Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"… As long as the usual you returns from this, nothing else matters."

"I will come back."

"I will definitely come back."

"… I'll definitely apologize to you with my head bowed down in front of you."

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The First Spell – Index Librorum Prohibitorum I

"Nn… ngh… fumyuuu—WAHHH!"

Uttering that nonsensical sound, Index Librorum Prohibitorum tumbled out of her bed and fell flat on her face. Fortunately for her, the bed was not too far elevated from the floor due to the small size of the dormitory room she was in; thus, her fall surprised rather than injured her. Even so, the fall was enough of a jolt to break her rest. She opened her eyes and, while rubbing the sleep from them, looked toward the window. Even through the nearly fully closed blinds, she could see the early morning daylight peeking through.

With some effort, she pulled herself off the floor and peered at a small digital clock placed near the bedpost. It read 7:08 am. She began the usual ritual of morning preparations – showering, donning her golden-patterned white nun habit, brushing her teeth, washing her face, tending to her nearly waist-length hair, and the like. For someone like Index, even this routine exertion was enough to work up an appetite, so she next walked briskly to the kitchen. Here, she was not alone.

Hearing a pitiful mewling sound, she looked at her feet to see her pet calico cat, Sphinx, sitting rather pitifully near an empty dog bowl. Not thinking for even a second that the animal may have purposefully positioned itself in a calculated play on the owner's sympathies, Index forgot her own hunger long enough to pulled out a small can of cat food. She expended enough energy in working the pull-tab loose on the cat food can to increase her own appetite. When she finally did open the food can and empty its nondescript brown mushy contents onto the bowl, Sphinx turned up its tiny nose and, whiskers shaking to and fro, stared up at Index with an expression that could not be read as anything other than displeasure.

"It's not good to be picky," Index scolded her pet cat. "Good children eat their food in all thankfulness." Perhaps having understood her on some level, the cat then started nibbling into its food without further complaint.

Finding human fare was easier than it should have been; there was a perfectly serviceable pot full of seafood paella in the refrigerator, courtesy of the Tsuchimikado siblings next door. She hungrily pulled the pot out, said her customary "Itadakimasu," stabbed into the contents with her utensils, and shoved large portions into her mouth.

"Ah, Touma," she said while quickly wiping her mouth with a napkin. "Could you pass me the soy—"

Index stopped herself in mid-sentence. An awkward silence permeated the entirety of the apartment building, drowning out the background noises from the usual morning rush of the city outside. Even Sphinx quit eating and stared fixedly at her. She returned the cat's gaze with a frowning glare. For a soundless three-and-a-half seconds, she and it locked eyes, as if each of them dared the other party to say something, anything. Then the cat relented and, bowing its head down and slinking back as if in contrition, resumed eating. Index sighed and did the same; yet she was not in the mood to hurriedly devour the dish as usual. She took her time.

"Gochisousama," the white-skinned, silver-haired, green-eyed, British Index shouted in impeccable Tokyo-style Japanese. After cleaning up and leaving the cat in the kitchen, Index walked to the living room and remotely turned on the television.

"—in the process of cleaning up St. Peter's Basilica, which was destroyed by a terrorist attack shortly before the events of World War III—"

Index growled and changed the channel.

"—the latest statement from religious authorities concerning the strange floating fortress which crashed in the Arctic—"

An ugly frown creased her pretty, doll-like face as she quickly changed the channel.

"In other news, through a statement released by its Board of Directors, Academy City has announced its intention to cooperate fully with relief workers in distributing aid to those in the Russian countryside hardest hit by the war—"

Index changed the channel again… and again… and again… and again. The resolution of the global conflict between Academy City and Russia dominated the TV landscape. Even channels not devoted entirely to news kept their eyes on the events surrounding the war. Index, who had been used as a catalyst to begin the war in the first place, and who had lost someone in that war, did not want to hear any more. Eventually, she turned off the television.

She could find no common cause with or sympathy for Russia, which had been propelled into war by an ambitious ultraconservative Eastern Orthodox bishop in collusion with an extremist faction from the Roman Catholic Church. This faction had imprisoned her mind by use of a control artifact in order to forcibly access the vast library of magical information stored within and use it to destroy and remake the world in their image. Although they ultimately failed, due to the intervention of a certain Japanese boy, the war they caused had wrought irreparable harm upon the world. Christian magicians all over the world would face a dramatic upheaval in their core belief systems in the days to come.

The other side of the war was little better. Academy City, a network of schools and research institutes located within western Tokyo, Japan, was a city built on the basis of strict adherence to the scientific method. It forcefully denounced religious and occult thought as mere superstition, denying the very foundations upon which the occult was built. The victory it scored over the much larger and much more numerically powerful Russian army was an anti-miracle; it demonstrated the power of Academy City's "hard science" against the magic and divine forces backing their enemies. While the Anglican Church shocked the Christian orthodoxy by siding with Academy City against its fellow religionists in France, Spain, and Italy, who had backed Russia, the move was a calculated political ploy by a ruthless archbishop.

Now, the boy who had saved her was gone, having disappeared in the wreckage of the floating fortress where the final battle had taken place. By choosing to remain at his home in Academy City over the objections of the Anglicans, in the hope that he would return, she had placed herself into a tenuous situation. She, a magician, was in enemy territory, buried within a sea of more than two million people who might well turn against her.

And this time, Kamijou Touma would not be there to leap to her aid.

"Touma…" she said softly, tears beginning to form in her eyes. "You said you would definitely come back…"

Before Index could shed any tears, a steady series of popping noises rang across her ears. These were faint enough that she could tell they originated from outside, yet sharp enough that they stood out from the ordinary noises of the city. These sounds steadily increased in frequency and intensity, increasing Index's anxiety. After six of these sounded off, Index had become fairly certain that something was amiss. After stuffing Sphinx into her nun habit for its own safety so that only its head poked out, she cautiously tiptoed to the apartment balcony, where she guessed that the abrupt sounds originated.

She had made it just past the balcony's sliding door and outside just in time to witness an explosion of light, sound, metal, and fire some four yards above her eye level.

"WAHHHH!"

With a surprised yelp, Index lost her balance and tumbled backwards through the still-open door and back inside, flinging her cat away from her in the process. After conquering the ringing in her ears, she turned her eyes upwards to take a better look at what was happening. But what caught her attention would not be above the balcony and in the air, but on the balcony railing itself.

Draped across the balcony railing lay a creature, the likes of which Index had never seen before. At first glance, she detected a vaguely feline base, but from then on out the creature was clearly, unmistakably fantastical. On the base of its back, standing out easily from its snow-white pelt, was a deep red marking in the shape of an imperfect ellipsis. Near this was a bushy tail whose volume and length nearly matched that of the rest of its body. Protruding from its catlike ears were two droopy, fleshy structures whose tips fanned out into three perfectly symmetrical, white-to-pink-gradient tips per "earlobe". At each tip, a red dot would mark the transition from white to pink. Even more strangely, at the midpoint between each of its two ears and its corresponding tips floated a ring of pure gold.

"Eh?" Index asked unintelligently, when faced with this strange creature who defied easy identity. "Eh? EHHHHHH?"

As if in response to Index's voice, the creature, the base of whose body had been draped across the balcony like a discarded toy, began to move. It slowly lifted its head up, and when Index looked into its eyes, she saw two shining red orbs, the likes of which could not possibly have been on any natural creature, staring back at her. In disbelief, Index drew back slowly.

Maybe I should let this little one seek happiness in a faraway place… she initially thought. She had begun to suspect that this creature was a magical tool or familiar of some sort… or if not strictly magical, then otherwise some runaway experiment of Academy City. It could even have been some state-of-the-art Academy City child's plaything that had been thrown aside after it had seen its usage. The black marks scattered around its otherwise pristine white fur would attest to that. Whatever the case, she felt that more trouble would come her way if she inquired further. So, with that in mind, she made up her mind to slowly back away…

"A sister? How unexpected, to see a Christian sister dressed in full habit in this far Eastern country." Index clearly heard a light, nigh-childish voice in her head. She glanced around her surroundings rather exaggeratedly before fixating her gaze back at the creature.

"Was that you? That was you, wasn't it?" Index asked aloud. "You can communicate with me with… um… telepathy, was the term the scientists used?"

"Ah, so you can hear me, Sister-san. I thought that I was merely talking to myself." The concise and pointed response assured Index that the creature was the one from which the voice originated, although she did not see its mouth move at all. "How fortunate for you. That must mean you have the potential to become a wonderful Puella Magi. Coming to this city may not be as fruitless as I originally thought."

"A 'magical girl'?" Index translated, her previous worry replaced with the first smile she has had her on face all day. "You mean, like Magical Powered Kanamin?"

"If that is what you wish," the creature responded as it hopped off the balcony in a most feline fashion. "I am a messenger from the Heavens who answers the desires of the faithful. No matter how impossible the wish, I can grant it."

"And you've come to grant my wish?" Index skeptically asked the creature. "For what reason?"

"Actually," it answered back, "I did not specifically come to seek you out, at least not this time. I landed here by chance after we were attacked."

"You were attacked?" Even as Index asked that question, she took a second glance at the creature's injuries. She then silently cursed herself for her momentary inattentiveness, which was unforgivable as a representative of her faith to a foreign land. "Just wait there a bit. You're injured, aren't you? This Index will fix you up."

"I'm fine. I was just knocked around a bit." Although Index had heard the creature's words clearly, she consciously chose to disregard them and ran the distance from the balcony to the restroom in such a timely manner as would have made Kamijou reassess her athletic capabilities. When she had returned with a clean mini towel in hand, she saw that Sphinx had woken up and walked outside the balcony, and that it was currently in a staring contest with the white creature. Sphinx's body was arched back, its tail pointed upward, its fur stood on end, and it was snarling even as it fixed its gaze on their guest.

In contrast, the other creature was as still as a pond as its beady red eyes returned the stare, with the only movement coming from the back-and-forth swishing of its bushy tail.

"SPHINX!" Index shouted; in response, the cat merely backed away slowly while keeping its labored stare fixed on the intruder.

"It seems as if this one dislikes me," the white creature responded.

"Sphinx," Index picked up the cat and stuffed it back into her habit. "You're being rude to our guest. What has gotten into you?" With that done, she picked up the white creature and began the process of slowly rubbing away the black marks on its pelt. "I haven't introduced myself. I am Index Librorum Prohibitorum. You can just call me Index for short."

" 'Index Librorum Prohibitorum'? That is in Latin, isn't it? Naturally, it would bring to mind a mountain of questions concerning why an obviously foreign young girl named after the Catholic Church's List of Forbidden Books is living in the heart of Japan," it responded as it was being tended to, "but you probably have your own circumstances. It wouldn't be my place to pry. As for me, my name is Kyuubey."

"Kyuubey?" Index asked, with one hand attending to Kyuubey while the other was thumping the still-restless Sphinx on the head. "That's no less strange a name than Index Librorum Prohibitorum. So, what are you anyway?" she asked Kyuubey. "Since you know about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, you must be a creature of magic. Who's your master? What magic organization are you from? You're not here on a mission to attack Academy City, are you? … Sphinx, quit squirming!"

"We are here looking for something… or probably someone," Kyuubey responded. "I'm not too sure of the details, but if it's that person, then it is best that you not be—"

An ear-piercing cacophony of glass shattering brought the conversation to an abrupt halt.

When Index turned around, a cloud of dust, debris, and glass shards assaulted her senses. She huddled around Sphinx and Kyuubey and closed her eyes to shield them from the explosion. Upon reopening them, Index spotted through the haze of the dust cloud the outlines of two slim, humanoid figures. Once the dust cloud subsided, Index ran to investigate the one closest to her – and gasped in shock and some horror at what she saw.

Collapsed atop a heap of glass and what was once a section of the apartment wall, a girl lay motionless and on her side. A small pool of blood surrounded the girl's legs, and she wore an expression indicative of prolonged pain on her face. Index, for her part, could instantly recognize who the injured girl was. The long, brown hair tied into twin tails… the petite, lithe figure… the telltale brown jumper shirt and checkered skirt of the elite school she attended… and the green armband further distinguishing her as a member of Academy City's volunteer law enforcement unit, "Judgment".

"Shirai… Kuroko?" Although Index had known this girl only as a passing acquaintance, Shirai's distinctive look and Index's innate ability of perfect memory retention allowed for easy identification. As Index was examining Shirai's condition, Kyuubey leaped from her hand and calmly walked toward the site of the incident. Through a freshly made hole where the front window was, Index could see the form of another girl.

Unlike with Shirai Kuroko, Index had never seen either this other girl or any identifiers within her clothing before. This other girl wore her jet-black hair long and unbound, allowing it to reach down to her waist and flap freely in the wind. At the base of her head, she wore a pink headband. Her eyes boasted a deep, mesmerizing shade of violet. For clothing, she wore a two-piece shirt-and-skirt combination held together at the nape of her neck with a bow, which, along with the color of the skirt, matched well with the color of her eyes. Beneath the skirt was a black pair of pantyhose with an argyle pattern at the sides of the legs. On her left arm rested a grey artifact which resembled a shield, except that the center of it and two nodes on each side were hollowed out.

All in all, Index thought for a second that this girl, who looked no older than middle school aged, reminded her of Magical Powered Kanamin. The outfit was certainly stylized. However, there was nothing magical about the shiny, metallic device that she carried in her right hand, with the deadly end pointed in Index's and Shirai's direction.

It was a gun.

Index, who was technophobic and in general technology-illiterate to a fault due to her upbringing in a society which disdained and belittled the usage of modern technology (including guns), could not tell how powerful it was, who made it, how many bullets it contained, or the like. She could, however, make a very educated guess that it was she who, with that gun in her hand, opened the ugly wound at the base of Shirai Kuroko's right leg.

"WHO ARE YOU?" Index shouted to the intruder.

"That was the last of them," the girl with the gun responded, withdrawing her firearm and running her free hand through the length of her hair in a manner that seemed contemptuously callous to Index. "We've wasted enough time as it is. We're leaving, Kyuubey."

Chapter Text

"WHO ARE YOU?"

"That was the last of them. We've wasted enough time as it is. We're leaving, Kyuubey."

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Second Spell – Index Librorum Prohibitorum II

The girl in violet leaped into the open sky in front of the apartment complex, with the strange white creature called Kyuubey perched on her left shoulder. From there, she instantly and literally disappeared from sight, leaving a stunned Index Librorum Prohibitorum and a wounded Shirai Kuroko in her wake.

That just now… was magic! The magic was practically instantaneous in its activation, and much too sudden and immediate for Index to analyze on the spot…

…but it was magic nonetheless, and powerful magic at that.

That one realization, Index feared, even as she rearmed herself with the first aid kit, would complicate and worsen the unfolding situation. Just by virtue of her demonstrated ability and willingness to wield magic, and at that against the protectors of the city, she would cause Academy City to once again become a battlefield. After Judgment failed to stop the magical intruder, security and police forces such as Academy City's Anti-Skill would bring out the bigger guns. Although such forces were well-armed and well-trained in the art and science of neutralizing criminals with psychic powers, Index remembered that the few times she had seen them fielded against even singular, moderately prepared magic users had ended disastrously for them. To put it frankly, they were vastly unprepared for the versatility, raw power, and determination an antagonistic magician could bring to bear.

With the Anglican Church's Necessarius busy with rebuilding its own forces and home nation, and with the hero named Kamijou Touma gone, the question of who could stem this fresh tide of conflict arose. For the sake of the city, and for the sake of the boy who loved and protected the city, and for the sake of preserving the perilous balance between magic and science, Index Librorum Prohibitorum felt strongly that she would have to bring down this malefactor herself.

However, before she could even begin to do that, she had a girl right before her eyes in need of salvation.

After confirming that she was still breathing and conscious, she delicately unrolled and straightened Shirai's body from its hunched-over position, taking care to keep the wounded leg level and clear the debris from the explosion away from the wound. She wrapped a fresh, unused piece of gauze around the base of the wound as a tourniquet. From what little she picked up from Academy City's compulsory First Aid classes while tagging along with Kamijou, she figured that this was the best she, personally, could do unassisted.

If only I could use magic to deal with this, she could not help but think… just as she heard a muted buzzing sound accompanied by something vibrating within her left pocket. On reflex, she fished around said pocket and found a pink cellphone. She opened it and immediately looked for the button to answer the call, only to find that she didn't have to press anything further.

"This is Uiharu," the youthful, panicked female voice on the other end of the line squeaked. "Shirai-san, we have reason to believe the intruder's an esper of some kind, teleportation or increased movement speed. She's already eluded three barricades and now seems to be changing course and heading back toward District 10. Yanagisako-sempai and Kaneyama-kun aren't responding. …Shirai-san? Shirai-san, come in! You can hear me, can't—"

"You're with Judgment, aren't you? Shirai Kuroko is in danger," Index cut in, neatly interrupting the girl on the other side of the line. "She's in the front room of a seventh-floor boy's dormitory, with a bullet wound in her leg." After narrowing down the address further, she added, "I've already taken care of the blood loss, but she still needs medical attention. Please call for medical assistance!"

"Excuse me," the one named "Uiharu" responded, "but who is this?"

"Hurry up and make the call!" Index shouted. "Every second counts!"

"Y-yes, Ma'am!" was all Index heard Uiharu say before the call ended.

After confirming once more that Shirai was still breathing and that the blood loss was properly stemmed, Index disabled the automatic locking mechanism (for all the good that did, as there was still a gaping hole in the front wall) and set out.

When magicians violated the boundaries between magic and science, the burden of bringing them to justice fell upon other magicians. Index Librorum Prohibitorum would uphold this tenet even as the justifications were steadily falling apart.

Moreover, as worried as she was about Shirai, Index's own position was a precarious one. She was still technically an illegal immigrant living in a foreign city. A deal brokered between the Anglican Church and Academy City, contingent upon Kamijou Touma's role as her guardian, had given her the political cover she needed to stay in the city, which otherwise kept tight controls on who was allowed inside and when. With Kamijou gone, and with her having actively defied her superiors in the United Kingdom with her decision to stay, she could not assume that she would be protected, if she were to be apprehended by Academy City's law enforcement and questioned on her immigration status. She left the scene for her sake as well as for others'.

Index ran out of the apartment and into a rapidly deteriorating scene of pandemonium.

Vehicles belonging to first-responders – fire, police, and the like – gathered in a seemingly haphazard array at the entrance to the boys' dormitory building. A growing crowd of panicked students gathered near the entrance, and in the distance, Index could view a procession of the telltale navy blue vans of Anti-Skill speeding to the scene of the incident. When she had made it to the floor, she could look back and see that, for once, the structural damage had not miraculously been localized to the Kamijou apartment. Indeed, there were even larger holes in the sides and doors of the sixth and eighth floors of the complex.

The girl from Judgment said that the magician was headed toward District 10, recalled Index. And we're in District 7...

There were twenty-three school districts in Academy City. District 7, located near the center of Academy City, was one of the larger and more populous districts. Within District 7 were located the student dormitories as well as many of the city's middle and high schools, from the prestigious Tokiwadai to the not-quite-as-prestigious high school Kamijou Touma had attended. It was also home to the office of the General Superintendent, the personage to whom the Board of Directors ultimately answered. Bordering District 7 to the southeast, and situated at the southern end of the city, District 10 had somewhat of an unsavory reputation. Ostensibly devoted to energy research, District 10 also contained the city's correctional facilities and orphanages, as well as, more noticeably, the only cemetery in the city. Unsurprisingly, it was also a major stomping ground for "Skill-Out", a term for armed roving gangs of Level 0 washouts from Academy City's Esper Development Curriculum who tended to target their more successful peers.

Index pulled her own cellphone out from underneath her robe while on the move. She accessed the cellphone's Global Positioning System and pulled up a map of Academy City, having seen Kamijou do the exact same thing during an earlier incident in which a lone magician walked through Academy City's security with ease. The border to District 10 was due south of her current position, and running to the inter-district border on foot would take roughly an hour and a half. Thinking on this, she quickly realized that trying to track a magician on foot, especially if the girl from Judgment was right and the magician could use instantaneous transportation, would likely be an exercise in futility. With that in mind, Index scanned the streets in hopes of finding an automated transport bus even as she continued her run.

In this environment, Index's attentions were divided among the three lines of checking her cellphone map, looking for quicker transports on the crowded roadways, and evading the eyes of Academy City's police and security forces. Thus, she was completely caught off-guard when a blinding light flashed before her eyes and an acute, stinging pain shot through her right hand, causing her to reflexively fling aside the cellphone.

Index, having been stopped in her tracks, looked around for the phone and saw it lying (face-up thankfully, which lessened the chances of main screen damage) on a sidewalk. As soon as she touched it, however, the sensation of pain from before returned. This time, as there was no blindness accompanying, she could see a sky-blue nimbus of static electricity flickering on-and-off around the machine. Puzzled, she glanced at the sky. It was mid-to-late morning, so the sun was still in the sky and the cloud cover was only moderate at best, with no signs of either rain or lightning.

While she had her gaze turned skyward, she saw a bolt of lightning race across the sky. The lightning, though high in the sky, was not quite at cloud level, so the source had to have been closer to the ground, at least relative to the skyline. Further inspection revealed that these blasts of lightning originated further from the road, behind one of the many wind turbines dotting the cityscape.

Although ignorant of the finer scientific points of electricity, Index knew that lightning simply did not act that way normally, so she went to investigate.

For her trouble, she found herself a mere couple of feet away from being flattened by a wind turbine rotor whirling freestyle like a giant white pinwheel at breakneck speed. Behind this dangerous projectile shot a trail of electricity. The dangerous shuriken crashed against the side of another wind turbine and detonated in a deafening boom, sending chunks of the building flying in all directions and creating a small cloud of dust. Index barely had time to look at the damage caused before the rotor, now suffused with an otherworldly purplish glow, floated away from the wreckage and rocketed back toward the other wind turbine… upon which it was completely sliced by a rod-shaped mass of razor-fine black sand particles.

Index tried to look up to get a better view of these strange phenomena, but the gaps in the view caused by the flying black things seemed to concentrate sunlight between them.

"Hey, you over there!" a girlish voice called in Index's direction while she was busy rubbing her eyes. "There's an esper terrorist on the loose, so you should be…"

Index, her vision and hearing cleared, knew that voice, and the girl to whom it belonged. Just like Shirai, she wore a Tokiwadai winter jumper and skirt. However, she was taller than Shirai (and slightly taller than Index herself), with short brown hair and eyes that matched well with her outfit. She also had somewhat of a tomboyish build to her. Most strikingly, however, her usually pristine school uniform had nicks and scratches all over it, especially around the arm sleeves.

That explained the electricity being thrown around. The girl in front of Index was Academy City's strongest and most versatile electricity-using esper.

"You… you're that idiot's pet nun!" Misaka Mikoto, the third of Academy City's seven Level 5 espers, the pride and joy of the Esper Development Curriculum, gracelessly hailed. "What are you doing all the way out here?"

"Who's a pet, Short-Hair?" Index shot back.

"You picked a bad time to go sightseeing. You've got to get out of here." Electricity flashed on the tips of Misaka's bangs of hair, and a ball of lightning formed within each of her palms. Misaka then faced the wind turbine, which now had a sizable dent in its side. "I know you're still around somewhere. So quit with the hiding and face me already!" Three streams of electricity shot out from Misaka's forehead and each of her hands and converged into a massive torrent of lightning, which destroyed the windmill in short order.

As soon as Misaka finished shooting, Index blinked… and then saw the violet magician (complete with Kyuubey perched on her shoulder) standing directly behind Misaka with the business end of her sidearm pointed at the back of her head. As with Misaka's, her outfit had evinced signs of the wear and tear of battle, but her stony expression did not change. "As you can see, I do not need to hide against the likes of you. Please do not make me pull the trigger."

Misaka, though visibly surprised and obviously caught off-guard, was not afraid. Instead, she suffused herself with a barrier of electricity that forced the other girl to quickly step back, lest she be immobilized by thousands of volts of sheer pain. However, even as she jumped back, she flung three objects forward. To Index, they looked like miniature green soda pop cans.

Index barely had the time to register just what those green things were when Misaka suddenly tackled her to the ground and covered her eyes and ears.

Thus covered, Index could hear only a muffled crackling sound and feel only a persistent tingling sensation across her back.

After four seconds, Misaka untangled herself from Index. "Hey, Shorty, are you all right down there?" she asked, shaking Index awake.

"Yeah…" Index confirmed, rubbing her eyes.

"Sorry about that. Those were just flash bombs. I can't believe I overreacted to something like—"

Two pink beams of energy descended from above and sliced through the cloud of distorted light. The first missed, but the second caught Misaka in the chest and blew her cleanly off her feet. With the trail of energy stuck to her taking the time to dissipate, Misaka rolled back to her feet and broke into a run, and a constant trail of pink energy lances dropped from the sky and lodged themselves into the ground behind her.

Index moved herself away from where Misaka was running and climbed her way to the top of another nearby windmill. Having done so, she could get a clearer look at the enemy. Surely enough, the magician in violet was the one sending those pink bolts after her. Apparently, she had foregone the use of conventional weapons entirely and was instead opting to use magic. The pink shots, Index could now plainly see, were arrows; from this revelation, it made perfect sense that the magical tool was a bow. The handle of the bow was a tree branch with a pink rose blossom at the tip. While one shot was nocked at a time, when fired, it would separate into four smaller shots which would fire simultaneously. The violet magician could easily control the speed at which the energy blasts traveled. She could manage up to twelve shots per second.

Strangely enough, although the magician was talented enough with the bow to keep Misaka on her toes, Index had gotten the sense of the bow being not hers, but someone else's. Perhaps it was the symbolism at play; the pink rose, in the language of flowers, symbolized grace, elegance, and appreciation. According to the prevalent idol theory of magic, in order to evoke the magic of the bow, the violet magician would need to bring out the qualities of grace and elegance. Yet the violet magician's moves, while not entirely clumsy, were practiced, rote, and purpose-filled; the girl wielding the bow did little to disguise the rigorous training she obviously went through to utilize the weapon.

Then again, it might well have just been the mismatching color scheme, with the bow (and the hairband, come to think of it) clashing with the magician's otherwise somber colors.

In any case, Index had analyzed what she felt she needed.

After lowering herself from her vantage point and returning to the battlefield, she took a deep breath.

"Reform and reverse direction," Index ordered. The latest round of bolts did just that, reforming into one concentrated mass of energy and shooting back upwards at the shooter. The violet magician dodged – barely – and nocked another set of arrows.

Spell Intercept is working, Index noted.

"Full tilt upwards. Release. Stabilize. Amplify. Release." Index heard the confused scream of the violet magician in reaction to her bow seemingly taking on a life of its own. The weapon shot a concentrated beam of energy into the sky, whereupon a series of pink concentric circles formed in the sky, blotting out the clouds for a quick few seconds, and swallowed the energy. The enemy then must have had a good idea of what happened, because she used her method of instantaneous movement to get out from underneath those circles. Index had done the same.

Not even a second afterward, out from the center of the circle shot an avalanche of pink energy that reduced everything directly beneath the circle to a smoking ruin.

Index had tried to continue running, but the magician in violet overtook her and kicked her to the ground. She kept her right foot planted on Index's back, and she had her sidearm pointed at Index's head.

"That was you, wasn't it?" the violet magician asked coldly. "What did you just do?" Index, who was beginning to feel the wounds and fatigue piling up, did not answer. "Very well. Keep quiet if you desire. I will not ask you again. Just know this – I have something that I need to accomplish in this city." Index heard a clicking sound. "And if you continue to obstruct me, then I—"

"Pick on someone your own size!" With another spear of electricity and a roar, Misaka Mikoto rejoined the battle.

"Persistent…" the violet magician seethed, stepping aside to avoid this latest attack and thus distancing herself from Index. She reached into her shield, probably for another firearm, when the purple gem on her left arm began to emit a bright lavender gleam. Paying no heed to the nun and esper in front of her, the violet magician clicked her teeth in an undisguised show of irritation. "It's close."

Then, she simply disappeared, her visage and presence completely gone without a trace.

For the second time that day, Misaka picked Index up. "What's with her? Teleportation? Energy projection? Instant materialization? Aerial bombardment? It was like fighting a flying armory! What kind of research institution could develop a Multi-Skill like that? Ah… I'm getting bad memories here." Index did not know whether Misaka was complaining to her specifically or simply giving voice to her frustration aloud, but something within her could not abide such ignorance in the face of the enemy.

"That wasn't an esper. That was a magician."

"…Hah?"

"Ma-gi-ci-an," Index pressed, separately emphasizing each part of the word.

"What's with you?" Misaka prodded Index's forehead with her own left index finger. "Did that terrorist kick something loose on that last hit or something?" Misaka shrugged. "That was totally an esper. In the first place, magicians don't even exist."

Index growled at Misaka. "They do! Magic and magicians really do exist!"

"Yeah, yeah, magic exists." Misaka's dismissive tone and hand-sweeping gesture completely betrayed her disbelief and undermined the sincerity of her admission. "So, Miss 'Magic Exists', do you have some convenient magic that'll help me track down that terrorist?"

"I do," Index shouted, puffing out her chest. She then produced her cellphone and turned it on.

The screen did not turn on.

Index pressed the on button again… and again… and again… and again. No screen had shown up, and no lights had appeared. The thing had broken after all. Index then growled at the device and shook it exaggeratedly, but it still did not respond.

"And this is the part when you get on your knees and scream, 'Such misfortune!' Right, Shorty?" The smugness in Misaka's voice did not improve Index's mood at all.

"Don't assign that Touma-like behavior to me, Short-Hair!"

Misaka then placed her left palm over her right eye in a show of exasperation. She then extended her right palm toward Index. "Hand it over," Misaka ordered.

"What?"

"The cellphone."

Index did so. Misaka fiddled with the cellphone's buttons for a few seconds… and then, using her prodding finger, sent a tiny trickle of electricity into the underside. With a victorious look on her face, she pushed the screen side of the phone into Index's eyesight. The phone was on, screen, lights, and all!

"The battery just ran dry," Misaka explained. "Seriously, what were you doing? You're supposed to let these things charge. Letting the charge go completely out reduces the maximum amount of power the battery can hold, you know."

Index could feel the blood rushing to her face. Oddly enough, this had something of a rejuvenating effect on her. "I… I knew that!" She then calmed down and focused on the map. They were still a fair distance from School District 10, and the prospect of someone on the level of Misaka Mikoto intercepting and stalling their target again was slim. "The suspect's headed toward District 10."

"How do you know?" asked Misaka.

"I overheard some people from Judgment," Index replied, "Shirai Kuroko and another girl."

"Kuroko?" Shirai was Misaka's underclassman and roommate.

"It's a long story," Index responded, cutting off her line of inquiry. "First, we need to find some quicker way to District 10."

Misaka sighed. "You could've said something about District 10 earlier if you knew." After a rueful shaking of the head, she whipped out her own cellphone, a stereotypically girly pink one with a childish frog-mascot strap on the underside, and rapidly pushed a series of buttons.

"What now?" Index asked, seeing the other girl retract her phone.

"We get back to the streets and wait at the next intersection. Follow me."

The wind vanes had taken Index further off the road path than she had realized. Noon had passed before the two of them were able to find an intersection, and nearly a half-hour passed before an available automated transport bus was available for usage. (That, Index realized somewhat belatedly, was the reason for Misaka's telephone call.)

It felt good, Index thought, to be finally off her feet.

"So," Misaka asked, "what's this 'long story' with Kuroko?"

"Shirai-san was attacked," Index recalled, "by that magician. But she should be all right. She should be in the hospital."

