Chapter 23: Offensive Statement

-VERTEX FOUR: 8.36679-

TSAB Headquarters

Interdimensional Space

Five words sent the entire Time Space Administration Bureau into high alert.

It was mostly unheard of for all levels of an organization as large and widespread as the TSAB to consolidate all of its branches, but those five words and the manner in which they were delivered, on top of everything else going wrong... the top brass wouldn't admit it, but they were terrified. Standard dimensional disturbances were bad enough; with the return of one of the deadliest Lost Logia in existence, the unauthorized firing of an Arc-en-Ciel on a planet capable of supporting life, and the inexplicable disappearance of a state-of-the-art L-Class flagship with all hands including two of the Three Aces, all within the same 48-hour span... those five words were enough to put the entire Bureau, from the Legendary Admirals down to the non-commissioned deckhands, on a crisis footing.

The five words themselves were simple: "Evacuate. Dead End is coming."

What was cause for alarm was that those words appeared simultaneously on thousands of worlds, on every communication system and frequency the TSAB had, even the most private encrypted channels. The sender was anonymous, the point of origin so thoroughly scrambled that it would take decades to decipher, the message delivered via a massive, coordinated burst that bypassed all existing security measures and ensured that the Bureau couldn't help but sit up and take notice. Even hundreds of history's most gifted hackers working together couldn't manage a feat like that.

All for just five words: "Evacuate. Dead End is coming."

Calls to defend the heart of the TSAB went out far and wide, to officers on ships of every kind, stationed in every dimension the Bureau had jurisdiction over. And the fleets answered: vessels of all classes now hovered around the station, at least ten ships for each of the six primary spires of the massive alloy structure that hung suspended in interdimensional space. Looking at it now from the outside, Headquarters resembled a model of an atom scaled to enormous size, with the countless ships its orbiting molecules: swarms of tiny single-pilot fighters covered the blind spots of thirteen enormous R-Class dreadnoughts, each half a kilometer long save for the largest and heaviest, the behemoth flagships Takuri, Kunisue, and Eltreum, which dwarfed the others at four kilos from bow to stern. There were well over two dozen L-Class cruisers, the missing Arthra's type, the most versatile the TSAB had. Half were jury-rigged with hastily-constructed Arc-En-Ciel cannons, just to be safe. Supporting them were scores of frigates bristling with advanced weaponry, quick and nimble recon flyers in tight formations, multitudes of autonomous repair ships guided by AI and equipped with hundreds of spindly arms ending in a variety of tools, floating artillery platforms and defense shield generators... and on the outer edges of Headquarters territory, a vast, networked proximity mine field, composed of several thousand chrome spheres in a spherical grid pattern. The Dimensional Navy was out in full force.

The higher-ranking officers of the Ground Forces on Cranagan scoffed at this entire operation, as was typical of them. Lt. General Regius Gaiz, in particular, railed publicly at the thought of expending so much manpower and so many resources over one cryptic message with an unknown source. Many Ground Forces personnel agreed with him, though unlike Gaiz, they prefered to keep their opinions off the public record.

Response from the Navy's commanding officers was swift. It came not in the form of arguments via comms or formal rebuttals, but in the form of the last automatic logs transmitted by the Arthra before the total disappearance of the ship and her crew. These logs struck cold fear into the hearts of everyone who saw them, even Gaiz, who silenced his complaints immediately.

The Athra's final logs revealed the following:

That the Book of Darkness had returned from utter annihilation with its Will fully manifested, and with possibly the most powerful mage in all worlds serving as her Unison Device, which raised her threat level from "catastrophic" to "exponentially apocalyptic". That latter phrase had to be coined in an emergency meeting of a half-dozen experts from the Threat Countermeasures Department, who were convened to assess the situation. The shaken TCD experts concluded that there were no official threat levels on the books sufficient to properly describe the magnitude of damage the Will could do with Cadet Yagami powering her, so one had to be invented and implemented for the occasion.

