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Marigold      THE HEART OF THE KINGDOM OF BERN
     With the end almost in sight.

     The plan works until it doesn't, and when it fails it fails without much fanfare, at first.


     It went like this, in theory: with Flamel having extracted a partial warpgate-map of Bern from a wyvern-rider's mind (Lugh naturally volunteered to help), Lilian advised advancing from gate to gate along the known connections, and Nobunaga advised splitting the wagons up to look less like a conspicuous war-band.

     The unusual activity from circling wyvern-riders didn't cease, though. Their patrol routes seem loosely clustered around the Warpgates themselves.

     Maybe it's coincidence; maybe you're all imagining it; maybe Bern's scrutiny is just an abundance of caution after they caught on that the Binding Blade was taken... maybe, maybe, maybe.

     If they were onto you, after all, wouldn't they have struck already?

     Everyone at the camp tells themselves that. Sue keeps fidgeting with her bowstring. Shanna and Thea are never far from their pegasi.


     Of the three wagons, two can almost certainly pass for merchants (especially with Merlinus's guile or Lucius's charm heading them). But one of them has to take all the spare weapons and armor, not to mention the pegasi and Melady's wyvern; hardly common livestock for sale.

     So if any of the wagons are going to get accosted, it's this one. Roy knows it. That's why he's here, while the younger teenagers aren't. The rougher, less colorful clothes he's wearing seem to suit him better than his normal noble blues.

     If you're accompanying that one endangered wagon now, on what's nearly their final leg, you've recently emerged from a Warpgate into another light-dappled oak-and-pine forest bordering a meadow. There are a few wyvern-riding scouts overhead, but that's nothing unusual, by the standards of the last two weeks. If you don't chat while the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head, when will you chat at all?
Marigold      "... so anything you can tell me about the Commonwealth's imports, I'd appreciate a lot," Thea is saying to someone from the back of her pegasus, when her sister Shanna isn't excitedly interjecting. "Lady Juno would really like to shore up Edessa's economy, when all this is over, but--"

     "The plants here should still be able to grow in Lycian soil. The climate's almost the same, I think," Roy is musing out loud, walking alongside the wagon. "It's just the mountain ranges that have stopped them from propagating. Um, I mean, the crops, people have already brought over, but the wildflowers and maybe the medicinal herbs..."

     "Still don't know how we're going to get to Zephiel," the old knight Marcus is grousing quietly-on-purpose as he steers the horses. "Not to disparage any of your talents, of course, but surely storming Castle Bern won't be--"

     "Melady, is that a cloud?" the Princess Guinivere says, pointing at the sky beyond the meadow, and all other conversation tapers to a hush.
     "What?"
     "That dark blot in the sky, right there--"
     Melady chokes. "Roy, call our allies now. Princess, back through the Warpgate with me. Everyone--"

     She in turn is interrupted by the lead horse being impaled by a Galle-pitched javelin from the sky forcefully enough to paint its remains across Marcus and two trees. The remaining horse panics and jerks hard enough to topple over the overburdened wagon; Roy scrambles to at least grab the well-disguised Binding Blade.

     "RUN!"

     The dark 'cloud' of wyvern-knights- less than a full army, far more than Galle ambushed you with that once in Etruria- are mildly restricted from their usual swooping by the thick trees, but the braver still make passes at it. When those of you called by Roy's summons are arriving through the arboreal Warpgate, the locals are just fleeing back through it towards the arctic Otherworld beyond, with whistling javelins and dozens of swooping scaly beasts at their tails.

     Up there in the sky, if you can spot him through the branches, is that man with the long blue hair and the stony face.
Riku Asakura Riku gets the call from Roy that something is about to happen.  With the convoy being this close to the capital of Bern, it makes sense that the call happens.  Riku, from his spot at home, gets up and immediately runs for one of the elevators to the surface of his home world. From there, it's a run to the nearest warp gate...

Running out the arboreal warpgate, it's almost immediate that he sees what's going on and Roy's sudden call for them to hurry.  Riku immediately runs towards the danger, aiming to try and get to Roy and the cart itself.  

"You go!" he shouts as he runs, activating one of the Ultracapsules.  An image of a giant of light appears.  "I go!" he shouts again; a giant of darkness appears instead.  Each capsule is slotted into a capsule holder, his legs still trying to carry him in front of the wagon.  "Here we go!" he continues, scanning each capsule with the Fusion Riser.  

He raises the Fusion Riser into the air. "It's time to get ready!" he continues, before pulling it over his chest and pressing down on the trigger.  "GEEEEEEED!" Riku's voice booms as his body starts to glow with white energy that seems to roll off of his body like fire.  

FUSION RISE!
ULTRAMAN
ULTRAMAN BELIAL
ULTRAMAN GEED PRIMITIVE

Ultraman Geed forms right at the foot of the wagon, aiming to grow to his full height so that his body can cover the others.  He also holds his hands out, forming a barrier of energy to try and provide extra protection not only to the wagon, but also to those in the party, civilians running to the portal, and those running out to help.  

It sort of makes him a literal giant target.
Odette Raskins Odette was one of many that didn't feel great about the unending presence of wyvern-riders around the army. It wasn't as though their presence was unexpected, but little could have been done to reassure her that things wouldn't start getting frantic again sooner rather than later.

Still, it's the calm before the storm, and she spends what little time there ends up being accompanying Lucius' wagon. She's still fawning over him as she's done for who knows how long, of course, but she's also eager to show him what she's learned after so much training, and to tell him about turning it all into tangible results.

"... And even though their suit was airtight, I was able to stop the bleeding without having to open any of it up. That was enough to gte out, and then we only had to pay a small fine since we got the ship back safe!" She raises her training staff for emphasis with an excited pace to her story about escaping a cave in with a miner. She still hasn't figured not sure how to explain space and its lack of breathable atmosphere, though, so she's settled for comparing to being underwater. "I don't get why the miner looked so worried after we got out, though... Have you ever had anyone like that after fixing them up?"

She's not even too bothered about the fine part, pleased as she is with the part about actually using the staff properly.

After hearing the call from Roy that something's amiss, however, the EMT cuts her story short and slips her Company-blue cap back onto her head. "Oh gosh, oh crud.. Um. D-don't worry, Father Lucius, we'll be alright. Just stick behind me if you see anyone, okay?." She tries to sound brave and reliable, but kind of fails terribly with all the visible trembling she's going through just getting her hand on the rather conspicuous sword strapped to her belt. Instead of drawing the sword, however, she brings her hand up to the inside of her jacket instead, drawing out a handgun and flicking the safety off before heading for the endangered wagon with her staff strapped to her back.

"Who's hurt, who's hurt...?" She murmurs to herself as her eyes dart from the front to the wyvern riders, trying to spot anyone that's been brought down by the riders. She's not keen on firing at any of the riders just yet, more concerned with locating and evacuating anyone she can get to safety first before it's too late.
Nobunaga     Oda Nobunaga arrives from the warpgate; taller, clad entirely in black with the great crimson cape. There is no cap and her hair is red as flames. Where she steps, the grass briefly burns, leaving a trail of blackened footprints in her wake.

    "You have finally shown your hand," the warlord's voice is likewise more mature in tone and timbre, though unmistakably Oda Nobunaga, "Took you long enough." Without ceasing her approach through the forest, she closes her eyes, "The Demon comes to destroy the Six Realms. My destination is a scorched Earth with neither Gods nor Dragons." She raises her sword, still in its saya, and sweeps it aside in a swift gesture.

    "The advent of the Demon King has begun!"

    Once she is certain that the majority of those fleeing have moved behind her, Oda Nobunaga everts her inner reality; "All that I behold shall become mine! Tenka Fubu!" A marble of Reality invades the Bernish forest, converting the surrounding countryside instantly into a raging forest fire.

    "Those who do not believe I understand what war is would do well to pay attention; this is what a lifetime of it does to a soul."

    Nobunaga shifts again, planting one foot forward. With her sheathed sword, she points to the skies, "Now, knights of Bern, prostrate your sins before Three Thousand Souls! Carve this truth into your bodies! Sansen Sekai!" The scorched terrain around her erupts, countless golden beams surging into the sky and then bending; chasing the airborne riders, bursting into heat and light on contact.

    "Ahahahaha... Haaa ha ha ha ha...!"
Angela Red Hooded Mercenary (let's call her Red) is riding Love (let's call her Queen of Hatred, because she's in her dragon form) by sitting cross legged on her head. She wasn't with the sneaky wagons because even in her human form, Love is not particularly sneaky and Red's face is heavily scarred and would draw attention from even the most polite of company. So that means they're rushing from afar, rather than keeping guard with the wagon like Roland, the everyman guy who looks like you'd lose him in a crowd if you glanced away for half a second.

"I wouldn't worry about it, man." Roland tells Marcus. "We can only think so much about it before we stir ourselves crazy running in circles. The war I fought was a little more wild than this one, but sometimes in war you just get a little gift that changes everything at just the right time. Or you lose a hundred guys because they're the ones who got lucky. We're doing as much about the logistics as we can."

Having abandoned the idea of assassination--Roland isn't exactly ever too keen on that anyway--he doesn't have much in the way of ideas this far from their destination. Odds are something's gonna go bad before it goes good anyway. That's normal.

''MElady, is that a cloud?''

"Almost on cue..."

He stumbles out of the wagon before he gets a concussion but Love stops to try and use her body to right the wagon back up while Red first her pistol in the air at Galle to try to keep him off Love especially since she's not so sure about the plan to mess with the wagon at all. Sure, Love could probably pull it in this state, but at HORSE speeds? No.

"Not so sure this is gonna work, Pink." Red says.
"You never know if you don't try!" Love growls back.
rRoland, meannwhile, rushes to the trees, trying to keep one between him and Galle as a general rule. God fucking damn it did it have to be THIS bad?
Madeleine Cadrasteia     This close to Bern, Madeleine's stayed with the Lycian League's wagons for the journey toward the capital. She spends the days scouting the surrounds, posing to curious locals as a hunter of game and practicing that very trade for the sake of the army's nourishment. In the well-off Bernish countryside, untouched by the war its crops are fueling, this means people are eating well. Today she's distributing thick-cut strips of dark smoked venison to the arms-laden wagon and its entourage, a hearty meal for those with jaws up to the task.

    When Guinivere notices and Melady confirms the incoming threat, Madeleine scrambles to directing people safely through the warpgate. It turns out shortly that she underestimated Galle's range with a javelin, however - that's a hell of a toss! Pulling her bow off her back, she readies an arrow and fires, seemingly in the direction of the approaching riders.

    With a low grumbling sound the arrow leaves a trail of dark smoke in its wake, and bursts into a large cloud of the stuff in the air over the edge of the woods. The wyvern knights will have to toss javelins blindly through a veil of smoke, or risk diving low into the now-blazing trees. The huntress then prepares her normal arrows, ready to open fire on the first knights to emerge through the cloud...
Lilian Rook     Even if it's Bern, Lilian has to be here before the swords are drawn when she can. Even if it's final stretch of the campaign that's taken so long and so many lives, with the shadows of enemy scouts always flitting over, and the dread of what she will do when Zephiel is right before her, it's not in Lilian's nature to withdraw now. Every reservation, every bit of uneasiness she feels, she reasons the Lycian League must be feeling twice over; and they don't get several days of vacation between each reason.

    So even though her last 'vacation' gave her so much more to worry about and brood on, even rattled and subdued as she is, Lilian would rather be here, with these people, than somewhere else wishing them all the best.

    Plus, the marching is good for thinking. Better than paperwork.