"Should be?" Misaka turned to Index. "Wait, what happened? Were you there?"

"They took the fight… to Touma's apartment," Index said. "They just crashed through the apartment… and then Shirai-san…"

Misaka shook her head. "I'd ask you what you were doing in his apartment – that's for boys, you know – but now isn't the time."

"Hey, Short-Hair," Index asked after a moment's silence.

"What's with you guys and silly nicknames? I have a proper name, you know. Misaka Mikoto. Mi-sa-ka-Mi-ko-to."

"Then, Misaka Mikoto," Index pressed on, undeterred. "Why were you fighting against that magician? You don't even have that armband, so you can't be part of Judgment. You're an esper with no conventional weaponry to speak of, so you can't be with Anti-Skill. You couldn't be out for revenge for your class junior because you didn't even know until I told you. You're a civilian member of this city, so there was no reason to put yourself on the line. So why?"

Misaka leaned back on her seat and turned her gaze to the bus's low ceiling. "No special reason. I saw a suspicious person tearing her way through the cops and decided to jump in and lend a hand. That's it."

Index merely stared at Misaka in response.

"What? Did I give you a wrong answer or something?"

"Not really," Index shrugged.

Another moment's silence passed between the two of them. Yet again, it was Misaka who broke the stalemate.

"Thanks," she said, smiling at Index warmly for the first time in the entire day.

"Thanks. For what?"

"For saving Kuroko. She can be a total weirdo at times, but she's a good kid at heart."

"You don't need to thank me for something like that," Index responded.

Around 1:30 PM, they finally made it to School District 10. Peacekeepers of various affiliations swarmed the northern entrance and checked everyone who wished to enter. Index, who did not want to face the authorities just yet, leaped off the train before it reached the official checkpoint. To her surprise, Misaka followed.

"What are you doing?" Index asked her.

Misaka shuffled her feet uneasily. "Well, I did kind of take out those windmills, so…" She trailed off. "Anyway, let's continue our search." As the two of them ran southward, Misaka quickly whipped out her cellphone and furiously dialed her way through a series of buttons. "Come on, pick up, pick up, pick up…"

Misaka visibly relaxed the tension in her shoulders and took a deep breath. "Uiharu-san? It's Misaka…" She paused. "Yeah, I'm doing fine. Thanks for asking." She paused and listened again. "Yeah, I already heard about Kuroko… She's at the hospital and will be all right? That's such a relief… Actually, I need you to do me a favor…"

Index could barely keep pace with the still-energetic Misaka and could thus concentrate only on snippets of the conversation. When Misaka finally ended the call, Index could only ask, "What now, Short-Hair?"

"Another Judgment branch fell silent," Misaka explained. "Their last reported location was an abandoned energy research lab south-to-southwest of our position, so we'll have to take a detour. If can we get there fast enough ourselves, maybe we can find clues to lead us to the perp."

Index gave a curt nod and, trusting the other girl implicitly, simply followed her.

The four-story former laboratory that Misaka led Index to reminded her of a desiccated, hollowed-out corpse. The outside of it was a very dark shade of grey, the kind of color that heavily implied destruction by fire damage or an explosion. In contrast to this somber color, a medley of green and bluish-colored hanging plants of varying species crisscrossed the perimeter of the building. The lawn around the building had been unkempt as well, and the grass grew long enough to completely cover both girls' feet and some of their lower legs as well.

The two girls picked their way through this grass and entered what they presumed was the front door. As soon as they did so, a thick, heavy, iron-like odor filled their senses. Index could instantly tell the smell.

"Blood," said Index to Misaka. "This whole place has the smell of blood."

Misaka tensed up. "Stay close to me."

As they picked their way through the ruins, they happened upon a roomy interior area that once served as either a lobby or a cafeteria. Directly above their position, they could hear the echoing sounds of two pairs of footsteps other than their own.

"Did you hear that?" Index asked Misaka.

Misaka nodded in confirmation. "We should get upstairs."

Finding their way upstairs was easy. Index and Misaka needed only backtrack to the point of entry, wherein there was a serviceable staircase leading upwards – serviceable being the operative word here, for as soon as Index stepped on the final stair, it collapsed, forcing Misaka to pull her up. Now that they had a better idea of where to go, the two girls quickly made their way to the source of the footsteps…

The deafening peal of a gunshot rang out, accompanied by a throaty female scream of agony. Index did not know much about guns, but she did remember the sound that the violet magician's personal arms made. This was not it; the sound was much more powerful and pronounced, perhaps indicating a weapon larger and with higher destructive power than the handgun.

Misaka made a reckless dash in the direction of the gunshot sound, and Index could do naught but follow.

The scientists' quarters in which the two girls found themselves housed a horror show for which they had to steel themselves.

Upon looking down at her feet, Misaka held her mouth in order to avoid retching on the spot. The bloodied bodies of four Judgment members – all but one of them female – lay on the floor, the telltale circular wounds on their heads indicating that they had, indeed, been blown away with a high-powered weapon. At the other end of the room, cowering behind what remained of a bunk-bed set, a fifth person, male, likely adolescent, pointed his firearm – which indeed had a much longer barrel length, confirming Index's suspicions – at the two.

"Why, you… were you the one behind all this?" Misaka shouted, completely fearless of the large gun the other person wielded. "Get out from under there before I force you out!"

The gunman rose slowly in response, allowing Index to get a better look at him. He was a pitiful wreck of a boy, with his shaggy, matted, short blond hair sitting haphazardly on his head. He wore a brown hoodie and blue jeans, and he had a manic, tear-, snot-, and saliva-filled expression of fear on his face as he continued to train the gun on the nun and esper. Index could feel an overwhelming aura of horribly distorted magic life force, the likes of which she had never felt before, emanating from this poor boy.

"I'm just a… just a… Level 0 after all…" he moaned. "A Skill-Out… an unneeded existence…" He made a pitiful show of steadying his weapon, even as tears clouded his eyes and presumably his sight. "You… you're from the Board of Directors, aren't you? AREN'T YOU? What did we… what did we go all the way to Russia for, huh? ANSWER ME!"

"You're not making any sense!" Misaka shouted. "I'm not from the Board of Directors or whatever, so just put that rifle down already!"

"It's useless, Short-Hair," Index shouted, hiding behind Misaka. "There's a powerful curse affecting this person!"

"A curse? You can't be serious!"

"SHUT UP, DAMN YOU!" ordered the gunman. He did not give them a chance to shut up. He fired a shot directly at the nun, only to have it forcibly deflected off its course by a shield of electromagnetic energy. Undaunted, the Skill-Out locked and loaded for another shot, but Misaka sent a powerful jolt of electricity back at him before he could fire again. The Skill-Out boy violently convulsed for a few seconds before finally collapsing to the floor along with the dead and dropping his weapon.

"Who would lay such a powerful curse on him?" After confirming that he was not going to get up and try attacking a third time, Index ran to the blond and examined his limp body.

"What are you—" Index's glare cut off Misaka's question.

"There should be a curse mark somewhere on his body, something like a tattoo, signifying the nature of the curse," Index explained.

"That's ridiculous. He was just under some kind of hallucination. You know, from breathing in all the plant waste around here or mental manipulation by an enemy esper or…"

"Found it," Index said. "What a relief. I thought I might have had to strip-search him…"

Ignoring the shade of red Misaka's face turned due to the mental imagery, Index examined the marking of the front of the neck. It was small, placed around the boy's throat area. The small tattoo was a pitch-black rendition of a symbol of some kind enclosed within a circle. The symbol itself was a line that ran straight through the middle of the circle lengthwise just before stopping at the upper tip. Branching out from this line were a series of six smaller lines, three on each side for purposes of symmetry, protruding out from the parent line. Index realized that it was a stylistic representation of a tree.

Index then grabbed a branch of overgrowth from the outside wall, dipped the branch's tip in the blood of the rifle victims, and began tracing the symbol found on the Skill-Out onto the wall behind him.

"Give me a proper explanation here," Misaka demanded. "You're totally creeping me out."

"Quiet," Index said evenly in response. "I'm trying to get to the bottom of all this."

After finishing her macabre wall artwork, she planted one of the safety pins holding up her outfit onto the direct center of the bloody circle. "Open."

As soon as she finished saying this, a wall perpendicular to Index's started to emit a ghastly black radiance that threatened to suck all light from the room. The black gleam just as suddenly turned into a bright green that forced Index and Misaka to shield their eyes before it stabilized into a lime-green replica of the symbol on the wall.

"It worked," Index said. "I had to wing it a bit there, using the corrupted mana from the environment and an alternate form of Spell Intercept. If I had to process my own life force to release the seal on the barrier, it would have gone badly for me."

"What are you talking about? What's going on here? Why am I out of the loop all of a sudden?" Misaka tapped her feet in irritation.

Index took a deep breath. This was like dealing with Kamijou in his more obtuse moments all over again. "Whatever did this to these children is on the other side of this seal."

Misaka cracked her knuckles. "So we go in, find out whoever or whatever's behind all this, and crush them, huh? Finally, something simple!"

While Index had hoped that the teenage genius behind her could find better words for her sentiments, she also realized that they would likely have to defeat what was on the other end of the seal anyway. So she nodded.

Without further preamble, Index Librorum Prohibitorum and Misaka Mikoto climbed into the symbol…

…and fell some ten feet from the sky before landing clumsily on top of each other.

When they regained their wits, they looked at themselves… and saw that their forms were stylized, two-dimensional… paper cutouts? They looked around and saw that they were in an expanse of forest, with the "trees" heavily resembling children's crayon drawings of trees. They heard what sounded like children playing and singing along happily in the background, but they could see no children – or indeed anyone other than themselves.

"What the Hell is this?" the two-dimensional Misaka asked, continuing to stare at herself in utter disbelief. "What kind of mental manipulation is this? Whose Personal Reality would be this twisted? Is this some kind of AIM Field corruption or something?" A spark of electricity flashed between her eyes. "No, this can't be a mental illusion, because I'd be immune to it…"

"Throwing around a bunch of scientific terminology isn't going to help," Index retorted.

"A scientific explanation would be better than just fumbling around in the dark like this!"

Index grunted in sheer annoyance. "Let's keep moving. If we explore, this should shed some more light on our situation."

Chapter Text

"I have something I need to accomplish in this city."

"Whatever did this to these children is on the other side of this seal."

"Whose Personal Reality would be this twisted?"

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Third Spell – Index Librorum Prohibitorum III

The two girls, Index Librorum Prohibitorum and Misaka Mikoto, slowly and cautiously threaded their way through the surreal sea of two-dimensional "trees". Misaka, as the one with actual firepower at her disposal, had taken point, while Index had followed behind her closely. Even so, as she was walking, Index was busy absorbing her surroundings, all five of her senses – and her sixth sense of magic – on their fullest alert. As the two moved across the forest, the "grass" beneath their feet crackled loudly and unnaturally, as if being fed to a flame rather than merely being stepped on. Meshing with this distinctly unnatural sound was the atmosphere of chanting and cheering in the background, which remained unintelligible even as the volume and tempo slowly but steadily intensified, further adding to their unease.

Suddenly, Misaka stopped walking, causing Index to bump into her.

"Don't suddenly stop like th—!" Index's protest was silenced when Misaka abruptly placed a finger on her lips.

"If we keep wandering around like this," Misaka said, turning her eyes upward, "we're going to get nowhere fast. Let's climb on top of one of these trees and see if we can't get a better view of this place."

"That might be a good idea," Index affirmed. She then picked the tree directly ahead of her and began climbing.

"Ah, wait! I didn't mean you!" Index could hear Misaka protesting. "Hey, can you even climb in that outfit?"

Deliberately choosing to ignore her, Index carefully began scaling the tree. The unrefined, childlike approximation of tree bark felt chilly, clammy, lifeless to the touch, and the nearly frictionless surface prompted Index to be especially careful as she climbed upward. Some thirty feet upwards, she had grasped a branch protruding from the side of the tree. The branch provided some small measure of support for further climbing but offered no vantage of point of view in itself, so continue her ascent she did.

She had climbed some eighty feet in the air when she finally reached the canopy. Directly ahead of her and to her immediate sides, the "forest" extended as far as the human eye could see. Only when she turned around did she find out that she and Misaka were heading the wrong way from the beginning, and that what was likely to be their destination lay at their backs.

Behind her, Index could see a massive structure in the distance. Given the four rectangular tower structures, each with a white flag on top of it, ringing a central, massive spiral tower at the center, Index at first thought it was a castle, not unlike what one would find in mid-medieval continental Europe during the Norman conquests. However, upon a more thorough inspection, she observed that each of the castle's towers, all four outer ones and the inner one, possessed a spinning wind rotor on the side facing Index, a sight fairly common to Academy City (despite its inland location) but incomprehensibly bizarre in a world where no discernible winds blew. Try as she did, Index could not immediately grasp the significance of these structures and thus resolved to go to this castle and take a closer look.

As soon as she resolved to go back down the tree, however, she witnessed a fiery explosion send the central tower crashing thunderously to the ground. The shock nearly caused her to lose her footing, but she steadied herself and made her way down.

"Hey, Shorty," Misaka said, once Index had safely touched ground. "I heard something hit the ground hard going on from behind us. I think we've been heading the wrong way."

"We were," Index agreed. "I think we should hurry up and go to that castle."

"Castle?"

"There's a castle in the distance behind us," Index confirmed, pointing in that direction. "It might well contain the source of this distorted mana."

"Then we should get going," Misaka said hurriedly. "Staying here is giving me all kinds of chills."

When Index and Misaka finally arrived at the castle seen in the distance, they discovered before them an imposing structure whose detailed stonework and towering battlements stood in stark contrast to the cartoonish nature of everything else they had seen in this world up to this point. Initially arriving at one of the castle's sides, the duo had to scurry around to the entrance. Once there, they saw, strung across the edges of the castle's battlements, a series of dark-blue rectangular panels tethered together by cords of a sickly greenish color.

"What are these?" Index asked herself aloud. "I've never seen such magical devices as these…"

"What do you mean by 'magical devices'?" Misaka retorted, breaking Index's concentration. The confusion and fearful uncertainty in her voice fatally undermined what was likely another attempt at sarcasm. "These are solar panels!"

"Solar… panels?"

"You know… those things which capture and store sunlight and convert it to usable energy?" After another second's worth of inaction, Misaka then reached out her hand. In response, one of the mysterious panels ripped itself from the wall and floated into Misaka's hand… whereupon it made a sizzling noise and Misaka's hand jerked away from it on reflex.

"Are you all right?" Index asked.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Misaka said hurriedly while she examined the solar panel (this time from a remove while levitating the panel using her powers). "Now I remember where I saw these things. Yeah, these are the Hyperion models, from that one green energy conference I had to attend with my dad a few years back. These things used an experimental virus engineered by an American institute affiliated with Academy City that perfectly spaced apart the carbon nanotubes inside, thus substantially increasing the efficiency of energy conversion and retention…"

Index folded her arms and grunted in annoyance again. The other girl might as well have been speaking a foreign language for all she could understand. "So answer me this, Short-Hair. What is such an obviously scientific device doing in such an obviously magical labyrinth?"

"More to the point," Misaka shot back, "what are these doing here anyway? And those propellers up there, for that matter… There's nothing even resembling a sun or wind out—"

As if in timely answer to Misaka's line of questioning, the wind propellers on the sides of the outside castle towers dramatically sped up their rotation. Precisely one second later, the chanting in the background went silent, only to be replaced by a shrill, ear-piercing cacophony that was half scream and half alarm claxon. Just above Index's eyesight, she saw the half-collapsed innermost tower, destroyed in the explosion she witnessed at the treetop, warp and reform itself into a stone-grey drill structure, with the pointy end "drilling" upwards. Rectangular cavities opened up, one-by-one with the impeccable timing of a machine, in the outer walls; and as each one opened up, one of the solar panels retracted into it. The one Misaka ripped from the walls automatically reattached itself to the grid and retracted into the wall alongside its brethren, much to the surprise of both girls. The sickly lime-green cords that once connected the panels together extruded out from under the wall, split into multiple interlocking strands (three to a pattern, a triple-helix), and drilled themselves powerfully into the ground, each of them exerting the force of a fully powered pile driver.

Aqua-blue symbols then flashed through the nodes on the panels like the different sections of a singular bulletin board system. With her experience in magical languages, Index could instantly recognize these symbols as runes; but before she could analyze this, a gleam of blinding light briefly flashed from the direction of the farthest tower to the right. Without any further warning than this, a gigantic bolt of lightning slammed into the open space between that tower and the one nearest Index's position. The area struck instantly caught fire, as evidenced by the plumes of smoke rising up from in front of the tower and the sudden flush of heat that Index could feel.

"Did you see that?" asked Misaka. Index nodded; and as soon as she did, the taller girl reached into her skirt pocket and produced a shiny, round, metallic object that Index could only guess was some kind of currency. Balancing said coin on her left thumb, she balled her left hand into a fist, flicked said coin into the air with her index finger…

"What are you doing, Short-Hair?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Misaka retorted, a nimbus of agitated electrons surrounding her. "I'm going to blow this freak show to pieces!"

True to her words, she flicked the coin right at the tower from which the light originated. The coin transformed before Index's eyes into a brilliant orange beam of light which sheared perfectly through the broad side of the targeted tower, toppling it on contact, as if the flaming sword of the archangel Michael had ascended back into the Heavens from which it had come after serving its purpose of guarding the Garden of Eden. In response to this, a pitch-black mass of… something… not so much flowed as bled speedily in its advance toward the direction of the two girls.

Moving ahead of Index protectively, Misaka tensed up and readied a second coin. "Stay close to me," she ordered, "and get ready to run. This could get ugly."

"Run? Where to?" Index asked, looking behind her. Another black mass was heading her way from the position from which they had come and quickly cutting off any escape routes. When Misaka checked behind her to see what Index was staring at, she instantly blanched and nearly fumbled her coin.

"This isn't good!" Misaka exclaimed, gasping in surprise. "It's thicker outside than inside!"

"We'll have to go further in," Index said. "This labyrinth is attacking us directly. At this rate, if we don't get to more defensible ground, we'll be surrounded!"

With all other options rapidly closing to them, the two braved the entrance of the mysterious castle, wherein the "fog" was at its thinnest.

Upon arriving past the gate, they found themselves within the courtyard. Another mass of black bubbled up from within the well and attempted to overwhelm them, but Misaka neutralized it with a timely blast of her electrical powers. This brief respite gave the two of them the chance to examine just what the black fog was composed of. When the two of them did so, they spotted that the black fog was comprised of a mass of grasshopper-like insects, with each individual insect possessing runes where its eyes were supposed to have been and double-bladed miniature scythes in place of legs. Other than the runes and blades, and the unnaturally dark coloring, Index could immediately identify what these insects were.

"Locusts," Index said. "These are desert locusts."

"What the Hell?" Misaka asked, just before flash-frying another surprise uprising of said insects that had tried to ambush them.

"The locusts are not all that strange," Index explained as she continued running. "These insects show up a lot within the Holy Scriptures. They were a sign of God's judgment on nations of plenty who refused to follow His precepts. One of the plagues of Egypt was a massive swarm of locusts. St. John the Baptist was said to have subsisted on locusts during his time in the wilderness, though that's a mistranslation. And one of the plagues in the Book of Revelations is—"

"Yeah, well, we're pretty far from the desert," Misaka cut in, "so what are they doing here?"

"They're this labyrinth's familiars," Index responded. "If we can reverse-engineer the process by which these familiars operate, then we can find and attack the labyrinth's source."

"You can do something like that?"

Index quickly stole an aside glance at the still-scrolling display on the solar panels. "Yeah, I can, but it'll take some time to decipher the necessary information."

"In case you haven't noticed, 'time' is one thing we don't have a lot of!"

"I know that!" Index shot back; but before she could continue her retort, she sensed a massive surge of the labyrinth's distorted mana coalescing and gathering into a pinprick-sized spot above them. A quick look upwards revealed that the leaden-grey clouds of the sky had split open to reveal a circular gap in the sky, through which Index could have sworn she had seen the fires of Hell. Upon witnessing magical force build up within that sky, she had a very good idea of what was coming.

"Short-Hair, get away from there NOW!"

"Eh…?"

"MOVE!"

Misaka obeyed Index's urgent command, and not a second too soon. Another lightning blast soundlessly flash-fried Misaka's former position and blew the two girls off their feet. The sudden flash of energy and subsequent wave of searing heat ripped Index's consciousness from her in the blink of an eye.

Index had the look and air of a petite, fragile girl of subnormal constitution, but she was made of sterner stuff than first glances would reveal. Not every girl could run from rooftop to rooftop in a crowded Japanese residential district on the run from professional magicians, after all. Even so, Index had to will her way past a wall of pain covering her entire body from the head down simply to get back to her feet. The pain was not entirely due to acute injuries; she was developing a headache from lack of food. She did not eat nearly as much as her prodigious appetite would allow, due to her emotional state earlier in the morning; and her unsatisfied, undernourished body was running against its limits.

"I'm… hungry…" she could not help but moan softly enough (or at least she hoped) that no one but herself would hear.

When she took a look at her surroundings, she found herself inside a cramped, circular interior room of stone. Destroyed husks of the "solar panel"-like magical tools littered the floors and covered Index up to her shins. Above her, she saw two triangular windows, one to the right of and below the other. To her back lay an upward-curving spiral staircase, and before her lay a wall of fire taller than her which barred entry outside. The walls themselves pulsated with the oily-colored panel connectors, which writhed in place free from their moorings. If she wanted to move past this point, her options now were to advance further into the labyrinth, brave the obstacles of stone and fire guarding the exit, or stay and perish from the familiars or the lightning.

And speaking of lightning…

Index glanced around and looked for Misaka. Surely enough, the esper was struggling to her feet as well… but was hunched over, with her right hand pressing against her chest.

"Are you all right?" Index asked as she hurried to her companion.

"Not… good…" Misaka wheezed. "That last one must have opened the wound."

It took only the briefest of instances for Index to recall the shot to the chest Misaka had suffered during her fight with the magician in violet. At the time, Misaka had seemingly rolled with the blow and shrugged the wound off, leading Index to assume that she had been fortunate enough to avoid being seriously injured. Now, it was evident that such was not the case.

"Why didn't you tell me about that earlier?" Index asked her accusingly even as she helped her to her feet. When Misaka's arm moved away, Index could now clearly see a widening line of red discoloring the brown of her tattered school jacket and shirt.

"Sorry," Misaka apologized. "It didn't seem… like a deal-breaker at the time… What was that last one? Electromasters are normally immune to lightning…"

"Magic follows a different set of rules from science," Index said. "Lightning and firestorms are manifestations of God's wrath and thus cannot be controlled by scientific laws."

Misaka moved her mouth to speak, but then clenched her teeth and wrested herself away from Index. A nimbus of electrical energy surrounded Misaka even as she attempted to steady herself without Index's support. Index, whose eyes were turned toward Misaka, had to follow the other girl's forward gaze before she could understand what had agitated the electric princess so.

The magician in violet walked into the tower they were in, her dark silhouette standing in sharp contrast to the bright glow of the flames surrounding her. Two thin trails of blood crisscrossed her face and converged at a reddened welt on her forehead. Her right arm hung limply at her side, and as she walked, she was clearly forced to favor her right leg. The gem on her left sleeve had lost its previous luster and was instead dimmed with a dull, darkened sheen. Her own familiar, the creature called Kyuubey, slowly kept pace with the violet magician, seemingly heedless of the wounds that were accumulating on its own body.

Even so, her emotionless expression and dark, piercing eyes still managed to instill within Index a sense of menace.

"So you found your way inside this witch's labyrinth, while chasing me, I suppose," she said as she advanced on the two of them. "I was wondering why the witch had suddenly decided to strike elsewhere, but now I know."

"It's you!" Misaka snarled. "You're the one behind all this, aren't you?"

"Don't be silly," the violet magician said, her voice's apparent lack of emotion contrasting with the venom in Misaka's. "Do you think I'm so masochistic as to do all this to myself? Or do you think I'd go all out of my way to falsify these injuries just to lure in a couple of schoolgirls? Quite the self-centered outlook you have there."

"Why, you…" Misaka responded through clenched teeth. "I'm going to make you pay for what you did to Kuroko!"

"Kuroko?" The magician tilted her head to the right in a show of confusion. "Who was that? Judging by that outfit of yours, I would imagine it was the irritatingly persistent one with the twin tails…"

"Why?" Index spoke up softly, so as to deliberately cut through the ugly atmosphere between the electric princess and mystery magician. "Why are you attacking Academy City? Is it revenge for World War III? Did Academy City do something to your magical cabal? Were you the one who laid that curse on those children? Answer me!"

"World War… III? Magical… cabal?" She still maintained the look of confusion on her face, and the sarcastic edge that was present in her goading had softened somewhat, a gesture that Index did not miss.

When the other party did not respond, Misaka spoke up again. "It's useless talking to her! Stand back. You can interrogate her all you want after I kick her ass!"

"You really remind me of someone…" the enemy muttered, the irritation in her own face beginning to show through the cracks in her until-then flawless composure. "Rather than trying to track me down, shouldn't you be worried about getting out of here? If this witch is not stopped, its plague of death and destruction will spread across your precious city while you rot within its bowels. Do you really want that?"

"Witch?" Index asked, deliberately cutting in once more to keep her accomplice's growing blind battle lust in check. Witches were mentioned many times within the library of books that comprised the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, across multiple cultures; and all of those cultures ascribed different functions and powers to those branded with the term. There were witches whose seductions and prophecies brought down entire principalities and nations; witches who ate the flesh of children to perpetuate their own youth; witches who were feared for their ability to control disease and illness in the times long before the advent of scientific knowledge; "witches" who simply had the misfortune of knowing and obtaining more than women of their station were allowed; and so many more. The term thus, to her, begged far more questions than it did answer any.

"When you say a 'witch,' does that mean that there's a witch at the center of this labyrinth, controlling everything?"

"That's not correct," a voice responded in her head. "What she is trying to say is that the 'labyrinth' as you call it is the witch itself. Though I have only her word to take for it…"

"Kyuubey," the magician said, casting an aside glance at the white familiar-like creature on the ground next to her. "You're saying too much…"

"The labyrinth is the witch itself…" Index repeated aloud. She then turned to Misaka. "Did you hear that?"

"Yeah, of course, I did!" she responded heatedly. "This bitch just admitted to trying to kill Kuroko!"

"No, not that! The labyrinth and the witch…"

Now it was Misaka's turn to wear the confused look on her face. "What's this about witches? More occult stuff?"

She can't hear it, Index figured out. She then turned to the other magician. "The one who penetrated this barrier was none other than I, Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I have some idea of how this 'witch' works. If I can just piece together the runes attached to the familiars, then it's likely I can come up with a countermeasure to effectively destroy it and free us all. But I cannot do it alone. I need someone to protect me as I analyze these symbols and decode their message.

"I know I'm asking for a lot," she continued, "especially from a magician. But I can tell… I can tell that you weren't the one behind this. If I had to make an educated guess, I would guess that your magic was purposed from the ground up to combat monsters such as this! If nothing else, that jewel on your arm reacted to this phenomenon long before I detected it!"

At this, the magician in violet flinched and, perhaps on instinct, reached into her shield.

"That's not all!" Index pressed forward, undeterred by the mystery magician's withering stare. "Upon detecting this, you immediately changed course in the middle of a combat, putting whatever plans you had on hold and charging into the barrier by yourself!"

The magician gritted her teeth.

"That's not all either! Not once in any of our encounters did you show any signs of having to process mana like other magicians! Your activations were instantaneous, without any need for invocation or processing of magical energy." Not merely content with just standing her ground, Index took a step forward and spoke her conclusion decisively. "You're not a magician who makes use of magical devices. Your body itself is the magical device… while you yourself, the real you, is externalized and manifested inside that gem! You modified your own body in order to build yourself into the perfect weapon to fight these 'witches'!"

At that, the magician in violet dashed forward at breakneck speed and clutched her petite, but inhumanly powerful left arm around Index's neck, lifting her off the ground and threatening to obstruct her air supply at her leisure if she so chose. Misaka, in response, immediately readied a spear of electricity, but Index managed to shake her head, a gesture that meant not to interfere for the time being.

"You're mostly right, Sister," the magician said, staring up at the girl in her power. "Your little analysis is right, but just barely missed the mark. 88 out of 100, I would say. Indeed, I am something other than 'human'. I'll also tell you something else: This witch is unlike any other that I've ever fought before."

Index's eyes opened further in shock at this candid admission.

"It's not quite on the level of Walpurgisnacht," the magician continued, "at least in terms of sheer attack strength and magnitude of corruption and in the fact that it still requires a barrier. But it's in a unique category of its own. It can regenerate whatever attacks are thrown at it and absorb its own structure to strengthen and repair itself. That tower you shredded, incidentally, has already been restored to full capacity." She emphasized the last sentence with an aside glance at Misaka.

"Much like an embryo, it comes fully equipped with all of the energy and nutrients it needs to survive. It does not need to infect to survive, unlike the other witches. Destroying its familiars has proven useless, as it directly harnesses the destructive energy needed to harm it to revive itself. We would need to find the witch's core, but it hides itself well. If we do not find the core, anything else is meaningless. And you think you, who have been bumbling around this maze ineffectually, can succeed where I, who by your own deductions has been created to fight these monstrosities, have failed, Sister?"

The pressure applied to her neck precluded a vocal answer, so Index instead lifted her arms and attempted to squeeze the magician's lifting arm. Her feeble arms could apply no pressure, but she let go regardless. Index collapsed to her knees and had to force her way back up. But when she did, she spoke clearly.

"I know I can succeed," Index answered her resolutely. "But I can't do it alone. If you can still fight, I need your help. That goes for Misaka Mikoto as well."

"Hmph…" The violet magician shot Misaka one last glare before returning her attention to Index. "Normally, I would ask you what kind of guarantee I'd have that the two of you wouldn't try anything funny, but it seems that this conversation is now over." With a sweeping hand gesture, she directed Index's attention to the barrier of magic energy that kept the familiars and firestorms at bay. The purple corona of energy flickered on and off, like a flashlight draining the last of its battery reserve. "The shield I erected has lost its power. If we're going to strike, we must strike immediately. What awaits us from this point onward is either victory or annihilation."

Not even a second after the shield at last dissipated, a cloud of the black locust-creatures swarmed their way into the tower in force… only to find themselves instantly incinerated by a well-timed cascade of explosions and entombed in the tower's collapse.

Escaping the crumbling tower through an open window in the second floor, the three girls sprinted in a tight formation, with Misaka and the magician taking point and the slower Index and Kyuubey bringing up the rear. With their way to the embattled ground floor thus gone, they dashed along the walls connecting the towers, and they stopped only briefly at intervals to allow Index to engrave the runes lining the walls into her memory before they unmercifully destroyed them. During their travels, a shot of lightning crushed a section of the walls into so much debris and blocked their way forward. With an army of locusts at their back and a newly made cliff at the hold, Misaka, Index, and their new ally were trapped… until Misaka used her powers to magnetically bond together a "staircase" of discarded panels.