That a woman who didn't exist in any of the TSAB's databases had managed to incapacitate and critically injure one of the most gifted young Enforcer cadets in generations, one of the legendary Three Aces, with nothing more than her bare hands and a weapon composed of a swarm of foreign nanobots. Ordinary nanobots were children's toys at best compared to the technologies that the TSAB outfitted Enforcers with, but these were clearly not ordinary nanobots. They broke down and froze Cadet Harlaown's Device and Barrier Jacket systems with scornful ease, which suggested that the woman called Viluy had either developed a breed of microscopic machines of an advanced level never seen before by the Bureau, or that she somehow had intimate knowledge of exactly how to disable modern TSAB technology. The possibility that both of those explanations were true was too frightening to contemplate.

That the resurrected Will had completed a partial dimensional transfer of a moon-sized organism that seemed to defy all conventional explanation. It was "half hostile cybernetic / technological AI construct, half unknown, uncatalogued parasitic transdimensional / extradimensional entity", again according to the mystified TCD experts, and both halves were seamlessly integrated with each other down to the molecular level. Even half-transferred, the technorganic entity proved itself able to assimilate eighty percent of a mid-sized M-Class planet in less than an hour. That was the crisis which presumably led the decorated Admiral Lindy Harlaown of the Arthra to ignore all proper emergency protocol and fire her ship's Arc-En-Ciel at the planet, in a desperate attempt to contain the situation. The technorganic entity, the Book of Darkness, the Will, Cadet Yagami, and the planet Carnaaji were now erased from space-time as a result... or so the TCD desperately hoped.

And all three of these unthinkable nightmares were allegedly the work of the same organization: the one named Dead End.

"Evacuate. Dead End is coming."

The words sent the Bureau's researcher departments into a frenzy, scouring all available resources for any mention of Dead End, its structure, its leaders, or its goals. Nothing could be found. It was as if the hand of a God had reached into the countless repositories of knowledge gathered by the TSAB and neatly wiped out any and all mention of Dead End and anyone or anything relating to it. Impossible, the TCD experts said, no organization with that much power could erase all proof of its own existence from the TSAB. Even attempting such a thing would set off a system-wide alert, and bring scores of the Bureau's best down upon the perpetrators' heads.

And yet, that appeared to be the case. The TCD experts had no explanations. One in particular, throwing his hands up in frustration, said this on record: "Considering the three impossible things that have already happened this week, I'm willing to believe in a fourth."

So the entire Dimensional Navy gathered. Gathered, and waited, with the fleets prowling around Headquarters and scanning every possible angle of attack.

When that attack finally came, all their careful preparation was for naught.

Once again, a message was broadcast simultaneously over every means of communication the TSAB possessed. This time, the message was longer, but worse than before. Far worse.

"Attention, all personnel of the Time-Space Administration Bureau." The cold, impassive face of the woman with the snow-white hair spoke from a million holo-screens, echoed in a million secure audio and telepathic channels. Thousands of officers scrambled to full alert status before she finished her first sentence. "I am Viluy, Agent of Labyrinth's Witches 5, Level 202, and Head of Scientific, Technical, and Magical Research and Development for Dead End." Eyes like chips of ice stared out at the combined forces of the TSAB without blinking. It didn't take long to determine that this was the same woman who disabled and maimed Cadet Harlaown, the same woman that Cadet Takamachi had atomized with a Full Drive blast sans limiters. Now she was back from the dead, somehow. "You are to lay down arms and surrender the Infinity Library and all of the data within to our forces immediately. Embrace your annihilation, and our mission will proceed in a timely and efficient manner. Should you attempt to resist, all will suffer for your foolishness. There will be no quarter and no negotiation."

Her message concluded with chilling curtness: "We are coming. End transmission."

Havoc ensued. The Infinity Library was a priceless treasure, predating even the foundation of the TSAB. No one knew exactly where it came from, only that it was already there in interdimensional space when the current Headquarters was built, and the construction crew chose to build around it rather than attempt to disrupt it in any way. The knowledge within the Library was beyond priceless; it was impossible to tell if it really was as infinite as its name implied, because no one had ever come close to exploring all of it in one lifetime. Inside the Library were books and data files from billions of worlds, many of which were so old that they only still existed as words on pages or bits of ancient code. In the Library, one could study the very foundations of magic, find record of every Lost Logia ever catalogued, learn how to build any one of countless numbers of horrible weapons from the wars of bygone eras. Only the TSAB could be trusted to handle its contents responsibly... and as Precia Testarossa, Jail Scaglietti, and others like them proved, even within the Bureau and close to it, there were rogue elements who could and would take advantage of them. Surrendering the Library to a proven hostile force like Dead End was tantamount to throwing open the gates of Hell itself.

