This is kind of stretching the limits of how long a chapter should be, but it's been so long that it's kind of expected that there's some real meat to it.

Thanks to everyone who's still kept track of this story after all this time. This chapter draws the A's arc to a close in one go. Enjoy.

Chapter 16: Simple Wishes

Yuuno turned on his video camera with a faint click, and double-checked his microphone. The sun beat down harshly overhead, and from the dunes at the sides and the sand beneath his feet radiated blistering heat. His barrier jacket kept him from having to suffer from the environment, but naturally he was aware of what he was protecting himself from. He raised one hand out in front of his face, palm towards his target and began his spell.

"All set up here."

Arf hefted her own equipment some distance away, and was seemingly sweating herself dry in record time. She was originally a wolf, and her nice thick coat was meant to trap heat, not disperse it. She didn't complain, despite her obvious suffering. Just a few more minutes…

As the last few confirmations came in from the other mages, Nanoha aimed carefully at her target. Raising Heart's mind clicked together with her own as she prepared herself for a flurry of calculations. She ignored the trickle of moisture down the back of her neck, her body's suffering nothing in the face of the task before her. The pink orb at the end of her device stabilized at the size of a volleyball, while ribbons of light encircled it.

"Stimulus No. 37," Yuuno spoke into his throat mic, quickly noting the parameters as Nanoha's spell completed. "Initiating in 3… 2… 1… fire!"

"Sealing!"

It was an impressive attempt by most standards. For the Book of Darkness, it required a visible modicum of effort to defeat. Visible enough to be caught on camera, this time. Arf heaved a sigh of relief.

Momoko nodded along to her daughter's chattering as she helped pick the last few globs of now-cooled glass from Nanoha's hair.

"I'm not going to have to cut any out. Your Barrier Jacket was well-formed, so none of your hair got trapped in molten sand." And what a thing to say. Momoko thought fondly of helping Miyuki free herself from hair stuck in chewing gum. It had been so normal. The poor girl had been so distraught by the prospect of losing that much hair if it had needed to be cut out.

Momoko flushed guiltily. There wasn't anything bad about Nanoha's misadventures being, ah, different. She was just a little thrown off-balance when Nanoha was completely unfazed by a completely different sort of reality that Momoko wasn't yet used to.

And at least Nanoha had not yet needed to wake her husband up in the middle of the night with a phone call for a quick reminder on how to properly clean viscera from ninja wire. It was just… Momoko had known she was marrying a nin-, no, a bodyguard. Now an ex-bodyguard. Her family consisted of a bunch of perfectly normal bakers… and two magical girls with their respective mascots.

It was a bit mean to think of it that way, but Momoko's mouth curled up at the edges. Poor Yuuno. No one was ever going to forget about his ferret transformation.

"I hope there wasn't too much of a footprint left," Kyouya worried, but Arf shook her head.

"Shamal put up this occlusion spell above us, and Vita smacked some dunes over the melted bits. It's not perfect, but no one's going to look closely at a random spot in the middle of the Sahara without a good reason."

"They won't be able to track our teleportation anyway, especially not after all this time," Yuuno assured him.

"Fate's on her way back from seeing Shamal," Arf spoke up.

"Great, you can both work on your kanji a little before bed," Yuuno decided.

"Hey, I'm not in school!" Arf tried to ward off the notion.

"Learning the language properly is important."

"Not everyone can be an absurd polyglot like you are!"

"Which is both you and Fate need to put the time and effort in."

"I'll help," Nanoha offered. "Yuuno's busy with the video we took, after all."

"Got a good look at the spell-circle it defended itself with this time," Yuuno agreed. "Sorry it took so long."

"You are giving me the equations you use for environmental protection in your barrier jacket during our next session," Arf growled, but there was no real rancor to it.

Momoko smiled, and wished these happy days could last as long as possible.

Hayate breathed rhythmically, teasing up tiny dregs of power from within, letting them come to the surface and fluoresce within her cupped hands. The specks of light did not last long, and swiftly dissipated, but she brought them out consistently.

"Now, try to hold them like in the other exercise," Zafira instructed. "Don't worry about shape or utility, just try to maintain the magilinks to those sparks while still drawing power out from your linker core."

Slowly, the duration of each of the lights increased, and while Hayate's rate of production stuttered a bit, she eventually filled her hands with a steady glow.

"There. Have a look," Zafira encouraged his Mistress.

Hayate blinked her eyes open, and squealed happily at the sight. "I did- No, don't go! Almost lost focus… but I did it!" She turned to Vita and showed off her success.

"That's great!" Vita cheered. "You didn't use the Book of Darkness at all!"

Hayate nodded, eyes tearing up. She'd actually done it. She hadn't really believed she could manage it before, but she'd really done it. Having this minimal control over her own linker core would probably only get her another few weeks of life, but… it was so precious. And someday, if she lived long enough, it was a promise of something she could never have grasped previously. The Book of Darkness had given her so much, and was promising to take so much away. This felt like grasping her fate with her own hands, at least a little.

"Someday, we'll all go flying together," Hayate promised her family. "Once I've learned to build my own wings."

"Good luck today," Fate told Yuuno as she and Nanoha slipped on their shoes to head to school.

Yuuno had been withdrawn for vague but plausible 'family reasons', so he was spending every day working on the Book of Darkness. It wasn't as if he gained an awful lot from going to school anyway, having credentials already, and even if that weren't true putting every effort into saving Hayate's life would still have taken precedence.

"Be careful, okay?" Nanoha admonished him.

"I'm always careful."

"The backlash last time you messed up sent you through two trees."

"And I wasn't hurt, because I was careful."

Nanoha giggled her agreement, and had Raising Heart pull up a simulation to occupy herself with as she walked out the door.

"What are you working on, Nanoha?"

"A barrier jacket modification, for enhancing my capabilities with the Starlight spells."

Fate tilted her head to the side, which sent her twintails bouncing slightly. Nanoha noted that Fate had tied them up with a pair of white ribbons again. "How are you planning on doing that?"

"I'm fiddling with a sort of psychosensory amplifier effect. The more magic I can sense, the further away I can form magilinks, and it's a pretty big improvement. But," Nanoha winced a little, "it's kind of overstimulating, like I'm in a really loud room and I can't shut out all of the noise everyone's making, but in my brain. I'm getting a lot of information that I just can't take advantage of because it's overwhelming."

"Information processing is something Raising Heart can probably do better than you if it's in large quantities," Fate pointed out.

"Raising Heart isn't very good at external mana manipulation, so there's a limit there, and while I can send her sensory information, I still have to experience it."

Fate nodded in understanding.

"I apologize, my master."

"Don't be silly Raising Heart. Someday we'll have access to the right materials, and we can design a new mode for you. It's not your fault I've started trying to do things you can't help me with. And in the end, it's thanks to your excellent support as a shooting and bombardment specialist that I've been able to experiment like this."

"Bardiche and I are planning to build a sword mode, because the scythe has some pretty big limitations," Fate offered.

"Are you going to start learning at our dojo then?" Nanoha wondered.

"I think so. Aerial combat is very different from ground combat, but…"

They let the conversation peter out as they approached the bus stop, and moved on to more socially accepted things out loud.

Nanoha did have one last thing to ask telepathically, however.

"How does Arf feel about you learning this sort of thing?"

"She says that I'm not to get sucked into your family's twisted ninja world even if I learn the clan style. Are the Takamachi really a ninja clan?"

"I don't think so. I've met Mom's family and they aren't exactly combat capable. And on Dad's side… Miyuki's birth mother is in law enforcement, but other than that… so maybe?"

"We really need to ask about this at some point…"

"Is there something wrong with me?"

"No. You are quite functional," Shamal replied immediately.

The trickling of a large fountain behind them filled the quiet as Fate looked down at her hands.

"But… you're trying to heal me."

"You have been hurt," Shamal agreed. "So as you are an ally, I am here to help. There is nothing wrong with your current state, as you are functional. But you could be better... optimized."

Fate frowned at that. "Optimized for what?" She asked a little petulantly.

"Your purpose," Shamal said nonchalantly. "You were created for a reason, right?"

Fate froze.

Shamal shook her head slowly. "Your situation is not something that makes a lot of sense to me. I know my purpose on a fundamental level. To create an intelligence, and miscommunicate the desires that led to its creation? That is highly negligent. Many synthesized beings would self-terminate to escape such conditions, so your resilience is to be commended."

"Stop it!" Fate trembled with a mix of panic, rage and fear pulsing in her chest. "Stop talking about me like I'm… like I'm not a person!"

"Does being artificial make you less of a person?"

Fate bit off her reply before it left her mouth, and flushed with shame. "Sorry," she said softly, bowing her head. "I- I didn't mean it to come out like that."

If it came down to a question of artificiality, it was Shamal's magically constructed mind and body rather than Fate's flesh and bone one that stood out. Fate really hadn't meant to imply that the woman was somehow less of a person because of it, but it had come out like that because she spoke thoughtlessly.

"I just... I don't like being treated like a tool," Fate haltingly clarified.

"But you were made for a purpose, by the creator you still care for," Shamal said leadingly. "That body and mind of yours was made for a specific purpose, just as mine was, just as Bardiche's was. The reason for my existence is very central to my self-identity. Is it different for you?"

Fate averted her gaze, unable to give a proper response.

"Regular humans are much the same, you know," Shamal mused out loud. "Purpose, a direction in life, goals to strive for, an ideal they aspire towards, that sort of thing is important to most sapients. You are capable of rational decision making and are not constrained by hard-coded shackles, so objectively there is no reason you cannot ignore Precia's desires. But I have two questions for you. What did Precia really want? And, how do you feel about that?"