Upon analysis of the runes, Index discovered that the "theme" of the witch was deceptively simple. The modern trappings were an ingenious evolution, using the instruments of the science side to help sustain its prodigious appetite even while hiding its true magical nature. But aside from that, they were largely superfluous as to the true meaning. At its core, the runes throughout the castle pieced together a narrative of a woman who had been secluded and sheltered from society at the behest of cruel men who wished, however misguidedly, to guard her innocence and virtue. Admired by all around her for her beauty and intelligence, she was locked away by her wealthy, jealous father until she could be married off. While in captivity, she had seen the truth and converted to the Way of the Cross. In secret, she specifically gave orders to her servants that her private bathhouse be made with three windows (in reverence to the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) rather than her father's two. This act of devotion to her Heavenly Father enraged her earthly one, who, upon confirming his daughter's conversion, rushed to kill her with his own sword. The Son of God, answering her fervent prayers, bore her away through an open wall in her tower to a mountain, where she was happened upon by two shepherds. When her father chased after her, the first shepherd rebuffed him, but the second had betrayed her into his hands; for this, she invoked the Lord's curse on him. He turned into stone, and his flocks of sheep became locusts.

Her father brought her before the magistrate, who quickly convicted her of blaspheming the pagan gods and ordered her imprisoned, beaten, and killed. She was made to endure many tortures and indignities. She was beaten by the sinews of bulls. Her flesh was softened for the blows by rubbing salt in the wounds. She was drawn and hanged between trees. Staves broke her legs. The executioners cut off her breasts. Her father had eagerly dealt her the finishing blow; and as retribution, he was killed where he stood, struck down by lightning and consumed in flames.

The Roman Catholic Church canonized this woman, Barbara of Nicomedia, in the eighth century. She became the patron saint of many purviews – artillerymen, cannoneers, prisoners, window-makers, young girls, and indeed anyone who potentially faced sudden death while doing their duty. She was invoked against fire and lightning.

Index, who was a walking encyclopedia due to the religious and heretical books and grimoires implanted into her mind, was able to cross-reference this information immediately. From then on, it was a simple matter of placing where they were in the narrative. If they could do so, then finding "Barbara" (the witch itself) would be simple… theoretically. The problem with that simple solving pattern was that the divine wrath of lightning at the end of the story coexisted co-temporally with the divine punishment of the locusts within the witch. "Barbara" could not be in any of the castle's towers, because if she were, then she would have doubtless responded to the relentless assault of the other two girls. Her next thought was that perhaps the witch had hidden herself within a range of mountains, as per the analogous point in the legend, but that too was unlikely. She would have seen the mountain range during her time on the treetops in the distance, unless it was specifically cloaked… in which case the locusts would have originated from this theoretical mountain range, which was apparently not the case. Even so, while improbable, the "mountain" theory was not entirely impossible. Come to think of it, the divine energy that could be tapped into by reenacting the tale of St. Barbara should have been on the theoretical level incompatible with the defiling force the witch gave off… which led Index back to believing that the witch was not just mimicking, but actively corrupting one vital theme of the original legend to sustain itself.

Just as she thought that, she heard Misaka yelp in pain and saw her cover her face in response to stray shards of glass from the latest round of enemy fire.

Wait a minute…

Glass…

Windows…

Two triangular windows, one to the right of and above the other.

The legend had mandated three windows in reverence to the Spirit.

"Of course… the tower windows…" Index said aloud in mid-run. "Why didn't I see it before?"

"That's quite the interesting face you have there," Kyuubey said. "Have you found something out? If so, please feel free to share. Even I can't keep this up forever…"

"The tower windows!" Index screamed out.

"I said destroying them was useless!" the magician snapped.

Index shook her head. "No, not like that! You have to carve another window into each of the towers!"

Both of the other girls did a double take, glancing at each other and then at Index in rapid succession.

"There are two windows on the uppermost floor of each tower!" she explained. "One of them is to the right of and above the other! There are supposed to be three windows, one to signify each facet of the Holy Trinity! In the original legend, St. Barbara the Martyr had her private chambers fitted with three windows to represent the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in defiance of her pagan father, who wanted only two! It sounds like a long shot, but if we can make changes and mess with the symbolism, then we can stem the flow of energy to the witch and force it to reveal itself!"

"What an annoying story…" Misaka muttered.

"So, do you have any precision tools in that electric arsenal of yours?" asked the magician in that subdued tone Index had begun to associate with her. "Or are you just some glorified stun-gun?"

"I don't want to hear about 'precision' from someone who guns her way through police once she gets caught!" Even with that retort, Misaka stretched out her hand. Three arcs of lightning shot forth from her outstretched hand and drilled into the side of the nearest tower. Instead of smashing into it and destroying it as before, the electricity lances carved into the stone like a welder. The lances briefly faltered, and Index thought she heard a disturbingly wet-sounding cough coming from the Electromaster. She opened her mouth to ask if Misaka was well, but then a bloodcurdling shriek of despair sounded through the air.

The solar panels and locusts ringing the tower burst into bluish-white flames, one after another, in a frightening and deafening chain reaction. The sense of relief Index could feel was almost palpable… and fleeting. Likely sensing the danger their master now faced, the locust clouds of the other towers abandoned their previous posts and descended upon the trio en masse. Unable to evade or counterattack this fell miasma, grievously injured from their previous battles, and with their energies stretched to the breaking point, they could only await their ends.

Misaka, the Level 5 esper, put up a magnificent defense, but faltered when the wound on her chest reopened and forced her to her knees. The all-consuming locusts capitalized on this moment of weakness and swarmed her down.

The violet magician, defiant of the end, summoned her bow and fired frantically while desperately trying to force her legs to move from her spot. But for each cloud of locusts she cleared, many times that number would come and take the place of the fallen. Focused on the locusts as she was, one last bolt of "divine" lightning caught her off guard and struck her and her familiar creature down.

Index found herself the only one left. Glancing around frantically, she saw nothing but darkness surrounding the area like a funeral shroud. Fear and hunger together conspired to rob her of her will to resist. Within her mind lay hundreds of thousands of tools to save her from her predicament, but with her own ability to use her own powerful magical energies deliberately sealed away, she could not use any of them. She wanted to curse her uselessness – curse herself for ever having been born.

If all of the magic knowledge in the world throughout history could not be used to save even one person from the darkness, then perhaps that knowledge has lost its right to be perpetuated and passed down after all…

Anyone can fight.

At the edges of Index's mind, as time seemed to slow to a crawl, she could hear a voice – the familiar voice of a certain boy. It was faint, ethereal, transitory, poised to fade away at any second.

As long as you have something you wish to risk your life to protect…

Even if it makes the entire world your enemy…

You can fight!

The conviction and hope in this person's voice briefly, if for a second, cut through the oncoming darkness like a beam of light. Index could not help but wonder – was this a spirit, come to guide the living in their time of need? Was it an illusion brought on by the fear of imminent death? Or was it…?

At the end of the light, Index could see, as if through a looking glass, a fell creature of despair, shattered hopes, and broken dreams. Where once its hands and feet were, a mass of cylindrical structures protruded from its arms and legs and stabbed into the ground. The cylindrical things pulsated as something flowed from its "arms" to its head. On that head was a crown whose shape reminded her of a castle's battlement; and on its body, runes were engraved that narrated a litany of oppression, torture, abuse, and finally destruction. On the spots where its eyes should have been, two fires black as night blazed unceasingly. The creature towered over the castle that once guarded it and glared furiously down at the remaining intruder, daring her to continue resisting right until the very end.

But Index was not afraid anymore, for he was with her.

Index boldly took a step forward, unwavering in her resolve to fight. She took one last glance around for something, anything that could be used as a focus for her last stand. Next to the fallen magician's position, she saw her wooden bow, which had yet to dematerialize. Without hesitation, she picked it up.

By all accounts, this was a futile endeavor. Magicians were notoriously idiosyncratic and individualistic; and as a side effect, there was no guarantee that this magical tool was not locked and coded to respond to only its user's magical signature. While Index could break the code and take control of the magic, as she had before, she could only do so by intercepting the spell while the caster had done the hard work of inputting mana and commands into it. Index herself had no power to fuel magic, as a safety feature to keep her from using the grimoires stored within her mind and becoming an existential threat to the world herself.

Even so, she could not simply stand by and watch as the others were devoured. Even if by some miracle she were saved herself, she would not be able to live it down if the others died. Someone had once refused to accompany her to the depths of Hell and instead, using nothing but his own fist and wits, had pulled her out. Now she fervently wished to pull the others out of this Hell…

She raised the bow at the level of the beast's head. Her vision was obscured by the descending locust clouds, but during that brief flash of light, she internalized the monster's position. She pulled the bowstring as hard as she could, but nothing came of it. No bolt of energy had materialized, and the first of the locusts had already begun to cut into her face with their scythe-like legs.

This was truly the end, it seemed…

"M… ma… do… k…"

Even in the midst of the witch's wailing and the locusts' buzzing, and even in the throes of her own pain, Index could hear the faint voice of the other magician. She could feel the touch of the magician's petite hand on her own legs… and she could feel a wave of energy not her own pulsing through her body. Seizing the moment, she reoriented herself and the magician's bow, deliberately ignoring the swarm of deadly insects. She then channeled all of this energy directly into the bow, refused the urge to avert her eyes as a blindingly bright pink light materialized in front of her face…

"I am Dedicatus545, the dedicated lamb that protects the knowledge of the strong!"

…and fired.

The pink beam of light shredded through the darkness, destroying all of the fell demons who dared cross its flight path, and struck the queen of the labyrinth head on. The cylindrical structures anchoring it to the ground severed one by one, with each of them leaking and bleeding a greenish-black substance that looked part blood, part oil, and part flame. The shrieking of the witch reached a fevered pace; the crown on its head shattered; and at last, the monster perished, screaming, in a conflagration of flame and lightning.

The pink light of the bow gave way to a pure white light which blinded and engulfed Index and the visage of the other girls.

When Index regained her sight, she found herself inside the same room from which she had entered the witch's barrier. The symbol she had traced into the wall to force the barrier open remained intact visually, but was now entirely bereft of any power; the analogous symbol she and Misaka used to actually enter was, perhaps unsurprisingly, gone without a trace of its existence. The blond Skill-Out was still alive but unconscious, as was his attacker, Misaka Mikoto, who was surrounded by a small pool of blood. The unfortunate schoolchildren of Judgment were still dead, though the lack of decay or smell, or, for that matter, the conspicuous absence of any of Academy City's law enforcement, led Index to believe that not much time had passed in the outside world while they were traversing the world inside the barrier.

While Index was searching the room for something to stem her fallen friend's blood loss, she found, near the spot of the barrier entrance, something she had missed on her first look-around. There lay a tiny, night-black jewel, with a princess cut on both sides, a stem-like structure at the bottom, and the witch's tree motif in the center. Index started to take a closer look at this curious jewel, but then without warning, someone snatched it out of her hands. Looking up, she saw the magician touch the gem to her own purple one, which effected a two-way energy reaction between the black gem and hers and brightened her own gem's violet glow. This having been accomplished, she hesitated for a second, gripped the black gem as if to crush it, and then – wearing an expression of deciding something distasteful to her – tossed the black jewel to Kyuubey, who immediately consumed it through a maw-like opening on its back.

"You're right, Homura. This truly does contain a prodigious amount of energy. So this is what you would call a 'Grief Seed'?"

"Yes," she – her name was Homura? – responded quickly and somewhat acidly, refusing to look at the creature she just fed.

"So your name is Homura?" Index asked her. "That's… a strange name there."

"That is not something I want to hear from some weird foreign nun who calls herself an Index," Homura responded.

Index opened her mouth to retort, but the sound of a police alarm grabbed her attention. Homura made a "Tch" sound to voice her irritation. She then grabbed Index by the scruff of her neck and Kyuubey by its back.

"Wh—what's going on?" Index asked.

"We're getting out of here," Homura responded cleanly.

"What do you mean 'we'?" Index asked her in disbelief.

"Did I not make myself clear?" Homura asked her rhetorically. "You're coming with me."

Brooking no further dissent, she activated her shield-like device. From Index's point of view, she could now see that the deceptively simple exterior of this magical device hid a patchwork of gears and wires surrounding a vial of sand. Upon activation, a gear slid into place and blocked the flow of sand; and in response, the world around the two turned stark grey. The gentle swaying of the plants surrounding the building stopped entirely, and no sound but the ones they made could be heard. Fluidly, with Index in tow, the magician named Homura glided through this world of grey and out the window. Looking down, Index could see a convoy of Anti-Skill vans and people in the midst of pouring out of them and swarming the laboratory. The members of the Anti-Skill squadron were all frozen in motion, allowing the two girls to skip through them with ease.

It wasn't instantaneous movement at all, Index realized. This girl has the ability to stop time!

"But what about Sh... Misaka Mikoto?" Index cried.

"The electricity user? I'll leave her to the police," Homura responded.

"Where are we going?" Index asked.

"Somewhere that isn't here."

Frustrated with the curt answers and at herself for being caught once again in a situation where she was powerless, Index then asked one last question.

"What are you doing in Academy City?"

At that question, Homura paused for the briefest of instances and turned her eyes toward Index. The two girls' faces met just inches away from each other. Homura stared into Index's eyes, as if peering into her very soul, which made Index more than a little uncomfortable. Then she turned away and continued her escape.

"A dear friend of mine has been abducted, and the few clues that I have point to this city. If you truly love this city as much as you claim to, you will assist me in finding her."

TO BE CONTINUED IN

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Fourth Spell – Akemi Homura I

Chapter Text

"With kindness comes naïveté. Courage becomes foolhardiness, and dedication has no reward."

"If you can't accept any of that, you are not fit to be a Puella Magi."

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Fourth Spell – Akemi Homura I

Absolute stillness…

Complete silence…

Utter darkness…

Akemi Homura regained consciousness and attempted to wake up – "attempted" being the operative word, as even the simple matter of opening her eyes encountered an unexpected and seemingly insurmountable resistance. As she further came back into her senses, she noticed an enduring sensation of heaviness pressing down upon her body. She could move her body only with the greatest of effort and at that could only twist and turn at the waist, shifting her position in a fruitless struggle against some imperceptible force. As well, moving her hands proved equally impossible, as they were locked into an outstretched position extended from her sides. In spite of her struggles, however, she could feel no pain – only a persistent sensation of deathly cold, a numbness that threatened to take her senses away from her again. Even as her mind told her that, logically, every pain receptor in her body should be screaming at this moment, she could sense only that numbing chill. Even she, who had experienced the depths of powerlessness and helplessness many times and crawled back up each and every time, had never felt as vulnerable as she currently did.

Where am I?

What is this?

What's happening to me?

Is this a dream?

WHERE AM I?

Despite her best efforts, Homura could do nothing but grope and flail blindly. To her surprise and horror, she eventually found that even the small movements she had previously been able to make with her upper legs and torso were steadily being suppressed by whatever force was holding her place. Now she was completely stuck in place, subject to a virtually complete sensory deprivation; and she grew ever the more anxious as seconds turned to minutes, minutes to hours, and hours to progressively more indeterminable and interminable lengths of time in this silent Hell.

Just where in the world… am I?

Am… am I… dead?

That can't… be… right…

I must… at least… open… my…

The sensation of coldness had, at some point in time, faded entirely and gave way to a total numbness. Even so, Homura struggled to retain consciousness, with her will being powered by the sheer fear that if she gave in, everything would all be over. She had fought for so long and hard, defied destiny itself…

…and she would not be broken… not like this…

"Is it really OK? You're… not afraid?"

"That's right! Why don't you try becoming a magical girl as well?"

"Will the battle ever end? No one knows."

"Homura-chan, I'm really happy that we became friends."

"Don't go! KANAME-SAN!"

Devoid of any other external stimulus, Homura began to hear, if not feel, a steady, rhythmic thumping sound. Whether or not it was her own heartbeat, she could no longer tell. In perfect harmony with the increasingly loud beating, memories – of times long past, of paths taken and avoided, of battles fought and won, of friends long parted with – began to surface.

"Either way, I'm against teaming up with her."

"This is terrible. It's too much!"

"DON'T LISTEN TO HIM!"

Faint at first, these recollections of distant pasts showed themselves more vividly as time passed on, as if her life was truly replaying itself before her very eyes. She witnessed herself, fighting for her life and that of so many others, fighting against despair and destruction embodied…

"Petrified and unable to accept their own fate… poor magical girls…"

"You, who continue to escape to different paths, cannot fight me…"

"If we'll turn into witches, then it's better to die here…"

"Better to die here…"

"Die… here…"

"Die…"

"Hey… how about we become monsters together…"

"Destroy, destroy, destroy until there's nothing left…"

"Destroy, destroy, destroy until there's nothing left…"

"Destroy, destroy, destroy…"

"Destroy…"

"This is not my battlefield…"

The cycle of instantaneous flashbacks finally slowed down to focus on one particular memory…

Although the mid-afternoon sky was covered with an otherworldly sheen of pink and violet, the leaden atmosphere reeked of depression, death, and madness. The rain continued to steadily pour down from this strange sky in a steady, unceasing trickle. The cityscape was littered with uprooted power lines and buildings and saturated with the stench of blood. And in the middle of it all lay she and her friend, immobile, battle-weary, and broken, with their arms locked together and their Soul Gems resting in their outstretched palms. The battle against the strongest of witches had been won, and the city had been saved; but who would save the saviors?

Kaname Madoka turned her head weakly and gazed at Akemi Homura. "I guess… it's the end for us too…"

Homura could only nod weakly. "Do you have any Grief Seeds?" When Madoka shook her head to answer in the negative, Homura sighed. "I see…" With that answer, she knew that her fate and that of her friend were sealed. One of two grisly ends awaited them – either untimely death or terminal corruption. Knowing this, Homura began to curse her fate, with her direst curses directed futilely at the little monster that set her and the other girls upon this path. "Hey…" she began. "How about we become monsters together and lay waste to this whole world? We'll wipe out everything… all traces of evil and sadness… destroy, destroy, destroy until there's nothing left…" Her face clouded with tears. "Don't you think… that would sound nice?"

Homura awaited Madoka's response. She instead heard a tiny clinking sound, and then felt one more surge of energy coursing through her. Quickly rolling over, she saw Madoka, smiling, holding a Grief Seed to Homura's Soul Gem.

"I lied earlier," Madoka said. "I had one left."

"That can't be…" Homura gasped. "Why use it on me?" The two girls were in dire need of energy, and at the rapid rate of corruption their gems were undergoing, a single Grief Seed could save only one of them. Madoka, realizing that, had made the ultimate sacrifice for her friend.

"Because I need you to do something that I can't," Madoka answered. "You can travel back in time, can't you, Homura-chan?" Madoka's voice nearly choked itself with its own sadness. "You can change history so that it doesn't end like this, can't you?" Homura answered a meek affirmative. "Could you save me from my stupidity… before I get deceived by Kyuubey?"

"I promise!" Homura pledged to her dying friend. "I will definitely save you! No matter how many times I have to try, I swear I will protect you!"

Madoka's next words were poignant with expectation and hope. "I'm glad…"

Before she could say anything else, however, a new, mortal wave of pain whipped the poor girl's body into a series of convulsions. Homura had seen this before. Terminal corruption had begun; Kaname Madoka was transforming into a witch.

Even before this, however, Madoka regained control of herself for one last request. "Could I ask you… for just one more thing?" Homura quickly nodded, prompting Madoka to finish her request. "I don't… want to become a witch. There are so many awful, sad things in this world, but there are also many things… worth protecting…"

"Madoka!"

At the mention of her name, Madoka regained her smile and, with the last of her energy and consciousness, held up her Soul Gem in front of Homura. "You finally called me by my first name… I'm happy…"

Given the chance to fill the world with the "happiness" called utter destruction, Kaname Madoka had responded by emphatically rejecting it to the bitter end. She had refused to curse the world or her fate, and she had instead entrusted that will to her friend. Kaname Madoka did not wish to become a witch.

Sobbing freely, Akemi Homura pulled a small handgun out of her arsenal, took quivering aim at the darkening jewel before her, and…

A blinding burst of scarlet light instantly pierced its way through Homura's sight, as if to spare her from reliving the nadir of that particular memory.

Homura shielded her eyes with her hands on reflex, only to, a mere second later, feel surprised at the fact that she could even move her hands, albeit slowly and with resistance not unlike that of moving her hands through water. Slowly and steadily, as waking consciousness continued to reassert itself in force, her mind further registered the impression of submersion in liquid as present across her entire body. Whatever she was currently covered in, however, was probably not water, as she discovered upon reflexive inhalation and exhalation. Instead of rushing in to fill her lungs, as water would have naturally done, the fluid remained in place.

Upon finally opening her eyes, Akemi Homura found herself submerged in a clear, transparent substance that was definitely not water, as evidenced by the numerous tiny immobile bubbles suspended in this solution. Unclothed, she was contained inside an upright cylindrical suspension device whose control space measured slightly over seven feet from top to bottom. In front of her, separating the interior of the containment area from the outside was an immaculately transparent window of what she was not entirely confident was merely glass. Aside from the free-floating bubbles, some of which had begun to flow upward and circulate through the tank as if of their own accord, visibility beyond this pane was perfect.

The room in which Homura's holding tank was situated gave off a discomfiting sense of starkness and austerity, not the least of which because of the sparse ceiling light provided by only four dimly lit compact fluorescent bulbs placed, each one placed artlessly by itself in a corner. Arrays of black wiring snaked through the walls, ceiling, and floor; and evenly spaced in connection between these wires sat rows of workstation desks with laptop computers whose monitors constantly filled and refreshed screens full of green numbers, alphabet letters, and Chinese and Japanese symbols against black screens. Next to each of these machines lay a tiny black box marked only with a yellow panel with a black "Hazardous Materials" warning label etched onto it. The sole point of exit was an unmarked door the height of the room itself with an ominously heavy-looking wheel-locking mechanism.

What in the world is this?

Twisting to her sides, Homura could see holding tanks – drab brown cylindrical structures filled with the mysterious fluids – that she could only assume were identical to her own. To the left of her, the cylinder housed a lavender-haired, fair-skinned girl whom Homura guessed to be no older than thirteen at the most due to her small size and lack of development. Nude, as expressionless and immobile as the dead, she floated serenely in her tank, providing no resistance whatsoever and making Homura wonder if the girl was a corpse or a puppet that was never alive to begin with.

The holding tank to her right contained a small human skeleton, fully intact and stripped completely of all flesh.

!

Shaken by this, Homura began trying to break the walls by slamming into them, first with her fists, and then with her entire body; but any force she could muster dissipated harmlessly into the liquid solution before even striking the containment wall. Forcing herself not to give in to the steadily mounting sense of panic, she activated her powers… only to be stymied yet again when the telltale signs of magic failed to materialize. She lifted up her left arm to her face and checked the back of her arm. Her skin was unharmed and free of blemishes, but she quickly realized what was missing.

Gone… My Soul Gem is gone!

Now fully awake, Homura's mind was ablaze with questions and worries. Why could she not activate her powers? Had she somehow returned to becoming a normal human girl, with her soul residing safely inside her own form and not inside a jewel? Had she been de-powered and captured, placed into this tank by the Incubators? What was Kyuubey's role in all of this? Had she fallen in battle? Where were the other Puella Magi? Was everything she had gone through up to this point, going back in time again and again to change the fate of a dear friend, only to be saved by that friend in the end, just the fever-dream of a sick and lonely little girl in a hospital?

Someone let me out of here!

After hours of swimming fruitlessly against her captivity, Akemi Homura had worked herself into exhaustion for the fourth – or was it the sixth? – time that day. Was it even a day? Was it a week? At intervals, the clear jelly would harden and entomb her in her little cage, and a wave of weariness would wash over her and send her into a dreaming sleep. Her dreams would consist of a series of instantaneous flashes through her long and storied history, all of them vivid, none of them pleasant. All the while, the computers in the room would fill, flush, and refill with data.

The only changes to each waking cycle would be the girls in the two tanks immediately next to hers. To her left this time was a young lady whose dark skin, taller-than-average height, chestnut-colored hair, and large breasts would heavily imply a non-Asian, the first one of her kind Homura had seen in the tanks. To her right lay imprisoned a much younger girl with a full head of green hair and a much smaller frame that indicated that she could not be more than eleven at the oldest. Like the rest of the captives, and like Homura herself, they were completely naked. The taller girl floated as still as the dead, yet the younger one was beating her hands against the glass pane much as Homura had done earlier... with the same lack of success. She was moving her mouth frantically, clearly trying to say something to someone, anyone who could hear her, but there was no one other than her fellow captives, who were powerless to do anything even if her voice could reach them.

The first indication Homura received that this cycle would be different was the change of color on the ceiling lights from scarlet red to a much more pleasant light blue.

The wheel-lock mechanism turned slowly in a clockwise direction, and after three full revolutions of the lock, the deceptively ancient-looking door parted horizontal-wise into two halves, which quickly receded into the door frame. Six humanoid figures shuffled their way through the open door into the room in single file. All six of these wore spotless white overcoats that brought to mind standard laboratory wear, but these coats boasted much more material on them and covered all of their bodies but their heads completely. The most striking parts of these lab-coated figures, however, were the head coverings themselves. All of the half-dozen laboratory workers' heads were completely covered from crown to neck by balaclava hoods of dark grey, and the fronts of the faces were protected by industrial-issue goggles that looked to be opaque from Homura's point of view. Their differing heights were thus the only visual clues usable to differentiate any given one of them from another. Each of these masked scientists sat down and manned a laptop in the room, which left only the centermost computer free to steadily continue its own work.

The green-haired girl at Homura's right, perhaps optimistically encouraged by the presence of humans on the other end of the tank, began pounding against her confines with all the more ferocity. As Homura might have expected, the scientists did not even turn around to regard any of the captives, as engrossed as they seemed to be in the unceasing scroll of data before them.

She was surprised, then, to see the lab-coat at the terminal farthest to the right suddenly vacate his or her post and turn around to face the little girl in the tank.

The green-haired girl, still clinging on to some form of hope, or perhaps possessed of some despairing madness, swam against her confinement; and the scientist on the other end simply watched. Homura was unable to gauge the scientist's reaction; no facial expression or discernible body language showed through the completely covered scientist's form. The scientist merely stood there, watching, seemingly as deaf to the girl's pleas as Homura herself was forced to be. After a single minute of this, the scientist finally moved… back to the workstation, leaving the girl to resume trying to plead and fight her way out to her heart's content.

Or so it seemed at the time…

The scientist opened the "Hazardous Materials" box from the top, and from it, a dark green glow of light pulsed. With a gloved hand, the scientist gingerly produced from the box a gem, one that consisted of a jade jewel surrounded by an inward curving "cage" of gold. Homura knew instantly – perhaps instinctively would be the better word – just what this jewel was and what it contained.

A Soul Gem…!

The name said it all. The fist-sized jewel contained the very living essence, the "soul" in as literal a sense as possible, of a Puella Magi, of a girl who had obtained the power of magic in exchange for her very destiny. Homura had seen the story play out countless times over. In exchange for the granting of a wish thought to be impossible, a girl was transformed into a being optimized for fighting monsters, and her life energies were externalized and compacted into a little jewel. In order to sustain the Puella Magi's existence, she needed to kill many monsters over and over again; and as she did so, the weight of her karma bore down on her ever the more intensely. Eventually, this vicious cycle would reach its breaking point, and the Puella Magi would eventually pay the price of her wish with her life. As cruel as this was, Homura, alone among all Puella Magi, knew that to only have to die was a supreme mercy, one granted to all of them by the selfless sacrifice of the girl who would become the greatest of them.

The Puella Magi of this era needed no longer fear becoming the monsters they fought…

If that was indeed the case, then why was the green jewel before her darkening at such a rapid rate? Why was the green-haired girl's body convulsing and contorting itself into a pained frenzy, the likes of which dredged up memories long buried within Homura's storied history?

It can't be…

No… no, it can't be…

She quickly wrenched her eyes away from the girl whose suffering she was unable to alleviate and turned them toward those who were most likely the ones behind that suffering.

Just above the computer at the center of the room, the Soul Gem floated in the air, held aloft by a tangle of red and blue cords that looked and writhed disturbingly more like the blood vessels of a functioning human circulatory system than any mere energy conductors.

Stop…

Please… stop this…

All six of the scientists continued plugging away dutifully at their terminals, as if displaying a most unscientific incuriosity at the fact that the very air around them was quivering like a mirage.

Someone…

"SOMEBODY, HELP ME!" a voice, young, girlish, unfamiliar, and terrified, blasted into Homura's consciousness.

And then there was silence.

A pitch-black miasma exploded from the ceiling and instantly covered the room – and Homura's sight – in utter darkness.

Out from the blackness emerged a world different in its entirety from the laboratory. While the containment capsules she and the other girls were trapped in were (unfortunately) fully intact, the surroundings around her had completely changed. Instead of inside a laboratory, the capsules were sitting, like ornaments, at the edge of a sidewalk. Surrounding these capsules was a Dadaist artist's impression of a highway: The road signs, although somewhat familiar in shape, were inscribed with runes whose meaning was opaque to Homura; the arrows on the road pointed in any and all directions as they pleased, with no regard to such banal concepts as consistency or logic; and the roadway itself was littered with piles of the burning wreckages of devices that looked like spike-studded steel coffins with wheels and automobile engines crudely attached to them. Still more of these cars traversed these unreal highways and created more destruction and madness as they slammed and crashed into each other frequently and violently. "Pedestrians" with bulbous brown heads, bulging green eyes, and disproportionately tiny bodies would periodically walk out into this chaotic situation and inevitably, to a "man", be run over and flattened by this chaotic traffic. Above the blood-red skyline overlooking this Hellish highway, humanoid figures, identical to the highway victims except for the comically oversized construction hard hats covering their heads and faces, alternated in shifts between gathering materials and compiling those materials into a thin, arched roadway held in suspension above the ground.

Homura checked the immediate surroundings, as far as her limited and isolated point of view, for any other signs of life.

The green-haired girl, so full of life and desperate energy just a few seconds ago, had gone silent inside her tank... exactly as Homura had begun to fear. Her eyes, though still open and wet with tears, had gone dark and hollow, as if they were a window to an endless abyss. She no longer floated upright in the tank, but instead bobbed along with the flow of the clear substance she was trapped inside.

She was dead.

As one who had to stare into such eyes as those a literally incalculable number of times, Homura did not have to guess or suspect anything else. To be more precise, the girl's body was dead. The soul still existed, and if the Soul Gem that had transformed was indeed hers, as was very much likely the case, then the world was a manifestation of all of the negativity that soul had accumulated, laid bare for all who had eyes to witness.

She had transformed into a Witch.

And those scientists with their strange computers and machines had likely somehow induced that transformation. How? To what end? For what reason? Who was all of this supposed to benefit? Were those scientists even human? And where was Madoka? The questions running through her mind afresh renewed her conviction to eventually find a way out of captivity, gather more information on where this place was and who was running it, and if it came down to it, crush the operation so that no more girls would have to suffer.

At around the same time she hardened her resolve, she saw one of the larger coffin-cars suddenly sprout from its broad sides a pair of grey, rail-thin, membranous structures that resembled the fossilized wings of some long-dead specimen. Thus newly equipped, the vehicle leaped into the sky and shot like a bullet toward what passed for the horizon...

...whereupon it was summarily intercepted and bombarded by a series of pinpoint blasts of lightning-blue beams of power.

The beams perforated and explosively destroyed the vehicle on impact; but this did not prevent the driver and passengers from leaping out of the wreckage and escaping the destruction. The little grey men sprouted wings of their own – the exact same shape as those on the car, but much smaller and scaled down for their tiny bodies – and continued their mad dash into the distance. Other previously ground-bound vehicles had begun to follow suit one-by-one and take to the skies, dispersing their passengers into the air as they did so. As the overpass neared construction, more of the builders who were working on it joined their fellows.

It soon became apparent just what was causing these mass direction shifts.

