing capitalist swine is kind of a Maelstrom tradition. And I take pride in my work.”

How…? How had this…? None of this made sense! Casimir had been insulting her just moments ago, insulting Homura, and now he was offering his help? Casimir never did anything free of charge—he was as mercenary as they came! Had she just screwed up? Had she just accidentally landed Homura in more danger?

She had to leave.

She was gone before either of them had a chance to stop her, running blindly through the manse’s labyrinthine hallways. Of course, she was far from the athletic sort, so before long, her lungs were burning, aching in her chest, screaming for a rest, and her form became sloppy, driven only by a need to get away without regard for stamina.

When she collided with the solid form of another person, rebuffed by their stature and thus falling to the marble floor, her immediate thought was that it was consistent with how the day had gone, that she should be again confronted with yet another opportunity to make a fool of herself.

Sure enough, it was Ophelia. Strong, stoic, inscrutable Ophelia, with the martial form and noble bearing of the proud people of the Kingdom of Vlindrel, far to the north, several decades shrouded in fell, eldritch fog, and thus lost to the world.

“I am given to understand that aught is amiss,” Ophelia stated without preamble. “I would know what has you running through the hallways thus undone, Mami. While I would hesitate to call you graceful even at your best, I can say with certainty that you are not usually so profoundly affected.”

She could affect hostility in the face of Casimir, and could somewhat hold to reticence in the presence of Zarya, but there was something about Ophelia, stark and harsh and glacially magnificent as the northern land she had once called home, that frayed her last overtaxed thread of composure just that much more, causing it to finally give and the floodgates to yawn wide.

“My sister… And Dorothea… She’s… Danger… And Maelnaulde… And the prince, the letters, the letters from the prince… She has her, and I don’t… She might be dead! I… It was my job! I had to protect her! And I… I failed!” Mami sobbed. “And she didn’t tell me, she never tells me, even when it’s my fucking sister! I can’t… It’s too much, I can’t—I can’t—”

“So, the situation as it stands is as such. You are expected to see the Prince of Maelnaulde via an encoded summons that our leader managed to disentangle at long last. Do you happen to know for an absolute certainty that she desires to hold this sister of yours hostage? She might not have her at all. It is certainly possible,” Ophelia mused, even as her crimson eyes bored into Mami on the floor, ever so slightly luminous in the lengthening shadows. “Though my instinct on the matter leads me to believe it is more likely that she does have your sister, and is informing you as a courtesy, and extending the knowledge to you as an olive branch.”

“But… But Dorothea said… She was a hostage,” Mami babbled.

Ophelia scoffed. “Dorothea is brilliant, undoubtedly, but she gets dizzy walking in a straight line. She assumes ill intent of anyone and everyone whenever given half the chance. It is a flaw of hers, a blind spot, of sorts. She has more than adequate reason to have adopted it, to be certain, and once upon a time, it was perhaps not so blind as much as an observable and consistent fact. Yet, in this case, it blinds her to a certain number of truths, or perhaps simply their relevance to the current state of affairs.”

“Wh…what are those?”

“Well, firstly, that I have heard of the prince of Maelnaulde,” Ophelia began. “I have met her and made her acquaintance, in fact; and while Dorothea enjoys her games perhaps overmuch, to the point where they could be argued to become frivolity, Her Grace is quite a bit more direct. Oh, she certainly enjoys toying with people, but while she does find amusement in raising some up simply to cast them down anew, she bores of such games quickly, and moves on to the next. In summary, had Prince Mercédès wished you ill, she would have acted upon it long before now. That she has continued to aid you this far is a testament to the genuine nature of her goodwill, difficult though her remarkable political acumen may make it to see.

“Secondly, that Dorothea is outmatched in this particular arena,” Ophelia continued. “While she is powerful in her own right, Her Grace is, and always has been, the kingmaker of any court into which she steps foot. Dorothea is versatile, but that comes at the cost of diminished proficiency when faced with someone like Prince Mercédès when she is in her arena. Simply put, if Her Grace’s hand in our continuing affairs was not meant to be seen, it would not have been; frivolous as she may seem, it is only in the seeming and not the being that Her Grace is so flippant, and had she wished you harm, neither you nor anyone else would have ever had the slightest chance of knowing by whose hand you were felled.

“And thirdly, that Princess Mercédès is not in the business of intimidation or coercion. She finds such tools and methods unwieldy, crude, and wholly inelegant. She is not possessed of Dorothea’s pathological need to keep secrets: she is capable of being open, and while you will think she is being open while she lies to your face, it is not the case that when she is being genuinely open that it can be mistaken for aught else,” Ophelia finished, reaching down and grasping Mami’s arm, hauling her to her feet. “And, if worst does indeed come to worst, I am given to understand you meant to communicate that protecting your sister was not only your sole duty, but also solely your duty in the past. Indeed, if Mercédès Lucerne seeks to make herself your adversary, alone you could not hope to prevail, I shall grant you that much; yet, the fact remains that you are not alone. You have resources to hand now that you did not in the past, and as your enemies may have grown, so definitely has your selection of allies. I would counsel you to trust in us in this endeavour as you do in any martial endeavour. We all lift together, Mami. You would do well to allow us to add our strength to your cause should it prove necessary.”

Mami took a deep breath. In, and out. “You’re right. I hadn’t…considered that.”

“I would not expect you to,” Ophelia replied, crossing her arms across her impressive chest. “No one can know all things at all times, Mami. No matter how they might try. The more important matter was whether or not my counsel was of any aid.”

