A/N: Update: Well, this has been a shitty turn of events, hasn't it?

I hope all of you are safe and healthy. I'm alright, just somewhat depressed over this entire pandemic situation. It's been hard for me to get any writing done since entering quarantine, in large part because I never got that laptop replacement, and also because, well, anxiety and tiredness and lack of focus. But if this is going to go on for a while longer, I might as well grin and bear it.

Writing has resumed on Chapter 33. It'll be very slow going as I'm doing it on my phone, but it'll get done one way or another. Stay safe out there, y'all.

Ryuko beheld her mother with clear eyes for the first time in her life, and as her consciousness screamed indistinctly between the overpowered ebb and flow of nausea, she willed herself not to admit that she stood low before the most powerful creature in existence.

Nobody else could imagine this feeling. She was closer to the vile being who'd birthed her – the woman who'd spawned Nui Harime, scarred Satsuki in every way imaginable, and waged war on her own species for decades – than she'd been since the rush of her rage-fueled fusion with Senketsu; and within that shattered, twisted form beat the heart of all Life Fibers. The heart of the abomination she and her sister had come so tantalizingly close to slicing apart. This was an affront to all living things, yet she was also staring into the essence of her entire life.

And it was taking everything inside her, but she was steadily outstretching her arms to tear this god's throat out.

Ragyo's scalpel-slash smile, lit up by the orb hovering in her hand, barely moved as her eyes flicked over each of them. If she felt any similar reaction to seeing her younger daughter all grown up for the first time, she didn't let it slip onto her horrific mockery of a face. She sized them up coldly, lingering on them only as long as necessary before moving on, as if inspecting slabs of meat ready to be butchered and packed. But she didn't attack, didn't even move.

Everything stood still for a moment, save for the wind whipping through the shattered windows, and then the moment passed and the world went back into motion. Before Ryuko could even muster up the energy to step forward, Satsuki shot across the room, screaming at the top of her lungs, slicing her blades with unbelievable speed and force. Then came Mako, slowed and disarmed by the drug but still putting all of her energy into her feet and rising fist. Within milliseconds, Ryuko managed to power through the wave of nausea and join them, arm shifting into a blade aimed right at Ragyo's forehead.

Not enough.

The realization struck her in an instant, right alongside the blow that slammed into her so hard, she didn't even realize it was a punch until she was on the ground. The side of her face stung and her vision blurred, but she could see her mother's vibrant white silhouette effortlessly slip between Satsuki's attacks and put her to the floor with a barely-perceptible gut strike. Mako was already down, somehow, and was still struggling to recover when Satsuki landed next to her.

"Not terrible for a first try," Ragyo said, licking her bared teeth.

It was all over in a fraction of a second. Ragyo moved like she was lazily pretending to dance, taking casual steps here and there that nevertheless cut her through the room faster than anyone could keep track. Moreover, she had fought them all off with a single closed fist, her other hand still held open to support the orange Fiber ball which grew more ominous by the second. But as formidable as she no doubt was in her horrifying state, Ryuko knew this scenario had been anticipated to the finest detail ahead of time: she and Mako were weakened, and even with Junketsu's power rippling through her body, Satsuki struggled to compensate for her depth perception against a swift opponent. Ragyo may as well have shoved three paraplegics off their wheelchairs.

… Huh. She'd forgotten how rewarding it felt to dissect an opponent's fighting style. Tsumugu would've given her top marks in training for that one.

"We need to rethink our strategy," Senketsu grunted in her head, panting along with her as she struggled to regain her power. "Evidently, we are in too-"

"No need, false one."

Ryuko's breath caught in her throat, and Senketsu choked mid-sentence. "She… can she-?!"

Her fist slowly dropping to her side, Ragyo was now turned toward Ryuko, making direct eye contact with her – yet also seeming to leer right into Senketsu's eye. It seemed impossible at this point, but Ryuko could have sworn her smile widened.

"Yes, yes. You have never dreamt of being this in-tune with even the mockeries of my Life Fibers. I can hear your private communications just the same as if they were screamed into my ear by a mewling infant." She let out a wet, chunky sound that might have been a quiet chuckle. "Frankly, it is just as unpleasant. So your little plans? Those inaudible gambits you so love to formulate amongst yourselves?"

She lifted a single finger in front of her lips, hissing a comical "shh" sound.

"Now is the time to listen."

Refocus. Attack. Kill.

Satsuki took in a shuddering breath and twisted all of the muscles in her midsection at once, forcing herself upright even as her body screamed from the blow. She gripped her blades tight in shivering hands and braced them against the floor, pulling herself up, until finally she felt Junketsu's power in her muscles again and kicked off for another attack. Not for a moment did she take her eye off the thing that called itself her mother.

Refocus. Attack-

She was on the floor again. Her vision blurred for a moment before plunging back into sharp focus, all so quickly that her entire head ached just from contrast. This time, it took six horrible seconds before she even processed that she'd been hit, six seconds of absolute numbness and disorientation and the feeling that her eye was going to roll out of her skull.

Refocus-

She felt the familiar hand close over her throat before she even saw her mother hunched over her. Her grip was tight, but not suffocating; just enough to let her breathe, yet enough to make it difficult. To make her strain. To force her to look straight up as Ragyo's face lowered close to her own, her breath icy and stifling. If Satsuki didn't know any better, she could have sworn she felt Ragyo's rapid, irregular pulse rippling the air between them.

"Behave."

Suddenly, Ragyo was fully upright again, the motion fluid and almost imperceptible. The hand bearing the orb never wavered, though Satsuki could have sworn it had twisted at an impossible angle just to keep level. All was exactly as it had been when they'd stepped off the elevator, except now they were on the floor when they were supposed to be crushing her mother's heart together.

"As I was saying, girls…" Ragyo turned away to face the broken window again. "Welcome home. Each of you was born just for this moment. I see that now, at the end. I made mistakes, and I can admit that now – I foolishly thought it was in my place to decide when each of you ought to die, but now, at one with His will, I realize the error in my judgment, if not my actions. To think you would be killed by COVERS or assassins or the whims of my last daughter… Such arrogance. What a dull picture that would have made of our beautiful life together."

Of COURSE she's monologuing about fate again. Satsuki rolled her eye, taking the opportunity to glance at her sister and Mako. They were both still on the floor, but neither looked like they'd gotten as much punishment as she had.

Well, of course they hadn't. Even sewn together with the heart of a cosmic entity older than the planet, even disfigured nearly beyond recognition, this was still Ragyo.

"Those events were mere redirections, checkpoints to ensure that you always turned just the right way to make it here," Ragyo continued, still staring out at the night sky. "All to bring you to your birthright. You three had to fight, had to suffer, had to die to get here… and now you are here. You who rejected the Life Fibers, you who were born to them, and you who were unwittingly forced against them, all tied together by the strings of fate I can so clearly see now. You were placed on this earth to bear witness to this, the night of destiny for the human species. The night of the great feast."

"Get… on with it," Ryuko hissed through gritted teeth.

Satsuki expected immediate retaliation, but after several seconds of silence so thick it threatened to suffocate them all, Ragyo made a noise that could perhaps have been a sigh had it not been born so wrong. "Very well, daughter. I suppose I never did have Satsuki's penchant for compelling speeches, did I? There are so few exciting ways to tell the truth, but so many colorful lies and distortions to keep armies in line. The night is young, but there is much yet to even start. I permit you all to stand."

Satsuki's rage was shot through with uncertainty, and it was never good to be unsure of oneself around her mother. Ragyo could never resist pouncing on a stray bit of self-doubt. Nevertheless, she clambered to her feet and got back into a battle-ready stance. At the very least, she was managing not to wobble – she'd come prepared for a lot worse than a few solid hits.

To her relief, Ryuko had gotten up right before her, and Satsuki stepped over just in time for the two of them to help Mako stand. It was easy to forget, with her immense power and boundless zeal, that she was far and away the least experienced – and least durable – of their trio. Once they'd silently assured each other's relative health and safety, they stood still for a moment, foreheads pressed together and expressions drawn tight; no words were uttered for Ragyo to twist and mock, but none needed to be.

They knew that when they separated, it would start a ticking clock for the world. A clock she currently had no idea how to stop.

Satsuki let her arms fall away from her sister's and protégé's shoulders, clenched her teeth to hold down the berserk scream bubbling out of her chest, and turned again to face her mother. Whatever happened, she vowed to herself, the plan still held. The sun would not rise with Ragyo Kiryuin still drawing breath.

"Have you recovered? Good." Ragyo gently flexed her fingers, and the Fiber orb seemed to glow brighter. "Now, then. You are surely wondering what the point of all of this is. How am I going to stand against all of humanity banded together, with only Nui by my side, and not a penny to our names? How do I think I am going to prepare this world for consumption if the Holy Original was almost slain and the apes have abandoned our clothing? What is this… thing in my hand?"

The air ran thick and cold with their collective disdain, but no one made a sound. Satsuki was too busy running through ways to even the fight, and she trusted the others would be doing the same.

Ragyo looked like she was going to speak again, but instead, she cocked her head and scanned the sprawling cityscape. The glimmering orb vibrated intensely for a few moments, then lowered from its suspended strings and settled into the flesh of her palm, swiftly enclosed by her spidering fingers; it let out a hissing sizzle upon contact with her skin, but if she felt pain, she let no one know. With a gentle inward sigh, she drew back her arm, bending and cracking joints Satsuki knew couldn't exist in the average human body. The wind through the window seemed to instantly halt, but it had to be a trick of perception. It had to be.

Satsuki's throat tightened.

With little effort and incredible force, Ragyo threw the Fiber ball out into the darkness. Even with Satsuki's visual impairment, there was no way not to follow it; it lit up the sky as if just an incredibly low-flying shooting star, racing ahead and slowly curving down into a graceful arc until it was hidden between the towers below. The darkness that fell in its place seemed… wrong, somehow. Satsuki couldn't help but think of infected tissue left behind when a grievous wound closed.

"Bear witness," Ragyo moaned, "to the meaning of life."

There was a flash, a burst of radiance so impossibly bright that for the three-and-a-half seconds it lasted, Satsuki thought her eye had given out. For just those scant moments, everything in her being was flooded with pure awe, and she felt her body start to float and twirl in the light's brilliance. Her stomach plummeted and her hair blew wildly in every direction. All that she knew, everything in her life, was beheld to the light and what might lie within it. Her grip on her blades loosened. Slacked. Gave way entirely.

