Everyone in Nayuta was within commlink range of each other, making any augmented individual within the city capable of sending and receiving messages composed not of voice or text, but thoughts. Which meant that Aliya had no difficulty sending an SOS, even at gunpoint.
“It’s Aliya! The military’s taken us prisoner!”
She need do nothing else but make that single silent plea. Yu was at the harbor when he got the transmission, right about when the amber aurora appeared. The militia was gathering at the shore and preparing to meet the enemy.
“What the hell are they thinking?!” Yu shouted, garnering himself the attention of the people nearby. Executive Officer Shiba, the burly Russian man Volonov, and Ein the Replicant Girl were with him. The latter had received the same message as Yu.
“So the young soldiers have begun a coup,” she mused. “Due in no small part to Nadal’s provocations, no doubt. Unfortunately, his scheming seems to have gone over their heads. It’s a shame.”
“Seriously!” Yu said. “I can’t even imagine how the speakers must be feeling right now!”
Ein shook her head. “You misunderstand. True, I do worry for the sages, but I was referring to the youths.”
“What?”
“Nadal has likely orchestrated this in order to...be rid of them.”
“Yeah, the sages aren’t really killers, but...” Shiba sighed. “Considering they specifically came here to escape a world of constant war, bloodshed’s not exactly a new concept to them, and I doubt they’d hesitate to get their hands dirty for the greater good. If they don’t sentence them to death outright, chances are they’ll just end up imprisoned for life or banished to a deserted island.”
“A coup gives them plenty of excuse,” Volonov said with confidence. His homeland, Russia, was not unused to the other side’s assaults, especially at Primorsky Krai where they took the brunt of the fighting. As a foreign refugee, he wasn’t in a situation so different from the elves. “They can’t do squat without just cause, not without upsetting the Japanese. They’d have riots. That’s what this is about. Your elf leaders used themselves as bait to make the military boys give them a reason. Gutsy move.”
While the fluent former businessman pulled the curtain back on the elves’ plot, another commlink came to Yu and Ein.
“Hey, um, my uncle says Ijuin and Natsuki are hiding somewhere in the tower?!”
“Uh, yeah,” Ijuin replied. “We’re in a secret room with some combat droids.”
“I’m with him,” said Natsuki. “They’ve been calling me here for a while now, saying they might need some extra hands soon or something. Didn’t know this was what they had in mind.”
Of the two of them, Ijuin was audibly the most shaken, but Natsuki sounded noticeably unamused. Yu could actually picture the samurai girl frowning for a change.
“Thank god,” Aliya sighed. “Then help’s on the way.”
“Okay, slow down! We’re still figuring out which droids to use,” Ijuin said.
“I mean, I’d rather be saving lives and all, so I can be there soon, but I’m not gonna be very cute when I see your uncle. Just for the record.” Natsuki was indeed tilted.
Yu remembered what they had talked about a few days prior. He remembered the things he felt that day, myriad and wild though they were.
“Mark III,” Yu muttered. To the other self slumbering within him. “Armorize.”
Adaptive nanofactors, sparkling and many, enshrouded him at once, armoring him in a black and gold suit. The ends of the Holy Shroud around his neck fluttered in the wind behind him. Like two long wings.
“Ichinose! You did it!” Shiba cried. “And...so easily! I thought you couldn’t get it to work!”
“Everyone needs me,” Yu said.
Ein practically swooned as she studied his armored form. “You mean those words. More than any I’ve heard you speak before,” she said. “Are you ready, Yu?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I’ll do it. I’ll be the person you’ve always known I can be.” It was a promise. To the partner who saw more in him. And to himself. “I’ve got to go! I’ll be back soon!”
“Do what you must,” said Ein. “We will hold the line until you return, by my word as queen!”
Yu activated the anti-gravity lifters and took off faster than a whirlwind. The air cracked as he instantly broke the sound barrier. He had felt sick on the day he faced the archmages. But not today.
Today he felt fine.
Yu reached his destination in just a dozen or so seconds, descending upon the wide roof of the three-hundred-meter tower.
“They’re supposed to be on the top floor,” he said to the Frame. “I need to get inside.”
The wind began to whirl as the Mark III transmitted the key signal, and a rectangle slid open in the floor to reveal an emergency exit. Yu leaped down into the observation lounge. Devicer Three in all his black and gold glory stood alone in the crowd of humans and elves.
“Three?!” an officer cried.
“We thought the elves had you!” shouted another.
“Well met, Asura of the skies!”
Soldiers and elves alike reacted with shock. Yu disregarded them and selected a weapon from his arsenal—the incapacitative paralytic sound propagator. A control window appeared on the Head Mounted Display in his visor.
“Let’s set the propagation nice and long,” he murmured inside his helmet. “One hundred eighty seconds should be good.”
Suddenly, a horrible, metallic screech whined from the Frame’s chestplate, and everyone in the lounge, both human and elf, collapsed from the non-lethal sound waves. It went on for exactly one hundred and eighty seconds as the people lay helpless on the floor, some of them merely twitching in vain attempts to move.
When the noise finally stopped, not a single person had the energy to so much as lift a finger. Among the paralyzed, Yu spotted his friend.
“Was that necessary?” she groaned through the commlink. “I think I might be sick.”
“Sorry, but I had to be safe. Unless you’d rather take a bullet in the cross fire.”
Yu scanned the room and, to his surprise, saw several officers starting to stagger to their feet. The sylphlike elves were still down for the count, but the younger, more physically fit of the group had recovered rather quickly.
One of them was Sakuma. As he stumbled on his feet, he reached for his waist, unholstered his 9mm, and unsteadily aimed it at Devicer Three. “Y-You...” he stammered, voice shaking. “You’re not Mizuki. Are you?”