[Author's Note 1: In the interest of full discretion, I should note that I made a few small changes to Chapter 1 back in late December, just to make sure everything going forward was consistent. Go back and reread before reading this chapter, if you'd like. - BHS]

Chapter 60: Young and Unafraid

-VERTEX ONE: 15.556984-

Azabu-Juuban, Minato Ward, Tokyo

Twenty-five.

Just eight more.

I'm almost done, only eight more until— "SHIELD!" Sakura Kinomoto's invocation barely left her lips in time. Rocketing down from high above, Joker's heel slammed into her, a cannon shot directly to her stomach. SHIELD's protection kept her alive, but given that she was hovering over a hundred meters off the ground, the subsequent fall would finish her off if it failed to hold. Wind screamed in her ears like a horde of banshees as she plummeted at terminal velocity, spiked like a volleyball with no way to course correct. FLOAT was now out of commission, and FLY and WINDY weren't yet recovered enough to be summoned. Whatever was directly below her was about to be destroyed, and she could only hope nothing important was within radius of her impact. But this was Tokyo, almost every square centimeter of available space was occupied. That was why she took their battle to the sky, to avoid as much collateral damage as she could... So much for that.

Arcana's primary and secondary power systems were reserved for the mission and taxed to their limit. Shields and barrier systems were currently relegated to tertiary power, lowest priority. Self-repair would take time she didn't have. To ease the burden, Sakura took to using intermittent bursts of the SHIELD Card's power to protect herself from Joker's attacks. Only a few seconds at a time when she could help it, so as not to exhaust the poor Card. SHIELD was trying its best to protect her, to keep it together for this, the most brutal fight of Sakura's life, but she sensed its growing weariness. Same for all of them; the Cards weren't made for fighting a war, and most of them weren't even made for fighting... I'm so sorry, SHIELD! she thought to it. Please just hold on a little longer! Eight more, just eight more—

Hold it did, somehow, even as she struck the roof of the building beneath her and kept going... it was a multi-story parking garage. Her body punched through layers of concrete, through metal girders, through embedded electrical cables, through things she couldn't identify. The roaring of the wind was replaced by an even more terrible sound: the thunderous hammering of entire floors collapsing atop each other one after another, as if the building had been hit by a bomb and not a single falling teenage girl. Five floors, eight floors, ten... SHIELD cushioned her impact with the ground level enough that it merely knocked her half-senseless and drove all the air from her lungs rather than crushing all her bones and killing her instantly. Alive was always better than dead, but lying there immobile and heaving for breath as what once was a skyscraper crumbled to pieces around her ears was an ordeal she would have nightmares about for years to come. Assuming she lived that long.

When the awful hammering and tremors finally subsided, when all that was left was rubble and an immense, spreading cloud of chalky dust, Sakura pushed herself up onto her elbows in the sizable impact crater she had left. It was at least half a meter deep. Gingerly she crawled to the rim and pulled her battered, aching body over its lip. "A-Arcana...?" she said after an extended coughing fit.

Arcana's ring-lights flashed from beneath the coating of dust that blanketed her and it both. Thank heaven. The gloves' insides still burned with intense heat, but she supposed she must have grown numb to it by now, for the sensation didn't hurt that much.

"Okay," she whispered, beyond relieved. "You hold on, too. We—"

Ashen clouds parted before her to reveal a shape in the debris, a human shape. Sakura forced her tender legs into a stumbling run. It was an old man, in his sixties by the look of him. He was a little portly and a lot bald, and he lay on his side amidst the destruction, his back to her.

"Oji-san!" Sakura said in a hushed but urgent whisper. "Oji-san, I'm sorry, but if you can move, you have to get out of here, right now! It's not safe!" The old man didn't budge, so she took hold of his shoulder and shook, feeling warmth underneath. "Oji-san—"

He rolled onto his back, and Sakura's heart tore in two.

The old man stared up at the clouds of dust he could no longer see with an expression of mild surprise. Tiny motes of powder settled upon the lenses of his eyes and into the wrinkles creasing his round face. The fluorescent vest he wore had a torn ID tag bearing the logo of one of the district's parking garages... he must have been this garage's night watchman. There was supposed to be a curfew in effect, but the Juuban district couldn't shut down completely. The various policemen, emergency workers, JSDF soldiers, and others needed places to park their vehicles when the streets were too crowded, after all. He may have thought he was a safe distance from the chaos. Her battle with Joker started on the district's eastern border, but who knew where they were now. Maybe it was quick for him. Maybe he didn't suffer.

One arm flopped lifeless at his side, and Sakura saw a glimmer of gold within the sea of chalk dust: a wedding band on his third finger. This was someone's partner, perhaps even a father or grandfather, and now he would never come home, never get the chance to say goodbye to his loved ones.

This was war, and war always had casualties. Any doubts as to that fact were shattered when Alph died. Dead End's primary objective was to hurt as many people as possible, that was part of what made them so dangerous and why they needed to be stopped. Sakura knew all this, and yet... and yet, at the moment the most tragic thing she could conceive of was this poor old man lying here alone. He was just a random civilian she had never met or even seen before, but he died for no reason as a consequence of her battle with Joker. He had done nothing wrong, done nothing at all except for his job. He didn't deserve this. It wasn't fair.

So much unimaginable suffering since the war began, and this made her weep. Crying as softly as she could for fear of who else might hear, she folded the old man's hands over his chest and closed his eyes for him. In the stillness that followed, she bowed her head and prayed for his soul to find its way to someplace beyond all of this. Whether that was Heaven or somewhere else, she didn't know. But prayer didn't seem enough, somehow...

"FLOWER," she whispered, visualizing a particular breed as the Card materialized. Just a few of them would do, and there they appeared in her hands: circles of lavender petals with bright yellow centers like those of sunflowers, attached to tall, firm stems with paddle-shaped leaves. Gently she tucked the little bouquet of aster into the man's hands. When someone found him, at least they would know he wasn't forgotten.

About ten meters away, two burning lights cut through the gloom like highbeams. Joker. "Where are you, mon petit?" his voice purred. "Please don't tell me you're dead already, that would be so anticlimactic."

Sakura froze, but only for a moment. For the sake of this poor old man and countless others like him, she had to keep going. Off she went, and another Card was at her fingertips with a thought. "GLOW," she said, "follow me." With that, she made for whatever looked like a way out, giving the body a wide berth. Every few steps, GLOW left a tiny, floating orb of vibrant green light behind, like a trail of fireflies. Enough to keep him following. Enough to distract him from the old man.

Once she clambered over the last piece of rubble and emerged into the summer night and fresh air, she allowed herself to shudder and shed a few more tears, but that was all. "RAIN," she said as she drew another Card. A very small cloud appeared above her head, ridden by a very small cyan jester-like figure. The resulting shower was warm, gentle, and all too brief... just enough to wash her clean of the dust and erase the evidence of her tears. Once it was done, she shook herself dry, rubbed her eyes, and glanced around to get her bearings. A look at Arcana's flickering readout told her that she stood on Daikokuzaka, the hill on the northwest side of Juuban, just over the line of the district's border and almost three hundred meters from where her fight began. The map put her within striking distance from another location, of considerably more import... how appropriate.

Clow's magic had done its work to make her easy to find. Now it was time for magitech to do the same. Sakura tapped the holo readout a few times to lock in her destination. One way or another, the mission would end there. She took off at a sprint, heading due east down the hill. It wasn't all that far, but oh, what she would give to have her roller blades! Using the DASH Card was an option if she really needed a burst of speed, but—

"Hi."

Millimeters to her right, Joker appeared out of thin air with no sound and no warning, and nearly gave Sakura a heart attack in the process. Screaming, every nerve lit up like the lights on a Christmas tree, she tried to force her arms to block and her legs to transition into a zenkutsu dachi in mid-stride. It didn't work; the signals got crossed on the way from her brain to the rest of her body. She fell backward and hit the asphalt at a bad angle, her limbs splayed in all directions. Now she was flat on her back, her bruised cheek against the street, eye level with Joker's curly-toed, high-heeled boots... one of which rose and came back down with the sole planted on her temple. Not applying any pressure, yet, but if he shifted his weight onto that foot...

"You know," said Joker. He bent himself double to lean down closer to her ear. "A lesser being would see an opportunity for a pun here. Something about bringing you to heel, or how you truly are beneath me, or some such nonsense. But I shall refrain... I hold myself to a higher standard."

Sakura lay trembling. Her heart jackhammered against her ribs, so loud that she could hardly hear him speak. He was in contact range, and she felt certain she could score another solid hit on him despite her position, so why couldn't she force herself to move...? She couldn't even look at him, her eyes were locked on the stretch of asphalt immediately in front of her, paralyzed.

"It baffles me," Joker continued in a sardonic drawl. One razor-sharp claw—or was it a fang? Her stomach did somersaults either way—caressed the uppermost curve of her ear with a featherlight touch. "I've been turning it over in my mind ever since you made your announcement, but I honestly can't imagine what your end goal is. All the effort you must have put in to train yourself and to work up the nerve to face me alone, knowing the disastrous consequences should you fail... and for what? If your aim was to impress me, mademoiselle, you have succeeded admirably. Job well done, toutes nos félicitations!" Four polite claps, and no more. "That being the case, you can stop now."

Sakura swallowed a few times, then forced one word through her closed-tight throat: "No."

"No?" His boot applied a few more ounces of pressure. "But why? You did train, but you're still no warrior and you never will be. All the others have their nemeses and their mighty battles against evil and darkness, but you? You were never meant for fighting. I can see it in your eyes how much it pains you to hurt anyone. Causing harm goes against your very nature. Without a willingness to hurt me, to kill me, you have no chance, no chance at all. Why throw your life away?"

At times, Sakura felt as if some higher being beyond her comprehension seized control of her body and guided her motions. It happened during her trials against the Cards, it happened when she stood up for her friends the last time she and Joker were face to face, and now it happened again: what she had to do was so clear and vivid in her mind that she moved without conscious thought. A knife-hand strike directly to the side of the ankle supporting all his weight—Seven!—and a defensive tuck and roll to her right, out from underneath him while he staggered and spewed fury...

She came up fists raised, sweating, hyperventilating, repulsed by the memory of his touch and wishing fervently to purge it from her brain forever. However, that higher being aiding her—if it even existed and wasn't just a figment of her fevered imagination—wasn't done. She spoke as if someone else moved her lips and helped her find the right words: "Y-you don't get it. I hate fighting or hurting people, you're right." Here she mustered her courage to stare him in the eye as she dropped into a fudo dachi, the Immovable Stance. "But you don't see the difference: it's not that I can't fight. I don't want to fight... but for this, I will."

*****

"Dokomo" - Communications Hub

The Lighthouse

Simultaneously

Two cats paced circles around the little room before a Beast of the Seal, an Incubator, and two fairies of unidentified species. There had been a third cat—actually a kitten—present a while ago, before she was sent to bed.

The two fairies, Chypre and Coffret, held onto each other, occasionally making fretful noises. Luna gently suggested that one of them might join Tsubomi and Erika down in the observation lounge, but both of them declined because neither would go without the other.

Not that Luna wasn't fretful herself, or Artemis for that matter. Even Kero seemed uncharacteristically nervous and on edge. The lone occupant of the room who seemed perfectly content with the situation was, ironically, the only one of them scheduled to be on the battlefield shortly... or so they hoped.

Luna didn't like this. She didn't like it at all. Already there had been too many deviations from the plan. She trusted her girls, just as Artemis trusted Minako, Diana trusted Chibi-Usa, Kero trusted Sakura, and the fairies trusted their Precure partners, but the stakes for Operation McGinnis were higher than anything they had ever faced before. So much had already gone wrong, and there were billions of ways the mission could still fail.

Again she passed by Kyubey as she paced, and again she tried to ignore the Incubator's unblinking red eyes and frozen smile following her every move. A mutual rapport had been established between all the non-human residents of the Lighthouse... with it being the sole exception. Not one of them trusted it, and for damned good reason, in her opinion. The horrific crimes of the Incubators became common knowledge once it was collared and given limited freedom to wander the Lighthouse, because Kyubey told them all everything without hesitation, and without the slightest care as to why the Incubators' actions were objectionable to anyone else. It was a horrible, bio-engineered thing masquerading as a friend and advisor to the countless impressionable girls its kind preyed upon. It had no functioning conscience, and if it had any system of morality at all, the particulars of it were a mystery to her. In private, she and Artemis explicitly forbid Diana from engaging with it or going anywhere near it if she could possibly help herself.

And yet. Assuming it was indeed about to do what it told them it would do...

Kyubey's thoughts emerged in audible form from the speaker integrated into the black collar around its neck: Artemis, Luna. I'm detecting that your stress levels are highly elevated. Our research suggests that for domesticated feline species, receiving personalized affection from their associated humans is an effective method of—

"Shut up," Luna hissed at it. "None of us are in the mood."

Next to him, Kero crossed his tiny arms and attempted to give the Incubator a menacing glare. The effect was almost certainly far less than he desired. "Yeah, if it's not somethin' helpful about the mission, can it. 'Sides, shouldn't you be gettin' yourself ready or somethin'?"

Kyubey's gaze pivoted to Kero. 'Getting ready,' as in preparing myself for the task at hand? There is nothing more to prepare. All is in place, and all that remains is to do what's required of me.

Artemis paused in the middle of his latest circuit of the hub. "You mean to tell us that nothing about your part of the plan bothers you?"

"N-not... not even a little, ~desu?" said Chypre, who cracked one eye open.

"Of course it's not bothered," Luna scoffed. "It doesn't have feelings."

Yes, as I've stated on multiple occasions, said Kyubey. It tilted its head to one side. An Incubator with the capacity for emotions would be considered mentally ill, and therefore defective. Our decisions are based on rational thinking and logic. In any case, I'm not 'bothered' because, for one, I lack the ability to feel 'bothered' in the first place, and also because I know exactly what's expected of me and what must be done. I will fulfill my function.

"Until you stab us in the back," said Kero, raising a suspicious eyebrow.

Why would I? said Kyubey. I chose to participate because doing so was the most rational course of action. Joker is a threat to existence, he must be eliminated as quickly as possible, and the most expedient way that I can make that happen is to follow the plan. I have no objections, no ulterior motives, and no reason to deceive you.

"Yeah, we're not buying that." Coffret growled and pushed himself in front of Chypre, shielding her from its view. "From what you said before, you guys always have some other plan you won't tell us about, ~desu."

I am almost certainly the last uncorrupted Incubator in existence. There is no 'you guys', no hive mind to subvert the operation. There is only the body and mind you see before you. To accomplish my goal of restoring the Incubators to their proper state, and to continue the fight against entropy, the obvious choice is to comply. What about me suggests that I will not do so?

Artemis's hackles raised. "Oh, I dunno, maybe the fact that you're you." Luna was surprised he didn't spit on the floor. "You may say you're helping us, but the day you or any other Incubator is trustworthy is the day winged rats fly out of my backside and start handing out power-up items to the Lights."

Kyubey blinked. Since they all knew that blinking was strictly a voluntary response for its species, presumably he did it for emphasis. I can assure you that the probability of such an event occurring within the local temporo-spatial-dimensional axis is near-zero. Even should a subspecies of flight-capable rodentia emerge from your gluteal region, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that their intelligence would be advanced enough to offer us their aid at all, let alone produce additional equipment for the war effort.

Just audible over the sounds of Kero nearly coughing up a lung in an effort to breathe again, Artemis grumbled, "Exactly."

*****

Azabu-Juuban

With each passing minute, Joker's attacks came faster and hit harder. Whatever it was she did to make him step up his game, she only hoped that it angered him enough to blind him to the true nature of the plan, but it came at a cost... For Sakura, what used to be a somewhat even fight was now a struggle to survive.

Joker wasn't even using the stolen Cards anymore, instead relying purely on his own abilities. Hundreds of his playing cards choked the air from one side of the street to the other, conjured at a range of sizes: the smallest tiny enough to fit in her palm, and the largest bigger than her mattress back home. The back of each one bore his leering, cackling face, and it was impossible to tell what they would do when and if she managed to hit them... Rays of dark purple energy spat from some, forcing her into a desperate dance to avoid wandering into their line of fire. Some flew like guided missiles, scoring long, thin cuts in her arms and legs with razor edges. Some wobbled like trampolines and rebounded her blows back into her when struck. And others did nothing at all except laugh at her...

As for Joker himself, he weaved through the swarms of cards without touching any of them, bending himself around them and snapping back into shape as if he'd turned his body into elastic. Nauseating to watch, and exponentially more dangerous to defend against, for now she had to worry about attacks from angles beyond the reach of any standard humanoid body. Centimeter by centimeter, Joker forced her backward, giving her barely any openings to counterattack. Her sole saving grace was this: by keeping her back to the east, facing away from the center of Azabu-Juuban, his assault steadily pushed them both toward her destination, albeit at a snail's pace.

Her arms were crossed before her face, the juji-uke position. Attempting to follow Joker's mad dance through the blizzard of laughing cards was disorienting enough to make her motion sick, but she was so close... She couldn't fail now!

The faint mental ping of a familiar presence sharpened her nerves. As Joker vanished behind a giant card to her right, she reached out with her senses to follow it. The presence jumped from one card to another, ahead two meters to her left, and the Card she needed was between her fingertips before Joker called the invocation: "MIRROR!" she shouted.

"SHOT!" One single line of bright, sizzling light streaked through the blizzard of cards, aiming straight for her center of mass. A round bronze mirror of antique style materialized at her chest-level to counter it, just a heartbeat from being too late. The bolt ricocheted off the polished surface and back into SHOT's tiny elfin figure, reverting it to its Card form.