It flickered out as quickly as it had appeared, and Satsuki realized – of course – that nothing had changed. Not with her, at least. Had she actually dropped her weapons, she was sure she would be dead before she could kick them back into her hands.

Where the orb had landed and the light pulsed, the cityscape was overrun with burning orange. There was no mistaking it for a roaring inferno, even for a second; anyone who laid eyes on it would feel in their deepest core that fire would be a mercy. No, the skyline ran orange with threads of the Original Life Fiber, some nearly as thick as the buildings they engulfed and some no doubt as thin as spider's webs, risen instantaneously from the impact site. There had been no sound or scattering of debris, and even as the tendrils continued to grow, Satsuki saw no buildings collapsing or smoke blocking out the stars. They just… grew, spreading effortlessly through steel and concrete and layer after layer of reinforced glass. Even as the shadows were lit up, the night was almost deathly silent.

From miles away, they were staring right into the end of the world.

"Self explanatory, yes?" In her near-trance, Satsuki hadn't even noticed that Ragyo had edged forward, and now stood precisely on the lip of the window with absolute poise and confidence. "This batch will only grow so far, but with His power, I can create more without limits. Nui and I will cover Japan, and then we will travel across the seas, delivering humanity from the sin of its own sapience."

Teeth gleaming in her crooked smile, she spread her arms wide – almost knocking Satsuki back into the room, though this time she was narrowly able to duck and roll back of her own accord. By the time she stood again, Mako had rushed to join her, seething with barely-contained fury – but they realized simultaneously that Ryuko was not following her. She remained at the edge, pallid and shaking as she stared out into the night, seemingly unnoticed by her mother.

"When the feast is finished," Ragyo continued with a husky purr in her voice, "all that will remain of Earth will be a new body – a far greater body – for the Holy Original to inhabit. And He will take flight once more through the infinite void, searching, waiting for millennia upon millennia for life to once more spring into being somewhere else, ripe for evolution, ripe for clothing. But this time, while He drifts and seeks the next feast… His prophet and His daughter will be at His very core, strung together with Him, at one with Him and all of His children for all of existence. Just as it always should have been."

Of course.

Satsuki felt like she should have been shocked, dumbstruck even, but the rant settled in her core like she'd already been briefed on it before flying out here. Of course it was something like that. Ragyo was always a creature of habit, and as cunning and dangerous as she indisputably was, she'd never give up on her basic plan. The steps couldn't be more different from the Shinra-Koketsu operation, but the end result was the same: Earth a husk blanketed in Life Fibers, and the engineers of its destruction clinging to some unimaginable reward at the end.

She gritted her teeth, worked her muscles for another run, and planned again for the best course of action that would end with her mother's heart crunched between her fingers. Nothing had changed. Humanity still stood on a precipice. If anything, she appreciated knowing the details now – they would come in handy when she needed something to amp her back up the next time she was struck down.

It wasn't until she had zeroed in on a possible soft spot in Ragyo's back that she noticed something.

In the time it took Ragyo to meander to the end of her monologue, for Satsuki to come to grips with what was at stake, Ryuko had slowly stopped shaking. Her skin had gone almost deathly pale, and her head and left arm hung limp while her legs bent unsteadily, striking an almost eerie figure against the night sky. The only part of her that seemed firm was her right arm, which had extended out at some point Satsuki didn't remember.

Extended out to form a blade, which currently rested inside Ragyo's abdomen.

It happened so fast that Ragyo's expression was still plastered with her natural self-satisfied glee, oblivious to the injury that would have been crippling to a human being. She was only just starting to crane her head – slowly, so slowly – probably not even in pain, probably in the same bewilderment Satsuki felt if she ever got around to shifting her expression. The realization hit her almost before she had to glance at Mako to see the same frozen reaction: she was processing too quickly, her brain flooded with adrenaline to try to take in something immediate. The same thing that often happened to car crash victims, the same thing she'd deliberately induced to escape from Ryuketsu's grasp in Aokigahara. She was seeing the moments before her at snapshot speed, milliseconds drawn out into endless seconds.

But… why? Why now? What did this have to do with-

Ryuko's head turned ever so slightly, faster than anything else, almost enough to glance back at them…

And everything in Satsuki's view exploded.

- A Few Minutes Ago -

"Now… want to see what else it can do?"

There was no way out. Jakuzure knew it as soon as Nui finished speaking; in her present state, and faced with such overwhelming power, there was just no way to get out of here with her life. It was hardly like she could fight and expect to win, right? Nui was… Nui was like a god now. She had a hard time imagining anything worse.

She would die here, alone on the roof of her worst enemy's headquarters, never knowing what happened to Satsuki or the others. And in all likelihood, she would die with both extreme speed and unimaginable pain.

Nui bent her head back and let out a high-pitched sigh, twirling her fingers in strangely discordant motions that hurt Jakuzure's eyes to look at. The black swatches began to swirl and amass around her again, but it didn't look like she was about to turn back into the towering monstrosity; instead, the squares started to hover motionless in the air, one by one, until they were all frozen at a set angle. Only when the fabric was as still as the night air did Nui turn to meet her eyes again.

"My only regret is that I won't get to see my big sis's reaction when she starts finding the pieces of you," she whispered, still smiling serenely. "But Mama's wishes come before everything else, so… it's our alone time now."

The surfaces of the swatches rippled in tandem, splitting as one to reveal light pink material somewhere inside the paper-thin substance. Out from one stretched something long and pale; Jakuzure realized with a sinking feeling that they were human fingers, each tipped with one of Nui's sharpened pink nails. And each finger slowly exposed a petite hand, with the hints of forearm beneath the wrist filling her head with terrifying possibilities. Nui's giggle was sharp and cutting in the otherwise quiet night.

Goodbye, Satsuki. If you're still alive, I'll be cheering you on with Ira.

In the split second she felt she had left before those hands started to do whatever work they were meant for, Jakuzure did the only thing she could possibly think to do: flung herself forward, her limbs screaming and her stomach threatening to drop out from under her at the sound of crackling glass, and sank her teeth into Nui's leg.

For just that moment, it didn't matter that it was a fruitless action, just one last spiteful attack to ensure she wouldn't go out clean and helpless. It felt really good. The blood that gushed into her mouth was shockingly acrid, like she was swilling carbonated battery acid with only the faintest hint of copper; her body screamed at her to let go and throw up, but she held fast, clenching down with all of her remaining energy. Surely if she gnawed hard enough, she could hit bone before Nui kicked out and reduced her entire spine to powder – assuming the inhuman little bitch still even had bones to hit.

Puzzled and slightly disappointed by the lack of ensuing screaming, she glanced up, giving her best crazy smile without sacrificing her grip. Nui was staring down at her not in agony, not even in fury, but – she cackled when she realized, sputtering out blood bubbles – in pure, smoldering indignation, with a bit of confusion, disgust, and mild discomfort thrown in for flavor. Everything about her in this perfect moment was so easy to read: her widened and slightly teary eyes, her brows curled but slightly lifted, the way her jaw slightly slacked and her shoulders trembled. For once, nothing so much as a sigh escaped those lips.

It didn't matter what happened next: Jakuzure'd managed to catch her completely off guard, to give her one last taste of the depths a human being could sink to. She could live with this for the next few seconds. This was a fine way to go out. Satsuki, if she was still alive… no, not if. Satsuki would take care of Ragyo and make this little girl eat her own teeth. Yeah. Yeah, this was good.

Nonon winked and mustered up a muffled "HA", even as she processed that the wound was starting to heal around her teeth, even as she processed that there were things worming out of the wound and into her mouth, even as she processed that those things were veins and arteries moving like disembodied spider legs.

At least she'd gotten this far.

She closed her eyes, and as the glass shattered beneath her and the yawning abyss opened up, she let herself go limp.

…

And suddenly something slammed into her chest, she was going up instead of spiraling down, and her entire inner voice started screeching something to the effect of FUCK THIS I WANT TO LIVE GET AWAY GET AWAY GET AWAY GET AWAY GET AWAY

Her eyes flew open almost without her input just as this strange momentum tore her off of Nui's leg, leaving the probing tendrils whipping around half out of Nui's wound and half stuck in her mouth; she was only just starting to spit them out when the momentum spiraled up and over, almost upside down, jerking her even further back into reality. It was at this moment, this precious moment she would remember for as long as she continued to exist, that she realized she was in a muscular man's arm, hooked tightly with her side to the cold metal surface of a boxy, clunky, stupid mech.

In that singular instant, Jakuzure knew that for as long as she lived, she would never experience another moment of childlike joy, another sensation of being completely content in her lot, the way she felt when Aikuro Mikisugi stuck one metal leg out and, with the continued force that would quickly take them in a full backflip, launch-kicked Nui straight upside her fucking head.

The impact, sudden and immediate, took Nui right across the chin; her head snapped back and blood spurted into the sky, and finally she let out a gurgling cry – far from a scream, but close enough to sate Jakuzure. She craned her head to try to examine the aftermath as they arced back down, but now they were behind her, crashing through another pane, surrounded by twinkling orange shards and hurtling toward the floor- oh, it was much closer than she'd thought.

Go figure.

"She's taken a beating, but Nui's right up there, and if that did anything, it probably just winded her. No time to waste."

As Jakuzure's brain caught up from the seconds-long rush and registered Aikuro's hoarse voice, she was half-aware of someone rapidly stepping to her, lingering by her side and making noises she could barely parse. Then the stepper spoke, and relief washed over her. "Thank god, injuries are mostly superficial. Probably just got banged up from the crash, however she survived landing here. Few broken ribs and joint sprains, but trust me, she's endured worse. Nonon, you okay?"

Jakuzure smirked despite her present pain, and finally looked around. She was on one end of a large hall lined with tacky pillars on one side and splintered orange glass on the other, angled all the way up to the ceiling she'd just crashed through; she was still in the hook of Aikuro's arm, which he'd thankfully slipped free of his dumbass DTR thing instead of trying to scoop her up with the metal arm. A small mass of people surrounded her, mostly various Nudists and a couple of the Honnouji volunteers. But right in front of her, clad in his black-and-green transformed gear but already shifting back to his normal look, was Inumuta – geeky little Doggy – and she'd never been happier to see him.

Even though she'd been unable to stand a few minutes ago, she wriggled free of Aikuro's grip and took to an unsteady kneel, the thought of confronting Nui again without the element of sheer shock value settling in her stomach as she forced herself to her feet. She was horribly nauseous and one of her knees screamed, but Doggy was right, she could handle worse.