    '... so anything you can tell me about the Commonwealth's imports'

    "Oh I could tell you, that's for certain. Since I manage the house's funds and all, I'm abundantly familiar with the channels; and more importantly, the grading system for assigning taxation and trade brackets to different worlds before brokering deals at finer levels."

    The subject is a pet interest. Not something she can share, nor effuse about, but something she knows well and feels fondness out of use alone.

    "The main thing is that the Commonwealth is so massive that it imports and exports practically everything, but they don't have an equally massive amount of it all, so navigating priority based on the demand is half the battle. You'll be pleased to know that there are several meters that the Commonwealth-backed credit is guaranteed around, and the iron standard is certainly the one that's both the strongest and easiest to explain to..."

    'The plants here should still be able to grow in Lycian soil. The climate's almost the same, I think,'

    "Really now? I've been wondering. It does seem like they were originally part of the same ecosystem, and that the mountains may have risen up between them; or perhaps they were divided by hills or highlands before they became mountains? There is the difference in weather events between the two, despite the climate; frequency of fires and high winds, for instance, can make a surprising difference."

    The interest is an open secret. Her complicated feelings around botany, both the learning and practical applications of it, may not be so much, but her enthusiasm was nakedly available when posing as a merchant at Edessa.

    "Remember when I took those soil samples in Ilia? I've actually been collecting them as I go. I plan to test them to see what differences there are in the nutrients available to the local flora, and how they change with the environments I've been recording in my notes, and then make some serious recommendations about import priorities; but if the crops and horses are growing the same on both ends, then..."

    'Still don't know how we're going to get to Zephiel'

    "There's only so much use to agonizing over it right now. I can paint you the broad strokes of my vision, but we're not at the stage where we can make a plan that factors in the enemy, much less have it not survive contact. Ah, old saying where I'm from, pardon."

    The open secret isn't a subject. Not one she will bring up on her own, and not one she is likely to entertain without good reason. The less she's asked about anything outside the practicalities, the longer she can keep this going, and the more time she has to think of something.
Lilian Rook     "Knowing how they're deployed once we're closer, and, much more critically, what Warpgates are available to the heart of Bern and where they lead, is necessary to know what our best, second-best, and most desperate options are. Even for this group, a frontal assault is likely untenable, but--"

    'RUN!'

    Even without Maltet, Lilian doesn't want to fight scores upon scores of wyvern riders like this; certainly not in the air, neither with the limited anti-air firepower at her disposal right now either. The trees are just open enough to allow the risk of attack from above, while not so open that the caravan can effectively shoot back; and random chance favours the larger force. So,

    "Faster! Come on! There's no point if they're already through the gate when we can fire! Can't any of you slow them down?!"

    Lilian is holding the rear on the ground. Fending off javelins and the swooping bodies of wyverns occupies too much of her focus to do much else. The limited number of knights that can attack through the trees makes it feasible to at least linger behind the slowest members of the caravan, block projectiles with her sword, and fire at closing riders so that she has to physically deflect dive attacks as little as possible, but that's it.

    "Of course it's that man! Why now?!"
Flamel Parsons     Flamel turns to the sky, shoots his eyebrows up, and fades from sight near-immediately with no further clear reaction. He remembers this, and while most of his truly traumatic experiences are mitigated and re-processed by experts, the memories of Galle impaling Roy still sting painfully and surge stressfully.

    ---

    "Security has declared a code gold, repeat, code gold." Delcares the Director on the PA system. "Inadequately-responsive staff are to move to their safety stations. Follow instructions from security. A Galle outbreak is underway. All staff with at least three months of memory-response drills, locate emergency arms and follow department security instructions..." His voice drones, tense, focused -- the mind has made contingencies, maybe a little too aggressive, for this situation.

    ---

    Can't any of you slow him down? Well, Lilian, Flamel intends to. When he re-appears next, at the top of one of the trees nearby Nobunaga, his hands are shaking a little. He can't get that thought out of his mind, the memory of a spear through Roy's midsection. He swallows, reaches in, and draws on it, revelling in the stress of sitting inside someone's astral inversion like this and letting it remind him of another awful disaster, letting it send his mind from one alert level to the next. A dozen hands reach from nearby, plucking burning trees out of the ground like weeds. Root systems tug out of soil and bark flakes away. He plants two fingers on each temple, grits his teeth, and... they begin to rotate.

    Spinning, and *fast*, like some kind of huge psychokinetic powertool. Gleaming and glowing too, shining with purple and white. Branches split away when they're misaligned, or sharpen oddly. The roots flay outwards. The rotational energy builds. "Alright," He whispers tensely. "I'm sick of your stubbornness. Your bullheadedness. You and your *sky*." He raises one hand, keeping the other at his temple. "Let's see you keep *this* idea out of your mind."

    The vast evergreen drill-trees, now burning projectiles, launch like ballistae, charged with psychic energy and ready to burst violently, explosively in the air -- these are pine and eucalyptus, and the resins and oils in them create a mess of flammable gas when they're agitated enough like this! That's a camp counselor's secret! So Flamel will try to fill the sky, that realm of Galle's own, with splinters, shrapnel, noise, dirt, wood, stress, that awful smell... And maybe he can slow the advance. Take his *place of power* from him, his sense of *safety*, and maybe Flamel can slow the advance. Hopefully he can complete that full launch-sequence behind Geed's shield...

    Hopefully it's enough to buy time to flee. He'll start following the fighting retreat, if that comes to it. But his priority is on making sure this isn't another awful ambush.
Petra Soroka     The vague shadow of danger hanging over the caravan isn't temporally relevant enough for Petra to stick around traveling with the wagons at all times just in case something happens, but it's enough that her first reaction to hearing the call for help is to feel a stab of guilt. She abandons class in a hurry with gossiping in her wake, and the entire trip through warpgates and hubs is spent equipping each piece of gear on the move, rushing half-dressed out of her tent to war.

    The forest is already a disaster by the time Petra hops out of the warpgate, tying up her hair into a short ponytail and dropping the compact mirror pendant's cord around her neck. The horses are recoiling from the wyverns that dive down past the canopy she can't see through, Geed's shins are a wall she can't see past, a scoop of the forest is already engulfed in flames and Petra has to concentrate to remember whether Brunnya's thing was ice or fire magic.

    Dressed in her Elibean red and black uniform, Petra shields her eyes from the smoke and fire, drawing her sword from the Silver on her waist as she finds the one person in the chaos she can spot and rely on. She joins Roland behind a tree, morphmetal in her hand unsteadily shifting from a sword to a javelin, trying to figure out what's going on. Already out of breath, she pants for a moment while catching up with him.

    "Roy didn't say what's going on. Wyvernriders? Galle, is it? Do you know where he is? Who the fuck set all these fires?"

    Pointed in approximately the right direction, or at least, 'up', Petra smashes the mirror in her hands to call out the Beauty of Ash. With wyvernriders descending on the army, she can't recklessly leap up into the open air, but the smoke blanketing the tops of the trees provides cover for the mech as it climbs up for a clearer view. Hidden in the smoke, the next wyvern that plunges down towards the army is intercepted by a feline pounce from the side, wyvern and rider both tackled down to the forest floor and torn through by a thousand sharp edges on the Beauty of Ash.

    The Beauty of Ash prowls just above the canopy to shield the retreating edge of Roy's army from as many javelins as its bulk can temporarily allow and tussling with wyverns that get within reach. Geed and the Queen of Hatred are the two best other meatshields she can see available to her, so the silent speech that radiates from the mech is directed towards them first.

    <Don't let them get behind you and separate you from the army. We don't want to commit to fighting them where they can fly.>

    The next bit of telepathy sounds like a jeer using a cupped hand as a megaphone, with an irritated toss of the mech's head. <Even though that's all somebody can think about!>
Desire Stars Faster! Come on! There's no point if they're already through the gate when we can fire! Can't any of you slow them down?!

     As Flamel rips up trees the treeline should be getting easier to navigate. The fires he set should be doing their part too, albeit on a much slower timeframe. But for every tree that's ripped up, two more sprout from the ground--not living things, but brutalistic concrete pilings that split off in haphazard spikes. Each of them rises as if the rebar and cement were set and poured into an invisible mould. That pour begins not from on high, but at the end of a parabola with its beginning point fixed at the nose of Kamen Rider Geats' Gigant Blaster.

     The heavy-machinery-slash-heavy-machine-gun spins its cement mixer rapidly, creating an obstacle course even more harrowing for a flier than a burning forest already would be. The jagged arms of Geats' not-a-place-of-honor spires have substantially less give than the branches of a tree. They don't whip, they bludgeon unmovingly and mercilessly, reinforced by metal rods. He fights not quite side-by-side with Lilian, but certainly within her peripheral, matching the pace of his retreat to hers. There is a particular intentionality to the placement of his 'trees'--

<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Don't try holding the line in the forest. They can encircle us easily and the canopy will just restrict your field of view. The gate is a chokepoint. If they have to fly low enough to use it and all in one direction, we can handle them."

    --they aren't just there to replace what Flamel uproots, but to impose a certain direction with their seemingly random barbs. The gaps are just big enough to be tempting, just numerous enough to seem as though multiple routes exist, but they ultimately funnel the riders low to the ground, towards the gate, and most importantly, the openings big enough for wyverns aren't high enough for them to just swoop down right on their current position. Any that want to try threading the needle have to start from the back and work their way forwards, necessitating another pass for any who've already returned to the sky.

    Kamen Rider Na-Go, meanwhile, is heard before she is seen, and shortly after is not easy to miss visually either. The sound of an anthemic march, bass pumping, drums beating, winds through the air over the darting of spears, the cries of soldiers, and even the whining splintering of flaming trees darting through the air. The slowest among the caravan pick up the pace, their burdens lessened and their beasts possessed of newfound vigor.

    While the subwoofers in her pauldrons thrum and the multicolored neon equalizers on her breastplate rise and fall with the rhythm, she alternates keeping the music alive with a few strums on the Beat Axe and hurling crackling arcs of lightning at the riders that slip through Flamel and Geats' gauntlet.
Marigold      Roy's been grazed on the calf by a wyvern-rider's javelin while he frantically rummaged for the Binding Blade behind the Love-righted wagon, but thanks to Lilian's protection, no worse than that. Now with the blanket-wrapped package under his arm, he clings to Marcus as the old knight gallops towards the Warpgate on his warhorse, leaving the toppled wagon behind. Roy, hugging his old mentor's back, looks afraid. Of course he does. As Flamel well knows, the last time Galle ambushed him, it ended with a Divine Weapon through his organs.

     Thea, Shanna, and Melady haven't dared take to the skies until they're through the Warpgate; pegasi can gallop quickly on the ground, but wyverns can't, and so Melady is practically dragging her big winged reptile behind herself while hurling invectives at the sky, rounding out the rear. Even Guinivere with her princessly jog makes better time.

     "Why don't you come down here yourself, you stupid bastard?!" she barks, alongside Petra. Melady is intentionally coordinating with Petra's provocations, right? "Of course it's Galle! Because he saw one last chance to muck everything up right before we can save the world! What is wrong with you?!"

     The sky doesn't answer her, except with another soldier's javelin, which she swats aside with a short yell of frustration.


     It's hard to count exactly how many wyvern-knights Galle mustered against you, especially once the sky starts filling with smoke; probably more than fifty, less than a hundred. Maybe five of them are trying to swoop at once, but the javelins come in volleys of two dozen at a time.

     It's less than the worst-case scenario of "crashing down on you with the whole army", but more than enough to be a credible attempt at a rout.

