Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 40: The First Attack

Chapter 40: The First Attack

-VERTEX FOUR: 8.36679-

Uminari City

Dead End had come.

Of course, the mysterious warning message that flashed across every TSAB screen weeks before reached here as well, though its audience was much smaller. Vertex Four's Earth—"Non-Administered World #97" in Bureau parlance—was not considered at all notable until a few years ago. More specifically, it was Uminari, a seaside city nestled in Tokyo's Minato ward, that piqued the Bureau's interest, though it was hard to tell why on the surface. At a distance, Uminari could have been almost any Japanese city: clean, peaceful, somewhat crowded. It used to be wholly unremarkable, no one's idea of a place to stage an invasion.

However, after the extraordinary first meeting of Nanoha Takamachi and Yuuno Scrya three years before, Uminari had become an unlikely hotbed of Bureau activity. Uminari was the home of the Takamachi family, Hayate Yagami and her Wolkenritter, and later the extended Testarossa-Harlaown family as well. The first meeting between Nanoha and Fate Testarossa (later Harlaown), and the majority of the Jewel Seed Incident skirmishes, happened in Uminari and its surrounding waters. Six months after that, after the Book of Darkness reawakened and choose Hayate as its Master, it was Uminari where the first clash between the TSAB and the Wolkenritter took place. It was a mile out from Uminari's primary harbor where both the city and the planet narrowly avoided destruction when the Book's corrupted self-defense program, NachtWal, caused it to go berserk and awaken its Will.

After two near-catastrophic incidents happened in the same city in the space of the same year, the Bureau's management thought it best to house a small, semi-permanent outpost there. The Three Aces being powerful, gifted, and famous as they were, they tended to attract trouble... better to have staff on hand to monitor them while they grew and trained, the higher-ups thought. Once all three graduated from school and became independent, plans could be implemented to relocate them to Midchilda, or any number of other Class-M planets, should they choose. The outpost could then be shut down quietly with little trouble, leaving Earth in relative peace. In theory, anyway. For now, the outpost stayed.

Not that the outpost, the TSAB officers on hand, or the mysterious warning were of very much help when the invasion came. Command structure, communication lines, and logistics were all in tatters in the wake of the Unisoned Will annihilating the Dimensional Navy and Headquarters with it. Without their fleets of trans-dimensional ships, Bureau officers could only rely on small craft or their personal transport spells to travel from place to place and planet to planet, the latter of which cost vast amounts of mana for each use. The only military branches of the TSAB left operational were the Ground and Air Forces, spread out across Bureau territory and all largely stranded. With no fleets, moving any of their forces any substantial distance was a long, slow, arduous process, prone to failures. Even the divisions in some semblance of proper order were hardly combat-ready, for everyone knew someone who had died in the Will's massacre. The families, the friends, and the fellow officers that the thousands of dead left behind were haunted wrecks, barely functional and hanging on by threads. All their best and brightest were assembled as part of the Navy that day, and they all knew it.

So when Dead End came to Uminari, it soon became apparent that the officers assigned to the outpost were woefully outmatched. None of them lasted long; the fortunate ones were killed immediately upon discovery, overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The less fortunate were captured alive, either snatched off-world to God-knew-where or used for something far more sinister. As their numbers dwindled, all they could do was to evacuate what civilians that they could, and try to protect the ones that were left...