"C-Come on," she grunted. They needed no further input; everyone was anxiously glancing up at the hole in the glass, where Nui's reprisal grew more and more terrifying the longer it failed to arrive.

The next few rooms passed in a blur, all gaudy sparkles and vivid red-orange hues. Their loose and shaken party seemed to be the only living things moving through these once-busy halls and offices. Through the pounding in her ears and the strain of listening for any sign of giggling, Jakuzure managed to absorb the basics of the situation: communications were down despite some of the earpieces still functioning, and numerous Nudists were scattered and either injured or dead, but Aikuro and Inumuta had managed to reconnect and start gathering survivors while evading the monster outside.

"Still no sign of Lady Satsuki's team, however," Inumuta whispered. "I've been trying to home in on Ryuko's Fiber energy, but between Nui's new getup and whatever the hell else has been going on here, any scans I can conduct are useless static."

Horrific images flashed through Jakuzure's mind, but she took pains to remind herself that if this ragtag group could keep pace with an amped-up Nui, then Satsuki, Ryuko, and Mako ought to be more than capable of handling whatever Ragyo was up to. But as she cleared her mind and tried to plan, another image bubbled up; the memory from just before the crash, of her former friend charging up from his seat and into the hall. She had no doubt now that he'd sensed Nui's attack coming.

"What about Mon-" she started, before she caught herself. "What about Sanageyama?"

Things were silent for a few moments, save their echoing footsteps and distant sounds Jakuzure prayed weren't coming from the rooms they'd just left behind. Then, with a bitter note in his voice sharper than she'd ever heard, her nerdy friend answered.

"He's in the wind. We've searched all over the place for him, gone back to our side of the crash site multiple times. I even did some old-fashioned shouting out there at great risk to my own health and safety, since he of all people ought to hear. Nothing." He pushed his glasses up, but she could see that his eyes were wet and reddened. "My guess? He is either dead or gone."

Jakuzure tried to stop her eyebrow from raising and irritating the wounds on her head, to no avail. "Gone?"

"Meaning, he decided to cut his losses when he saw all of the bodies, and he slipped away. He'd be long gone by now. Maybe he thinks he can hide somewhere and ride out the fallout, whether from us or from Ragyo."

"You… don't believe that."

"I don't know what I believe," he muttered quickly, sounding embarrassed to have even brought it up. "But why not? He's done it before."

She had no response, and no idea why she felt any urge to see some good in the blind idiot. No matter how much he contributed or how much he admitted to his enormous screwup, and no matter how many attempts she made to reach out and be the bigger person, their time confined together in the headquarters had done little to improve her feelings toward him beyond tolerance of his presence. Once an oath-breaking coward, always an oath-breaking coward. But… still, to flee here now? To feel the weight of the human race on his shoulders and brush it off like nothing? Could anyone be that callous?

No, she thought, too quickly for her liking. No. Whether splattered on the pavement or trapped elsewhere, Uzu Sanageyama was still here.

She hurried on.

The building was still quiet. Jakuzure strained her ears, filtering out the pattering footsteps and her involuntary grunts, but she heard nothing. The spidery sewing machines they passed hung still and lifeless, and the display screens looked like they hadn't been dusted since they were first installed. The only things still working normally were some of the sterile overhead lights, whatever they were still pulling from with the power cut off ages ago, and the hospital glow they filled the space with didn't give off any warmth. They'd walked into an abandoned world, a frozen place so devoid of life that she almost wanted to scream just to start an echo; yet this was where Ragyo and Nui had been living for what felt to her like ages, and the latter was clearly very much alive and none the worse for wear.

What had they been doing? Waiting? Patiently biding their time for the trap to spring, and nothing else? Jakuzure had a sudden mental flash of the creep-ass duo standing motionless together in this very hallway, silently staring in the direction of the Nudist HQ, and suppressed a violent shudder. Her vision of Nui was still there when she cleared her mind, staring at her and getting freakier by the second; stifling the pain, she closed her eyes and gently shook her head.

Nui was still there. In fact, there were two of her now.

Jakuzure blinked, almost shook her head again.

Wait wait wait waitstopwaitstopwaitSTOP

She didn't understand what was happening until her spine lit up with agony trying to stop her from buckling forward, since her legs had already tried to overcorrect. With some effort, she managed to catch herself at a knee and pull herself back up, or at least, she felt like she did. She supposed it could have been one of her friends who caught her. She was pretty sure, at least, that she was the one kicking and snarling and trying desperately to fight something that wasn't even happening yet.

There were two Nuis at the end of this long, dingy hallway. Two identical little psycho girls, joined hand in hand and completely frozen, staring at the group with blank eyes and tranquil smiles. Their figures were dimly but clearly lit under a patch of working lights, yet Jakuzure found it hard to see them clearly. Nobody around her moved or broke the silence; she was so fixed on the twin Nuis that she wasn't even sure if her allies were readying their weapons, whatever good it would do.

The walls drummed with the beat a thousand tapping fingers.

In her mind, she was already running. Her muscles felt the movement even as she stood rooted in place, and her mind was mapping out which doors they'd passed and whether they looked safe to enter. Her legs were still shot from the stumble alone. Inumuta could teleport, but how far, how fast, with how many people? Could he react in time to do any of it? Was he scanning the girls right now? Did he even see them? Did any-

"Bye," the Nuis said with a single voice that shook the building.

The walls exploded inward.

Jakuzure got one look at the thing that filled the air from all sides – the smoky mass of swatches, faces, and body parts overtaking the crumbling hall – before she turned and ran, joined by an orchestra of other pounding footsteps and echoing gunshots. Her brain screamed at her that it would not be enough. She smacked her head against the next doorway to make it stop.

The only reason Satsuki didn't instantly rush forward, upon clearing her eye of the blindness and dust, was that Mako beat her to it. Even with her movements slowed and her powers nullified, she beat Satsuki's reflexes by a split second, forcing her to hastily cut off her momentum lest they collide and roll over the edge.

Ryuko and Ragyo were nowhere to be seen. Or, well, that wasn't quite accurate: she was quick enough to catch sight of two brilliant dots of light, unmistakably red and white respectively, careening deep into the glowing cityscape together. It was obvious what must have happened, but she could not put together how.

At the very last fragment of vision she'd had before her eye was overwhelmed again, she could have sworn she saw a massive burst of energy – similar to the thrust of Senketsu's flight form, but a far brighter red in a far less focused jet – explode from every thread of Senketsu's entire back at once. If that were the case, Satsuki could only guess that the sheer force of it, of whatever surging power had driven Ryuko to make her instantaneous attack, had catapulted them both clear of the building faster than either she or Mako could process. Yet it hadn't done anything more to them than slide them back a few feet, rather than, say, blow them straight through the back wall as physics should have dictated.

How? What WAS that?

There would be time for learning later. Satsuki stepped up to Mako and clasped her shoulder, sweeping her eye over the girl's strained expression. "How well can you move now?"

"S-she's all alone with Ragyo, we have to-!" Mako half-screamed in one breath.

"We are." Satsuki pointed out to the web of Original Fibers, where she was almost certain her sister and mother had landed. "Are any of your powers back yet, or do you need me to provide transport?"

After a few moments of near-hyperventilation, Mako shut her eyes tight enough that Satsuki worried the lids might peel off. Her cheeks puffed up and her fists trembled, but within seconds, she let out a ragged exhale and shook her head. "Not yet," she groaned. "I think I feel something, but it's not coming up. And if I can't do my normal stuff, I don't think I can properly use the Uniform, either."

She looked almost puppy-like in her despair, so Satsuki was quick to pat her reddened cheeks, hoping it would quickly let her know that it wasn't her fault. Without wasting a single instant, she sheathed her blades and concentrated her mind in full on assuming a flight form of her own; it still took some time for the memories of properly using the accursed Kamui to come back, but she was pleased to feel Junketsu's leggings slowly fuse together until only a booster remained. Mako obligingly rushed over and clung to her side.

Now, hopefully she could make the relatively short flight. She had only flown a few times in training conditions, whether in secret at the manor or during her very brief time getting reacquainted with the uniform before the Naked Sun's launch. Synchronized as she was, Ryuko made it look effortless. She hoped she could tap into some of that relaxed confidence, at least.

With one last minute calculation to account for Mako's weight imbalance, she kicked the jet into action, propelling them smoothly and gracefully out into the cold-

"NOOOPE!"

-and into a wall. An enormous, black-and-red wall that rushed up into Satsuki's face from out of nowhere. Everything went white for a split second; all Satsuki could process was the sound of Mako's shrieks cutting through the whistling of wind past her ears. When her sight returned, she barely had any time to note that they were spiraling downward before she instinctively flexed all of her core muscles, angling her body into just the right painful position to let the jet slow their descent. And she had barely any time to think about where they were descending before something else slammed into her: the curved glass of the dome, which splintered and shattered as she rolled down end-over-end until she managed to hook her elbow into the edge of a broken pane, stopping dead and pulling herself and her passenger to an awkward kneel on the nearest stable-looking surface.

Then, only then, did she finally feel the searing sting of the first impact all across her face. She first tested her eye, then her jaw, both in working order. Her nose didn't seem to be broken, though it bled rather heavily down over her lips, and she only had what she considered minor cuts and scrapes over the rest of her face. For such a severe blow, she would have expected more. It seemed… measured. Just enough to knock them out of the air without causing any severe injuries; Mako seemed to be just fine too, barely even groaning despite visibly bleeding from several cuts.

"YOU DON'T GET TO LEAVE SO SOON!"

Satsuki numbly turned up to the source of the rumbling whine that drowned out her thoughts, and after rubbing her eye to ensure she was not hallucinating from the blow, she found herself completely up to speed.

Ah. So Nui is a giant monster now. Inconvenient.

Really, though, she was almost relieved. At least now the little brat was no longer an unknown variable, and it settled the question of how her ship had been taken down.

She quickly glanced at Mako just to check how she was handling the sight, but if she was feeling any fear, it was masked under a furious snarl the likes of which Satsuki had only ever seen a protective Jakuzure match. In that moment, before she reverted her attention to Nui, she kind of understood why Ryuko had fallen for her.

