Chapter Text
April 26, 2047. 13 days after Kirika’s 17th birthday.
S.O.N.G Headquarters, 9:19am.
“Here, something warm to drink.”
“Thanks, it does feel warm.”
Tomosato and Fujitaka had this exchange countless times through the years, always playing the same role. Fujitaka wasn’t allowed to use the coffee machine after a mishap on the first attempt that ended in a small fire and a very angry Ryouko Sakurai.
“Heard from Ogawa yet?” Fujitaka tapped away at his hologramatic keyboard as he asked, not making eye contact. He didn’t expect an answer of any meaning, Ogawa had been gone for several months in search of the original relics.
“Nothing new, but Igalima and Shul Shagana came in today. Elfnein’s making the shards now. She said their Symphogears will be combat ready in a few days if she works non-stop, and a week if she doesn’t. I hope she gives herself a break though.” Tomosato spoke in the same uninterested tone. The retrieval of two new relics was fantastic for S.O.N.G, but they were lacking in a vast amount of firepower. Gungnir and Airgetlam were yet to be recovered, while Ichaival and Ame-no-Habakiri had fully functional Symphogears once more.
Elfnein had worked meticulously after realising that while Sakurai’s Symphogears were destroyed, the relics likely remained safe and could have fragments taken from them once more in order to create new Symphogears. She dubbed the project “Symphogear System MK2”, with the plan of rebuilding the anti-noise armour to their old specifications, with applied alchemy to increase their phonic gain output.
“Same old Elfnein, though the more Symphogears we have the better I suppose. Where are the wielders?”
“At home. It’s not like they have to come in at 9 sharp you know, there isn’t a heap for them to do.” She sighed at him as a small alert appeared on her monitor. “A signal’s coming through. Looks like… a radio telescope? Forwarded by… NASDA?” Tomosato’s eyes widened as she read out the source of the message.
“It came with an audio file, play it.” The navy blue haired girl brought her finger to the air which displayed the audio window, immediately, a coarse, fluctuating noise resonated throughout the command room of the UN organisation. “That sounds horrible!”
“I’ve turned it down, you can uncover your ears, genius.” she rolled her eyes at the cowering officer. “It sounds like a terrible song.”
“According to the sensors, it’s an aufwachen waveform. But it’s even more disorganised than the one from Shem-ha’s bracelet…” Fujitaka’s eyes shot open as he swivelled in his chair and frantically began hammering his keys.
“Well if it’s disorganised, could it be a relic shattering?”
“That wouldn’t make any sense. A relic’s energy isn’t contained and then released. It's constantly emitted, so it wouldn’t spike if it was broken, it would just fade out. That’s what the waveforms are. It’s not more disorganised, it’s more complex. If Shem-ha’s was Apple, this is something else entirely…”
“More Annunaki.” She spoke more to herself than her companion, disbelief lining her voice. It had taken everything to defeat Shem-ha. It took Burning X Drive. It took Carol. It took the Symphogears themselves. She slumped back into her chair.
“I’m shocked too, but we need to deal with this. Contact the commander. I’m running the linguistics correction and aging programs as we speak, then I’m going to get a report from Ogawa and contact the military. Assemble the wielders, and tell Elfnein too.” Fujitaka addressed her, despite their equal position and ranking, she got up, composed herself, and walked off, pulling her communicator from her belt as she walked through the automatic hydraulic doors. This was important.
9:46am
“What’s the status?” Genjuro had very few words as the faint hiss of the command room entrance announced his arrival.
“We still don’t know, Commander.” Worry laced Tomosato’s voice as she addressed her boss. “We don’t know what it says, we can’t get a hold of Ogawa, and Elfnein can only reconstruct her memories of Carol, who wouldn’t be fit for combat. We’re defenseless, sir.”
“Now hold on, we don’t know for sure that this is a hostile message yet.” Fujitaka’s eyes left his monitor’s audio display as he swivelled in his chair to confront his partner. His calming voice was a front, but it held firm nonetheless.
“Fujitaka’s right. We need to stay calm, Tomosato. Overreacting will likely draw an even bigger response from world governments. Let’s focus on decrypting the message.”
“Decrypting what message?” A deep, authoritative woman’s voice rang out from behind the S.O.N.G staff. Genjuro lowered his head and turned to see the flowing pink locks belonging to Maria Cadenzavna Eve, designated S.O.N.G administrative leader. At least, that was her title until Airgetlam was retrieved. With her stood Kirika and Shirabe, who had clearly tagged along with nothing better to do.
“Ah, Maria, as well as Kirika and Shirabe. Hello.”
“Hey to you as well. Now, what were you saying about an encrypted message?” Maria’s tone was firm, assertive, quickly stripping any idea Genjuro may have had to hide information from the wielders. After all, if it wasn’t a threat, they had no reason to know, he thought.