Something was wrong. Joker had to know that that was how she sealed SHOT in the first place years ago, didn't he? Using it the exact same way was far too simple for him, far too obvious. Which meant that it was likely a feint, and his actual attack was about to come from—

Sakura whirled on her heel as Joker's clawed hand rushed past her, missing her neck by a hairsbreadth. Instincts borne from all her training with Toya screamed the next move at her: she seized his outstretched arm by the wrist, grabbed the back of his knee with her other hand, and used his own momentum to lift him off the ground, roll him over her leg, and slam him painfully to the street on his back. All his laughing cards swept into the sky along with the impact, as if by a great updraft. While he was down, before he could make sense of what had just happened, she clocked him in the face with an open-palm strike. Six more! Thank you for making me practice the yari dama so many times, onii-chan, she thought. I'm sorry I complained so much about the bruises!

Livid and spitting fire, Joker was back on his feet in an instant. "Casse-toi...! Do you even know who and what you're up against?!"

"No," Sakura admitted as she brought up her dukes again. "All I see is a thief who stole my friends and my home from me. And I'm going to get them back. That's enough."

"Simple-minded fool." Flecks of spittle flew from Joker's lips. "Still you fail to grasp that what I did to you was only a means to an end, one component of a machine beyond your imagination. Allow me to enlighten you as to where you stand in all this, Cardcaptor. I'll give you some much-needed perspective... in common vernacular, the big picture. The biggest there is."

Just as had happened that night in Tomoeda, every trace of levity, theatrics, and sadistic joy vanished from him. The thin veneer of a human personality was gone, and in its place the true monster beneath his smile emerged. In Joker's eyes, in his face, in his voice, in all his being, there was only hate, scalding and freezing cold at once. It was fanatical, murderous hatred for everyone and everything, an all-consuming loathing that would continue unabated for the rest of time if he let it. Malice seethed from every atom as a toxic miasma, almost a tangible thing, like the sensation of unclean air on skin. "As vast as you may think the universe is," he said softly, "you have no way of grasping its true size. You and I, this city, this planet, even this whole accursed galaxy? Mere preons to the whole of creation, if that. So infinitesimally small and insignificant that a mere glimpse of our true scale in relation to all that there is would collapse any mortal mind. Don't insult me by labeling it something as simple as nihilism; it's not belief, it's objective truth. I know, I saw it for myself. And as nothing as we are to our universe... this, my dear, is just one universe."

As he spoke, he advanced on Sakura at a slow and menacing walk. His arms were at his sides, he made no move to fight or defend himself or do anything except keep talking, but still she found herself unable to move in any direction except straight backward, away from him. "At this very moment, variants of the two of us are fighting—and have fought, and will fight—the same battle in countless upon countless timelines of countless upon countless parallel realities," said Joker. "More are spawned for every possible possibility, an endlessly branching stream of worlds... In some, you win. In some, I kill you here and now. In others, I take control of you. In still others, you drop dead on the spot from one unlucky misfired chemical reaction inside your fragile little body."

Tiny lights shone in the pools of darkness that were his eyes, like the last embers of dying stars. "Don't you understand? When I died, I saw the truth of how it all works. I saw proof of how wretchedly pointless my old life was. After all I sacrified for Pierrot, I saw that I could have killed or corrupted more magical girls than there are grains of sand in the desert, and it wouldn't have made the slightest whit of difference. It wouldn't have been enough. Even now, if I seize absolute victory here tonight... centillions of other Jokers will lose, and the charade will go on. Which makes any victory, any action, any choice at all, worthless. Worse than worthless. Lost in the stream."

And he rose in volume like the gradual, escalating wail of an air raid siren, saturated with madness: "Everything that can happen, does happen! Every choice is made, every outcome is decided! Life means nothing! It amounts to nothing! Nothing any one being does has the slightest significance! The very concept of 'uniqueness' is a grotesque lie! Whether you live, die, win, lose, destroy one universe or save another, the mere possibility of something else happening means that it will, and already has! The same senseless struggle repeats itself as it's always done, and nothing is ever or will ever be accomplished!"

Joker came to a stop, silhouetted by the full moon above, a stain of ink marring its familiar features. His voice dropped to a sinister whisper, like leather on silk. "No more. It's the same script of the same farce, performed over and over and over again for an apathetic audience... I despise it, and I refuse to allow the empty spectacle to continue. Once I force the rest of existence to accept the truth of how futile it is, the very heavens and everything under them will curse my name to realize that truth and beg for the release I offer. As all voices cry out suffering and the last light dies, I will stand victorious as the final Joker, the only Joker. Howling into the void, forever immortalized as the one who brought absolute, eternal despair to all realities. I, the one who took the only action that could ever mean anything: bringing it all to an irrevocable end. No more possibilities, no more outcomes, no more timelines, no more universes, no more cycles, no more hope. It will END."

Sakura stared at Joker for a long time, dumbstruck. The depths of his hatred were more vast and terrible than she ever imagined, his speech was akin to a defilement of her every belief and emotion, everything she held dear. How was it possible for someone to be so twisted? Sakura thought—no, she knew—that there was no such thing as pure evil. Wasn't what Fantine told them about Cosmos and Chaos Seeds, how one always contained at least a trace of the other, proof of that? Yet here was a living refutation of that belief. Whether it was pure evil or the closest thing to it, here it stood. Quaking before it, defying it, even being inspired to fight harder by it, those reactions were the most natural.

So why didn't she want to do any of those things? Why hadn't she collapsed into a pile of quivering jelly by now? Joker's rationale was one of the most appalling things she could ever imagine. Helpless terror wasn't just an acceptable response, it was probably the smartest response. And it didn't make sense, because the only thing she could think to do when faced with Joker's fathomless hate for existence was to say this, a sentence she was astonished to hear herself utter: "I feel sorry for you."

Shocking, because it wasn't the only response she had. It wasn't even the strongest. But it was honest, because more than fear, bone-deep as it was, she felt profound sadness for him. Joker's hate was a black hole, and it consumed him so thoroughly that light for him might as well never have existed at all. He was a monster, it was an undeniable fact. There was no helping him. He was sworn to be the enemy of reality itself, and he needed to be stopped. Utterly destroyed, most likely. But try as she might, Sakura couldn't extinguish a few glimmers of genuine pity... because for the first time, she felt she understood him.

All right, it was just an inkling, but still. She was sure she had at least a grasp of it: if what he said was true, Joker was a single drop of water, a drop which had glimpsed the full size and scale of the ocean it was part of. That the glimpse drove him beyond insane was only natural... if she had been the one to see it and survive, the same would have happened to her. Lashing out at existence with rabid fury made at least a tiny bit more sense if it was a mad, desperate attempt to be seen as more than just that one indistinguishable drop. But if he truly did hate all of reality, everyone and everything... then even his Dead End allies were nothing more to him than means to an end, and he had willingly condemned himself to a path of total isolation. There could be no excuses for his actions, but even for a monster like Joker, that was a tragic thought. Could he even see that? Did he have any comprehension of how alone and broken he truly was, she wondered?

A flash, a snap, and the right side of her face lit up like the sun and instantly began to swell. The pain took another few seconds to fully register... first a pulsing pressure, then a knot of writhing agony. It was a surgical strike, delivered in an instant, before she could begin to move to protect herself. Joker had hammered her in the most abused part of her face, her right cheek felt faintly lopsided now. Unbidden tears welled in her eyes as she fell back into a pathetic attempt at a defensive stance, one she knew Toya would chastise her for if he saw it.

Though her vision was veiled both by tears and by the growing knot infringing on her field of vision from below, it was plain that for however enraged Joker had been before, now he boiled. Incandescent, bloody spotlights roared to life within his eyes, which gaped like open wounds. The irate grimace on his lips contorted his entire face along with it. The lines of the X-shaped scar in his mask glowed like hot coals. His fist actually trembled, still raised from his attack. Rendered speechless for perhaps the only time in his existence, Sakura saw in his expression every little spasm of the titanic effort it took to stop himself from slaughtering her. With chilling certainty, she knew she would be worse than dead right now if not for that inner battle. Every nerve screamed alarm as she fought to force her limbs to move.

Joker's teeth parted a crack, and the words that slipped between them could have eaten holes through alloy steel: "How... dare... you..."

"I—" Sakura stammered.

One hand shot out and wrapped around her neck, lifted her easily off the ground with hideous strength. "You think," said Joker in that acidic hiss, as bit by bit he applied pressure to her windpipe, "that you have license to pity me, you detestable little speck of a human...? Oh, no. That is an insult nonpareil." With the point of a single claw, he prodded her freshly broken cheek and rotated it a few degrees, and it was like someone twisting a knife in an open wound. A lance of agony thundered through her skull. "However much you think you've suffered thus far, you have no idea the nightmares I can still visit upon you. Dragging you screaming through a million hells won't begin to make up for what you've just done, connasse."

His grip was too strong, his thin fingers like titanium. Not enough air. Clawing at his arm accomplished nothing. At least from this vantage point, though, she could get in another easy hit before she suffocated... Her fingers curled—

Joker hurled her down the hill like living a shot put. At least that let her breathe again, though she sacrificed her first breath to yell "SHIELD!" before she touched ground. The first time she bounced off the street, SHIELD's barrier wrapped around her, skintight. By the second bounce, it was a simple bubble, unable to hold a complex shape any longer due to its growing exhaustion. It dissipated altogether before the third bounce, parting with a mental sigh of regret and regressing back to Card form. Rough asphalt skinned Sakura's right shin as she ground to a stop, forty meters from where her flight began.

Tired, she was so tired. Tired of fighting, tired of hurting, tired of fearing for her life. For a moment she just lay there and let a warm little river of blood trickle down into her sock, soaking the fabric. She was so close, but so tired. It was never like this in her own universe, not until Joker arrived. The Cards could be dangerous and some of them were aggressive, but they were never cruel, never evil. Clow Reed's trials never prepared her for fighting a war, and so much was at stake. So much depended on her, on the plan, on this one and only chance. But she was so tired...

Sakura-san.

Sakura-chan!

Hey, Sakura...

They were only phantoms of her mind, but she heard them just the same: voices of the people she loved, the ones lost because of Joker. If she fell here, countless more would suffer and die. She was tired, beaten, and bloody, but she was alive. Back at the Lighthouse, she promised that as long as she was alive, she would see this mission through. Somehow, she would find the strength.

More joined the voices of the lost... not with words, but with emotions. One by one, all the Cards in her possession lent her their support. Even the ones too weak to fight any longer pledged her all remaining strength that they could give. They knew the stakes and the risk to themselves, and they didn't care. She was their true Master, they said in one united force of will, the one for whom Clow Reed gave them life and purpose. They would not fail her.

Strange, for she felt another presence urging her on, too. Unfamiliar, but warm, like a loved one's embrace. So faint that it trembled when she took notice of it, but it was there, and its message was clear. Same as the others, even without words: Stand up, Sakura. We're here, and we have your back. You've got this.

Palms braced against the street, Sakura pushed, and slipped a little. One more try, easy does it. A little easier this time, her own energy supplemented by that of the Cards. Up on her knees, that was it. A little more—

She froze. Gazing up at her from her shadow was a face she knew. It was a face she once found cute, if a little creepy. Ever since she learned what its owner had done, though, it struck her as sinister. It stared unblinking with round, red eyes like glass marbles and a catlike smile that never moved.

"K-Kyubey...?" said Sakura, deeply confused. "Did something go wro—"

Hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Alarm, danger! shouted her senses, singing to her nerves before Kyubey even widened that catlike smile into a grin full of needlelike teeth, teeth that she knew for certain their Kyubey didn't have. Kyubey—no, the Incubator—launched itself at her face and opened wide.

Shrieking, she threw an arm before her face. The Incubator latched onto it, plunged its needle-teeth into her forearm. It didn't chew or tear, it just held on, leechlike, its eyes staring...

No time for anything fancy. Sakura punched it in the face. Revolting. Underneath its fur it felt like warm, meaty dough. What little bone structure it had, teeth and all, gave way easily. The Incubator's eyes glazed over as it went limp and slid off her arm.

She panted hard, heart hammering. Puncture wounds formed two neat little half circles on her upper and lower forearm. Painful, but nothing compared to her other injuries. Incubators weren't designed for combat even with Joker's modifications, so she had to wonder, what was the point?

Goosebumps spread over her skin as a tide. With no visual indication or sound to announce their presence, they appeared around her, spread out in a circle from her ankles: dozens, no, hundreds of grinning Incubators. A crowd of them, all staring. Waiting to pounce.

Forty meters to the west, on the upper slope of Daikokuzaka, the shadow that was Joker brayed with laughter, which pinballed from wall to wall down the narrow street. "Not the kind of furry magical companions you're used to, are they? Mademoiselle Kaname and her friends must have told you all about these remarkable creatures. But did they happen to mention this little factoid, I wonder...?"

Every single Incubator present opened its mouth and spoke his words in unison: "Every single one of them is me."

Sakura had never before wondered what being attacked by a horde of rats would be like. She tried not to even think about rats if she could help it. This was what it was like: small, crazed bodies pouncing from every direction, united in purpose, inexhaustible in number, more every second. Teeth that were little more than a nuisance in one set of jaws becoming the stuff of nightmares in hundreds of them at once. Warm, dirty paws clambering over her clothes, pressing on her injured face, tangling in her hair. And they laughed at her, all of them laughed at her... They broke so easily, but for every one body destroyed or flung away, three more replaced it.

Her eyes streamed with terror and panic, she didn't dare open her mouth to scream. Through the swarm of flailing bodies, she looked to the east, caught a glimpse of the patio at the bottom of the hill, just over fifty meters away. It was in sight, so close, but there were just too many and SHIELD couldn't help any more and—!

"FIREY!" Air and freedom of motion, as a dome of flames swept outward from where she stood, incinerating each Incubator it touched. Blood was everywhere, she had no idea how much was hers. There was an acid swell in her injured cheek. Adrenaline was keeping her going, but it wasn't enough to make it that far on her own. "D-DASH...!" Her ankles sprouted wings. With all her might, she ran for the patio—A fifty-meter DASH, her brain chose to quip for no reason she could understand—in the distance, pushing the thought of the things she was stepping on out of her mind. The horde followed, but with DASH's speed, they couldn't catch up. Their attacks slowed, then stopped. Why?

One quick peek back over her shoulder to check. It made her stomach lurch... there was a vivid yellow-green cloud descending the hill after her. Everything inside the cloud—building surfaces, glass, cars, stray bicycles, telephone poles, power lines, cement sidewalks, the bodies of the remaining Incubators, everything—all of it corroded from the outside in, crumbling into dust. The MIST Card. Joker used MIST on a populated street... he had to be stopped! Sakura wrenched her eyes away, focused them on the patio. Twenty meters left. Ten. Five...

DASH's power gave out, and her legs along with it. So tired, more tired than she had ever been. She collapsed against a familiar granite pedestal for support, one known by everyone who had ever been a child in Tokyo or the surrounding cities. Standing at its top was the beloved statue of Kimi-chan, the Girl in the Red Shoes, her simple dress and short pigtails captured in bronze. Relieved, Sakura sobbed and pressed her less-injured cheek against the pedestal's cool granite surface. This was the place.

Or more specifically, the place was about twenty meters west and a little to the north of Kimi-chan, she recognized it from Usagi's stories and her own trips to Tokyo in her own universe, though in her world it was a café and not a jewelry store. The Jewelry Osa-P, owned by the Osaka (now Umino) family, site of Sailor Moon's very first battle. Damaged and boarded up at the moment, but still standing. What twist of fate led it to happen here, where her legend began, Sakura didn't know... but here was where it would end. Full circle.

Her breath came in ragged gasps as she flopped herself over, propping her back against the pedestal for support. She wasn't sure she could stand on her own, but she would try to sit up, at least. Facing the street from where she came. When Joker—

A blur of motion. A short, dull, metallic sound. Something round and heavy dropped into Sakura's lap. She recoiled in horror and disgust, for Kimi-chan's head gazed placidly up from between her thighs, sheared cleanly off her shoulders.

And suddenly, there he stood before her, without his armies, without the stolen Cards, without his corrupted Incubators... just him, alone. Grinning that awful, twisted grin. Proud of himself.

"You...!" Sakura sputtered, as close to outrage as any time she could remember. "K-Kimi-chan...She... she didn't have anything to do with us, she wasn't even in your way! There was no reason to—! Why?!"

Joker leered and counted on his fingers. "Au contraire. Because she's important to you. Because she's important to this city and the humans living here. Two valid reasons... but mostly, I did it because I wanted to."

That, for Sakura, was enough. Precious few things could make her truly angry; even Toya's endless teasing was done out of genuine love and affection, annoying as it was. Joker had just crossed a line. She took care to set poor Kimi-chan's head aside, behind the pedestal, and demanded her aching legs to support her weight, her arms to raise, her fists to ball. It was a struggle, but she managed to stand—

Joker backhanded her right across the broken cheek. Excruciating pain, she couldn't see, could hardly breathe...

*****

As she crumpled to the cement and lay still, Joker looked upon her, this tiny human who had caused him aggravation beyond belief... and his lips spread wide in his most distorted of smiles. Now he was sure he had it, he knew what she was doing. Clever, really. She used herself as bait to draw him out to the field, then goaded him into a fight she could not win in hopes of making him overconfident. And for what purpose? Perhaps she thought that he would slip and reveal things he shouldn't... the existence of Chaos and its role in Dead End, most likely. Capture that admission on a camera and spread it to the four corners of creation, and it was a reasonable assumption that his own authority might crumble. Very clever indeed, almost brilliant. A lesser being would have fallen for it. Too bad for her, he was not a lesser being.

"You know," he said, looming over her, "for the last fifteen minutes or so, I've been trying to come up with ideas for exactly how I'll make you pay for what you've done. So many options open to me! I could break your mind and soul, then rebuild you to my liking, as I did with poor, worthless Kanna. I could rip you apart piece by piece over a period of months, or I could force you to watch as I do the same to your friends. I could even place you in a Ball of Neglect! An old favorite, with a new twist: an endless parade of illusions of your fondest desires, each one draining away your life force a teensy bit more while you remain near-oblivious. The only thing that will keep you from perfect bliss will be the vague, unshakeable suspicion in the back of your mind that something's wrong. Nothing you'll ever be able to define, of course... it will just linger there, always gnawing away at you. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, forever.