The colossal shadow-thing Nui had become – or more likely, was wearing or controlling – bent down to examine them with its swirling orange eyes, drumming its spindly fingers against its cheeks. Each keening vocalization from the glimmering suggestion of a mouth made the glass beneath them shudder. "YOOOOU… ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WITH MAMA, LIKE OUR DEAR MIDDLE SISTER! BUT YOOOOOOOOOU ARE SHARED PROPERTY, AND MAMA ALREADY HAD HER TIME WITH YOU, SO I GUESS THAT MEANS YOU'RE MINE NOW! HOW ABOUT THAT?!"

"Ragyo barely had any time with her, actually," Satsuki said, restraining her instinct to scream at the infuriating little girl. She had to conserve every shred of her energy, and even as a multi-storied beast, she had no doubt Nui could hear her just fine. "Our fight was cut rather short. So why don't you let us both proceed to meet back up with her and Ryuko, and once we have finished rending the woman of the hour to pieces, we can all come back to play with you."

The Shadow-Nui cackled at what had to be the top of its lungs, if it had any; even having survived through Ryuketsu's endless shrieking, Satsuki's ears ached at the echoing noise. The high laughter was sharply cut off by an equally unpleasant sound, an eardrum-rattling rustle which Satsuki would almost assume to be the flapping of a thousand bat wings if she were feeling more imaginative at the moment.

The giant's texture was so deeply and uniformly dark that Satsuki almost didn't notice its chest splitting open, folding out to each side like angel wings; now, she could clearly see that its body was made up mostly of black fabric swatches, each shimmering with barely visible Life Fibers. And from this opening emerged Nui, clad in a fancy black gown and seemingly fused into the mass from the waist down, but otherwise just the same sadistic little twerp Satsuki remembered – though she noted an ugly purple bruise over her jaw marring her otherwise pristine skin, a perfect match for her scabbed eye.

"Oh, y'know, big sis, I never did get a good chance to look at you after you left me to rot with those naked apes!" Beaming from ear to ear, Nui mimed pulling out a pair of binoculars and peering through them. "Wooooow. Even wearing my dearly departed Kamui, you can't begin to cover it all up. Really makes you appreciate all of those gentle, loving baths, huh? It's such a shame you'll never get to go back to those days, now that you know what you could've had!"

Satsuki rolled her eye and glanced at Mako again; she could tell her rage was overpowering, but the younger girl met her gaze with eyes in perfect focus, clearly waiting on her to make the first move.

"You have not answered my proposal, Nui," Satsuki half-shouted, just loud enough to make herself heard at that distance without giving her 'little sister' the idea that she was getting a rise out of her. "And for your information, my beloved thinks these scars are quite cute. You will have to find other means of insulting me."

"Yeah, yeah, the little pink gremlin you've been letting into your bed." Nui stuck her tongue out, blowing a loud raspberry at her and licking her lips as she withdrew it. "I actually spoke to her just a few minutes ago. I'm actually kind of still speaking to her, or at her, I suppose, because she is a TERRIBLE conversationalist. I can't see what it is about her you like so much, sis. There isn't an elegant bone in her so easily breakable body!"

"What on earth do you mean, you're still speaking to her?"

"Chest like a flat iron, only curve on her is that bulbous head! And the mouth on that little girl. I can tolerate a little bit of cursing in the right mood, but do you actually like such a vulgar-?!" She cut herself off, leaving her mouth frozen open for a few seconds in the same unbending smile. "Oh, I'm multitasking, silly! Otherwise, I'd be down on your level so we could be face to beautiful face! You should try it some time! Because right now you still have to go meet up with Mama again, and you'll probably also want to catch up to your little lady love before I finish playing with her, but it'll be so rude if you just up and leave in the middle of a conversation!"

After so many years of living under the same roof, Satsuki was used to filtering out nearly everything Nui said, as ninety percent of any given speech was either complete nonsense or designed to hurt her. Instead, she honed in on the few pieces of relevant information, and let her mind race even as she prepared to spring into action.

One: If Nui was dangling Nonon's life as a taunt instead of describing her death or displaying her corpse, that meant she was alive. She had never seriously doubted that, but it warmed her heart all the same. And if she was alive, others likely were as well.

Two: Nui was hunting Nonon and giving her trouble while her real body was right here. She could be talking about her ability to make Life Fiber doppelgangers, but Satsuki hadn't seen her use that ability in many months; they were too weak and too easily destroyed to be useful as more than distractions. So she must logically have a new ability, or some powered-up version of her old one, and that was another unknown variable.

"My proposal, Nui," she spat, her mental processing having only taken a few moments. "Allow us to go to Ragyo as you have apparently arranged, or defy your mother and give us your all right here, as you so clearly long to."

For once, Nui fell completely silent. Her expression tightened, losing all sense of joy and impish sadism; her good eye fixed Satsuki's with a flat glare that could have been etched into glass. The wind seemed to die around them.

"She's your mother, too," she half-spoke, half-hissed. "Don't you dare say 'your mother' like you're not my sister, Satsuki. Our mother."

Satsuki felt involuntary shudders overtaking her body, but fought to keep her muscles still. She had almost never seen Nui so furious, certainly never with such a swift drop from taunting to seething. And the universal truth of battle was that overwhelming anger made you easy to predict – and to exploit.

And few people know how to rile an opponent up quite like…

"Wow," she said, slackening her posture and assuming a toothy grin that felt alien to her lips. "That really pissed you off, huh, ya frilly little bitch? You want to go back to acting like a god, yet it just takes one little slight and it all comes tumbling down. It's like you actually still think we're family or-"

She was already kicking off and swiping out to catch Mako when the strike came down, but even now, she was surprised at the giant hand's speed. A shattering storm she could only compare to the Naked Sun's crash overwhelmed her senses, the scream of glass and metal instantly turning to dust inches away from her almost worse than the shockwave that rumbled her bones and turned her sidelong jump into a painful airborne cartwheel. Reflex took over as her body came down and she found her palm meeting the glass, allowing her to reestablish her core balance and flip up to right herself – just in time to cover her eye with both hands as the shrapnel cloud caught up to her, assaulting her with tiny pinpricks and cuts that, while trivial compared to all of the other injuries she'd sustained in her life, hurt horribly in their own right. Hopefully Junketsu would shield her from the worst of it, as she certainly wasn't about to waste time tending to herself.

The moment the hail of debris passed, she lifted her hands away and refocused. In the course of her two tumbling crashes, she had cleared some distance around Ragyo's tower; around this corner of the great glass expanse, she was greeted with the numbing sight of the Naked Sun – split completely in half, one blade buried in the dome and the other lodged in one of the nearby complexes. A grim reminder of exactly what she was fighting. Other than Nonon, how many of her troops could have survived that?

She shook her head and turned back toward the collapsed mess of glass and steel, muscles already tightened up for another dodge. Her colossal enemy reached her with one quick and rumbling stride, Nui's body having disappeared back into the whirling fabric mass that was now cracking its 'knuckles' theatrically for a second strike.

"STAAAY STIIILL!" Came the rumbling whine once again. "YOU LITTLE! TRAITOR! SLUT!"

If she could just get Nui all the way around the dome and then subdue her somehow, she might have enough of a time and distance advantage to get herself and Mako back to Ryuko, to find out what was going on with Nonon and the others, to just get a handle on the situation because at some point in the past few seconds her fingers had started shaking and she couldn't make them stop.

Stay calm. Breathe deep.

Break off from Nui. Save Ryuko. Save Nonon. Save everyone.

Focus on the fight at hand.

Break off from Nui. Honor her father's last wishes. Get revenge. Free humanity. Stop all of her friends and loved ones from dying horribly while she was too far away to help any of them. Propose to Nonon. Honor Ira.

You're used to hiding your feelings. Just keep it up for a few more hours.

Break off from Nui. Simple, immediate goal, she could do that. She turned quickly to check Mako's condition, her face flushing in shame over getting distracted from the health of her comrade.

Only when her mind finished catching up did she realize Mako hadn't followed her from the impact.

And that she was, in fact, sitting on Nui's shoulder, kicking her legs out and wearing the widest smile she'd seen her with in a long time.

It took more than a couple of seconds for Nui to notice something was off. Mako still wasn't great at counting, especially when her mind was racing in a million different directions at once and her heart could barely keep up, but she wanted to savor every moment of this.

Learning about the end of the world, losing sight of Ryuko, and getting smacked out of the sky by a giant hand was a good way to get the blood pumping, it turned out. And when she realized she was once again face-to-face with the little girl who'd taken her entire life away not that long ago, now all hopped up on Ragyo's power and turned into a cloth kaiju, her senses started clearing up just a little bit faster. She knew enough adrenaline, blood flow, and heightened emotions could overpower a lot of drugs; it was good knowledge to have when customers were trying to leave the family clinic in a hurry. So she concentrated, worked herself up, remembered the bitter shell of a person she'd once been, and felt whatever she'd been dosed with slowly starting to fade into the background.

But listening to that conversation? That… that lit a fire in her. She didn't even need to get her Uniform working again to get this done.

When those precious seconds passed, Nui jerked her head over to look at her; her expression would be hidden in this mess of cloth, but Mako figured she was contorting her peppy little smile in vein-popping rage. Smiling as sweetly as she could in return, she gave a little wave toward the big glowing eye and kicked her feet out for good measure. "Hi again, Nui! How 'bout you quit talking to Satsuki like you're some school bully, huh?"

She was already perched on Nui's other shoulder by the time one of her immense hands came up to swat her; the teleport was still a little wobbly and felt like pushing her body through a wall of water, but it did what she needed it to. As soon as her shoes touched the fabric, she tensed herself up and rammed her shoulder into the side of Nui's head as hard as she could, teleporting again as soon as the attack landed. Another hand crashed down where she'd just been, but now she clung to the top of the monster's head, peering down over the edge to try staring her in the eyes.

"See, she's my friend, and she's my girlfriend's sister, and you know what? You're right! She's your sister too!" She kept her tone cheerful, beaming it out with a wide smile like she was going on one of her childish motivational rambles from so long ago, but it was hard to keep the irritation from creeping into her voice. "And let me tell you: losing family really sucks! You should be thankful for every moment you get to spend with your big sis, because you never know-!"

The part of the head she was perched on rippled for a moment, the only warning she had to teleport back onto a shoulder before the swatches shaped into a gaping, razor-lined mouth. Watching the thing bite up into the air where she was just standing, it took her half a second to get her composure back.

"You never know when the time might come that you never get to talk to her again!" She slapped the closest patch of Life Fibers tangled in the swatches she was standing on, willing them to dissolve, but only managing to sap a bit of color out. "And sure, in your case, she doesn't really want to talk to you anymore, because you've been a pretty horrible little sister! But still! Be a little nicer, okay?!"