On board the Eltreum, Admiral Midget Crowbel, one of the three living legends at the very height of the command structure, roared into her comm once the transmission finished, with a fury that belied her great age. "Attention, all Infinity Library staff!" shouted the silver-haired woman, until now seen as a paragon of calm and steely nerve by every member of the rank and file. "Condition red! Go to immediate lockdown, this is not a drill! I repeat-"

There was a hiss of static as the comm channel went dead.

The Admiral shot to her feet with such a speed that twinges ran all down her spine to the tips of her toes. The hem of the red longcoat she wore fluttered briefly around her ankles. "Report!" she barked at the ops officer.

"A-Admiral," he said, "there's-"

The lights of his console interface faded. So did those of the conn's station next to him, and that of the chief tactical officer behind her. One by one, every console on the bridge flickered and died. Only the main viewer remained active, displaying a holo of the massed Dimensional Navy...

And as Admiral Crowbel watched in abject terror, the running lights on each of the hundreds of ships went dark in waves.

The bridge officers sprung into action. Commands and status reports bounced back and forth in a storm of chatter:

"- some kind of cascade nanovirus! We can't reboot anything-"

"- hailing the Gallant, no response-"

"- all defenses down, all sensors down, only life-support, art-gravs, and viewers active, comms fluctuating-"

"- 3rd Division reporting massive power failures throughout the Kyushu-"

"Temporary channel to the Takuri established! Admiral?"

Admiral Crowbel swallowed. Her throat felt like sandpaper. "Admiral Kiel," she said, unable to hide the trembling in her voice. "Your status?"

The voice that answered was choked with feedback and distortion, but the stunned disbelief in it was clear as a midsummer's day. "Dead in space. Everything's down."

The Admiral wobbled on her feet, feeling every second of her eighty years press down on her at once. "And Admiral Phils? Any word from the Kunisue?"

"No response," said Kiel.

Kaiser help them all. The three Legendary Admirals and their flagships, all crippled without a single shot fired. The officers below them had proven themselves capable of taking charge... of course they had, otherwise she wouldn't have retired in the first place, but this, being so decimated even with all three Admirals present... the Dimensional Navy had been rendered headless. Helpless.

With the viewers in every ship still active, they all saw the transfer gate open, a hundred kilos beyond the Headquarters' operational border and the patrol of the now-useless fleets. Every hand braced for an army to come pouring through...

What emerged from the gate was a single small figure, one that terrified the ranks of the TSAB more than any army ever could have: a young woman with long, flowing, gold-silver-copper hair, a midnight blue Barrier Jacket of ancient Belkan design, three pairs of midnight wings, and smoldering vermillion eyes. A red-black aura seethed from her body, mingling with the violet, snake-like tendrils of the cursed Book she carried under one arm.

The Will of the Book of Darkness. The Black Demon. The destroyer of worlds.

A desperate call went out on every channel that still functioned. In response, TSAB mages of all levels equipped their Jackets and personal barriers and rushed to the hatches of their ships. Those that were still able made short-range transfers into the void, forming into defensive walls, into attack squadrons, into anything that they thought might possibly delay the catastrophe about to befall them. Searing lines of light in every color streaked out through the swirling fractals, a storm of energies all targeted at the Will...

She didn't even need to blink to dismiss them; every blast dissipated into ether at her thought. In the terrible calm that followed, she made a grasping motion with her fingers.

Back among the deadened vessels, the hull of the dreadnought flagship Takuri split open along her underbelly. A great, jagged tear raced through four kilometers of alloyed steel in seconds, and like some poor animal gutted by a savage predator, her innards spilled out into the void, propelled by bursts of escaping oxygen that flash-froze into glittering clouds...

On the bridge of the Eltreum, the ops officer had managed to jury rig a console, fueling it with his own mana. As he beheld the mangled husk of the flagship, his shaken report went all but unheard over the comm channels. Only the automated log recording software caught what would be the final words of his mortal life: "The... the Takuri..." he whispered, ghostly pale in the light of the carnage on the holo-screen. He didn't need his console to confirm what he was about to say. "... the Takuri is gone. All hands lost."