"But now? Now I think I've finally decided. I've become, shall we say, enamored of one particular Card of yours... the ERASE Card. Do you know, that was one of the first that I collected in my jaunts through your timeline? Such a useful thing, the ability to cleanly do away with not just living beings or objects, but concepts. I used it to strip the particularly stubborn Cards of their loyalty to you... wiping the slate clean, as it were.

"Now I'm thinking of another delightful usage of it." Here he leaned close, delighting in her feeble attempts to right herself. "All those emotions and pesky morals of yours, your heart and your sense of right and wrong... I think those things are ripe for erasure, non? It will be so freeing for you. You'll still recognize all those people you care so much about, but you'll have no compunctions about turning the full force of your power on them. Yes, I think that will do nicely."

Sakura pushed herself up to one knee.

"And if I get bored with watching that, well. There's something that I realized after thinking about that Seed you have... a perfect balance of Cosmos and Chaos. Très fascinant, oui, but doesn't that mean that just a teensy nudge in either direction will do as much damage to who you are as a full turn of anyone else's Seed? I'm so anxious to find out. Naturally, you won't care either way.

"But just listen to me prattle on," said Joker. "It will be far easier to demonstrate." He snapped his fingers. "ERASE."

The Card wouldn't come.

"ERASE!" Again he snapped. No Card. His skin prickled, but he didn't know why... "POWER," he commanded. That one wouldn't materialize either. "FIGHT. CREATE. TIME. NOTHING...!"

Sakura began to smile.

Cold realization extinguished Joker's glee, as if he had been drenched by ice water. "You," he said. "What did you do...?"

Sakura stood up, fire in her eyes.

Losing himself in fury, Joker curled his fingers into a fist and threw it at her. "I said, what did you do, you filthy little shit?!"

She caught his punch without flinching, and her grip on his hand was like a steel press. A two-colored aura flared around her, flitting between cyan and pink, and two feminine figures resolved to either side of her: one as tall and graceful as the other was diminutive and elfin. Both fixed him with piercing glares. They were released forms of POWER and FIGHT, two Cards that he knew for a fact that were in his possession only moments ago...

"Sorry," she said. Her magic circle shone golden from the glowing rings on the back of each glove. And with total earnestness, she added: "This time... I guess the joke is on you."

*****

Crossroads

The Lighthouse

Months Earlier

"I think I may have a plan for our next mission," said Nanoha Takamachi as a smile slowly took form on her lips. "If I'm right, Joker's sadism could prove to be a weakness... a weakness that we can exploit. Sakura-chan, you still haven't customized your AMP yet, right?"

Sakura flushed pink and fidgeted in her seat. "Well, no," she said. "I haven't even given it a name. I know I need to, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything for it to do. What powers could it have that my Cards don't?"

"No need to be embarrassed," said Nanoha. "Actually, I was hoping that was the case. You recovered one of your lost Cards during the rescue mission, didn't you?"

"Yeah, she did." Nagisa Misumi, Cure Black, was next to speak up. "It had a force field over Dead End's palace, and we only got in because Sakura changed it back to normal."

Sakura nodded. "Right, LOCK."

Nanoha leaned in close. "So how exactly did you restore it to its original form?"

"Well, I mean. The Cards are all alive, and they're all my friends. Or they're supposed to be. Joker corrupted it, but I just sort of... reminded LOCK of who it's supposed to be. I shared my feelings with it."

Subtle but still noticeable, Nanoha's next words carried a rising tone of excitement. "So theoretically, you could do the same with other Cards as well?"

"I mean, sure! It worked with NOTHING, too, back when it all started. If I could only reach them—"

Nanoha pounded a fist into her palm, winced, and beamed from ear to ear. "Perfect. This is exactly what we need, Sakura-chan. Let's go see Mary-san right away..."

*****

And over the coming weeks, as Doctor Atenza engineered, built, and fine-tuned the AMP Device that she would name "Arcana", Sakura was there every step of the way. For every atom of Immaterial used in its construction, she poured into it her love for her Cards. All the things about them that were dear to her heart: the beautiful shade of blue of NOTHING's eyes, the giddy power that rushed through her body whenever she took hold of SWORD's hilt, how FREEZE's released form was really cute if you realized how much it resembled one of those absurdly colorful tropical fish. The test of courage that led her to meet ERASE, SNOW's long and elegant sleeves, MAZE's clever attempts to keep them from escaping from its labyrinth by any means except playing by its rules... scary at the time, yes, but now she couldn't help but look back on it with some fondness. She thought of STORM's massive tangle of curls that looked like it would take forever to comb, how she transformed MIST into a Sakura Card to fight an animated metal railing, of all things. She remembered how funny it was when CHANGE caused Kero and Shaoran to swap bodies with each other, how hard she had to fight from chuckling when she heard Shaoran's stubborn and serious voice come from Kero's cute little face. How RETURN let her speak to Clow Reed for the first time. LITTLE's naughty giggle. The way POWER's cheeks puffed out when her pride was challenged... As she clutched the Immaterial to her chest and thought of each one in turn, in her mind she repeated the words of the spell that would bring them home: "O lost Card, aimless and wandering, return to the hands of your true master, and be restored to your original form! SHADOW! O lost Card, aimless and wandering, return to the hands of your true master, and be restored to your original form! ILLUSION! O lost Card, aimless and wandering..."

Joker could steal her Cards, he could even control them, but he never thought of them as living beings. He never knew them like she did, and she knew them better than anyone save Clow Reed himself: not only their powers, but their funny little quirks, their personalities, their hearts. He was incapable of caring about them, and because of that, he could never truly be their Master. Arcana was built from the ground up with infusions of Sakura's love for all the Cards... and it was engineered to remind one of them of that love with each and every blow she landed on him.

*****

Her mission was never to win against Joker. Her mission was to prolong the fight, endure it until she hit him once for every one of the thirty-three stolen or altered Cards. And because she had so angered and distracted him, and more importantly because he never thought of the Cards as more than tools to be used and discarded, he never noticed them slipping from his grasp one by one until it was too late.

Now? Now it was too late. Only six were left, and she already made sure to take back every one he had that might allow him to escape. In fact, she took those as early in the fight as possible. The instant that the realization showed on his face that he had been fooled, the realization that he only had a handful of the Cards left... that was the instant that she sent the telepathic signal to the others. One quick, loud burst of just three words: He knows! NOW! All that was left for her to do was finish it.

What followed wasn't strictly an orthodox Shotokan-school kata, but for those waiting and holorecording from the rooftops and the street, for the many watching inside the Lighthouse and on board the Arthra, and for the countless numbers who would see the footage later, it didn't matter; it became legend just the same. With FIGHT guiding her motions and POWER providing new energy and massive enhanced strength, her fists had the force of industrial piston hammers, they landed like falling meteorites. A left hook to his jaw first, followed by a right to the opposite side—Five, four!—which crushed bone and made the flesh of Joker's face ripple with visible shockwaves, like thrown stones breaking the surface of a lake. Both of Arcana's gloves burst into rainbow flames as she drew her fists back for two straight underhand shots to his solar plexus, left and right—Three! Two!—which bent him double. A faint imprint of each fist distended from his back as all breath, and all ability to breathe, was stolen from him. The flames' scouring heat finally reached her nerves and they shrieked in protest, but she pushed the pain to the back of her mind. She was almost there. One last burst. Two straights right to the center of his face—One! Zero! That's all of them!—which crumpled beneath her knuckles like paper.

With a musical, keening whine, the glove on her left hand melted. Its Immaterial evaporated like morning dew, the rest crumbled to cinders. The flesh beneath was... she couldn't bear to look at it right now. Had to stay in the fight just a little longer. For her senses told her that there was still one card left on Joker's person... not one of hers, but his own twisted creation. There was a familiar presence in that card, trapped, waiting to be saved like a princess in an old fairy tale. No matter what came of her, no matter her injuries, no matter anything, she could not and would not rest until that card was returned. And wasn't it appropriate? Her coup de grâce would save her best friend, who was there at the very beginning of it all.

She looked down to her right hand, where Arcana's remaining glove burned and shed iridescent wisps of itself, all but a few scraps of its red pseudo-fabric covering gone. She had already asked far too much of her AMP, the poor thing. Just as she thought that, though, the glowing ring on the back of its palm flickered with faint light, as if to say, Don't worry. It's all right. It still worked, and it would hold for this one last blow, because it had to.

Odd, for there was that other presence again, the unfamiliar one. Still faint, but clearer than before. This time, by concentrating, Sakura actually made out words:

... Rei... Rei... Sakura...

What that meant, what Rei Hino—or any other Rei, for that matter—had to do with this, she didn't know... but the words didn't matter, what mattered was the feeling. Someone believed in her with everything they had, just as the Cards did. Someone held her, told her it would be all right, and gave her the final push she needed. Whoever you are, she thought, thank you. For you, for everyone... I'll do my best.

"Secure, Arcana!" Sakura darted back about ten paces. This required a running start. As she took the first step, she mentally dismissed FIGHT... the Card had done enough, she could manage on her own. POWER stayed active, she needed its strength to keep moving. Joker tottered drunkenly back and forth before her, too stunned and injured to move. He occupied her entire field of vision, all her focus. Did he know what was about to happen? Because with less than a meter between them, only then did she herself know what the final blow would be.

Of all people, the idea came from Kero. He knew she wasn't into the fighting games he loved so much, but poor Kero still took it as a personal offense when she had no idea who the "Ryu" person he talked about was. Once they got back to their shared room, she was given a thorough education. She didn't understand it all and it didn't make her any better at the games, but it gave her the idea to ask Toya if he knew Shotokan karate. He did, and that was the style he taught her from that point forward.

Even though she lived in a world of magic, she found some of the stuff in Kero's games kind of... well, silly. People shooting massive fireballs out of their palms, or using yoga to make their limbs stretchy, or upside-down hurricane kicks that spun the fighter performing them like a top through the air. Shaoran and Meilin never failed to remind both her and Kero that real martial artists couldn't do that, not without using magic to shatter the laws of physics.

That "Ryu" guy Kero was so fond of, though? She learned enough to recognize that a good number of his moves, while exaggerated, were based on the real Shotokan-style. Kero, naturally, was beyond thrilled when those moves came up in their training sessions. So it was for her little friend, her mentor and constant companion, that she decided which of Ryu's signature techniques she would finish it with. She could even make it look sort of like the one in the game for him. He'd be ecstatic. Good for him.

Close enough to Joker to see the individual pores in his skin, Sakura tucked her left arm in close to her side. With her right... well, she wasn't just punching with her hand. Toya drilled that lesson into her brain. As she rotated, she put her whole body into the uppercut. Every iota of force she could muster was directed to her right arm, and magnified by POWER's magic. Her fist, burning bright with rainbow flames, crashed into Joker's broken jaw from below, his neck snapped backward at a sickening angle. Impact lifted the two of them off the street as if gravity had chosen to give them a temporary reprieve. And they rose, and rose, and with all her heart Sakura roared: "SHORYUKEN...!"

It happened for just the briefest instant, before the blinding flash that followed. Sakura swore she saw another hand, another fist, a ghostly overlay of someone else performing the uppercut alongside her. Was she dreaming? Hallucinating? It was only a hand and part of an arm, impossible to identify who they belonged to. She didn't know anybody who wore yellow scrunchies on their wrists... did she? No, not scrunchies. Something she knew the shape of from cheerleading practice—

The thought was driven from her mind as Arcana exploded. In one last parting gift to her, it somehow directed all of its energy outward and away from her, to spare her further harm. Its detonation swallowed everything above Joker's shoulders in kaleidoscopic fire and blazing heat, its shockwave catapulted him back up Daikokuzaka in the blink of an eye.

Somehow, Sakura touched down on her feet, upright. She promptly lost her balance and almost facefaulted, but she stood. Something glowed bright inside her collar, it whirled like a dervish until it emerged: the Sealing Key on its necklace, spinning on its axes and enveloped in an orb of white light. Its shape stretched, slimmed, changed... Its birdlike features disappeared in favor of a much simpler design, a golden star enclosed by a pink ring, with two tiny baby wings attached to either side. Not the Sealing Key anymore, but the Star Key once again. Her Star Key, the one she made herself in the Final Judgment. Proof that she had mastered the Cards, that all of them were hers and hers alone.

As glad as she was to see it again, something else was even more important. "T-Tomoyo-chan..." Fluttering down from on high like a feather in the breeze, it was a tall, dark card, not one of hers. She couldn't rest, not for a moment, no matter how exhausted she was, until she had Tomoyo back. Maybe it was the hand of fate, then, that guided it straight into her burnt fingers as she opened them a crack, then closed them around the card's edge, her fist still raised to the starry night sky. Triumphant.

*****

It was all going wrong. It was not how it should have been.

Joker should have been the victor.

Instead, he, Joker, had been deceived, thoroughly made a fool of. Impossible. And more impossible still, the one responsible was Sakura Kinomoto... guileless, simple-minded, naïve Sakura Kinomoto fooled him. Outrageous. Inconceivable. Unforgivable. As of this moment, he thought, fuck her power and fuck her value to Dead End. He would kill her over and over and over again, as many times as it took until he was satisfied.

Doing anything of the sort was beyond him at the moment, of course. At the moment, he was blind, deaf, and dumb, because his body terminated in a mangled stump of solidified, charred-black ink-blood that used to be his neck. Tongues of prismatic flame raced over the rest of him... had he still possessed a mouth, he would be screaming. Whatever the brat's glove had been made of, it was anathema to him. The fire's merest touch scoured him with exquisite agony, the likes of which he hadn't felt since Sailor Venus scarred him with her Holy Blade. Too much pain to bear, he couldn't block it out. Groping wildly, his hands found his chest and plunged through it, wrenched it apart...

A moment of void and nothingness.

Freshly reformed from an Incubator body, Joker blinked and—

Still burning. Still in agony, though lessened. How?! The flames were gone, still consuming his discarded corpse, but their pain lingered. A frustrated howl tore from Joker's new lips as he collapsed to all fours and savagely smashed his head into the cold asphalt, bursting it like a melon.

Void and nothingness.

It still wasn't enough to stop the burn. He did it again. And again. And again and again, until he was numb enough to it to properly function.

The moment he could, he turned his murderous gaze to her, still standing at the bottom of the hill, fist raised high...

Joker blinked. He couldn't begin to explain why, but though it was the dead of night, he could see Sakura Kinomoto's shadow. But was it her shadow, though? Faint and hazy, it stood upright beside her rather than extending from her feet, and though it mimicked her victory pose, it didn't conform to her shape. It was shorter than she was, and what he presumed was its hair was a completely different style, long and wavy. And no shadow Joker knew was rosy pink. No shadow he knew shed multicolored sparkles. Perhaps he was hallucinating, for next he swore he saw it move independently of Kinomoto. It stood on one leg, striking a pose that Kinomoto didn't notice or couldn't see. Though it had no eyes or any other features that he could make out, Joker shivered, for he had the unshakeable feeling that the shadow turned its head and stared right at him in the last instant before it faded... He blinked again, and it was gone without a trace.

*****

The black card between her fingers reformed into Tomoyo Daidouji in her arms, in a bridal carry to be specific. The real, living, breathing Tomoyo, back to normal. Sakura's heart leapt into her throat. When she was taken in Tomoeda, Joker claimed that Tomoyo was awake and aware while trapped in the card, and it had been such a long time since then. Would she be traumatized after all this time? Would she ever be okay again?

"Sakura-chan...?" Tomoyo's eyes fluttered open, and she smiled as if waking from a long sleep.

Oh, there came the tears. No holding them back now. "Tomoyo-chan!" And Sakura's legs chose that moment to buckle beneath her. POWER's magic and her own adrenaline could only sustain her for so long. Still she held Tomoyo tight as they fell together, landing with a bump on the patio's concrete.

"Sakura-chan!" cried Tomoyo, overjoyed, as she threw her arms around her best friend. Sakura tried not to moan, her aching ribs... "I knew you'd do it, I knew you'd save me!"

"I'm suh-sorry," Sakura managed between sobs. "Suh-sorry it took suh-so long... Tomoyo-chan, I m-missed you so much... Are you okay? D-did he h-hurt you?"

"I was asleep, I don't think I even dreamed very much, but—" Tomoyo pulled back and gasped in horror. "Sakura-chan, your face! Your hands!"

Delicate fingers took hold of her hands and held them up to the moonlight. Sakura's stomach did flips... the damage was awful beyond her ability to describe, but the worst burns of all were on the back of each palm. Seared into the exact spots beneath where Arcana's ring-shaped lights had been mounted were perfect reproductions of her magic circle, etched in thin lines of congealed white tissue.

In rising panic, Tomoyo continued: "Oh my goodness, Sakura-chan, you're bloody and beaten up all over! We must call you an ambulance and get you to a hospital right away, you—" She stopped. Sakura knew that look. She didn't have to follow Tomoyo's gaze to know that her indigo eyes were scanning the wretched state of her hoodie and loose-fitting street clothes. Stained with her sweat and the blood of both herself and others, scorched in a dozen places, torn to shreds in a dozen more, and filthy with dirt and grime from city, nature, and Witch Labyrinth, she knew she looked like a disaster area. Tomoyo's brow furrowed just slightly. "... Sakura-chan, is this what you've been wearing...?"

Sakura burst into laughter... which hurt, but it was a good hurt. Same old Tomoyo, thank heaven.

"Well. Isn't this just magical."

The sardonic voice shook them both, but Sakura couldn't imagine that Tomoyo felt the same level of brain-freezing panic that she did. Not now, not when they were finally together again! How in the worlds did he recover so quickly...?

Upon looking up, she recanted that thought. He wasn't recovered, not really. Joker was intact and unblemished apart from the X-shaped scar, but he lurched as he approached them, like a zombie from one of those awful movies, his movements slow and halting. Every few seconds, a series of terrible convulsions wracked him, and his face contorted each time, teeth clenched tight enough to fracture.