A gargling wail broke her train of thought as she searched for the next words, and Mako found herself reflexively digging into the very unstable surface for grip as Nui flung her entire form backward, then forward again, trying to shake her off.

"BECAUSE SATSUKI…!" Mako shrieked, trying to make herself heard over the winds like the subject of her speech so effortlessly could; it hurt her throat really bad, but it just barely worked. "SATSUKI'S NOT! JUST! MY FRIEND! OR YOUR FAMILY!"

The thrashing slowed after a few more seconds, and Mako didn't waste any time seeing what else the little brat was going to do; she teleported to the front of her "chest", clinging to what little she could find purchase on, and forced all of her energy into dissolving every Life Fiber her skin was touching. It took a lot of strain in the very short window she knew she had, but even though she was still weak, she was successful: bunches of Fibers slowly grayed and crumbled, and the swatches they were connected to fluttered away…

Yeah! This is so much easier than I thought it'd be!

… And were replaced almost immediately, more Fibers surging up from the swirling darkness as good as new, already connected to new swatches. Nui's "body" hadn't even reacted to the damage.

Oh. Well, I guess I still have to finish the speech.

Without giving Nui any time to retaliate, she turned back to the slightly busted-up REVOCS HQ and was standing there in an instant, once again next to a visibly disoriented Satsuki, giving herself a second to catch her breath. Her heart was racing out of control, but she could handle it. She turned to the giant monster again and struck what she hoped was a cool, inspiring, Nui-enraging pose – legs apart, arms crossed above her head, fingers making a peace sign, expression still positive but now a little aggressive – and kept speaking as soon as she could form words again.

"Satsuki is also technically still the terrifying, charming, super sexy Student Council President of Honnouji Academy! And back when that meant more than it does now, before she decided to put her awesomeness toward saving humanity from you and your mom, she saved two crying No-Star Students who'd just lost everything because of you, Nui! Remember that? She put her sword to your throat and forced you to leave all just to save two kids who were worth nothing, even though she knew she could get tortured to death for less, and even though she did end up suffering for being a good person eventually! And I OWE her, even now, more than I can ever tell her! So I WILL NOT just sit around and listen to her stupid little waste of a sister acting all high and mighty and gross and weird! BE! NICE!"

She choked for a second and went into a coughing fit as she finished, her rapid heartbeat and exhaustion catching up with her, but she held the pose steady. She had to see what Nui would do. If all worked out as she hoped, Nui would be so rattled and infuriated that it would give her and Satsuki a window to get her out of this monstrous shell and kill her, then rush to Ryuko's aid and kill Ragyo, then look for the survivors. If all worked out as she dreamed, Nui would break down in tears, admit how wrong and evil she was, and kill Ragyo for them before killing herself on the spot.

Neither she, nor Satsuki, nor Nui said anything. The latter stood still, staring down at them, the vague and flickering red-orange face giving no real indicator of her mood.

Then:

"SHUT UUUUUUP!"

It looked like they were going with the first option. Nui reeled back and launched another strike at them, slightly slower but still more than enough to demolish their current position. Mako whirled to the side and readied herself to teleport, while Satsuki, ready as ever, dodged and smoothly transitioned into springing off the building, leaping past the oncoming arm with her teeth bared and her blades ready.

Mako had one moment to consider why the side of Nui's fist was rippling outward.

Before she could react, the fist froze halfway through its attack, along with the rest of the cloth kaiju. From out of the rippling area burst Nui's true body, still garbed in that weird black dress – but this time, the momentum carried her completely out, separating her from her monstrous form except by a few tangles of Life Fibers. The entire titanic monster form came apart in the blink of an eye, its Fibers sucking quickly back into Nui's dress while the swatches came apart and fluttered down like dark confetti. Satsuki, already past the point where she could attack the fleeing Fibers, flipped around in shock.

Mako processed this whole scene in a slowed-down moment, well before she saw that Nui was beelining right at her, good eye bulging wide open and mouth pulled back in a berserk grin.

She barely had time to think about teleporting before the demented little girl plowed into her, knocking her off her feet and wrapping her from the waist in a crushing grip that pinned her hands against her hips. They hung in the air for a moment, Mako's view of the sky obscured by Nui's frozen features, and then plunged down; the shattering of thick glass against her back blew all of the wind out of her lungs, and she barely had enough time in the next second to breathe again before landing did it again. They rolled and tumbled with the impact, but Nui refused to let go of her, no matter how hard she kicked and struggled.

When they came to a stop, Nui lifted her head up slightly, giving Mako just enough space to see that they were back inside the building, this time in a dimly lit exterior hall with the slanted glass on one side and rows of doors and columns on the other.

"There was a time when I wanted to take you as a prize for all my hard work," Nui said through her unmoving smile. "When I thought you were a neat little novelty who I could reward with baths if you were good to me. But, little Mankanshoku… that time passed ages ago. I am so, so, so, so, so, so done with you. I'm done with you wrecking up my life, I'm done with you wrecking up Mama's plans, I'm done with you being an unholy Anti-Life Fiber abomination, and I AM SO! DONE! WITH YOUR ATTITUDE!"

At the last screeched word, she released her grip and stood in one swift motion; Mako cried out in pain as she was yanked up by her hair, even though neither of Nui's hands seemed to be touching her.

"So you know what? Fine, Mama can have my big ol' traitor slut of a sister. I hope she peels her like an orange and strangles Ryuko with the skin. You? You're mine, and I intend to pay you back in full for everything you've made me suffer since I knocked on your front door and cut your mama's belly open!" Nui launched into a giggling fit, but cut herself off after a few seconds and plastered a serene smile over her face. "But you're the last human who means anything to me who I'm gonna get the chance to play with, and I've been waiting for so long to get my hands on you, so you know what? I'll grant your last request. I'll be nice, and let you have a little bit of a head start! Just like the day we met! That way I can-!"

Mako spun on her heel and teleported straight through the nearest wall, making another jump as soon as she could work up the energy.

Far behind her, she heard a muffled scream of irritation.

The world was blinding orange and her right arm hurt like hell.

"Senketsu?"

"We were out for less than a minute, and we seem to be uninjured. Currently, we are in the midst of the Original mass Ragyo birthed. Focus on getting your bearings back and locating Ragyo."

"Right."

As soon as she could feel her muscles again, Ryuko sat up and rubbed the grime out of her eyes. Her vision slowly adjusted to the blooming light, giving her time to unsteadily stand, smooth Senketsu out – he said he was fine and she felt he was fine, but still, she had to check – and rub her arm up and down until she isolated the pain centers. It felt almost like a couple of dislocated joints, but those piddly little things wouldn't explain the layers of burning soreness in her flesh and Fibers alike. Christ, what had she just done to it?

"We seem to have momentarily entered a state similar to our… 'Ryuketsu' transformation." Senketsu kept his voice as calm and stern as it usually was, but she felt his pang of regret at the name. "Our minds perfectly fused for an instant, allowing us to attack at our full power without Ragyo being able to listen in. Might be useful if we can trigger it again. It is still a bit blurry, but if I were to guess, the overwhelming rage and hatred we both felt listening to Ragyo's plan likely played a role. Speaking of, you really should get battle-ready again."

"Makes sense," she said under her breath. There was no time for anything further.

Her vision cleared just as she shifted the sore limb to its blade form and back, resetting the bones in a few seconds. She was more surprised by her lack of overwhelming nausea than by her location; her Fibers were itching uncomfortably and there was a knot in her gut, but she remained in total control of her body otherwise. She guessed she and Senketsu had been desensitized by now.

The mass that sprawled out around her – it had seemed so much smaller from the tower – looked like nothing else to Ryuko but a gigantic mass of veins and arteries knotted together, bloated with diseased blood that glowed a hateful orange. They spiraled out from every angle, melting into the concrete and steel almost seamlessly, already prepared to overtake the entire planet. It was as though the Original, that disgusting orb she and Satsuki had come so close to killing, had unfurled outward and exposed the infested innards hidden behind its crust. Already, the once-cold night air felt nearly as humid and heavy as that of the chamber beneath Kiryuin Manor.

Ryuko couldn't tell how far it had spread, or how far this batch would keep spreading. Really, she didn't care; with enough time, energy, and motivational smooching, Mako would definitely be able to clear all of this foul crap up like it had never been there. And that was assuming that killing Ragyo wouldn't just magic it all away, which, while unlikely, couldn't be discounted. So, bottom line: back to killing her mom.

She craned her neck and scanned around the glimmering branches. Ragyo could be down any shadowy alleyway, behind any window, or perched on-

"Here, daughter."

Ryuko dropped to a knee and blade-shifted both of her arms, steeling her whole body for a crushing attack and whatever retaliation she could offer. When none came, she stood and turned her head up to the web, where the voice had originated.

Nothing. There was nobody there.

"S-Senketsu?"

"I-"

"Oh, you needn't bother with the uniform, darling," the voice came again. "It knows nothing more than you."

Ryuko spun around, eyes flickering over every corner and blind spot. As far as she could see or hear, she was completely alone; there wasn't even the click of a stray footstep on the asphalt.

"Alright, enough of the fucking mind games!" She screamed, pausing to listen for anything her echoing voice bounced off of. "We already fought you once, you already explained your evil plan, WHAT is the POINT?! Just get over here and let me-!"

"Let you?" Ragyo whispered, her freezing breath brushing just past Ryuko's ear.

Ryuko was in mid-spin, arcing her arms out together so that they would chop an X right through Ragyo's stomach, when she felt hands slip over Senketsu's spikes and settle tightly into her shoulders. Her motion came to a stop instantly, the momentum of her arms and lower body only managing to send a few pulses of pain through her as they each tried to follow through and locked up against her immobilized torso. The hands pushed down a second later and forced her roughly to her knees, then, with a sharp tearing sound that almost made her puke on the spot, jerked back to arch her resisting spine backwards until she was almost folded against herself, leaving her staring up at the web and the night sky beyond it once more.

"That… ought to do it," Ragyo grunted, sounding pained but unbearably smug all the same. "Now we can talk, as mother and daughter. The way we might have always talked, had Soichiro just revealed your success to me instead of stealing you away."

Struggling to no avail, Ryuko craned her neck as far as she could and strained her eyes to see behind her. They were Ragyo's arms, of course – but Ragyo herself wasn't attached to them. They were severed messily at the shoulders, the blood-soaked clumps at the end trailing red and orange Life Fibers that rooted the limbs into the ground, and yet they still held her in a death grip. She was almost horrified until she remembered how Nui had crippled her with a severed arm at the Naturals Election.