From further into the sky, at the razor's edge of Homura's viewing distance, she could see twelve bluish-grey dots floating in the sky. She could not see any further details, but what she could see easily enough were the beams of energy emanating from these at steady intervals. The little creatures were clearly no match for those energy attacks, and the ones using their vehicles as cover fared only slightly better; yet they threw themselves with reckless abandon against their mysterious assailants. The skyline itself seemed to burst into flame.

First one, then a second, and then two more of the laser-spitters had fallen from the sky and landed onto the ground, each of them landing with an earth-cracking tremor that Homura had seen but not felt. Grounding them allowed a closer look at these things, and Homura did not fail to seize the opportunity to do so. What she saw were four deep blue human-shape metallic devices that heavily resembled suits of interlocked chainmail and plate armor. The heads of these nine-foot-tall curiosities were enclosed by glossy, opaque drum structures, and the rest of their bodies were reinforced and folded in such a way as to remind one of the specialized suits worn by astronauts on journeys into space. On these particular units, ugly white cobweb-shaped cracks appeared on the otherwise smoothly polished surfaces of the heads, and sparks of electricity periodically erupted from their heads, arms, and feet. Next to these damaged armor suits lay guns that, being too large to fit with human hands, were evidently designed to be wielded by the armors. The guns looked like tank main guns modified for anti-personnel use by paring down the length of the barrels and compensating for the ensuing theoretical loss of killing power by adding to the barrels' width.

Upon closer inspection, the one that landed nearest Homura had been torn open in the chest area, revealing what was once a human's hand prior to being blooded, mangled, and stripped of all fingers except for its ring. In addition to this, a mixture of a brown substance she suspected to be oil and a red substance she was more certain was blood mingled and pooled together on the ground around both of the armor suits. If any of her senses besides sight could penetrate the fluid of her confinement, Homura figured she would have been treated to a foul acrid, ferrous odor.

Above the cloudless sky, the battle between the flying familiars and the futuristic knights still raged on. The overpass road, which by now had been built to encompass the whole of the roadway as far as Homura could see, had apparently been made to spec, as all of the familiars allocated to building it had joined their compatriots to fight against the foreign element.

Just as Homura wondered why that particular road received so much attention, she received her answer in the form of a lone vehicle speeding its way through the overpass and shooting straight toward the battlefield. Clearly at least twice as large and as long as the previous vehicle, this twelve-wheeled monstrosity resembled a commercial freight truck; on the broad sides of the freight compartment were inscribed a graffiti-like jumble of black runes, and on the front was painted the face of an angry, scowling elderly man with a long red antenna where its nose was supposed to be. Upon seeing this face, Homura was reminded of the old demon in Japanese folklore that guarded Hell in the form of a burning ox cart with an old man's face on the wheel.

As soon as this truck entered the firing range of the invaders, they did not fail to blow the thing to pieces with their weaponry. Just as with its smaller counterparts, however, this freight carrier managed to unload its contents into the sky mere instances before it was annihilated.

Out of the first hole blasted into the freight compartment shot a crackling, sizzling nexus of dark green energy, a not-quite-black hole in the sky. Indeed, much like the aforementioned astronomical phenomenon, this energy drew matter into itself. Instead of sucking in anything and everything within its power like a true black hole, however, it targeted such specific items as the wreckages of the lesser vehicles felled by the invaders... and eventually the corpses and weapons of the four suits of armor the vanguard had managed to vanquish in the initial assault.

So the witch has finally shown itself...

As the pieces flew together toward the center of this energy, they did not simply funnel into the epicenter. Instead, they gathered in extremities around the center and orbited around it, clumping and interlocking together and forming clear extrusions around the sizzling "core". The end result of this fusion begat a crude, unsteady, and almost mocking approximation of the super armor suits, with wheels as its shoulders, elbows, and knees, and the guns as fingers for its hands. Around the gangly metal limbs and the fender grill that passed for a head, the core of the monster, still exposed, pulsated like a beating heart. This newly constructed monster Homura estimated to be around twenty feet in height, as its sheer height and mass absolutely dwarfed its opponents.

It did not take long after the end of this formation for the clash to resume in earnest.

The remaining eight suits of armor flitted and darted in a synchronized orbit around and far away from the monster, changing directions as necessary to avoid the limbs that flailed and trashed in an attempt to swat them out of the sky. While dodging the monster's attacks, they would speed back into optimum damage range and shoot. Even Homura, in spite of herself, felt some twinge of admiration for the workmanship of the suits of armor and the skill of the pilots. With that having been said, all of the skill and firepower that the flying suits could muster could ill account for the fact that the core continued to regenerate all damage done to its extremities and, when targeted itself, would simply draw all attacks harmlessly into it.

It seemed to grind down into a stalemate...

...until the monster suddenly cupped its two hands together and extruded from them a massive, sky-darkening blast of energy. When visibility of the area was restored, another seven attacking suits were simply gone with no traces of their existence whatsoever, leaving only a single survivor.

There were no tears to be shed for the fallen. Homura still did not know the details, but she had gathered enough information to strongly suspect that the pilots of those armored suits were either those same scientists who had watched over her captivity or closely related to them, and that those same scientists through means unknown had somehow induced the girl's transformation into a witch. If the scientists did not know what they were doing, they were incurably hubristic and foolish; if they did, they were irredeemably evil. In either case, they were beyond saving. The witch had simply saved her the trouble of doing what she was likely going to have to do herself when she had the opportunity to escape.

All throughout this, the most important question still remained.

Madoka, where are you?

The Kaname Madoka she knew would not have allowed that girl to suffer as she did. The Kaname Madoka she knew would not have allowed the witch to be born. The Kaname Madoka she knew would have taken onto herself the burden of the girl's pain and anger, in whatever form it may have taken, and quietly bestowed to her one last vision of hope before her life's candle was extinguished.

If nothing else, she liked to believe, Kaname Madoka would not have stood by as researchers steeped in folly undid her great work.

Out of the initial group of twelve flying suits of armor, only one remained to continue the fight. Shaken by the instantaneous elimination of its comrades, it broke formation and flew more defensively than it had while in a group. Its rate of fire had decreased drastically and sporadically from its previous high of five seconds per energy burst, and as the battle wore on, it had progressively given up even the pretense of trying to engage the monster on a proactive stance. Perhaps emboldened by the destruction of three enemies in one shot and the tactical cowardice of the remaining one, the monster gave chase, smashing with its ever-growing limbs and pausing every so often to shoot the annihilating energy blast straight forward at that lone metal insect trying to fly away and save its pitiful existence.

The battle would soon be decided. Madoka willing, the next group of lab coats would dwell upon their predecessors' fatal insanity, terminate whatever experiments they were running on her and the other Puella Magi, and free them. Even this rather generously assumed that Homura would not find a chink in the armor and liberate herself and the others. She had no intention, after all, of gamely waiting to be killed while unable to fight back, whether to the scientists or to the monster that had sent them to their graves.

She did not get far with these thoughts of escape when a twinge of an emotion not unlike, yet distinct from, fear briefly overwhelmed her.

Not again. At a time like this...

She braced herself for another cycle of blackout and sensory deprivation, followed by whatever process was used to bring her worst memories to the surface, but the expected never came to pass. Instead, she shuddered as a presence, entirely distinct from that of the witch, a cloying oppression that threatened to deny her existence, filled her mind with an uncertainty and terror that could be felt even through the containment fluid. The air itself quivered and warped like ripples in a disturbed pool of water, as if gripped with the same maddening fear that had threatened to overtake Homura. Even the monster in the distance must have sensed this disturbance in the atmosphere, for it stopped its up until that point relentless pursuit of the lone suit of armor, reared back, and shot forward at a hurried speed it had not displayed in its previous battles. The suit of armor, instead of giving chase, merely held its position in the sky.

As the monster sped toward Homura's prison, the air in front of her continued warping and distorting, and before long, cracks and tears in the air began to manifest. Tiny at first, these cracks lengthened and widened with a mounting intensity, and the feeling of utter dread Homura felt grew proportionally with each new distortion. For Homura, who had as a traveler through time been able to predict her surroundings by virtue of her experiences in living through them, the uncertainty of being unable to predict what would happen next added greatly to her unease. Ever since waking up into captivity, she had been unable to discern what would happen next, and her perfect prison prevented her from reacting to these changes on her own terms. For the first time in so many long years, she found herself... afraid of what the future may bring... and more specifically, afraid of what evil creature would crush its way through the witch's barrier at any moment, and of what portents such a monster would herald.

The space in front of Homura's view shattered like so much fine glass, causing her to skip a heartbeat.

The first thing to emerge through the opening in the atmosphere caused by the shattered was an arm, completely wrapped in white, tight, form-fitting bandaging with tiny flecks of gold sewn intermittently. The arm and the outstretched palm attached to it were, at odds with Homura's initial expectations, slender and short, youthful in appearance. Another arm slowly shoved its way inside, right through the widening cracks; this second one was, unlike the first, covered in the same sterile cloth as that of the laboratory workers, yet it was still noticeably shorter than all of the other workers she had seen up to this point.

Another momentous series of fracturing and shattering later, the figure emerged fully into the witch's labyrinth. At first glance, this one looked no different from the others aside the odd lack of height relative to the others - less than five and a half feet tall, from the looks of it - and from the tight, white-and-gold cloth wrapped securely around the right hand; but the other difference was in the mask. While the others had incorporated all-protecting and all-concealing headwear into their uniforms, the headwear of the others was utilitarian and not at all striking after initial impressions. Such was not the case with this new one, whose mask was a black-and-grey sunburst-shaped icon divided perfectly into vertical halves. One half was a deep shade of grey that reminded one of a heavily overcast day; the other half, covering the left eye, was an abyss-black surface marked only with a drawing of an eye and a mouth locked in an expression of mortal terror.

Upon seeing this mask, Homura tried to gasp, but the containment fluid regulated the air that she could inhale.

She had seen that symbol before.

That sunburst was the face of a monster she had seen devour an entire universe.

That monster was the dark side of a goddess.

That goddess was Kaname Madoka.

But if that was Madoka... then who - what - was this person in front of her eyes?

Upon emerging fully in this world, the young woman (?) in the witch mask turned toward Homura's direction. The two stared at each other, face-to-face, for all of one second, before the witch-mask quickly turned to the right and headed in that direction... as if willfully ignorant of the massive creature of steel and evil that had gunned down all but one of the witch-mask's comrades and was even at that very moment gearing up for an assault on this impertinent being who dared force their way into its sanctum. Seemingly heedless of the monster, the witch-mask lightly tapped the containment cylinder of the green-haired shell that was once a girl. With an emission of smoke, the glass of the cylinder quickly receded into the top of the chamber, which left the corpse and the fluid surrounding it to spill out in a mess onto the floor.

In a series of blindly precise motions, the witch-mask picked up the dead body with her left... and countered a thrashing strike of the monster's right "arm" by grabbing the tip with her own right hand. Despite the massive size difference in limbs, it was the monster who visibly struggled to force more power in its attacking arm to turn its losing position in the struggle of strength around. For all the good it did against the new opponent, however, the monster might as well have been a toddler trying to arm-wrestle an Olympic champion. While holding the struggling monster in place with one arm, the witch-mask held the body of the girl aloft in the left arm, thrusting the dead body's face toward the enemy as if offering the body back to the corrupted soul. Instead of deciding to accept the offer or even giving any special regard to the body its soul once resided in, however, the monster decided to use its other arm. The charge of energy in the hands' tips meant that, instead of simply trying to add more leverage to the clinch, the monster simply intended to blow the target away with its stolen railguns at point-blank range.

Likely sensing this tactic at the same time as Homura, the witch-mask…

…tossed aside the body.

There was no defensive stance. There was no shifting of the legs to loosen up for evasion. Other than throwing away the body, the witch-mask made no other movements and certainly no preparations other than to apparently allow itself to be blown away by this final attack. Even far more mobile enemies who utilized the freedom of the skies and kept their distance from the blast were shot down; the witch-mask, by contrast, was ground-bound and at point-blank range – prime distance to be washed away in an inescapable wave of darkness. Once the guns' charges had reached their telltale critical threshold, Homura had to consciously tell herself to not shut her eyes.

In doing so, she was rewarded with a glimpse of the witch-mask's form in that fateful second before it would be bathed in the evil energy's fell light. In a natural, fluid cascade of motions that Homura almost missed, the witch-mask lifted up its right hand and pointed it, with palms turned outward, toward the direction of the blast.

As anticipated, the enemy primed its guns and unleashed the storm.

A torrent of lightning and fire consumed Homura's vision.

When it reached the witch-mask's hand, however, the energy deformed into an incomprehensible mass of visual noise and imploded upon itself, shattering into hundreds of tiny shards. Into the midst of it all, bathing in the baleful radiance of the onslaught of darkness, unharmed and unfazed by what was up until then an absolute offense, the witch-mask purposefully advanced forward, footstep by footstep, distorting and crushing more of the attack with her right hand as it did so. The shuffling became walking; the walking sped into striding; the striding segued into a full-blown run.

The familiars of the monster sensed this strange turn in the tide of battle. Foregoing the increasingly obsolete tactic of simply reinforcing the witch with their bulk, the familiars and the vehicles they rode, not bothering to wait for the shards of the failing energy attack to clear, simply dropped from the sky and piled on top of and in front of the intruder, effectively entombing the foe and sealing any methods of advance or retreat.

That's what should have happened. Again, in spite of all logic and experience to the contrary, that was exactly what Homura found herself wanting to have happened.

The scene that played out, in defiance of these hopes, began with the witch-mask continuing its advance, and using the pile of familiars as steppingstones on its path forward and upward. Each vehicle adding to the surreal pileup had unintentionally become a platform that led ever closer to the epicenter of the beast. In an attempt to stop this in its tracks, the monster thrashed at the base of the pileup with one arm and, with the other, chopped downward so as to smash the runner and its supports in one blow... even if it meant having to destroy its own familiars and their modes of transport into the ground to do it. Once again, its own movements and intentions were thwarted, as the witch-mask gripped the tip of the monster's limb and, using the barrel of the railgun at the tip, agilely vaulted itself onto the broad side of the monster's arm. From there, the witch-mask ran down the length of the arm, deftly dodging all of the beast's attempts to shake it off. Upon reaching where the shoulder would be if the monster's limbs were better defined, the witch-mask spread its arms wide...

...and dove directly into the core of energy at the center.

For a single second, the world lost its color. Even through the soundproof containment chamber, Homura heard a strange sound akin to an air-filled balloon popping and a mirror violently shattering at precisely the same instance. The entire witch's labyrinth and everything in and of it warped, area by area, into sections with the consistency of disfigured puzzle pieces; and each section, as it warped, fell off the sky like broken glass off a windowpane. Behind each of the fallen pieces was the laboratory setting with which Homura had ample time to familiarize herself. The familiars and vehicles comprising the monster's body broke off on an individual basis and fell to the ground, breaking into pieces upon impact.

Before long, the sky had literally fallen down around the core of energy whose will had previously held the world together. Said core dilated and enlarged erratically, pulsing like a hyperactive heart, as if to tell the dying world around it that it refused to perish along with it. The witch was not given this choice, however, for the right hand of the victor was upon it. It too, shattered into so many tiny fragments.

In time, the bizarre world of the witch's labyrinth gave way to the laboratory setting which Homura had come to loathe.

The most noticeable change in the room's scenario was that of the gem being held in place by the disturbingly artery-like cabling suspended from the ceiling. No longer a sublime jade color, it had completely blackened, and a corona of corrupted black energy flowed around the jewel's hollow core. A curse danced on Homura's lips, but thanks to the containment fluid, no sound was able to escape from her mouth.

A Grief Seed.

The Grief Seed, as its name implied, was the embryonic, dormant form of the monster that had just been defeated. After the Puella Magi accomplished the daunting task of defeating the witch and thus reducing it to the gem that spawned it, she would then use the energies remaining inside the jewel to purify her own Soul Gem, restoring her energies and cleansing the corruption that inevitably resulted from using her magic. The corrupted energy would then be fed to the animal-like companion for energy absorption and further purification. The reliance of Soul Gems upon this method of purification meant that, whether they liked it or not, Puella Magi would have to defeat witches on a continual basis in order to perpetuate their own existences.

Such was how the creators of the system intended it. However, here, in this laboratory, she saw none of the alien animal-like creatures normally responsible for ensuring the gem's purification. What she did see was an unpurified and still volatile Grief Seed hanging from the ceiling, with seemingly no one or nothing tending to it. Her worry increased; left untended, the witch would revive and likely adapt against whatever flaws led to its initial defeat. In addition to rendering meaningless the effort and sacrifices needed to defeat it the first time, it would make the witch more dangerous. In addition, if the scientists were the ones who lost their lives in that barrier, then there would be no one present who could fight the witch, except for the one with the sunburst mask. In any case, there were few things Homura could imagine worse than being trapped again in a witch's barrier while unable to fight back.

Suddenly, however, the raw, impure energy from the Soul Gem began to be sucked into the wiring itself, like dust into a vacuum cleaner. One second after, the green scroll of data against the black screens of the monitors turned an ominous red. The containment fluid, which had up until this point allowed Homura to float freely and consciously within, hardened and sealed her movements once more.

She knew by experience what would come next. The lights would go out, and all five of her senses would be sealed, including her waking consciousness. Her life would then literally flash before her eyes in a montage of increasingly ugly memories depicting the low points of her life. This was likely how the experimenters induced witch transformation in the other girl before her, and many others before her. Realizing this was empowering in its own right; she knew what to resist and had a good idea of how. It was simply a matter of fighting against her own mind and body.

The wheel lock turned. One rotation. A second rotation. A third rotation. The door parted, and as before, six figures in lab coats and concealing head- and hand-wear shuffled in and took their positions. Whether or not these were the same ones she could not tell, though it did call into question her earlier hypothesis that the first batch of researchers were among the ones lost in the witch's barrier. Among this half-dozen was the one in the sunburst mask, still noticeably shorter than the others, yet shown to be potentially as dangerous as any of the rest of them combined. Only three containment cylinders, hers and the two to her immediate sides, lay within Homura's immediate peripheral range of sight, yet she suspected there were many more. The one on the right remained empty for the time being; green-hair's body was irretrievably lost within her own barrier, due directly to the witch-mask's actions. The one on the left still contained the tall, dark-skinned foreigner, whose situation had not visibly changed in the slightest.

The other scientists, as usual, manned their terminals. The witch-mask, however, did not move to a computer, but instead chose to walk right in front of Homura's containment cylinder. Unable to move as she was, Homura could not help but stare at the witch-mask directly, face-to-face. No identifiable expressions or features escaped through the mask; on Homura's end, she kept her own face as expressionless as possible. She was not going to allow this lot the pleasure of even looking as if she were going to give in.

As if sensing this, the witch-mask then turned away from her and motioned in a two-fingered gesture with her left hand in the direction of the other scientists. In response, one of them reached into the hazardous materials box nearest its terminal and carefully lifted out of it an object whose violet gleam preceded it out of the box. If Homura had any doubts as to what this object was, they were completely eliminated when the witch-mask, upon being presented the glowing jewel by the other scientist, deliberately held it to Homura's eyesight.

Another Soul Gem... No, that's…

My Soul Gem!

This bastard...

And then everything went dark, leaving Homura once again to her own thoughts.

Chapter Text

"You don't have to understand."

"My words don't have to resonate within you…"

"But still, I beg you. Let me protect you."

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Fifth Spell – Akemi Homura II

Homura saw red.

Homura heard red.

Homura felt red.

Homura tasted red.

Homura smelled red.

Her entire world was the color red.

In perfect synchronicity with the harsh red light filling the periphery of her vision, a shrill police alarm-like sound filled Homura's ears, which after the prolonged periods of sensory deprivation latched on to this strong stimulus all the more greedily. Where once her sense of touch had succumbed to numbing suddenly gave way to mind-blanking, sense-assaulting pain across her entire body. The smells of smoke and burning filled her nose.

This dream had felt particularly real, much more so than the others...

...And then she opened her eyes.

Jolted out of her dreaming slumber, Homura awoke to a reality that she could only wish was another artificial nightmare.

The upper half of her body was free from the cylinder, which had at some point tipped over and smashed upon the ground, spilling its contents – including Homura herself. Shards of the glass-like containment cylinder's walls had buried themselves into her skin, and the blood from the ensuing skin lacerations had stained the jelly-like fluid on the ground a deep red. The laboratory itself, likewise, was in chaos. Blazes of fire were spreading across the computers and telecommunications cabling and incinerating all of that precious equipment that they touched. With their bulbs broken, the light fixtures hung lazily off their suspensions and bled sparks of light and fire that added to the conflagration. The other tanks had also been destroyed, yet the dark-skinned girl did not respond in any way to her sudden freedom except by lying against the glass-, fluid-, and flame-filled floor.

Even in the literal heat of the moment, Homura quickly realized that if she did not want to die in this place, she had to get out as speedily as possible. She willed her exhausted and unwilling body to crawl completely out of her tank and get back on her own two feet. As soon as she attempted to do the latter, however, the ground shook as if from a directed blast, blowing her right back to the ground and knocking her onto her back. This was painful enough in and of itself, but the numerous tiny shards of glass embedded into her bare back had been pushed further in, introducing her to a brave new world of pain. On reflex, she screamed out, but no one heard or answered.

Somewhat serendipitously for Homura, whatever had caused this blast had knocked her Soul Gem off the ceiling suspension and onto the floor. Homura seized this opportunity and immediately lunged for it, but balked once she saw the dull violet coloring, as using it to heal her wounds in its current state would run the risk of terminal corruption. She had to find a power source to replenish it, and quickly.

Ignoring the sweltering heat and pain tearing through her back and legs, she once again and this time successfully forced herself to stand on her shaky feet. Remembering where the scientists stored their jewels, she then tried to check the boxes next to the burning computer equipment. Said boxes turned out, for better or for worse, to be more flame-retardant than the rest of the equipment in the room, but even they were damaged to the point where Homura could – and did – smash the tops open to reveal their contents. The scientists must have been forced to abandon the equipment on extremely short notice, as there were four unopened boxes containing fresh Soul Gems. A fifth one was empty, and the last of them contained an unpurified Grief Seed, which she promptly used to strengthen her own jewel. As there were no Incubators in sight, she quickly resealed the Grief Seed back into its box. This was neither the most intelligent nor the most ethical of decisions, she knew, but survival came before anything else.

With new strength and radiance flowing through her Soul Gem, Homura healed herself back to full capacity. When her magic returned, as did her magical clothing and bow... as well as one shield-shaped device, situated on her left wrist, she had thought she would never see again.

Homura stared at the artifact on her left hand in sheer disbelief.

"Why is this thing here?" she asked aloud.

The only thing that answered her was another room-shaking blast. Following her ears, she looked up to see a ceiling that was caving in by the second. She was reasonably certain that someone or something was trying to pound its way into the room, but was much less sure about whether or not she wanted to be around when the laboratory was broken into or destroyed, whichever came first. With this in mind, she ran straight to the door and tried to open. As soon as she gripped the wheel lock, however, she flinched back on reflex, for the lock felt superheated to the touch. Not letting this stop her, she simply blew the door off its hinges with pointed, rapid-fire shards of her own concentrated magic.

Exiting the room led Homura down a narrow corridor of indeterminate length, one thick with the scents of blood and fire. The thickening smoke trails obscured her vision and prevented her from obtaining an accurate picture of her position relative to any potential exit points. The lack of vision also meant that Homura had stepped on, before being able to see, a masked corpse in a laboratory coat. The body's upper half, separated through the torso by some great blunt force entering through the front, lay slumped against the walls. The mask itself had been partially destroyed as well, and the unmasked portion of the face was that of a middle-aged, balding Japanese man with an ugly, blue discoloration on his forehead. It was somewhat of a relief to see that the scientists were human after all underneath the hoods, but this relief did not last long.

A three-pronged fork in the path down the corridor lay ahead. But before Homura could try to figure out which was the path to freedom, a spray of bullets fired from to the path to her right, forcing her to hug the walls for safety. She peered across the corner in order to see where these projectiles had originated from; but before she could see past the smoke, the path immediately behind her spat out a column of flames with a force that blew her off her feet and sent her on a short tumble forward.

Shaking this off, she scrambled to her feet... and found herself staring right into a gun barrel whose chamber size suggested enough firepower to blow her head off in a single shot. She quickly activated the shield-like device on her left arm and watched as the entire world around her became a greyscale that somehow accentuated its surrealism. In this grey world, time stood still. The flames stopped roaring, and the bullet shells held their position in mid-air.

I never thought that I would see this thing again... or miss it, Homura thought.

Homura allowed herself a sigh of relief before getting back to business. She reached into her device in order to take inventory of what she had to work with. She had a wealth of firearms, munitions, and the like that she could gain access to within literally seconds along with her time-stopping ability, and she would likely need them now if she wanted to survive and make sense of where she was.

Thus safely out of danger for the "time" being, she was able to take a better look at her would-be murderer. It was a suit of armor that looked identical to the ones she saw fighting the witch, but was smaller and lighter. This one was built for ground theatres, as evidenced by the small wheel-like protrusions on its legs' undersides in lieu of the wings of the earlier, taller models. The barrels were longer and thinner than the aerial models, which made Homura wonder how the bullets that shot out were able to cause so much damage, besides the obvious answers of modified shells or simply knowing precisely where and what to shoot. Strangely, and also unlike the aerial models, the clear, undamaged window around the machine allowed Homura to confirm that these monsters did, indeed, have human pilots.

Wishing to conserve her magic until she had a better idea of what she was up against, she released the time lock, but not before putting distance between herself and the shooter. Reasoning that the person in the machine was more likely than not one of the laboratory's defenders, due to the scientists themselves having used these devices in the defense of the laboratory against the witch, she ran further down the path it was guarding. Just as she had come to that conclusion, however, she had witnessed two of the machines gliding and strafing across the hallway, shooting at each other. The only difference between the two belligerents was their coloring – one wore the deep blue she had seen inside the skyline of the witch's labyrinth, and the other was a sandy brown. As of currently, Brown clearly had the advantage and was pushing Blue further back. Not wishing to waste her valuable energies on interfering with this battle, Homura continued her run without even the slightest thought of decelerating, slid between the legs of the brown one, and left both of the combatants to do battle with each other as they pleased.

Continuing down this path led to a large room identical to the one she originally escaped from, right down to the extensive fire and impact damage spreading across the room's consoles. Of the six containment centers, the three on the side to Homura's right were empty, and of the empty ones, two of them were tipped over and destroyed in the same manner as hers. The three on the other side of the room had also been blown over, but this was not quite as surprising to her as what they evidently used to contain prior to their destruction.

Spread out like inanimate plush toys amidst the flames lay three exotic creatures, all of whom possessed markings on their coats unlikely to be found on any natural animal.

The first was completely black, save for the brightly-colored tattoo-like markings strewn in a seemingly haphazard fashion across its overturned egg-shaped body. Extending outward from each of the four sides of its body were a fleshy, ear-like structure with a pink tip split into four lobes and a glowing ring of gold orbiting the broad centermost point of the "ear". At the base of the "egg" was a bright red marking that was itself egg-shaped. Two red, shining orbs positioned so as to look like eyes were located on the side facing the ground. The second appeared much more animal-like in form; indeed, were it not for its red eyes, strangely-shaped and -colored jet black ears, and the rings on each ear, this one might well have passed for a dressed-up house pet or doll. The third, like the second, was catlike in appearance, with its primary differentiation from the second being the shorter white earlobes that matched the rest of its white pelt.

Homura knew instantly what those creatures were, and she was more familiar with the third of those creatures than she could ever have cared to be. In this situation, however, she vastly preferred the devil she knew to the ones she did not.

"KYUUBEY!" she screamed out almost involuntarily as she dashed toward the fallen creature.

From behind Homura abruptly sounded a shrill whistling noise, like the undoing of a knot or the cracking of a whip. She quickly aborted her dash and spun on her heels in an anticipation of the next surprise... only to catch the faintest glimpse of a glint of light among the flames. Less than a second afterwards, first the egg-shaped creature, then the black-eared feline one, and finally the one she called Kyuubey suddenly flew quickly yet listlessly toward the room entrance and beyond, as if their bodies were being pulled by some kind of string.

Not in the mood for surprises, Homura stopped time and intercepted the three Incubators in mid-air... only to find that they were, indeed, being pulled by an extremely thin piece of wire. After prying them loose, she retraced her steps down the corridor in order to follow the trails of wire to their points of origin (in the process stepping over the broken machines of the two combatants who had apparently fought each other to their mutual ends after Homura left them the first time).

Following the strings through a distance of ten meters, Homura finally encountered their origin in the form of a butterfly-like mechanical device hovering above the ground. Though a great deal larger than a normal butterfly, it was nonetheless small and compact enough to comfortably navigate the cramped corridor even at full wingspan. The ridges and patterns marking the mecha-butterfly were covered by a dark, scaly structure that managed to emit something of a gleam even when utterly immobile due to stopped time. Two complex interleaving networks of wires and lenses emulated the butterfly's natural compound eye system. The wires used for capturing its prey emitted from tiny protrusions extending from the fore and hind legs. Unlike the human-shaped mechs, however, this butterfly one did not seem to have a cockpit, which suggested that this was piloted either from a remove or by an artificial intelligence system.

Whatever its purpose was, Homura did not want this thing pursuing her or the Incubators as they made their escape. So, after laying the Incubators on the ground, she reached into the butterfly's delicate network of compound eyes and ripped them out, as many of them at a time as her small arms could. She blasted off the antenna and tore off the hind legs. For good measure, she also strategically fitted shards of her own magic into the ridges of the butterfly-mech's "veins". And to be sure, she picked up her charges and ran down the length of the other path of the corridor before releasing the time lock.

Three seconds after time resumed its flow, Homura saw a flash of light and felt a fresh heat wave wash over her from behind, but she did not look back. For that brief moment, she was content; the butterfly could not cause her any more trouble while it was on its death throes.

She barely had time to release this tension before she heard another whistling sound heading her way from the distance ahead of her. She immediately dropped to the ground and, looking up, saw five burning trails of smoke and light whiz past her position. Having a very good idea of what those trails belonged to and what was going to happen to her immediate area if she did not get out of there, she continued running forward as fast as she could. Surely enough, another cascade of explosions blasted through the corridor behind her, and an ensuing wall of smoke and fire advanced toward her position, cutting off all hope of retreat unless she wanted to burn energy running through flames.

Only one path remained – forward.

Homura threaded her way through the flame-wreathed laboratory and continued to gather information on her surroundings as best she could. One fact that was readily apparent was that at some point, while she was asleep and likely being experimented on, the laboratory had become a battleground. The brown humanoid mechs had made much progress in destroying the laboratory and gunning down all personnel they could find; the blue mechs, by direct contrast, were the ones defending the laboratory, and badly at that. The brown ones, who were the aggressors in this fight, were clearly winning; the blues could match neither the brown mechs' numerical superiority nor their technical prowess. As far as Homura was concerned, she had no dog in this fight – the browns attacked her on sight, treating her no differently than any of their enemies, while she was convinced the blues were being controlled by the scientists experimenting on her and the other Puella Magi. She would have destroyed them and their experiments herself if she had the luxury to do so. But for now, she had to better conserve her precious magical powers until she had a better idea of what to do and who to fight.

She still had many questions to be answered, after all.

Who were these people anyway? How did she – or the other magical girls and the Incubators, for that matter – end up here? What were they doing with the Soul Gems? And where was this place anyway?

Eventually, hours' worth of dodging belligerent mechs and walls of technology set afire had paid off. Homura had found a hole in the structure above, very likely caused by and most certainly exploited by the invaders, which led her out of the corridor maze and into the upper levels. Dodging through all of those heat waves left Homura utterly unprepared for the onslaught of bone-chillingly cold air and snow breezing through the opening.