Fighting Joker alone was the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced, but now Tomoyo was here, vulnerable. That was so much worse. And the toll of the night's events had caught up with her... the Cards were back, her Star Key was back, but she herself was a stone's throw from blacking out.

It didn't matter. "G-get behind me, Tomoyo-chan," she said as she put her weight on one knee, as a test. The attempt made her vision swim. "I'll... I'll think of something."

Tomoyo's response was tranquil. "No," she said, laying a hand on her shoulder. "You've done more than enough to protect me, Sakura-chan. Now it's my turn."

"T... Tomoyo-chan, don't!" More scared than ever, Sakura clung to her desperately as she stood up. Any other means of stopping her was beyond her.

Tomoyo only smiled and took a deep breath. She took her place in front of Sakura, turned around, and spread her arms wide, a living shield... and when she spoke, Sakura found herself glad that she couldn't see her dear friend's face. Never once in her life had she heard Tomoyo Daidouji speak like that. It wasn't even that different from her normal voice, that was what frightened her the most. Calm, even, and unfailingly polite as always, but hard and unmoving as tempered steel, at a temperature of absolute zero. Tomoyo got angry on even rarer occasions than Sakura did, but this wasn't anger. This was fury. "Joker-san," she said, "stop where you are. This is your only chance to turn around and leave. You will not harm another hair on Sakura-chan's head, not now or ever again. I will not allow it."

To Sakura's astonishment, Joker did stop. He stared at Tomoyo as if he couldn't decide what to think or feel. "You...?" he said after a long pause and a few more shudders. "You won't allow it? With no magic, no powers, no weapons, no ability to fight, nothing? You, of all people, are telling me what I can and cannot do?"

"Yes," said Tomoyo. "If you take one more step, I swear that for the rest of my life, I will use everything I have in me to ensure that you will regret it, forever."

There was no need to guess Joker's emotion now: he was quite plainly baffled. Slack-jawed, even. Brought to a standstill by Tomoyo's words, by Tomoyo's face that she couldn't see. He convulsed, cringed, and pressed a trembling hand over his left eye. "You?" he said again.

"That's right," said Tomoyo.

"And just who exactly the fuck are you?" Joker hissed from between his teeth. "Pardon me, let me be clear. I already know more about you than I wish to, but I don't actually care that much. What I meant, s'il vous plaît, was 'Who exactly the fuck are you to speak to me like that?' There we are, no more ambiguity. Is that better?"

Tomoyo didn't budge. "Leave," she said. "You will not touch her. You have lost."

Tendrils of shadow eked from him, moonlight glinted off his claws as he raised his left arm, took a step forward. He spoke, low and ominous: "Everything you have in you, you said. Well. I shall be happy to accommodate you by scooping all of that out. I might even give what's left back to your friend, if she asks nicely."

"Tomoyo-chan!"

Tomoyo stood tall...

And the near-silence of the street was broken by a lion's roar. Something like a mountain lion, to be exact, golden and regal, which rushed past them at blinding speed and took Joker's left arm with it. Just the arm, the rest was left behind. Ten meters away, the great beast tucked in his massive white wings as he paced back around with his prize clutched in his teeth... but not for long. He bit down savagely, crushed it to a mass of ink-blood and pulp in his jaws, and spit it to the side, disgusted. "There!" snarled the lion in a thick Kansai accent. "That's for tryin' to tear off my wings, bastard!"

Joker was in a state of shock. "You—!" He said nothing more, because more than fifty arrows of white light riddled his chest then... whatever curse he was about to form died with a gurgle.

Strong arms lifted Sakura up from where she lay, and a pale hand applied cooling magic to her cheek, lessening the pain. "Master," said a low, quiet voice. "Our apologies for arriving late."

Sakura couldn't see past her tears, but she knew that voice. She knew the shape of those wings, even through the veil of moisture. "Yue-san!"

"Shoulda taken that chance to get out while you could!" And that was the voice of Kero's true form, coming from the golden blur that was the winged lion. "Sakura, you were phenomenal, you did us all proud. Just rest and let Yue patch you up... And Tomoyo, welcome back. Now go hide somewhere safe. We'll handle this trash."

*****

Oh, this was bad. Very bad. "Monsieur Kerberos," Joker wheezed to the lion. "Monsieur Yue," to the angel. "Pardonez-moi... for not shaking your hands. Ah, right. Paws." Damn it all, the beast's fiery breath burnt the wound closed as it passed, and the arrows' magic interfered with his ability to regrow the arm. "You both think... you can do what you want to me? Your precious Master... might take objection to that."

Yue's icy blue eyes fixed him with a glare of utmost contempt. "She might. Our Master is far more merciful than filth like you deserves."

"That's the thing. We ain't as nice as she is," Kerberos added, pawing at the asphalt.

A weak chuckle escaped his lips. "Mes amis, mes amis!" he said, waving his remaining arm. "Must we talk of violence? We're all together again... Why not sit down, have a nice cup of tea... and chat like civilized people?" As he talked, he ran through destinations for an escape teleport in his mind. Back to La Fin de Toute was the obvious choice, but he didn't want to just turn tail. Oh no, there had to be suffering before he went. Somewhere roughly half a kilometer from here would give him enough time to heal himself and order an airstrike, or something. He concentrated...

... and found himself blocked. From both that destination, and La Fin de Toute, and anywhere that wasn't within a rough two hundred-meter radius of his current location. Not enough to even escape the district. What was going on?

Joker let none of this show on his face. He was a consummate professional. Instead he summoned enough power to blink himself off the arrows, just half a meter to his left. The effort made him sink to his knees, but now the healing could begin. Clawing at his stump, he raised his head to grin at the beasts, and—

"Merde," he whispered.

There was a very good reason why he took so many steps to neutralize Kinomoto as a threat. Furthermore, there was a very good reason why he took the Cards he wanted from her Vertex so early in his operations. The girl was stupidly clueless as to what those reasons were, and he wasn't about to divulge them to her. The simple truth was this: with all the Cards at her command, a sufficient supply of magic, and the right motivation, Sakura Kinomoto was the single biggest confirmed threat to himself and Dead End in the multiverse. At full power, if she wanted to, she was capable of winning the war by herself. The flaws and defects of her human personality were the only limitations holding her back.

What he didn't bother to account for, if only because he never imagined losing the most dangerous Cards at once—let alone all of them—was that if they were returned, all the Cards would be A) eager to avenge what was done to them and to their Master, and B) very, very angry.

Kneeling in the street, Joker felt the first stirrings of real panic as the released forms of all fifty-two Sakura Cards—and one Clow Card, the NOTHING—stared back at him with expressions that suggested that they were ready to end him, right now, no matter what Kinomoto thought. Her will was perhaps the only thing stopping them, and even that could only restrain them so much.

And yes, it was all of them. The six major elemental Cards, all siblings of each other, hand in hand. FIGHT and POWER, the latter of which didn't look even remotely cute anymore. BIG and LITTLE, reunited again and side by side. SWORD and SHIELD, floating en garde as if weilded by an invisible duelist. MAZE and LOOP, which he used back at the palace to make Jamais Ville, just on a whim. The Cards he dismissed as useless to him, the ones he let Kinomoto keep to make it interesting: BUBBLES, SONG, SWEET, FLOWER, GLOW, THROUGH, TWIN, LIBRA, FLOAT, RAIN, CLOUD, JUMP, DASH, and MOVE. The truly dangerous ones he targeted first: NOTHING, TIME, ERASE, CREATE, MIST, LOOP, SHOT, and STORM. The chameleon-like CHANGE, which he took but found no use for. And more than a dozen others... all released of their own will, all out for his blood. To his mild shock, he felt intense glares even from the ones that didn't have faces, or humanoid features at all. There were a curious number of those.

"W-wait..." The tired voice of Kinomoto herself drifted up from Yue's arms. "All of you don't have to—"

A distraction. Perfect. Fifty-three Cards, plus two Guardian Beasts, plus two humans, one of whom was on her last legs. A bit hard to fan all of them out decently with only one hand, but oh well. Joker flung his own cards at them and guided them with his mind. Each burst into clinging, strangling ropes of his own Dark Paint, and with all their focus on Kinomoto—

Movement behind him. He blinked himself to its source, about ten meters back, and beamed. Perhaps things were looking up after all. Some decrepit old human woman, dumpy and swaddled in blankets and a long-sleeved coat, was sprawled on the pavement before him, having taken a fall. Now that he could think, it was a simple matter to regrow his lost arm, which he used to haul the woman to her feet and catch her in a choke hold. Not the most elegant strategy, but. "I wouldn't move!" he called to Kinomoto and her cohorts, all struggling with their bonds. "Now, if you'd be so kind as to allow me to take my leave, I'll try to kill this bitch semi-painlessly. Savvez?"

Yue all but spat, his eyes wild. "Monster! Have you no shame?"

"Shame is for your lot," said Joker. He materialized his rapier and held it at the woman's throat. A rapier was for stabbing, not slashing, but perhaps they were too enraged or dumb to notice. "I prefer to remain uninhibited." My, but the woman was putting up a fight. Spry for her age. Oh well. "Clock's ticking! Take too much longer to decide, and I may slip!"

The old woman looked up at him. Her eyes were clear, deep blue, with no hint of age. She smirked, and in a familiar voice she said: "Too late. Gotcha." And from within one of her sleeves—Joker reeled with disbelief—she pulled the Moon Stick, pointed the horns of its golden crescent moon at his face, and called out: "MOON HEALING ESCALATION!"

And as he screamed and burned once more, awash in purifying light, as the old woman's image melted away with the press of a jewel-topped pink pen and was replaced by none other than Sailor Moon in all her glory, all Joker could think was, How?! He stabbed a finger into his rapidly-deteriorating skull—

Void and nothingness.

He regenerated several meters away, in the middle of the square. Only a second or two had passed, Sailor Moon hadn't even stopped her attack yet. Joker hurled bolts of dark energy at her and spewed invective without rhyme or reason. Damn it all, how was she here?! He had to find the limit of whatever jamming field was blocking his teleportation, had to regroup and counterattack with the rest of Dead End! Where in all the hells were they?!

"All right," he snarled, moving in the direction of a few of the bound Cards. "Well done. But that wasn't my only hosta—"

"ORAORAORAORAORAORAORA...!" The ululating battle cry came from the north street... the north street where, he noted, there was a very large dust cloud sweeping down the block, accompanied by a flurry of rapidly approaching footsteps. Joker grabbed hold of the nearest target, FLOWER, and drew one of his razor-edged playing cards. This time he pressed the edge into its neck. Could it even bleed? It didn't matter. "I know for a fact that this one can't fight!" he attempted to shout over the noise. "So whoever or whatever that is, call it off! This is your only—"

The footsteps dropped off suddenly, and the shape ahead of the dust cloud vaulted off the ground. An ungainly leap, it looked like, for her legs did a weird, slow pinwheeling motion in midair... but her right fist was raised, and forks of dark electricity licked up and down her entire arm like the tongues of snakes. FLOWER vanished from his arms, back to Card form, and it was just him and the Precure. One of the two original Precure. Nagisa Misumi, Cure Black.

"Shine on, Yang! This one's for Honoka, you asshole!" roared Black over the storm coming from the device on her wrist. "PRECURE... BLACK THUNDER PUUUUUUUUNCH!"

The explosion of Kinomoto's glove threw him like being launched from a catapult. This, by contrast, was like being strapped to a hypersonic missile... but only after taking a lead cannonball to the face and being struck by lightning, simultaneously. Every bone above his neck was broken, g-forces and stray arcs tore at the rest of him. The shockwave generated by his flight shattered every single pane of glass in his wake, large and small: windows, doors, storefronts, windshields, lampposts, a destructive cacophony. No way to tell how far it would be before he touched ground again. Too numb to move. At least it might put him out of the range of—

He stopped dead and dropped to the ground, back in the center of the square. The same place he started. The exact same place, because Black stood in front of him, her gauntleted fist smoking, wearing a wild and satisfied grin. "A hundred fifty-meter run from the district border to here to build up enough charge for that... but man, was it worth it!"

Joker fled to his right... and ended up back on the same spot.

He fled to his left... and ended up back on the same spot.

Forward, backward, north, south, east, west... every attempt to leave the square, even with teleportation, put him right back where he was. It dawned on him at last, but he shot a glance at his feet to be sure. There was a red ribbon of a figure-eight design directly beneath him. The LOOP Card.

"So," said Black, grinning wider. She cracked her knuckles... Did Joker hear the sounds of shotguns being cocked as she did that, or was that his brain having suffered a concussion? "That was the haymaker. Here comes the combo! EAT THIS!"

Now he understood why she was feared. Now he understood why she and Cure White were the standard by which all Precure were judged. He heard tales from the denizens of Dusk Zone, from Freezen and Frozen, from Fusion, Bottom, Kage, and even from Chaos itself, but never had he faced Cure Black in battle directly. When he captured the rescue team in front of the Merry-Go-Round, that was different. Then, she was exhausted, wounded, alone, hopelessly outnumbered, and desperate... and yet, he remembered belatedly, she still carved a swath in his forces until he ordered Jamanen to summon Drone Fortune, playing on her trauma.

What he understood now was that with or without White by her side, with the proper motivation, Cure Black was a force of nature. A typhoon, or more accurately, a meteor storm. The hell of blows she rained down pulverized him, there was little other way to describe it. Body after body after body regenerated on the spot and was disintegrated in seconds, her fists' mach-speed barrage burned through them by the dozens if not the hundreds...

And in the course of this punishment, the awful comprehension struck: it took very little magical power for Incubator bodies to regenerate upon death. It could be done almost instantaneously, as was already proven multiple times over tonight. Azabu-Juuban, and indeed this entire Vertex, was abundant with Incubators, and magical power. So exactly how long Black could keep pummeling him and destroying his bodies was determined only by how much energy she had. And, he remembered, Black had not been seen on the battlefield by anyone since Akemi snatched her and the others on her team out of the palace, months ago from his perspective.

How much energy did she have? How much energy had she stored up, waiting for this moment?

"Enough!" The word tore from deep within his throat. Somehow he gathered enough of himself for a concentrated expulsion of dark power directly from his newest body... it only pushed Black backward a meter or two, but it was sufficient. Black was hideously strong, yes. She was also blistering fast, and durable, and tenacious. But for all her power, she couldn't fly unassisted... as far as he knew. And if all movement on the horizontal axis was denied to him by the LOOP, he would simply have to try a vertical escape...

Joker launched himself from the ground. Twenty meters straight up, fifty, a hundred. Sailor Moon couldn't fly in her base form either, and the Cardcaptor was too weak to pursue. There were a number of flying Cards, yes, but all he needed was a few seconds of open air. "Joker to headquarters!" he bellowed into his comm unit. He thanked himself for the foresight to integrate comm units into the standard Incubator template; they regenerated along with him. "Joker to base, come in! Reaper! Unlovely! Miki? Somebody answer!"

Silence.

How?! How were they doing it?

"Starlight Arrow!"

The voice came from one of the rooftops below. A glint, a high-pitched whistling sound, and something pierced him through the chest. It was a spear of sparkling pink fire, more than a meter long. Murder in his eyes, Joker whirled to find the culprit...

Madoka Kaname stood on the roof of the Pallet Plaza building, forty meters below him. The rose on the upper limb of her bow blazed like a fuschia torch. Even from this distance, he recognized the defiance in her eyes. She was unafraid, unafraid of him.

If nothing else, he would teach her the error of her ways. He would teach her how foolish it was to shoot him with just a single arrow. Joker threw himself in her direction, fangs and claws bared, his howled promises of endless torture unintelligible even to himself.

And Kaname just watched him come, staring, making no attempt to notch another arrow. The words she spoke next didn't even register to him: "Your turn."

"Precure Peace Thunder... Hurricane!"

That was a voice he knew only too well. Yayoi Kise, Cure Peace, the timid crybaby. The only remaining one of the Smile Cures, his most hated enemies of all, to elude his grasp. Back in their native Facet, he let her go after he killed their fairy and corrupted the rest of her teammates into new Bad End Cures, because he thought her too broken to fight anymore. Because he thought sending her in that state to whoever kept rescuing his targets would send a message. It didn't, so he sent the Will to kidnap another timeline's version of her, Kanna Kise, whom he broke and remolded into a new Bad End Peace, just to reinforce the message. That didn't work either; Kanna couldn't even win a simple fight with her despite having all the advantage.

Now, as flurries of sparkling thunderbolts cascaded from one of the roofs behind him and homed in on the arrow in his chest as a makeshift lightning rod, ensuring that every last volt of her most powerful attack scoured him thoroughly, Joker experienced an exceedingly rare moment of regret. As a surprise even to himself, he was still capable of that emotion. Thrashing and spasming out of control, lit up like a power grid, he regretted not eviscerating the little whore when he had the chance.

At last the storm petered out. Paralyzed by numbness once again, Joker hung there in the air over Azabu-Juuban, pondering who was at fault for this, how any fight that started in his favor could have ever gone so catastrophically—

Ten meters above him, the lines of a pink spell circle inscribed themselves in the air, and a rush of mana washed over him. It took him a moment to comprehend what appeared from the circle...

The most recognizable thing, to his exhausted brain, was a blazing pink sun. A massive, crackling orb of mana with two intricate runic ribbons orbiting it, drawing a million lines of light into itself to swell in size. All the discarded mana in the area, he realized, now began to sparkle, like the stars seen from the surface of a planet. Mana. Now he understood. Those accursed gloves Kinomoto wore, the device on Black's arm, the new magical tools all the thrice-damned Morning Lights sported these last few months... all were powered, to some degree, by mana, the magical energy source from Vertex Four.

It was as if another lightning bolt sizzled through his brain. What was before him wasn't a sun, not at all. Away, he had to get away...!

"Restrict Lock!"