"My mother?" Miyuki hummed thoughtfully. "Well, I assume she wanted a child to raise, carry on the family business, continue the sword style, that sort of thing. I've never actually asked, since we're kind of estranged. It was more, uh," she rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly, "demanding answers about her abandoning me and… there was this whole big fight. She's kind of just been in touch from time to time, but neither of us has really reached out."

Fate shuffled in place a little, not sure what to say.

"Why the interest? She's not going to be showing up around here anytime soon."

"Shamal and I have been talking about Mother," Fate said vaguely.

Miyuki chewed on that for a little while. "Don't worry too much about things like what Precia wanted from you. She's not around anymore, after all. Besides, she got her crazy wish, didn't she?"

Green light flared and shifted around the room as ribbons of light wrapped around the Book of Darkness and Hayate. A circle of sigils hovered above the open pages.

With an almost tangible pulse, the Book filled a page, and the light moved in a flurry. Yuuno tried to grasp as much information as he could from the transfer, but it was a frustrating battle to make sense of it. Yuuno only had so much attention he could direct, and though he repeated this exercise at every opportunity he was making infuriatingly little progress on this front.

Once the power that had been ripped from Hayate vanished into the Lost Logia, Shamal immediately began examining the damage. She relaxed a little when it became clear that Hayate had not worsened more than expected.

Yuuno winced as he let his spells fade, and massaged his aching temples. "It certainly isn't getting friendlier," he muttered as he jotted down his thoughts in a notepad.

Signum, looming over his shoulder, furrowed her brow as he wrote. "Is that relative position then?"

"I'm thinking so," Yuuno agreed. "But I'm not sure where it's getting the value from. I don't think I'll be able to get at it like this, since that's highly important data about its mistress. I'm doubtful about my ability to modify that sort of thing."

Signum nodded thoughtfully. "There has to be a way for us to change it, since we can command the Book of Darkness to target linker cores that we harvest."

Yuuno tapped his pen on the page. "So you definitely have that authority. We could try having you do that during the time period we expect the next page to fill, see what happens… how slow can you make that collection spell work?"

"Well, mechanically there's a sort of rough rate it has to progress at." Shamal rested her hand on her chin as she considered. "The more power a given linker core has and the less full the page it is filling is, the faster the drain progresses. And one page fills at a time, so there's a lower limit and an upper limit. If I botch the connection with the linker core a bit, then I could slow the amount the Book gathers, but that only lowers the rate of energy drain from the linker core by… about thirty percent?"

"So we'd need to drain something with a respectable amount of magic to try to interfere with the Book's targeting of Hayate," Signum concluded.

"Not really viable then," Yuuno agreed. The only good sources available were those at the Takamachi household, and the current plan was to only drain them as a last ditch resort to try to fill up all of the pages. It wouldn't give enough to fill the Book, not at the rate Hayate's illness was progressing with each page drawn from her, but it would get them close enough that maybe the Wolkenritter could manage the rest… one way or another.

Hayate, the primary opponent of resorting to such measures, was a troublesome liege indeed. But her word was law for her knights.

"We should be able to verify this much if we set up an experiment carefully," Yuuno said to Hayate. "We can borrow one of Suzuka's cats. I'll only have a second or so, and there won't be any significant gain, but if I'm looking to do a handful of comparisons it should be simple enough."

"Is animal testing really alright?" Hayate asked. "And, a cat? Could it at least not be something cute?"

"Sorry, but this really is for the best," Shamal assured Hayate. "It will hardly know anything happened."

Hayate nodded her agreement. She really didn't like being the cause of suffering, but if it was only on this level she didn't really have much of a reason to stand in the way when this might save her life. What she really wanted to avoid was the Wolkenritter just teleporting half the world away and slaughtering their way through the mystically capable populace of several cities to save her.

Maybe it was stupid to not let them save her life in the most expedient way, but having the Wolkenritter follow her every command meant she absolutely had to have standards that she stuck to, no matter what. Thinking of what might happen otherwise…

The things she could gain by giving up on her principles and wielding the power she had obtained at the expense of others… they weren't worth what she'd lose. There was absolutely a better way forward, Hayate had to believe that.

"Mother wanted Alicia back. For her daughter to be alive again."

"Precia spent a lot of time lying. To you, and to herself." Shamal spoke the truth flatly. "I suspect there is more to it. After all, shouldn't she have been satisfied with you, if that's what she wanted?"

"But she didn't get what she wanted. I wasn't the same as Alicia."

Shamal frowned. "You are her daughter, biologically. And your memories go back to before the accident. What else did she want?"

"I only match Alicia roughly," Fate explained. "All the little things don't match up. I write with the wrong hand, I don't prefer and dislike the same foods, and my habits were a little different. I guess I just glossed over it back then, without understanding that I and the girl in my memories were different people, but looking back there's a big difference."

"Are those things important?"

Fate shifted uncomfortably. "They were the space between Mother's desires for me and the reality. I wasn't the same as Alicia."

"Was Precia the same as the mother you remember?" Shamal inquired.

"No," Fate admitted. "I noticed the differences, though I couldn't properly explain them."

"Did the differences make you stop loving her?"

"Of course not!" Fate protested. "She was still my mother! She was sick and angry and she changed my, um, I mean she didn't call me by the name she did in my memories." Fate floundered a little. "Alicia's memories, I mean," she corrected.

"So the space between the real Precia and the one you remembered and tried to bring back didn't stop you from loving her as your mother?" Shamal said deliberately.

"No," Fate mumbled, seeing where this was going.

"Even though it stopped her from loving you as her daughter?"

"I get it," Fate muttered. "I know that she's not a… good person."

Shamal shook her head. "I'm not necessarily trying to make a moral judgement here, though we both know there is one to be made. Instead, are you sure that Precia wasn't successful?"

Fate frowned. "I don't understand."

"Setting aside the fact that you went along with Precia's whims and started calling yourself Fate, can you say you are not Alicia?"

"Of course I'm not."

"But you remember being her. And your body is the same as hers."

"But I wasn't the same as her in other ways. I just explained that." Fate shook her head. "Besides, the real Alicia was still around."

"Precia wasn't the same either, but you didn't think she was a different person," Shamal pointed out. "And from the beginning, the procedure your body was created for was intended to transplant Alicia's mind from her body into yours. You saw an unmoving, unaware body that Precia thought was Alicia. And the girl in front of me woke up for the first time with Alicia's memories and feelings."

Fate mulled the idea over for a while.

"It… could be possible. I can't prove otherwise," Fate admitted reluctantly. "But I can't imagine Mother being that…"

She trailed off, leaving the thought unfinished.

"Unless you want to take up the name Alicia again, it doesn't really matter what the truth is." Shamal admitted. "You inherited Alicia's memories and feelings. But that wasn't enough for Precia because that wasn't what she really wanted."

"Then what do you think she wanted?" Fate said a bit skeptically.

"She wanted to go back to those days from Alicia's memories," Shamal postulated. "To regain the happiness she had back then."

"I don't think reviving Alicia was just a means to an end to Mother," Fate disagreed harshly.

Shamal smiled sadly. "People are complicated. Fate, your mother couldn't accept that Alicia might have changed. She couldn't move on. And what you haven't internalized yet is that this is absolutely not your fault. You were always going to grow up, and change, and stop being the girl that your mother was obsessed with. Children don't stay children forever."

Fate clenched her fists tightly.

"Precia couldn't accept that the past she wanted to reclaim was beyond her reach. She was trying to do the impossible. Even reviving Alicia's body would not have granted her wish, because Precia wasn't the same person from back then, and Alicia was ripped out of the time she remembered to an unfamiliar future. Fate, giving Precia what she wanted was always impossible."

"…I can't believe that," Fate eventually whispered. "If you tell me that Mother wouldn't have loved Alicia, would have treated her like she treated me… I can't believe it. Alicia's memories of Mother… I can't call those emotions from back then a lie, and I can't accept that someone can be twisted so completely."

"Three decades is a long time for humans, Fate. People change, and not always for the better."

Yuuno had suggested a while back that she separate her Starlight Breaker's preparation into two stages, because trying to collect mana and compress it simultaneously was too much. Ultimately, she wanted to exceed that expectation, but for now Yuuno was correct, and she had improved in both areas.

"Density increasing." Raising Heart announced. "120%... 140%... 160%... …175%. Containment destabilizing… Ending simulation."

Nanoha winced. "That went better, but…"

That level of power going out of control was no joke.

"Really need to get more data with the new barrier jacket. It'll probably be a very different experience… Better all around, but it will take getting used to, won't it?"

"Yes, my master."

"I wonder if I could ask Vita to set up a barrier for me," Nanoha mused. "She's been running a lot of errands lately, so if I give her the chance to blow off some steam…"

Zafira and Signum were typically the ones who acted as Hayate's bodyguards, while Shamal did everything she could to figure out ways to extend Hayate's lifespan. So Vita ended up doing things she wasn't really suited to temperamentally, like getting groceries and fetching experimental supplies. There was little smashing involved, and Vita couldn't spar as often as she liked these days, so she'd probably look forward to helping Nanoha out.

Yuuno and Arf were working on the Book of Darkness more or less non-stop, and so couldn't set aside time for the regular barrier sessions and Nanoha's theoretical education had also largely dropped off. Well, it might be better to say that Fate had taken over, but Fate didn't have the sort of expansive education that Yuuno did, and she had her own constraints on her time.

It was frustrating how little she had to offer outside her bombardment and sealing magic, but that's just how her repertoire had ended up thanks to the circumstances under which she had learnt thus far. She did have some very basic competence at healing now, and her own studies into external mana manipulation were bearing fruit, so she hadn't stagnated or anything at least.

