But Loqi wouldn’t let go. As she neared the train line, she heard his voice again.
“Aranea!” This time it blared over a loudspeaker rather than the comm. He’d apparently stuck to her the entire way, like stink to a chocobo. She cursed herself for not thinking to turn off her coordinate data when she silenced the comm. Too late now.
She turned a corner, and there he was in his giant, obnoxious armor. Blocking her way in all his MA-X Cuirass glory.
“Some guys just can’t take a hint, huh?”
She was tempted to lay into him out of sheer frustration but managed to keep the venom in check. Of all the times to make a nuisance of himself, why had Loqi decided to do so now? Before she could think about it any further, there was a loud boom. Reflex propelled her to safety before her thoughts caught up with her body. A crater was smoking in the ground just shy of where she’d been standing. The Cuirass was firing on her.
“What the hell are you doing?!” she shouted.
“I would ask you the same!” his reply boomed. “Do you expect me to stand idly by in the face of your dereliction?!”
Her head was throbbing. The MA’s speakers were too damn loud and the situation too damn ludicrous. The whole day was a shit sundae, and Loqi was the cherry on top.
“All right,” she snapped. “You wanna play? Then let’s play.”
She drew the Stoss and thrust it at the Cuirass. If her words wouldn’t make him back down, she’d let her spear do the talking.
Her spearpoint slammed into the cybersuit’s left leg, rocking it off balance. She followed immediately with another thrust. The quickest way to put the MA out of commission was a concentrated assault on one leg. But several thrusts later, Loqi still wasn’t going down. It was a damn testament to the custom plating he’d rigged his armor with. The maneuverability of the Stoss was unmatched, but for all it excelled in that regard, it lacked in raw power. She was going to have trouble delivering a finishing blow to a heavy opponent like this.
And her mounting exhaustion wasn’t helping. Hour thirty-six. At this point, her overtime hours were racking up overtime. If she didn’t finish this quickly, she might not be able to finish it at all. Just as she began to mull this distressing new realization over, she heard a shout.
“Look out! Above you!”
The voice came from the MA’s speakers, but it wasn’t Loqi. He was young, but not that young.
Aranea looked up.
“Oh great,” she muttered. Loqi’s cry of dismay came in unison.
A winged daemon was incoming on a steep dive. Aranea leapt to meet it with the Stoss, skewering it through the middle, only for the corpse to explode off to either side. The Cuirass’s guns seemed to have found their mark, too.
In any case, the daemon was dead. Attack averted.
“Looks like you owe me one, Blondie,” Aranea drawled, right atop Loqi’s haughty assertion, “You do realize you’d be dead right now if not for me, yes?”
And all of a sudden, the whole situation seemed utterly ridiculous. The world was falling apart, and here they were, squabbling over battlefield credit like a couple of green cadets. Aranea felt the fight drain out of her with that realization, and she holstered the Stoss. Just as the spear clicked tight in its catches, the cockpit of the Cuirass popped open. Apparently, their little two-step wasn’t over. Loqi seemed to think their coincidental timing just as absurd as she did, and she found herself laughing along with him.
“It seems my accusation was unwarranted.”
“Finally figured that out, huh?”
Took you long enough, she was about to add, but stopped short. Loqi wasn’t alone in the cockpit: he held a small girl in his arms. Her presence solved the mystery of who had shouted the warning earlier, but it also posed an even greater one―who was she?
“Tell me, then,” Loqi asked. “Where are you headed in such a rush?”
“Got some business to take care of in Tenebrae.”
Loqi carefully lowered the girl to the ground. “I suppose it’s all that’s left to us now.”
“What do you mean?”
“The last safe haven in the empire.”
“For the moment, anyway,” she responded.
Pretty soon, they wouldn’t have even that. Diamond Weapon’s flight and the impending danger surged back to the forefront of her mind.
“We never should have used daemons in the way we did,” Loqi said. “Now it seems we’re finally paying the price.” His words possessed an edge of self-derision.
Aranea couldn’t have agreed with him more.
“And I’d wager that this nation was set on the path of its own destruction the very day that man arrived in the capital.”
The chancellor. Perhaps Niflheim’s fate had been sealed years ago, well before she and Loqi were born. Perhaps the moment Ardyn Izunia had stepped onto their land, welcomed with open arms, this end had been inevitable.
“We could use an extra hand in Tenebrae, you know,” Aranea found herself saying.
Loqi sniffed. “My place is here,” he replied, “in the heart of the empire to which my life is sworn.”
What a time to be harping on that, she thought. Maybe that was what marked the difference between a former mercenary and a soldier born to the role. To Loqi, this was his heritage. House Tummelt had proudly provided Niflheim with generation after generation of officers and leaders. Maybe that was a thing worthy of respect in its own way. Not that it made it any easier for her to comprehend.
“If the capital is to fall, then I shall go down with―”
“I wanna fight, too!” the girl interrupted.
She looked to be about seven, maybe eight. She seemed healthy, and her eyes were bright and inquisitive. Even at a glance, Aranea could easily perceive the confidence and willpower the girl carried within her.
“No. Out of the question,” Loqi replied.
“But I can help! I’ll beat up the daemons with you!”
“Listen to me,” Loqi said. “I am taking great pains to see to your―”
“I never asked you to,” she pouted.
“And yet I am duty bound to do so. I must give everything I have to see to your safety, and to―”