Snow?

In emerging from the ruined laboratory, Homura was greeted with an expanse of leaden overcast sky and a wind chill that threatened to worm its way into her very soul. Homura found it difficult to breathe, and not just from the cold. A sustained gale-force windstorm imparted its heaviness and gravity onto the air, making it difficult for Homura to catch her breath; and her fingers, clasped as they were around the Incubators, threatened to stiffen on the spot. Unrelenting snowfall and the ceaseless wailing of the winds, the likes of which she had never experienced before, conspired with rising plumes of smoke to drastically whittle down her range of sight and hearing to just a few meters ahead of her. Below her, the snow on the ground swallowed her ankles and threatened to mire her entire lower leg if she stayed still for too long. Difficult as it was, she had to stay strong and continue moving on.

As she was continuing her walk, she suddenly felt a crippling, sharp pain tear into her left foot. Instinctively, she bent down on her left knee in pain, which caused the strangely silent creatures she had been protecting to fall out of her arms. As she could feel the cold seeping into her body through a freshly opened wound, she resolved to heal that with magic before it could even think about beginning to develop complications. With this having been done, she stopped to inspect the ground in order to see what stabbed her in the foot, as well as to recover the Incubators.

Removing the snow beneath her revealed a royal-blue-and-black-patterned panel shaped like a butterfly's wing. For confirmation, she lightly ran her fingers against the ridges of the veins… and frowned. As she thought, the ridges were razor-sharp. This thing had once been a wing belonging to one of those strange mechanical butterflies that she had encountered inside the laboratory. The right edge of the wing was bent out of shape and ruined so as to suggest that someone, or something, had sheared this wing straight off the host's body, most likely in as few goes as possible when the obvious lack of damage elsewhere was taken into consideration. On the bottom tip of the wing was a series of alphabet letters and numbers separated by a hyphen. Although the significance of this eluded Homura, she examined the alphanumerical string and committed it to memory. She did not like to admit it, but she was getting desperate for some kind of clue, any clue, as to her situation and those of the other Puella Magi she encountered.

"H… s… C… A… -0… 1…?"

After sounding it out, Homura tossed it aside in frustration. More likely than not, it was just the serial or model number of the butterfly mech, and she would need much more than that to shed some light on this mystery. She continued groping around for the Incubators she had dropped, all the while refusing the urge to curse them for choosing forms with white pelts.

"What are you doing, Akemi Homura?"

"That voice… Kyuubey? You're awake? Where are you?"

"Behind you."

She had to focus her eyes intently to see just a little more past the snowstorm to see the silhouette of the white-furred creature against the stormy backdrop of white snowfall. Unmindful of the near subzero temperature of its surroundings, the Incubator was busily eating away at the bodies of its brethren. It then dawned on Homura that the others were likely dead husks from the start, and that she had mistakenly conflated the heat of the flames of the laboratory interior with the creatures' natural body heat.

Whatever. She had bigger things to worry about.

"Kyuubey? Where are we? What is this? What's going on?"

"What do you mean, Akemi Homura?" it asked back.

"How did we end up here? And where is 'here' anyway?"

"Ah, the location. According to my estimates, we are near the peak of a volcano mountain region in the middle of Kunashir, the southernmost island of the Kuril Archipelago. If I remember correctly, the Kuril are disputed territory between Russia and Japan. That includes this one. Perhaps we are in the midst of renewed hostilities for ownership of the islands?"

"Maybe so," replied Homura, "but in that case, that does not even begin to explain why all of those Puella Magi are here… or what we are doing here, for that matter." Homura's first thought was that the girls were Puella Magi who contracted to fight in the dispute. But that was a wide guess based on a woefully incomplete picture, and she knew it. If nothing else, Akemi Homura was never so altruistic that she would never throw her destiny away for the sake of a few goddess-forsaken snow traps and fishing posts that had barely a couple of thousand people inhabiting it at any given time.

"Unfortunately, your guess is as good as mine. I do not sense a connection to any of my fellows here either. Is this what you humans call 'loneliness'?"

Homura did not answer this question. Instead, she asked another two. "Why have witches returned? Where is Madoka?"

"There you go about that 'Madoka' again," it answered, its tone giving an honest, but fruitless effort at simulating exasperation. "I could say nothing about the alleged existence called 'Kaname Madoka', but it cannot be doubted that this is an irregular occurrence. Indeed, that artifact on your left arm is exactly as you described. That would mean you were right about the concept of 'witches' and 'Grief Seeds', and by extension Kaname Madoka."

"So you have no idea of what's going on here yourself?"

"It's unfortunate, but that's exactly the case," Kyuubey promptly affirmed. At that particular moment, she almost regretted saving it from the flames.

"How useless..." she muttered. "In that case, keep your eyes open for any clues as to what is going on. Even I can't see or hear very far in this storm."

With Kyuubey in tow, Homura continued to brave the snowstorm and, with very measured, deliberate steps, search the area. For what it was worth, the worst of the storm had begun to recede and taper off as night fell upon the area. As Kyuubey had said earlier, they were indeed on a mountain, and at an altitude that would likely seem closer to the peak than to the base. The air was still thin, and the cloud cover was as thick as ever; but the snowstorm had abated to the point where she could see a comfortable distance around her.

Much like the storm, the fighting had calmed down considerably as well. The laboratory inside the mountain was in ruins, and likely everyone unfortunate enough to still be inside had died. Homura sighed in irritation at her own self; if she had not been so focused on getting herself out… if she just had a clearer head back then and ignored her own pain… then perhaps she could have saved her fellow Puella Magi before the attack on the laboratory had progressed too far. While the brunt of the fighting seemed to be over, the sandy brown mechs belonging to the victors had continued increasing their numbers and pouring into the mountain's interior. They were searching the mountain's base for something, or someone. Homura began to feel that if she were able to beat the searchers to whatever it was they were still here for, her own position relative to the situation would improve.

Operating on the assumption that they had yet to find what they were probing the mountain installation for, Homura carefully tracked the machines' movements and routes, taking care as she did so to avoid being caught herself in their dragnet. She especially prioritized the sides of the mountain where there were comparatively fewer of them. She still moved cautiously and slowly when the snowstorm was thick enough to drastically impede visibility, but when and where she could see more than a couple of meters ahead of her, she moved quickly. She especially avoided the skies whenever possible as she figured that the mechs would easily pick up either her form or her energy signature while in flight.

She had advanced some forty-five meters, by her own reckoning, below her initial point of exit when her Soul Gem began to gleam hotly.

"Homura! That overwhelming energy... Can you feel it?"

"I feel something," she did confirm. A dreadful sense of foreboding threatened to weigh her down and root her to her spot, as if to do otherwise would be to march into a waiting grave. It was a feeling like, and yet unlike, that of mortal terror, the likes of which no demon or witch – aside from the dreaded Walpurgisnacht, which she had not occasion to face in an unfathomably long time – could evoke in the seasoned veteran. And yet, it all felt terribly familiar somehow.

"We should follow this signature to its source. It could shed more light on our situation."

Right. She had almost forgotten that the little bastard did not quite feel fear or apprehension as humans did. It certainly had its own methods and protocols of self-preservation, but the fear of death, as an innate feeling that could possibly interfere with its directives or deter acting upon them, was as alien to Kyuubey as Kyuubey was alien to her.

But for all that having been said, Kyuubey was right. Giving into her apprehension could potentially cost her a crucial chance to find the answers she so desperately sought.

Her resolve to finish tracking down the source of this mysterious energy led her back into the mountain compound via a cave entrance far off the beaten path. Unlike previous sections of the laboratory, this room was largely untouched from the natural cave formation it was hewn out of, which suggested that this room was not part of the original laboratory design. This also meant that it was wider and had much more room with which to maneuver than the corridors with which to move around. Further adding to the "natural" atmosphere of this formation, a shallow pool of ice melt lay across an untouched expanse of interior just to the left of the entrance. Nonetheless, she saw a collection of black cabling snaking alongside the walls and ceiling, which all but confirmed in her mind that she was on the right track to something. In addition, she saw another of the three butterfly mechs patrolling the interior. Their presence, ironically enough, benefited her, as the cave was completely dark except for the small light reflections off their gleaming coats and the flashlight-like probes emitting from their compound eyes.

The ample, roomy, dimly lit interior of the cave allowed Homura a fairly easy opportunity to evade the butterflies normally. Even so, she activated her time-stop and reduced the slim margin of error to 0%.

At the end of the trail of wires set a room that unnaturally segued from the natural formation of the cave system surrounding it to a sterile environment that was much more like the laboratory she had grown familiar with. Unlike the other sections of the laboratory, however, this one remained undiscovered by the invaders and thus untouched by the ravages of war. Much like the room in the laboratory she had escaped, containment centers – four in total for this particular room – ringed the edges, and each of them had a corresponding HAZMAT box and computer. There were differences, however. The containment centers were empty of anything besides that strange fluid, despite their undamaged state. Moreover, all but one of the four computer terminals in the room were inactive. Only the one at the corner of the room farthest from Homura and to her right was active, and that was being worked on by the only person besides her in the room.

Homura hid herself and Kyuubey behind one of the containment capsules and watched the scientist intently. Although this person was masked and clad like the other scientists, and although Homura could see only the back of her, she could nevertheless see telltale signs of this one being female. Long, light lavender locks of hair peeked out from underneath the mask; the hands pounding away at the keyboard were undisguised and clearly slender and feminine; and her heavy breathing was of a voice that could only belong to a girl. As if heedless of the intruder in the room, the girl on the keyboard continued typing furiously at the keyboard. She was clearly in a hurry and not in any luxury to calmly assess whatever situation she was in.

"No way," the lavender-haired girl muttered to herself as she assessed whatever data was in front of her. "Right into Academy City? But that should be the last place on Earth... I don't get it at all... What is she trying to do here?"

Lavender seemed to want to throw her hands up in exasperation... but stopped when the door to the right made a hissing sound and smoke came out of it. Lavender immediately unmanned her terminal and placed her left hand against her hooded forehead. When she unclasped that hand, a gem with a glowing core the color of bright lavender, encased within a cage of gold, appeared within it.

"Homura, that's a Soul Gem!"

"I can clearly see that," replied Homura telepathically.

A nimbus of magic wound its way through the form of the mystery Puella Magi, blurring her form into indistinctness as it did so. Her visage flickered unsteadily for a fraction of a second before finally disappearing from sight, leaving behind only her work on the computer as evidence of her existence.

"Teleportation?" Homura wondered.

"Not quite. She's still here. It's just that she manipulated the light in the area so that she would not be detected by sight. Her power seems to be invisibility."

Indeed, even while invisible to the eye, she was still finishing up, though she was even more in a rush than before. Likely, she was trying to finish and get up before the door finished depressurizing and opening up. Only now that she was invisible, Homura could see past her and find out just what it was she was working on.

Homura activated her own magical ability of time stopping just before the mystery Puella Magi could completely wipe the screen. On the computer screen was a geopolitical green-on-black vector map of Japan that was unevenly pockmarked with red, blinking dots. The distribution of these dots was very noticeably heavily skewed; while between Hokkaido and the surrounding islands, including the one she was on now, there were only three dots, the mainland was teeming with them. Most noticeably, an area corresponding to western Tokyo, in addition to containing by far the most numerous and most rapidly blinking dots, also contained a huge red circle around it.

The locations pinpointed by the dots were significant; of that much Homura could tell. But what was the significance exactly? Were they the locations of other laboratories similar to this one? Were they known bases of the laboratories' enemies? Or was it...?

Homura decided to release the time lock and allow the scene to play out. The door at the other side of the room finally opened, and two figures briskly stepped through. The taller of the two was yet another balaclava-wearing lab-coated goon, while the shorter...

The shorter was the one in the dark sunburst mask who singlehandedly defeated the witch.

"Have we been followed?" the shorter one asked the taller one. Her voice, although demanding and authoritative, was nonetheless clearly that of a teenage girl's.

"Negative," the taller one replied. The obsequious, servile note in this older man's voice indicated clearly that he was subordinate to the shorter one. Unsurprising, considering she was likely far more dangerous than he could ever be. "Neither our enemies within Academy City nor the Association of Science knows anything about this annex."

"Just so," she responded. "Have you found Bradwell or the escapee yet?"

"Negative," the taller one replied again. "But it does not matter, does it? Even if this 'Bradwell' girl shows up at this point, and somehow evades the surveillance net of the 'Holly Blues' and the powered armors, that simply means she has missed her window of opportunity to effect any meaningful interference. With the sole exception of the one girl, all of the subjects who have not perished thus far have already been salvaged and relocated to other installations. It is only a matter of time before the last straggler is recaptured. Of that I can assure you."

"You overestimate yourselves," she responded. "There are plenty of places in this mountain range to hide and wait out a search force if you know where to look. Like this place here, right?"

"Point very much taken. However, if she is in hiding, then she is too busy lying low to be of any threat to us. What could she do? Try to rescue her fellow subjects? If so, she will find that city far more inhospitable to her ilk than any snowcap, I can assure you."

"You had better hope you're right, for all of our sakes," she said. She then waved in the direction of a terminal nearer the entrance. "Patch me through to Kihara, and be quick about it."

"Sir," he answered crisply, already trotting toward said terminal. Both Homura and the invisible magical girl, independently of each other, repositioned themselves (using their respective powers) to get a better viewing and hearing angle of the anticipated correspondence.

The scientist dutifully checked the encryption keys and then logged onto the network using a username and a password that were asterisk-ed away from sight. After a confirmation screen appeared, he planted his face, left eye first, onto the screen. The witch-mask folded her arms in a show of impatience while her subordinate patiently cleared his way through layers of security.

"What's taking so long?" she asked him.

"A few seconds, if you will, Sir," he implored. "The blizzard is causing some slight interference with the data transfer rate."

"Reduce the quality of the telecom feed. Change the settings to 'SOUND ONLY' if you must," she ordered. "Time is of the essence."

"That will not be necessary," he said, indicating the screen. Surely enough, the screen display changed from its black-and-green display to a more standard high-resolution color screen. On the other end of the screen appeared another person with an evil sunburst mask identical to that of the one nearer Homura. This one appeared to be slightly taller, but no other identifying marks could be discerned. Surrounding this one was a backdrop of pure white, presumably done deliberately so as to enhance anonymity.

The witch-mask in the cave balled her gloved right hand into a fist and jabbed it downward at, and through, the desk. "Who the Hell are you? And where is Kihara Ryoushi?" Evidently, she had meant to talk to someone other than this person.

"The good doctor had some other business to take care of," the other masked person said. Unlike the previous witch-mask, this one used a voice changer to further disguise any chance of identification. "For the time being, you may use me as your point of contact. I have been authorized to act on his behalf concerning this matter. Shall I reconfirm my authentication?"

"Where. Is. Kihara?" she demanded once again.

"We have confirmed the retrieval of the subjects thus far sent. As of this communication, teleportation-type espers are en route to receive the final subject. Afterwards, you are to leave the installation immediately. Are we clear on this point?"

The disgust and indignation the female witch-mask suffered showed strongly even through the total face and body covering. "Perfectly clear," she said, trying and only fairly succeeding at suppressing the anger in her voice.

"Ah, and one more thing," the one on the other end of the line added.

"…?"

"Elise Bradwell."

"What about her?"

"You should have been more careful. She is within that very same room."

"Impossi—"

The words on the lackey scientist's throat died instantly. With a bright flash of lavender light, the hidden magical girl instantly materialized back into view and threw off her hood. Five six-foot, whip-like rods of radiant, hardened lavender light instantly materialized from underneath the sleeves of her lab coat and shredded through the garments, revealing once and for all her true identity as a Puella Magi.

Long tufts of wavy, if slightly unkempt, light purple hair, roughly equivalent to Homura's in length, ended in straight bangs that seemed to spill past and cover her right eye and both of her ears. A single braid was tied horizontally across this hair at the front, with the tying mechanism being a lavender-colored ornament shaped like a crescent moon. At 5'6", she was roughly on par with her opponent insofar as height, yet her flawlessly white skin color and her face, most especially her high cheekbones, marked her as a girl of Caucasian ethnicity. Her clothing consisted of a white-and-violet laced corset and matching neck bow positioned as if to add lift to her rather impressively-sized breasts. Her hands were covered only with gloves with the same decorations, translucency, and color as her "upper armor". The bottom of her magical girl outfit consisted of a black-and-purple Glen check patterned skirt that reached down to just past her knees. Completing the princess-like look was a pair of glossy high-heeled slippers, reminiscent of the Cinderella story, worn under translucent lavender-tinted leggings that covered, if not obscured from eyesight, what parts of her legs the skirt did not. The beams of light extended from the tips of her right hand's fingers and moved as if they were extensions of her own limbs.

After her transformation completed, she wasted not a second further and went on the attack. She swung her right hand downward and to the left, and the blades of light followed, completely slicing through the nearest containment capsule like a high-speed, high-powered cutting laser and destroying it instantly. That which seemed to be impervious to all of the force Homura could muster while she was inside one had been out with ease. Without losing any momentum, Elise's light beams then descended on the witch-mask.

"ELISE!" Screaming out her opponent's name, the girl with the mask grabbed all five light beams out of the sky with her right hand and pulled on them. The lights wavered and flashed as the masked girl struggled with the source of the sudden attack in a game of tug-of-war.

That was the moment Homura decided to attack. She did not know who the lavender-haired girl was or why she was fighting, and she had only recently discovered what kind of being she was and the nature of her powers. But everything she knew about the situation told her that the one in the mask was one of the people running the experiments and that she had the potential to be an exceedingly dangerous enemy. To deal with her would be to knock one of the key pieces in this deadly chessboard off the board in one early, decisive stroke. In the event that the light-wielding girl was another enemy, she could interrogate or handle her at her leisure after the bigger threat was taken care of.

She activated her time freeze, which stopped the two combatants in the middle of their combat and allowed easy, unfettered shots right at the masked girl's center mass. Whoever this girl was, she could not dodge both the beams of light and an unloaded clip at full auto at the same time. She quickly whipped out a Beretta ARX-160 assault rifle, disabled the safeties, primed the gun, loaded with ammunition, and took aim. With her, this would all come to a swift end before it could escalate any further.

"Homura! Be careful! She can still move!"

The beginnings of a cry of disbelief erupted from Homura's throat. That was all she was able to get out before a force that she could not detect impacted in the center of her face and sent her and Kyuubey flying helplessly backwards into the wall. The assault rifle clanged and echoed loudly in the otherwise silent frozen world as it fell from her hands and onto the ground. The leftover momentum from the force that hit her caused her to sink painfully into the rocky surface of the wall; and when that force finally abated, Homura slumped off of the wall and fell helplessly onto the ground.

"So that's how you were able to slip through the cracks. I see now. I see it perfectly. But even so, I can't understand you. I don't understand," the witch-mask said, her right fist balled and extended toward Homura's direction. "You possess such magnificent power, and yet you resort to toys like these. Why?" She retracted her fist and contemptuously kicked the weapon away from Homura's reach.

Did she just… punch me? "But that's… who… what are…" Homura managed to squeak out before coughing up a wad of blood. She tried to pick herself off the ground, but the witch-mask preempted this by stomping forcefully onto her back and thus pinning her once more to the floor.

"You will be properly cared for later," she said, lifting her foot off Homura and at the same time returning her attention the blades of light. Grabbing hold of them once again, after a minor exertion, she severed the light blades partway from their source by "ripping" them in half. As soon as she did so, the light source holding the blades together vanished, as did Homura's magic holding the surroundings in place. Time flowed once again.

"!?" The Puella Magi named Elise drew back in shock after realizing that her attack had suddenly disappeared before her very eyes. Quickly recovering, however, she returned to invisibility and, from a direction at a drastically different angle from where she seemed to be facing, shot out another five lavender light beams, these ones nearly enough to cross the entire room edgewise. The witch-mask simply responded to this onslaught by dodging the beams as they passed through and grabbing, twisting, and destroying the ones that threatened to close her in. When one of the inert computers near the other scientist had been destroyed by the light beams, and when said scientist barely avoided having his own person cut down by a row of three blades, he decided that courage was the better part of valor and made a hasty exit from the room.

Refusing to just lie there and give up, Homura picked herself off the ground and considered her options. She at first considered a flash bomb, figuring the enemy was not going to be deflecting and negating attacks when blind, after all. Then she took the measure of the room and decided against it. She would just get caught in the blast herself, and she knew for a fact that the enemy was able to move in a time freeze, which meant Homura simply couldn't time it to go off while she was at a safe distance. She instead decided on the bow. Kneeling on one knee, she once again took aim and, timing her shots to match when the enemy's more dangerous hand was too busy manipulating the blades of light, fired. The witch-mask dodged to the side to avoid the shots of pink light while still tangling with the lavender light, but Homura had accounted for that. She readied another shot…

…only to have her hands violently jerked upwards and to the right and held in place. This forced her to let go of the bow, which disappeared into motes of pink light upon hitting the ground.

Shit. Now what?

Homura quickly turned around to see what was binding her. She found her answer in the form of another armored butterfly hovering near the entrance of the room. She had sneaked past them on the way to this point using magic; once she thought about it, it was not surprising that they would turn up again once she made her presence known. She regretted not simply destroying them when she first passed by them, even with the potential risk of blowing her cover. However, in using her Soul Gem to reinforce her tiny frame with supernatural strength, she was able to rectify that mistake. With a jerk of her captured hand, she tugged on the strings tethering her to the butterfly and yanked the unfortunate mech in the direction of the masked girl... who summarily swatted it out of the air with her right hand as if it really were just an insect and not a mechanical creature fashioned in the shape of one.

"As much as I enjoyed this display," the masked person on the other end of the teleconference line cut in without preamble, "I must inform you that the teleportation-type espers mentioned earlier have arrived. Preparations will now be made for the extraction of the final subject."

"Final subject? Wait, there's another one of you? What's the meaning of this?" Bradwell asked. Both the Puella Magi of Light and her opponent had aborted the fighting to pay attention to the teleconference.

"Do as you will," the masked girl responded. "I grow tired of all this."

With that, smoke seeped out of the edges of the cavern ground and walls, and a loud, whirring noise could be heard. Underneath the three girls, the smoky ground shifted and rotated at a speed that threatened to knock Homura and Elise off their feet and ruin their positioning relative to their mutual enemy. The walls and ceiling parted from their foundations and receded into the distance, leaving the three of them on a rocky platform surrounded by walls of pitch-black panels. Lines of carved circuitry ran like arteries through these panels, and through them, patterned pulses of red, blue, yellow, and green flowed endlessly upward.

"What's going on now? And who are you anyway?" Elise asked, finally regarding Homura while not taking her eyes off the masked girl.

"That is what I would like to know," Homura responded.

The girl in the mask looked up. "So if you mind telling me, why did you do such a foolish thing as bring the two of them down here with me?"

In response to this question, a rose-pink light illuminated the panels, revealing a vast, empty chamber with only a single monitor screen in the middle and a clear, glass structure at the other end. Much like the containment centers, it was cylindrical-shaped and filled with the same fluid. It was much taller than its standard counterparts, however, to the point of stretching from the ground to the ceiling. A workstation terminal lay next to the containment column, and next to the computer, yet another hooded scientist stood patiently like a statue.

However, all of those details became superfluous to Homura when she laid eyes upon the occupier of the containment column. A young girl, appearing no older than early adolescence, floated in upside-down suspension inside the containment device, her expression as blank as that of the dead. A fluffy column of pink hair hung off her brow and extended downward to the floor. The sole article of her clothing on the girl's person was a hospital gown that matched the color of her hair.

"Ma… Ma… Mado… ka…?" Upon seeing the girl in the tank, Homura's eyes dilated in disbelief and shock, and her knees gave way, causing her to fall onto them. Just as quickly, the shock subsided, leaving only a burning, rage-filled desire to rescue her and destroy the ones responsible. "Madoka… MADOKA!"

The girl named Kaname Madoka had subjected herself to a fate worse than death in order to give hope to all of the magical girls throughout all time. In confining her here and experimenting on her, the bastards were denying her sacrifice – rejecting the hopes and dreams of magical girls past, present, and future. They had to pay. They could not get away with this. She would not let them.

"So that girl is Kaname Madoka…"Kyuubey mused.

"MADOKA!"

Consumed with grief and rage, Homura threw her previous caution to the wind and made a dash toward her long-lost friend. As she made the dash, she activated her time artifact, stopped the masked scientist and the magical girl Elise in their tracks.

"You cunning fool!" the masked girl, who was proven to be immune to stopped time, cried out. She tried to intercept Homura, but this time, Homura had a better idea of what her opponent was capable of and had much more room to maneuver around than previously. Figuring the opponent was heavily right-handed, Homura dodged to her own right, pulled the pin off an anti-tank grenade that she had short-fused for just an occasion and threw them right in the masked girl's face, at an angle that would be impossible at the throwing distance for the enemy to cleanly dodge. Before releasing the time lock, for good measure, she armed herself with a katana and charged straight at the containment column's computer console and at the hooded lackey next to it.

Before she could finish this, however, the time lock forcibly expired without Homura's consent. She aborted her run on the containment center and darted away from the grenade, lest the explosion which she knew would be coming a mere two seconds later take her with it. The ensuing explosion engulfed the girl in the mask and the nearby other magical girl and encased half the strange chamber in a smoky haze. This, in turn, allowed Homura to right her course and continue her dash toward Madoka.

Just a little more… Just a little more… Madoka…

When the smoke finally cleared, the computer was destroyed. The connectors had been blown off and incinerated, while shrapnel from the grenade itself lodged itself in the monitor's screen, finishing the machine off. The masked scientist near the console was nowhere in sight. Homura did not care about that one. The grenade must have saved her the trouble of liquidating him.

We can finally be reunited. This time, I can properly protect you. Just a little more…

Upon finally reaching the containment column, she found…

…absolutely nothing.

Homura paused instantly and took a step back. Where did this go wrong? Did she use too powerful a grenade and accidentally blow Madoka away? No, that could not be it; she would never make such an elementary mistake. The cylinder was completely untouched, and any attack that harmed Madoka from without would have had to pierce the glass-like shell protecting her. Did the girl with the mask do something? No, she had taken the brunt of the attack as Homura had expected but was unharmed and still focusing on the light-wielding magic girl as her opponent. The upper half of the sunburst mask had been blown off her face, revealing a set of heterochromatic eyes whose silver (right) and blue (left) irises. The mask had been destroyed; however, the rest of the strange attire, as well as the person wearing it, were otherwise unaffected by Homura's gambit.

This left only the light-wielding magical girl as a possible suspect. This too was unlikely, as she was too busy unfurling a shield of hardened light to possibly go after Madoka. Depending on how far her blades of light could be extended and depending on how much control she had over the properties of the light she wielded, she could have used her light to pass through the barrier and solidify inside, leaving Madoka at her mercy. Again, however, this was unlikely, unless she considered destroying Madoka or making her disappear with her light a necessary sacrifice in the effort of stopping whatever her enemy was planning.

So what had happened?

As she had continued thinking, she came to a realization which hit her like a splash of ice-cold water.

"As of this communication, teleportation-type espers are en route to receive the final subject."

"Teleportation…"

"Afterwards, you are to leave the installation immediately."

In that very instant, the panels powered down and turned pitch-black again, leaving the three in darkness. The ground began to rumble fitfully, and much more violently and uncontrollably than the first time.

"So it's begun," the now partially unmasked girl's voice chimed victoriously in the darkness.

"No, it ends here."

"Only for you. This laboratory is now done for and has been consigned to the darkness. Darkness that allows no light in for you to utilize, Elise."

A chain reaction of explosions blasted away the walls on the other side of the room and advanced their way forward at a quickening rate. As soon as these explosions started, Elise reactivated her blades of light on both of her hands.

"See?" Elise said. "There's plenty of light to go around."

"You fool. Does your determination to settle things with me really go so far?"

"Hey, stranger. You with the guns and bombs."

"What?" Homura asked, surprised that Elise would talk to her even while she was fighting her enemy.

"That girl with the pink hair, inside the big tube. She was your friend, wasn't she?"

"And so what if she was?"

"You saw the map I pulled up, with the big red circle around western Tokyo? That's a special place within the Tokyo area called Academy City. I wasn't able to pinpoint where exactly, but wherever they took that girl and the others, I'm certain it's somewhere within that city."

Elise's and the masked girl's silhouettes became visible among the encroaching flames.

"Why are you telling me this?" asked Homura. "Even if you gain my gratitude, that's no guarantee that I'll be willing to help you."

"Agreeable type, aren't we?" Elise retorted. "It's just that… I figured you wanted to save your friend."

The containment cylinder crashed down onto the ground loudly, and the flames roared ever the hotter and consumed all the faster.

"What about you?" Homura asked her finally.

"You worry about yourself, and about your friend," Elise said. "I'll worry about my own self… and about my own friend."

"This is bad, Homura!" Even in the literal heat of the moment, Kyuubey's voice rang loudly and clearly within Homura's mind. "If we stay here, we'll be caught up in the blasts!"

Homura did not have the luxury to consider beyond face value the true significance of the other magical girl's words. Forming a violet magical mandala underneath her legs, she shot upward and through rapidly narrowing gaps in the collapsing ceiling. Thus free from the vertical shaft, she switched directions and glided horizontally to the entrance of the cave formation just seconds before a thick wall of ice and snow sealed it shut.

Once outside, she was faced with the bitter cold of a raging mountainside blizzard. But this time, she was filled with a simmering rage that not even the cold of the north could snuff out.

An entire colony of butterfly drones converged on Homura in mid-flight and tried to subdue her with their strings. One time-stopped second later, a cluster of grenades had completely blown them right out of the air.

Three brown mechs flew in Homura's direction and opened fire. All three of them were hacked apart lengthwise by a katana, the clean cuts in their armor materializing well before their systems could even recognize that they had been damaged.

Homura did not have to look back, nor did she, to hear the loud, satisfying explosions that ripped apart the laboratory compound.

"Where to now, Homura?" Kyuubey asked.

"To Tokyo. No, to this 'Academy City'. If Madoka is in that place, I will find her. And if they dare lay a finger on her, I will use every means at my disposal to eliminate them."

Madoka. Even now, my answer has not changed. No matter what may come, I will save you. I will protect you.

Chapter Text

" A dear friend of mine has been abducted."

" If they dare lay a finger on her, I will use every means at my disposal to eliminate them."

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Sixth Spell – Akemi Homura III

"Allow me to summarize the salient points of your long, rambling exposition, if you will," Homura said, in between slow and measured bites of the potatoes of her curry rice and potato dish. In direct contrast with her slow pace, just across the old wooden table the two girls were dining on, the foreign nun named after the Index of Forbidden Books continued gobbling down dish after dish at an alarming rate. Whereas Homura had barely finished the rice portion and was slowly chipping at the beef and potatoes, the Index girl had already managed to devour a dozen whole dishes, with no signs of being satisfied or even slowing down. Just where the food went inside that tiny body of hers was yet another of the growing list of mysteries facing Homura.

"Go ahead," Index said after quickly wiping her mouth.

"Currently, there is a war between a 'magic side', as represented by a secret occultic arm of the Christian religion and a 'science side', as headed by this Academy City that we are in now. Due to a treaty, this war was primarily a cold war, hidden underneath shadows, until the recent onset of World War III, which ended only a week ago. One of the main branches of the magic world is your church, the… Necessary… Necessario…" Before she realized it, Homura found herself stumbling over the unfamiliar term.

"Necessarius," Index supplied. "The Church of Necessary Evil, the 0th Parish of the Anglican Church."