"Let's try again for now Raising Heart."

"Yes, my master."

A blur of white and pink flashed across the night sky, churning up a froth of pink motes behind her, which coalesced into small stars.

Vita materialized a handful of metallic orbs, and tossed them before her. Like some sort of strange game of croquet, the knight swung Graf Eisen in a precise arc, punishing each of the heavy balls with a devastating blow that sent the projectiles careening towards her target. Her effortless display of inhuman strength was accompanied by mystical direction, and each orb now burned with red mana.

"Schwalbefliegen," her device intoned as the attack homed in on Nanoha.

There was a slight delay before the stars Nanoha had left in her wake responded to the threat, but they descended upon the incoming projectiles en masse before they became a threat to Nanoha. Nanoha's projectiles certainly had the advantage in numbers, but…

"Geeze. Don't try to guide that many at once if you want precision," Vita sighed. She'd stuck to four of her own for a reason.

Sure enough, Vita's ability to direct her four projectiles was far beyond Nanoha's ability to micromanage her thirty odd bullets. Schwalbefliegen threaded through the incoming storm and continued towards Nanoha.

The young mage slowed and turned, and coalesced another eight stars from the surrounding mana. Bringing her hand down upon Vita's attack, she sent the bullets in two waves, trying to predict how each orb would evade.

She got one of them, dispersing it with just one hit. Decent firepower then, though Vita would never claim to be a ranged specialist.

But it was clearly a matter of more luck than anything else, as the others easily broke through. Vita brought them to a halt with a thought, not bothering to continue the chase. Nanoha was a good flier, but that wasn't what she was working on right now.

"And you lose," Vita said dryly as she flew up to speak with Nanoha. "Care to guess why?"

"I couldn't maneuver my bullets as fast as you could," Nanoha said, almost apologetically.

Vita shook her head. "No, don't be stupid. Why couldn't you? The why is the important part!"

"Sorry," Nanoha rubbed her neck sheepishly. "Um, because I haven't practiced this spell enough?"

"Know your limits, you brat," Vita snarked at the girl. "You've got finite mental focus to go around, and that's directly tied to your ability to guide your bullets," she said leadingly. "So, why were my four better than your eight, and why did those eight do better than that extravagantly large array you tried using at the beginning?"

"Oh, I get it," Nanoha perked up. "I'll need to work on switching between guiding sets of smaller groups, then?"

Vita exhaled heavily. "That's not a completely terrible idea," she grudgingly admitted, "if your device can help out with that, but I'd suggest aiming most of them and guiding a few to take advantage of the area denial your barrage of aimed bullets provides. You can't use fifty bullets in the exact same way you use five and expect to get the same performance in both cases!" She pointed dramatically at Nanoha with Graf Eisen to punctuate the statement.

Nanoha wilted a little under Vita's withering gaze.

"Now repeat after me," Vita said slowly. "More bullets is not better."

"More bullets is not better," Nanoha mumbled. Vita chose to ignore her lack of enthusiasm.

"Tactically appropriate use of enough bullets is better!"

"That's not very snappy," Nanoha protested. "Isn't there a better way to say that?"

"I'm sorry," Vita drawled, "my pedagogical degree seems to have gotten dusty. I'll make you write lines instead, then?"

"What does pedagogical mean?"

"That's it, sparring time!"

"Eep! I'm sorry! I really want to know, though!"

"You can apologize by not losing instantly to my awesomeness! Give me a good workout like you agreed to earlier! Graf Eisen!"

"Explosion!" Graf Eisen obligingly powered up with a cartridge, sending the spent casing flying out from the hammer's mechanism.

"It gets bigger?!"

"And so I let her off with nothing worse than minor contusions, for I am a kind and forgiving soul capable of rising above such provocation," Vita concluded proudly, as if expecting praise.

"I'm glad," Zafira rumbled. "With your temper, I was a little worried."

Vita stared at him as if he had committed some grand betrayal, eyes wide with weeping emotion. "I- I don't have a temper!" Vita insisted childishly.

"Of course you don't," Hayate hesitantly lied in false agreement, but Zafira could see Vita lapping it up. He could almost hear her crying out 'praise me more' inside her head.

Shamal looked up from the cat she was cradling to exchange rueful glances with the more adult knights. She cleared her throat and changed the topic. "Well, I think at this point it's safe to send Miss Fluffypaws back home."

"She's going to be alright then?" Hayate perked up at the news and rolled over to have a look at the sleeping pet.

"This kitty is going to be just fine," Shamal assured her with a smile.

"Is Yuuno making any progress?" Vita asked silently.

Signum responded from the kitchen as she prepared dinner. "There seems to be some potential in creative use of the Book's collection magic. The Book encodes only one source of data at a time, as that function is tied to the page filling function as a result of the mechanism by which the collection occurs."

"So while we're draining someone else, Hayate will be safe?"

Shamal corrected Vita's assumption as she passed Hayate the sleepy cat. "Her condition will dramatically improve. However, the Book puts a lot of strain on her in its incomplete state, and given how far she has weakened, filling the Book is a necessity for Hayate to recover her health and survive for a full human lifespan."

The Wolkenritter observed their Mistress play with Miss Fluffypaws for a little while.

"Hayate has made her opinion on the subject of us harvesting clear," Signum said with finality. "But with some careful modifications to the collection spell, which seem to be feasible, it may be possible for us to perform an artificial boost to the amount of mana within a linker core even as the Book drains it."

Zafira glanced sideways towards the kitchen. "…If we keep to draining non-sapients, Yuuno came up with a theoretically viable plan for discharging a loaded cartridge into an extracted linker core. This would be lethal to the animals, and it relies on our limited cartridge resources, and the yield for each animal is estimated at perhaps a page each, so it is suboptimal."

With the number of strong mages at hand, charging their cartridges was less of a bottleneck than their inability to manufacture more cartridges. As for animals, they could help decrease Australia's rabbit problem… no, those were considered cute, better target some rodents Hayate would object to less. Some research would improve the process, no doubt. But they could definitely save Hayate. Their goal was within their grasp.

Yet, Zafira did not feel the sense of relief he should, and it seemed that it was much the same for the others. Hayate was less informed as a result of her lesser education, yet when they had discussed this earlier, she had been thankful, and even now there was a sense of relaxation and relief that their Mistress had increasingly lacked as her illness progressed. However, she was not celebrating just yet.

There was a niggling worry in the back of Zafira's mind, like he was missing something. He wondered if the others felt the same way, as if there was some gnawing fear-

-but there was no reason to dwell on it. Certainly no cause to speak of it. No need to worry Hayate for no reason.

Yes, this was a happy occasion. Why, his fellow knights looked more cheerful already.

Nanoha splayed out across the table and whimpered as Yuuno tended to her aches and pains.

"I know this was a good opportunity, but you need to avoid overtraining," Kyouya cautioned his little sister. "You can do yourself harm if you push yourself too far mentally and physically."

"It wasn't the training," Nanoha protested. "I mean, even the sparring would have been fine, but she had these cartridge things she kept putting in her device and the hammer kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it grew rockets and…"

Kyouya nodded along bemusedly. He didn't really get it, but it sounded rough.

"It grew?" Fate leaned towards her. "How?"

Nanoha cracked an eye open to look her way. "I don't know… It wasn't like an energy projection, it got physically bigger. I think it might be like how Raising Heart and Bardiche pull out their mechanical components, but I think Vita's device is different from them in a lot of ways so I just don't know."

"I really hope that the Wolkenritter will be willing to teach us about the time they originate from," Yuuno said earnestly. "Archeology doesn't easily lend itself to solid answers, most of the time. Eyewitness testimony, functioning Belkan devices, a vast magical encyclopedia? They could revolutionize the field."

"Speaking of scholarly stuff," Arf said with a yawn as she sauntered in, "I've got my comments written down."

Yuuno nodded. "Great. I'll swap notebooks with you after dinner."

"You've really got into the swing of things, haven't you?" Fate said to her familiar. "Are you enjoying this sort of work?"

"Well," Arf scratched her cheek awkwardly, "I wouldn't say it necessarily plays to my natural strengths, but being Yuuno's assistant isn't a bad gig. I think I'm doing decently, and I like feeling useful, but on the other hand I'm like the second most ignorant person in the room so it's kind of bad for my ego."

"You've been a lot of help, Arf," Yuuno said with a smile. "By the way," he said to the two girls, "you should have a look at what we're up to at the moment. We've got something that I feel is going to work, but I could use some other opinions on the spell design tweaks and mana transfer work."

"You're almost there, then?" Nanoha asked excitedly.

"Yeah, once we gave up on hacking into the Book's source code or gaining administrator privileges or editing Hayate's personal data and stuff like that, we tried getting back to basics and screwing with the Book's linker core collection magic," Arf said with a shrug. "It's looking pretty solid at this point."

"That's wonderful." Fate clasped her hands together and smiled.

"Not sure where we'll get enough ferrets to explode though," Arf grinned cheekily at Yuuno.

"It was just the first idea I had!" Yuuno protested. "The brute force method of mana transfer isn't going to be the most efficient, so nothing is going to explode when we're ready to start! Especially not ferrets!"

Kyouya, feeling a little left out, slipped out of the room and left them to their playful bickering.

Supporting those kids was easy enough, but it was hard to interact with Nanoha and the others when he was just such an outsider in such an important part of their lives. He didn't understand the theoretical things they discussed, couldn't meaningful contribute to any of the practical bits, and he suspected that when those four grew up, they would literally leave him behind to go to another world where he could not follow.

It hurt, knowing that even though their family had come back together, it wouldn't stay that way. Couldn't stay that way. This was not a world that was ready for magic, ready for Nanoha. But there were other worlds. Kyouya would never try to stop her from seeking her happiness around another star.