     Madeleine, Flamel and Nobunaga blackening the air and hurling their ranged attacks drop a couple of them, and press back some of the remainder into rising above the smoke for safety. After one rider beefs it and spills onto the ground on Geats' spikes, the others are reluctant to try; some still do, but that cuts the volume of plunging attacks further. The Beauty sponges a good number of javelins (with thanks from Shanna who hurriedly weaves behind her) before Geed can get set up; naturally he's the biggest and scariest-looking target. Some of the dozens that pepper him are bound to hit gaps in his armor, but better the giant than anyone else.

     With Na-Go's help, most of the locals present have made it through the Warpgate by the time the sky glints and a flutter of blue is glimpsed through the burning trees.

     From down below, only the keenest ears could hear the last order Galle gives his knights, but the effect is apparent.
Marigold      A swooping shape descends like a hawk towards a rabbit, a spike of glinting steel in place of outstretched talons. Galle's spear sweeps aside the bullets his wyvern doesn't take; sparks across the back of Geed's knee; carves over the Beauty of Ash's shoulder; lops off the top of a concrete spike; clashes for a split second with Melady's weapon-- "Come on!"-- and then plunges through the Warpgate into the wintry landscape beyond with barely more evidence than its lingering trail of sparks and a whistling noise.

     Then there's the crunch of his impact with Marcus's horse, on the other side.

     A half-dozen of Galle's hardened lieutenants try to follow his breach through into the arctic landscape beyond the Warpgate, their own wyverns hot on his black steed's heels; a chiseled red-haired man, a blond with a taut ponytail, two small women who might have once been Ilian mercenaries, and a tall and a short one wearing full-faced helmets. Their formation is disciplined, but they don't quite equal their general's skill and speed.


     On the other side of the gate from the inferno, it's nearly a blizzard. Whether you're in some world's Arctic or just wintry nowhere is hard to guess when the rolling white snow-dunes stretch out to the horizon. Visibility isn't much better than the smoke, but Shanna and Thea are used to snow; they've taken to the sky in preparation for wyvern-knights making it through.

     The next Warpgate is just visible three hundred feet away, uphill, and the gritty snow will let you sink in shin-deep.

     Likely more pressing is the red against the white.

     Galle's wyvern practically rammed Marcus's horse over while the two soldiers struck each other. The wyvern is recovering faster, but both men are standing (and bleeding) for the moment, weapons still raised; Roy has scrabbled backwards from where he fell while clutching the precious raggedy package, but not far enough to be safe from a javelin-toss.

"The Binding Blade. Give it to me."
"You can't be serious."
"Tell me where or I'll kill the boy."
"You'd kill us all. You stubborn fool, if you win there won't even be a sky!"
"..."

     Gray-haired Marcus isn't fast enough to stop the spear lunging for his heart.
Riku Asakura Thankfully, for Geed, his barrier can absorb most of the javelins aimed at him, but those who can maneuver around the front of him can get some damage in at him.  Of course, for him, this is better than someone else... at least in his own mind, this is a better trade.  Sparks rain from his body where the javelins actually strike; though they don't cause blood, they do show burn marks where they have landed.

<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Don't try holding the line in the forest. They can encircle us easily and the canopy will just restrict your field of view. The gate is a chokepoint. If they have to fly low enough to use it and all in one direction, we can handle them.

The trees are on fire; the whole area is burning... he isn't sure how or /why/ that is, but Geed is more concerned about trying not to get caught out in the open while the others retreat.  Lilian's tactical mind was a lot better than his own, so he trusted her guidance on these matters more than his own instinct.  

This DOES mean he has to shrink to get through the portal.  Thankfully, he can do that.  The moment he goes to turn, however, Galle's attack on the back of his knee forces him to the ground.  It wasn't just sparks, but a blasting of white energy that comes from the attack... enough to cause the giant to fall to a knee while he gets through.

"Argh!" Geed manages to get out before forcing his body back to his feet and forward again.  It /hurts/ to push himself just after that sort of nasty attack, but he still manages to move, shrinking as he does so he can fit through the portal.  He also sees the lieutenants coming... and with most of the people through the portal...

Geed moves to grow again, moving his entire body to try and create a huge snowdrift in front of the portal.  Trying to make a makeshift barrier from the ton of snow already on the ground.  Should they charge in after them, they'll crash right into it... and hopefully be of little help to the battle already forming.
Nobunaga     "Come to me!" the warlord Nobunaga bellows, thrusting her hands to either side in the frame of flames around her, "Crash upon me and know only the despair and futility! Fuahahahaaa--!"

    A booming voice that draws down javelins, stabbing into the ground around her. Only one would have been on-target, but with the shine of steel she has diverted it; her sword now free of its saya. Crimson eyes narrowed just a touch, the amusement has left her voice. All that remains is icy coldness: "Is that it?"

    The saya disappears in a burst of golden sparks only for Nobunaga to thrust her freed hand skyward, "Is this all the *pathetic* rabble that Bern's great king would seek to challenge me with!?" A cluster of some twenty rifles manifests just beyond her fingertips, spreads out slightly, and fires all at once in a shotgun-like cone of violence, "Useless!" Even as those guns swing up from their own recoil, they're vanishing; replaced with entirely new weapons. She aims these swiftly based on incoming javelins, firing again, "Useless! Usele--"

    "--Hooh~?" In the twist to track a third potential group of airborne Knights, Nobunaga takes note of the squadron pursuing Galle towards the gate. The tempo of her tirade derails and the annoyance on her face flickers to interest. She takes note of the others following Lilian's advice; solid as it is. She only meant to be a distraction, which has only mostly worked.

    "Ahahaha... How interesting."

    The bulk of Nobunaga's currently readied rifles all swing out in seemingly random directions, track and lead individual targets, then fire and vanish. Only one of them hasn't. With a little noise, she hops up onto it, bracing and balancing like a surfer or skateboarder, and takes off after them. Beneath the pall of smoke, with that big cape, she only really scans as a dark flame-framed mass with glowing crimson eyes.
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Maddie knows her arrows alone can't match the wyvern riders' numbers, not without the relatively narrow choke that is a warpgate. So through she goes, hustling to find a good position on the snowy slope before Galle arrives. She knows the time she has is far from luxurious.

    Among the raging blizzard, Madeleine is difficult to spot even for those who know her exact location to begin with - a vanishingly small group, likely only the assembled telepaths. A slate-gray blob at the edge of visibility may be the only cue that something's there at all, and it's just as likely to be one of the decoys she's proactively scattering.

    Her own senses are keener, and although her sense for the movements of a pitched battle is fledgling, her understanding of pursuit and flight are second to none. She's ready for Galle's meteoric arrival before it comes, and is already pouncing for the Wyvern General from eight o-clock as he clashes with Marcus. Galle is an extraordinary man. Does Madeleine expect a single blow, even from ambush, to bring him down? Either way, will she manage it here and now?

    We'll never know. Her spear leaves her hands mid-leap, thrown to knock Galle's attack off-course. It'll still be a serious wound for the aging knight, the force of Madeleine's toss only tipping the more powerful thrust's trajectory from Marcus's heart to his left armpit. An instant later Madeleine crashes bodily into Galle, or perhaps whatever off-hand weapon he brings to bear, or perhaps the back end of his spear, with a knife in hand.

    She forces her way into Galle's personal space, attacking low to challenge the Wyvern General's footing. With this much of a reach disadvantage it's not a position of strength, and Maddie knows it - but it's all she could muster without trading Marcus's life for Galle's.
Angela ''Roy didn't say what's going on. Wyvernriders? Galle, is it?''

"It's Galle, I'm sure of it." Roland says. "They didn't even check to confirm we weren't just travelers, just saw what we were carrying with us and made the call, no hesitation." He thinks for a moment about the fires. "Heard Nobunaga shout 'All that I behold shall become mine' right before the fire happened." He frowns a little. "Think me talking shit at her got her pissy because I'm pretty sure she was at least half talking to me when she was bragging about how much about war she knew about." He rolls his eyes. "Yeah I didn't mean to start a forest fire in the forest we were in the middle of." He coughs into his fist. He can't argue against smoke for cover but he can argue about having to somehow push through a forest fire while javelins are raining down. Even if they are unaimed.

''Don't let them get behind you--''

"You can count on me!" Love says. Of course, Love can't actually fly but she can shoot lasers out of her mouth and it's a pretty long lasting laser too. She doesn't really need to aim so much as blast her purple laser through the smoke and just twist her head around to make the laser move around and be a huge problem for the wyverns.

Of course, giant purple lasers are pretty easy to see!

But while she's busy with that, the Red Hooded Mercenary leaps off from Love and fires two shots at Galle from her pistol, aiming for GAlle's hand to try and detour that spear from plunging into Marcus--or at least that critically.

"Leave the old man alone, there's feistier and sharper prey to hunt."

Roland covers his hand and mouth, slinking towards Galle and Marcus himself, but he's risking a slower approach to try and mask it from the wyvern rider, hoping to catch him by surprise.
Petra Soroka     The crunch of spear against glass leaves the Beauty of Ash reeling in Galle's wake, with a splatter of fragments hanging around its damaged shoulder like glittering cosmic dust. With Galle slipping past their back line, Petra has to retreat and regather past the warpgate, but he's already outpaced the wounded mech while she was recovering from the attack.

    The Beauty of Ash drops out of the air, dipping below the thrown javelins of the trailing wyvernriders with an abrupt downwards slide like the machine's propulsion stalled. Taking cover beneath the curtain of smoke in the woods, it lands beside Love, favoring one leg to limp like a cat while its broken glass slowly slides back into place. Its head nudges against her weird fucked up neck-shoulders, to get her attention in the brief moment of reprieve.

"You can count on me!"

    <Galle's gotten to the rest of the army. Could you ¶tower defense¶ by the warpgate until you can't anymore?>

    To take its weight off of the cracked shoulder, the Beauty of Ash lopes on the forest floor in an odd, semi-bipedal posture, assisted by telekinesis to skim across the smoldering detritus with as little impact as a human's footsteps. Unhindered by its own weight and bulk, it scampers towards the gate more like a pegasus than a wyvern, and rapidly catches up to where Melady is wrestling with keeping hers moving below the canopy.

    With a silently broadcasted <Giddy-up,> as warning, the mech's snout scoops down to slide under Tryffin and then lifts to carry it like a kitten, with Melady still on its back.

"Tell me where or I'll kill the boy."

    The Beauty of Ash is buffeted by the blizzard when it passes through the warpgate seconds later, releasing Tryffin to fly on his own in the snowy sky. The sudden shift in temperature causes the crystalline hardlight to squeal and creak, physical tension overlaid with the shouting from Petra from within the mech.

    <What the fuck is wrong with you?! You're fucking suicidal at this point, for no reason! If you're so concerned about flying, then why not fly with the thanks of the next ruler of Bern after helping us win the war, because otherwise there won't *be* a Bern, or any wyverns!>

    She's separated from Galle by the lieutenants that followed him, a few steps too slow to interpose between the ranks of wyvernriders. Lunging towards Galle means tangling with several of his followers; she accelerates from a stop to a sprint in a second, creating a shockwave of glass that peels off from the air pressure to pepper the wyverns like chaff. The Beauty of Ash wrestles with them, as a hostile ball of blades to try and pin them down long enough to get to Galle.
Odette Raskins Fifty, one hundred, any wyvern riders coming along with Galle are too much. Although Odette has her Trideag-standard weaponry on her, her confidence in actually wielding them against the fliers isn't quite high enough to make her rush any of them down, especially from the ground. There's a part of her that's worried Melady's and Petra's shouts might make things worse, but...

Petra's got to have something in mind. Melady, too, if she's doing it as well, so there has to be a plan they're both in on! Trusting in that, she keeps hurrying the locals along to get them out through that warpgate, glancing back and up frequently as the shadow of the wyverns grows darker with each second.