"I see," Homura said quickly and evenly in response. "As far as the magic side is concerned, 'magic' is the ability to achieve supernatural effects by processing one's own life force into mana, and then by subsequently using that mana according to a set of precepts and theorems entirely unrelated to what we know as physical laws. This system was created so that people without innate supernatural ability or talent could reach the level of the talented."

Index nodded again. Homura noticed that her eyes were wandering to the stall selling the curry dishes. If Index was allowed to leave the table, Homura feared on some gut level, she would lose the girl's attention span to her insatiable hunger. She thus thumped loudly on the table to reclaim Index's attention before the nun could begin to make a run for Dish #13.

"This process stands opposed to Academy City's 'scientific' ESP development curriculum which uses a top-secret methodology of drugs and hypnosis, among other things, to alter its students' brains in such a way to allow those brains to produce psychic powers. These methods are incompatible with each other, to the point that espers who try to use magic suffer severe and potentially fatal bodily rejection backlashes. On the other side of the issue, magicians who do not either have strong wills or take measures beforehand feel distinctly uncomfortable around espers when in the middle of performing their magic."

"According to the treaty preserving the balance between magic and science," Index volunteered, "I'm not allowed to observe the actual processes used in the ESP development program."

"Continuing on," Homura said, her patience wearing thin as the conversation continued, "the organization at the forefront of the 'magic side' in opposition to Academy City is the Roman Catholic Church, which somehow retains enough of its power and prestige even in the modern age to manipulate such First World nations as Russia, France, and Italy into declaring an all-out war on a sovereign city-state within secular Japan with a total area of only one-third the size of Tokyo."

Index frowned up at her. "Well, actually, Russia's magic side is Eastern Orthodox, not Catholic. World War III was brought on by the alliance between the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches. But go on." Homura took a deep breath. From this point onward, it was going to take a supreme effort of will to not let her incredulity show on her face. As it was, it took a surprising amount of willpower on Homura's part to avoid rolling her eyes.

"Furthermore, despite the massive personnel, land, and resource disadvantage such a war would entail, and despite the influences exerted on it via the international community by the two largest denominations of the largest religion in the world, Academy City managed to not only fight Russia to a standstill, but also emerge victorious."

Index nodded vigorously. The childishly self-satisfied look on the nun's face, reminding Homura of the smug self-confident look a certain someone had on her face just before she did something damnably stupid, could do naught but exacerbate Homura's unease and anxiety. She could deal with Index's verbose and slightly condescending manner of lecturing, but what she was far less well-equipped to handle was the implication that there were other methods, other paths, to attaining supernatural power – ones that did not involve little girls selling their souls, emotions, and bodies into the service of inscrutable alien beings. Within Index's lecture on the history and systems of magic, Homura felt, was the reason why she felt an instinctive loathing of this city, one that informed every step she had taken within it since the beginning of her infiltration two nights ago.

All of the pain… the agony… the suffering… and for what?

Put simply, the mere existence of Academy City, of the churches, and of the ESP development program made light of all of the actions that Akemi Homura had taken up until this point. If the nun was to be believed, this city had forged a path to supernatural power via a purely technical process, one that made no mention of, and seemingly made no allowances for, the machinations of inscrutable alien intelligences preying upon the emotions of human girls for their purposes.

A chill ran down Homura's spine, one entirely unrelated to the steadily declining temperature of the November autumn night.

"And you," Homura said, addressing the girl who was stealing glances at the outdoor food stall where the two had purchased their dinner. "You are one of Necessarius' ultimate trump cards: someone who has read and perfectly memorized all of the 103,000 books of the Index of Forbidden Books; hence that unwieldy name of yours. And among these works inside your head are more than mere written disagreements with church wisdom; they are actual tomes and grimoires that possess an active, intelligent drive to pass on their knowledge and can potentially corrupt and poison the souls of those who attempt to gain access to the magic therein. By your own admission, you've involved yourself in this matter on your own accord because you wish to uphold the balance between magic and science as outlined by the treaty."

Index nodded again, though much more slowly and much less vigorously than before. The smile from earlier had faded from the nun's face, and her eyes veered off into the distance, past even the food stalls that had previously commanded her attention. Clearly, there was more to her hand in the matter than being bound by the dictates of some treaty. At some level, this girl called Index was emotionally invested in the outcome of Homura's search for her abducted friend. Homura would need to confront her sooner or later and discover what the other girl was truly after, but now was not the time. Confronting her so soon without gaining her trust would merely prove counterproductive, especially during this critical briefing of the rules of this new game board.

"This treaty was supposed to prevent magic and science from coming to blows, was it not?" Kyuubey, who was up until this point silently listening in on the conversation from the vantage point of an adjacent table, chimed in. "Then in facilitating an international conflict among powerful nations and in allowing the conflict to escalate into a worldwide stage, it has obviously failed in its purpose. Until the authorities can redraw the lines and reform the treaty, then it would be best to consider such a thing as dead letter, for our purposes."

"Eh... you might have a point there," Index conceded.

"But I must say," continued Kyuubey, much to Homura's growing displeasure. "If both 'magic' and 'science' have demonstrated verifiable paths to attaining power that can be duplicated, honed over time, and taught to posterity, then there should be no need to fight over which path is superior. There is no limit to how interesting humans can be. They draw battle lines and fight each other for incomprehensible reasons."

Homura was inclined to concur, but she found the thought of being on the same wavelength as an Incubator, even on something such as this, to be revolting on a gut level. More than that, however, Homura had pinpointed the reason for her own unease during the exchange.

This was a world utterly different from any she had expected.

She had known from her brief talk with the mysterious foreign Puella Magi, and confirmed with her own senses that there existed a sovereign city-state within Japan. She had battled with police forces with tactics and armaments comparable with elite American squadrons; and soon after that, she had witnessed the reality-defying powers that the schoolchildren of this nation-within-a-nation could bring to bear. But it was not until Index had given her that primer on the history of the occult world and of the conflict with "science" that it truly dawned on her.

She was in another timeline, likely another world. As such, many, if not most, of the old rules did not apply here.

"Does that cover the background info?" Homura asked her.

"More or less," Index answered back. She then indicated the Soul Gem on Homura's left hand by pointing at it with the pronged end of the fork still in her hand. "So that jewel on your hand… what is it exactly? A lich's phylactery? A catalyst used in a Solomonic spirit-binding ritual? A materialization of alchemy using the Stone of the Six Keys of Eudoxus? Or maybe an object based on the old Norse and Russian tales of the deathless man who hid his soul inside an egg?"

"…"

Homura suppressed the urge to wince at the mention of the term "lich" but otherwise hesitated to answer. She knew she should repay Index's good faith by providing some answers of her own, and the previous encounter proved beyond doubt that Index was no stranger to magic. Homura's primary reason for withholding information from her compatriots in times past was because she knew precisely how they would act when presented with the unfiltered truth of the Puella Magi system. Given how this particular girl had been able to touch upon that secret within minutes of being presented with it, this would likely not be the case with her. So why was she still reluctant?

Once again, she found herself staring intently into the other girl's large green eyes.

If she knew what a Puella Magi was, would she still be so eager to unravel the mysteries of the Soul Gem? Would those eyes turn away in revulsion and disgust? Would she still be as willing to go along with her and possibly risk her own life, status, and position within Academy City to follow a stranger down what was likely going to be a lonely, bloody path?

"The Soul Gem is an interesting and useful instrument, is it not?" Kyuubey's voice rang, cutting through Homura's thoughts. Its snow-white form crossed the small gap between the two tables effortlessly and settled right at the geometric midpoint of Homura's and Index's table. "Should you want to experiment with it firsthand, you need only wish it, and I can turn you into a Puella Magi with your own Soul Gem."

Homura gritted her teeth and shot a glare at the little creature. As if sensing what was to come next, the tiny calico kitten abandoned its former position of trawling for scraps at the bottom of the table and leaped to the top. Fur standing on end, it paced the length of the table directly between Index and Kyuubey and kept its eyes trained on the alien creature, as if daring the thing to come any closer to its master on pain of getting mauled. Kyuubey, however, showed no sign of recognizing any of the animosity directed its way.

"None of the female citizens of this Academy City have a shred of magical talent. None, that is, except you alone. Figuratively speaking, you are an oasis of potential springing from a geyser in the midst of a vast, barren desert wasteland. Just agree to the contract, and–"

"That will not be necessary." Homura punctuated the verbal interruption of the Incubator's ill-timed sales pitch by hitting its backside with a half-eaten stick of leek from her plate. "Now then, back to the matter at hand. Based on what I have told you of my situation earlier, what do you think is going on, based on your expertise on this world's magic? Do you have an idea of what these experiments are trying to accomplish?"

Index opened her mouth to speak, but Kyuubey preempted her. "Homura," it said, "I think it's unproductive to start exploring from such a standpoint."

This took Homura by surprise. "What do you mean?"

"I mean to say it's transparently clear what they are trying to gain from the experiments, in at least one sense."

"What do you mean?" an irritated Homura repeated.

Kyuubey answered her question with a question of its own. "Why is it that we created the Puella Magi system in the first place?"

"Harvesting energy from the emotions of humans in order to prevent the heat death of the universe via entropy," Homura recalled. "So what of it?"

"You still don't understand?" Kyuubey asked, the lilting in its voice trying and barely succeeding at simulating exasperation. "How surprising. You are usually more perceptive than this. Then let me refresh your memory. Think back to all of the laboratories we hit on our way to the city and inside. And then think on the common thread linking the 'themes' of the witches and familiars you have battled. Therein you'll find your answer."

Homura thought back. According to Index, the true form of the last witch they fought was a monster, based very loosely off a Christian legend, which turned out to be a refinery that constantly dredged a viscous substance out of the ground. Its familiars were solar panels, black locusts, and propellers. The one before that was a sentient maze that consisted of a system of metal pipes, one reminiscent of those found in a certain popular long-running platform-jumping video game series. The source of its power was a colorless substance that flowed among the pipes and shifted freely between liquid and gaseous forms, making it difficult to lock down and destroy. Its familiars were a pair of giant old-style water wheels that outdid even the espers and police of Academy City in sheer doggedness. Then there were the...

She paused.

Drills. Oil. Lightning. Furnaces. Water wheels. Solar panels. Wind farms. Propellers.

"Energy," Homura muttered, almost under her breath. "They're mining the Soul Gems for energy."

"According to a guidebook I once read," Index supplied, "this School District 10 that we're currently in now houses the majority of Academy City's energy research laboratories."

"There you have it."

"That theory's something to go on, yes, but it's just that – a theory," Homura said. "There are still qualifications to it that can't be ignored."

"Such as?" Index asked.

"For one, witches are highly individualized beings, with personalities that vary as widely as any human's, even considering the circumstances that shaped and spawned them," Homura said. "In all of the time I have devoted to fighting them, I've never heard of a distinct 'theme' that could be applied to an otherwise completely disparate group of witches. But that may be a function of how they're created and handled in this world. There might be a fundamental difference."

"But it's something to go by, isn't it?" Index offered. "If that's the case, then we can crack this case wide open simply by finding out where all of the energy they're collecting is going and what that energy is supposed to accomplish."

"That's my next objection," Homura countered. "The energy given off by the Puella Magi system is an energy source that runs directly counter to the Laws of Thermodynamics."

"Ther-mo-dy-na-mics?"

"'Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changed.' That's a fundamental rule of physics. As far as what I understand from your lecture, even your magic system merely converts energy generated by the normal functions of the human mind and body into a usable form instead of creating it from nothing. Beyond even that, we're talking about energy that can affect thermodynamic equations on a potentially cosmic scale. Logically, it should be impossible for human technology to reach a level that allows it to utilize such massive outflows of energy, especially without the Incubators' assistance."

"Those scientists could have stolen the information from us. There were Incubators in those capsules as well as Puella Magi, after all. The possibility cannot be discounted that they tampered with us as well as with you." As it made its counterpoint, Kyuubey paced across the table. "We theorized that it could eventually be possible to create a manmade Soul Gem, but the technology would take estimably hundreds, if not thousands, of years to refine before a usable, stable container was made. But that would necessitate a mindset in which the human soul was accepted as a distinct and separate entity from the human body and mind, something that a nation at war with all non-scientific elements could never come to."

"From what you described, this situation has the fingerprints of both magic and science," Index said. "Experiments like that are exactly what the treaty was supposed to prevent. In that case, Necessarius should be investigating. Perhaps if we can get in contact with them..."

"We will do no such thing," Homura ordered. If the other girl was to be believed, then the mere presences of Homura and Madoka within Academy City were potential matchsticks waiting to set off an already delicate political situation. However ridiculous the story may have sounded, she ill needed to be indebted to a major organization for saving her friend. She also did not want to run the risk of betraying her friend, a goddess, into the hands of a Christian militant organization, no matter how benign their mission statement may have been portrayed. She thus steeled herself for the expected questioning of "Why not?", if not outright objection from the other girl. To her surprise, however, the nun simply nodded her agreement and smiled.

"I think that would be for the best right now," Index said.

"How unexpected. Since you were a member of this particular organization, I thought you would be more amenable to their involvement in this case."

Index finally ceased pecking at her food entirely and stared off into the graffiti-covered building behind Homura, or perhaps at the layer of opaque royal-blue plastic strung along the sides of the buildings between which the food stall they were eating in was ensconced. Her unfocused eyes and shuffling legs told Homura, well before she actually answered, that her answer would be at best a filtered response... or more likely an outright lie.

The relationship between Index and this "Necessarius" organization was clearly more complex – and less pretty – than that of a mere missions dispatch to a foreign land.

"You have your reasons, don't you?" Index finally asked. "In that case, it's best that we try solving this case on our own."

In the end, she opted for a guarded response, without either explaining her motives or asking for the other party's. Don't sniff out my secrets, and I won't sniff out yours, she seemed to want to say. Homura could not decide whether this nun was good at hiding her surface thoughts or was as completely transparent as she seemed to be on the surface.

"Now that I think about it," Index continued on, "there's something about your situation that strikes me as strange." Homura merely stared at her. "Don't you think that the show you saw at the end of your captivity was a little… how do I say this? Contrived?"

"The timing of the appearance of the other magic girl and the one in the mask, right?" Homura asked her.

"Right. If the masked person on the other end of that screen knew beforehand that the other magical girl was coming, they might have known about you as well. You say you don't know how you ended up surviving your captivity and release when the others died?"

"I think I know what you're getting at," Homura responded, "and I don't think it's the case. There's no way they could have predicted that two magical girls who have had no prior association with each other would meet each other at that point in time and would have the same goals of crushing their organization. Not unless–"

"Normally, that wouldn't be the case," Index said. "But that could have been anything. The common ESP ability of precognition on a more focused scale, perhaps? Or even your own magic that allows you to control time? More mundanely, they could have manipulated events so that you were the only one to survive to escape your capture. That 'Elise Bradwell' girl could even be in on it."

"That would mean that their target was not just Madoka, but me as well... but for what purpose? In that case, why would they take such a convoluted route? If I was one of the targets all along, they could have completed their objectives while Madoka and I were in their captivity. The only way I can think otherwise is..." Homura paused and stared at Index.

"That they wanted you here, in Academy City, as well," Index responded. It was good to know if nothing else that the other girl was on the same page as she. Still, it was not a pretty thought. Homura ill relished the notion that she had potentially stepped into a trap from the very outset even as she thought she was grabbing hold of her own destiny.

Mere seconds after this, Homura heard a tinny, three-note chime being broadcast from above. Looking up at the source proved futile, as any viewpoint of the sky was blocked by the blue sheet of plastic above them. Opaque as it was, however, the plastic was not entirely soundproof.

"This is a public service announcement," a nondescript female voice sounded from above, "reminding all students to please observe the curfew times set by your respective learning institutions. The current time is 8:30 PM, with the general curfew of 9:00 PM in effect for all students not currently enrolled in night classes. As for students who are, please relocate to your designated institutions; all others, please return to your designated dormitories. Identification checks will be in effect to ensure compliance with curfew ordinances."

"We should get going," Index said. "Judgment and Anti-Skill will start patrolling the area soon, and if we're caught past the curfew..."

"That will not be an issue," Homura responded, to which Index merely returned a puzzled look. Homura answered that look by pointing to the blue plastic covering that she was staring at earlier. "Do you have any idea of why I chose this place in particular to have this little discussion?"

"Because of its proximity to Academy City's energy research?"

"Something like that. The highest concentrations of hot spots on the map corresponded with this general district, though I was unaware of the specifics of its being the energy research center," Homura admitted. "But there's a more immediate reason. Do you see those plastics covering the buildings?" When Index answered in the affirmative, she continued. "Those things create blind spots in the city's aerial surveillance systems, and very likely by design. It was no coincidence that I encountered the least resistance from the police forces in this area. And that's not all."

To further prove the point, Homura produced from out of her shield a small can of aerosol, which she sprayed in the periphery of Index's general eyesight. Within the slightly smoky mist of the area of spray, the two girls saw several tiny silvery, thin slivers of metal suspended in the sky. Each of these curious devices hovered in the air on a set of two rotating, shimmering structures that reminded one of insect wings, or, more accurately, the wing-like structures of seedlings designed to pollinate via the wind. Index, who had evidently never seen such things before, to say nothing of noticing their existence, reached out to touch them. Before she could, however, Homura dispersed the aerosol with a casual wave of the hand, rendering the shiny winged sheets of metal completely invisible to the naked eye once more.

"What were those?" Index asked her.

"To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what exactly they are or what they're called," Homura said truthfully, "and I'm entirely at a loss to explain how they actually work. However, I do have a very good idea of what they're designed to do because of a very convenient property of theirs. Apparently, they're freestanding electromagnetic disruption devices. The alleyways around here are swarming with them." Upon seeing the quizzical look on Index's face, she continued on. "You have a cellphone, do you not?"

Index nodded slowly and gave a tentative "Yeah…" in answer. On some level, Homura found the inquisitive look on the girl's face mildly endearing.

"Try to call someone."

After one more second of staring at Homura, clearly trying to discern from her expression the point of the exercise without asking outright, she complied, produced the cellphone from one of the sleeves of her outfit, and attempted to turn it on. Unexpectedly for her, yet exactly as expected for Homura, the cellphone would not even turn on. Evidently, the nun had something of a stubborn streak; she gave up on powering the device only after no fewer than five on-off cycles.

"What's with this thing?" she cried out after the fifth attempt ended in failure. Her teeth audibly ground against each other as if they were readying themselves to bite the phone apart. If nothing else, the girl seemed to have something of a persistent streak. "Why won't it turn on? That short-hair must have done something to it after all!"

"That was the whole point," Homura answered, letting a slight smile escape her lips. "Thanks to those little winged devices, the police cannot track this area electronically. They also create blind spots within communications networks, which is why your phone is unable to send or receive any messages. For the time being, this general area is as ideal a base to continue from as can be hoped for if we are to continue unhindered by the authorities. It's by no means a permanent solution, but as long as we are careful, it should buy us the time needed to continue our search."

"So where are we going next?" Index finally asked.

"To the next target," Homura said. "Just follow me."

The Minamoto, Minamoto & Shaw Institute of Theoretical and Applied Quantum Physics was a sleek, elegant twenty-story corporate office building with a postmodern design that veered further into the asymmetrical as the building reached the top. Situated beside the branch point of an artificial river delta, it had been seemingly purposefully isolated via a long stretch of roadway from the rest of District 10 and its decrepit research facilities, seedy dropout haunts, and landfills.

Even in the dead of the starless night, the immaculately polished surface of the "Minamoto Labs" (as it was colloquially called) exterior clearly reflected the waxing gibbous moon. A spacious parking lot, fenced off by a large, barred, bronze-colored double gate with a comparatively tiny one-window security kiosk beside it, separated the two girls from the front entrance. Despite the ample parking space, only thirteen vehicles – ten cars of varying make and color and three unmarked white vans – were seen parked at the area, with the vans having been parked nearest the entrance. This in and of itself was not unusual, as night had fallen. However, instead of cars, the parking space was crawling with something entirely different.

Homura counted as many as thirty beige-colored, two-foot-tall cylindrical devices whirling on horizontal axes and roaming autonomously across the lot. At the top of each device, a deep blue "eye" unceasingly whirled across a black wedge artfully cut into the device's "head". Aside from the coloring and height, the architecture of these robots gave Homura an unwelcome reminder of the manned machines she had encountered and fought against at the Kunashir facility.

"Not good. Those are–"

"Security robots," Homura cut in, neatly interrupting Index's statement. "This is the most prominent building within kilometers," Homura said. "I'd like to say the security detail suggests we're on the right track, but to my experience, every laboratory that hasn't been reduced to wreckage is similarly well-guarded."

"But this is by far largest target facility we've seen yet," Kyuubey piped in.

"So how are we going to get in?" Index asked.

Homura had nothing to fear from the security guard-bots themselves. From what she had gathered of them, they were primarily eyes and ears for security forces and had no suppressive abilities of their own. The ones she had encountered earlier, closer to the city's more populous hubs, would simply alert nearby police and volunteer esper dispatches if a suspect was unable to prove that he or she lived in the city. She doubted that this was the case due to the remote location and the search area of these robots, which was limited to the surroundings of the building itself. More likely, if this was indeed another research laboratory, it likely had its own private security force. The ones in the city proper could not stop her, but she still did not want to needlessly tip their hand. In the event that the laboratory was one of the ones held by the masked scientists and their associates, she did not want them using the facility's hired goons as cover while they went to ground.

She grabbed Kyuubey, who at this point was riding on Index's head, by the head. Ignoring its cries of confusion resounding inside her mind, she planted her left foot forward, wound up… and threw the little white thing in a carefully controlled, and magically enhanced, underhand motion. Thus thrown, the little creature glided in a straight line, inches parallel to the ground, across the length of the parking lot, with its flight path cutting directly through the centermost gap in the gate and across the midpoint of the security robots' projected search ranges. Directing Index to follow her, she then sprinted and hopped onto the canopy of a nearby tree so as to obtain a better view of the situation. Index waited behind the tree at its base.

" What is the meaning of this, Homura? If you have a plan for getting in, you should tell us beforehand, should you not?"

Ignoring that remark, Homura watched on as the security robots continued their patrol routine in apparently total disregard of the white alien creature thrown into their midst. She waited at this position for the next five minutes for confirmation; once she was sure that there were no changes in the guards' patterns or new factors in play, she leaped from the top of the tree to its base.

A mere mental gesture later, time came to a complete stop.

The world around her shimmered and warped, visually passing through a grainy, greyscale filter briefly, and then froze entirely, all within a second. The formerly busy security patrol now sat frozen in motion, as did Index who was still at the base of the tree, observing the situation with an impatient, anxious look that was now somewhat comically welded onto her face thanks to the time stop. A simple touch on the head freed Index from the time freeze.

"We're breaking through," Homura said, in an authoritative tone that effectively preempted any further questioning from her partner-in-crime. She quickly grabbed Index's right hand. "Stay close to me," she warned. "If you get too far from me, your time will stop as well."

After receiving a quick confirmation nod from Index, she made her move. With Index in hand, she vaulted over the security gate in a single bound. Once through that obstacle, the two girls dashed straight through the parking lot, with Homura moderating her speed to keep pace with the considerably slower (but still surprisingly fast) Index and pick Kyuubey back up along the way. Instead of heading inside through the glass front door and alerting what she could have been reasonably certain were security cameras watching the front entrance, she instead bounded straight upward, with Index still in tow. She ended her jump so as to land gently inside the second of three metal-colored flower boxes attached to reflective sloping windows on the sixteenth floor. First, she peered through the window to see if there were signs of other people on the other side of the window. When that check passed, she somewhat harshly tossed Index into the third flower box and, using a steel wheel glass cutter she produced from her shield, cut a circle into the window just wide and low enough for her to reach into the window and unlock it from the inside.

First Homura and then Index (along with their respective companions) crawled into the open window. As soon as Homura entered, an acute onset of a feeling not dissimilar to nausea welled up within her for an instant and disappeared just as quickly.

Somewhat to Homura's surprise, the first room the two had entered had an air of luxury and excess about it, in a striking contrast to the grim austerity of the other target facilities. A square, three-yard-long and -wide indoor swimming pool, with a steadily humming motor pushing jets of water underneath the surface, sat at the center of the room. A surrounding wall with velvet-colored pull-down recliners and miniature, personalized white towel racks encompassed the pool's outer perimeter. To top it off, at a corner of the pool room opposite the point of infiltration, a fully equipped billiards table lay unused.

At first thought, Homura could ill imagine a place like this associated with the inhuman experiments that she and others like her had endured in the cold, uninviting mountain compound. But then she quickly suppressed the thought before it could turn into a digression.

"Do you notice anything out of the ordinary?" she asked to Index, after allowing the other girl to regain her bearings as she had nearly tumbled through the window.

She shook her head in the negative. "Are you sure this is the right place? This looks more like some kind of fancy hotel than a lab."

"Appearances can be deceiving," she responded. "Besides, this is only one room. We still have yet to explore the rest of this facility. Let's keep on the move."

That having been said, the two girls cautiously moved toward the door on the other side of the pool. She signaled to Index to stand next to the wall against one side of the entryway while she took an identical stance on the side next to the door's doorknob. She then carefully unlocked the door and, after opening it, produced from her skirt pocket an elongated shard of glass nicked from one of her previous targets. Holding up the glass to eye level, she scanned the area outside of the room via the glass's reflective surface. Using this, she found that there was an opening through one of the perpendicular walls in which one lone security camera was situated. Other than that, however, the area was empty.

She signaled to Index to follow her through the door.

The lobby the two entered after a short walk through a hallway could well have been mistaken for its own ground floor, due to the building's unique construction, had it not been for the windows on the sides offering their own unique unobstructed view of the night sky. Looking up, the girls could see the entrances to the other rooms on the floors above them, separated only by height and a railing system designed to keep travelers above from falling down. At each corner of the "base" room, a cascade of water trickled down a stone waterfall system, artfully designed so that the overflow fed a system of potted bonsai cherry blossom trees in unseasonable bloom. At the center of this sat a marble work of art consisting of a stylized gun primed and pointed at a one-foot-tall wall with two vertical slits chiseled into it. Behind this wall sat another, blackened wall with five vertical powder-white lines against them. Homura instantly recognized this setup for what it was even before looking at the mini-plaque next to it that explained the history, schematics, and setup of the infamous "double-slit interferometer" of quantum physics.

As Homura steadily examined the interferometer, the sense of unease that had dogged her ever since she had entered the building began to grow.

"Homura?" Index's voice served to bring her back to her senses.

"Nothing to be found here," she concluded. "Let's continue on to the lower floors."

Due to the unique construction of the building, the staircase that led downward was in an entirely different room from and sloped at a considerably more forgiving incline for convenience's sake than the one that started at the sixteenth floor and went upward. As the two girls wound their way downward, the sensation of disorientation and nausea that had beforehand seemed a fleeting annoyance intensified and assaulted Homura's sense of balance. More so than ever before, she felt as if she was trespassing into a foreign, hostile land. The very air itself seemed to whisper into her very being that she had wandered into enemy territory, even more so than she already had. You do not belong here, a voice whispered in her mind.

"Are you all right?" Index asked her.

"I feel... I feel..." Try as she might, Homura found herself unable to give proper voice to her situation.

"You can sense it too, can't you?" Index asked as she reached out to steady Homura, lest she misstep and tumble down the staircase. Upon not hearing Homura immediately respond, she continued. "I'm sorry for doubting you earlier. There's definitely something very wrong with this whole place. And I think I have an idea what it is."

After ensuring that Homura was still on her feet, Index shoved open the door leading to the emergency entrance on the eighth floor and rushed through the passageway, in a complete disregard of the low profile that the two girls had taken pains to maintain up until this point. In a reversal of their prior roles, Homura had to follow Index's lead.

The passageway that they entered was darker than a moonless, starless night, forcing Homura to supplement her visual range with a flashlight. Once she turned on the light, she found herself and Index inside a narrow corridor whose sides were coated from end to end with laminated sheets of paper. On each of these sheets was an exquisitely hand-drawn black pentagram inside a red circle, inside of which was drawn a symbol that varied individually from sheet to sheet. From what she learned of the magic system of this world from Index, Homura was reasonably certain that the symbols inside the circles were runes. What she did not know, however, was what the runes meant and what kind of magic was waiting for them at the other end of the passageway.

"Runes," Index said, affirming Homura's observation.

"So I gathered. This is what you 'magicians' would use to actuate a spell, isn't it?" Upon Index's nod of confirmation, Homura continued. "Do you know what these spells are doing?"

"I'm trying to find out right now," Index responded as she skittered up and down the hallway. "This is a complicated, multicolored array, but what I can tell so far is that the base layout uses the Opila runes of 'property' and 'territory', strengthened and reinforced by Hagalaz rune of 'violent banishment'. The layout seems to be that of a 'people-clearing field' that prevents non-magicians from interfering inside the space delineated within…"

"Which means," Homura interjected, "that someone put up these symbols to keep someone out, am I correct?"

"Normally, that would be the extent of it. A standard field should not require this much energy or reinforcement. There's a related casting woven into it that uses the same meanings of the runes I mentioned earlier to create a spatial distortion. I've seen it before. According to the orientation, the runes' area of effect is… hmm… on the other end of this corridor."

"What is the likelihood of there being a trap?" Homura asked.

"Very high," Index answered. "If we're lucky, disrupting the array should merely repulse us from the area of effect. And if not..."

Index's trailing off told Homura all she felt she needed to know. "Very well then." She produced one of her smaller, personal-issue handguns and undid its safety. "It seems we're going to have to take that risk if we are to proceed onward." After motioning to the other girl to return to her side, Homura turned on one heel and aimed at one of the sheets of paper further down the hallway.

Before she could pull the trigger, however, a white-hot light shone directly in front of her face, causing her to cover it on sheer reflex with her free hand. Upon regaining her bearings, she saw in front of her the source of the sudden beam of light: a high-powered flashlight being shined in her direction, and at that by another human being. As soon as the realization dawned upon her that she and Index were not alone in the room, Homura tensed up and preemptively pointed her gun in the direction of the intruder even before her eyes could register the details necessary to make a more accurate threat assessment.

Once their vision cleared, the two girls found themselves face-to-face with the holder of the flashlight, a person whose distinguishing features had been obscured in totality with a dark grey helmet, a pair of adjustable goggles designed to hide the eyes as well as protect them, and a complete head-to-toe set of military-grade body armor. As if to further complete the unsettling ensemble, a variety of weapons, including an assault rifle, a grenade belt, and an unmarked spray can whose contents Homura could only guess at, were present on the intruder. Gender. Age. Nationality. None of these potential features of identification could readily be made out, which slightly unnerved even Homura.

Just like the ones back at the mountain... she could not help but think.

The armored person reached into the right trouser pocket, but Homura reacted before the gesture could be completed.

"Don't move," Homura commanded. She made a conscious effort to still the rapid beating of her heart and center the handgun's aim on the area between the eyes, right above the bridge of the nose. "Any false movements and I will shoot."

The other party continued digging in the pocket, as if Homura had never said anything, and finally produced a device that looked like a miniature feature phone, only with no numbers on the dial and a visible antenna that seemed to render it somewhat outdated compared to more modern designs. He or she then pawed the cover of the device with his or her thumb.

"You didn't hear me? I said not to move!" Homura aimed at the device and fired.

The shot was perfect. A well-timed shot knocked the device out of his hands, potentially destroying it in the process, and forced the assailant to react on Homura's terms. It also had the advantage of cutting off communications and thus delaying the arrival of any backup forces the enemy may have wanted to call in.

