ARPEGGIO: CRIMSON HARMONY

A/N: Readers and reviewers, hello!
So, i'll try to be brief: this is my first story, and i'm pretty interested to see what it could turn out to be. The idea for the plot came to me a while ago, and i finally gathered the courage to write it down. I should point out that this story is set in the anime storyline, but there are going to be significant differences that will be explained in future chapters, as i expand everything. That said, if there are any errors in the plot or the language i'd like to kindly ask you to point them out to me: i've done my best to proofread everything, but i'm not a native english speaker. Constructive criticism is also welcome.
Thank you, and enjoy your read!

Chapter 1: Virus

City of Taranto, one year after the start of the Fog War.

An agonized scream of pain and anguish pierces the silent night.
It is the scream of a man with his heart broken.
In his embrace lies his wife, soon to be mother, but not in this world. Not anymore. Behind him, the city of Taranto burns, its buildings falling and its citizens long silent; and in front of him, the cause of all this misery.

It was a merciless, brutal affair: the Fog ships had acted with the express purpose of reaping as many innocent souls as they could, first targeting any highway and road leading out of the city, catching the many people who were evacuating and cutting off those who remained inside; they then proceded to obliterate every single city block with an advancing bombardment, from the coast inland and finishing in the outskirts of the city.

The result was a massacre: even after the rise of the sea levels the city remained prosperous due to its peculiar position, with population reaching the 160.000 souls, of which none escaped the enemy's grasp; but Andrea Ribaldo, a 23 years old young student and his wife Laura, also 23, managed to survive by rushing their car towards the advancing bombardment, slipping into the ruins of the docks in between salvos and almost escaping their doom…almost. Then one of the giant dock cargo cranes suddenly crumbled directly in the way of their car, and to avoid it Andrea lost control: they went careening through the rubble until the car violently impaled its nose on a long piece of debris.

After the crash, Andrea managed to get himself and Laura out of the wreck, feeling quite relieved to have been this lucky; then he took a better look at Laura, and he paled.
A sheet of twisted metal had lodged itself into her thigh, and while he was extracting her from the car it came off, revealing a grievous wound on her leg which, judging by the quantity of blood she was losing, had cut the femoral artery.

Laura knew her time was limited: "Andrea…I'm scared..." she said crying, "I don't want to leave you here alone, and our baby…i wish i could..."
"Shhh, what nonsense are you saying..!"
Andrea replied almost angrily; "I'm going to find something to stop the bleeding, and then we, yes we, are going towards the mountains to live happily, where those fottuti sea monsters can't reach us and our child!" Laura smiled at the thought, but still continued to grasp her husband.

"Laura please, let me go, i need to find.." he started, but she cut him off.
"It's too late…i feel myself slipping, please stay here…i don't want..*sniff*...i don't want to go alone!" by now tears were falling down from both of their faces, but she continued to talk.
"Promise me, amore mio, promise me to live on.." she looked down at her rounded belly, "...for both of us. Promise me." He was fighting hard not to cry openly, for he didn't want his wife's last memory to be of him in tears, when he promised. He didn't know how he could possibly do that, but he couldn't think about that, he promised because the love of his life wished him to.

They shared a long, wet and warm kiss. "I'll love you. Always." he confessed.
"I know...and i'll wait for you." she said, wincing at the pain of her wound, "Now hold me…it hurts, and i feel cold…ahh, much better." she relaxed as she felt the heat of his body pressed against her.

They hugged each other tightly, until he slowly felt her body getting limp and start to lose its warmth; he looked at her, and saw her in a strange serene expression: her beautiful, well rounded face was relaxed in a small smile, and her long straight brunette hair was disheveled in the same way it was after the numerous times they made love. Andrea smiled; she was so beautiful…and yet so unmistakeably soulless.
His wife was dead. The only one person in this world whom he cared for…was gone.
He stared blankly at her body for a long time, his mind trying to understand…then he started crying, a few tears first and then rivers, but it was not enough as the pain in his heart caught up with his lungs, and he let it all out.

A few kilometres out at sea, a lone female figure was looking at the burning city, locks of wavy black hair descending all the way down her back to her rear, and deep blue eyes that were narrowed in a sharp expression as she tensed: "I thought you said there were no survivors, Fiume! What was that?"

The reply of her heavy cruiser escort came soon enough: "Roma, I'm reading a single life sign in the city area, but the fires are making it hard to pinpoint its location; the thermal scans are all messed up."
"It's not a problem; being the only one among us equipped with a mental model, i shall go ashore and scout for it myself. Fiume, keep watch with your ranged sensors; Oriani and Carducci, you two destroyers will get close to the port with me and lend help if this body is in danger, or defective in any way."
"Affermativo!" Chorused her three escorts.
After steaming into port, Roma got up from sitting on the bow and used a long holographic stair to step on the closest pier. Her readings were much clearer now: the human was close, and it wasn't moving at all; maybe it was wounded...yes that was probably it. All the easier to finish off, then! And so she set out to end her bloody work.

