Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 7: Collapse

CHAPTER 7: Collapse

-VERTEX FOUR: 8.36679-

Carnaaji

Gale-force winds lashed the rocky canyon as the enormous sphere slid free of its portal, already occupying more than half the sky. Standing out against it was the Will's violet-black spell triangle as she maintained the Dimensional Transfer... the Will herself was a barely visible black dot.

Nanoha and Fate looked upon it in silent horror, their hands clasped in a death grip It's too big... The words screamed through Nanoha's mind, over and over again. It's too big. Not even she should be able to transfer something that size! Oh God, the planet... if that thing stays in the atmosphere for too long, the planet will-!

And Viluy simply watched, with the closest thing to joy her icy face could express. "Lord Moebius," she said to it, somehow managing to be heard over the wind's howling, "is this not to your liking?"

The rounded surface of the sphere rippled. With a low, scraping sound of shifting metal and silicon, hills and canyons appeared upon it, distorting its shape into something new, something familiar. Two vast, circular depressions set above a smaller, more angular one, and below that a series of gleaming steel mountains arranged in a grid...

Nanoha and Fate stared upward, paralyzed.

It was a face. No, not a face, a grinning skull, kilos wide and staring down at them from the heavens. Cold, electronic blue lights like distant stars flared within its empty eye sockets as its monotone rumbled through the canyon, spreading fissures through the ancient rock. "CLASS-M MID-SIZE TERRESTRIAL PLANETOID," boomed the skull, its voice metallic, chilling and fathomless as the bottom of an ocean. "LOCAL DESIGNATION: CARNAAJI. ELEMENTAL COMPOSITION: SILICON. CARBON. IRON. MAGNESIUM. OXYGEN. NITROGEN. SULFUR. NICKEL. TRACE AMOUNTS OF CALCIUM, ALUMINUM, AND TITANIUM. CORE COMPOSED OF MOLTEN NICKEL-IRON, SURROUNDED BY SILICATE INNER MANTLE. CONCLUSION: ACCEPTABLE. COMMENCING CONVERSION."

They descended from the gap between the skull's upper and lower teeth, a writhing tangle of cables of all sizes wound together. Unraveling themselves, they spread out in a hundred different directions, plunging down and piercing through the rock and soil of Carnaaji like needles piercing flesh. Tremors shook the canyon, fracturing more of the walls, dislodging boulders the size of cars...

Nanoha, we have to stop this! cried Fate in her mind. There was no question of speaking aloud now; the awful noise of relentless metal grinding rock to powder drowned out everything else. Try to cut through some of those cables, I'll take out that woman!

Of course she would. Like it or not, Nanoha was in no shape to engage in real combat with another mage yet. Her inner tactician recognized that the plan was sound, but still... Fate-chan, please be careful! We don't know what else she's capable of!

I will. Go! I'll keep her off of you as best I can!

*****

The two Aces split off. Viluy's eyes briefly followed Takamachi's vector for a moment before she lost interest, giving Harlaown her full attention. Takamachi in her prime would have been a subject for extensive study, but now? Now she was a flawed, sad specimen of her former self, not worth her time. Besides, however many cables she managed to sever, it wouldn't be enough to stop Lord Moebius.

Harlaown, on the other hand... now she was a worthy subject. The TSAB's networks were filled with fascinating data about Fate Testarossa Harlaown and the forbidden, secretive project that gave her her name. Viluy smirked as she recalled the blissful rush from absorbing every bit of knowledge she could find about Harlaown, about her mother, and about Jail Scaglietti, the originator of Project Fate. A desperate attempt by a desperate woman to resurrect the dead through the creation of an Artificial Mage, indistinguishable from the deceased... The results were flawed, of course, but evidence of at least partial success was currently rushing up at her, wielding an axe-like Intelligent Device.