Genjuro closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh before giving them the truth. “We received a message from the Annunaki. NASDA sent it through to us this morning.” The former FIS trio’s faces slowly morphed into sheer shock as the words that their commander spoke to them rang within their ears. It made so much sense that Shem-ha wasn’t the only Annunaki, but Earth was supposed to be abandoned. Shirabe was the first to catch on.
“Wait” the youngest of the wielders spoke with obvious confusion on her face “Shem-ha was meant to be sealed away on Earth, if they know she’s gone, they’re probably coming back just to monitor us, right?”
“Why would you tell people who aren’t meant to know you exist that you’re coming back to monitor them though?” Genjuro muttered quickly, unintentionally shutting down her line of thinking, in response to which Shirabe hung her head.
“Hold on a second, the analysis is done!” Fujitaka raised his hand as if to silence them before unpacking the brand new data.
“What analysis?” Tsubasa asked as she walked in with Chris, Hibiki and Miku not far behind them.
“Annunaki message, the program just finished undistorting it” Maria explained.
“Annunaki? Didn’t we already beat those guys?”
“We beat Shem-ha, Yukine. Not the entire race.” Tsubasa interjected, having understood immediately. Her voice was cold and calculated, as if the situation was already a dire life or death one.
“Quiet, I’m playing the message.” A short sentence played through the main speakers, tampered with by radio interference, though very obviously not Japanese or any other human language.
“The lost universal language.” Maria was the first to vocalise the thoughts of everyone in the room. “How are we going to even figure out what it says?”
“Wait, play it again dess. I thought I recognised something!” Fujitaka rewound the audio clip, and the same grainy lost dialect played once more. The end of the data byte sparked Kirika’s brain once again. It simply sounded like:
‘S--m-ha’.
“See! Can’t you guys hear Shem-ha in that?” The blonde bounced up and down at the thought of potentially discovering the first breakthrough.
“I think Kirika’s right! It’s fuzzy, but it’s there!” Hibiki agreed, looking towards the rest of the group for approving looks, which were given by everyone except Tsubasa.
“Something doesn’t add up.” The sapphire-haired idol muttered to herself, but still loudly enough for everyone to hear. “If Shem-ha is mentioned at the end of the message, it makes sense for it to be addressing her. Not to mention, if the Annunaki wanted to punish or reward us for defeating Shem-ha, they would know we don’t speak the universal language. That’s why Enki spoke to us in Japanese on the moon.”
“What are you getting at, Tsubasa?” The elder Kazanari asked his niece, whose eyes shot up to meet his own as she spoke with a dead seriousness.
“This message wasn’t meant for us. It was meant for Shem-ha. But it doesn’t make sense for the Annunaki not to know about the Curse of Balal and the Lunar Ruins.” Tsubasa turned from Genjuro’s perplexed face to address her comrades. “Someone’s looking for Shem-ha.”
“Fujitaka. Tomosato. Find every piece of Babylonian text you can, see if any of the words match up. We might be able to translate bits and pieces.” Genjuro addressed his support staff. “We need every piece of information we can get. And find me Ogawa.”
“Yes sir.”
“Commander.” The screen in front of Genjuro illuminated with the generic-looking, unassuming face of Shinji Ogawa, second in command of S.O.N.G, and professional ninja. Behind him stood blank, decrepit grey walls with no natural light shining on them, the man illuminated only by the forward facing light of his communicator.
“Ogawa. How is the search coming along? We could need Symphogears sooner than we could’ve imagined.”
“Has something happened? I still haven’t been able to find either Gungnir or Airgetlam!”
“We could be under threat from more Annunaki, but we don’t have concrete evidence yet. Can you give me any good news?” The agitation was thinly veiled, despite knowing that Ogawa wasn’t at fault for the lack of relics, Genjuro’s usually calm demeanor was crumbling rapidly at the potential danger ahead.
“Yes sir. While I haven’t found either of those two, I have found this.” Ogawa tilted his receiver to showcase the item he was holding. A circular stone plate with a silver screen in the middle.
“Shenshoujing…” breathed Tomosato. “But where did you find it?”
“I didn’t find it. I interrogated him .” Ogawa once again turned his communicator’s camera over to the wall on his left.
A wall of iron bars, behind which sat Fudou Kazanari. Now on death’s row after being found guilty of multiple cases of murder, terrorism, and actively threatening Japanese society.
“Father…” Genjuro grimaced “I hope he was cooperative.”
“Luckily, he was.” Ogawa put on his classic manageresque smile for them. “And even more luckily, it seems the person I’d like to talk to is right there with you.”
“It can wait, Ogawa. Come back to HQ with Shenshoujing immediately though, I’m sure Elfnein would like to see if a gear can be salvaged from it once again.”