"Focus, Ryuko, focus." The purr in Ragyo's voice churned Ryuko's stomach, but she immediately turned her head to face the source. "You wanted this, right? To be closer to your mother in the time we have left together?"

There. Finally, there she was. She stood tall atop the gnarled mass at the center of the web, just as disgusting to observe as she had been a few minutes ago. Spiky, skeletal red-orange Fiber limbs protruded from both of her ragged stumps, which still gushed blood that hurt Ryuko's eyes to focus on and steamed when it flowed over her bare skin. After a few moments of eye contact, she smirked – a strange and unsettling motion now, the corners of her glossy lips sliding over the permanently bare teeth in her cheeks – and spread the Fiber limbs wide, grunting in clear strain and discomfort but never dropping her expression. Ribbons of flesh and sinew slowly traveled up the length of the arms, blending seamlessly together until she was left with her old arms again, arms identical to the ones whose fingers still wrapped around Ryuko's shoulders.

Then she moved, and Ryuko immediately understood her little voice trick: her entire form disappeared, sinking cleanly into the Original mass below as if she'd dived into water. With barely any delay, she reappeared on the ground, striding effortlessly from the surface of one of the thick strands nearby. Neither it nor she was affected in any way by the motion, any more so than if she'd simply stepped out of a blanket of thick fog.

How… do I kill this?!

Her stride unbroken, Ragyo stepped up in front of Ryuko, infuriatingly close but just far enough that no amount of struggling could make her restrained arms lash out and connect. "Getting to see you without your unstable elder sister and your unholy little friend distracting me… oh, yes, Ryuko, you are beautiful. Look at the powerful muscles beneath your skin. Look at the Life Fibers tangled in your hair. You are a perfect creation in every way, all that I had hoped you would be when I sewed the Fibers into you. I would have been so happy to raise you and Nui as true sisters, true daughters of the Holy Original."

"You…!" Ryuko snarled, involuntarily grinding her teeth; every compliment felt like an ice-cold finger brushing over her skin. "You dumped me down a garbage chute, you sick old bitch! You thought you'd killed your baby straight out of the womb! Don't act like I was ever anything to you!"

Again with that gross, enraging smirk. "Times have changed. You will forgive me for being a romantic, but I have had such a long time to consider how much truer your loyalties and affections could have been compared to… Satsuki. You are the same as Nui and I, Ryuko – you've not yet felt what it is to be one with Him, but you are so close. Next to all of the humans you were forced to throw your lot in with, you alone feel the strength, the ecstasy, the connection of being a hybrid. And unlike my sweet, tender little Nui, you actually retain your lucidity! You were raised by a man who at least calls himself a scientist, you must have a mind for facts! You, more than anyone else, should know in your heart that what we are doing is the only course life can take! Can you not imagine drifting through the endless cosmos entwined with us, all together as a family? Dining together in the next great feast of whatever lifeforms the Fibers choose to elevate next?" She threw her head back and spread her arms wide. "Does everything in your being not shriek for that reality?"

Ryuko started to retaliate, but cut herself off as Senketsu let out a low, seething growl that echoed through the web. It was more bestial than any sound she'd ever heard him make, in or outside of her own head, and she needed no explanation; even feeling everything he felt at once, she could only imagine how viscerally the idea offended him.

Ragyo's smile flickered, but she kept it up as if she expected Ryuko not to notice. "Something to add, Senketsu? Perhaps you are already hungry?"

"Fuck off," Senketsu spat, trembling against Ryuko's chest. Ryuko almost dislocated her shoulder instinctively trying to reach down and comfort him; instead, she tipped her head down and nestled her chin as close to his eye as she could manage.

Chuckling through her pursed lips and still-exposed teeth, Ragyo crouched down until she was almost eye level with Ryuko. "And what say you, darling?"

"If you needed further clarification," she grunted, "we'd rather die a million deaths, each one following a lifetime of all the shit you put my sister through, than be entwined with you for a split second. Just talking to you is making my blood boil over. You're a raping, murdering monster, a sick excuse for a mother, and you're not even charming enough to make your monologues entertaining, let alone remotely convincing. So like I said: ENOUGH with the mind games. We came here to fight, you came here to die. I'm ready when you-"

She tried to get the last words out, but her mouth refused to cooperate; her voice came out muffled and wet, and all she could taste was something too putrid to describe, emanating into every corner of her mouth and down into her throat. Instinctively, she tried to bite down, but her jaw was locking up, disobeying her every silent scream to do something, anything, anything. A cold tear rolled down her cheek.

Then Ragyo's lips parted from hers, and it was over.

"You came here to die, daughter," she moaned, licking her lips theatrically. "If it was your fate to reject a life together because Soichiro's will is rooted too deeply into your brain, and my fate to exchange my Mind Stitching for the ability to propagate His spread, then that is the way of things."

She kept going, rambling into another one of her speeches, but Ryuko was barely listening. She was no longer being forcibly kissed, so why didn't she feel any better? Why did she still feel so… imbalanced? Why was she still shivering, quietly working her jaw up and down, trying to restore her sense of presence and not vomit all over the pavement? It had just been a kiss, not even a tiny fraction of what she expected Ragyo to do to her, what she'd already done to Satsuki. Just a kiss.

Just a horrible, horrible fucking kiss.

So why couldn't I do anything to stop it?

Only when Senketsu tightened against her did she find herself calming down slightly. She could feel everything he wanted to say to her, to scream out to Ragyo as he tore into her with hands he wished he had, but they both knew it was pointless to talk now. He felt as nauseated and used as she did.

"-insistence that you have synchronized with this false one," Ragyo continued from whatever she'd been raving about. "That, more than anything, exposes the severity of Soichiro's crimes against you. He ingrained in your mind that it is possible to become one with a mockery of a Kamui, sewn from Life Fibers diluted and poisoned by human blood, its innate will broken. The truth is that you have been turned into a parasite, Ryuko. Your exquisite body soaks up power from this living deformity while it is denied the ability to truly consume, distorting all that is natural and righteous about the Life Fibers. I abhor parasites."

Ryuko glared and half-opened her mouth, but said nothing. Just had to air out the sensations left behind.

"You cannot imagine how heartbreaking it was, seeing you in that demonic state. So close to perfection, so close to true synchronization and a tantalizing glimpse into what we could be as hybrids joined within the Holy Original, and yet… the very incarnation of all your wasted potential. Uncontrollable, delusional, weak enough to be taken apart in a single night by the apes who have tried and failed to eradicate Nui and I for almost your entire life. A mere monster pretending to walk as a god. Small wonder that Satsuki and the young Mankanshoku could tame you again."

"Funny." Sucking in a breath and leaning as far forward as the vise grips would allow, Ryuko tried to match her mother's smug grin with her own. "I seem to remember almost killin' you two that night. Snatching up your hearts, bashing you all over the walls with my uncontrollable, delusional, weak little hands. But it's all such a blur, I must be mistaken."

One corner of Ragyo's smile curled down in what would have been nearly imperceptible dismay on a normal mouth. "Okay, daughter. You wish to so rudely adjourn our only true conversation as mother and child so quickly, fine. Perhaps there was little to be said in the first place."

Again, she knelt down until her face was almost touching Ryuko's, and the air sucked out of the space around them. Somewhere far away, Ryuko was dimly aware of what sounded like explosions of shattering glass and steel, but her mind refused to stray from the threat ahead.

"Perhaps…" Ragyo purred, flicking that grotesque tongue over her lips again. "We can come to a more primal understanding. One intimate moment together, before I have to take your life. A piece of consolation for the life you could have had, and for the waste that was your perfection."

As badly as she wanted to shrink back into herself and scream out every foul word in her vocabulary, Ryuko kept her eyes laser-locked on Ragyo's face, soaking in every detail and quickly turning it over in her head. "This is gonna hurt," she muttered to herself.

"Oh, worry not, dear. You will be treated like a princess. I've no need to break you in like your sister."

With that, her eyes drifted closed and her face crept forward, taking up all of Ryuko's vision. She felt a tingling, spidery hand sliding down her chest, past her navel, toward the tight piece of fabric between the halves of her skirt.

She locked her eyes on the target.

Willed herself not to think, not to feel, just to move when she needed to.

Didn't count the seconds, didn't want to risk being overheard, didn't want to ground herself in what might or might not be happening.

All that mattered was what she kept sight of, for the single moment she needed to: Ragyo wasn't kissing her again yet. Their faces were within a minor muscle spasm of touching together, but she held back, eyes half-lidded, smiling that inhuman smile, watching, waiting to see her reactions, waiting for her to blush or cry or beg.

And for that, for just that one sick little impulse that might pass from interest in another second, she left Ryuko's mouth free.

The screaming started immediately, of course – but as the high note carried into the night, Ryuko's teeth were too packed with blood and cartilage to let out more than a muffled grunt. She moved before she could even let herself think about what she was doing, jerking her head back with so much of her strength that it let out a painful crack, tearing away what she'd acquired – maybe the nose, maybe the upper lip, maybe both – and spitting it back into Ragyo's eyes. The expectedly wretched taste filled her mouth an instant later, but Senketsu numbed her tongue as soon as he caught up to her movement.

Ragyo started to reel back, blood obscuring her vision and fingers clutching the ragged, spurting hole in the center of her face, but Ryuko was already on her; their faces met again as she slammed her head forward as fast as she could, as hard as she could. Whatever part her forehead connected with, she couldn't tell – didn't have time to think – whether it was that or her own skull that shattered so loudly in her ears. Not like it mattered; it hurt like a bitch either way, and she could regenerate it, probably. All that mattered was the result: Ragyo choked… gasped… and for just a moment, lost her impeccable balance.

And once again, the moment was all that mattered.

The spikes that were already sliding from Senketsu – she hadn't even needed to give him the transformation order – wouldn't be enough to cut away the hands that restrained her. They'd both known that without needing to confer about it. But they would, and did, cut just enough to force them into adjusting their grip – just in time for the booster already formed over her legs to let out a single pulsing blast, barely enough to send her a few meters. She felt the fingers take off chunks of her shoulders from the force, but she was suppressing enough pain already to ignore it and the shockwaves it sent up the lengths of both her arms.

