One week later, two weeks before the day…
“So quiet,” Rin said sleepily. She was on the couch in the Fuji Squad meeting room. As she’d said, the entire Cavalleria building was silent. Everyone was out on a mission, so it was almost unoccupied. Only the Fuji Squad members in the meeting room remained: Fuji, Hanabi, Rin, and Kuon. They all wore their Maneuver plugsuits with the school-recommended windbreakers over them. They looked like members of a track team.
Hanabi was sitting at the monitor desk in the center of the room. She turned back to Rin and said, “Hey, we’re on standby for this mission! No loafing around!”
“Yeah, I know…” Rin said, waving her hand. She appeared to be melting into the couch. Next to Hanabi, Kuon grinned at this familiar riff, and Fuji considered scolding Rin himself but abandoned the idea.
Hanabi’s injury was mostly healed, and the bandages were only still on her arm as a precautionary measure. The broken bone and burns were fully healed within a week—the Witch Bubble and modern medicine were really impressive that way.
The Fuji Squad’s two main attackers might have both been injured, but looking at the big picture, the last operation had been a huge success. After all, they’d eliminated a Jave Queen and a Gate without any fatalities. There were only two injured, a prototype frame badly damaged, and minor damage to the Reimei frame. They were the most miraculous results since the war with the Jave began. Despite the ambush, this was a far better result than the four-figure death toll the Capital battle had incurred.
Rumor had it that as a result, the Fuji Squad would be showered in medals and guaranteed significant ranks once they officially joined the Air Force next year… That is, if they survived that long.
With this success behind them, the Fuji Squad were left out of the current operation so the Twin Star Heroes could rest and recuperate. They were ordered to be on standby, but that was mostly a formality. No one was checking in on them, so they could hardly blame Rin for not taking it seriously.
The monitor desk showed the view from the mobile mothership’s cameras in real time. It displayed blue sea and sky, with the occasional white cloud—Aohime Island. Specifically, the Mid-Blue space, where the Imperial Air Force had closed a gate and the Kiryu had first seen action.
The Air Force and the Lunatic Order were deployed there en masse, but not because new Jave had appeared. This operation was entirely an experiment. They were testing a new Device developed by the genius researcher, Tooka Nürburg.
“Is this even possible?” Kuon said, voicing everyone’s thoughts. “Can we…make our own Gate…?”
There was a long silence. The very idea seemed stupid, but it was theoretically possible. The method was, naturally, an application of Heavy Magic, but Kuon had stopped comprehending the explanation less than ten seconds in. As far as he was concerned, it was like a spell. Like, abracadabra extra veggies garlic with that?
But Kuon thought it sounded worth a shot. The space inside the Gates was merely a passage; they could get in but not go through. Many people had gone into the Gates, but nobody had gone out the other side and returned to tell the tale. To open the door on the other side required a different key.
And Tooka was trying to make one.
Ideally, this would take place somewhere a Gate had already been. That meant the Capital, Fukuoka, or Aohime Island. Of course, there was no need for this to take place in the Empire. There was no telling what would happen in the event of a failure, and they were opening a door to the world of their mortal enemies, so it could likely lead to combat. However, the military and imperial top brass had settled on Aohime Island.
This was because, unbeknownst to the Cavalleria, this operation was being run by the international alliance, and the Empire currently owed them one. They couldn’t argue with them about it because military command had ordered the Kiryu, on loan from the alliance, into a Gate…and lost it. To make up for that failure, they were forced to agree to an obviously risky plan like manifesting a Gate over their own territory.
Technically, the entire Kiryu hadn’t been lost. The most important part of the frame, the Core, was recovered safely by Hanabi before it exploded. As long as they had that, it could easily be repaired and reconstructed. Such was the magic of Division Maneuvers. Naturally, the alliance hadn’t told the Imperial military this. Hanabi had reported it, but somewhere along the line the information had been deliberately suppressed, and it hadn’t reached the right people.
So now, the students sent to help with the experiment were gathered in the sky over Aohime Island. They were holding specialized equipment similar to curved metal poles. Linking these together made a massive ring, like the frame of a mirror or window.
Fuji pointed at the screen, explaining, “Supposedly the Gate will appear inside that ring, but that’s just a support material. The DM with the capacity to make the Gate is—see, here it comes.”