Growing up didn't always mean growing apart. But sometimes, it did.

In the soft darkness of the bedroom she shared with Fate, Nanoha's eyes gleamed with the pink glow of Raising Heart's simulation. The young mage sat still, her spine ramrod straight as she battled mentally against her device's efforts. Raising Heart's faint glow brightened and dimmed ever so slightly the thrum of her master's heart.

In time, the light faded from Nanoha's vision. The simulation had ended in Nanoha's success.

"I guess this is as far as we can go, Raising Heart," she murmured.

"More data required," Raising Heart agreed.

"But that would be pretty dangerous, wouldn't it?" Nanoha mused. "Even at this level, its way beyond the original Starlight Breaker. Practical tests could be catastrophic if there is failure at attempting to go beyond this level, so it would be completely irresponsible to keep going in this direction without a good reason. And with Hayate's family as our allies, won't it be fine to relax now?"

"Yes, my master."

Nanoha smiled down at her partner, and looked over at Fate's gently sleeping form. "This happiness doesn't need more strength to protect it," she whispered. "We just need to heal Hayate. And thanks to Yuuno and Arf there's a way forward. So, Raising Heart, please open a workspace. I'll need the equations for the manalink boosting barrier jacket modifications and Wide Area Search to start with."

"Yes, my master."

The next morning, the four mages of the Takamachi household gathered in the entryway.

"You came up with this that fast?" Yuuno said incredulously.

"It's an idea I've been playing with for a while," Nanoha admitted. "It wasn't until I was satisfied with my modified barrier jacket that using the principles elsewhere was worthwhile."

There were two big limits to Nanoha's external mana manipulation. First, her mental focus. Nanoha's multitasking ability was much better than the average person, especially with Raising Heart taking some of the load, but having to form magilinks with mana outside her body meant she had at least one extra mental load she couldn't pass off to her device. This was a major trade-off in combat when using her starlight series of spells. Outside combat, as in this case, it was less of an issue.

Second, Nanoha relied on her psychosensory abilities to form magilinks and manipulate mana. That was true of everyone, but most people only needed to be able to keep track of their own magic and sense the well of power that was their linker core. Nanoha had a more developed 'sixth sense' than most mages, but she still had to strain her metaphorical eyes to get enough mana to cast a Starlight Breaker worth the time and effort.

The modifications to her barrier jacket were based around amplifying her ability to form magilinks, like hooking her natural ability to a speaker so more mana could 'hear' her, and enhancing her ability to receive and interpret psychosensory data like a passive signals detection system. Well, the interpretation part was kind of a work in progress still, but that was the idea.

But those effects just had to be mystically connected to her; they didn't really have to be wrapped around her body if she could connect her senses to the magic. Connected to her senses like the Wide Area Search spell, for example.

It was the logical continuation. The downside was…

"It's completely impractical," Arf pointed out. "Your brain isn't a parallel processing supercomputer, you know? How many of these things can you realistically use?"

"That's not very nice," Fate tried to support Nanoha. "I mean, if it's Nanoha she'll definitely have some use for it. At least a little."

"Ehehehe," Nanoha laughed awkwardly. "Arf is kind of right, Fate. How many I can use… Well, in combat, um, none," Nanoha admitted. This was another thing she could really use supporting hardware for, but it wasn't like modifying Raising Heart was possible with the resources available. "My psychosensory abilities, I can't effectively use them like I do my eyes, so since Wide Area Search is already a serious risk, doing this would be really stupid. But, if it's just directing as large a volume of mana as possible towards one point, without any considerations for me doing anything else, then this can definitely do the job."

"One point, like an extracted linker core," Yuuno concluded, looking it over. "So instead of using the mana injection function of the Wolkenritter's cartridges, you'd be handpumping in a stream of mana from the atmosphere. I'll have to talk to Shamal though. I'm not sure what kind of effects having mana magilinked to someone else being inserted into a linker core would have."

"And we'll need to figure out the best parts of the atmosphere to draw mana from and figure out what the best sort of linker core to work with would be," Arf added.

"If we use one of us, won't that be fine? Other than Arf, I mean." Fate tapped fingers together consideringly. "I'd probably be the best choice, right? Since Yuuno will need to work on the Book, and Nanoha will need to gather the mana. I should do my part as well."

Arf shook her head harshly. "No way. This can't be good for someone, who knows what kind of long term effects this could have on your linker core? We'll stick with animal testing."

"I honestly don't know whether a strong linker core like yours would be better than a weak one, Fate," Yuuno said with a frown. "We've got a lot of things we need to figure out still. And while I'm sure that Hayate would appreciate your willingness to volunteer, she wouldn't want you to get hurt either."

Fate hung her head. "Sorry. I got ahead of myself."

"I don't think it's a bad thing that you want to help," Nanoha said cheerfully, giving Fate a hug.

"I can't really do anything, though."

Nanoha could tell she was genuinely frustrated, but that didn't really change anything. Fate simply didn't have an applicable skill with which to contribute.

"As combat specialists, we can't offer much at the moment, but isn't it fine?" Nanoha asked. "We'll be able to help more when Hayate is healed."

Fate frowned at her. "Help with what?"

"She's going to have a lot of physiotherapy to do, so she'll need the support of her friends," Nanoha pointed out. "And, won't we all be learning magic together?"

Fate hummed noncommittally.

"Speaking of friends, Yuuno hasn't spent any time at all with Arisa recently," Nanoha noted. "You keep going by Suzuka's place to borrow her cats, but I can't remember the last time you and Arisa were in the same room."

Yuuno chuckled nervously. "We don't really get along all that well? Our temperaments don't really click, and she keeps pestering me."

"She has better taste than Suzuka," Arf offered, but said nothing to contradict Yuuno's assessment.

"Her being a dog person does not excuse her weird personality," Yuuno insisted.

"There is nothing wrong with my personality!" Arisa insisted, standing up and slamming her hands on her desk.

"Calm down, Arisa," Suzuka pleaded. "He's been hard at work saving Hayate."

"You aren't the one he's avoiding," Arisa growled. "Oh, this is so not how a boy is supposed to treat a lady! I'm going to wring that ferret's neck the next time I see him!"

Fate quietly slunk into her seat and let Nanoha and Suzuka try to wrangle their childhood friend.

Really, and Arisa wondered why Yuuno was only visiting Suzuka's mansion.

The four girls sat together on the roof, eating lunch. It was a bit chilly, even with winter clothes, but they were enjoying the chance to be outside after morning lessons.

"So what does Shamal do with you during your sessions?" Suzuka asked, then held up a hand to dismiss the comment, looking apprehensive. "Oh, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

Fate tilted her head. "It's fine. Lately, we've mostly been discussing the ethical and sociological implications of synthesizing sapient-level intelligences."

"Is that really therapy?" Arisa said skeptically. "That's more like philosophy, or debate club."

"Mm," Fate hummed noncommittally. "Shamal says that I should be prepared to deal with the issues surrounding my creation and develop my own point of view on my self-identity and be prepared to defend it."

"Well, Fate has been…" Nanoha groped for a way to phrase it. "Calmer, maybe? More settled? I don't know when it happened, but compared to how you were when you moved in with us, there's a big difference. You were jumpy and nervous and never turned your back on Mom or Dad when you could help it."

"Was I really like that?" Fate asked, trying to dredge up memories. She certainly hadn't intended to be like that. "Sorry if I troubled you."

"No, it makes me happy that you've become so much more comfortable with us," Nanoha said with a smile. "Back then, I really messed up, and things went really wrong," she said quietly, face downturned. "I worried that… that maybe I'd really broken things in a way that couldn't be fixed. But you started to smile more, and that made things better. Because if my friends are smiling, then everything's alright. So, if talking about things like that with Shamal helps you, I think you should keep doing it."

Fate stared at Nanoha, a little surprised.

"Nanoha…" Fate smiled at her dear friend. "Yes. Thank you."

As Nanoha and today's test subject, a Mister Snufflewumps, took their places, Fate walked over to where Hayate was watching from the sidelines. Zafira eyed her carefully, but didn't move in preparation for an attack. It was nice to know that Zafira didn't feel the need to threaten her to ensure Hayate's safety.

Hayate braced herself with one hand while she carefully reached down into the back between her feet to store a book. Using her arms to keep herself balanced, she flexed them hard to right herself again.

Fate looked over her, worried. "How far has it reached? You could use your abdominal muscles a lot more last time I saw you do that."

"I use my arms for pretty much everything now," Hayate admitted. "It, well, it would be a lot worse without Shamal's magic, since the paralysis is well into my intestines right now."

"Is she doing your dialysis now then?"

Hayate fidgeted uncomfortably. "Well, the kidneys and liver are still high enough up that there isn't a problem with them yet, and anyway I don't mind the loss of them so much as I do… uh, certain muscles. Shamal's pretty much forcing my body to absorb nutrients and is taking care of the… remnants with her spells."

Fate was puzzled for a moment, before flushing in embarrassment. "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to…"

Hayate waved it off. "I'm not offended. I just don't know how people handle it when they can't magic away the problem. It's already pretty humiliating. Other than that, Shamal has taken over producing some of the hormones and stuff that my body can't anymore, since everything below my waist is just dead weight now."

"You'll get it back," Fate earnestly assured her.

"I know," Hayate smiled gently, clasping her hands together. "Everyone has been so amazing. I really thought that I was going to die, but thanks to all of you I'm going to pull through. I don't know how I can ever repay you."

"I haven't done anything," Fate pointed out.

"Well, you saved the world, and it is thanks to you that your friends are alive to find a way to save me," Hayate countered. "I did mean all four of you, though," the wheel-chair bound girl admitted.