Such was how Homura calculated the scenario would be played out.

What actually happened was significantly different. The bullet completely whizzed past the target, whose form briefly wavered in and out as if it were a projected image with questionable reception. The flickering allowed Homura to see the bullet's trajectory; it had embedded itself into the wall directly behind him, just barely missing the laminate cover of one of the many runes place thereon. Thus unimpeded, the enemy completed the call.

"This is Sumiyoshi," he began speaking into the device. His undisguised baritone voice marked him as unmistakably adult and male, and likely middle-aged at that. "Repeat. This is Sumiyoshi. Have completed the search up to the eighth floor. No signs of either Shaw or Akitaka yet. Continuing the mission."

"Understood," a scrambled, nondescript voice responded through the communication device. "Continue on. Surveillance team has yet to pick up any abnormal activity; however, we are beginning to suspect the enemy has some capability of defeating standard-issue sensory equipment. There is a low to moderate possibility of esper involvement on the enemy side. Is there anyone else present besides the target?"

"That's a negative," Sumiyoshi answered, even as he crept right past – no, through – Homura and Index. "Will keep you posted on further developments. Over and out." Having thus ended his progress report, Sumiyoshi continued on to the stairway entrance behind the two girls.

"I can imagine that's what you meant by a distortion," Homura said, to which Index nodded. "Whoever that 'Sumiyoshi' person is, there's a decent chance he knows better than we do what to look for here. We should follow him back upward."

"But what about the magic array ahead?"

"It's best to gather more information before we go rushing headlong into a trap," Homura said. "Rationality is the key to unraveling this mystery."

She had barely finished saying that when, as if in mockery of those words, the air suddenly grew cripplingly heavy. Without warning, the runes on the walls, as if taking on a life of their own, freed themselves from the walls and from their laminate containers and flew in single file past the two girls and up the staircase. Homura's vision turned upside down before failing entirely, and she had to fight the urge to vomit back up the meal that she had eaten earlier. She did not even realize that she was about to collapse to the ground until she felt Index's hands against her back. Her senses returned to her one by one; she could feel the burning sensation on her left hand even before she could see the violet glow brightening the surrounding darkness.

"If it wasn't clear that we should go back up before, it is now," Index remarked. "Can you still move?"

"Yes," Homura replied. "We should move quickly. It has been quite some time since my Soul Gem reacted this strongly."

Index and Homura hurried after the trail of flying rune papers, switching staircases and speeding past the man named Sumiyoshi as they did so. In short order, following the runes' flight path led the girls to a third staircase at the twentieth story. This staircase, in turn, led them outside the building and, finally, to the rooftop, a square-shaped mass of bleached white concrete with a raised circular platform situated directly at the center. The platform was marked with a black circle painted around the outside of it, and directly at the center of this circle was the English alphabet letter "H", which marked its purpose as a landing pad for helicopters.

As it was, there was no helicopter, or indeed anything or anyone there until the runes and the girls chasing them arrived. Said runes shifted from their single-file flight path and spread out into a three-tiered radial orbit around the airspace surrounding the rooftop. The air around the Minamoto Labs rooftop became a blurry mass of white-on-deep-blue, and a collection of wildly differing scenes, each with its own cast of people, flashed before Homura's eyes.

"What is going on here?" Kyuubey asked. "I've never seen this magic before."

"The cross-sections contained within the spell are overlapping! You have to avert your eyes!" Index, who was shielding her and Kyuubey's eyes (or at least the little red structures on its face she assumed were eyes), shouted. "The spell's gone out of control! The bounded spaces are overlapping and conflicting with each other, causing the runic arrays to intermingle and tangle uncontrollably with each other! If you look into the intersection point for too long, your mind will shut down from information overload!"

"How can we stop it?" Homura asked.

"Trying to isolate the cause right now is impossible! They're reacting too violently!"

"I see..." At that, Homura once again activated her time-stopping magic, but not before securing Index, just as before, so she would not be frozen in time as well. The errant pieces of paper held their position in the sky; and the deep blue forms gathered on and around the helipad had shown themselves to have vaguely humanoid shapes and forms, making them only somewhat less unsettling. "Does this make things easier?"

"Much," Index acknowledged.

"Then hurry up and make your analysis."

"I am," Index quickly responded. After a tense ten seconds of what looked to Homura like Index simply staring a hole into the runes while muttering to herself, Index turned to Homura. "Do you see the symbols that look like... um... diamonds with kite tails?" she asked, indicating the paper sheets containing said symbols with her tiny right pointer finger.

"Are they the source of this?"

Index nodded. "Well, more or less. If we can just neutralize those, we should be able to safely untangle the spell and find out what's going on."

"I see," was all Homura said. That was all the warning she gave the other girl before rearming herself with the pistol she had readied earlier. Instead of shooting directly at the runes, however, she propelled herself forward and into the open sky and waded into the flock of paper pieces holding their position in the sky. While in the air, she quickly scanned each of the floating papers for the particular symbol that Index had indicated earlier. When she found a match, she ripped that paper out of the sky, and before long, she held within her unarmed hand a stack of those papers that was almost as tall as she was.

"Stand back," Homura cautioned the other girl. "I'll take them all out at once."

After flattening the paper stack to a more manageable height with her feet, Homura shot a three-round burst downward, right down the center of the stack. The sounds of gunfire and of the skipping of spent cartridges against the rooftop floor echoed in the stillness, and the three bullets held their place in a hover over the paper stack. With this having been done, Homura pulled herself and Index back into the safety of the staircase's interior before releasing the time lock. At that very instant, a fresh wave of disturbed energy rippled its way through Homura's senses, making her feel as if her heart had skipped a few beats. One second later, two of the shadowy humanoid forms began fading into clearer view and filling out, fitfully and haltingly, in color and in depth.

Once the shapes fully materialized and the surrounding world regained its "time" and stability, the two found themselves face-to-face with the two people whose shapes were contained in the frozen cross-section. The one closer to Homura's and Index's position was a foreign woman of unbound silvery-blonde hair, grey eyes, and a slight height advantage of three inches over Homura. Her face was treated fairly conspicuously with makeup that was artfully applied to make it difficult to guess just how old she was. In spite of the cold November night, she wore only a white blouse and a pair of bleached blue jeans. She carried a half-used cigarette in her mouth, but there was no smoke coming from the burned end.

Strange as this woman was, however, her presence paled in comparison to that of the man behind her. The first thing Homura noticed about the male was his height; at six-and-a-half feet tall, he towered over everyone else in the area. A short crop of unnaturally vivid red hair hung over his shoulders, with a few stray locks almost but not quite obscuring the strange bar code tattoo underneath his right eye. He wore a pitch-black, stylized rendition of a priest's robes, and on each of his fingers was a silver ring. Like his companion, he held a cigarette in his mouth. Also like his companion, he was clearly a person of Western ethnicity and tastes. However, in contrast to his companion, who wore her confusion on her face, he maintained a menacing glare as he stared down at the two girls.

"Oh, my," the woman began. "Who'd have thought we'd run into the girl all the way out here? I guess we should let Kanzaki know, huh? That poor thing's probably running herself ragged up there, all worried to death."

"You do that," the man nonchalantly responded to his companion. He then returned to bearing down over Homura, who in turn could hear him muttering something under his breath even as he continued fixing his gaze on her. He lowered his hands, and a fresh collection of rune-coated papers fell from inside the sleeves of his garments yet did not quite settle on the ground as gravity would have normally dictated.

"Wait!" Index said, jumping in between Homura and the giant priest. "She's not an enemy!"

The runes floated and held their place at the priest's feet, as if to spite of Index's outburst. The priest raised his right hand into the air, and the blonde woman jumped back to distance herself from him.

This, plus the priest's unwillingness or inability to disguise the killing intent radiating from his every movement, prompted Homura to take preemptive action. She stopped time once again and placed arrow shards right next to each one of the runes, and restarted time anew.

As soon as she did, a nimbus of heat energy manifested into flames, and in turn, those flames coalesced in the priest's raised right arm, elongated into the shape of a Western greatsword...

...and then promptly dissipated harmlessly, much to the confusion and terror of the priest who apparently looked forward to the act of destroying a teenage girl with a flaming sword.

A gasp of confusion had barely escaped his lips before Homura closed the distance between the two of them in an instant and planted the barrel of a handgun against the priest's chin.

"You!" the priest bellowed. "Who are you?"

"A friend of rationality," Homura answered, "and an enemy of those who immediately opt for the violent approach upon being faced with an unfamiliar situation. I would heavily suggest you put some effort into improving your first impressions… Necessarius."

Chapter Text

"Magic is but illusions. Illusions are but falsehoods. Falsehoods are but lies."

To Aru Mahou Shoujotachi no Monogatari

The Seventh Spell – Akemi Homura IV

Homura and the mysterious redheaded priest continued to lock eyes with each other. Despite, or perhaps because of, the gun Homura pressed against his chin and the runes still floating around him, neither of them so much as blinked. The Index girl remained in place, continuing to stand as an ineffectual partition between the two of them. Even in this situation, Homura kept her left hand free and her senses sharp, just in case the Necessarius priest's partner decided to try something to help her comrade. Such a threat had yet to materialize; the partner merely stood at her spot, her expression blank and unreadable. Kyuubey, perched on Index's right shoulder, passively watched the scene unfold, as if he were not a participant in the matter. The only movement in the area came from the rhythmic swaying of Kyuubey's long, bushy tail, and the slight disturbances the cold, blowing wind brought with it.

"That disgusting, shameful thing..." the redhead muttered under his breath as he looked down at the gun pressed against his chin. "Have you thrown away your pride as a magician?"

"Yes," Homura responded evenly and sarcastically. "A long, long time ago."

In response, the redhead clicked his tongue. If he had expected a response to his barb, that was clearly not it.

"Who are you?" he asked Homura, repeating his earlier question. "What are you after? Knowing who we of Necessarius are, why do you so brazenly interfere in our business?" He crunched deeply into the cigarette in his mouth, causing ash from the spent end to land directly on the bridge of Homura's nose. "As it just so happens, I am in an extremely foul mood tonight. Depending on how you answer, I might just roast you to cinders here and now."

"An empty threat," Homura countered quietly yet confidently. "I can move faster than you can reactivate your runes. Besides, what kind of investigator kills their suspects before they can talk?"

"Make light of us at your peril, little girl." The priest glowered as he stared down at Homura. "The life of a witch has no such value." Homura felt a passing twinge of anger at this man calling her a "witch" to her face, but she recognized it for the provocation it was and refused to rise to it. Perhaps this unpleasant fellow had mistaken this forbearance on her part for weakness, for he continued speaking. "If necessary, we can obtain any information we need from your corpse."

"There won't be any need for that," Homura said calmly. "We simply want an exchange of information. That is all."

There were those who said that Akemi Homura was not the best at reading emotions. That having been said, even she could sense that something in her calm declaration of intent had incensed the priest even further. Over those tense few seconds, his rage had been building steadily to the point where Homura knew it would eventually overtake any fear of retaliation. She did not know where this raw hatred at first sight was coming from, but she knew she had to end this standoff quickly before he inevitably escalated the situation. She had been a second too late, however. The redheaded man once again bit into his cigarette, this time hard enough that it split into two. The half of the cigarette no longer in his mouth, still lit and burning, landed squarely onto Homura's nose.

There was no doubt that he was doing this on purpose. Even so, Homura kept her poise.

"'We'? There is no 'we,' witch. I don't know how you established contact with this child or what led you to bring her to this facility, and I do not care."

Realizing that she was losing control of the situation and that she needed to regain this control, Homura pressed the cigarette in her hand to his face once more.

...the cigarette?

At that very instant, Homura drew back and stared at her own arm - and the cigarette it was holding - in sheer disbelief, having realized that in the midst of that conversation, something had gone seriously wrong. Out of instinctual fear, she took but one step backward before she felt the icy touch of cold, hard steel pressing firmly against the back of her temple and heard a click that sent another chill down her spine. Alarmed, she slowly glanced behind her, moving only her eyes just enough to shift her peripheral field of vision while consciously keeping the rest of her body still. At the razor's edge of her vision, she saw the white blouse woman with the gun in her hand, an exultant, ear-to-ear grin plastered onto her makeup-heavy face.

"That was a nice trick you pulled, dear," the unknown woman whispered. Just hearing this one sentence spoken in the casual, cloyingly sweet, unforced tenor in her voice set Homura on edge, unsettling her in a way that the male barcode priest's overt belligerence and overconfidence never could. "Judging by how instantaneous that was, that had to have been an illusion in conjunction with space-time magic. No, wait, never mind, space-time magic could have done it alone… Well, anyway, this time your luck was just a little bit off. You picked the wrong person to try pulling that one on." The chilling contrast between her calm voice and the audible clicking of the barrel behind Homura's ears mingled with the cold in the air. "'What must not bend must break.' The Bishop of Borglum, by Hans Christian Andersen. You see, therein lies an interesting fairytale that kicks off with a cautionary tale about using the law to steal other people's property. Oh? Not interested?"

"Well done, Theodosia," the priest said, the earlier animosity in his voice gone and replaced with a dispassionate, impersonal tenor. He produced from his long, black robe another cigarette, which lit up on its own as if to oblige him. He inhaled the thick smoke deeply and exhaled downward, deliberately blowing a hazy cloud of tobacco directly into Homura's face so that it stung her eyes and nose during its upward rise. "We wasted a bit more time on this than I cared to, but with this we can now continue where we left off. You will inform Kanzaki that we have unexpectedly encountered the Forbidden Index on-site, while I keep the suspect in check. While we're at it, I will reinforce the field that the suspect has breached. Are we understood?"

"Sure thing, but first…" The priest had barely finished rattling off this new set of directives when Homura felt the grip around her back slacken. Instead of keeping her suppressed as his partner ordered, the woman who answered to the name of "Theodosia" lifted her gun from off of the back of Homura's head and flipped the gun upside down and right-side up in a repeated, rhythmic motion not unlike that of a child examining a toy gun. After four repetitions of this, she shook the weapon itself up-and-down, while dangerously holding the gun at eye level.

Watching this bizarre display unfold before her eyes, Homura could not help but recall how technologically illiterate Index was. Doubts unbidden began to creep into her mind. Was she like this because of these people? Was unfamiliarity with basic modern technology a recurring element among her entire faction? If so, could these people possibly be of any use in helping track down Madoka or the unknown faction of scientists who abducted her? Was soliciting her help in the first place a mistake?

"What are you doing? Quit fooling around and get to work!" The redheaded priest was visibly just as confused as Homura was. Both he and Index stared at the woman who was at that moment staring down the barrel of the gun, said barrel perilously pressed against her left eye. Pointedly ignoring the befuddled Homura, Theodosia walked over to her tall partner's position, gently pulling Index out from her position beside the priest…

…and kicked him in the shin with all the force she could muster. He bellowed loudly and kneeled over in a pain-induced shock, spilling a fresh volume of rune-coated, laminated papers out of his voluminous black coat as he crumpled to his right knee. Thus bowed, his head was at his attacker's waist level and in perfect position for what happened next…

"Pistol whip!" Theodosia shouted as she executed precisely that, slamming the butt of the weapon against the crown of her partner's lowered forehead. He barely had the chance to recover before the silver-haired Index sank her teeth, as hard as she could, into the flesh of the man's left-hand fingers. Once again, Homura found herself at a loss for words. Thus, she was not entirely prepared when the pistol-whip woman turned her attention from the beleaguered redheaded man to her.

"I apologize for the belated introduction," she smoothly began, her calm, easygoing voice having become a disorienting contrast to the absurdity on full display behind her. "What was it you said? We needed to work on our first impressions? My name is Theodosia Electra. This surly fellow here is Stiyl Magnus. And apparently you have already been acquainted with our lovable Index Librorum Prohibitorum." Having introduced herself and her companion, she casually and carelessly tossed the gun she pilfered earlier back to Homura. In the same motion, she smoothly retrieved her cigarette from Homura's hand. "You also said you had some information to share. We can start with a name. What should we call you?"

Somewhat taken aback, Homura found herself glancing in Index's direction, as if hoping to confirm something. She found only a "lovable" nun and a calico kitten savaging an ill-tempered priest's ring-studded hand. Perhaps more to the point, Kyuubey had at some point perched itself on top of Theodosia Electra's shoulder. Notwithstanding the steady swaying of its white, bushy tail, the alien monster remained expressionless, motionless, and soundless throughout the entire encounter; yet Theodosia did not so much as register its presence. Homura concluded that it was a safe bet that Stiyl Magnus would be unable to sense it as well, but she was currently unable to test that conclusion as Stiyl was still recovering from his cohort's sudden and inexplicable act of betrayal.

Aside from that, Homura found herself unwilling to immediately accept Theodosia's entreaty. At the back of her mind, she remembered that this woman, quirky as she appeared to be, was a member of what Index described to her as an organization of magic users that passed judgment upon other magic users. In fact, it was their difference in behavior that made her all the more hesitant to take her hand. Was their contrasting behavior a psychological tactic? Was Theodosia merely playing the "good cop" to Stiyl's "bad cop"?

"Well then," Theodosia responded, having sensed Homura's reticence. "I'll just call you 'Cool, Mysterious Gunslinger Girl.' Yeah! CMGG for short." With that, she patted the cool, mysterious gunslinger girl on the back in a cloyingly ingratiating manner. "OK, CMGG, could you just stand there and not make a fuss while Stiyl fixes this field of runes back up? Pretty please?"

"...Akemi Homura." Before her conscious mind could keep up with the Necessarius woman's tortuous manner of speaking, her building annoyance led her mouth to move on its own.

"What was that, CMGG?"

"Akemi Homura!" Homura had been caught off guard by the rising volume of her own voice. She chided herself mentally for giving in to her unease and annoyance. "Th—that's my name."

"See? That wasn't so bad, was it?" Theodosia reached out toward her shoulder once more, but this time, Homura rebuffed her by swatting the unctuous arm aside, glaring at the older woman throughout the motion. If Theodosia took offense to this, she made an excellent show of not wearing it on her face. She merely shrugged, turned on her heels to walk toward Stiyl and Index, and then just as quickly walked back to Homura's direction.

"What now?" Homura asked.

"Did anyone tell you that you have such an awesome-sounding name? I'm not even all that good at Japanese, and I can just feel how intense it is."

Homura did not answer that question. Instead, she responded with another, more pointed one of her own. "Why are you here? What led you to this specific facility?"

"Why are you?" Theodosia Electra readied another cigarette out of the left rear pocket of her jeans. Unlike her still-busy redheaded companion, however, she opted to manually light her cigarette. Homura began to open her mouth to insist that the woman in front of her answer first, but was surprised when said woman continued speaking. "You don't have to answer me immediately. I have my own guesses as to why you could have possibly shown up at this old lab, but I also suspect we're still missing some pieces of the puzzle. And since the Index is already here, we can skip the stakeout, no?"

Stiyl took one more drag out of his cigarette. "Indeed, there's no point in putting this off any longer if she is with us. But I'll be the one to go through. You keep the exit clear. Make sure the combatants below don't follow us in. And if you come across any sign of Kanzaki, fire off a messenger spell immediately."

"And about her companion?"

"All the more reason for me to do this. I am loath to leave her in the company of another stranger."

"Well, it certainly worked out well for you the last time," she responded with a wink. Stiyl briefly shot his female companion with a glare filled with all the venom he could muster. She impishly smiled… and then straightened her face immediately before pulling out of her pocket what looked to Homura like a small, red jewel box. "If you're going all the way down there, then you will surely need this," she responded, with none of her previous levity.

Stiyl shook the box slightly, as if to test its integrity. Then he made a gesture to Index to follow him, which she (and later Homura and Kyuubey) did all the way to the edge of the Minamoto Labs rooftop opposite Homura and Index's point of entry.

On each of the two ends of the rooftop lay a small, white, circular platform encased in clear, glass-like tubing that ran down the curving slope of the exterior. The group (minus Theodosia, whom they had left at the center of the "H" on the helipad) chose the platform on the right. As the material was immaculately translucent, Homura and the others could peer out through it above, across, and even underneath them. The one thing that could have provided any obstruction whatsoever to this clear view was a laminated piece of paper attached by some adhesive to the inner wall of the tube. On this paper, in black ink, was a symbol that Homura had seen an uncountable number of times on her way up to this point – another of Stiyl Magnus's runes.

As for the man himself, Stiyl was peering outward and downward, a scowl of annoyance and disgust plastered onto his face. Homura did not have to follow his gaze to see what he was looking at; loud red and blue strobe lights streaked through the tubing and assaulted Homura's vision. Looking downward herself, she could see (but not hear) a loosely organized procession of the dark blue Anti-Skill vans and smaller cars streaming into the laboratory's spacious parking lot.

"And now we get to the crux of the matter," Stiyl said evenly to Index. "Your expertise is required."

"My expertise? What do you need me to do?"

"This array was not merely meant to repel civilians," Stiyl answered.

"That much we gathered on the way here," Index responded back. "So, what was its real purpose?"

"'We'?" Stiyl Magnus let the simple pronoun slip off the tongue in a way that made the two girls hearing it feel his lingering distaste. "To keep something contained. Something that will quickly become problematic if we were to allow it to escape its seal."

He pressed a button on a panel located next to the tube's entrance. In response, an enclosure made a mechanical, scraping noise as it sealed the entryway, shutting them all inside the capsule. Thus sealed, the capsule with the party inside slowly slid down the tubing running down the sloped side of the building. In the midst of their descent down this slope, Stiyl abruptly ripped the laminate paper off of the interior wall of the elevator.

Upon Stiyl's removal of the rune from the elevator wall, Homura felt a wave of nausea assault her senses. A quick glance at Index's pained face told Homura that she was similarly fighting off nausea. Even Index's pet calico cat must have sensed something, as it quickly poked its little head out from its hiding spot inside the chest area of Index's habit and scanned the area with its little yellow eyes before just as quickly retracting said head back in. The gem on Homura's left arm shone faintly, lending a somber purple hue to the red and blue flashing against the night sky. That having been said, there was nothing yet to substantiate this feeling. There were none of the telltale signs of a Witch's labyrinth. No leaden sky, no familiars, no Witch's Kiss… not even a symbol to delineate the barrier.

So, what was this man leading them to?

"What in the world is this?" the telepathic voice of Kyuubey sounded. "Something is distorting my senses!"

"A Witch?" Homura responded.

"I sense the presence of a magical reaction. But I've never felt something like this from a Witch. We might possibly be dealing with something else entirely. Be ready for anything, Akemi Homura."

The elevator continued its descent past the noisy raucous of the ground level and into a groove recessed into the ground. Once the tube had slid through, the "ground" above them closed shut, leaving them in what would have been near-total darkness if it were not for Homura's pulsating Soul Gem and a small orange flame held within Stiyl's hands. According to the display on the side of the clear panel, the elevator had stopped at "B4".

As soon as the elevator stopped, they disembarked and threaded their way through one of the two stark-white hallways leading out of the elevator room. All the while, Homura could not help notice, he was steadily tearing laminate rune papers off of the side of the wall, which lent credence to her theory that Necessarius had locked down this entire laboratory for some time prior to Index's reuniting with them. With each removal, a faint, ferrous scent grew more pronounced, which made Homura all the more uneasy.

So then why did they not call her earlier? was what Homura could not help but wonder.

They walked through a seemingly interminably long hallway, past six partially melted Plexiglass partitions that had somehow previously been burned through with holes large enough for Stiyl (and anyone shorter than he) to pass through. Passing through the sixth of these, they finally stopped at a door in the middle of the hallway to their left that seemed at first glance to be no different from the others, except for a sickly, flickering green strobe-like light that escaped from the bottom of the door. The door was cold, solid steel, with an uninviting black sign posted next to it that read, in yellow print written in three separate languages (Japanese, English, and Simplified Chinese), "RESTRICTED AREA'' and "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT". On the side of the door opposite the "RESTRICTED AREA'' sign lay one final set of Stiyl Magnus's runes, which he promptly pulled off of the door with a motion that Homura could not help but compare to that of a scab torn off of an infected wound. Pulling off those runes revealed a small, gray square incision in the wall surrounding a dark red panel. Stiyl produced from his pocket the small box Theodosia had given him earlier and popped it open, revealing the sole item underneath: a severed human eye, dark-brown of iris and reddened with exposed ocular nerves.

"What on Earth is that? Is that… someone's eyeball?" Index asked her Necessarius comrade, disgusted. "Why in the world are you carrying something like that around?"

"This is why," Stiyl responded. He held up the iris of the unsettling thing to the panel, which in turn hummed to life and turned from red to blue and finally, after a few seconds of this eyeball staring into the panel, to green. In response to this, the steel door made a hissing sound and smoothly slid upward, allowing the trio (and two quadrupeds following them) access to what was on the other side of the door.

To Homura's surprise, the scene that greeted them on the other side was a featureless, unremarkable server room. A dozen computers and monitors, three each set across one of four rows, lined the center of the expansive room. Its floor, decked in a brown-and-white speckled, immaculately painted tile, showed none of the signs of the rusty discoloration that lingered around the edge of the doorway. To their left, an unbroken row of tall, white computer server towers ringed the western wall, and all of them were silent. Finally, directly ahead of them, a single electronic door led into another, far more expansive and spacious underground chamber not unlike that of a car garage.

In all this, Homura could not help but notice that there was no one else in sight. Indeed, there had been no one in this entire twenty-story building, or the floors below ground, except for Necessarius and that one man in tactical gear whom they had followed to the top.

All of that changed at the instant when second Stiyl Magnus ripped off one last laminated rune from the whiteboard it had been pasted onto.

The scene that now greeted them took Homura back to the waking nightmare she had fought her way through at that laboratory in Kunashir.

The blackened computers and equipment, evidence of having been destroyed in an electrical fire. The broken pods with the strange white suspension fluid pooled around their wreckage. The small, open HAZMAT boxes, which Homura imagined had contained Soul Gems to experiment on. The dried pools of blood on the floor.

Homura gritted her teeth out of sheer mortification. Just thinking about what kinds of experiments occurred in this room threatened to wash away her early caution and trepidation in a wave of anger.

How could anyone who called themselves human do this to magical girls? To Madoka?

Just as she was beginning to lose herself in these morbid thoughts, Stiyl addressed her. "I suppose now is as good a time as any. Time for us to quit dancing around each other and 'exchange information', as you put it."

"Something we can both agree upon," Homura said coolly, after a moment of centering herself and suppressing the anger building within her. "So again, what led you here?"

"It requires a bit of explanation. I hope you're not in a hurry." When Homura made it clear she was not going to respond to this provocation on Stiyl's part, he continued speaking. "As recently as a month ago, there were unexplainable spikes of energy that manifested as stresses on Academy City's power grid, causing blackouts. Apparently, a similar incident earlier this year turned out merely to be internal unrest from saboteurs trying to drill holes in the city's security, so the Board of Directors started their own investigation from that angle. There was no role for us magicians here. But then, the war came and everything changed.

"According to our contacts on the inside, the room ahead of us contains a set of backup remote controls to some kind of device called a 'particle accelerator'. The machine itself is underneath Academy City and runs the length of the city's exterior walls underground. The largest of its kind in the world, or so I was told. I'm not a scientist, so I have no idea of what a device like that is supposed to do. But I was told that if you charge it with too much energy, it could potentially explode and spread poison across a large swath of the city in short order." He chuckled. "Ridiculous. Why would the Science Side install such a dangerous device on its own doorstep? Such a thing would have caused great harm to this city if it managed to fall into the wrong hands, would it not?"

"Why is this man taking such pride in his ignorance of technology? How interesting," Kyuubey's voice cut in.

Homura's expression must have registered with Stiyl as having thought something along similar lines as Kyuubey, and so he let out a "Hmph" before continuing. "But that's exactly what happened. Three weeks ago, one of this city's special operations units went rogue, commandeered the device, and threatened to deliberately overload the machine if their demands weren't met. They even went so far as to take school children hostage."

"And? What were those demands?" Homura asked.

"Unfortunately, I couldn't give you an answer on that one. You would have to ask someone further inside. But I do know this much: whatever goals or motives they may have had, the terrorists were annihilated to a man, and that should have been the end of it there. But since then, in the middle of World War III, this 'particle accelerator' device suddenly started acting out of turn, charging itself to full blast without warning and just as suddenly going silent, on and off, causing blackouts throughout the district. And then we find this…"

With that, Stiyl lit a small flame with his cigarette and touched it to the only one of the HAZMAT boxes in the room that was still intact. A small, brightly glowing rune on the side of the box flashed into view briefly before starting to dissolve, as if being melted away by the fire placed upon it. Homura, by now getting the gist of the magic system at play thanks to Index's explanations, figured that yet another seal was being undone; and thanks to her prior experience, she had a very good idea of what had been sealed inside that box.

Surely enough, the second the red magician's flames finished "burning" away the rune on the small enclosure, Homura's Soul Gem emitted a powerful glow that bathed the darkened room in a blinding violet hue. As if in response, a pitch-black miasma built up around the now-unsealed containment box, roiling, writhing, threatening to suck away the violet light in the room and plunge everyone therein back into darkness.

"No doubt about it! There's a Grief Seed inside that box, and it's still active. If we don't deal with it as soon as possible, it will become a Witch."

"That's a Grief Seed!" Index exclaimed. "Why do you have such a thing?"

"I see…" Stiyl said, his even tone of voice refusing to match the small girl's panic. "So, you have some idea of what this nasty little thing inside is. What did you call it again? A 'Grief Seed'? Come to think of it, it did kind of resemble a seed. And it did indeed spawn a monster, so I think we can work with that. Well then, since you have a proper name for this repulsive little artifact, I would hope you also had an idea of what it was. Where it came from. How it was formed. Its purpose. How researchers from Academy City managed to get their hands on it. Unfortunately, we are still very much in the dark here."

"I can answer some of your questions," Homura said, thankful that some of the edge in Stiyl's earlier demeanor was beginning to ebb. "But first, may I have the Grief Seed?"

"For what reason? What are you intending to do with this?" Stiyl asked, said edge in demeanor beginning to return. "I will remind you that this place is still under lockdown. Try anything funny, and you will regret it."

"Once again, I can assure you that your threats are unnecessary," Homura said, holding out her hand. Instead of immediately complying, Stiyl let his eyes wander toward Index, who silently nodded. Only then, after this wordless exchange, did he pull the malevolent black jewel out of its box and begrudgingly give it to Homura. Before she could give the Grief Seed to Kyuubey to purify, however, she saw from the corner of her eye another formless black mass, nearly identical to the miasma surrounding the jewel, bubbling into view from inside one of the monitors. Before she could even open her mouth to scream out a warning, the monitor caved in and noisily shattered, allowing the darkness to punch its way out and causing Index to scream anyway in surprise. Out of the monitors spawned three pitch-black insectoid creatures that closely resembled oversized mosquitoes, but with hollow, umbra-spewing "exhaust pipes" in place of stingers. The Grief Seed itself responded to this new phenomenon in kind; the miasma surrounding the still-impure Gem spawned another trio of these mosquito-like creatures.

These insectoid monsters revved up their "engines" and, as if they were drawn to the fear and surprise in her voice, made a beeline from their respective spawning points and, like homing drones, blasted straight toward Index. Homura pulled out a pistol to intercept, but this time, she was beaten to the punch. Twin swords of fire arced through the air and incinerated all six of the creatures before they could converge on the living grimoire library. These flames instantly cleared in front of Index's eyesight, leaving no trace of either them or the monsters that had tried to attack her.

"As I thought," Stiyl muttered. "It's still active." A fresh set of embers lighted in his outstretched palms. "Hand it back. It's a pain in the ass to reseal it, so I'll just incinerate it here and now."