"C-come on! We need to keep moving, keep your.. Make sure not to leave your backs open!"

As she calls that out to those heading through the first warp gate into the snowy region, Odette's face goes pale upon seeing (but not hearing) Galle saying something to his knights. Luckily for her, his attention is clearly on someone else, but that just means she has to give chase through the gate while he's already speeding right through it.

The sound of the impact on the other side has Odette picking up the pace, one hand already shakily drawing out her sidearm in anticipation of something worse than whatever that crunching sound was. Seeing both mounts toppled with Roy on the ground nearby moments later, the EMT starts sprinting over in the hopes of getting the young lord back on his feet.

"Up, up, don't stay there! W-we can rest when-" As she shouts at Roy to warn him and snap him out of the sort of daze she's seen from other people in these kinds of situations before, she catches just a glimpse of Galle's spear moving through the air. With a surge of adrenaline rushing through her, Odette throws herself forward right at Roy. She briefly lifts him off the ground the moment she makes contact, although it turns into more of a stumbling tackle to get him out of the way and possibly even onto his feet.

She doesn't actually stay on her feet for long after that, though, before she tumbles sideways from Galle's spear ramming right through her arm and her side in a single blow, spraying fresh blood all over the snow.
Desire Stars      It's all everyone can do to keep this from being a rout. Na-Go is gaining on Geats, the distance between them increasing as the more experienced rider seems to hesitate.

    No matter what kind of life I'm born into, this coin always follows me. That's how you'll know it's me, when we meet again, Fae.

    "I'm sorry."

    "Geats...? What are you doing?! Don't slow down!"

    "Na-Go, take this." Geats removes the Powered Builder buckle and tosses it to Na-Go, right as the rider that snapped off one of his spires collides with him, sending him flying. The Magnum Shooter puts two quick blasts into the dismounted rider, as the articulated blasters on his legs push him across the ground, out of the way of the still-sliding mount.

    "Ace!"

    "I've been selfish. I hope you all can forgive me for that." Geats rises to his feet with a kip-up, holds his free hand up and shouts as if beckoning the heavens themselves. His cry resounds above the din of battle, almost like thunder.

    The skies are shot through with five burningtrails, like falling stars. But they aren't meteors or comets. Slamming through the crowd of descending riders like bullets are five Boost Buckles.

---

    On another world, the hooded figure that is the Game Master fumes in the Desire Temple, watching the display remotely on one of the many eye-shaped monitors that float through his dark, echoing sanctum. "The Goddess took action, at a moment like this?! Why are things happening that I didn't arrange for..." 'INCOMING MESSAGE' requests flood the monitor array as he clenches his fist, leather gloves creaking audibly.

---

    The five Buckles collide in Geats' outstretched hand with a spectacular eruption of heat and burning red light, as a red-hot sigil appears near their point of impact. The sound of a superbike's engine shifting gears rattles in the chest, the sigil forming into four 'tails' set against a square 'body.' At the moment of that sigil's creation, a fiery shockwave explodes outwards, the newly-forged artifact eliciting a grunt of effort from Geats as he struggles to hold it. Cinders rise slowly into the air following the blast, leaving a variant of the metallic-red Boost Buckle with four black 'tails' in his hand as it cools down from red-hot.

                                      SET!                                      

    "Henshin!"

    A burning ring of five flame-decaled 'BOOST' logos surrounds Geats, and as he turns the accelerator on the new Buckle, it spews four jets of flame. The five 'BOOST' logos spin into a blur, forming greaves, bracers, pauldrons, a breastplate and a helmet, all burning red-orange.

                                 BOOST Mark II!                                

    Geats' armor, red-orange and gold-accented, split between his personal fox motif and Boost's performance-racing theme, has scarcely manifested over him before the four 'tails' at his waist are whipping in the wind.

    The distance between himself and the gate is cleared in the blink of an eye. The rev of the Boost Buckle's engine and tongues of flame from the armor's boots are the only warning. Na-Go, now equipped with the Powered Builder buckle and armed the Gigant Blaster, covers his passage and steps through. By the time she's through, Geats is already a red-orange blur on his way to Galle.

    Much in the same way that Galle's wyvern had crashed into Marcus' horse, Geats' fist crashes with superhuman speed and force into Galle's elbow, one heartbeat after a harrowing dime-stop.
Flamel Parsons     "I'm getting so sick of you." Flamel mutters in a tense, pathetic sort of way when the massive maneuver is coming his way. His usual beaming smile is cracked and weak.

    ---

    The Parsons Institute is full of shouting, men running through hallways with guns, alarms blaring. The Department of Clairvoyance isn't something anyone needs to tell that disaster is on the way and how, but nobody knows *where*. And so they run in mental circles until the impact finally rocks the facility.

    ---

    Flamel breaks his fall by braking his fall when he's knocked out of the treeline by the formation cavalry charge, falling to the soil invisibly to find a good position for counterattack. There's Galle... And there's Marcus. He doesn't know where the Blade is and he's *not* waiting around to find politely. He clenches his teeth, tries to find a way to approach without risking Marcus...

    That's a moot point.

    ---

    "OPEN FIRE!" The Director yells, as squads of men pour into the breach site and unload their weapons dangerously at the figure in the smoke.

    ---

    Flamel doesn't know what happened to Marcus, but he knows what'll happen to Roy if he lets it. Vivid memories flash in his mind, of Galle hurting him. Slugging it out never works out for him here, with these powerful martials and their high-effect violence. But Flamel, denied any other option, goes for a direct confrontation. But like the other Wyvern Generals, Flamel knows this one will be too hot to handle in his specialty.

    All of that is irrelevant. Flamel isn't thinking that tactically. This isn't some INTJ dude. He just slams the man with overwhelming telepathy because that's what his gut says to do, attacking his willingness to strike directly. <STOP!!>

    The pounding mental effect when he leaps forward might well drive Galle back physically a bit. <This, this is *awful*! It's AWFUL! Did you see him *clutch*?! Did you see him **flinch**?! You, you want to say you're doing this because someone gave you the sky, but how can you do something like this with it?! You're taking it away from everyone else!>



    His goal is to rip away layers, with deft mental-combat payloads. Hands tearing armor off, but on a mental level, mirroring Petra's words with direct mental intrusions into his mindscape. <What the fuck *is* wrong with you?! Some stupid jealous, 'If I can't have the sky then I'll make everyone else fear it' complex?! Sure! If you were born too heavy to fly, don't do something a *normal* insane person would do and drop ballast by cutting your legs off, just fill the sky with dragons!> He tries to grab and rip out any of the man's surface-level ability to find satisfaction in anyone else's fear.

    <Or are you blocking out the *inevitable* outcomes of what you're doing? Thinking, oh, you kill enough people for this, next year *surely* someone *even stronger* will come stop the bad outcomes of what you're doing? No! It'll be *dead*! And every neighboring world that can't take what she does here too!!> He tries to dart into his mind's eye and bare-fisted punch out of the man any trusting foresight that imagines the world is safe and stable like that.

    <Or are you just so, rrrrh, so *sunk-cost dedicated* that your *stupid honor act* that *barely* improves you over the man named after his own insanity means you have to do this long killing-yourself routine, just to get out of having people scowl at you in the streets ten years from now for everything you did?!> He puts his mental defenses up against any counterattack and just rushes the man, head low, and tries to bring a psychic rising knee up into his foe's subconscious and survival-instinct, trying to remind the entire mind all at once of the brutal death at the end of this.

    In the real world, he's just sort of drifting there, one hand out and another with two fingers on a temple, flinching every so often and clenching his teeth with a rough scowl. Still, anyone with an ounce of mental sensitivity can 'feel' it in the air.
Lilian Rook     Even the grazing blow on Roy is enough to make Lilian's heart leap halfway to her throat. The image of what happened last time is a bad enough reminder of the stakes to keep her heartbeat pounding in her ears; the constellation of emotions surrounding are ones she dares not think about in the heat of battle. She practically shoves him along, calling out "You know what to do!" to Marcus on the way past. She still can't very well leave Melady without Triffin, even in the cold and pragmatic sense, so once again, her place is clear and mandatory.

    '"Of course it's Galle! Because he saw one last chance to muck everything up right before we can save the world! What is wrong with you?!'

    "Was he always the kind of incorrigible bastard who won't give up anything unless he 'tried and lost with his full strength' and then just keeps relitigating it?!" Yelling right now mostly serves the purpose of keeping Melady informed of where she is, but it's a shared frustration point too. "You had your big moment Galle!" Lilian screams up at the sky. "Stop dragging it out!" She doubts he can even hear her from the ground. Pointless venting keeps her nerves steady until she can finally bring the rear guard close to the Warpgate; and this is the only battle loud enough where she can be jealous and weird about it.

    A feeling that is unfortunately rekindled, if only for a moment, by the man himself, and his ridiculous against-all-odds dive that threads every possible needle on the way to the gate and ploughs right through. Having to watch it, knowing that she can't be in two places at once to do anything about it, makes her feel like she's going to choke. It's a perfectly good feeling for the bitter winter on the other side; that there isn't any wind to be driven out of her, and the first frigid breath jolts her back to her senses.

    --In time to witness the aftermath of Galle's first strike, having taken place where she was lagging behind too far to see it. Her thoughts about how long a wyvern can fight in this cold and how it compares to the effect it'll have on her feel terribly quiet and far away. Lilian gives a harried look over her shoulder to the approaching lieutenants and wastes a precious fraction of a second wishing that she'd pushed harder to blot the Apocalypse sigil so that someone could fire it right this instant.

    §Geed and Oda are holding them for now. Call Roland plan A, Petra and the Abnormalities plan B, Parsons plan C, and a drawn-out engagement plan D. Even if it's Galle, he just can't win against a third of our entire force alone. All we have to do is not let him take anyone down with him. First--§

    "Roy! Over--" Lilian relocates mid-sentence to not be right next to the Warpgate, but further behind Marcus and Madeleine instead. She doesn't spare the effort to cover the footprints carved in the snow behind her. "--here! With me! Take the Blade and keep going!"

    §So he's full of shit and wants to go out in a blaze of glory, or he's well and truly a stubborn idiot and he can only afford to go for one target from one direction.§
Marigold      What is Galle's fucking problem?

     That day at Castle Ostia, when you held off Bern's wyvern knights alongside brave Lord Hector and swayed Melady to your side, he was there choosing duty over love. In Etruria, when the dragons began coming to light, he brought Mulagir to bear against Roy and chose duty over humanity.

     After you left Ilia, he clashed with his old mentor Sigrun, who taught him how to fly. Did he choose duty over the sky, then, too?

     Two years of this, and the simmeringly sullen look in his hard blue eyes hasn't changed at all. No-one else has been given so many chances. No-one else has turned so many down.

     "Was he always the kind of incorrigible bastard--"
     "No," Melady says with her eyes on the sky as Lilian rearguards her through, and it sounds more seethingly bitter than a 'yes' could ever be.

     Wyverns are tough to down with bullets, but Nobunaga manages; one drops just as it flies through the warpgate, wing shot, and spills one of Galle's two helmeted lieutenants into the snow. He shakes himself off and braces his spear against her onrushing approach through the gate like she's cavalry.

     Love destroys another as it flies through- this one belonging to one of the short women, likely an ex-pegasus-knight who switched sides to Bern- but its rider leaps off just in time, lands on Love, and tries to get the haft of her spear across Love's throat to jerk her head back and redirect the energy beam. "No you don't. Through, through, through!!" she barks.