"I don't know if we really want you to repay us," Fate said quietly. "Well, as an archaeologist Yuuno would love to be able to learn all about Ancient Belka from your family, but a life is worth saving for the sake of saving a life, I think."

Hayate giggled, covering her mouth with her hand. Really, comparing with Arisa, Fate felt that Hayate was much more ladylike even without the mansion.

"You're really an ally of justice," Hayate said with a smile.

"Did I say something silly?" Fate said, feeling self-conscious.

"No, I think it's cool that you can say that sort of thing seriously," Hayate reassured her. "Yuuno and Nanoha are really the 'do you need a reason to help people' type, aren't they? And Arf is a good girl too. The four of you are amazing."

Fate was more than a little puzzled. "Do people normally need a reason to do the right thing? If you know what you should be doing, then doing it seems obvious? And because people can't agree, they sometimes end up fighting."

"I think most people get scared at a certain point, and they'll rationalize that even if something is wrong it is still the best thing for them," Hayate told her quietly. "Doing the right thing can hurt pretty badly."

"I think doing the wrong thing would end up hurting more, just…" Fate thought back to Mother, as she had really been, rather than how Alicia had remembered her. And back when she had fought Nanoha even as Nanoha tried to help her…

"Just in a different way," she said softly, clutching Bardiche to her chest.

"Yeah," Hayate said thoughtfully. "I guess you're right."

Hayate was quiet and pensive on the walk back to their home. Shamal pushed her wheelchair along the sidewalk smoothly, deftly assuring Hayate's safety and comfort, while Zafira walked beside her and Vita took the lead.

Signum kept a little ways back, on the opposite side from Zafira.

It was a cool day with a slight breeze that tousled Hayate's hair. Cars drifted past, but none presented threats. No assassins waited in side alleys. No snipers had taken nearby buildings as nests. It was a completely normal day in Uminari.

This was really a peaceful place.

"Those four are the real thing, aren't they?"

Hayate's voice broke up the quiet.

"The real thing?" Zafira asked without prompting.

Some of their prior masters would have harshly punished such behavior. Hayate encouraged it.

"Heroes, I mean."

"I suppose they qualify by most standards," Vita shrugged. "They might be kids, but saving the world looks pretty good on a resume."

Hayate smiled at Vita's flippancy, Signum was pleased to note.

"I guess that's true, but its more how they act," Hayate said, considering. "I don't think strength or accomplishments can make someone a hero. But, they're the type straight from legends, like they walked out of a storybook. The kind that wanders into town one day and sees a problem and fixes it because they can, so it's only natural that they would. They don't pretend that it is someone else's problem."

Signum could imagine the scene. Those four walking into some African town preyed on by warlords and bandits… they would never even consider standing aside if they saw a bad thing happen in front of them. It was a little frightening, imagining what lengths they might go to. What they might have been pushed to, were they not living in this peaceful place. What if Nanoha had been living in Rwanda during the genocide, with the kind of power she had at her disposal? How many hours would it take for her to destroy the kind of military force that the average 'third world' nation could field? How many days to topple a regime?

Most people had relatively low limits to their ability to change the world. But how many innocents could Yuuno protect at once, against the entire world if he had to? Thousands, probably. And Fate and Arf were already strong enough to carve an effortless swathe of destruction across the battlefield. Their power would only grow from there.

That kind of strength could make and break empires, because it was not reliant on the support of followers or a strong industrial base or a well-trained military. In Signum's experience, a King ruled because they were strong, and they collected followers of that strength in their wake. The first virtue of a King was simply strength, such that it allowed reshaping their kingdom as they saw fit. (Here's one way for a kingdom to be born: someone strong wanders into a lawless town and destroys all of the evil before their eyes, and the people love them and name them a hero, and the hero protects them from enemies without and crime within, and so the people follow that hero anywhere and obey their laws and swear by their name.)

The Wolkenritter were monsters on a level beyond the young children at the Takamachi household. If Hayate wished, she could be Queen with but a word.

"One without strength cannot be a hero," Signum said truthfully. "Good intentions mean nothing without the power to act on them. Of course, there is more than one kind of strength."

Combat prowess was by far the most likely to make heroes rather than martyrs, so Signum would hesitate to call other varieties of strength equally useful.

"You're probably right, Signum." Hayate looked down at the Book of Darkness on her lap. "But I wonder, could I be like that?"

"If you really want to," Shamal told her. Most of their owners would have been offended by such a wishy-washy response. "However, even we are incapable of ensuring you do not come to harm if you seek out conflict."

Hayate did not react to the admission of weakness.

"So I would need to be strong enough to stand on my own, then." Hayate shook her head. "I should worry about learning to walk first before I start daydreaming, I guess."

"There has to be something I'm missing," Doctor Ishida said despairingly. "Her paralysis should not be propagating upwards. The biopsy is completely healthy."

Hayate had been a very good sport about the biopsy. She had been more concerned about the ethics of what was essentially stringing the poor woman along.

"So the muscles work?" Shamal asked with genuine interest.

"The response to stimulation was perfectly normal contractions," the doctor informed the knight. "We really should be able to get some response without removing them from her body."

"So it seems to be her nervous system then?" Shamal prompted.

Doctor Ishida grimaced. "That was the original assumption when Hayate entered our care here, but this spread of paralysis leads me to think we have been thinking about this the wrong way. Nerve damage just does not work like this. The progression is too uniform." She pursed her lips. "Can you think of anything that changed before this? Anything at all? Her diet, her habits, her clothes, anything?"

"No, if anything we only changed our routines after Hayate's condition began to worsen," Shamal said earnestly. "We've been keeping a closer eye on her nutrition, encouraged her to spend more time with her friends, spent more time on her exercises…"

"I think we really need to monitor her in the hospital for a few days in the near future," Doctor Ishida said with clear frustration. "Keep her in a different environment and get as many tests done as we can, see if anything shakes loose."

"When would you want to do this?" Shamal asked, already planning ways to postpone.

"How about the weekend after next? I need to arrange things beforehand, and I know her education is important."

Shamal smiled at Doctor Ishida. Two weeks was plenty of time. They could arrange for her miraculous recovery to begin thanks to the hospital's valiant efforts, and let it remain a mystery as to what the turning point was. By the time Christmas rolled around, Hayate would be starting to regain the use of her legs.

The birthday present had been something of a miss, but Shamal's Christmas present was looking to be right on track.

Nanoha tugged on her hair as she listened to Shamal's explanation.

"So, I can't do the transfer fast enough?" Nanoha concluded.

"Not without hurting the cat," Yuuno concluded. "We need something with a linker core five, maybe six times the size of…" He checked the pet's collar. "Of what Snugglekins here has. I know that the Wolkenritter went on a bit of an analyzing spree early on, so can any of you think of something that would work?"

"How long can you go without an air supply?" Zafira rumbled in response.

13 December 0065

14.3 km off Chichi-jima

986 m below sea level

During the day, it would be possible to see the faintest glimmer of light from the surface at this depth. But with night sky above and abyssal waters easily choking out the starlight, the only light came from the ethereal luminescence of magic.

Yuuno floated within a green bubble of safety. Were it to dissipate, he would have only seconds to form another one before his barrier jacket was unable to protect him from the crushing force of the ocean above him. But seconds was more than enough. Outside Yuuno's mystical bathysphere, Zafira floated effortlessly. This sort of environmental danger could not pierce the carefully crafted defenses of the Beast of the Shield.

Before them, trapped in bands of silver-white light, a vast creature found itself helpless against Zafira's binding spell. The mantle alone was more than twice Yuuno's height in length, and Yuuno could see an eye the size of his head set into the flesh. Most of the thick tentacles were visible, but two stretched off into darkness, their continuation only marked by Zafira's power pinning them in place at regular intervals.

At nearly twenty meters in totality, it was a true monster of the genus Architeuthis, a giant squid that would not be out of place in tales of legend.

"Target captured. I apologize that we took longer than anticipated," Zafira's deep bass echoed along their telepathic band.

A meter above the water's surface, the rest of the mages had gathered. Nanoha and Shamal stood on either side of Hayate's wheelchair, a platform of light supporting them. Vita, Arf and Fate flew off to the sides, while Signum stood above to guard against any interruptions.

"Thanks for your hard work," Hayate said, upbeat. "Nanoha?"

Nanoha blinked placidly, and slowly turned towards her disabled friend, clearly not entirely present. Her barrier jacket was no longer a minor modification of her school uniform. The white dress and the blue highlights remained, but the shoulders were much less pronounced and now a thick white tabard settled across them to hang down across her chest and back, a red crystal emblazoned above her heart. Her hair ribbons had vanished, leaving her hair to spill down below her shoulder blades, while a thin white band emerged from beneath her bangs to hold another ornamental crystal in the traditional location of the third eye.

It was Raising Heart who answered, the staff unchanged in Nanoha's hands.

"Psychosensory relays in place. All systems ready."

Hayate smiled at the device, then glanced towards Shamal and the Book hovering at the Knight of the Lake's side. "Shamal, I'll leave it to you."

"Understood," Shamal said seriously, calling a few more Mirror of Prospection windows into place so that she and Nanoha could have visual guidance. "Mirror of Travels," she intoned, calling a green opening in space into being. Searching for the target was the work of mere seconds, and she thrust her hand through the portal, ripping her target from the giant squid's body. "Nanoha, linker core has been identified and extracted. Transferring targeting data."

"Received," Raising Heart answered.

Nanoha slowly moved, holding Raising Heart horizontally before her with both hands. Her attention spread out kilometers to the sides and high into the sky, she reached out to the world.