"Chain Bind!"

"Commandment Rope!"

Three colors of solidified mana caught his limbs, waist, and neck, and held him fast. Immobilized, he could only stare up at the fiery orb... and its source, wielding Raising Heart transformed into a hi-tech cannon, was Nanoha Takamachi, the only one of the five most dangerous Morning Lights he had yet to face in person. This couldn't be; he was sure the injuries from the Gadget Drones and her fight with Viluy left her in no state to fire her signature spell. The readings from Hadenya in Uminari confirmed as much before her signal was interrupted.

But no, he saw. It wasn't only her. Fate Testarossa Harlaown and Hayate Yagami floated at either side of her, their hands on her shoulders, their own magic circles aglow below them... funneling their own mana and energy into Takamachi. Bolstering her to fuel the spell that she could not fully manage herself. The faces of all three were grimly determined, pale and eerie in the rising pink light. Vengeful angels, about to deliver divine judgment.

No. No.

"Maximum power!" Nanoha Takamachi shouted to the heavens. Her two friends joined the invocation with her: "STARLIGHT... BREAKER!"

It was not lethal, not like the one that incinerated Viluy. For this one, Takamachi kept her limiters in place. This time, it was not lethal... so at length, Joker felt the gigantic beam of pink light slamming into him like a thousand freight trains. He didn't feel the impact with the street below, because for as long as it took him to fall unconscious, he did so well before they let him drop.

*****

The crux of Operation McGinnis, Nanoha told them all during its inception, was both Joker's sadism and his perception of Sakura.

He considered her one of the most valuable targets of all, there was no doubt of that. To some degree, he feared what she could do at full strength. But rather than simply kill or corrupt her, Nanoha staked the entire plan on the prediction that Joker, being Joker, would never take decisive action to do either of those things when there was still the slightest chance that he could wring more twisted enjoyment out of tormenting her.

To that end, Nanoha said, Sakura would set herself up as irresistible bait: she would appear out in the open and make herself impossible to ignore. Nanoha also deduced that for whatever reason, probably his ego, Joker would never allow it to be known that he answered to Chaos. He professed himself to be the most feared and hated being in existence, and for his troops or the multiverse at large to hear that there was someone or something above him would do severe damage to that image.

Therefore, the message that Sakura shouted out at giant size to all of Azabu-Juuban and the surrounding area. The mere suggestion that she was about to reveal Joker's secrets would force him to come out of hiding and stop her in person. That was Phase Two.

As for the rest of Strike Team Tiger? Aside from providing backup and assisting in the hunt for Grief Seeds in Phase One, Madoka, Sailor Chibi-Moon, and Sailor Saturn were there to sweeten the pot, as it were... and of course, Saturn was present to use the Amethyst Morendo on Joker if she could, as a last resort. Giving him not one but four high-value targets in the same place, they hoped, would outweigh any misgivings Joker might have about appearing in person.

The next step was to lay the trap: to keep Joker there in the Juuban district while Sakura used Arcana to retrieve her cards from him. Any suspicion that she was up to something before the right time would cause him to flee. Here, Nanoha said, was another advantage Sakura had going in: she was innocent to a fault. She was honest. She was straightforward. In other words, the last person Joker would ever expect to deceive her enemy. "Think about it," Nanoha told her, grasping her hands. "If it were almost anyone else, it wouldn't work. But because you're you, you're perfect!"

And then there was the matter of Sakura's fighting ability. A delicate balance had to be struck: Sakura needed to be skilled enough to hold her own for the required amount of time, but not skilled enough to overpower him and send him running. His perception of her as a worthy but defeatable opponent had to remain intact.

Phase Three largely consisted of the fight between Sakura and Joker, one on one. Once it was commenced, Sakura was to do everything she could to keep all of Joker's focus on herself while she retrieved her Cards from under his nose. This part was an immense risk; Toya, Yukito, Meilin, and several of the other Lights attempted to talk her out of it. Sakura swallowed her fear and refused, for the sake of the mission and all who counted on her. While Joker was distracted, the rest of the Big Five, along with Fate, Hayate, Cure Peace, and any others able to lend their aid, would position themselves for Phase Four... most of them in Juuban proper, while the three Aces prepared a jointly-powered Starlight Breaker. They did so on the other side of the world, a hemisphere away, in another dimension entirely to avoid detection, but there they monitored their comrades from afar, ready to transport to Japan and fire at a moment's notice.

Yuuno Scrya, Chrono Harlaown, and the captain and crew of the Arthra were also instrumental in this phase. Yuuno and Chrono were to slip in unnoticed while the battles on the street and below were waged. The moment Joker realized that the Cards were missing, they were in grave danger of him flying the coop. So to that end, when Sakura sent her telepathic signal, the boys were to enclose the entire Juuban district in a large-scale temporo-spatial force field of their own design, shunting all combatants inside into an empty alternate dimension where collateral damage wasn't a problem, and denying Joker escape to or contact with the outside world in the process.

And in the event that Joker still found some method of wriggling his way out of the numerous traps they set for him, Chrono had Admiral Lindy Harlaown and the Arthra on standby in orbit of Jupiter's moon Io. In an absolute worst-case scenario, if Sakura, Sailor Moon, Madoka, Chibi-Moon, or Saturn were to fall to Joker's corruption, or if all other options to stop him were exhausted... the Arthra would transport herself into high Earth orbit and fire her Arc-en-Ciel on the district, erasing it and him from time and space forever. Or so they hoped.

As with Sakura's mission on a smaller scale, the plan was never to win the war on this night. For all their preparation and training, they knew the odds of doing so were slim to none. They knew better than to think they had accounted for everything Joker might do to slip from their grasp, and they knew their time was limited even if they were successful.

No, the primary aim of the plan was simply to prove that Joker could be beaten. To prove that as vile, terrifying, and dangerous as he was, he wasn't invincible. For all his power, he wasn't infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, or any of those things. Not only could he be beaten, Nanoha reasoned, but if the plan worked... Sakura Kinomoto, the one among the Lights least suited for and least comfortable with fighting when the war began, would be the linchpin of his defeat.

*****

Sakura lost consciousness a few seconds after the Starlight Breaker plowed Joker's charred body into the street from high above. For a while she drifted in and out of dreamless sleep, only vaguely aware in one period of wakefulness that Nanoha had enclosed her in a healing barrier. She couldn't make out Nanoha herself, but she knew the pink mana that comprised the field. By the time she fully woke, her many cuts, scrapes, and bruises were healed. Her hands and fingers were swaddled in the same type of glittering silver bandages Nanoha wore on her own for so long, and a gingerly examination of her cheek found a patch of the same stuff there, too.

"Lie still," a stern and stoic voice commanded from outside the field. "You are very fortunate that your injuries were not more severe, Master, but you will still require proper medical attention once we return to the Lighthouse."

"Yue-san," she said, settling back on the cushion of air that the barrier provided. It was like floating on a cloud. "I'm so happy to see you again. So Yukito-san is...?"

The distorted white face above her nodded. "Perfectly well. As he watched your fight, he had to be restrained from intervening until the appointed time. A number of times, in fact. So did Kerberos, and Lady Li, and Toya."

That thought made her glow inside. "Onii-chan..."

"He asked me to pass a message to you," said Yue. "He said, 'I'm proud of you. You did a fantastic job...'"

Even wounded and exhausted, Sakura knew there was more than that, so she waited for the rest.

"'... for a monster,'" Yue finished. "I questioned, but he assured me that you would know what that means."

"I'm not a monster," she said quietly, and she chuckled, just a little.

"Might wanna reconsider that, Sakura," said a little yellow blur hovering over her head. Kero. "If you are one, you're the best kind. Nobody's gonna want to mess with you after this, you took down the scariest guy in history!"

"I'm proud of you too, Sakura-chan," said a soft, gentle voice to her right. "The others showed me everything, they recorded all of it." A musical giggle. "Of course, the footage would have looked better had I done so myself, but. I was indisposed, it can't be helped."

Sakura turned in her direction. "The others... told you what's going on? Where we are, and what happened to Tomoeda...?"

Tomoyo's smile slipped. "Yes. It was quite difficult to understand much of it, but they told me... Li-kun is gone, and so is all of Tomoeda. It's so horrible, I can hardly comprehend it." A long pause. "But I know you'll bring them back. Everything will be all right, somehow. I'll never stop believing in your invincible spell, Sakura-chan. And we're finally together again, so we'll help each other get through it whenever it's too much to bear. I know we can, because you can do anything."

Color rose to Sakura's cheeks. "Hoeee~... N-Nanoha-chan came up with the plan, I didn't really do that much..."

"Don't be silly!" said Tomoyo, tutting at her. "If I understood it right, everything hinged on you. Look at what you did tonight: you fooled him! You fought him! You won! And if you still don't believe you've done something important?" Here she pointed. "Just look over there."

Sakura followed her finger. It was, admittedly, a difficult sight to process. After all the horror stories about him, all the suffering caused by him, all the nightmares he unleashed, the sight of him now was surreal. Joker, the scourge of reality, was on his knees inside a transparent box of shifting multicolored energy that was just a bit too small for him, bound from neck to toe with every kind of magical, technological, and conventional restraint the Lights could think of. The other Lights surrounding him had a veritable forest of Devices, AMPs, wands, and weapons trained on his position, daring him to try to make the slightest move. He was clearly alive, exuding deepest loathing for everyone and everything he could see, but at least for the moment, he was trapped. Helpless. Defeated.

Joker turned his acidic glare on Sakura, sensing her looking at him. If "loathing" was the word to describe his state before, there were no words to describe it now, they didn't exist. He knew. She saw in his eyes that for as much as he had suffered, he knew the worst indignities of all were at her hands. Outsmarted, outfought, and above all pitied by humble Sakura Kinomoto? These things had birthed what was at best a baleful and undying animus, the likes of which had never been contemplated before.

His eyes were gaping circles, his scar glowed from within like a hot branding iron. In the left eye, in that window of pitiless black, Sakura saw something stare at her... something that wasn't Joker. Something so dark that it made ink look bright as day, vast and empty and cold as the farthest reaches of space where not even the merest photon of light had ever dared shine, older than time itself. The unfathomable abyss in the eye of Joker's mask stared back at her—it recognized her—and it spoke:

Y O U.

The single word was delivered in an awful, sepulchral voice, a voice that sounded like it had lurched out of the blackest pit in Hell. Rumbling and guttural as boulders grinding each other into dust, its pitch was impossibly deep... if human vocal range was a well, this voice had struck its bottom and kept digging down for miles. And it was loud, a thunderous basso profundo that rattled every bone in her body, a localized earthquake. From that one word's reverberations, she expected the entire ward and everything in it to crumble; that no one else seemed to hear it at all only magnified its horror.

She knew. All doubt was banished. She knew had just learned definitive answers to a number of the questions that plagued the Lights over the past few months...

"Sakura-chan? Sakura-chan, are you okay? You're trembling..."

Tomoyo's words came from far away, but they snapped her back to reality. Apparently the spine-chilling fear that voice inspired was evident, even if the voice itself was all in her head. Then again, Tomoyo was the most skilled person in the worlds when it came to reading Sakura's emotions... only Toya even came close to her. Indeed, Sakura was trembling, and clammy, and creeping with goosebumps. Probably sweaty and pale as a sheet, too. She tore her eyes away from Joker's, swallowed heavily, and spoke, more husky than she liked. "I-I just... I heard something. I'll tell you later, Tomoyo-chan, I promise." Then, raising her volume as much as she could: "Hayate-chan?"

She and Hayate Yagami hadn't had much contact with each other yet. Mostly they knew each other through Nanoha, though Sakura was determined to be friends with all the Lighthouse residents eventually, if she could manage it. From what she understood, Hayate couldn't safely do much fighting without her lost Book or Rein, her Unison Device... but she still had a gargantuan supply of mana, she could still fly, and with assistance from other mages she could cast low-level spells. Thus, her part in the plan was limited to contributing bindings and sharing as much of her mana supply with Nanoha as she could. "What's up, Sakura-san?" she said, jogging to the barrier's side. "You okay?" Her features crinkled with concern.

"I need you to pass a private message to Sailor Moon," said Sakura. "I can't send telepathy like you can... not without a Device..." Her bones creaked like old wood as she attempted to raise an arm.

"Shh, shh." Hayate gently pushed her back down and took hold of her hand. "Don't strain yourself, hero. You've done more than enough, so let me handle it."

"Thank you." Sakura gazed into Hayate's eyes and relayed her message.

Hayate's hand tightened on hers, and Sakura winced.

*****

Sailor Moon?

Usagi Tsukino, Sailor Moon, tried not to flinch. When her name rang in her mind, the words were... haunted. If there was one word she knew to describe the way Hayate spoke them, that was it. And if she was using telepathy rather than speaking it out loud... Oh no. Her stomach dropped. Hayate-chan? What is it, what's wrong? Terrible at hiding her emotions as she was, she at least made an attempt to keep calm and retrain a determined, unafraid expression. She was one of the ones keeping a bead on Joker during his imprisonment; they couldn't afford to give him any advantage, no matter how small.

Sakura-san asked me to relay a message to you, said Hayate. I don't think anybody else knows, and we shouldn't let Joker hear.

Her throat grew tight. What is it? What did she say?

She said... A pregnant pause. She said that she just found out where Chaos is. It talked to her, just now. It's inside Joker.

Midwinter chills ran up and down Sailor Moon's spine and spread to the tips of every finger and toe. Fantine expected that something like that was the case, but even so. The last and most terrifying enemy she faced in her original career, the entity responsible for all the violence of the last seven years of her life, the source of all the evil in all the multiverse... and it was here, just a few centimeters from where she stood. When she played her part in the plan, it saw her through Joker's eyes. Facing it in one or more of its countless reincarnations, that she could handle. The entity itself, though? It hadn't been seen or detected in the physical world since she dragged both it and herself into the bottom of the Galaxy Cauldron, five years ago. It came within a few heartbeats of winning last time, and it took the combined use of every Sailor Crystal in the galaxy and the sacrifice of her last life to stop it... Now it was back. By all accounts, it was worse than ever, and it shared a body with Joker.

What would it take to stop it this time?

Oh God.

Anxiety. Unbearable grief, loneliness, and despair. Forced to watch the people she loved be slaughtered by Galaxia and her forces, one after the other. Forced to strike down her dearest friends, resurrected and twisted into her murderous puppets, by her own hand. The awful choice made at the literal end of the universe, a choice that no one else could make. Often she closed her eyes and she was back there, standing alone on the lip of the Galaxy Cauldron... aching, exhausted beyond measure, paralyzed by that choice. Often she bolted upright in the middle of the night with silent tears streaming down her cheeks, sweating icy bullets, her heart pounding at light speed, because that place and that time always waited in her nightmares, vivid and raw as the day she lived it... and died it. Whenever this happened, she would claw at her chest with one hand, and reach blindly in the dark for Mamoru's hand with the other. He knew, and he would hold her without a word until her tears and tremors stopped.

No matter how far or how long she was from there and then, it would always be with her. She would never forget, and worse still, part of her didn't want to forget. Not after all the good people she saw cut down. Not after everything she fought for in order to reach the Cauldron and make the choice.

I want to keep going, and build our future together. No matter how hard it gets, this is the life I want to live!

Those were her last words to Guardian Cosmos in the Cauldron, her last words before she was reborn once again. Those words were the choice, her choice, in essence. Every day since then, she made an effort to stand by that choice, no matter the nightmares, no matter the trauma, no matter how many times she saw the Cauldron waiting when she closed her eyes.

She never regretted her choice. Now and forever, she would fight, just as she fought back then, because life was worth living.

But... Chaos, the enemy, was right here. Now. Looking out at them all. And knowing that brought everything back...

"Congratulations," Joker deigned to say suddenly. "I say that with complete sincerity, mes amis, congratulations. What you've done tonight was an extraordinary achievement, I am impressed and humbled. I'd applaud you if I could, but pardonez-moi, I can't seem to move my hands..."

Sailor Moon pushed down that train of thought for later. No distractions, the mission wasn't over yet.

"Sakura-chan," Black called over to her barrier. "If you can, tell your SILENT Card to be at the ready. Who knows what kind of garbage he feels like spewing..."

Nanoha's finger moved to rest just behind Raising Heart's trigger. "Have you accepted the position that you're in?" Polite as ever, always professional.

"Am I in a position?" Joker sneered. "Come now, you can't all be this stupid. What exactly is your end goal going forward, hmm? You already know that you can't truly kill me, not in any way that matters... and keeping me imprisoned?" He bared his teeth. "Even if you could manage it long-term... if I don't make a scheduled communication every forty-eight Earth-standard hours, Dead End's armies are under standing orders to mobilize and raze everything. You'll lose more trying to lock me away than you would executing me. Or attempting to."

Sailor Moon's heart beat faster.

"Or perhaps you plan to put me on trial!" crowed Joker. "Oui, oui, let the wheels of justice turn, see how well that works out for you. You and I both know: there's no law in any world capable of judging actions of my magnitude. No proper punishment exists for my crimes. If that's your plan, amis, try again."

He's baiting us, trying to make us lose control. Don't respond, said Nanoha via telepathy. Aloud, she said: "No, you're exactly right. Even the harshest sentences the TSAB has aren't enough for you. That's not what we have planned."

Joker's shoulders twitched with what might have been an attempt at a shrug, if not for all his bindings. "Hmm. When it comes to torturing, a scant few of you have the connieres to do it properly, so to speak. Not that it would gain you anything. So no execution, no imprisonment, no trial, no torture... I'm genuinely curious. What exactly do you plan to do with me? Because the longer you keep me here, the bigger the targets on your backs. What will it be? You'd best be quick." He looked at each of those surrounding him in turn and spoke in a mocking cadence. "Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock... aghhh..."

"Arrester Chain," said Yuuno through gritted teeth, pulling tighter on the green mana chain looped around Joker's neck, one of many he contributed to the process. "This is for Alph, you son of a bitch..."