     The other lieutenants follow her lead. One of the four others- a hard-jawed Bernish man- lands in front of the gate and has his wyvern spread its wings wide to try and stop Geed from piling up the snow, with the bulk of the regiment fast approaching; the other two peel off into the sky towards Melady, Shanna, and Thea, but one has to wheel back around and slam into the Beauty of Ash as Petra pursues through the gate.

     When the lieutenant's wyvern recoils from the glassy shrapnel piercing its scales, its Ilian-expatriate rider halfway steps off it, braces a foot against the Beauty's chest, locks eyes with Petra, and swings down a pickaxe-like polearm with a sharp cry to try to chisel through the mech.

     The explosion of Geats' new Buckle on the other side of the gate topples the nearest swooping riders and shoves back those further away, buying Geed that much longer to try and barricade the warpgate. Rushing in--
.
Galle's spear is eight inches from Marcus's chest. Madeleine's toss jars his aim from the heart. Might still kill an old man
.
Six inches. Red's bullet strikes his breastplate. He staggers, still lunging
.
Four inches. Galle's eyes flick right; ducks the second bullet, skimming hair
.
Two. Flamel tries. Pupils dilate but spear is faster than nerves
.
Zero
Crunch.

     Galle skids ten feet and crumples back across the snow. Geats' punch didn't shatter Galle's arm only because, by an interposing twitch of a few degrees, it shattered his spear instead. Marcus touches his own unarmored chest, bewildered; his hand finds the spear pierced his shirt but not his skin.

     Madeleine goes for Galle, still sprawled out. That keeps him grounded for a moment, interposing his knee against her just to keep the knife at bay, and--
Marigold      "--here! With me! Take the Blade and keep going!"
     Roy nods shakily, grabs up the raggedy-wrapped Blade from the snow, and scampers. But Galle's eyes flick to the inconspicuous package, too. He gets out from under Madeleine just long enough to hurl what's left of his speartip at Roy, but the attack finds someone else instead.

     "Odette!!" he yelps, grabbing his wounded rescuer and hauling her to her feet. "Come on! Can you still-- you shouldn't have-- p-please, hang on...!" His hands are trembling as he tries to steady her shoulders, glancing back to check that Marcus is alright before dashing towards Lilian as fast as supporting Odette allows. His eyes are already pleading with her to do something.

     Galle is thankfully too occupied to pursue. His wyvern recovers in time to force Madeleine away, one way or the other; he rises in time to slam his forehead into Flamel's--

     There was satisfaction-in-fear and joy-in-mastery in here, two years ago. Not anymore. Galle is torched-out already; Flamel's mental grip finds less than he expected, and a stab of determination ripostes him.

     No, Galle doesn't think he'll be stopped by a hero anymore. No, he doesn't particularly expect to live either. No, he's resigned to being scorned and hated whether he lives or dies. But these are the ingredients for despondency, not determination. Why is he here and not drinking himself to death?

     His wyvern half-encircles him and bristles up menacingly, limiting angles of approach. He takes the second to wipe the blood off his lips and draws another polearm from beside his saddle. This one's metal-reinforced and tipped with a pickaxe-like hook at a right angle to its spear-point.

     "And why are you willing to die for the Blade?" he says in measured tones, characteristically dour. His eyes slide from Petra to his right, to fleeing Roy and Odette at his left, and then settle on Geats dead ahead. "Just to deny it to Bern?"

     "The Blade answers to the will to victory. Is there none among you here with more will than a noble's cowering child? Or don't you have a vision of your victorious world at all? If your vision for Elibe is merely return to its doomed and miserable peace, no wonder the Blade spurns you." What an odd challenge.
Riku Asakura "Miss Nobunaga!  Please keep them off me while I do this...and see if you can clear that one in the way!" Ultraman Geed calls out.  Geed is doing his best to block the warp gate as best he can, which means using the material he has most on hand... which is the large amount of snow that has built up in this world.  He could probably move it later so they can move forward...!

The lieutenant's wyverns are rushing into their lines... he thinks that it's possible they could hold /them/ off, even if Galle was here with them.  He had faith in their ability and skill, but if the hundred or so others rushed in here, they'd be cut down pretty quickly.  He noticed the one standing in his way, having called out to Nobunaga to try and keep his way clear.  Though he wondered if he couldn't just overpower the rider with his sheer size and leverage.  

Even before he could grow to his full height, Geats busted through the gate, buying him the time he needed.  While his head turned to watch Geats go, he turned his head back towards the wyvern still in his way.  He couldn't afford to be caught up in hero worship right now, even as his heart soared for the Kamen Rider.

He runs back again, grabbing another massive pile of snow, and starts charging it down the line towards the warpgate and the rider who is getting in his way.  Hopefully Nobunaga could chase them off, but he couldn't stop for anything... which means trying to leverage his height and massive snow pile against a very determined rider.  

Riku couldn't contemplate that this person was probably just fighting to try and save his home, just like he would... he was probably ignorant of what his king was doing.  It was so much to think about right then and there, and all that he could do was push himself to try and keep this from being their final resting place!  
Angela ''Could you tower defense by the warpgate until you can't anymore?''

"Yeah!! I won't let anybody past! I know what tower defense is now. I become the tower. The tower that says 'no passing, friends only, no boys allowed until season three after the amnesia arc is complete!"

She swooshes around along the ground towards the warpgate, breathing out pop shot dark purple laser bolts towards any soldier that might be in the way or looking at it funny--fortunately, at this point, Love can differentiate 'friendlies' from 'enemies' having been with the Elibe forces for long enough that she has actually gotten to know some of them! And care about them! And so long as Love is out in the multiverse, she will never try to hurt a friend again because she has found her meaning of existence out there in the multiverse because out there in the multiverse, there is infinite conflict and where there is infinite conflict, there will always be the need for a magical girl such as herself. Knowing this helps soothe over the realization that should everyone's greatest hopes and dreams come to pass in Elibe, she probably won't return all that often--fairy tale kingdoms with magic and royalty and nothing for a magical girl to fight for is too much for her. There will be other magical kingdoms that need her, other wars, and she's looking forward to them even as her heart aches for the friends she made here. She'd say that she'd never forget Roy and everyone else, but her memory is pretty bad. She's always forgetting.

And she might have spent the rest of the battle just combatting wyverns and protecting a warpgate when...

''Is there none among you here with more will than a noble's cowering child?''

Galle has triggered something deep within the Magical Girl of Love's heart. "Hey!!!" Love turns her head, distracted from her mission by her magical girl soul. "Don't you talk about Roy like that! He's not a noble's cowering child! He's got a strong heart, he cares for people, he aches even when his enemies suffer, even when they'd see him dead! He knows the reality of the world and still holds hope and love for the imaginary, the fantasy, that children remember and adults forget! He is a good guy, and he's my friend! Don't talk about him like that! What will do you have, to keep trying to kill a 'cowering child', huh?? You're possessed by a dark force, Galle, that's using your desperate love of the sky to corrupt you! But if you keep allowing Dark Nihil to control you, your love for the sky will fade away and lose all color! Don't mistake our empathy for you as weakness! Or our care for ''how'' we win as trepidation!"

Roland stalls in his approach by the speech and he lowers the shotgun he had aimed for Galle ever so slightly as something in the magical girl's words gnaw at his own bleak heart. He has been given his mission, but does he really feel that in his heart right now? Or is it bleak and empty and he's just trying to satisfy a side-dream of someone whom he hoped to live his life with? Is he a fool for even hesitating? For caring at all about how things are done? Shouldn't he just keep killing and killing and killing until something finally puts him down? Isn't anything less betrayning her?

Red has little to say, backpedaling to keep close to Marcus. His oldness has resonated with the Abnormality who is very much against elder endangerment. Of course, she doesn't really know the guy but she takes a moment to look at Marcus's chest. "Hey Grandpa," Red says, refusing to look directly at him, her tone intentionally forged to be like an insult since she can't really be honest. "Nobody's going to be happy if you die on the battlefield like this." Her tone is bitter and heartbreaking. "Don't let a wolf make you easy prey."
Nobunaga     When she downs but one of the lieutenants on Galle's heels, Nobunaga tilts her head forward, letting out a disappointed little noise. If she had aimed up a few degrees more, perhaps, the volley would have torn into the riders instead of these obnoxiously durable flying lizards. The rider recovers quickly, whirls, and braces for her approach.

    An admirable stance, she considers. Different in some ways, but similar enough to what her own soldiers had used at Nagashino. Yari are longer than javelins, she reasons, necessitating the slight change in posture to properly brace the weapon. But he's made a crucial mistake: She *isn't* cavalry.

    She raises her sword as she advances, balanced as she is on a floating rifle. Some two dozen guns materialize around her, already aiming for the man in her way. When she brings her sword down to point forward, the weapons discharge in bursts of flame and acrid gunsmoke. Perhaps only a second after the gunshots, a group of diminutive Nobbu soldiers dart around the backside of the gate and jump on him, followed by one of the heavier Nobbu Tanks that simply tries to run him over. If he survived the bullets, the tank should at least be heavy enough to hold him down.

    Nobunaga jumps off her rifle as she draws close, stepping past him without even looking.

    "A pity. You would have made a fine samurai."

    Nobu?

    "Kill him. I have no need for prisoners."

    As the Nobbusengumi steps forward to deal with the wyvern knight, drawing its little katana, Nobunaga twists in place and sweeps her free hand to the side. In response, the scorched earth tears open and from its depths crawls forth Great Mecha Nobbu and another squadron of smaller soldiers and Nobbu Tanks.

    "Secure this gate. Slaughter any wyvern or rider who comes through."

    With Geed building up around it and Love supplying the lasers, Nobunaga whirls in place to face the gate once more. Since Geed's solution involves snow, she recedes her reality marble; the ground around her cools in this world's snowy cold, and in its place a great blackened skeleton rears up behind her with flames filling its ribcage and skull.
Desire Stars Is there none among you here with more will than a noble's cowering child?

    "These people have clawed their way to Bern's doorstep, against all odds. Everyone you've bought, threatened, or turned against them, they've outsmarted, outfought, and outlasted. All of that they did, with no guarantee that they'd survive to see their vision of Elibe, much less the next day. There's nothing doomed or miserable about that boy you threatened to kill."

    "He's becoming a good man. And he's reminded me of what the 'will to victory' truly is. No matter how difficult you made it for him, he never stopped reaching for it with everything he had."

"'Let me show you my determination.' If I said that, would you believe me?" That type of con-man line is typical of him, and yet... He tilts his chin up at Galle, answering the challenge and offering one of his own with the gesture. As Galle gets back astride his wyvern, Geats reaches for the Desire Driver and spins it.

                                  REVOLVE ON!                                  

There's no armor pieces to swap out--so what would that do? The armor reassembles itself, not switching places, but switching forms. The claw motifs on Geats' bracers and boots weren't just for show. Standing on four legs instead of two, Geats lets loose a shrill cry, charging towards the wyvern. It seems suicidally slow, at first, until a sudden rev of the armor's supercharged engine propels him laterally at blistering speed, an asymmetrical zig-zag to throw off Galle's aim and timing. Snow is kicked up and boiled into water, then steam as it flies.

    His golden claws superheat themselves and rake across the wyvern as he passes, hitting the ground and flash-vaporizing the snow. The armor's golden lenses and four flaming tails glow from within the steam cloud, which is soon dispelled. He darts through it like a bullet, taking to the sky for another pass and leaving briefly-clinging tracks of flame lingering in the air.