"All hands, emergency barrier activation, now!" howled Admiral Crowbel to anyone who still could listen. "Abandon ship! I repeat, all hands, abandon-"

She came at them like a typhoon, like a tidal wave, like a hurricane. Before the Will, the full might of the Dimensional Navy amounted to children's toys, tossed aside and broken in droves. With no air in the void to conduct the sound, the tortured groaning of entire decks rending apart was heard only by the few on board the doomed ships who survived long enough to hear it. A thousand fires blossomed and were quenched as the oxygen needed to sustain them rushed out through countless hull breaches. The mages of the remaining infantry forces mounted a wild, desperate charge at the Will, only to have their Devices detonate like plasma grenades in their hands, reducing the luckier ones to cinders. Admirals, Captains, Commanders, and Cadets alike... all fell, scattered as easily as motes of dust.

Of all the many roles Doctor Mariel Atenza had taken on in her service with the TSAB, triage nurse was among the last she ever expected. "But I'm not a medical doctor...!" she tried to explain to the med staff when they rushed into her work station. They didn't care.

When it became clear to the upper ranks that the battle against the Will was doomed to failure, many of the fleet COs took the initiative and had their lower-ranking officers transferred to Headquarters for their own safety. There were so many of them that even HQ, as huge as it was, became overcrowded in a hurry. Then the casualties of the battle began flooding in... and Mariel realized why it was that they needed her, medical training or not. What she saw of the wounded made her retch; what she saw of the recovered bodies of the dead would remain in her nightmares forever.

Mariel was an engineer, a Device technician, a maintenance expert. The closest thing she had to any kind of medical doctorate was her work with cybernetics. Considering the disaster now unfolding, those areas of expertise were close enough for the medical staff.

And in the end, even triage seemed pointless. The enemy had no regard for the wounded, displayed no hesitation in attacking medical mages. It was savagery. It was butchery. The doctors, the real ones, knew that the Will would break through HQ's defenses in minutes, if not seconds... so the chief physician pulled her aside and told her to run, to try to protect the Library while there was still time.

As much as it tore at her heart to leave the infirmary and flee for her life... she knew that if she dropped back or hesitated for more than an instant, her corpse would join the thousand others caught in the storm of the Will's godlike power.

What kept her running, what kept her from sinking into an incoherent stupor of helpless terror, was the knowledge that there was someone else at HQ stupid enough to stay behind, who would not leave despite the unthinkable danger bearing down on him. That person was perhaps the only mage still alive and active who had a glimmer of hope of thwarting Dead End's goals.

Familiar corridors raced past Mariel in a blur as she ran. The sight of each one was another dagger in her heart... HQ was like a second home to her, and in a very short time, this place that she loved would be as good as dust. She tried to etch each bulkhead, each hatch, each room, each door into her memory, for she knew she would never see this place again.

Flashes of green up ahead. He was still here. Mariel didn't know whether to be relieved or incensed. "Yuuno-kun!"

A blonde-haired boy of about thirteen stood in front of the massive double doors to the Infinity Library, arms out and fingers spread, beads of sweat rolling down his young face. His magic circle flared forest green beneath him as he strained, pouring all his mana into the spell. Through gritted teeth, he answered the voice calling his name. "H-here, M-Mary-san..."

Mariel ran right through the runes of his spell circle to grasp his shoulder. To intrude on a spell in progress was supposed to be unthinkable. "Yuuno-kun, we have to get out of here and find Nanoha-"

"I c-can't," said Yuuno. The waves of power radiating from his fingertips wobbled unsteadily. "Can't... let them... have the Library...!"

Of course the boy had a personal stake in this. Though he was recruited into the TSAB at roughly the same time as Nanoha, his pupil-turned-equal-turned-superior, he eschewed the Ace's military service for something more his speed. He was a natural fit for the Infinity Library; while he had done more than his share of fighting in his short life, he considered himself far more a scholar than a warrior. Within a few short years, Yuuno came to know the Library better than staffers who had helped run it for decades. It seemed to respond to him, always providing him with the right information, provided he searched for it with enough patience. There was serious talk that he would be promoted to Chief Librarian before his eighteenth birthday, and a few of the older librarians were willing to bet any amount of credits on that outcome.