"That would be an unforgivable waste of energy," Kyuubey cautioned. "Homura, letting him destroy it would be unwise."

Instead of obeying him, Homura smoothly handed the Grief Seed to Kyuubey for purification. It was something of a waste, absorbing a Grief Seed when she still had ample reserves of her own magical energy and could not count on being able to secure a steady supply in this city which denied the mystical. (It was also frowned upon for a magical girl to cleanse her Soul Gem with a Grief Seed taken from a Witch she did not help defeat unless the victor offered to share, but such a rule could not reasonably apply here.) But she purified it anyway, primarily to deactivate the Grief Seed and prevent the rebirth of the Witch.

It became evident that Stiyl was unable to sense Kyuubey's presence. Even so, he clearly sensed that he had been defied. The flames that formed the base of his twin flaming swords steadily began to intensify as he bore down on Homura, two meters shorter than he, once more. She could smell the thick reek of tobacco lingering on his breath although he had long since extinguished the last cigarette he was smoking. "What was that you just did? Or did you not hear my words earlier? You seem to be thinking I'm making idle threats."

"Not at all," Homura responded. "I simply neutralized a threat. Now it cannot give birth to any more familiars."

Even with that having been said, it was not Homura's words, but Index's gentle tugging on his dark, priestly robes that caused him to extinguish the flames in his hands and stand down. "The Witch that spawned from that egg-like device," Index asked. "Is this the reason for this lockdown?"

"A 'Witch'? Interesting usage of the term. But no," Stiyl answered, "not quite. A reasonable guess, but that's not it. These monsters are formidable, but not something that would require this much effort to hold back. No, that would be whatever was feeding on these creatures."

"Is that even possible?" Index asked, to Homura more than to Stiyl, as she continued looking in Homura's direction despite Stiyl having chosen to put physical distance between himself and Homura. "Do Witches eat other Witches?"

Homura stowed away the Grief Seed she just used. "It's uncommon, but I have seen Witches consume other Witches' Grief Seeds."

Stiyl Magnus was evidently still not entirely trusting of her. Yet Homura noticed that this hostility dissipated instantly whenever the Index spoke up in her stead. His anger would cool, and his hand, so quick to burn anything and anyone he deemed necessary to burn, would stay. As evidenced by the man's earlier words, he was angered not by the intrusion of the Puella Magi system into this delicate balance of magic and science, but by the fact that she had (admittedly forcibly) solicited Index's help and brought her to this place. Clearly, these two were not merely colleagues; but whatever compulsions motivated him to protect her so ardently were not entirely requited. Index had been formal, speaking only when asked a question relating to her expertise or to protest his "kill first, ask questions later" approach toward Homura upon their first meeting.

As she considered this, a question crept upon her conscious mind. Why hadn't they sent for the Index Librorum Prohibitorum at the first opportunity when the Witches had begun to attack?

It was then that Stiyl turned his eyes back on Homura. "Just to be sure, is it safe to assume that you've disposed of that jewel? That it will spawn no more monsters?" When Homura answered with a verbal nod, he snorted derisively and then returned to his original position near Index. For her part, Index was peering into the exposed interior of one of the broken containment pods. Curiously enough, the calico kitten that had been hiding underneath her habit was doing something resembling an examination of its own.

Upon closer inspection, Homura found Index's hands clasped tightly to her chest, clutching something in her hands that her pet cat was steadily poking at. Homura had only a side view of her, but once she had moved to the side, it was more apparent what the smaller girl was carrying.

It was a Soul Gem. Was. The golden base shone untouched, but the inset jewel, split down the middle and marred with an ugly crack at the center of the split, was a dull, lifeless, dark green. A silent, crystalline lamp whose light had burned out and would never shine again.

"This was a peridot," Index said, though with her back facing the wall, it was not readily apparent whom she was talking to. "The green color, representative of the element of wood in feng shui. The ancient Egyptians called this 'the gem of the sun'. In the past, jewelers would use these to create enchantments to ward off nightmares and protect against terrors originating from the dark." She then turned around, this time facing Homura. "Was the owner of this jewel, um, just like you?"

Homura nodded in confirmation.

"But if that's the case…" Index trailed off. "What happens to someone whose 'Soul Gem' is destroyed? Do they just lose their magic and return to being normal humans?"

Homura averted her eyes as she calculated the best way possible to respond to this line of inquiry. However,

"Of course not. They die. The designation of 'Soul Gem' is not metaphorical or literary. It contains their very souls. A human body that loses its soul can no longer perform the functions necessary to sustain life." Kyuubey's shooting down of Index's optimistic, best-case-scenario leading question was accompanied by hopping on top of the right shoulder of Stiyl Magnus and, bizarrely, nuzzling against the man's barcode cheek tattoo in a manner not unlike that of an overly affectionate housecat. Homura, for her part, wondered why Kyuubey would so brazenly and uncharacteristically let that information slip. All of her prior experiences with the Incubator led her to believe it would withhold that information to the bitter end, admitting it only when it had its targeted girl firmly in its grasp and it would no longer be necessary to hide it.

Index shot a nasty glare in the Incubator's direction, but it did not answer back. "…We should keep this jewel, and any others we find, as evidence," Index responded, her voice beginning to break. As if anticipating Stiyl's next line of protest, she continued, "Don't worry. This has no power to hurt us."

"Are you sure about that? Could you have made your analysis that quickly?"

Index took a quick glance in Homura's direction. Homura, sensing this for the wordless question that it was, decided to answer. "There's no need for an analysis. I'll answer. That jewel is – no, was – a Soul Gem. A receptacle for the soul of a Puella Magi, and the source of her power." She showed him the back of her left hand, and the dark violet diamond-shaped gem on it.

"A 'magical girl'?" Stiyl asked, repeating the Latin phrase in English. "Like in the cartoons so popular in this country? Ridiculous. Am I going to be punished in the name of the…" He stopped mid-sentence and then glanced back-and-forth rapidly between the two girls accompanying him, clearly comparing Homura's Soul Gem to the broken green one in Index's arm. It was hard to tell in the flickering light of the laboratory room what expression Stiyl was wearing on his face and thus what was going through his mind, but all ambiguity was lost by his next action.

He ripped his cigarette away from his mouth, threw it onto the floor, and ground it into said floor with his feet. "Damn you, Academy City," he muttered. When Index simply looked at him with a puzzled expression on his face, he quickly answered back. "This changes everything. If that jewel contained a human being's soul, then we have much bigger problems at hand than a bunch of scientists getting ahead of themselves."

The investigators moved, at what Homura could not help but notice was a faster pace than before, to the more expansive garage-like room beyond the server control area. Homura thought she had gotten a sense of how expansive this next room was just from a glance at the clear window from the computer server room. Now that she was actually in this chamber, however, she found out how much "a sense" had sorely overstated the point. Stepping into the seemingly large and spacious room revealed that it was actually somewhat cramped and inducing claustrophobia. It was a tunnel, with a giant, multi-segmented, cylindrical machine running perpendicular to the entryway's point of view and occupying much of the room's space and set snugly onto a set of metal tracks dug into a hollow on the ground. Starting at 25 km from its "base", it led Homura's eye to follow its progressive decrease in height as it went further along the tunnel, lending it the appearance of a giant bullet ready to shoot off into the darkened distance at the push of a button. In better days, it would likely have been painted a clean white, but now, it had been lined with bullet marks and red and brown splotches distributed unevenly across the surface.

The ground beneath them was painted with more of the same, sterile tiling of the laboratory, but along with air-exposed blood that followed the trails out of the computer room, there was a new addition to the debris on the ground. Shards of what appeared to be ground-up jewelry, comprised of a rainbow of colors, lined the ground they walked on. By now having a good idea of what those shards were, all three of them took pains to avoid stepping on them as they threaded their way through the garage.

Here, in this spacious chamber, they were not alone. The faint, persistent glow of Homura's Soul Gem began to intensify, a clear indicator of the nearby presence of a Witch. No barrier or entry showed itself. More immediately, once they reached the other side of the "bullet", they saw on the underside of the tracks an infestation of the strange mosquito-like robot familiars, resting and writhing in place in the dark crevices underneath the giant machine in a grotesque parody of the nesting instincts of real insects.

"They really seem to have made their home here," Stiyl said, visibly disgusted. As numerous as they were, they were weak; Homura and Stiyl were of one accord in quickly clearing away the infestation of mosquito familiars and in ensuring none of them got anywhere near Index. Thus cleared, the darkness gave way to a tangled, gnarled mass of wiring and twisted metal that had clearly been sheared off of the underside of the large bullet machine. Hidden behind the mass of hardware and cabling, a single human being lay still, dressed in a lab coat that would have been white in better days but was currently covered in the brown color of blood exposed to the air. The figure was hunched over in a sitting position while propped up against the wall. Independently of each other, both Stiyl and Homura stepped forward to investigate the particulars of who and what this person was while Index drew back. Upon closer inspection, the unfortunate soul was male and elderly, bald except for a ring of thin, white hair caked around the back of the head. Even an amateur could have told that whoever this man was, his end was not a peaceful one. Upon further searching for exactly how he was killed, however, both Homura and Index simultaneously came across a most startling detail.

The man's right arm was missing. It had been chopped off cleanly in as few motions as possible, by something absurdly sharp, possibly in one motion by something able to carve through human flesh like a hot knife through butter. The lack of wounds elsewhere on the coat or the body made it plainly evident that whoever or whatever killed this man had been aiming for his right arm from the start.

Homura considered what this meant. She mentally retraced her steps, beginning with the escape from the burning laboratory on the island. The butterfly-shaped mechs. The powered suits of armor warring with each other, with her caught in the crossfire. The mysterious masked scientists. The unnamed magical girl. And the unnamed magical girl's counterpart, the strange white-haired girl who favored her right hand in battle.

"Her right hand…" she muttered. Then, more loudly so that Index and Stiyl could hear, she continued on. "There was a girl at the laboratory in Kunashir I escaped from before I made it here. White hair, black bodysuit, a little taller than myself. Heterochromatic. She favored her right hand in combat to an unreasonable extent, even when I and the other girl fought her. Some kind of power, magic absorption perhaps, something that could only be channeled through her right hand. Would there be any clues within your grimoire library?"

Homura waited for an answer, but none was forthcoming from either of them. Turning back to face them, Homura was instead faced with another peculiar sight. Index, whom Homura had found during their short acquaintance to be so characteristically verbose and fond of exposition, was silent, and not by choice. Her mouth opened and closed, clearly trying to make speech. Trying, but not quite succeeding. In addition to being unable to speak, Index wobbled back-and-forth where she stood, giving off the impression of a delicate white teacup about to fall off of a kitchen table and break upon hitting the floor. Her large, green eyes were staring off into the distance, unfocused.

"But that's impossible," Index responded. Homura could not immediately tell if this response was directed to her, as Index was not looking in her direction. "That's Touma's power. Imagine Breaker? No, no, that's wrong. That doesn't belong to anyone other than him. This is just another strange person like Fiamma. Yes, that's right. Another evildoer like Fiamma… Touma's not gone. He's just gotten himself lost. He's going to come back to us any day now, Sphinx… and when he does, he's in for such a scolding, making me worry like that…" As she babbled on, a pitch-black glyph resembling a crude drawing of a bird's nest etched itself onto Index's neck.

"The air around us is distorting," Kyuubey warned. "Be ready for anything."

Index was not the only one acting strangely. Stiyl was also standing stock still and silent. He did not act as erratically as his smaller companion, but he was still visibly unnerved. He had broken out into a sweat even despite the cold air of the underground passage they were in, and his breathing was becoming audibly less steady by the second. A complex admixture of fear and anger ran across his cheek.

With the two Necessarius magicians frozen in place, the atmosphere around them warped and twisted. Homura readied her weaponry, all of her senses on full alert in order to not be caught off-guard by whatever form the incoming Witch would take…

…before the distortions stopped entirely.

The telltale warping of space-time that accompanied the advent of a Witch grew silent, and the once-foreboding atmosphere stilled itself, leaving in its wake a spacious chamber with an inert machine, a maimed corpse, and two confused girls. Homura barely had time to process this unexpected turn of events when she felt the cold ground beneath her stir and tremble. With a heartbeat-like rhythm, the ground quaked and thundered, accompanied by rumbling that became increasingly more frequent as time went on.

Index, now back to normal, looked at her feet and clutched the calico kitten and the broken Soul Gem. "What's going on now? Earthquake?"

Homura doubted this. A place like Academy City, which according to Index's earlier lectures, had prided itself on being decades ahead of the rest of the world, in technological advancement, would doubtlessly have dedicated some of that advanced technology toward securing their own underground facilities against earthquakes, especially when located in a place like central Japan with its infamously precarious fault lines. On top of that, the rhythm of the tremors was too intentional to be an act of nature. Indeed, it felt more as if something was trying to break through the ground and into the surface…

And then she heard it: a metallic screeching rising from within the depths of the earth itself. The ground beneath them stopped its intermittent rumbling and shaking and instead began continuously shaking, with patches of tiling and earth vibrating loose as they had begun to be displaced. Whatever was underneath the ground and trying to break through was going to succeed in doing so very, very soon.

"Get away from that machine!" Homura ordered loudly and firmly, pointing to the giant white "bullet" that was itself beginning to work its way loose from the mini-tunnel cut into the ground for its purposes. "You'll be crushed!"

"Do not order us around, you outsider!" Even as he uttered these words from his mouth, Stiyl was already on the move, pulling Index (and the kitten) away from the tracks where the quaking was at its strongest and toward the slightly higher ground closer to the interior walls. At this point, cracks were beginning to pockmark the ground and walls. In response to one set of fractures forming near Index's position, Stiyl Magnus let another rune-coated slip of paper free from his baggy robe sleeve and infused it with his own magic. She was unable to determine what kind of magic he cast, but the context of the immediate situation led Homura to believe that it was to either mitigate the damage from the earthquake or protect himself and Index from it.

Homura did not have too much more time to think on this, however, as the ground underneath her erupted.

Columns of dirt, tile, and gravel rose up from the ruptured ground and flew in all directions, like an explosion inside a volcano that had shaken free of its magma. However, this was no natural eruption; it was caused by something else entirely – something that had broken through to the surface. True to Homura's earlier fears, the giant bullet-like machine had ripped free of its anchor to the ground and sailed through the air, its tip briefly pointing to the sky like a sword aimed at the Heavens itself before crashing to the ground and explosively shattering, adding the element of fire and its attendant smoke and heat to an already dangerous situation. Barely managing to dodge all of this, Homura could barely make out the silhouette that resembled a tower steadily rising through the empty air. When it cleared, Homura found herself face-to-face with an awe-inspiring sight unlike that which she had ever faced.

Adorned with stark white scales, the creature possessed six curved, ivory-colored horns – with each pair adorning the top of its head and the sides of its ears, respectively. Huge, scaly wings, each with a spiked tip protruding from the top, propelled its massively long body through the sky, blowing more debris about as they steadily pumped. Snakelike hollow "pits" took the place of a nose. Its legs, though relatively short compared to the rest of its body, were thick, muscular, and trunk-like. Its belly, logically the weak point of creatures like these, shone in layers of polished silver that clearly showed evidence of being armored or enjoying similar protection. Its tail was wiry, yet jagged, with gray overlapping scales protected by a line of black ridges that made it look like a chainsaw as it whipped out. Two rows of teeth that could probably crush a tree trunk between them protruded from the sides of its mouth, giving it a demonic, predatory grin that seemed to be perpetually plastered onto its face. Disgustingly, the creature's mouth was full of severed human arms, with no regard to differentiation of race, ethnicity, gender, or age. It did not care to retain this macabre meal, however, as it thrust itself upward, allowing the severed appendages to rain down.

Then there were its eyes. A right one of royal blue and a left one, slitted like a snake's, of gold.

This was a dragon. A creature of mythology that had captivated and terrified the hearts of human beings throughout their thousands of years of history, crossing barriers of time and culture with its sheer majesty and terror.

It continued its ascent through the laboratory, intent on letting neither ceiling nor machinery impede its upward trajectory. Curiously, it stopped for the briefest of seconds to lock eyes with Akemi Homura. Homura knew that she should check on Index and Stiyl, and perhaps Theodosia as well if this monster was going to follow through on its intent to barrel its way to the surface, thereby destroying the building in its way. But in this particular instance, such concerns lay distant at the back of her mind.

In this world, there was only her, her beloved, and the disgusting creature that had dared come between them.

After all, whose eyes were those? The answer to that was clear enough.

Akemi Homura activated her time-stopping magic, freezing the surroundings around her. The mere fact that this beast was still able to move even within the world of stopped time removed any lingering traces of doubt in Homura's mind as to the identity of this creature. Homura drew an arm cannon, aiming the barrel so that it had a direct line of sight to its left, golden eye. "Give her back, you bitch," she said. "GIVE MADOKA BACK!"

The dragon's eyes shifted downward, staring back at Akemi Homura.

Come and get her, those eyes seemed to respond back.

With that "conversation" over, it turned those differently-colored eyes upward and went back about its business of crushing its way upward. Refusing to countenance even the thought of being ignored, Homura released the time lock and unloaded the cannon on the monster before it could finish breaking through. Having gotten accustomed to the futility of opening barrages like these during her countless fights with Walpurgis, she did not expect this monster would die. So, she took out a rifle and fired.

She took out shotguns and fired them.

She primed machine guns and fired them.

She cooked grenades and threw them.

She armed RPGs and fired them.

She set up a rocket launcher, ignored the redheaded man and the four-meter-tall vaguely humanoid creature made of fire that suddenly materialized in front of him as if from thin air, and fired.

Despite Homura's (and Stiyl's) attempts, nothing so much as singed the dragon as it successfully barreled its way through the ceiling, leaving more chaos and destruction in its wake. Furniture, technology, glass, and before long the framework of the laboratory itself tumbled down through the freshly-made hole leading from the underground to the surface, feeding the fire that had already been made by the exploding machinery and Stiyl's fire monster and turning the formerly quiet underground into an earsplitting, burning deathtrap. The entire laboratory had been compromised and would cave in upon itself in short order.

Covering her eyes so that the dust would not blind her, she grabbed both Index and Stiyl with each of her hands and activated her time magic. Once again, everything stood still. The falling shards and wreckage held their place in the sky, creating a patchwork of art in suspended animation. Though startled, Index quickly realized she was going on and clung to Homura tightly. Stiyl, on the other hand, was wide-eyed in amazement as he stared at the still world of gray around him.

Homura did not allow him to remain in reverie. "We need to escape now," she said. "The entire building will entomb us if we remain here."

Stiyl opened his mouth and began to say something in response, but suppressed it just as quickly. He looked up at the hole leading to the first floor of the laboratory and clicked his tongue. "How far does your magic extend?" he asked evenly.

"If we break contact, then your time stops as well."

"I see," was his response. Reproducing the twin short swords of flame he wielded together, he pointed them downward toward the ground, not quite letting the "blades'' touch the ground, while firmly holding the "hilts" in hand. "Then hold on and close your eyes." Bursts of flame emitted from the tips of the flame swords, first in spurts, and then more consistently and continuously. Before long, two trails of concentrated fire emitted from these swords, producing streams of smoke that held their position in the sky as soon as they left Stiyl's person. Stiyl's feet began to lift from the ground, dragging the two girls upward with it as he drifted upward. "I don't like doing this. Using magic to fly is the hallmark of an amateur, given how dangerous it is and how easily it's countered by anyone who knows what they're doing. But now, I've no choice."

"Is that really magic?" Homura asked, looking downward at the smoke trails perfectly suspended in mid-air. "This is just basic rocket science. Wouldn't this be a violation of your treaty?"

Stiyl just snorted. In that one instance, Homura had grasped some facet of the man named Stiyl Magnus. No treaty, law, or stricture would stop him from protecting the girl who even now was hanging off of his other shoulder. If there were any laws in place forbidding such action, they were not worth following anyway. This was all about protecting the one he loved. It was also something Homura understood very well, since she had time and again been forced to do exactly the same thing in the past.

The stream of fire continued to grow thicker and larger until it looked as if the three were floating in the middle of a giant column of fire. The trail grew longer still, until finally, it disappeared altogether, just in time for the three to catch a foothold at the front entrance. The once lavish and expensive front door had almost completely collapsed upon itself, forcing Homura to kick what was left of the glass out of the way and make an exit for herself.

As soon as she released the time lock, Minamoto Labs sank into the earth with a thundering crash. Those police officers with vehicles parked closest to the destruction scrambled free before they could be pulled into the collapse along with those vehicles and not a few unfortunate security robots. In the distance, Homura heard, and then saw, a flying machine converging on their position. The thrumming of this machine's rotors made it sound like a helicopter, but Homura was not entirely sure that "helicopter" was the right term to describe it. No helicopter she had ever known possessed six wings or could cut through the air so quickly. This six-winged flying machine was briefly accompanied by one more traditional fighter jet flying behind and above it before breaking off from the six-winged flier and blasting sharply upward into the sky out of view. Homura could only presume that the fighter jet had taken off in pursuit of the white dragon, which she had regrettably lost track of during the escape.

"You look pale. Are you all right?" That was Index's voice. She had remained close to the redheaded priest, who was evidently in discomfort. He had dropped to one knee and showed signs of struggling to catch his breath. Homura was unsure whether he had overexerted himself flying them out of the laboratory or whether his magic had a specific physical drain on his stamina. Whatever it was, as soon as Stiyl heard the nun's voice, he shook off his exhaustion and rose to his feet.

"I'm fine," he said. "Used more magic power than I thought. But that aside, we need to get moving, and quickly. Between your new 'friend' and that white monstrosity, the fields I've so painstakingly set up have now been completely laid to ruin." Stiyl shot a glance at said "friend"; Homura did not respond. "Being caught out by Anti-Skill at this point would be a pain in the ass. Then, more than ever, we need to regroup with the others."

It took a surprising amount of willpower on Homura's part to not leave Necessarius' side and pursue the dragon immediately. Nonetheless, she snuffed out those unbidden thoughts before they could take root and impede her judgment. She still needed their help and expertise to track down the enemy. "Where is your partner? The one on the roof with you?"

Stiyl narrowed his eyes and sighed. "Theodosia? That need not bear asking. Unless she managed to escape from that helipad, she likely died when the rooftop collapsed along with the rest of the lab. Once things simmer down, I will certainly return to find the body." His voice was as even as ever, making it difficult for Homura to determine whether or not this was merely an ill-timed attempt at humor or he was going to seriously write off his companion. If nothing else, the frown on Index's face clearly indicated her displeasure.

"Could you please kindly not kill me off like that?" a familiar female voice whined. Those present turned around to see Theodosia Electra. While she seemed undamaged, her clothes seemed to have taken the brunt of it. Her formerly pure white blouse was dingy, gray, and torn by little nicks, cuts, and scrapes in more than a few places, including one small one on the upper-mid chest area that would have probably needed some mending soon before it grew large enough to become an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction. Her jeans were shredded in such a way that it could have been mistaken for an aging "Forever Young" woman's way of remaining trendy. Planted on her back was a device that could possibly have been a hang glider of some sort, but was covered with a downy bed of feathers that instead made it look like an eagle's wingspan. "Wings of Hræsvelgr," she said, as if that explained her survival. "Though they're not exactly wings. Can't really fly with them and all. But…"

But before Theodosia could get too far into her haphazard explanation, Stiyl's coat pocket rumbled, and the sound of a pipe organ could be heard playing through a tinny, slightly damaged speaker. In response, Stiyl reached once again into his coat, pulling out not another set of runes, but a flip phone with a red color and a garish skull keychain hanging off of it.

"I forgot I had this silly thing," he said to no one in particular as he answered the phone. Was he talking about the phone itself or the keychain? "Tsuchimikado?"

"Finally got through to you-nya," a youthful, male voice rang through on the other end of the line. "I've been trying to reach you since forever. Phone lines weren't reaching, communication spells didn't work either, it was a mess. Those labs in District 10 were on your beat, weren't they? Did you see that dragon before it disappeared?"

"Of course, I did. How could I not have seen it? I was at ground zero when it broke out. It certainly grew up in its cage," he seethed. "This is a huge blunder on my part."

"We'll get to the lecture and the paddling later. Where are Nee-chin and the Index?"

Stiyl sucked his teeth. Something in those words had rubbed him the wrong way. He was about to respond, likely with some very harsh words towards whoever was on the other end of the line, but Index pre-empted him by grabbing the phone. "I'm right here, and I'm fine. You don't need to worry about me."

"Really now? That's a load off my shoulders-nya! But, Stiyl, whatever happened to 'we can't let that girl in on this'? Change your mind?"

The earlier glare from Index toward Stiyl returned with a vengeance. "What is he talking about?" she pointedly asked him, her large, green eyes narrowing in suspicion.

Stiyl didn't immediately answer. He cringed and recoiled from her gaze and instead took refuge in his own growing indignation toward whomever he was talking to on the phone. "If we're going to talk about responsibilities," Stiyl said, "it was you whom I trusted to watch her. How could you have let her run off without so much as a guardian spell?"

"Give me a break, man. I get trapped in some modern art exhibit; and by the time I've managed to fight my way out of it, there's a twin-tailed middle school girl-shaped hole in my apartment wall, the cops are swarming my place like flies, and Index suddenly goes missing. Normally, that kind of back-to-back shit would happen to Kami-yan, not me. Anyway, I had arranged for Nee-chin to be a second set of eyes. She wouldn't happen to be with you, would she?"

"Not yet," Stiyl admitted. "I made some… miscalculations and used up more stamina than I cared. Once I recover my energy, we'll run a trace for her magical signature."

"You still in traveling condition?"

"Yeah."

"Then let's make a date and meet back up at Komoe-sensei's place!" the one called Tsuchimikado said jovially, right before he continued on with a much graver tone of voice. "Just be warned though. Since we're on the topic of blunders and mistakes and all… this whole thing can partially be laid at my feet. I'll tell you more once we meet in person."

"I see," Stiyl said. "Then we'll go there. Oh, and tell that woman to clean up her place. We'll need the extra room for one more person."

Back at a certain dormitory in District 7, a lone girl stood on top of the rooftop of the eight-story dormitory room. She was dressed in a black collared button-down shirt with a gold trim and a golden-colored cherry blossom emblem, with a matching ankle-length black skirt. This was the winter uniform of Private Shidarezakura Academy, one of a network of all-girls schools in the prestigious School Garden. Her long hair, an exotic color of silver that leaned toward lavender, was tied into a folded ponytail yet still had enough at the front to obscure her forehead with bangs and long sidelocks. This hair, along with her purple eyes, tall stature, and large… well, sizable assets, clearly marked her as a foreigner. Such an exotic creature would have stood out like a sore thumb amongst the backdrop of the ordinary dorm were it not for her innate light-diffracting magic hiding her presence.

It was easier to sneak into Academy City than it had any right to be, thanks in large part to the other girl failing to take notice of the cameras hidden within the ordinary cleaning bots and thus attracting the city's wrath. Rescuing her was the right call.

She shook her head and admonished herself. Saving others was always the right call, whether or not their presence would coincidentally prove advantageous to fulfilling one's own mission.

You don't need a reason to save anyone, after all.

Like nearly everyone else in the city, she turned her eyes southward and witnessed the white dragon ascend into the sky. Unlike nearly everyone else, however, she remained calm. After all, without its intelligence, it was just a mindless beast, a mere avatar of chaos and destruction. And if Elise Bradwell had any say about it, it would remain that way until it met its end.

"MO-KYU!'' The mysterious magical girl was not alone. Accompanying her was a metallic, four-legged, red-eyed creature that looked like a lifeless, robotic approximation of Kyuubey, right down to its oddly tinny voice. "MO-KYU-KYU!" it said.

"That goes without saying," she responded. "QBS, activate."

The robotic Kyuubey-like creature coiled and folded itself into a compact shape and disappeared into light. Immediately afterwards, a lavender-colored jewel with a silvery crescent moon inset materialized on the left side of her head. Her Shidarezakura blazer disappeared, and in its place was a white corset filled with silver-colored floral patterns across the front. The black skirt shortened itself to a knee-skirt with a color-shifting Glenn pattern. Finally, the comb that had previously folded her hair into a ponytail separated, letting her now-unbound hair fall to just above her waist. The separate pieces of the comb folded themselves into two pairs of lens-like structures orbiting her.

Her transformation into a magical girl complete, she looked upward at the sky. "Never a dull day in 'Academy City', is there?" she asked herself rhetorically, with a smile on her face. A tired, weary, mirthless smile.

At the exact same time, some 7,500 km to the northeast of Homura's position, a search of an entirely different kind was underway.

Even in the best of days, the Arctic Circle was nearly devoid of life, save for the occasional polar animal that had to take an entire evolutionary detour to adapt to the biting, persistent cold. The sun was nearing its highest point in the sky at the 10:00 am morning, but that did little to fight off the relentlessly chilly cold for the dozen or so of men – and one little girl – milling through ice, snow, and stone wreckage with their hands and tools, both magical and mundane.

The lone girl among the group kicked a nearby stone panel with her feet… which turned out to be a bad idea, because while it did not budge from its spot, the girl could somehow feel the pain seeping in even from her steel-toed boots. Yelping, she jumped around and tried to blow on it… only to see the air she exhaled instantly solidify into a thin trail of ice.

"Boss, it's been a week, and there is absolutely no sign of him," said one of the men, whose blond hair could be seen poking through the fur lining of his parka. "Are you absolutely sure he's here?"

"I'm 100% sure!" the little girl snapped back at the man who called her 'Boss'. "This is where the Star of Bethlehem crashed. He just has to be. We'll keep looking until we find him."

The Dawn-Colored Sunlight was a cabal that claimed true inheritance from the Golden Dawn and would boldly stand astride the boundary between magic and science. At the young age of twelve, Leivinia Birdway would stand at the top of this cabal. Her tiny body belied a sharp mind, unparalleled mastery of magic, and a commanding presence.

Yet despite all of this, she was unable to save one boy. One stupid, tactless, heroic boy who dove into the heart of a world-spanning conspiracy and saved everyone.

Just as her subordinate, Mark Space, reminded her, it had been a week since the Star of Bethlehem fell to the earth. Although the sole remaining inhabitant of that great and terrible edifice crashed along with it, Birdway had been full of confidence that she could fish him up from the freezing water and save him. She needed him and his unique power for her next major project, after all, and whatever she needed was always there, waiting for her to grasp hold of it…

…which was why she was wallowing in frustration, with not a little bit of genuine worry and trepidation creeping in as well. The boy's mysterious right hand was a wondrous thing, but it wouldn't have prevented him from perishing in a floating fortress crash or drowning in freezing water.

And yet, there was nothing. Not a single clue.

"…"

She was still searching. It was the only option left to her. She also began to worry on some level that if they did not find him soon, the chances of finding him at all were going to plummet. The thought alone made her want to cry out loud, but she held it in.

But then, something unexpected happened.

"Boss!"

It was the voice of her first subordinate, the blond man named Mark Space, that shook her out of her pessimistic reverie. She perked up.

"Now what? Don't call me unless you've found him, fool! Please tell me you found him…"

"Well, not exactly," Space responded. "But I found this."

Annoyed, but mildly curious, Birdway allowed Space to present his finding. It was a large, golden, egg-like jewel case with a teardrop-shaped handle. It was plain enough to see that the jewel cage was supposed to house a jewel of some sort, but no such jewel was present, leaving the cage merely pretty, golden, and hollow.

What is that jewel? Birdway could not help but ask herself. One of Fiamma's stolen spiritual items?