    The second pass is heralded by the tenor snarl of the armor's engine and another startling burst of speed. A downwards cyclone of flame with the armor's nose at its point carries both the impact of his strength at that blistering speed and the intense heat of the flaming torus around him. He pulls up, leaping across the air as if it were solid to put himself in position for a second swoop, but this time--

                                  REVOLVE ON!                                  

    He hangs in the air for just a second, gunning the accelerator on the Buckle.

                                 BOOST STRIKE!                                  

    Geats is enveloped in a caul of flame, clinging close and slowly moving across his armor without influence from the wind. The golden lenses of his helmet glow as the rest of him darkens, almost like a solar eclipse--a thin, intense lance of flame erupts from the back of his helmet, widening dramatically until looking at him is near-blinding. He throws a series of four hook punches, each one conjuring a flaming red fist. They take off towards Galle, followed by Geats himself, fist outstretched as the rocket thrust behind him reaches its final, brilliant stage.
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Madeleine snarls and spits as Galle's wyvern tackles her off the Wyvern General. She wraps an arm around its neck to keep from being launched, and digs her knife into the joint at the base of a wing. Ice flows from the wound in pace with blood, spreading across the wing to keep the creature grounded. After a brief further tussle to avoid its snapping jaws, she drops free and rolls away from the twice-injured creature.

    She hustles to recover her spear, and ends up standing somewhere between Roy and Kamen Rider Geats. Not in a rush to break the standoff, she listens to Galle's accusations. "You think yourself the keeper of the Blade?" she sneers, lip curled in disgust. "We have met with Bramimond, Roy has been judged by the weapon's true keeper. You're just some *asshole*."

    Raising her weapon in a defensive posture, she begins to circle as she continues. "Whatever Roy and the rest will build after this is settled, if it lasts a thousand years or a dozen, it will have been worth it. It's not for the Blade that I'll fight you, it's for people to live and die and laugh and love without dogs like you biting at their heels. Without men who think the world is better off dead."

    That's enough talk for Madeleine. She pounces - but not *at* Galle, she wants to leave him for those more specialized in man-to-man combat. No, her target is the wyvern. Whether it lashes at her with jaws or claws it strikes only a substituted decoy, and she's rising from beneath the creature, driving her spear into its gut. The wound bubbles with venom, which drips hissing into the snow at her feet. Digging in her heels, she controls the beast's movements by keeping her weapon lodged inside it - the wings on her spear are for precisely this, and unless it can fly *up* on one good wing, its ability to play mobile interference for Galle will be little to none.
Lilian Rook     'Odette!!'

    Lilian draws in breath and it sounds like a hiss. Her fondness of Odette isn't so great as her backbreaking sense of personal responsibility for everything, and even that isn't as strong as the burning memory of when the Lycian League came within inches of a very different story. Despite the many pitfalls and betrayals along the way, the League's luck has averaged out unusually well, but their good fortune has been nowhere near so miraculous that she could believe Roy's demonstration of moral character will protect him from Galle's spear.

    'Come on! Can you still-- you shouldn't have-- p-please, hang on...!'

    "Now isn't the time!" says Lilian, summoning up her courage in the face of Roy's pleading look. "She is the healer!" follows in the same desperate tone of 'please just understand'; that there isn't anything to be done, and that if there were, she would do it only after Roy is safe.

    That resistance falters for only a moment, but it's just enough for the cold, practical mindset of a operations commander, ordering men and women she barely knows, to inform her of the math it's already crunched out in the gap, and take the wheel for a handful of seconds.

    "Stop moving her; you're making her bleed. It's cold enough that we still have time if she passes out." Lilian practically slaps Roy's arm off Odette, then takes her weight with one of her own, immediately smearing her side with blood. Three motions in quick succession apply talismans for health, luck, and protection, all drawn from the same pouch in the same movement, and then a split-second flare of black-gold magic causes the blood on the surface of Odette's wounds to freeze solid; there isn't time to make it coagulate.

    "Raskins! Up! You have two minutes before that melts and you start bleeding again!" Lilian says, shaking Odette on purpose to get her attention. One of the talismans should be providing an excess of energy and focus, which makes her intent clear. "See to yourself!" is all she can say before running out of time; and Lilian uses what she has left to get Odette fifty paces away, behind a terrain feature.
Lilian Rook     Six seconds spared for Odette feels like an eternity in this situation. Some of Galle's lieutenants making it through the gate immediately tilts his odds from desperate towards merely implausible; and it'll be worse if more of them join.

    'And why are you willing to die for the Blade?'

    "Grand words coming from the man they sent to die to get it back." Despite the number of allies clustering around Galle, the fact he doesn't have Maltet anymore emboldens Lilian to draw and fire her sidearm to put pressure on his defense first; even if its silver, there's a limit his weapon can take, and she wants to get to it quickly. "We're going the wrong way to run away with it now aren't we."

    'If your vision for Elibe is merely return to its doomed and miserable peace, no wonder the Blade spurns you.'

    There are a hundred things Lilian could think to say on the subject of will and vision, at least if it weren't to Galle, but it's the last part that catches her, tripping something in her mind halfway through her third reload. She uses the fourth burst of fire, more or less indistinguishable as a discrete set, to get out "Spurned? Bramimond offered it up from the Shrine of Seals you stupid man! I bet you believe Zephiel gets all his orders from prophetic dreams, too!"

    Lilian has no possible way of knowing why Galle believes what he does, but it doesn't really matter whether her guess is right or wrong. "Do you think we're politely returning it?! Why else take it into the heart of Bern but for her!"

    She really, truly, hopes that she's right. It's the last, surprise check she can think of before staring down at the void that had swallowed her when she came upon Murdock's pursuit and followed the wrong trail on purpose. "Even Apocalypse is right here with us! Do you understand what any of that means or are you blind and deaf as well as stubborn and stupid?!"

    Thinking back to the past, hovering around all of her memories of Galle, makes it easy to retrieve the particulars in vivid detail. Giving Flamel the telepathic equivalent of a tap on the shoulder, Lilian sideloads the extremely specific vision of a future that she'd given up on ever seeing; the one that made Galle very nearly pause once before.
Odette Raskins Roy's back on his feet. Good. Now Odette can just keep running with him, and that means forcing Galle to give chase and overextend until everyone else can bring him down! The problem with that plan, aside from not having a chance to actually communicate that with anyone, is that the snow is a lot higher than Odette was expecting it to be. Wasn't she running on it just a moment ago? Why's it in her face?

Why's Roy yelling for her? "H-huh? Yes, why not? Come on, we need t... To...?" It's really hard to stay upright right now, actually. Nodding deliriously at Roy as he aids her in getting back to her feet, she casts a worried look over at where Galle's facing off with those standing in his way, then lets out a confused noise at Roy. "D-did you get hit? Oh crap, all this... Show me. Where-"

As she goes straight into triage mode, she notices that it's taking a while to actually get her case open. She glances over at her medical case, only then noticing that her arm isn't moving quite right, her case is still closed, and there's a lot of blood dripping off it.

"O... Okay, Roy? I just nee-okay. We okay!" Slightly delirious from the blood loss and just now realizing she's even been injured, Odette opens her case with her left hand shakily while popping out a pair of injectors and jabbing them directly into her arm and side in one relatively smooth motion. It doesn't stop the bleeding one bit, but it does help her move along with Roy more steadily while she keeps her gaze fixed on Galle.

"And why are you willing to die for the Blade?"

"I not. This is... My friends. They're counting on us to live!" She replies to Galle in an uncharacteristically loud voice, dropping the spent injectors to draw out her sidearm. Even with just one hand to steady it, she's able to keep it trained in his general direction while lurching along with Roy to reach Lilian. It's taking a lot out of her just to do that, but the injections help keep her aim steady.

"Blade or not, we... We're not dying to die here. We have everyone back home waiting for us, and Elibe's peace is... It's not doomed! Maybe before was..." She calls out, looking far more confident about any of that making sense than it actually did coming out of her.

"Now isn't the time!"
"Stop moving her; you're making her bleed."

Feeling some relief washing over her as Lilian supports her, Odette nonetheless still tries to keep herself moving with her own feet instead of leaning hard on Lilian. She keeps her sidewarm trained on Galle for a little longer, too, even firing a trio of rapid shots at center mass if it so much as looks like he's going to start swinging at someone. It's only once Lilian moves her to safety that she reholsters the gun. "Gnghh... Thanks, Miss Rook. I've bandages and-oh. Oh, what is that?"

With the wounds frozen to buy her some time, she spends only a few seconds marveling at the sight of that magic working to keep her from bleeding out. Once she's done, she gets right back to rummaging around in her case. "R.. Right! Thanks, Miss Rook. Thanks, Roy. Don't worry about me, I've... Understood!"

Frozen wounds, but the risk of bleeding out is still present. Two minutes gives her plenty of time, then, to get bandages and blood packs ready, getting her arm's wounds closed up enough that she can once again use two whole hands to close up her side and attach enough blood packs to get herself back onto her feet with only a minimum of shaking from the pain starting to come back to her.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel takes the headbutt hard, and it leaves him reeling. Brain to brain contact is known as a valid way to achieve Psychonautry, because it can open the door between the minds and allow conduction of the astral form. That also means that a strong, firm headbutt is also a way to sort of jar Flamel out of Galle's head and back into his body. But not without a moment of deeper psychic intrusion.

    Gleaming light streams down Flamel's forehead from a split eyebrow. "NNNNRRGH!" He stumbles back, wiping flecks of light off his face. "Don't *say that*! I'm sick of it, I'm sick, I'm *sick of you* and the way," He rubs one eye clear, and flares light out of it. "You people gave up a thousand years of peace for your own personal insanity!" He pushes his sunglasses up his nose and shouts, "Do you know what that is? What kind of value that has? You think that was *rot*, that was *failure*?! If Murdoch hadn't done what he did, it would have been the foundation for a cure for Bern's manias! If Brunya hadn't done what she did, it would have been a cure for Zephiel's isolation! If *you* hadn't done what you did," He cracks his neck dramatically. "Then the *world* would have been different for you!"

    "You're right! I *am* someone who only dreams of the status quo! Because the status quo was a thousand years of people allowed to think freely, live their lives, accumulate the *normal* amount of trauma for the *normal* reasons! It wasn't tyranny of the insane! It wasn't giving up a *thousand years*, and the divine intervention of old gods, and the will of Saint Elimine, all for the sake of resolving one man's misgivings about how people act when they dress and eat a little too nice for a little too long! The status quo is the *only* thing that gave you the *slightest hope* for the sky, and you'd rather bite the hand that feeds you, latch on, shake, tear flesh from bone, froth at the mouth until you kill or be killed, than admit the *truth*!!"

    A telepathic tap on his shoulder...

    ---

    The Director picks up the ringing red phone on his desk, puts the receiver to his ear.

    "Yes."
    "..."
    "You believe that will put this to rest?"
    "..."
    "I'll send it. But it's hazardous for us to handle."
    "..."
    "Standard infohazard protocol, then."

    ---

    A vision? Flamel has that. For once, frustrated and anguished, Flamel finally decides to just knuckle down and embrace his role as hero of the status quo when it's challenged. "Because it wouldn't give you *everything* you wanted, you wouldn't let it give you what you needed and *some* of what you wanted. Well, fine." He passes something through his mind, processing just enough to amplify. He aims for that gap in the rationales, trying to hammer home a brutal final mental strike, having torn away all other reasonable confabulation options. A telepathic payload of possibility, of deep-level could-have-beens and squandered would-have-beens and desperate should-have-beens as vivid and vibrant as if Galle had lived them himself. A deep-level shot of hope to a personal internal narrative that won't accept it, where it will be most painful for it to rest regardless.