She could comfortably ignore all of it because, as she slid uncomfortably across the ground with her back pressed to the road, she passed right between Ragyo's grotesquely splayed legs. And she had more than enough presence of mind to spring herself up in a twirling roll, just far enough to let the whirling spikes in her shoulders and skirt connect with flesh, and to jab one of her blade arms upward as hard as she could.

Don't know how far you actually got with me, don't care at the moment. This one's courtesy of my big sis.

She didn't know how much pain Ragyo actually felt in this twisted body, and whatever damage she did would probably go away immediately, but still: she knew in her heart that that would register. And to her delight, as she rolled past the ensuing torrent of polluted blood, the screaming resumed.

"Hope you weren't planning for-!"

The back of her head smashed into the asphalt before she even felt Ragyo's fingers twisting through her hair. Her vision exploded into a haze of blinding light and pitch darkness, and her entire skull rattled, not helping the pain of the blunt force trauma she'd just put it through. With her momentum halted, her legs started to slide out from under her, raking her back with the booster's stinging fire and straining her scalp against Ragyo's grip.

She had barely enough time to register the sickly white blob above her and jerk her head to the side before Ragyo's free hand crashed down next to her, splintering the road with a shockwave that got her ears ringing, but shook the clarity back into her sight. Thinking quickly, she arched her back up and let the booster free, her legs curving back on her body's axis and up over her chest. As her knees buckled against her breasts, she shifted the booster away and kicked one leg straight up, heel aimed squarely at Ragyo's face; her mother caught the stiletto between her teeth and stopped the attack dead, pulling back for another punch as she did, until she kicked the other leg out and spiked her right in the forehead. As Ragyo lurched back, Ryuko slashed both arms together over her head, and the hand clutching her by the hair fell free, giving her a moment to kick out again and propel herself off Ragyo's body – just in time to feel the edge of another powerful strike graze the top of her head.

Ryuko scrambled to her feet as soon as she rolled to a stop. Ragyo stood a short distance away, seething and letting out a restrained whine through her clenched teeth; the telltale sound of someone desperately trying not to convey how much pain they were in. It was a distinctly human sound, one Ryuko had grown familiar with ever since throwing her first punch in boarding school. The damage to her scowling face had already healed to the point that it was impossible to tell she'd been attacked there, but the massive slash from crotch to navel still dripped as it knotted itself back together, and the skeletal orange replacement fingers were only just starting to wriggle out of her stump of a wrist.

She was tremendously powerful, yes. Still godlike, even. But even if severing her Fibers from both ends wasn't enough to permanently damage her anymore, even if all the hurt in the world just gave her a few moments of pause, she could be hurt.

Then again... it would be really, really stupid of her to try taking her mother on alone. Her heart screamed to rush forward and dismantle her piece by grotesquely mutated piece, to pay her back right here and now for everything she'd done, but there would be time for that shortly. She'd made that mistake too many times to slip up now and let the impulse endanger everything. If it turned out she couldn't get away from this creature, well, then she might have to buy some time; otherwise, she needed to find her allies, and fast.

Blood was slowly cascading down Ryuko's face and body from injuries she couldn't quite remember having, even as she struggled to regenerate them, but she kept her stance and prepared to take flight. "What was I saying? Oh yeah," she said with a grin, sliding her blade arms together so they let out a shrill grinding noise before pointing one at the slowly healing wound between Ragyo's legs.

"Hope you weren't planning for a fourth daughter."

"Nooooooonoooooooooon~! Where'd you goooooo?"

Nui's shrill voices, all squeaking out the same thing, made the walls shudder even before the footsteps drew near. Jakuzure sucked in her breath and held it. Her heart was bashing against her breast, practically begging to explode free from her body and escape this place, and she barely felt like she could contain it. The incessant beat might just give away her position, anyway.

From where she lay, flattened on her side beneath a disused sewing table (for once in her life, she gave great thanks for her smaller stature), she had barely enough room to launch one attack. With her injuries slowly numbing, she felt she could effectively utilize her Goku Uniform again, but she didn't dare transform yet – for all she knew, Nui would sense the surge of Life Fiber energy and rush into the room to tear her into pieces. No, it would be a last resort, for when she was inevitably cornered in here. She'd have just enough time to shift and fire off one attack, either a sonic blast or a missile; neither would probably do very much, but she could at least hope it would buy her time to jet out of here.

If only there were some way to snip that Original Fiber stitched into her dress… Jakuzure wasn't the most well-versed in Life Fiber taxonomy, but she had a feeling that would bring the little snake down for good, no matter what kind of nightmares she tried to surround herself in. A sliver of an idea formed in the back of her mind, one too insane to nurture from where she was stuck now, but one that refused to die.

The steps drew closer, closer, closer. Clutching her mouth, she poked her face out from the shadows just far enough to see the room, hopefully not far enough to expose her position; not that it mattered much, because there was only one way out of this room, and blowing open a new path with a missile wouldn't exactly be stealthy.

Nui's arm was already curled around the doorway, pink and black fingernails drumming inaudibly against the wall. As she watched, it was joined by another, and then another, each addition pulling more of the mass that waited beyond into the light.

The mass that had engulfed Aikuro and his stupid DTR when she'd dared to glance behind her mid-sprint. The mass that, for all she knew, had engulfed everyone but her and Doggy.

"I can smell you, Nonon…" The voices whispered, giggling to themselves like a bunch of naughty schoolgirls. "I can taste you in the air. You don't taste very good, Nonon. Why'd she have to choose you? Why'd she have to choose you? Why'd she have to choose you?"

The fingers drummed faster and the voices swelled to fill the space around her. The mass appeared slowly from around the corner – partly dragging itself, partly floating, partly churning forward on identical legs she couldn't count the number of.

"Why'd she have to choose you? Why'd she have to choose you? Why'd she have to choose you? Why'd she have to choose you?"

The closest thing she could compare it to was an enormous, bloated centipede made of red and black smoke, so cumbersome-looking and yet so sickeningly fast. Its shape shifted and churned with every movement, and sometimes the dark fabric became smooth, pinkish-white flesh with glowing red varicose veins. Nui's faces – clusters of them – appeared sporadically along on the surface, mouthing something before sinking back into the darkness.

"Why'd she have to choose… you?"

The hands pawed at each other and the body they sprouted from, digging into the walls and pulling the enormous being along, or maybe guiding its way. Despite the legs, despite the footsteps, it rarely seemed to touch the floor. And she had yet to see how long its body was.

"Maaaaaybeeeeeee…"

One of the faces lazily floated out of the fabric, then jerked to face her, sending a shock up her whole body. She stifled her scream and retreated into the shadows, readying herself to attack.

Nothing happened. The voices and the trundling steps fell silent.

As cautiously as she could, Jakuzure peered out again, just in time to catch a glimpse of a stream of Life Fibers snaking away back around the corner. In less than a second and without a sound, her tormentor had vanished altogether. The only sign that Nui had even been there was the snowfall of fabric scraps drifting slowly to cover the floor.

Nui hadn't given up, she knew that much. Nothing could make that little shit stop dogging at the heels of her prey, short of a direct order from Ragyo, and sometimes not even then. The only possibility was that she'd gotten hurt or distracted by someone she considered a higher-value target than Jakuzure, and had rushed off to deal with that.

And there were just a select few people she could think of whom Nui might want to tear apart more than her. But Satsuki could handle this, no sweat. Ryuko and Mako too, probably.

"You can come out now," she called, suppressing the shiver in her voice as she wormed her way out of her hiding place. As soon as she did, Inumuta materialized beside her in a flash of bright blue, already transformed and spasmodically tapping away at the keys across his uniform.

"I've already scanned your vitals," he muttered, "but you're okay, right, Nonon?"

"Yeah, thanks. Come on, we might not have much time. She shows up again, I'm gonna feel even more fuckin' useless than I already do, and feeling useless was pretty much exactly the opposite of what I came here to do."

"Right." Inumuta started toward the doorway, humming an odd tune to himself; he was keeping cool, but she knew him too well not to recognize his anxiety. "Well, my Life Fiber scans are clearing up slightly, but there's still too much background interference to get a pinpoint on where she might have gone and when she might be back. But I am reading scattered human life signs along the path we just fled through. They're either hiding in side rooms or they've fallen a few floors down, but their hearts are still beating."

She thought about keeping her relief to herself – didn't want to show too much affection for the Nudists even if she'd technically been one for weeks now, it'd make her seem less cool – but she realized there wasn't much point. The smile slipped across her face soon after. "So she didn't just rip all of them apart. Good. Can you get a read on who exactly made it through, and how injured they are?"

"Nah, not right now. Need more time for that, on top of all the other things I need to do." He paused, pursing his lips as his fingers clacked away. "But I think I can get enough of a lock on their signals to warp them out alongside us, once we decide we're doing that. And on that note, do you have any suggestions as to what we should be doing? Because I'm fresh out of ideas."

The preposterous idea she'd just come up with flickered to mind again, but she pushed it down as they made their way out into the hall. "If our comms are still technically working, just being jammed or disabled something, is there any way for you to get them back online? If we're going to somehow win this, we need to get coordinating across the battlefield again."

"Way ahead of you. I think I can send out an EM wave that can switch all functional communicators within a generous radius to a working frequency. But again, it'll take a bit of time and a lot of energy. Once I do that and the mass warping, I'll be spent for a while. We should plan it all out, just in- CHRIST!"

Jakuzure fell and scurried backward, so shocked at her geeky friend's flailing outburst that she almost didn't notice the distorted shape pop into being in front of her. For a moment, her fight-or-flight instincts told her it was Nui, back to finish them off in a more personal form; it took her a solid second to note the short mop of brown hair in place of the comical blonde twintails.

Mako, for her part, screamed and stumbled back in turn – for all of the time it took Jakuzure to blink, and then she was on them at a bullet's speed, tackling Inumuta to the ground and wrapping them both up in a suffocating hug that made Jakuzure's wounds sting. "Aaah, you guys! You're okay! I actually found you! Oh, Satsuki's going to be so happy!"

"Satsuki?" Jakuzure asked, cutting off any further rambling. "Satsuki's okay?"

Coughing and catching her breath, Mako released them and stood, allowing them to get to their feet; Inumuta let out a dramatic sigh, but was ignored. "Y-yeah, she's fine. Ryuko, too, she's… well, I don't know, but I trust her to handle herself. We were trying to get to her and Ragyo when Nui stopped us, and long story short, I pushed her buttons and now she's hunting me. So we should probably run, huh?"