At that time, Andrea had seen the battleship and her destroyers moving into the harbor; usually, being a war history nerd, he would be awed and completely extatic at the sight of such big and (almost, if not for the advanced technology) historic ships, armed to the teeth with cannons, torpedoes and machine guns, but at this time he couldn't care less; he was too much absorbed in crying and picking up the pieces of his will to live to notice what happened and what it meant for him, or else he could have done something like running the hell away before the raven haired battleship girl came in sight of him.

Not that it would've mattered, she would have found him anyways, but he could at least have tried; still he raised his head, to look at whom he presumed was another survivor…hypothesis that crumbled the moment he saw the girl's arm spawn a wide and crimson energy blade, which hissed malevolently with every motion.

"So...you have come to kill me, whoever you are…" Andrea said with a broken voice as she closed in, "I don't have any more reason to live. You killed my wife, and you killed my child, before he or she even lived," she kept closing in, "You may as well kill me and let me join them." he continued, standing up and locking his green, watery eyes on her abyssal cold ones "…but i have one hope. That one day you will understand what you have done…and when that day comes," suddenly all his grief turned to cold anger as he finished in a low tone, almost hissing out the words, "remember me…you monster." Then the blade plunged straight through his heart.

He recoiled in pain, but stayed standing, his eyes looking defiantly into the emotionless pieces of glass that were the battleship's, before she removed herself from his insides, blood spewing onto Roma's white toga styled dress, and he slumped to the ground, where a new crimson pool was forming beneath him and joining that of the blood of his beloved wife. The scene would have left the battleship almost unfazed, if not for one detail.

The blood of that last human, strangely enough, was disappearing from her arm and from any point on which it splurted on her bare skin…where was it going? It wasn't dripping on the ground, nor evaporating…suddenly she started to feel something; disgust was the first emotion, then came horror as she looked at the crimson painting that laid in front of her, and then a gut-wrenching fear.

"What's happening to me?!" she shrieked, and she heard someone responding, one of her escorts…but she couldn't understand her, and now she couldn't even hear anything! That…infection was...damaging..?..her from the inside! The mental model must have been defective, and now she really regretted taking her core along, and what the hell was that? …Whispers? Finally, her systems were coming back online. She was going to examine and analyze everything that happened with her escorts, repair herself and seek out any and all flaws, making sure this thing couldn't happen again. Hell, that was scary. It was then that she heard them.

"Kill the fog…" Ehh? "kill the fog…" what the hell? Roma slapped herself hard to try to reset her sound matrix, but the interference was still there: "kill the fog...that is the demand of the ones you murdered…"

"What? Who's that?" Roma asked, confused.
"Kill the fog…that is wish of the city you burned…" that choir was soon joined by another; "look at us..you monster"
"What are you saying? No, those were orders, the Admiralty Code is absolute, it can't be wrong!" but the voices continued, "kill the fog…monster!...that is the scream of the innocents you reaped…"

Roma was starting to panic by now, for the volume was increasing and there were even more voices, and she was starting to feel a wave of emotions she couldn't understand, threatening to overwhelm her, "kill the fog…that is the prayer of the heart you broke…why did you do this?...you are a monster!...kill the fog…that is the cry of the unborn you butchered…" then screams joined the whispers, and visions of hell itself appeared before Roma's eyes. At this point her processors were completely overloaded, and she started crying, tearing her hair off and clawing at herself with such a desperation to expose the flesh, that her nanomaterials failed to heal. Suddenly, she fell to her knees as the voices continued her psychological destruction. "no..stop..no..why..NO! NO!" ...and then she looked at her last, fresh kill.

An agonized scream of pain and anguish pierces the silent night.
It is the scream of a girl with her mind shattered.

And then the concert started anew, and laser cannons sang their deadly song. But instead of the deafening roars of city-destroying flames and the screams of dying people, other sounds could be heard: the pained groans of shredded armor, the explosions of intercepted missiles, the agony of nanosteel hulls as corrosive torpedoes bit holes into them, and the crying of broken, sinking keels…and then silence.

Only one ship still stood above the waves: her big imposing hull was a lucid black, with crimson glowing neon stripes, that kept going like open wounds along her whole length; above the deck, a towering sickly white superstructure, and nine blood colored main guns in three turrets adorned her form.
From her bow, an holographic passageway extended to the docks of the ruined city of Taranto, and a lone crying girl, with a torn white toga and long shredded black hair, could be seen climbing it towards the deck of the silent battleship, bringing with her two long and narrow anti-gravity pods.