    He rushes the man, the way only a telekinetic can: Psychic hands on the spear's structured head *pulling* rather than pushing, to take advantage of the one vulnerability that its design isn't meant to account for. And he tries a mirroring headbutt to fire that psychic munition Lilian's given him, a psionic bunker-buster that will smash apart the complex, or so Flamel hopes. He's putting it into that skull head-first either way.

    "I hope your remorse centers still fire, you fucking psychopath!"
Petra Soroka     Through the frosted iridescence of the thick glass of the Beauty of Ash's chest, it's impossible to really make out Petra's face where she rides in the core. It's very easy, however, to make out the blur of blonde and beige that comprises her featureless head, and to strike down towards it while its limbs are entangled with the thrashing wyvern.

    The crystal body of the mech crunches like paper under the spike of the wyvernrider's polearm, and florescent orange fluid leaks out from the crack. The Beauty of Ash, and Petra's hazy shape inside of it, twists to try and tear away from its attacker, but failing to escape in time to avoid a second strike, takes it with a second dribble of fluid coming out. It ducks its head down to butt the wyvernrider away from its chest, then the squeal of Petra's telekinetically-applied tension builds as she tugs on every angle of the mech at once, causing it to explode in a shower of shrapnel that aims itself in the air to bombard the soldier at close range.

    With the mech in pieces, Petra falls to the ground and draws Fourth Match Flame from the sheathe on her waist in the same motion. With a flash of light from the sword suddenly igniting, the wyvern is cut down, and the fragments of the Beauty of Ash slice at its rider as they reverse course to pile back into the mirror hanging from Petra's neck.

"Just to deny it to Bern?"

    "No, dog! Fucking Bern only needs it to keep it away from us! It's to kill the person who can only be killed by it, dumbass!"

"Is there none among you here with more will than a noble's cowering child?"

    "God! You're so irritating!" Petra warily keeps just out of the much-longer reach of Galle's spear, trying to relocate herself between Galle and where Roy's scrambling away to. The heat from her sword melts the snow in front of her, but there's so much built up that it refreezes smooth and slippery whenever she moves away... which is worse for her than for Galle, really.

    "We're literally here in Bern with the whole, collective intent to win! Roy's been committing to this one thing for *years* now, and we're seeing it through *right now*! What the fuck have you been doing these past two years, huh?! Don't challenge us about our fucking 'will to victory' you pretentious fucking cocksucker, when your whole mission statement is jerking off about getting to do barrel rolls and then coasting on inertia until the world ends!"

"If your vision for Elibe is merely return to its doomed and miserable peace, no wonder the Blade spurns you."

    Petra gestures frustratedly with her EGO sword, causing a flare-up to melt the snow around Galle into a muddy slush. "Everywhere we've been has *already* changed! The Western Isles aren't getting mulched for Etruria and Bern's slave labor shit! Etruria's leadership got burned out of a ton of the corrupt freaks that were there before! Ilia's restructuring its whole economic shit to not just be a starving mercenary farm anymore!"

    When Geats occupies all of Galle's attention with his new suit's light show, Petra closes the distance between them in a single step boosted by the Silver under her feet. Within the reach of Galle's spear, Petra wraps her hand in Silver to choke up her grip onto the blade of her flaming sword, slamming the haft of his polearm with the base of the blade and wedging it there between his hands to keep him from getting any leverage in swinging it.

    "We've got the fucking princess of Bern right here! Have you ever been worried about a return to the status quo before, or are you just making shit up to justify what's most convenient for you to already do?!"
Marigold      Marcus can normally take good care of himself- for someone not far off from sixty, he has sharp eyes and a strong body- but being caught in his civilian guise, without his customary heavy armor, is doing him no favors. Shooting a worried glance after Roy- who's with Lilian, and thus presumably fine- he turns back to his stunned mount and smiles ruefully at Red.

     "Then help me get my horse up. Saint help us if we can't run," he says. "Don't think it has any broken bones... and thanks. Hah, I'd die for Lord Roy, but don't let him hear that."

     "Now isn't the time! She is the healer!"
     Roy knows that. Of course he knows that. His eyes still beg Lilian to help Odette, though. Reminding him of the hard realities can't make him stop wanting childish things; it can only make him feel guilty for wanting them.

     "Stop moving her; you're making her bleed."
     He heaves a breath of relief when Lilian changes tack, and squeezes Odette around the shoulders one more time before easing her down. "O-- okay. Thank you," he says shakily. "She's becoming delirious. Um, I think?"

     Honestly woozy Odette isn't that different from normal Odette. But with her spirited to safety, Roy is left kneeling in the snow, smeared in mostly someone else's blood, and fumbling with numb fingers at the Blade's cloth wrappings.

     The ex-pegasus-knight kicks off of the Beauty with almost-familiar form to reduce hte headbutt's impact, but the spray of shrapnel still catches her off-guard; she lands heavily in the snow with an "Aghh-- c-c'mon...!" of choked disbelief, moves to pull a piece of shrapnel from under her chin, and then realizes that that's a really bad idea.

     Shanna, maybe taking her ex-comrade's presumed defection personally, swoops down from the sky to disarm the fallen officer as Petra turns away. "What's your problem?!" "Ghh. Money, what's yours." "Oh, well, uh..."
Marigold      Galle's sullenly stony expression turns to a disbelieving sneer when Lilian and Madeleine begin to talk about Bramimond and the Blade.

     "Bramimond released it to you because you're toothless. If you could use the Blade yourselves, you would have already cut me down," he responds, with baseless confidence. "Break and run. Then I'll have done you a mercy. Even if I stepped out of your way, you'd only march to your deaths against Iðunn."

     "Everywhere we've been has *already* changed! ... Ilia's restructuring its whole economic shit to not just be a starving mercenary farm anymore!"
     It's Petra, maybe surprisingly, whose words push through to make his expression squirm. There is no good retort to that. "And where is Lady Juno to wield the Blade? That was her dream. You blundered into it," he finally says, but he remains unsettled.

     "There's nothing doomed or miserable about that boy you threatened to kill."
     That hardens him again, squared off across from Geats. "No," he agrees bitterly. "I guess there's not."

     Madeleine goes for her stab, and Lilian opens fire, and Galle becomes a blur of motion again.

     Maddie pierces the wyvern's belly just as hoped, rewarded with a shriek; but it's already trying to crack off the ice freezing its wing, and boar-spears weren't meant for creatures with long serpentine necks. It has plenty of reach to lean down and try to chomp her with daggerlike teeth while she's committed to gripping the spear, and Galle leans around to whip his polearm's blade at knee level and constrain her options further.

     While dashing as best he can across the Geats-created slush back towards his pinned-down lieutenants, Galle deflects Lilian's shots back towards the other Elites with the 'silver'-coated haft of his polearm. If he notices the cracks developing with repeated blows, he deems it an acceptable cost.

     The armor that Galle's lieutenants wear is a cut above the rest; it can't all be the miraculous metal that Elibe calls 'silver', since there's a limit to what even wyverns can carry, but at least the breastplate and helmet are. The bullets that Nobunaga fires at the spear-bracing lieutenant's torso ping off. Still, he's pierced through in both arms and one leg, falters, and drops with a sharp "Nnngh-!!" into the snow.

     At the same time, Geed is heaping up a barricade of snow, and the lieutenant trying to use his mount's wings to hold the feat of engineering at bay can't keep it up much longer. Another half-dozen wyvern riders slip through in the meantime, but these ones are more of the rank-and-file.

     Galle's eyes flick between his subordinate about to be executed, and the warpgate about to be closed. He lunges for the former, cutting through whichever of the giant skeleton's appendages are imposed to block him and shoulder-checking the fighting vehicle to budge it. "You. Get up."

     Un-pinned, the wounded lieutenant who was about to be beheaded finds their second wind; draws a knife to hold off the descending katana; and lunges for Nobunaga from behind. If they get the blade to her neck, they just hold it there- 'call off your forces' being the silent demand.
Marigold      Galle can't help with the threatening. He already has to contend with Geats rushing him down again, and a moment later with Flamel injecting that nauseatingly-painfully-happy vision of a life with Melady that could have been. It's hard to tell if the contortion of his face as he raises a hand to blot out Geats' radiance is more from the emotional torment, or the flashbanging.

     That hauntingly beautiful phantasm of reconciliation is less reachable now than it ever was before. If he indulged his better nature now, would anyone really forgive him? Would anyone look him in the eye like that? Forget loving him again; could Melady ever say his name without bitterness? It aches all the more for that.

     His breath shudders as the first of Geats' four blows drives him back.

     "I always hated this world," he says.

     Twirling his polearm, he halfway deflects another flaming fist, but this time the sleeve of his armor catches fire. "The earth and everything that walks on it! All of it! Ashes in my mouth. What of Zephiel's madness? I didn't need him to tell me that."

     Another. He tries a different deflecting technique this time; it doesn't work, and the Geats' blow drives him two more steps and sizzles against his breastplate. He grits his teeth.

     "All my joys were taken from me in your 'peacetime'! The sky was all that's left. I slaved and I starved and when my dreams were snatched away Bern's was the only extended hand to me!"

     Petra comes in to tangle his weapon, and Geats dashes in for the final blow; it's the most he can do to bury his polearm into the ground like a bracing piton to try to not be hurled back through the warpgate. It audibly splinters as it digs a furrow in the earth, and he lets go with one hand just to punch Geats' helmet.

     "If your highest ambition is to save that world, the world that brought me to this, then--!"
     "SHUT UP!"

     He looks up just in time to see Melady plunging towards him from the sky, leaping clean off of her wyvern Tryffin.

     There's a moment where he could try to raise his polearm to spear her as she falls. His watering eyes widen at the opening. He can't take it. Galle raises the one arm he can spare instead, with charred and broken armor, to ward off the blow.

     Melady's sword goes right through his forearm with a sick noise on the way down.
Madeleine Cadrasteia     The wyvern's jaws indeed fall outside of Madeleine's split-second calculations. It's only her supernatural resilience (helped just a little by the chainmail) that keeps her arm from coming off in its grip. Lifted clear off the ground and tossed free, her spear yanked back out of the wyvern's poisoned wound as she refuses to relinquish her grasp on the weapon. Being flung is the only thing sparing her from a crushed knee - Galle's swing is too low, now.

    By the time she's back up and into the fight, Galle is facing off against Geats, on the defensive after Flamel's psychic assault.

    "I always hated this world,"

    "So what!?" Maddie exclaims. "It's all got to go, every tree and hill and creature? God, it makes me *sick* that I used to think like you do!"

    She stances up with Drogrung in both hands, looking for an opening that isn't really presenting itself amid Geats' barrage of flame and fist. "It's a shame you'll not get a chance to learn that what you hate is still beautiful, still *worthy*." Will Galle hear her? Is he going to survive the next eight seconds? It doesn't matter to Madeleine. These words are as much declaration for her own ears as invective for Galle's.
Riku Asakura The Wyvern and Rider keep the snow from piling up, which lets six more riders through!  It's not a whole lot, but every number counts... and the more that got through meant the more that could turn the tide of this fight.  "Nobunaga!  More are getting through!" he calls out to the warlord, but right now, without Love shooting them down, this was going to get crowded real fast.  

From his position, he hears Galle's sad statement that he hates the world; he can't begin to understand the motivations of anyone who would hate a world.  Even being thrown into the world like he was, he could never understand what kind of pain would drive someone to be like Kei Fukuide.  But he's not in a position of being sympathetic; they're trying to roll them over and kill them.  