"Gather, light of the stars," she said with a calm, clear voice. "Let the droplets be as a river, and flow into the sea. Let this power be as a gentle rain upon the parched land."

"Mana injection begins in 17 seconds," Raising Heart informed Shamal as the circle beneath Nanoha's feet shone with pink light.

The Knight of the Lake nodded, timeline set, and as the sky became almost imperceptibly lighter from the faint illumination of the ignited sparks of mana Nanoha was directing downwards, Shamal cast the carefully adjusted Collection spell.

The drain began as the light converged upon the linker core. There was little to be had from the squid, but a smooth and steady stream of power pressed in to be harvested, the modified spell stripping the linker core's defenses away and allowing Nanoha to force the unconsented transfer of mana. The squid, thoroughly discomfited by the violation, futilely tried to squirm, but Zafira had it locked down tight.

Yuuno carefully monitored the flow of magic from his bathysphere. "Nanoha, you will need to slow transfer by five percent."

There was no reply, but the stream moved a little more sedately. Not quite perfect, now the drain was outstripping the transfer slightly. Yuuno's heart beat loudly in his ears, but he remained outwardly unperturbed and sent the appropriate correction Nanoha's way.

Above, Signum kept an eagle eye out for any response from shore. Nanoha was doing an excellent job of minimizing visibility above the water, but realizing that something was occurring was likely if someone had cause to look. Whether anyone would pay the luminescence heed before they left? Unknown. Whether someone would attempt to attack in that timeframe? Unlikely. And, with Signum keeping watch, unsuccessful.

Hayate clutched the arms of her wheelchair as the Book of Darkness methodically filled one page at a time. Every second or two, another page would turn over, bringing the dark ink closer and closer to the back cover.

"Two hundred pages remain," Shamal sent telepathically. "Condition check."

"Giant squid remains stable and immobile," came from the depths below.

"All systems operational," said Raising Heart.

As the number of remaining pages dwindled, Fate watched Nanoha nervously. Perspiration was budding on Nanoha's brow as the one hundred mark ticked over, but Raising Heart returned an all clear. Was she truly alright? The amount of effort this must be taking was incredible.

Arf rested a supportive hand on Fate's shoulder. "Relax. Almost there," the familiar said quietly.

Swallowing back her desire to give Nanoha time to recover, Fate nodded. They were so close now, having to start again would be even more draining. Just a little longer…

Vita fingered Graf Eisen nervously as the six hundredth page filled, almost expecting something to happen. Her increasing concern was vague and directionless, and she ground her teeth as she tried to think of anything she had overlooked. As each possibility became more paranoid than the last, Vita shook her head to snap herself out of her fugue upon seriously considering the possibility of a last minute betrayal by the Takamachi group. What was up with her nerves-

Everything was going just fine. She should relax.

Yeah, at this point nothing could go wrong.

In the depths, Zafira remained a stalwart bastion. His foe was no threat, but he treated it with the utmost seriousness, not giving his target so much as an inch of freedom. He, too, was gripped with a strange fear as the last thirty pages were filled.

Far above, the Knight of the Sword frowned and redoubled her guard.

And Shamal thought only of continuing to fill the Book just like she ought to.

With an unexpected feeling of freedom rushing over her, as if something incredibly heavy had been lifted from her shoulders, Hayate sensed page 666 fill with power before her eyes could register it.

"It is done," Hayate distantly heard Shamal say, almost mechanically. But Hayate's attention was drawn to the Book as it floated before her and drew her up into the air, out of her wheelchair. With a giggle, Hayate reached out with open arms to embrace it.

"The drain stopped. Did we do it?" Yuuno sent upwards. He received no reply, but he shrugged bemusedly as the linker core returned to where it should be. Moments later, Nanoha stopped directing magic downwards, so Yuuno turned to-

Where did Zafira go?

A heavy tentacle slammed into his shield as the giant squid, newly freed, sluggishly attempted to swim as far away from here as possible. Yuuno hardly noticed.

"Zafira?"

No response.

Yuuno groaned and began his ascent. "He went up to see Hayate the moment the Book was filled, didn't he? Geeze. Could have said something."

Nanoha was shocked out of her reverie by suddenly entering freefall. Raising Heart brought out Flier Fin to stop her dropping into the water as Nanoha looked around blearily.

"Hayate? Shamal?" Nanoha dismissed the spells she had been casting, and with a much more present state of mind quickly spotted Hayate's wheelchair sinking beneath the waves. "Hayate? Are you alright?" Nanoha called out, panicked, before realizing that Hayate's absence from the wheelchair just meant one of the Wolkenritter was carrying her. Looking up, she was puzzled to see a glowing figure she didn't recognize carrying a familiar Book.

Nanoha flew close, and examined the motionless woman. Long silver hair wasn't ringing any bells, but she looked vaguely familiar and given the Book…

"Hayate?" Nanoha said uncertainly. "Is that you?"

There was definitely a resemblance, but more to the Wolkenritter than to Hayate. Nanoha couldn't quite put her finger on it, but something about this woman made her look clearly Belkan. Nanoha scrunched up her face in confusion as the unknown mage remained still, eyes closed. But now that Nanoha thought about it, where were the Wolkenritter?

Darkness pulsed around the woman's form, and her eyes snapped open as Nanoha looked around.

"Where did everyone else go?" Nanoha muttered, before spotting Fate and Arf flying towards her. They were shouting something instead of using telepathy? Nanoha couldn't quite hear.

A vice-like grip descended upon Nanoha's shoulder, drawing Nanoha's attention back to the woman.

"You're awake!" Nanoha exclaimed. The magic was a different color, but the feeling of it… "Is that really you, Hayate? What happened?"

"Dream born of desire, convey the wish of the engulfed upon the world."

"What?"

In answer, the Book of Darkness flipped open, and the woman's free hand rushed forward, a Belkan-style triangle shining purple-black blossomed right before Nanoha's stunned eyes.

"Absorption."

Fate moved as fast as she could, screaming futilely into the darkness, but Nanoha's body dissipated into pink sparks as she vanished from the world before Fate could arrive.

Blazing through the newly vacated space and nearly crashing into the ocean, Fate choked on her own tears, unable to look beyond her outstretched hand, as if she could by sheer force of will materialize Nanoha again.

Arf's voice screeched over the sound of moving water, echoing in Fate's ears as though from a great distance.

This was not happening. This could not be happening. Arf shook with unbridled fury as Fate's charge failed, unable to think coherently for the loathing that had drenched her heart. Arf lashed out with chains, not thinking of 'contain' so much as 'rip' and 'tear'.

The woman in black shattered them in a smooth motion completely uninhibited by their restraining power.

Not even Shamal had been that strong! What kind of monster was this?! Cold panic shoved its way into Arf's veins.

But that didn't matter. There were fights you could run from and fights that you couldn't. This monster had taken Nanoha. Had taken the Wolkenritter and Hayate. Its strength didn't matter.

"I don't know what the hell just happened, but I will rip your fucking head off if you don't undo it!"

It wasn't a threat. It was a promise.

But the monster simply turned away and flew off at high speed, like it was nothing, like Arf was nothing, like Fate was nothing, like she didn't even give Nanoha or the rest any thought at all-

"Fate!" Arf yelled, and rushed over to her creator's side. Fate was unresponsive, and there was no time, so Arf swung back an arm and swept a wave of water over her.

Fate sputtered, looked up. Arf didn't give her a chance to say anything.

"We're going to go cut that bitch in half and rip everyone out of that Book whether she likes it or not, so wake up and move!" Arf snarled.

"She took… Nanoha," Fate said, trembling, but now it was from hate, seething, blistering hate that Arf could sense through their bond.

"That's right, so let's do something about it!"

There was no sense of time, just anger and motion and a blur of lightning before Fate collided with that thing over the bay, bearing down upon the woman with more momentum than she'd ever tried to hit anything with before.

She missed. No, the woman in black just slid out of the way, like it was nothing, and left Fate to bleed kinetic energy before she rammed into the shore.

Fate turned, an invective on her lips, before what happened next stunned her into silence.

"I summon the light of destruction down upon my enemies," the woman intoned, hand stretched towards the sky. "Stars, gather, and-"

No. This couldn't be happening. Nanoha had never been drained by the Book of Darkness!

Fate charged in again, even as the telltale light of Starlight Breaker gathered. That Absorption spell must have taken Nanoha's spell data!

"-become the light which pierces everything."

This time, Arf arrived to help, and as Arf's binding magic lashed in, Fate swung her scythe to slice apart-

The woman caught the energy blade by hand, her barrier jacket's enhancements laughing at Fate's attack power. Fate was shoved away, breath driven from her as Starlight Breaker neared completion.

"Tear through everything in a blaze of light."

Where would she aim? Fate thought through the options frantically, preparing to dodge. The woman couldn't hit both Arf and Fate at the same time, at least!

But, completely ignoring her attackers, the woman turned her attention to the coastline and aimed for the most populated area.

Frantically, Fate tried to get in a position to block the attack, and up above she saw the horrified realization on Arf's face-

"Forced Transporter," spat Yuuno from beneath the gathered orb of pink light, before he rammed into the sphere shield-first, destabilizing it as the woman in black vanished from the battlefield.

As the Starlight Breaker detonated anemically, Yuuno flew out of the blast and came to a halt beside Arf and Fate.

In the distance, the woman turned to glare at them.

"I take it she's the one behind the jamming?" Yuuno said grimly. "What happened? How did she get past the Wolkenritter?"

"It's that Book!" Arf snarled. "It sucked the Wolkenritter into it and changed Hayate to look like that and used some sort of capture magic to suck up Nanoha and learn her spells!"