“Right away sir.” Ogawa gave one final nod as he shut off his communications link. Genjuro turned back to the group once again.
“I’m going to speak with Elfnein. I suggest you all prepare in one way or another.” The burly officer strutted past the rest of the group and to the laboratory, leaving the wielders with their thoughts, and the administration with their measly amount of data.
11:20am. S.O.N.G Lab
Genjuro sat on the bench opposite Elfnein’s relic fragmenting apparatus, eyes locked firmly at his own feet, hands clasped across the gap between his legs.
“Tell me, Elfnein.” he spoke slowly, not sure if he actually wanted the answer that he needed. “Do we even stand a chance against another Annunaki without Carol?” Elfnein finished sprinkling powdered tungsten into her test tube before answering him directly.
“That depends.” Hesitance also outlined her own voice. “How much time we have. How these Annunaki compare to Shem-ha. How many resources we truly have at our disposal. We don’t have enough information to say for sure.”
“So you don’t think we can win?”
“I didn’t say that. But as you said, we don’t have Carol. She dedicated her alchemy as a direct challenge to the gods. ‘Dissect a god, and you can know the world it created.’, she used to say to us. There’s no alchemist in this world who holds power even similar to Carol’s. It’s not that we can’t win, we just have to find a new way to win.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Not at all. We’ve got no Dainsleif and no morally sound means to create a Philosopher’s Stone.” the tiny homunculus sighed, defeated. “But that doesn’t mean we should just give up.”
“I suppose you’re right. But we need something new, huh?”
“Unless there’s a second Dainsleif or another alchemist killing people out there, that’s the case.”
“What if there was a second Dainsleif?” Elfnein looked up from her work, while Genjuro lifted his head to meet her eyes simultaneously. “What if it didn’t have to be our Dainsleif, or even this world’s Dainsleif?”
“You mean another universe?”
“Gungnir, Ichaival and the Nehushtan Armour weren’t the only relics that Germany sent over during the Second Great War.” Genjuro began explaining to Elfnein, who was now completely fixed on the crimson-clad muscle mountain as he continued his tangent. “They also sent us one other relic. Gjallarhorn.”
“But there’s no Symphogear creation attempt ever listed in the S.O.N.G records for a Gjallarhorn.”
“Because it’s a complete relic. After some study, it was determined that it had the power to send people to other worlds, but activated seemingly at random. Without the certainty that anyone would ever come back, we’ve never used the relic.”
“So you’re suggesting we try and find a way to control the relic and go to another world for help?”
“Yes. We need another world’s Dainsleif. A new Ignite Module.”
“But you said we don’t even know if someone would be able to return from that other world. It’s too risky.”
“Obviously we don’t want to have to do it!” Genjuro raised his hands to emphasise his backpedalling. "There’s a chance that these Annunaki aren’t even hostile. But maybe we should look into controlling it.”
“The Yantra Sarvaswa. Shirabe’s report said it had only been cut in half, not completely destroyed. There’s a chance we could repair it.” Genjuro straightened up, seemingly done with the conversation after Elfnein’s revelation. “Where are you going?” she asked, rightfully curious.
“To prepare.”
2:53pm
‘All wielders to the command room as possible - Commander’
“What’s this about?” A skeptical Chris was the first to speak upon Hibiki’s arrival, as she was the last to enter the room.
“A way to fight. We need more relics.”
“We can’t just get new relics though, Commander.” Shirabe’s curt mannerisms on display as she pointed out a very real fact.
“No, we can’t, but we can retrieve old ones.” he replied, holding up a deep blue wetsuit with two parallel green lines running down each sleeve before throwing it to Kirika, who inevitably fumbled the catch before getting tangled in the limbs of her new apparel.
“Each of you take one of these.” Handing out the wetsuits as he spoke, all of them in the trademark S.O.N.G blue with each wielder’s characteristic colour along the arms and legs. “We leave for the Undersea Dragon’s Palace at 0700 hours tomorrow.”
“But it’s just a pile of rubble.” Interjected Maria, level headed as always but still confused.
“Indeed. But the relics that were inside have been around thousands of years, and there’s a good chance they survived the collapse. You’ll be collecting any relics you can find among the rubble, and specifically aiming for the two halves of the Yantra Sarvaswa. Any questions?”
None of the wielders spoke. “Dismissed.” Genjuro breathed a sigh of relief once his team had left the room. They might have a way to fight after all.
“Commander! We translated the message!” Fujitaka called out from behind him. The larger man almost broke into a sprint approaching the monitor.
“How certain are you?”
“Our estimates say it’s upwards of a 78% accurate translation sir!”
“Quickly then, play it!” Once again, the distorted radio crackles played over the command room’s speakers, only this time, the words between could be understood.
‘This is -----a. Do you read me, Shem-ha?’