So the fact that he was now risking life, limb, and sanity to protect the Library didn't surprise Mariel, so much as frustrate her. "Yuuno, this entire quadrant is about to become a large-scale dimensional dislocation!"

"I know, I know! But if they get the Library-"

He had no need to finish. If they got the Library, everything was lost. Large-scale dimensional dislocations would look like a child with a scraped knee compared to what they could do with that kind of knowledge.

Far off, but growing closer by the second, Mariel heard corridors collapsing one by one, buckling in on themselves... but no screaming. Odds were there was little left of anyone to scream. "Yuuno, hurry," she begged, clutching at the sleeves of her lab coat. "Please, hurry...!"

"Going... as fast... as I can...!" said Yuuno. Grunting with effort, he balled his fists, made a violent yanking motion...

Despite imminent death racing toward them, Mariel couldn't help but marvel at the young librarian's skill. "Gifted" was a term often used to describe him, and rightfully so: he was the one who gave Nanoha Takamachi, the Ace of Aces, her initial training. Barriers were his specialty, she knew. There were already dozens in place on the way here, programmed to admit only those with a valid TSAB energy signature and repel everyone else. This, though... In awe, she watched as the engraved double doors shrank down and compressed themselves like a piece of the folding paper called "origami" from Nanoha and Hayate's home country, the art form that so fascinated Admiral Lindy. There was an odd prickling in her chest that she couldn't quite place...

Beads of sweat rolled down Yuuno's forehead as he manipulated the local space like a weaver at a loom, enclosing it in barrier after barrier and locking it away. The sizzle in his fingertips was a telltale sign of overtaxed mana reserves, but just a little longer, a little longer- There. The doors were gone, and only a blank stone wall remained.

Mariel goggled at him. "What was that? What did you do?"

Underneath him, the spell circle flickered out. Yuuno dropped to one knee, gasping for breath. "I-"

His words were lost in a keening howl from above, the sound of metal tearing like tissue paper. Acting without thinking, Mariel threw herself atop the boy as a human shield, activated a two-person survival barrier with a mental command, and-

And the bulkheads above them peeled away, leaving the corridor exposed to endless vacuum. Among its eye-crossing swirls floated the Will, flanked by the woman from Dead End, the woman called Viluy with the impassive face and icy eyes...

"You two," she called down to them. "The Library. Where is it?"

Yuuno cast a perceptive filter on his eyes, just so he could stare up into the void long enough to smirk at her. "Gone," he said. "Sealed off from space-time. Out of your reach."

Viluy sneered. "Then I have no more use for either of you." She raised a hand to the Will-

"I wouldn't," Yuuno panted, looking away. Just a few seconds of maintaining the perceptive filter put his mana level at critical... "The barrier that's sealing the Library away... will only unlock if Mary-san and I both approve access to it. I've encoded it... to our Linker Core signatures."

Again, Mariel goggled at him. Her glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose. "You what?!" Some part of her was aghast at the violation of privacy that that implied, but if it kept them alive for a few more seconds-

"Sorry, Mary-san," said Yuuno with a weak grin. "I was about to tell you. You came along at just the right time for me to incorporate you into the spell, thank you."

Now Viluy's sneer twisted into an ugly scowl. "You insect-"

Calm and cool as ever, the Will raised an eyebrow. "Lady Viluy? Shall I prepare Relics for them?"

"That's the thing," said Yuuno. His grin grew stronger. "Access has to be granted willingly, by both of us. Try to force it through torture or mind-control, even with a Relic, and... Well, I'm not sure what will happen exactly, but I'm fairly certain that no one will be able to find it. Ever."

Aghast, Viluy fought to retain her calm. "A bluff," she said. "I've read your data, Yuuno Scrya. The Library is precious to you, you've devoted your life to it. All that priceless information... you could never bear to risk it."

A low chuckle slipped from the boy's lips. He coughed, leaning on Mariel for support. "I'd much rather destroy it or lose it forever... than see someone like you get your filthy hands on it."

"Yuuno-" Mariel's heart swelled with pride. Gifted, nothing, he was brilliant.

In a petulant gesture, Viluy swept back her curtain of white hair. "No matter. If consent is all it takes, there are ways to coerce you. You will come with us, Yuuno Scrya and Mariel Atenza. Will, bind them."