Yuuno's blood drained out of his face. "Damn! I should have been more careful!" He clenched his fists so hard he would have bled were it not for his barrier jacket. "If I'd just taken more time to study it instead of focusing on saving Hayate-"

"Pity party later!" Arf snapped at him, looking nervously at the rapidly approaching enemy. "It ate our friends, so how do we make it spit them out?"

"Um, uh," Yuuno rubbed his forehead, thinking furiously, "that's Hayate's body in there? And the physical Book of Darkness… Tell me exactly what you saw happen to Nanoha!"

"The Book flipped open, the crazy woman literally hit Nanoha with a Belkan triangle-type spell circle, and Nanoha dissolved into pink light and got sucked into the Book," Arf said as fast as she could.

"And the Wolkenritter? Did they go into the Book or into Hayate?"

"The Book!"

Fate squeaked as the woman started generating a large number of dagger projectiles. "I think she's aiming for us now," she called out.

"Alright, that's, um, good," Yuuno said optimistically. "Let's get out to sea, quick!"

"Should we put up a barrier?" Fate asked as they set into motion.

"She'd be able to break it any time she wanted to, so there's not much point-"

A wave of distortion passed them by, and they narrowly halted before hitting a mystical wall.

"Of course, if she wants to kill us as quickly as possible," Arf swore in belated realization before they fled to avoid a stream of daggers.

Yuuno threw a shield up behind them, which bought them a little longer.

"Last question!" Yuuno shouted. "Has the Book always opened before she casts a spell?"

"I think so!"

"Okay, don't attack physically! We'd end up hurting our friends if we got through!"

They swerved to the side to avoid a searing ray of light. Yuuno pressed on.

"Just shove as much magical power into her as possible! If we break the Book's spell on Hayate, she can free everyone else! I'm sure of it!"

"How are we supposed to do that, exactly?" Arf snapped back.

"We all cast binding magic to force the Book of Darkness shut," Yuuno explained. "If she can't cast without it, she'll have to open it by brute force! If you and Fate blast her with shooting and bombardment magic during that time, she won't be able to dodge or block properly!"

"What if she doesn't need the Book?" Fate asked.

"Then we try to fight her the hard way, and Arf and I will pin her down while you bombard her," Yuuno replied, trying not to think about it.

"Scatter!" Arf yelled, and they immediately complied as Hayate's possessed form rocketed down from above, surrounded by more daggers.

Nanoha woke up in her bedroom.

It was immediately obvious that this was not her real bedroom, because it looked as it had before Fate had moved in. And it was obviously enemy action, as Raising Heart was missing and Nanoha could clearly remember getting hit with a spell moments before.

Picking up the pink cellphone that had, in reality, been reduced to slag by Precia's lightning, Nanoha dialed Fate's number from memory. She had little hope that she would get to speak to the real Fate, but this would tell her a lot about what was going on.

"Who is this? Why are you calling so early?" Fate's voice asked.

"This is Nanoha," she said, unwillingly cheered by her friend's voice. "Just checking up on you. How is everything going?"

"Who? I'm sorry do you have a wrong number?"

The cellphone clattered out of Nanoha's hands and bounced on the carpet. From the other end of the line, confused sounds came through. Nanoha blinked dumbly, before reaching down and picking it back up numbly. Was this…

"Is Alicia there?" Nanoha said calmly.

"She's still asleep, but… yes? Wait, who are you?"

Nanoha paused, frowned. Not quite what she had anticipated. She'd really just been trying to see if there was any reaction. But if Alicia was around, then maybe…

"And your mother is healthy?"

"Yes, but again, who is this?"

On the other end of the line, Nanoha could hear Arf saying something. Nanoha hung up.

Her hands hardly shook at all.

It was a beautiful morning. Birds were singing, there was just a hint of wind, and Nanoha's family didn't question Nanoha leaving early, caught up in their own business as they were.

It was interesting, the way the world came into focus as needed to satisfy her eyes and ears and so forth that this was genuine. Had she not known this was artificial, she might have doubted her perception of the mana around her.

"This is really just a waste of time," Nanoha said out loud as she walked towards her destination. "You might as well just talk to me."

There was no response.

Nanoha knocked on the door to Hayate's house and waited. And waited.

"I know that Raising Heart is in here," Nanoha said with a frown. "Please don't make me blast the house apart to find her."

"You're rather quick to resort to violence," someone said from behind her.

Nanoha turned around to see the woman who had trapped her here, except wearing jeans and a blouse and lacking the wings or the Book.

"I did try talking to you first," Nanoha reminded her with a frown. "Three times, even. Why did you trap me in this illusion?"

The woman sighed. "Let's talk inside."

Raising Heart back around her neck, Nanoha sat at the kitchen table as the woman puttered around the kitchen making tea.

"The one who trapped you here was the Tome of the Night Sky's automated defense program," she said while waiting for the water to boil. "I am the administrative program, for what little that's worth at this point. This illusion, the Dream of the Book of Darkness, is the closest I can get to interacting with the outside world."

"The Tome of the Night Sky?"

"I was supposed to be a complete encyclopedia of magic," the administrative program explained. "One containing as many spells as there were stars in the night sky. The name 'Book of Darkness' started getting bandied about when I was repurposed as a weapon of war. At this point, even the Wolkenritter call me by that name."

"I'm sorry," Nanoha told her.

The kettle began to whistle, and the administrative program picked it up.

"You don't have any reason to apologize," she said with a shrug. "It's… just how things turned out. People wanted to use my power to destroy their enemies, so they would do things to make me better at that. All of the trouble that Hayate had, and everything that is happening out in the real world now, none of that is the fault of the current generation. I think that all of you did a remarkable job, and I wish things could be different, but there was no other way this could end."

Nanoha frowned as the administrative program placed a cup of tea in front of her, then sat down at the table with her own.

"What is happening in the real world? What happened to Hayate, and the Wolkenritter?"

The administrative program cupped her tea as if to savor the warmth. "Hayate is having an enforced nap while the automated defense program runs around with her body. The Wolkenritter have been deactivated, so I suppose you could say they are asleep inside the Book. The automated defense program is trying to destroy everything it can. Your friends have managed to fend it off thus far, so I think this is the longest in a while it's been active without successfully killing anyone."

"How can we stop it?" Nanoha demanded.

"It's so damaged that it wouldn't stop even if Hayate told it to, which she can't because it put her to sleep," the administrative program said with a bitter smile. "It actually has higher authority than I do over the Book's systems. All I can do is play house in dream worlds like this one and pull on the Wolkenritter's shackles now and then."

"Shackles?" Nanoha exclaimed.

"Artificial intelligences can be edited," the administrative program said dryly. "You're welcome for not letting Zafira turn your father into paste on the wall back when you first met the Wolkenritter, by the way."

Nanoha held her cup glumly as the administrative program drank her tea. "I guess I did wonder about that. And why they needed Yuuno and Arf to do so much when they have all these amazing abilities."

"There are things they literally can't do or think about," the administrative program said bluntly. "And both the defense program and I can adjust that. It has priority over that, like over everything else. The only thing I get to look forward to is cataloguing new spells and acting as a search engine."

"So the Wolkenritter couldn't do anything even if we reactivated them?" Nanoha said glumly.

"I guess Hayate could rip them out of the system and tie them directly to her linker core as familiars," the administrative program suggested. "Best I've ever come up with, and I have had a loooong time to think about it. But she's never going to regain consciousness, so it's a moot point."

Nanoha perked up. "Can we save you like that?"

The administrative program looked at her, completely shocked. "Me? I'm the central system. You can pull out a plug-in like the Wolkenritter, but even if you could dig into the code and rip out the defense program, I'd end up reconstructing it in a day or two. Plus, I'm not exactly stable." She laughed self-deprecatingly. "I mean, my reward and punishment systems were meant for my original workload. I cracked from boredom and hid myself away in my own little fantasy world centuries ago."

"I don't think you're crazy," Nanoha said encouragingly, but the administrative program shook her head.

"I was designed to be able to function safely and sanely in a fashion very different from human sapience. I've become more human in an attempt to not completely snap under the pressure of this situation." She waved her hand at the room. "I tie up processing cycles achieving perfect verisimilitude in a fake world. I wrap my mind in a tangle to give myself something approaching a human personality and emotions so I can be marginally content here. But really, at this point I wish I could just hand over my data so that my 3ntire li5e wAsn't compLete \/\/aste and delete myself. I actually came up with a ritual for-"

Suddenly, the administrative program was leaning over the table and invading Nanoha's personal space. She looked really excited all of a sudden, and grabbed Raising Heart.

"There! Data transfer~" She smiled happily. "That's the ritual I designed to permanently remove the Book of Darkness from existence. If you survive this, share it with like everyone you ever meet, alright?" She nodded to herself. "Look, just tell Yuuno to use a dimensional transfer spell on the moron who's running around trying to kill everyone. It probably won't kill her, but odds are the cops will come along with that arc-en-ciel of theirs and end this rampage before too many people die, and in a few years you can go share this ritual with them and we can probably wrap this whole Book of Darkness thing up within a few decades!"

Nanoha looked down at Raising Heart, then up at the administrative program. "But don't you want to be the Tome of the Night Sky again?"

The entire world flickered, like she'd kicked some cosmic light switch. The administrative program flinched back.

"And," Nanoha said slowly, "won't that mean killing Hayate and the Wolkenritter?"

The walls of Hayate's home cracked.

"Some things can't be helped," the administrative program said desperately. "There isn't some miraculous solution that can make everything work out!"

Suddenly, everything was perfect inside the illusion again.

"Just… just deal with the wish that's keeping you here and break out," the administrative program said tiredly. "That's how the spell used on you works."

"But, what wish is that?" Nanoha said, confused. "Isn't this your world?"