"All we did..." Next to Nanoha, Fate solemnly ran a fingertip over the pawprint sewn on her eyepatch. "All we did was for Alph."

And on her other side, Chrono put his hand on his sister's shoulder. "For Alph."

By the healing barrier, Hayate clutched at her chest. "For Alph..."

Nanoha nodded. "For Alph!"

The point of Madoka's arrow shook, but remained pointed at his skull. "All right," she said into her comm. "It's time."

Stepping from the thin air before Joker's box, there came a small white creature, something like a cat and something like a rabbit. It appeared to have four ears: two triangular and two long and droopy. There was a bushy tail, an eternal feline smile, round and unblinking red eyes, and a thick black collar around its neck.

Next to the healing barrier, Tomoyo reached inside its field as her friend shook visibly. "It's okay, Sakura-chan, it's okay. You'll be fine. I'm right here."

Hello, Kyubey said through his collar's speaker to the assembled Lights and allies, turning to stare at them each in turn. Is everything prepared?

Madoka tensed visibly. "Yes. Do it, quickly. Just like we talked about."

Joker stared down at Kyubey, processing this development. "So there was at least one left. I should have known. Bonsoir, Incubator. Threatened into collaborating with the lesser life forms, I see?"

No. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement, said Kyubey. To facilitate the Incubators' larger goals, I agreed to cooperate, and to share a limited amount of information. It's interesting, for we appear to have developed similar technology simultaneously, independent of each other. You and your forces, with input from your corrupted faux-Incubators, combined Anti-Magilink Fields with our Isolation Fields... while Yuuno Scrya, Chrono Harlaown, and myself developed a method of combining them with Vertex Four's temporal force field spells. The results are, as you may note, far more effective and versatile than the ones cobbled into your Gadget Drone units, according to this operation's combat data. Was that some small hint of pride in his voice? No, Sailor Moon decided, it was her imagination. One of said fields currently seals off this district from outside interference, while another keeps you bound, he finished.

"Bravo." Joker smirked and dripped with sarcasm. "Whenever you fancy an attitude adjustment like the rest of you, feel free to call."

I will not. Kyubey's tail curled around his paws. You have corrupted my kind, taken us beyond the bounds of our universe against our will, and used us to do untold damage to the tempero-spatial-dimensional axis throughout the multiverse. You are a threat, and you must be purged.

Joker's smirk collapsed into a small, twisted line.

Kyubey turned to look at Madoka. As always, his smile was unchanging. You were very interesting, Madoka Kaname. He swiveled back to Joker, stared him in the eyes, and said simply, Execute.

What happened next happened far too quickly for the eyes of any human or humanoid to process. All they perceived was an instant, blinding flash as if from a camera, and a snap like a firecracker. Once the spots faded from their eyes, they saw that Joker still knelt in his box, heaving for breath... but Kyubey was flat on his back, those round red eyes glassy and staring at nothing. Faint wisps of smoke rose from him, they gave off a sharp tang of ozone. He lay there perfectly still until Hayate bit her lip and stepped forward to retrieve him from the ground... as she did so, his head lolled to one side. When she turned around and carried him back to the barrier, his limp tail slipped from her arms and swayed gently in the night breeze.

No final speeches, no goodbyes. Not that anyone was eager for them, but still. This was how it had to be. Madoka was more surprised than anyone when Kyubey readily agreed to the proposal the Big Five put forth to him during the operation's planning stages. Then again, he demonstrated that he was as always pragmatic to a fault. Manipulative, scheming, deceitful, and treacherous, but pragmatic. And when the stakes were as high as they were... they supposed it really was the coldly logical thing to do, for the sake of reality.

Speaking in both a wheeze and a growl, Joker formed words with difficulty: "Whuh... what... did it... do...?"

"He rebooted the hive mind, and used himself as a template," said Madoka. Sailor Moon could hear the traces of doubt in her voice, and didn't blame her in the least. After all she, her friends, and the Puellae Magi at large had been through, trusting Kyubey to follow their instructions as given was a tremendous risk. Even if it worked as the Lights planned, the prospect of restoring the Incubators to a universe where they could potentially exploit even more innocent victims went beyond risk. But... but leaving them as pawns of Joker and their abilities in his hands was unfathomably worse, for everyone and everything. She could see Madoka praying that Kyubey had truly understood that, and inwardly she prayed the same. "All the Incubators in this universe are back to normal now, Joker," Madoka continued, a little stronger. "Every last one. He purged you, kicked you out. Which means that if you die here... there's no more backup bodies for you."

"Yeah, but I dunno. I'll believe it worked when we see proof." Black raised her fist over Joker's head and cocked an eyebrow. "How about we test it out?"

One look at Joker's expression confirmed that something had happened, and it wasn't to his liking in the least. Black veins stood out in the visible parts of his face and neck, his teeth were clenched together in that bone-fracturing way. "Very..." he snarled. "Very clever. Whatever... shall I do now. Are you... quite finished?"

"Nope." Cure Peace was next to speak. There had been both disbelief and joy in her smile when they gathered back together to tie Joker down. Even with all of the Cures working as a team, only Reika Aoki, Cure Beauty, had scored anything close to a direct victory on Joker in their battles before. His last act of his original life had been to melt himself into Dark Paint to serve as the final catalyst to Pierrot's resurrection... the Smile Cures united never got a chance to truly deliver him justice. It was plain as sunshine on her face, there was no doubt among anyone assembled what was going through her head right now: Finally. We did it. Finally. Her next words seemed slightly incongruous with her generally adorable image, but: "Now it's time for the interrogation."

"Inerrogation!" An expulsion of air burst through Joker's lips, followed by the most strident fit of laughter from him since he regained consciousness. "Interrogation, she says! All of you truly are the most imbecilic creatures known to reality. Even if I've lost the Incubators, you can't kill me without forsaking your advantage! No amount of pain will loosen my tongue! But by all means, if you think you have a way to interrogate me..." He flashed a sharklike grin. "Go ahead."

"You heard him," said Sailor Moon. "Sakura-chan?"

Helped to sit up by Tomoyo, Yue, and Kero, who was now back in his miniature form, Sakura drew out the Star Key on its necklace from her tattered collar.

"Remember, Sakura-chan," Madoka called back. "If it gets to be too much for you, just say the word."

Sakura nodded, closed her eyes, and began the invocation: "O key that hides the powers of the stars..." Inside the key's ring, its golden star spun in circles. An orb of blue light enveloped it, it whirled on its axes. Below her barrier, her magic circle—not Clow Reed's, hers—shone bright. "Reveal your true form to me. I, Sakura, command you under our contract... Release!" And the Star Wand emerged, reborn...

"Feh," said Joker. Unimpressed, he curled his lip at her. "You can't even stand. Your little show took everything out of you... do your worst."

"LIBRA," said Sakura, drawing a particular Card...

For the second time in minutes, Joker's face fell.

"That's right," said Yuuno. Sailor Moon could tell he was trying extremely hard to maintain his composure. A few deft motions of his fingers, and the uppermost plane of Joker's box lowered from above his head to beneath his jawline. "You're cooperating whether you like it or not."

"No," said Joker. "No. Even with this, you won't—"

Now released, the pair of golden scales that was LIBRA floated close to Joker, within a meter of him, and emitted a soft glow...

"First things first," said Nanoha. "What does the Merry-Go-Round do?"

Thrashing his head back and forth, Joker groaned. One by one, words were dragged out of him, in a process that looked extraordinarily painful: "It... breaks... the cycle!"

Black blinked. "Is that it?"

"I see what he's doing," said Nanoha. "He's giving us what's technically the truth, but in the most unhelpful way possible."

"Just like an Incubator," Madoka frowned. "That means we need to word things carefully, so he won't find any loopholes. How about... where are the other Merry-Go-Round pods?"

Joker locked his lips and suppressed it as long as he could, but finally: "Everywhere," he panted.

"No." Fate shook her head. "Too easy to exploit. More like, 'Where exactly are the other Merry-Go-Round pods? In this universe, the ones that aren't in this district?'" she added in a hurry.

Joker screamed, his eyes bulged, cords stood out on his neck. "Perseus... Arm!" he rasped. "Cr... Crab Nebula... research... arrrgh... station...! Co... coordinates..." Very slowly, one digit at a time, he divulged the data.

"Yuuno-kun, is the Arthra getting this?" said Nanoha, risking a glance over at him.

"They are, and the coordinates check out, but this isn't going to work either. There's no way to make him give up the numbers faster, so he can afford to stall until Kinomoto's energy runs out."

"I'm... sorry..." a weak voice from the barrier floated over.

"Don't be, Kinomoto, you're doing your best. We'll make this work for as long as we can."

"I think I've got one." Peace shifted position, coming around to place herself face-to-face with the harlequin. "Why are you really doing this? Bad guys talk about destroying the universe all the time, but it doesn't make sense to actually do it. You told Sakura-san that nothing means anything, but you... you've put in so much effort into this war, like you're trying to do something anyway. Why bother, if it doesn't matter? What do you get out of it?"

Joker stared at her, and his lips spread into the devil's smile. "Eternity," he said.

"Guys!" From the barrier, Sakura's breathing came in rapid bursts. "Time's... almost up..."

Madoka danced from foot to foot. "But we've barely learned anything yet!"

"Then we have to make this last one count," said Sailor Moon. Thinking of foolproof questions was for smart people like Nanoha, or Ami. Joker was smart too, that was the problem. Even under LIBRA's compulsion, he knew how to twist the truth—or what was technically the truth—into pretzel shapes. So maybe instead of pumping him for information, she thought, maybe they should focus on affirming what was already known, or suspected... "Yuuno-kun, Chrono-kun," she said to their two technicians. "You two can still record holograms, right?"

Both of them nodded.

"Good," she said. "Start taping. Okay, guys, try not to freak out about this if it gets bad, but..." Deep breaths. Then: "Joker, are you working for Chaos?"

Joker relaxed and craned his neck toward her. His lips spread into a grin that raised every hair on the nape of her neck, maybe the most horrible one she had ever seen from him. Open-mouthed, like an upside-down triangle, both his upper and lower rows of teeth visible and a strip of blackness between them. "Oh, lapin. I'll give you that one for free," he said. "No LIBRA necessary. It hardly matters anymore; cat's out of the bag, as it were. No, I'm not 'working for' Chaos. Chaos and I... are equals."

Silence, deadly silence, and a pall of chilled air accompanied those words. Sailor Moon tore her eyes from that awful grin and moved them to Sakura. All the other Lights did the same...

Sakura's grip on the Star Wand faltered, and LIBRA vanished. "It's..." she gasped as she slumped back onto her air cushion. "It's true."

"Very true, and that's the end of that." With rising glee, Joker brayed at them, hyena-like: "That's right, as of this moment I don't care anymore. If my soldiers get upset about it, they aren't worthy of Dead End anyway. I am, and always have been, the authority they answer to, the name they fear... now they have reason to fear me even more. So merci beaucoup, Morning Lights. Feel free to spread the word. This changes nothing. And now? Now you've squandered the only chance you'll ever have to get your answers."

"Don't count us out yet!" Black pounded a fist into her palm, but she couldn't quite hide the desperation in her words. Her thoughts were clear, even without sending them: He's right, isn't he?

Stay focused! The command barked through their telepathic link. Nanoha shot each of them a steely glare, one which reminded them again why she had such a fearsome reputation in her universe. Interrogating him didn't go as planned, but we still won and we still have him. He hasn't eluded us yet.

Yet, said Peace, visibly deflating. We know he's working on it, and he's going to escape if we don't figure out what he's planning. Somehow, he's going to escape...

We still have the Arthra. Yuuno's tone was unchanged, still grim. Distressingly so, for those who knew him. I told you all how this works. If we get any hint of a teleportation signature from him, if he tries anything to attack us somehow, I transport him and his box into Io orbit and Admiral Lindy fires the Arc-en-Ciel. End of story. Harlaown, your channel with Lindy's still open, right?

Yes, said Chrono. All clear and staying open. They're ready up there.

If Joker noted the outward signs of their exchange, he chose to ignore them, in favor of taking advantage of Peace's fragile state. Now he seemed faintly snakelike, and only moreso when he hissed and flicked his tongue between his teeth at her. "That's right, Mademoiselle Yayoi. Your victory, such as it was, was for nothing. It's only a matter of time before I return to Dead End... and to your ex-comrades.

"All you had to do was do nothing, mademoiselle. All you had to do was hide away in your Lighthouse like the miserable weakling you know you are. I spared you your friends' fate, I gave you that chance, and what did you do? You persisted. You showed your face again. You defied me. And you joined in on this operation, to avenge them... Had you not, they would be safe a while longer. Had you not, it wouldn't be personal. So what happens to your dear Happy and the others once I see them again is entirely on your head. Who knows what I'll do to them after all of this?" He slithered his tongue over his lips. "Or what I'll have them do to each other?"

"Stop it." Peace's eyes glistened, her lip trembled like a leaf about to fall from a branch. "W-we're going to beat you, f-for real. I'm g-going to get my fuh-friends back..."

"You might," rasped Joker. "But in what state? And in how many pieces...?"

She had been incredibly brave throughout all of this, but there was only so much Peace could bear. "Stop it!" she sobbed, tears spilling over her lashes and down her cheeks.

A flurry of telepathy followed:

Don't listen to him, Peace! We've got you!

Yayoi-chan, we're right here with you. You're not alone.

He's trapped and he knows it, right now he's just an angry dog barking from the other side of a fence. You'll be okay.

Hayate-chan, tell Sakura-chan we need the SILENT Card, now!

I'm sorry, guys, she can't manage it yet...

"And speaking of 'Peaces', heh." Oily smugness oozed from Joker's every word. "There's still the matter of my Kanna. Can you guess how I punished her after she lost to you? The effects have been delightful to watch, I truly am a genius. The next time the two of you fight—if I allow her to set foot outside the palace again, that is—I think she'll be far more motivated. In a way, she's another one you've failed! Just like you failed your friends, and your fairy, and yourself."

Small hands balled into fists. Red-faced and sniffling, Peace raised one and cocked it back, small arcs of electricity jumped over it...

"Yes, yes," said Joker. "Go ahead and cry. That's what everyone loves you for, isn't it? The only real skill you have."

More words, spoken aloud from Peace's comm: "Yayoi-chan, it's me," said the gentle voice of Yui Nanase from the Lighthouse. "Listen to me: I love you. I'm so proud of you, and Miyuki and the others would be proud of you too. You haven't failed anyone. Not them, not the Lights, not Kanna, and not me.

"I know it hurts, and as much as I wish I could, I can't make that pain go away... but I can tell you that you'll use that pain to become even stronger than you are now, and you'll do so many amazing things with it. I know, because I've already seen you do it so many times. Hating everything like he does is easy, and it's cowardly. It's giving up.

"But choosing not to even when it's hard, especially when it's hard... that's the most courageous thing there is. Your feelings and your heart make you strong, Yayoi-chan. Stronger than he could ever be. Stronger than even you realize. That's part of what I love about you, and why you'll win."

"Yui-chan," Peace whispered. Calm settled over her, her features relaxed, her tears slowed to a stop. Once more she faced Joker, and after a moment of thought: "You... you hurt us, b-but we keep fighting. You take our friends, our families, our worlds from us... but we keep fighting. You try to break us, try to kill us, but we're still here, no matter what you do to us. And I think... I think that scares you." She lowered her fist.

Joker was stunned speechless.

"Attagirl, Peace." Sailor Moon beamed at her and did some sniffling of her own. Her grip on the Moon Stick wobbled a bit... some warrior she was. "I owe you a hug when this is over. Scratch that, lots of hugs. You're my hero."

That nearly set Peace crying again, for very different reasons. She radiated joy...

"Gag." Joker stuck out his tongue and heaved. "The speeches, always the speeches! At least Mademoiselle Deville doesn't love to hear herself talk like the rest of you do. She should get a medal."

"Oh, shut up, hypocrite," said Black. "You wish you were as cool as Peace is."

Overhead, a low of thunder rumbled through the district, an oncoming storm...

Instantly, Joker perked up again. "Well, well! The reunion's happening sooner than I expected. Do you hear that, my dear Yayoi? Kanna's on her way, and I have a feeling she brought her friends..."

Oh, how Sailor Moon wished she had a hand free to put a reassuring hand on Peace's shoulder. Tension tightened the poor girl's body, but Peace couldn't feel what she felt, expressed in three words: "That's not Kanna."

From above, like an emerald arrow from the heavens, Makoto Kino, Sailor Jupiter, descended on them with an exuberant roar, foot first... and just before contact with the street, she twisted her body to the right and delivered a brutal roundhouse kick to the back of Joker's skull. The resulting crack was deafening, like one of her own thunderbolts, and his box doubtless would have flown fifty meters or more had it not been bound to the asphalt. Jupiter rose from a perfect three-point landing, wiped her brow, and said, "Hey guys! Sorry I'm late, my check-up ran overtime. What did I miss?"

"Jupiter!" The temptation to drop the Moon Stick and embrace her friend was harder for Sailor Moon to resist than ever. She got the report from Madoka, of course, but a report was a report. Seeing her again in person, alive, healthy, back to normal... Her eyes leaked like faucets. "Mako-chan...! I—"

And stars of awe filled Peace's eyes. "Sailor Jupiter... the original electric magical girl! You're so cool..."

Jupiter's head turned at the sound of her voice, and she was rendered briefly speechless. Her cheeks flushed with cherry red. "S-Sailor Moon, who's this little sparkly one in yellow? Oh, you're so adorable, I just want to hug you!"

Sailor Moon shook her head. She should have seen this coming. "Mako-chan, meet Yayoi-chan. Yayoi-chan... well, I get a feeling you already know everything there is to know about Mako-chan..."

*****

Raising his head with some difficulty, Joker snarled through his teeth. "Mademoiselle Jupiter. You're looking very much not like a crocodile, congratulations."

"Shut up," said Black again.