"Yes, Milady." The Will raised her hand, crackling with power-

And Yuuno Scrya turned loose the spell he had been preparing in the back of his mind since the moment he heard the bulkheads tearing. A dimensional transfer gate, for both of them. The most dangerous one he had ever cast, one that drained the very last of his mana. He and Mariel vanished in a green flash-

"Will!" screeched Viluy. "Track them! Where did they go?!"

She was bidden to try. The Will scanned the residual mana particles. For one of the only times in her eons of existence, she registered surprise. "I... I do not know, Milady."

"What?!"

"I do not know," the Will repeated. "That spell... there was no destination specified."

So close. They had been so close. Viluy pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. Yuuno Scrya. Damn him. "Then we had best pray that Master Joker has an alternate method of summoning that creature..."

"Yes, Milady."

Somewhere Beyond

"Good show."

"Ridiculous. They could have gone anywhere."

"They went nowhere instead."

"And everywhere."

"Precisely. They've left a false trail, and now they're nowhere to be found."

"Fair enough, I suppose you have a point. Very well. But now they don't know the way home."

"All the ways lead home, but home isn't where they need to go. Might we recommend them the other road?"

"'Second star to the right, straight on 'til morning.'"

"Not really a star."

"Not really a morning if they don't succeed, either."

"Another fair point."

"To our mutual friend, then?"

"To our mutual friend."

TSAB L-Class Inspection Cruiser Arthra

Two bodies slammed painfully into a metal floor as they materialized... and an instant later, a klaxon blared its screeching call. Yuuno moaned; the sound was like a jackhammer to his poor skull. Never again.

The wet sound beside him, he surmised, was Mariel throwing up. It seemed like the proper thing to do. He thought he might try it himself.

Voices, voices shouting back and forth. It had to be TSAB officers. Very few others could trade jargon like they could.

"Intruders? Here?!"

"- came out of nowhere-"

"- some kind of massive dimensional transfer, but these residuals don't make any sense-"

"What is it? Are we under attack again?"

"Stand down, all hands! Stand down!"

That voice. That scent, green tea with ungodly amounts of sugar and cream. It couldn't be. Impossible. Yuuno blinked his bleary eyes... "A-Admiral Lindy...?"

The green-and-blue blur closest to him extended a hand. "Yuuno Scrya. Unbelievable. And is that Doctor Atenza with you?"

Mariel heaved in response.

"At ease! Someone shut off that damned klaxon," said another blur who had to be Chrono, Lindy's son. His voice sounded deeper than when Yuuno had last heard it. "Good to see you safe, Scrya, Doctor Atenza. How did you even find us?"

That was an excellent question. "I..." said Yuuno. "I didn't. I opened a transfer gate with no destination. Wouldn't recommend it."

"Yet you're here," said someone unfamiliar. Strange, it didn't seem to have the telltale ring of a voice transmitted over a comm, nor the mental "echo" of someone using telepathy. It was a female voice, soft but steely. A little testy. "I hope this is the last time we have uninvited guests... you're lucky that good people vouched for you."

"Easy, Fantine," said Lindy, sounding very tired. "They're both friends, we can trust them, I promise. Yuuno-kun, what happened?!"

Gingerly, Yuuno stood up. His whole body tingled. The darkness swirling in the pit of his stomach could be attributed to a different source. "The TSAB Headquarters..." he began. How to tell her? How to tell anyone? "We were attacked. We got a warning about Dead End, the Navy was called in to protect us... but they were..." His eyes stung. "They never had a chance. Some woman called Viluy disabled the fleets, and-"

Claws bit into Yuuno's shoulder, making him cry out. He was spun around, and his clearing vision made out a fierce pair of blue eyes, two fluffy, pointed, white-tipped wolf ears, a mass of blazing orange hair. "Viluy...?" said his captor. "Did... did you just say Viluy? That woman's alive...?"

"A-Alph...?" Yuuno stammered. The last time he heard Fate's familiar speak with that much venom in her voice, she was half-dead from a reckless attack on Precia Testarossa. The pieces began to fit together. "Then, if you're here, that must mean-"

"Nanoha and Fate are here too, yes," said Lindy behind him. "Easy, Alph, he's still recovering."

"Never mind that," said Alph, hard and cold. Her claws dug in deeper. "Yuuno, tell us everything."

END OF CHAPTER 23