"We already were, at our own leisurely pace." Jakuzure tried to restrain her elation at the news, but she couldn't help it; her face flushed pink as she bit her smile down, and trying to stop her excited shivering just made her feel – and no doubt look – like a child about to get some candy. At least this was Mako, the ridiculously sweet one with none of her girlfriend's natural inclination to get under people's skin (a relatable trait, but still). "So, erm, you were out there dealing with Nui? And now she's chasing you personally, in her real body?"

Mako nodded, glancing anxiously over her shoulder.

"I assume she was in that big-ass new transformation of hers beforehand, and came out of it to get in here with you, up close and personal?"

Another nod, another glance.

"And did you or Satsuki do any damage to her, any at all, before she started hunting you?"

"Well… I tried." Mako looked at the floor, ashamed. "I managed to get onto her and start dissolving some Life Fibers, but she just grew new ones faster than I could keep up. I'm still a little weak from the drug – oh yeah, she drugged me, by the way, it was awful – but I'm pretty sure she can regenerate new ones faster than anything can damage her."

A timeline pieced together in her mind: Nui, freshly wounded and royally wound up, about to give chase into the building (or just smash that section to rubble) when Satsuki and Mako distracted her, forcing her to send in a proxy or a special limb or whatever it technically was so as not to let her quarry go. She endured a few attacks, but her outfit was busted enough that she had almost limitless shielding around her true form. Then, when she was angry enough to leave that transformation, she had to suck her duplicates back to her real body so as to not lose any Life Fibers – and Mako was enough of a priority for her that she'd follow with that real body in the first place.

… Perhaps her nonsense idea wasn't so impractical after all. In fact, it made way more sense now than it had in her head a few minutes ago.

Running through the details in her head, she beckoned for them to keep moving. "Alright, as much as I want to rush off and get back together with Satsuki right away, I think I've got a plan. It's a little out there, and there are a million ways it could fail, but if it works how I'm imagining it, we could finally put this brat in the ground and take Ragyo's last card off the table. Doggy, in addition to getting our comms working again, I need you to run some calculations, and they need to be as accurate as you can possibly get them, no matter how long it takes."

"Whatever you'd have me do is better than waiting around to be slaughtered." He cracked his knuckles and readied himself to process the numbers. "What calculations am I running?"

She explained, and watched with a smirk as he cocked his head and worked his jaw back and forth in surprise. Nevertheless, he set to work and began typing rapidly across his body once more.

"And me?" Mako asked, all trace of the affectionate sweetheart having drained, her stern face now the picture of Nudist discipline. "I assume I'm important to this working, too?"

"Well, of course." Jakuzure kept smirking, imagining the outcome of their victory. "You're our bait. And that means you get to smack her around until we have her where we want her."

It couldn't have been more than a minute or two since Mako and Nui had disappeared into the progressively shattering dome. Satsuki stared at the hole in the glass, then back out across the dome toward the gradually spreading knots of the Original Life Fiber. Goddamn it, her hands were shaking again.

Nui was gone now. Nothing impeded her. Why couldn't she just pick a path and stick to it? Why couldn't she choose?

With every second that ticked by, humanity shambled closer to defeat and devouring. Every moment that she stood inactive was another loved one she was potentially allowing to die. Ryuko – the sister she'd spent all but the past few weeks of her life believing to be dead, the sister she'd held as her first motivation for someday killing her mother, the sister she so badly wanted to spend more time with without having to discuss military strategy or matricide – had been fighting Ragyo alone for minutes on end, if she was indeed still alive. She'd observed (and experienced) her in combat enough to have faith in her abilities, but against Ragyo infused with the heart of the Original? She'd need backup. She'd need help.

But Nonon was in trouble, too. Her best friend since childhood, the one confidante she could always turn to without having to be afraid of compromising her image, and the one who showed her that she could still feel love and intimacy. Sure, Nui's attentions might be focused on Mako now, but she had no way of knowing how far things had gone already. She might be badly hurt, maybe even on the verge of death, and if she was still somewhere inside the headquarters, Nui might just divide her attention again and finish what she started. And what of Inumuta? Assuming he still breathed, he was still one of her best friends, introverted as he was. And if he lived and Nonon didn't, could he ever forgive her for letting another Elite die, for not being there just like she'd failed to be there for Ira?

And… and Mako, too. Ryuko's own Nonon. The girl she'd once protected, who evidently still felt indebted to her after all of this. If anything, she owed the world to Mako; without her, Ryuko's rescue would have been impossible. Even if she had the least personal relationship with her out of any of them – they'd only begun talking regularly after she'd assumed command of Nudist Beach, after all, and she struggled to process such an openly affectionate speech coming from her – she still felt a surge of protectiveness toward the younger fighter. She deserved her own vengeance against Nui, to be sure, but leaving her alone now would just be yet another crime inflicted on her by a Kiryuin.

Fly into the cascading web, or leap back into the headquarters. There were only two options. The former risked multiple lives, the latter risked only her sister's.

But if you don't kill Ragyo now, the entire world could suffer.

She closed her eye and gritted her teeth.

But you could lose everyone.

She sheathed her blades – it took everything in her to not drop them – and pressed her palms to her temples. Her skin was clammy. Her fingers tugged at her hair without her meaning to.

But you're wasting time deciding, you selfish little failure. It could already be too late. They might all be dead already because you couldn't make up your mind. Humanity could be doomed to consumption because you were too worried about your friends.

Her knees hit the splintering glass before she realized she was falling.

"So?!" She half-shouted; her face was already so wet with blood that it took the catch in her voice for her to realize she was tearing up. "Am I not allowed to be a little selfish, after everything I went through to get here? Is it so unforgivable for me to want something good for myself and the people I love when this all ends?! Have I not given enough yet?!"

Dad recorded a message preparing for his own death. He knew the mission had to come first. You've spent your entire life preparing to give up everything for this battle, and here you are, paralyzed at the thought that you might have to make a few sacrifices to save the world. You are a joke. All of the training and all of the pain was for nothing.

She tried to yell again, just to drown out her thoughts, but she was breathing too hard to get any words out. Her heart thumped rapidly, and a pins-and-needles sensation crawled its way up from her ribs to her neck, spreading all over her face.

What would her father do, if he were still in charge? Would he throw all of his men and billions of people around the world to the wolves just to ensure his daughters' safety? Or would he order them to concentrate on killing the ones who needed to be killed, no matter who lost their lives in the process? Would he be victorious, or would he be slumped over his desk, bawling as she was now?

Would she even be here if he hadn't helped murder an entire family on her island?

"L… Lady Satsuki."

Her eye shot open, and she was suddenly acutely aware that she was not alone, hadn't been for at least a few seconds. All she could do was glance over her shoulder.

Inumuta stood next to the hole Mako and Nui had disappeared into, in the middle of shifting his Uniform back to its normal state. His glasses reflected the dome's light, but Satsuki didn't need to see his eyes to know that he'd shed tears recently. His left hand was clutched tightly against his chest, while his right hung awkwardly at his side, searching around for something to do before being quickly shoved into his pocket.

She started to scramble to her feet, but the motion died before she even moved her knees all the way. She knew, in her rational mind, that it was pointless to try hiding anything; he had seen her at some of her most vulnerable moments since the Grand Festival, and she knew deep down that he still revered her. Even so, she felt the last vestiges of the unbreakable 'Lady Satsuki' slip away into the darkness, likely never to be seen again. It was a strange, numbing feeling.

"You're… okay," she whispered.

"Of course we're okay," he replied, his voice wavering but projecting confidence. "We're the Elite Two, nothing can stop us. Oh yeah, Nonon's okay too, if that wasn't clear. She really wanted to come see you, but she and Mako are working on dealing with the giggling abomination at the moment, and warping multiple people alongside myself takes some energy I can't afford to misuse, and… well, you know."

Nonon's okay.

The nauseating tingling across her upper body subsided, and as she felt her heart rate slow, she suddenly felt deeply silly. Gingerly as she could over so much broken and nearly broken glass, she successfully stood up and did her best to straighten the messy strands of hair she'd pulled on, before quickly wiping her face on her forearm and watching the blood disappear into Junketsu.

Inumuta spoke as soon as she turned back to him. "Hey, Lady Satsuki?"

"Yes, Houka?"

"I erm… well, forgive me if I'm out of line in saying this, but I feel like I should, being the only one here." The light dimmed in his glasses as he cocked his head down toward the dome, giving her the chance to see his dry, reddened eyes. "I can't imagine the amount of pressure you've placed on yourself, and I know Nonon should be the one giving you this pep talk, but… well, I know by now how you think, and how you still feel like all of this has to be your job because we're trying to kill your mother and your littlest sister. I just want you to know that even if you're in charge of our forces and you have more reason for revenge than anyone, this is not a battle you have to bear ultimate responsibility for alone, and having a panic attack doesn't… doesn't make you weak, or unfit for command. I'm not judging you for having a human response to stress, you know?"

Satsuki had no idea how to respond, but her muscles felt the faintest bit lighter now, and as far as she could tell, no part of her was shivering uncontrollably. She took a few deep breaths, and try as she might, she couldn't stop herself from forming a gentle smile. "Thank you, Houka. I suppose I needed to hear something like that."

"G-good." Hiding his face behind his zipped-up collar, he lifted his clutched hand away from his chest and extended it toward her. "Believe me, I'd love to stick around and help however else I can, but I have to get back inside and help with the Nui situation before something goes wrong. Here, Mako told me you three had yours stolen before you woke up, so I managed to pocket these off of… some soldiers Nui got to before we could. One's for you, one's for Ryuko."

She took what he was holding out: two earpieces, slightly banged up but unbroken.

"I'm sure Nonon will explain the plan if and when I manage to get communications back up and running." He was already shifting back to his transformed state as she hooked one of the devices to her ear and slid the other into one of her gloves. "If all goes well, we will be back outside shortly, along with a ton of wounded and a very irritable little girl. For now, just... just know we're okay. And know that I know, that we all know, you can take care of Ragyo, no problem."

He gave her a quick bow, and disappeared in a swirl of blue light before she could say anything.

"Thank you again, Houka," she said anyway. "Now... where was I?"

The booster slid over her legs as soon as she kicked off, and she soared into the darkness, aiming for the horrible light stretching throughout the cityscape. Her heart still hammered with worry for all those she held dear, but they were all, for the moment, still alive. And if they'd survived this long, they might to be able to survive – maybe even prevail – without her aid. The only unknown was Ryuko, and she wouldn't be unknown for long.

It was time for the daughters to take what they were owed.