Worse, he can't keep building this without dealing with the rider.  Eventually he stops pushing the snow.  Perhaps for a moment the Lieutenant might think he's won... but that was because Geed was forced to deal with him himself.  His hands started to glow brightly.  His body surged with red and black energy, crackling like electricity.  He surged, his body nearly convulsing in a way to gather that power directly into him before it stopped.

Part of him hopes the rider gives up and flies up as he fires the beam.  To just give up trying to stop him, but... he can't let any more riders through.  Finally, he concentrates that power through his arms before firing his Wrecking Burst down.  The massive red and blue energy beam that is used to destroy kaiju is focused on the rider and his mount.  Then he could seal the portal with the snow.

Internally, Riku is... trying not to cry and being forced to make this decision.  
Flamel Parsons     Flamel, disoriented and struggling after the two headbutts, pushes himself back to his feet to watch the larger, stronger, faster martial opponent, striking out at even Geats double-boosted... His sunglasses, shattered, have fallen somewhere.

    Then Melady's sword is in his arm. Flamel moves like a man possessed, eyes wide. He rushes to the pinned side, digging desperately in an inner jacket pocket for that door. Pressed in his palm, he tries to move under his pinned arm in a desperate slide, around his back, and then smash it open-palmed onto the back of his head. He loaded Lilian's mind in his payload last time.

    This one is his:



    In a town with less than twenty thousand people, a child has been born within this minute. This child will not leave the town from birth until death, with the exception of two visits to a hospital less than a hundred kilometers away, and a vacation maybe once every five years. They will grow up, and they will get grades of C and low B. They will attend community college. They will connect with a significant other, then spouse, with whom they have no special chemistry, and who they stay married to largely for reasons of convenient. They will have three children, none of whom they'll raise exceptionally. They will eat things using recipes other people devised for them, listen to whatever stories happen to be put in front of them first, live in a house that just sort of coincidentally happens to be on the market. They will believe the first things they are told, and the second things only if they're repeated for ten years.

    This person is repeated, in collage, a thousand times. In Flamel's mind, this person is presented in a hundred exhibits and chambers. Their soul is bared in heart-wrenching triptych and carving. Their life and death and the arc of their soul contributes to a vast and ineffable burden and triumph, one that Flamel has put into a sling and tries to slam into Galle's mind. He's striking with a weaponized point of view, a fundamental truth Flamel believes in and believes that Galle needs placed in his mind.

    This hypothetical person contains more of the world than every powerful warrior put together. This person contains more of the world than every psychic, every wizard, every great inventor. Data is not defined by outlier, it is defined by median. And that is good, that is right, and that is fair. That is the only way to have the yearning dreams, ambitions, and aspirations. Any attempt to take that apart is like sawing off the branch you're standing on. Nothing but abyss to find in destroying your foundations just to climb the stairs.



    Or so he believes. Flamel was aiming that for the battle-willpower. If he can't drive Galle to exhaustion, hopefully he can drive him to retreat. But extra-hopefully, he does one more thing: He grabs this side of Melady's sword, fingers shining just a little where the blade bites through synthetic replicant infiltrator flesh, gripping hard to try to make sure Galle can't yank his arm away from Melady. "Tell him, tell... Tell him..." That white-knuckled grip is the last energy Flamel has at the moment, but he has two more words: "...Grow up!"
Nobunaga     Overseeing Geed's work and the deployment of her own forces harassing wyverns as they try to slip through, Nobunaga is a bit distracted. She has her back to the fallen wyvern knight, aiming clusters of rifles skyward-- a few degrees above center of mass, to better catch the riders than their wyrms-- rather than pay attention to him any further. It's the clash when Galle slams into the Nobbu Tank that alerts her to things going awry.

    Events play out in precious few seconds. Acting quickly, the Nobbusengumi goes for the kill. Due to its small size and light weight, the knight is able to fend it off with his dagger forcefully enough to end the little familiar sprawling with an alarmed Nobu!? He's back on his feet, scant paces from the warlord, already in motion.

    A force like the kick of a horse slams into his midsection armor, buckling the metal and knocking his feet up off the ground. The flash of a skeletal forearm, wreathed in flame, crashes a fist into the side of his helmet hard enough to spin him around. The followup, a forearm lariat, slams into the man's chest and drives him into the ground on his back. The skeleton's hand spreads out its fingers encompassing his entire chestplate and pressing him into the melting snow.

    "I'll commend your persistence," Nobunaga states as she finishes turning around, "Many men would not try to fight with such injuries. Admirable devotion; but misplaced." As she drags her sword up his chest armor and aligns the tip of the blade with the eye slit of his helmet, the snow-covered Nobbusengumi trots over.

    Nobu?

    "If you were wise, you would have joined me long before now. I am the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. Opposing me only has one possible outcome."

    Gunfire rings out from the entrenched Nobbu soldiers engaging scattering wyvern knights. A bright pink beam from Great Mecha Nobbu joins Geed's, swiping through the sky. They are soon joined by the chattering of the Nobbu Tank's machine gun hands.

    Oda Nobunaga returns her attention to directing her soldiers, swinging her sword violently to the right, then more gently sliding it into the saya at her left hip.
Lilian Rook     'She's becoming delirious. Um, I think?'

    "It's shock. She'll walk it off." says Lilian. It's hardly expert medical advice, but a first opinion that comes from a lot of experience seeing injury and being injured. That, and an implicit order to Odette, couched in a stern reassurance to preempt psychosomatic exacerbation.

    --------

    'Bramimond released it to you because you're toothless.'

    "Bramimond gave it up because the war they fought wasn't finished and they don't give a single solitary fuck about you melodramatic fascists and your suicidal ideation."

    For some reason, hearing those words from Galle inflame's Lilian's temper. She'd hoped for lies and gotten pathetic self-justifying attitude instead; and with Galle having more runs at the Lycian League than any other general, and more mental real estate reserved for him of anyone besides Zephiel, it feels like an smug indignity having to hear it; dragging the battle and his image further through the mud. "And you don't know the first thing about Iðunn you hysterical, sulking death cultist!"

    'That was her dream. You blundered into it'

    "Did you come here just because you're lonely?! I'm sick of hearing you talk! To think I was ever impressed by you!"

    The timbre of dialogue between her and Galle is so radically different than the last time that it instills a sense of detached surreality to the exchange. Not so much that Lilian doesn't notice where her shots are going, weigh whether it matters, decides that one could hit Roy, and then spins the modular array to the sign of Mars make him deal with explosives instead; fewer shots and more frequent overheats, but at least they can't ricochet, and the heat will stress the metal.

    'I always hated this world'

    How many times has Lilian been in this situation before? How many times has she heard the words? How many times has she seen herself-- wanted to see herself in the eyes of the one holding the blade pointed in her direction? How many times had she lowered her sword and reached across that divide? How many times had she been spited? Getting a little worse every time, adding to a weight that gets a little heavier, it's come to feels like it occupies half her waking thoughts in the days since Kepler; since the Walden; since meeting Iðunn and seeing the shape of Zephiel anew. The burning question of how many times she will have that same knife twisted in the same old spot before it stops stinging had come to her time and time again, almost overwhelming her with its tiresome frequency, stranding her across an uncrossable divide that she put there for no reason, yearning to make her own hate, her own hurt, count just once.

    'The earth and everything that walks on it! All of it! Ashes in my mouth. What of Zephiel's madness? I didn't need him to tell me that.'

    Lilian flickers into being behind him, sword low and rising with the plunge of his polearm into the ground, where it can't defend him.

    "And still this world has so much to love. You're a chosen one amongst the forsaken; so I don't want to hear it."
Lilian Rook     Maybe it's for that reason that she can't summon the wave of secondhand grief that always comes. Maybe it's just because it's Galle, and she has no more patience left. Perhaps, just because, it's because of Elibe; because Lilian can envision-- if only just barely-- the fullness of the arc of how someone should grow and heal and leave their hate behind, here. It's a lesson that this continent has so often, so patiently taught her, again and again in a score of different ways, by seeing, listening, and reaching out, that it makes her feel like . . .

    "Not from someone so blessed that there are people who still want to save him."

    The amount that Lilian pulls her blows for Galle is considerably short of anxious care for his life, even on Melady's behalf. A god-take-the-wheel ambivalence loosens the friction on her blade, gliding through its motions to rend armour, ruin silver, and spill blood. When Melady takes his arm, Lilian spins and fires a walking barrage to the Lieutenants as part of her multi-action, then swings around with the pommel of her sword; both hands, torque from the hips, body weight behind.

    'the world that brought me to this, then--!'

    "You don't know anything about the world! You haven't seen people rally against corruption in their home, fight to liberate their fellow man, nor live side by side with dragons! You haven't seen them throw away tradition and change their way of life for the better, or struggle and find a reason to live again instead of just a reason to die! People do the right thing, even if it means forsaking their traditions, their grudges, their loyalties; even their lives!"

    "What have you done in Lycia?! Etruria?! Ilia! Sacae! You don't even know where Arcadia is! All you ever do is sit at Zephiel's heel and drink up all of his despair secondhand! Because it suits you! What the fuck would you know about the world seeing it from Bern?! Come down from your precious fucking sky for once and look at the people who who live outside your head you wretch!"
Marigold      Galle's right hand and half his forearm hit the snowy ground, followed by a heavy splatter of blood. Melady lands in front of him with an icy crunch, poised for a rising cut to mirror Lilian's.

     The pain of his severed arm doesn't really come; nor that of the deep rend across his back. It's shock, mostly, that widens his eyes.

     Shock that Melady really did it? Or that she hasn't yet finished him off?

"Not from someone so blessed that there are people who still want to save him."
"...Grow up!"
"So what!? It's all got to go...?"

     His mind is reeling before Flamel touches it, and reels worse after. Still he pushes back against the vision of normalcy. This beautiful world has shown a cruel face to Galle; partly due to his own choices, and partly not.

Would he be happier if he'd had a "normal" life like that?
If he were the kind of person who could be happy with it?

Even if the world is dying, why should *I* have to fight for *them*?

     "You don't know anything about the world! You haven't seen people rally against corruption in their home, fight to liberate their fellow man..."
     "No. I haven't," he says in a bleak moment, with Melady's blade pointed up at his guts.

     He's still got a regiment behind him, and a knife at his belt; three-quarters of his limbs and two-thirds of his blood. The wyvern knights hesitate, looking to their leader. If he ordered an attack now, he would certainly die, but he might still win.

". . . Give me the Blade."
"You can't be serious. I hate you," Melady coughs up.
"Like I said--"
"We will kill you you stupid pig."
"--it won't do any good with you."
"... What are you saying?"

     But about then Roy has finished undoing the Binding Blade's wrappings with his cold-numbed fingers, and staggered to his feet still bleeding from his calf and slick with Odette's blood. From some fifty feet away, he can't quite see what's happening with Galle, but he sees the wyvern knights circling and judges the risk.

     Weakly but hopefully, Roy lifts the Blade up and swings it down. There is a soft whoosh of flame along the arc, and sparks twinkle in the air and pop among the riders in the sky, but the sparks conspicuously avoid the wyvern knights themselves. Even pressed and scared like this, Roy couldn't wish them dead.

     Galle's pain-drawn, pallorous face twists in some hard-to-name way. He makes a gesture to the sky with his one remaining hand, and his knights calm themselves from their short panic and begin to peel away; and he casts one more look at Melady for a long second, and turns on his heel to leave through the gulch Geats' searing blow melted in Geed's barrier, showing you his bloodied and armor-torn back.

"Just like that? You're leaving, just like that?"
"If you're not going to kill me."
"Don't you have anything to say for yourself?!"
"... I don't want to take anything more from you. What I've taken already, I can't give back."
"Galle! ... GALLE!!!"

     The cold wind howls a while longer.