Remember, stay focused and keep your eyes on him. That was Nanoha, once again through telepathy. I know it's hard, but hopefully we'll have time for the reunions and reintroductions once we're done. We just need to wait for Saturn and the others to catch up...

I'm really sorry, said a new voice in the link, but Saturn's not coming.

Nearly a dozen heads craned to the south.

Madoka couldn't help herself. Despite what that message implied, she smiled, relieved.

Across from her, Sailor Moon let out a breathless little squeal.

Coming up Zoushiki Street was another split-off group... all tired and most of them filthy, but alive. Led by Chibi-Usa Tsukino, Sailor Chibi-Moon, with Homura Akemi in step close behind, they were followed by Ayumi Sakagami, Cure Echo. Mamoru Chiba, Tuxedo Mask, brought up the rear with the Chibi-Stranger in his arms.

There was a mental sigh in the link, though not a displeased one. Sailor Moon looked to be having some sort of seizure with the effort of staying in position, so Nanoha said: It's okay, Usagi-san, go ahead. We'll cover you.

"Usako...!"

"Mamo-chan!"

She was off like a shot, blonde pigtails flying behind her like streamers. Tuxedo Mask welcomed her with open arms, his costume somehow still pristine as if both he and it were fresh from the cleaners, despite the trip through the subway system... perhaps that was part of his power, Madoka thought. Then she blushed and averted her eyes, for the two of them chose that moment for their reunion kiss, in full view of everybody. Much bawling followed as Sailor Moon hugged him, then Chibi-Moon, then the Chibi-Stranger... She made an attempt to embrace all three at once, but only succeeded in nearly choking them.

Madoka, said a cool, quiet voice... not through the group link, but a private one between the two of them.

H-hello, Homura-chan, said Madoka, blushing a bit deeper. They had no chance to talk about things back in the lab after Sakura sent the signal. The Stranger immediately took her through a portal door to the roof of the gallery, and that was that. Now was the first time she thought about Saturn's proposal since she made it. The four of them, in a relationship? She didn't know what to think. The mission, the mission came first... What happened to Saturn?

Homura's pale cheeks turned pink, she couldn't meet Madoka's gaze. Chibi-Moon sent her and her father back to the Lighthouse, along with Sailor Lethe and Sailor Mnemosyne. Hotaru failed the "safety net" test.

Oh. Of course. After all that happened, Madoka couldn't blame her in the slightest, but that meant... She can't use the Morendo on Joker. Which meant that she likely wouldn't use the Morendo on Joker, at least not tonight.

She wanted to be here, in case she had to, said Homura. She tried to insist on returning to the surface, but—

It couldn't be helped. When I asked her if she was okay, she said "No". Didn't even try to deny it. Chibi-Moon, having finally extricated herself from Sailor Moon's grip, joined in the group link. I know that was part of the plan, and I really am sorry, but considering everything... She needed rest, and she needed some time alone with her dad to talk things out. I had to send her back.

Damn it, said Nanoha. Pain flashed in her eyes, unable to be suppressed. That was our ace in the hole... What are we supposed to do now?

Confused, Jupiter glanced back and forth from face to face. "Is there something going on that I don't know about? You're all giving each other these weird, dramatic looks."

"Oh!" Echo nudged her way into the circle and stammered. "U-um, I can get this one! It's telepathy, Jupiter-san. We don't want him hearing."

"No kidding? I can understand the others having it, but Chibi-Moon, when did you learn to do that? Hey there, by the way, it's been a while."

"H-hey, Jupiter, I'm so glad you're back. It's kind of a long story. Not one I really want to tell in front of the clown, either."

"Gotcha. Speaking of whom..." Jupiter's eyes narrowed, she fixed Joker with a fearsome glare. "You've gone quiet. Finally realizing how screwed you are?"

Peace giggled, and somehow a few more stars twinkled in her eyes, joining the ones already shining there.

"I do wish all of you would stop talking," the harlequin muttered. "Apparently when I said you couldn't torture me, I was mistaken."

"Shut up, clown," chorused Black and Jupiter together.

Black turned a violent shade of red and scratched her cheek. "S-sorry."

"Don't be, I like your style!" All agrin, Jupiter looked around at each of them. "All this other universe stuff... I don't really get how it works, but if there's people like us everywhere, it's only a good thing, right? We can all have each other's backs, and—" Her words trailed off, and a curious, dreamy expression floated over her, her cheeks turning nearly as red as Black's face. "And who is that...?" she said, pointing over to where Yue stood guard over Sakura's barrier. "Those wings, that hair, those eyes!" With a sigh, she clutched her hands together at shoulder level. "Ahhh, he reminds me so much of my old senpai~!"

"Jupiter." Chibi-Moon pressed her face into her hands. "Don't start. You don't have a chance with him anyway. He's taken and he plays for the other team."

"AUUUUUGH, YOU GUYS ARE JEEEEEEEERKS!" Yet another new voice, this one a high-pitched screech, started everyone present. All across the square, heads swiveled to the east.

I don't get it! Madoka thought to the others. Everyone's here, aren't they? All of Team Tiger, the Big Five, and— Oh no.

It turned out that someone was missing, someone Madoka only just remembered. That someone was not technically part of the operation, so it was at least a little understandable that they would forget about her... but, she realized with dawning embarrassment, not only was given no details on the plan, but she had no Device of her own. When the signal went out and everyone raced up to the street level, she must have been left behind... underground, in the darkened subway system, with little to no idea of what was going on.

It certainly looked as if Sailor Iron Mouse had spent a considerable time crawling out of a darkened subway. Her ears and tail drooped, all the ruffs of fur on her uniform were matted and the uniform itself was filthy, she sported more than a few bruises and scrapes, and her watery grey eyes stared at everyone, broadcasting hurt and accusation. "I'm trying, you know!" she said as she stomped across the patio. It appeared she had crawled up out of the gaping crater left by the southwest crystal spire on the opposite side of the square. "I'm doing my best! I came down here when you asked me to, I opened three of those disgusting pods for you... which all stabbed me, you know! In the hand! It really hurt! I even told you to leave it to me so you could do what you had to do! The least you could have done is send someone back down there to pick me up when you were done, but noooooo!" Her cheeks puffed out, she looked more like a chipmunk than a mouse. "I had to stumble around lost in a dirty, stinking human subway system, in the dark! There were rats down there!"

Jupiter blinked. "But you're a—"

"It's the principle of the thing!" Iron Mouse squealed, pulling at her ears in frustration. "If I'm gonna help you guys, we need to get a couple things straight! First of all—" She stopped, having just seen the figure imprisoned in the box. Her jaw fell open, her eyes were like dinner plates. "You got him," she said in a hushed tone. "You really got him."

"Ah," said Joker. "I thought I smelled something."

Cautious and shivering, Iron Mouse crept closer, step by step. Several times, her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

"Iron Mouse?" said Sailor Moon. "Um, we're all really sorry about leaving you down there..."

"Y-yeah," said Chibi-Moon. She made a few frantic hand gestures to encourage the others to do the same. "I don't think any of us knew there would be pods here, we had to adapt the plan on the fly. Right, Nanoha?"

It took a second, but Nanoha nodded assent.

Iron Mouse wasn't listening. Liable to faint at any moment, she crossed the patio until she stood about a meter and a half from Joker. For a few moments, she just stood there shaking, threading her tail through her hands.

Joker made a display of yawning as widely as he could. "Well, if all the other maggots are crawling out of the woodwork, I suppose you would too. What is that human quote? 'Et tu, Mouse?' A paraphrase, of course." Refusing to even meet her eye, Joker yawned again. "Just one more of you I intend to flay alive. I'll add you to the list."

"You—" said Iron Mouse in a quiet voice, almost inaudible.

"Me?" Sneering, he tossed his head, a noncommittal gesture. "It's too late to beg me to come back, rate. I knew you'd try, for what it's worth. You make the little electric one—" Here he jerked his head in Peace's direction. "—look like a paragon of nerve and fortitude. In all the multiverse, I doubt there is a single being as craven and spineless as you... but it hardly matters as long as you survive, does it?"

Iron Mouse shook like a leaf, it appeared she would burst into tears at any moment. She swallowed, a sound audible to the whole square, and then she spoke. "Y-you a-aren't huh-half of what L-Lady Galaxia was. You were n-never even f-fit to suh-stand in her suh-shadow." To widespread astonishment, Iron Mouse drew herself up to her full, tiny height, sucked in a breath, and squared her shoulders. "... She would have crushed you like a bug."

Silence, save for the wind's gentle blowing.

"Iron Mouse," said Chibi-Moon in awe. "Holy shit..."

Tuxedo Mask bent an eyebrow. "Language, young lady."

Iron Mouse herself scarcely seemed to believe what she had just said. Now she trembled harder than ever as she collapsed backward on her backside, hyperventilating.

And when Joker fixed her with his most poisonous of glares and made no sound in response but an animal growl... she screamed and dived behind the legs of the nearest person to her, which happened to be Chrono Harlaown. He looked none too pleased by this.

It didn't matter. Slowly at first, but then with more vigor, a round of cheers and applause went up for Iron Mouse, the last person anyone ever expected to say such things to Joker's face. Still she shook and still she gasped for breath, but there was something on her lips that resembled the beginnings of a smile...

Madoka, said Nanoha over the cheering, which grew more and more raucous. Madoka started, she thought the link had been closed. But no, this was a new link, a private one.

Y-yes? Madoka said back to her. What's the matter?

We still need to figure out what to do with him, said Nanoha, more solemn than her expression let on. We won the battle here tonight, but you heard what he said. His forces will be on their way soon, if they're not here already. You took command during Phase One, the Empty Nets mission, and you did an exemplary job by all accounts. I'm not placing all of this on you, perish the thought, but you... A sigh and a melancholy smile. You seem a little less happy than most of us here, so I thought I'd ask you and not spoil their good mood. Sorry.

I-it's okay, Nanoha-chan, Madoka said with a reassuring smile. Her eyes traveled over to Homura, standing apart from the rest, radiant in the moonlight... Homura-chan and I have been through a lot, we still have things to work out... between the two of us, of course, but with Chibi-Moon and Saturn too.

More cheering, more shouting. Someone had given Iron Mouse a drink from a nearby vending machine, and the little fake Senshi clutched it to her chest like a precious treasure.

A thought occurred to her. If she can, said Madoka, maybe... maybe Homura-chan can lock Joker up inside her shield. I've seen her put stuff much bigger than him in there before, and as far as I know, there's no way in or out of it without her specifically grabbing something she wants from it.

Doesn't Akemi-san keep her arsenal of weapons in there?

Well, yes, but if we put him in there in his box, I don't think he could use them—

Something flew over their heads, unnoticed by any but the two of them. Madoka only saw it for an instant, but the sight drove a dagger into her heart. Oh no. No, not now!

It wasn't an object that would normally cause panic. It was a red, metallic cylinder with an attached hose. But the fact that it was here, and what it meant...

Everyone! Madoka shouted through the link, frantic.

Too late. A straight-bladed cutlass followed the fire extinguisher's trajectory and rammed through its center. Clouds of cold foam and white fog erupted from it and blanketed the square in seconds. Wheezing, shouting, voices raised in alarm... and a clang as the empty canister fell and struck pavement.

No, thought Madoka. No. Please, no.

Footsteps in the fog as someone strode out of it. Her silhouette was shrouded by a long, billowing cape, and another blade winked faintly at her side. Coming closer, heading in Joker's direction.

Everyone! Madoka sent again. Please, whatever you do, guard Joker! You can't let anything happen to him!

More footsteps in that direction, faint shapes drawing in close. Weapons being drawn.

Madoka felt her heart tearing to pieces. The safest thing, the smart thing, would be to join the others and defend Joker's box with everything she had. The even smarter thing, what Homura would do in her position, would be to put an arrow through the caped figure's stomach. Quickly, quietly, so she didn't suffer.

She made her choice. She made it emphatically clear where she stood.

But still, even after all she had done, the thought of killing one of her oldest friends was too terrible for Madoka to bear. So she ran through the fog after her, found Joker's box by following its glow, threw herself in front of it, and spread her arms. Into the fog, she cried out: "Sayaka-chan, stop!"

From the curbside, Iron Mouse peeked out from behind a newspaper box. "Miki...!"

"Mouse...?" said a voice from the clouds, which thinned and parted slowly. Sayaka Miki stood there, her expression unreadable, her cutlass raised. "Madoka-chan," she said upon meeting her gaze. That was all.

In a blink, Homura was next to her, a shiny black handgun pointed directly at Sayaka's Soul Gem. She said nothing, but her eyes blazed...

And in a series of flashes, there were three Midchildan transport circles between them and Sayaka... Out of them stepped Mami Tomoe, Nagisa Momoe, and lastly Kyoko Sakura, whose expression boiled over with barely repressed rage.

Behind them, Joker laughed long and loud. "Ah, finally! Ma sirène! I'd have appreciated an earlier appearance, but I must admit your flair for dramatic timing is magnifique."

Kyoko took point and raised her spear, wild-eyed. "You've got some nerve showing your face here, bitch. After all the shit you've pulled...!"

"Language, Sakura-san," said Mami, cool as ever. One of her rifles was poised to fire, the hammer pulled back.

"Sayaka-san," said Nagisa. "Please. Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't. Just turn around and walk away, I'm begging you."

By then, most of the fog had evaporated. It didn't take more than a glance for Madoka to see that every single one of the Morning Lights present stared at Sayaka. Those who had weapons had them drawn, the rest had their fists raised. She was hopelessly surrounded. Surely, thought Madoka. Surely even Sayaka, legendarily bullheaded as she was, wouldn't be this foolish. Surely she wasn't about to do what Madoka feared she was here to do...

"Don't worry, Commissar Miki," said Joker. His smugness was back in force, and multiplied. "I'm reasonably sure you can survive long enough to make use of yourself. If you would, butcher the two boys in the blue and green Barrier Jackets first, would you?"

Silence. Sayaka took a long, slow look at all the driven and angry faces staring at her, as if seeing them for the first time. Her eyes fell back on Madoka... "You guys really did it," she said. "Incredible. I don't think anyone could have seen this coming, to be honest."

Nanoha spoke in a polite and even tone that nonetheless would have brought a lesser person to their knees. Raising Heart's cannon barrel had her dead in her sights. "Sayaka Miki of Vertex Five, you are wanted by the Time-Space Administrative Bureau for aiding and abetting crimes against interdimensional law. I advise you to drop your weapon and stand down."

Anxious and confused, Black pounded her fists together. "I remember you. You were at the Merry-Go-Round!"

Sailor Moon looked from one face to another, in clear distress. "We... we should at least hear what she has to say for herself. We can't just fire on her, she was Madoka-chan's friend!"

"Yeah?" Kyoko spat on the ground. "She was my friend, too. Then she sided with the asshole in the box. She did nothing the whole time Mami and I were Witches. She stabbed me through the stomach... and then she stood by and did nothing again while Joker tortured Alph, broke Kurumi's leg, and almost destroyed everything! That don't sound much like friendship to me, does it, traitor?"

Sayaka's expression didn't change.

"S-Sayaka-chan," said Madoka, folding her hands over her heart. "We've been through so much together. I know you better than anyone... but I can't understand what you're doing. What you've been doing. It just doesn't make any sense. I know you're a good person—"

"She betrayed us," said Homura, ice cold. "She betrayed all of reality, because of her grudge against me. There's no reasoning with her. Miki, I thought the two of us had reached some measure of understanding when we fought tonight. But if you make one single move to free that creature behind us..." Her finger dipped into the handgun's trigger well. "I swear to you I will shatter your Soul Gem right now, no matter what Madoka says."

"Oh, this is just wonderful!" Joker's strident cackle drifted from behind them. "So much tension, so much drama. Go on, Miki. Prove to them that your loyalty is to Dead End. To me."

Sayaka brought her cutlass to bear, rotated it so that the point was to the stars.

Everyone grew tense. No one moved.

And no one was prepared for Sayaka Miki to thrust her cutlass into the ground before her. No one was prepared for her to go down on her knees. No one was prepared for her to calmly fold her hands behind her head, drop her transformation, and say two simple words: "I surrender."

Silence and stillness all around.

Of all people, it was Joker who was first to speak. "No," he said, hushed. "No. Even for you, this is the height of stupidity. It must be a trick. After all you've seen, you of all people should know what happens to anyone who betrays me..."

Sayaka began to smile, and she spoke a sentence that shook the world: "That's the thing: I'm not betraying you. I can't, because I was never on your side in the first place."

Silence and stillness all around.

Madoka's brain ceased functioning.

Sayaka spoke softly but with great conviction. "I'm sorry. I really am. If you all don't believe me, or want to kill me or lock me up anyway, I don't blame you and I won't stop you. I've done terrible things, and I've allowed terrible things to happen. But please... let me at least tell you why."

Everyone looked to Madoka, who nodded absently...

"It was Sailor Mnemosyne who did it," said Sayaka. "When Joker came calling for me, she gave me back all my memories from every timeline. I don't know if she even intended for me to see it all, but I saw myself die or become a Witch over and over and over again because of my stupid mistakes, the same stupid mistakes every time. Because I was reckless, I got myself killed. Because I was stubborn and I thought I was better than them, I refused to take help from Kyoko and Akemi. Because I refused to see that Kyosuke didn't love me, and never would..." A few tears rolled down her cheeks. "I turned into a Witch. Over and over and over.

"Joker told me himself that he wanted me to go after you, Akemi, but I could tell that wasn't the whole story. I thought he was up to something from the beginning, but after I saw all of my memories... well. All those other times, I was so stupid. And I realized that if you two were going to escape, I had to stop being stupid and get smart."

Homura shook her head, her eyes never leaving Sayaka's face. "Lies. You hate me. You allied yourself with Joker because you've wanted to kill me ever since I took over our universe."