It looked like a pitch-black egg.
On the screen, next to the flying mobile mothership, they saw an even bigger elliptical object. This DM was like an egg painted black on its side, but it wasn’t paint. This was a Heavy Magic Field, bending the light so it appeared black. The Servants flying around it were cameras, the eyes of the user inside. Since light couldn’t get in, they couldn’t see out, either.
“This is the Anti-Jave Combat Final Mobile Maneuver, the Nürburg. Naturally, it’s Division 5 only, and the rider is Tooka Nürburg-kun. The frame itself was developed as a final weapon, but in this instance, they’re using it to open a Gate.”
The sheer scale of it got Rin off the couch. “That’s huge! Ridiculously huge! Bigger than the mothership! That’s, like, the size of our school!”
Hanabi and Kuon were equally stunned.
“Wow…it makes the Kiryu look tiny…”
“And Tooka’s inside that thing?”
The DM that was big enough to rival a Queen Jave slowly descended into the ring. The ring itself seemed to have thrusters on it and was hovering unsupported as the students backed away.
The countdown to start the operation hit zero, and the Nürburg began to move. The field around it began rotating irregularly. The pitch-black surface changed, alternating bands of white and black like a zebra, and then the white began to dominate. A black dot appeared at the center, surrounded by white. It looked like a single black point at the center of a white egg.
Then the black dot was gone completely, only to reappear at the center of the ring.
To Kuon’s eyes, it looked like the dot had moved from the Nürburg to the center of the ring. The ring began emitting light, shifting dizzyingly from red to green, green to blue, blue to yellow—and then the black dot in the center cracked.
That’s when it got really wild.
A black, sticky fluid-like something spilled out of the black dot. But rather than fall towards the ocean, or spill over the edge of the ring, it instead filled the ring itself like it was trapped inside transparent glass. Once full, it swallowed up the black dot as well. All that was left was a black mirror of darkness. Everyone watching recognized it, thinking the same thing: It’s just like a Gate.
While everyone stared at the black mirror, wondering what would emerge, Tooka stood on top of the Nürburg, her DM deployed. It was the same exo-arm type of DM she’d used to carry Kuon.
“What is she—”
Tooka approached the mirror and reached out with one of her exo-arms, touching the surface.
Wump.
Ripples ran across the mirror’s surface. A beat like a heart echoed, and the waves turned to a swirl. As the spinning grew faster, black sparks started flying around. As the sparks grew more dramatic, a black shock wave shot out of the mirror. The screen went completely blank, but soon restored itself. By then…
“She did it!” someone whispered.
At the end of Tooka’s exo-arm was a 300-meter-wide, one-centimeter-deep black field, spinning like a black hole.
“A Gate…!”
The same black moon that had brought mankind to the brink of death had now been created by mankind’s own hands.
What happened next was perhaps inevitable.
With the pseudo-Gate opened, Tooka turned her back on it, heading back to the Nürburg. Suddenly, a flood of Jave poured out from the other side. The manta swarm turned 180 degrees and wheeled around the pseudo-Gate, attacking Tooka, the Nürburg, the Student Echelon on standby behind that, the Air Force Cavalleria, and the mobile mothership.
The battle had begun.
The feed on their screen cut out. “Squad Leader!” Kuon yelled.
“Emergency deployment!” Fuji orders. “Everyone, activate your Maneuvers!”
Halfway out the window, Hanabi turned back. “We don’t have orders yet, though?!”
“They’ll come in on our way! Let’s go!”
Hanabi kicked off the window sill, activating Reimei in mid-air. Kuon and Fuji were right behind her. “Rin!”
“S-sorry…!”
Rin was the last to leave, looking unusually rattled. Aside from the Fuji Squad, the entire Lunatic Order was in this operation. That included the Sagara Squad, and their attacker, Okayama. Hanabi had heard about Okayama and Rin’s budding relationship, so she put a hand on Rin’s shoulder and whispered, “He’ll be okay.”
“…Yeah. I know.” Rin nodded and mounted the extra weapon on her back—the long-distance movement unit, Falcon—like a motorcycle. The other three grabbed onto the end of it, and all thrusters fired, accelerating rapidly. In the blink of an eye, the school was out of sight.
Command ordered the Fuji Squad into action two minutes later.