Mami nodded with a weak smile. “More than I think I can express. Thank you, Ophelia. I… I needed that.”

“Anytime,” Ophelia replied, nodding her head. “The physical world is where the simplest of battles are waged, and of little use is an ally who refuses or neglects to tender such aid during the more dire struggles waged in the mind and the heart. Were you able and were our situations reversed, I have no doubt that you would do all you could to salve my hurts as I would to salve yours, or indeed, those of any of our compatriots.”

Mami laughed aloud, and it was a cathartic thing, with little mirth but a great relief. “Who would have thought that you were so sensitive…”

Ophelia shrugged. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. You had the need, and I was in a position to supply the ability. There is little and less of any significance to this beyond that. Or, in your southron phrasing, you are welcome.”

“What are you even doing out here this late?”

“Dorothea and Ardrea had no need of me, and Zarya, evidently, has her hands full,” Ophelia explained. “I had thought to occupy myself for the time being. You southrons have many amusements of which we in the north are bereft, you see, and I must admit that I was curious.”

“Well, I suppose if you’re looking for something to occupy your time with…”

Ophelia smirked. “While I’m flattered, Mami, I find that giving counsel in such a fashion and more carnal delights rarely mix well together.”

“Oh… Right…” Mami sighed.

The rune fencer cocked her head. “It has been some time since I have had cause to carouse in a manner that does not include bedchambers and the surrounding upholstery. I find myself struck by the sudden inclination to indulge in such things. Instead of bedding you, then, I would suggest that perhaps you and your lover could join me for a spot of tea. We are friends first and foremost, after all, and I find it ill-omened to step between a possible lover’s quarrel. It tends to have a, shall we say, distinctly negative effect on unit cohesion and morale.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Mami chuckled. “Fucking Hell I’m dumb…”

“Far from it, as you seem to be both capable of speech and hearing,” the knight of Vlindrel noted.

“I don’t mean it in that—oh. You were joking…”

“Indeed,” she allowed. “Another reason why I must refuse is that if I bedded you in your current state, as you had asked, I would be remiss in my duty as your friend to keep you in more or less working order as it pertains to mind and heart. Indulging the impulsive decisions of one who is emotionally vulnerable is a faux pas for several very good reasons, that being among the greatest and most significant of the lot.”

“You know, ordinarily, I would take umbrage with that, but I don’t really have a leg to stand on in that arena, do I?”

“Correct—you are quite thoroughly paraplegic at the moment, as a matter of fact, at least as it pertains to such objections,” Ophelia confirmed. “Now, shall we dally the night away here, or shall we get on with the affairs we have just now arranged?”

Mami was about to respond, but then took a moment to look around. “I must confess that I seem to have lost my bearings in the commotion.”

“Well, where were you all last gathered?”

“The second training yard, the one with the dummies,” Mami replied, having long since learned to trust in the Vlindreli’s unerring sense of direction.

“Excellent. It appears the route you have taken is circuitous, as we are nearby there at this moment, fortunately enough. Shall we?”

“Shall you what?” Zarya asked from behind them. Mami looked around the rune fencer’s shoulder, surprised.

“Ah, Zarya. Mami here was just asking for me to escort her back to you,” the knight answered. “Hartigan, Dorothea will be visiting Cassandra’s chambers in the western tower. If you make your way there, you will either find her, or find Cassandra, who will then direct you from there. Is that acceptable?”

“Eminently so,” Casimir replied, bowing with a flourish. “Then, with that, I shall take my leave of you. And…do think about my offer, princess. I shall require a reply, whether it be yay or nay, on the morrow. Preferably sooner rather than later, I’m sure you understand.”

“Noted. And…thank you, Casimir,” Mami replied.

“Hey, what are friends for?” With that, he turned and split from them down an adjacent corridor, saluting them with a sassy wave as he retreated into the deepening dark. “See ya!”

“Um…Zarya,” Mami said, turning her attention to the Galeborn. “Ophelia offered to accompany us to have tea together, wind down, and all that. I was thinking we could go to the library and I could see about brewing us a pot?”

Zarya huffed with a wry smile. “Sure, why not? Hell, let’s just pull out that cake you’ve been saving.”

“Wh-What cake? There’s no cake. I don’t see a cake…”

“You know you’re awful at lying, yaah?” Zarya chuckled.

Mami balked. “No I’m not!”

“You really are,” Ophelia remarked.

“Hey! One of you two is supposed to be on my side!”

“We’re both on your side,” the rune fencer protested without inflection.

“Yeah, Mami. Your awful lying skills don’t make us love ya any less.”

“Let’s just go…” Mami sighed, resigned.

“Sure thing, love,” Zarya said fondly.

Ophelia and Zarya proceeded along the way, chatting about innocuous subjects of martial rigour that were entirely beyond Mami’s understanding, but she wasn’t particularly bothered this time.

Because Ophelia was right. Once upon a time, it might have been only her and Homura against the world; but those times were not these. Even if worst came to worst, she knew her friends would aid her as surely and readily as she would for them.

She just had to believe in them. And maybe, just maybe…

…Maybe, by believing in them, she could come to believe that things were going to turn out alright this time.

And maybe that would just have to be enough.

Right now, however, she had cake to eat. Now that she knew her hiding spot had been discovered, she would be damned if she let anyone get between her and her sweet, precious confectionaries.

Homura…I won’t fail you. I won’t leave you alone again. Not this time.

I swear it.