"Oh, I do," said Sayaka. "Akemi, I hate your guts. That hasn't changed. All that stuff I said about wanting to beat the shit out of you? It was all true. I still think you deserve to die for what you did to her. That's part of why Joker and Dead End never suspected me, I didn't have to work hard to fake wanting revenge on you. It was totally in character. But here's the thing..." A rueful smile. "In those first few seconds, with all those memories flying around in my head... I realized that as much as I hate you, you were the only person who could maybe keep Madoka safe from him."

Homura's mouth fell open.

"Because you love her, you idiot," said Sayaka, not bothering to conceal her scorn. "For all the awful shit you've done to her, you love her. It made me sick to even think about it, but I had to trust that you'd do the right thing, that you'd know Joker was way worse than you."

"I'm not hearing this," said Kyoko. "This isn't happening."

"Think about it," said Sayaka. "If there was gonna be one of us on the inside, it had to be me. Kyoko, he'd never have trusted you, you're a wild card and you hate following rules and orders. Mami-san, you'd fall apart trying to pretend to be a bad guy. Of the three people he went after, I was the only one he might buy being loyal to him. It's what the old me would have done."

Mami was distraught. "But you were loyal! You followed his every command, I saw you!"

"Because I had to." Sayaka's response was matter-of-fact. "That makes me as much to blame as him for what he's done, I know. That memory of Akemi tearing you apart, Madoka, the one he sent to all of reality? That was mine, and I'll regret it for the rest of my life. I swear, I had no idea that was what he'd do with it. I had no idea he was going to... to make that thing collapse an entire universe. But if I'd tried to stop him, he'd have killed me or brainwashed me and done it anyway. He had to believe I was his best little soldier, and you all did too, or it all would have been for nothing. Even while I worked for him, though? I did everything I could think of to help you guys."

"Bullshit." This time, Mami didn't bother chastising Kyoko's outburst.

"It's true. From the very beginning," said Sayaka. She fixed Homura with her gaze. "When we fought in the classroom, I gave you the hints that made you realize that Joker had hijacked the Incubators. I had to dance around it so you'd think it was your own idea, but it worked. And you never suspected I was feeding you information, because stupid Sayaka was so blinded by how much she wanted revenge that she didn't even know she was being helpful. Right?"

Again, Homura's mouth fell open.

"Right, exactly," Sayaka continued. "I did the same thing down in the tunnel to the lab, I let you know that Professor Tomoe, the Time Reaper, and Eas were down there, to give you an idea of what you were up against. I brought that storage chip filled with Grief Seeds with me, knowing you'd take it off me when you won. And what's more?" Here she smiled proudly. "I sabotaged the Isolation Field that was supposed to keep you out of that lab. You'd have never gotten in or even noticed it was there if it wasn't for me."

Now Chibi-Moon spoke up, rousing herself from a state of shock. "No. No, that's not possible. The professor said it was Eas who—"

"Because I've been trying to push Eas into leaving Dead End for months now, and it finally worked," said Sayaka. "All that research I did that I told you about, Akemi? It wasn't just to figure out how to beat you. I read all about Eas, and I found out exactly how she became one of the Precure from the Labyrinth higher-ups. I knew I couldn't do much without getting myself caught, but..." Again with that melancholy smile. "I reminded her of what Cure Peach always said to her, what got her questioning Labyrinth in the first place. 'Do what makes you happy,' is what I said. Joker, you were there. You heard me."

Joker said nothing.

Sayaka pressed on. "So I set it up to make it look like Eas was the traitor. Obviously it couldn't be me, I was his Commissar, in charge of making sure everyone else was loyal. Couldn't have worked out better if I'd planned it... that way, I could find out who might be wavering, and try to do the same thing I was doing with Eas. All while it looked like I was doing my job." Switching briefly to wide-broadcast telepathy, she continued: Eas is already gone, and I can tell you who else might turn later. The Bad End Precure... something's happening with them that I don't think Joker intended, but now's not the time. As for Kanna... With a regretful expression, Sayaka faced Peace, who was white as a sheet. I won't lie to you: Kanna's in bad shape. I can tell you this, though: the real her is still in there somewhere. I saw her, just for a few seconds. If you can bring her back out, I think she can still be saved.

"She—" Peace murmured.

"That's not all," said Sayaka aloud. "I gathered information, as much as I could. On Merry-Go-Round segment locations, all of Dead End's bases that weren't classified, what research projects they've been doing, what weapons they have, how strong their armies are and who's in them... I've got it all here, everything I could fit on a crystal drive. It's inside my thigh, I slit it open and put it there to smuggle it out of the palace.

"And the other thing I smuggled?" Her grin returned, wider than ever. "You'll love this, 'Master' Joker. It's one of your Marbles, I grabbed it after you rushed off to stop Kinomoto-san. You were in such a hurry to shut her up that you left one out in the open. You see, he invented these things, mostly for himself, to sneak around and spy on the multiverse, gathering information without anyone knowing he was there. They can make you pretty much invisible, untraceable, and almost immune to magic. That's how he did it, Akemi. That's why your stolen power didn't work on him. I have one, and you can examine it for yourselves, figure out how to counter it."

Madoka glanced in Homura's direction. To her astonishment, she was trembling faintly. "Even if we choose to believe you," she said. "You still haven't explained why. Why delay me in the tunnels, if you always intended for me to reach the lab? Why wait until now to reveal yourself?"

Sayaka sighed. "Because I hate your guts, Devil. I left Madoka to you, and I hoped you would protect her, but I still can't stand looking at you. Not after what you did. I needed that fight, even if it was stupid and selfish of me. And also? I had to know. I had to know if you being exposed to everyone and losing your powers had done anything to change you. Remember? I said you had to prove to me that you could care about someone other than yourself. By the way, when we fought, I bet you didn't even notice, did you? You had no idea that I let you shoot the bottom of my ear off... you destroyed my comm node for me. So thanks for that.

"Anyway, you did prove it, but not in our fight. Not really. I had a hunch you had changed, but I still had my doubts. I thought you might say anything to get what you wanted. So after a little while, I activated the Marble and headed down the elevator into the lab after you... I was there, watching. I saw you fight so hard to save Sailor Saturn. I saw the look on your face when the other Hotaru got hit. I was there when you held her hand and smiled at her as she died... and I heard it when you confessed.

"That was it. That was the proof I needed," said Sayaka. "Damned if you didn't really do it. Not even the Devil could have faked that. You changed, and I saw the evidence with my own eyes. I was already planning to take my leave then and there... but then I saw all of you jump up all of a sudden, and I heard Madoka talking about 'the plan'. That's when I realized that you guys were doing something crazier than I ever thought you'd do.

"I copied your magic signature with my Marble and followed you, and I guess that's why I was swept up in your force field thing with you. I couldn't believe what I saw when I got up here: Kinomoto-san was up on the surface fighting Joker, but it was all a fake-out. You pulled him, him, into a trap, and you actually pulled it off!

She shook her head. "You all forced me to defect ahead of schedule, so I couldn't get all the data or samples I wanted. I had to act fast, see. I'm here, though, and I swear: this isn't a trick. This isn't a lie. Do what you want with me, but as hard as it is to believe... I'm on your side." And here she looked between them all. "And if you don't believe me, ask Kinomoto-san. She can tell you."

All of them pivoted around to where Sakura lay in her barrier. The LIBRA Card was back out, the scales glowing. She wore an expression of utter bewilderment. "It's... it's true," she said. "It's all true. She means it."

"You..." At the front, Kyoko heaved a sob and broke into tears. "You...!"

"Kyoko, I'm so sorry," said Sayaka. Her eyes were haunted with regret. "I know you must hate me. Back then, if I hadn't convinced you otherwise, you would have knocked me out and dragged me back with you, it would have ruined the whole thing. I tried everything else I could think of to get you to leave me behind, but nothing worked... except attacking you."

"You stupid cunt!" Kyoko screamed a frenzied howl. "How dare you... how dare you say you're sorry after what you did! You helped Joker! You stood there and watched! You stabbed me through the gut! And you think just because you were playing bad guy the whole time, I'm gonna walk over there and... and forgive you, like nothing happened?!" Incensed, she tossed down her spear and turned away. "Fuck you, Sayaka. Fuck you."

"Kyoko, don't—" It was as if Kyoko's words had torn open her stomach.

"Stay the hell away from me!" And Kyoko fled to the other side of the patio, sobbing.

Slowly, slowly, Mami lowered her musket. "If Kinomoto-san's Card says it's true, I'll choose to believe it. But Miki-san..." Mami's eyes narrowed. "As noble as your intentions may have been, as much as you may regret your actions, you still betrayed our trust. This is not over between us." With that, she turned her back and moved in Kyoko's direction.

"Mami-nee, wait up!" And Nagisa ran after her without a second glance.

Sayaka's shoulders slumped. Bitter with regret, she lowered her head. "Yeah. I guess that makes sense."

That left only Madoka, Homura, and Sayaka. Madoka gazed back and forth, back and forth, trying to process the unbelievable. Sayaka was on their side all along. Sayaka hadn't gone insane. Sayaka had returned to her. This should have been happy, joyous news. And oh, part of her was happy, ecstatic. The six of them, together again. That was nothing but a good thing.

However, there was still shock to deal with. There was still the sadness and despair of months spent thinking her treasured friend had willingly turned to the dark side. There was still the fact that Kyoko, Mami, and Nagisa were so deeply hurt. All of that couldn't just disappear. What should she do?

Seconds ticked by.

"Homura-chan," she said finally, "put the gun down."

"Madoka, I don't think—"

"I said," she repeated, putting an edge on it, "put the gun down. I've decided that if I don't go and hug my friend in the next ten seconds, I think I'm going to lose my mind. She can explain everything later, but right now... please, lower the gun. Just let me have this."

Homura closed her eyes and stowed the handgun away in her shield.

She ran then, into Sayaka's arms, bawling and calling her "stupid" over and over. Sayaka held her tight and apologized dozens, hundreds of times, and that was all for a while. Things between them were still fraught, complex, and confusing... but they were better. Just a little bit better.

That counted for something, didn't it?

Time passed.

*****

After a while, the Big Five all approached Joker's box, still under strict guard. He hadn't moved, he hadn't spoken in almost half an hour. His expression was a blank, so unlike him.

"Joker," said Sailor Moon, who raised her wand. "You heard everything, right?"

His response was flat, monotone. "I dozed off during the exposition."

"It doesn't matter," said Madoka. "We're going to lock you away until we figure out another safe place to keep you. If we have two days to stop Dead End, well. We'll figure out something."

"You won't." Joker said in that listless drawl, utterly without emotion. "You think this is the end, but you don't know anything. You think I'm beaten, but you're very, very wrong. As I said before, much as I loathe to do this, I must admit it: you did well tonight. I am impressed. This was your victory, so by all means, enjoy it while you can." He turned his face away from them. "But always remember..." His mouth split into that most horrible of grins again, the upside-down triangle. "I'm the one with the last laugh. Au revoir."

SNAP.

Before they could move, before they could think, Joker was facing the exact opposite direction he had been a heartbeat ago, his neck twisted to a grotesque degree. His body went limp, his head lolled, his frozen grin beamed at them, more hideous than ever.

"No," said Black, aghast. "No, he couldn't have."

There was a mad scramble to the box... but before they could reach it, Joker's corpse melted into an inert puddle of Dark Paint and dissolved. His bonds fell empty to the box's floor.

Madoka was almost sick.

"He..." said Nanoha, plenty pale as well. "He killed himself. He must have truly been out of options to escape."

"He's been dead before," Homura spoke up from behind them. "Even before he took the Incubators. Joker wouldn't commit suicide if he wasn't sure he would come back."

"Goddammit!" Black pounded a fist into the asphalt, which spiderwebbed with cracks beneath her. "What do we do now? This was our chance... how are we ever gonna stop him again?"

*****

5

"This was our chance... how are we ever gonna stop him again?"

Sailor Moon's shoulders sagged. The same question now plagued her thoughts. "We'll just have to find another way," she said, laying a hand on Black's shoulder. "But we beat him. Just this once, we beat him."

"And Sakura-chan restored her Cards," said Nanoha, gazing over to where she slept fitfully in her barrier. "We also have a number of new allies, and we recovered three Precure from the pods thanks to Iron Mouse. This was a victory, we can't forget that."

4

The wind began to blow.

"Still seems too easy," said Black, her head in her hands. "Leaving, just like that? Something must be up."

"I don't think he would just retreat either," said Nanoha, "but we did have him cornered. There can't have been much he... Akemi-san?"

Homura Akemi stared up at the night sky, stricken. So did Madoka, next to her. Up there, a ceiling of clouds gathered rapidly as the wind picked up, moaning softly.

3

"No." The word drifted from Homura's lips, soft and plaintive. "It can't be. It's not possible."

"He didn't," Madoka whispered. "Please, no. He couldn't have summoned it here..."

"Madoka-chan? Akemi-san? What is it, what's the matter?" Sailor Moon grabbed their shoulders, squeezed.

What was once a wind became a gale, sweeping stray papers and leaves around their feet. There was a strange, high-pitched sound rising in the air...

2

It wasn't only Homura and Madoka now. Mami, Kyoko, Sayaka, and Nagisa all rose to their feet, staring up at the sky with near-idential expressions of horror.

Between one eyeblink and the next, a shadow appeared before the full moon, which was rapidly being encircled by slate-grey cloud cover. They only saw it for a moment before the clouds closed over the moon entirely, but—

1

—but it looked somewhat like the upper bulb of an hourglass, with part of a vaguely cross-shaped stem at its lowest point. It was difficult to tell, but the shape rotated slowly and steadily... Rain began to fall in cold, sharp bullets. The sound of the wind made for a mournful dirge, the patio's trees swayed back and forth. Somewhere up above, thunder rumbled... and with it, that bizarre sound became fully audible.

"aAaHaHahAHAHahAHahhaHhahAHAhhaHAAhhAhAHAhahHAhAhaHhahAA"

The storm broke over them in earnest, the calm of the night from moments ago a distant memory. Homura Akemi stared up to where the moon had been, and spoke a name: "Walpurgisnacht..."

"haHaahahaaAahahAHAhAhAhAHahaHahaAhHhahahahaAHahahAAHAhaHAHA"

END OF CHAPTER 60

NEXT:

CHAPTER 61

AS LUCIFER FELL

[Author's Note 2:

And here it is. This isn't the end of Act III, that's next chapter... but it is the culmination of what I've been working towards for years now.

Five years ago, after the reaction to the end of Act II, I promised myself that I would change things going forward, so that all the readers who told me things were "too bleak" and "hopeless" wouldn't be right. This is the fulfillment of that promise. It was a long, long, wait (and a monstrously long chapter), but I hope it was worth it.

And appropriately enough, happy fifth anniversary to Hugtto, my most beloved Precure series. There's still nothing else like it.

Sayaka's speech was an exposition dump, I know, but I wanted to make it absolutely clear that this was not a retcon. Her character arc was plotted out since before I even started the story eight-plus years ago, this was always in the plan.

You guys have no idea how hard I worked and how meticulously I went through the chain of events to make this chapter happen, so please: if at any point you stood up and cheered like I desperately hope you did, or even if you wanted to, let me know in the comments, in detail. :D

Soundtrack:

- Sakura's comeback: The music I had in my head throughout this scene was Takashi Ohmama's magnificent title theme "The Witch from Mercury", from the Gundam series of the same name. Start it up with the line "Sakura pushed herself up to one knee" and try to time it so that it ends with the word "Triumphant." Clara Sorace, thank you for responding to my post on your Facebook, your vocals in this piece are transcendent.

- As an alternative for the above, Jennifer Cihi's "The Power of Love" from the first Sailor Moon anime's DiC dub soundtrack absolutely will fit here, timed to the same lines. For something a little more low-key but still appropriate, "Sakura's Theme II" by Takayushi Negishi from Cardcaptor Sakura's OST works too.

- Cure Black's entrance: "Stardust Crusaders" by Yugo Kanno, from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders's OST. The only appropriate accompaniment to a Star Platinum-esque beatdown. An alternative, of course, is the original "DANZEN! Futari wa Precure" OP theme by Mayumi Gojo.

- Madoka and Yayoi's combination attack: "HEART GOES ON" by Aya Ikeda and Mayu Kudou, from Heartcatch Precure, or "Where Courage is Born" / "Yuuki ga Umareru Basho", sung by the Cures' voice actors, from Happiness Charge Precure's movie.

- The Starlight Breaker: "Tsudoe, Hoshi no Kagayaki" by Hiroaki Sano, from the Nanoha OST. The Starlight Breaker theme, what else? TV series or movie version, either works.

- Iron Mouse's speech: "Song of Friendship" / "Nakayoshi no Uta" ~Piano Version~ by Hiroshi Takaki, from Tropical-Rouge Precure's OST. Or, "Omae no XXX de..." / "With Your XXX..." by Tarou Iwasaki, from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's OST.

- Sayaka's explanation: "Decretum", by Yuki Kajiura. Naturally, Sayaka's theme from Madoka Magia's OST.

- And for the finale, what else but Yuki Kajiura's "Nux Walpurgis", from the same source.

EDIT: Here's the YouTube playlist. As of this writing, everything is on it except "Nakayoshi no Uta", and I'm working on that. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvXaLTIONlEy-5thoIda-0eR8dh9ONGnC

Everyone reading this, you all have my gratitude for your patience and for sticking with me this long. As I said, the next chapter finishes off Act III, but there's one more Act to go. I'm finishing this thing if it's the last thing I do.

And as always, remember: comments and detailed feedback are an author's food pellets, so leave plenty! - BHS

My links: http://wlo.link/@bhsdesk

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Annie, my sweet baby.

For the past thirteen years, almost every word I wrote, I wrote with you here beside my desk.

As I wrote this chapter, even though your body is gone, I could sense you here beside me again...

And every time my characters stared at darkness and despair and overcame it against all odds? That was for you, baby. All for you.

I miss you so much, but I'm doing okay.

I'd say you'll never know just how much I love you... but that would be a lie. You always knew, and you always will.