Alyssa checked her watch. "She's here," she said.
Miyu, who was perched in a branch overhead, looked down. "Tate and Yuuki are clear of the facility."
"Oh?" The more human of the pair smiled. "Pity." Then she reached up and pulled the limiter circuit hidden in her hair ribbon away. Without its timed emanations bombarding the cells of her brain stem, she could feel the rising fever and nausea as her power began to drive the physical cells of her body beyond what they found comfortable or, in the long run, survivable.
The trees rustled around them, tossing their heads like upset horses as a tremendous bulk of white and black and flaming orange roared by close overhead. Neither so much as blinked.
Unaware, or at least heedless, of the two enemies he had so casually overflown, Kagutsuchi backwinged once to kill his momentum before letting himself drift easily over the devestated secret compound's courtyard. "Now?" Alyssa asked. From where she stood on the ground, of course, she couldn't make out any details beyond those that Artemis was able to relay to her from overhead, but there wasn't any problem relying on Miyu's judgement to call the shot.
"Now," the replicant answered calmly, taking note as she did so that Duran seemed to have grown greatly since the time of her last image of him - before only slightly larger than a motorcycle, he now had to bulk nearly as much as a large automobile. It was a moot point, of course, but if any data on Miss Kuga's conduct was available it might reveal something useful about the interaction between Valkyries and their Childs.
"Hai!" her mistress chirped, then flinched, squinting, as the sun overhead suddenly seemed to become impossibly bright. The emission spectrum was solar, but slightly changed, as though reflecting... A subroutine presented a possibility, and a quick calculation of the angles of the second light source which had joined the sun in the sky above provided corroboration.
They had believed that Diana's ability to focus and redirect light was limited to her own area... and had been wrong. Badly wrong. The 'HiME-sentai's attack had not been badly timed - it had arrived precisely when they had intended it to, at a point where Alyssa could be manipulated into manifesting Artemis... so that it could be destroyed, burned from the sky by Diana's gaze.
Alyssa screamed, and simultaneously, almost to the nanosecond, Miyu felt the tactile and other sensors in her toes begin to simply... stop reporting... one by one.
Panic was as much a physical reaction as a mental one, and a vice to which Miyu was not susceptible, but the painful awareness that stabbed through her was almost worse. The seperation from her previous incarnation had caused serious changes in Alyssa's emotional state, and the backlash of Artemis's death was erasing her, rather than Director Walton, as had been intended when Alyssa's conditioning was planned.
Once she had finished vanishing, there would be no one to protect Alyssa... and SEARRS would never leave a loose end like her uncut.
Unacceptable.
She rolled off of the branch and ended beside her charge with a thud, landing thrown slightly off by the absence of proper response or feedback from her feet or, now, fingertips. "Alyssa," she said, then had to repeat the name twice, more sharply each time, before the child turned her head and began to focus on her. "You have to go."
"Mi...yu...?"
She brought her hand up between them, and saw the import of the green evanescence rolling slowly across it penetrate into her mistress's mind. "Run," she urged. "They'll be coming for you... You don't have long to get to the safehouse we set up."
"I won't... leave you..."
Enough of her hands' structure remained to pull Alyssa to her feet and wrap her arm around her back. "I'll come with you... for as long as I can."
"...thank you..."
*squee*
Sometimes, things just flow, from the mind to the keyboard, and there's just nothing better. ^_^
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"