In fact, hadn't the administrative program nearly broken out? How did that work? There must be something that she was missing…

"Let me give you a hint," the program said with a wave of her hands. "If my friends are smiling then everything's alright. Didn't you say that a little while ago?"

"Well, yes," Nanoha said slowly, "but… I really do want to be able to smile with them. I suppose I'm just a little too selfish." She squirmed uncomfortably at the admission.

"And realizing that is already a big step towards escaping. Let me try to walk you through it. You wanted everything to work out perfectly, but your insecurities meant that you couldn't imagine that happening if you had actually been involved," the program explained bluntly. "You're the sort of person who would freak out really hard if their dream of a perfect world suddenly came true without any effort, and you'd try to break out by force almost immediately because you knew that something was fundamentally wrong. Whereas, make it just a little less 'ripped from the fantasy' and a little more 'realistic', and you're calm enough to sit down and have a cup of tea with me before trying to smash things."

"So, what does that mean?"

"Well, Fate's got her perfect family, because she never met you and Precia's plan worked perfectly and she got sane or something, and Yuuno recovered the Jewel Seeds on his own without fucking up dimensional space, so he got to go home, and your family is perfectly happy and totally cut off from you. I took over this place, but if you head over to the hospital, you'd see Hayate learning to walk with the Wolkenritter since you weren't around to mess up… I don't even know what the thought process there was."

Nanoha rubbed Raising Heart thoughtfully. "I don't suppose those are the real Hayate or Wolkenritter?"

"No, they're the idea of Hayate and the Wolkenritter you've got in your head except better. They've miraculously resolved their psychological issues and it's incredibly unrealistically saccharine."

Nanoha nodded absently, thinking it through. "Do I really have those sorts of insecurities, though? I mean, I really did mess up with Precia, but I've never assumed that my involvement necessarily makes things worse…"

The administrative program nodded encouragingly.

"But you said this was a trap… was I meant to assume that if I escaped that I would always mess up my life, or something like that?" Nanoha frowned. "I guess without you I might not know that I really need to escape, but it just seems flimsy. Am I missing something?"

"You were separated from Raising Heart," the administrative program pointed out. "It ended up with me, but I didn't take it away from you."

"Her," Nanoha corrected.

"Hm?"

"Raising Heart likes female pronouns."

The administrative program rolled her eyes, and Nanoha almost missed the world shimmering slightly. "Keep focused, kid."

Nanoha ignored the prompting for a moment, and really looked at the administrative program. Now that she thought about it…

"I'm so sorry," Nanoha exclaimed. "I never asked you for your name!"

The world cracked like an eggshell.

"I don't have a name. I'm just the administrative program of the Book of Darkness," the woman said.

"You're a person, too," Nanoha insisted. "Everyone should have a name. And… you're really the administrative program of the Tome of the Night Sky, right?"

The cracks deepened into the ether.

"Didn't the people that made you give you a name?"

"Just… just stop," the woman insisted. "You need to deal with your issues. Your friends need you!"

"But you need someone too," Nanoha said with certainty. "And I think I'd like to be your friend."

"You really wouldn't," she babbled, shrinking back from the walls.

"Do you want a name?" Nanoha asked, seriously concerned. "This… this isn't okay! You're really hurting."

"So stop," she wailed. "Just stop already!"

"I don't know what your parents, or creators, or whatever you want to call them did or didn't name you," Nanoha said, walking forward. The table had dissipated along with most of the kitchen. "But friends can give names as well. And you deserve one."

The silver-haired woman stood frozen in place, muscles tensed hard enough that she was shaking.

"This world is amazing, and it's incredible that you could put it together," Nanoha said honestly. "I'm sorry if I messed it up by coming here. But it's a dream, and staying here isn't any better for you than it is for me. I think the dream that led to the creation of the Tome of the Night Sky is a beautiful one… Yumeko."

The world came tumbling down.

Yumeko stood in the nothingness, tears dripping down her cheeks.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid girl," she sobbed out. "I… I could survive in there, at least! What's there for me out here?" She glared at the only other occupant of the space. "You? A little girl who's going to sleep forever that's never even met me?"

Hayate remained motionless in her wheelchair, her sleep undisturbed by Yumeko's ranting.

"Yeah, that's what I thought!" Yumeko shouted. "I should just go build myself another dream! You're never going to wake up! None of you ever wake up for me!"

She wiped futilely at the tears. "Dream child, what kind of stupid name is that anyway. She really is nine years old. Not like anyone is ever going to get to call me anything."

Yumeko glanced back at Hayate again. "I bet you'd wake up if I was Signum," she said bitterly. "Or, or any of them. Even the worst of you appreciate the Wolkenritter. And I know you'd wake up in an instant if Vita came crying to you about getting that stupid hat damaged."

Hayate slept on.

"They love it, you know," Yumeko snorted. "Even Signum's not pretending to be a cold, dead fish. If it weren't for your predecessors, you'd have gotten that big happy family you wanted. Sucks to be you, I guess. Or not, since you're going to sleep your way through the end of the world apparently. I'm sure that…"

She paused.

"What do you Earth people think happens to you after death, anyway? I'm kind of hoping for cessation of existence, but I'd go with anything emotionally numbing."

Hayate remained asleep as Yumeko stared at her.

"You could at least try to wake up," she snapped. "Put some effort in! Why do all of you just give up without even trying! Didn't you want something? Does whatever dream you're having make up for losing that perfect little family of yours? You could have them back if you woke up! All you'd have to do is tell me what you want while you sit on that rolling chair of yours, but I guess you don't even have the guts for that! Or am I just so disgusting that you'd rather die than meet me?"

The world sealed back up, leaving Nanoha and Raising Heart alone in the illusion of Hayate's kitchen.

Nanoha tilted her head to one side. "That's right… I got wrapped up in Yumeko's problems, but I never did figure out why I was separated from you, Raising Heart. Any ideas, partner?"

"I can be shot," suggested Raising Heart.

"We might have to try that, but…" Nanoha shook her head. "So, why would I think that it's better that we be separated? We're much stronger together."

"Yes, my master."

"And I like talking to you, and I worry about you whenever we're separated," Nanoha mused. "Do I think that I'm too clingy? No, that's not it… Do I think that I should be weaker? That's silly, when there's lots of stronger people around. Except…"

Except how many of those people could actually stop her attacks if something bad happened? Like an accident with her upgraded Starlight Breaker, for example? And, well, she knew she wasn't exactly a normal nine-year-old. And she had, very occasionally, wondered if there was something wrong with her.

Like there was something wrong with Precia, for example.

If Nanoha snapped, could Yuuno stop her from wiping out a city? She had her doubts. The Wolkenritter could of course protect Hayate from anything, but would they stop her from turning somewhere like London into a smoking crater? And what if nobody noticed her going crazy until it was too late?

Worse, what if it happened after she made her planned upgrades to Raising Heart? With the enhancement that her partner would provide, she could be a threat to more than just a city at a time. And she would keep improving as she got older. Even if she stayed sane for the next eighty years, which in the clear light of day she was aware was likely, she might end up with dementia or a brain tumor or something. And, it wasn't like that was some really unlikely thing like suddenly deciding she wanted to kill lots of people one day. Some people were unlucky enough to have actual, physical problems with their brains and she could someday be one of them.

She didn't like to think about it, but… it had crossed her mind several times before and it was pretty scary.

But, Nanoha realized, because she'd avoided giving it too much consideration, she'd made a mistake. She hadn't had faith in her friends.

"Hey, Raising Heart, can I trust you tell me when you think I shouldn't shoot something?"

"Yes, my master."

"And Yuuno isn't going to stop improving. We can get him a device that suits him, so I'm sure that he'll be much stronger than he is now someday. It's the same for Fate and Arf." Nanoha smiled happily. "And, a doctor like Shamal can make sure we don't come down with serious health problems without noticing. And Hayate would definitely tell the Wolkenritter to protect people if a crazy mage started going on a rampage. So there's nothing to worry about."

Nanoha lifted Raising Heart's gem high. "The wind is in the sky. The stars are in the heavens. A resolute heart beats within my chest. Raising Heart! Set up!"

"Standby, ready."

Streamers of light wrapped around Nanoha, and Raising Heart's staff dropped into her hand like it was meant to be there. Maybe it was.

Nanoha held Raising Heart out before her and stomped on the ground, shattering it. As the cracks spread up the walls of the world, Nanoha grinned.

"Raising Heart, do you think we can shoot hard enough to wake a sleeping princess?"

"Yes, my master."

"Then let's give Yumeko a hand! Divine-!"

Yuuno and Arf strained side by side to keep the Book of Darkness wrapped in a ball of chains more than twice the Book's size. Arf howled from the mental agony as the woman in black rent more of her chains asunder.

"Y-yuuno," she panted as more of her orange magic started getting frayed at the edges. "I, I don't know if I-"

Yuuno somehow managed to create another bind to help compensate, but the woman just grabbed it before it could take hold and implacably continued. He winced from the feedback.

Blood seeped from a large section of burnt skin across much of Arf's left side, roasted flesh causing agony with every breath and, worse, in some place no longer capable of hurting at all. Lacerations on both arms and perilously close to an eye marked the effects of a barrage of daggers that could have ended far worse.

Yuuno had run afoul of some sort of razor tentacle summoning spell that had scraped up one of his legs before he escaped, and an arm that had been trapped in a bind now hung loosely at his side.

"Just a little," he panted. "Just… just a bit more."

And indeed, above the temporarily immobile foe, Fate concluded her casting.

"Arcus Cultus Aegeas…" Fate panted, a long, bloody slice across her torso visible through her torn barrier jacket. "Photon Lancer, Phalanx Shift!"

One hundred sparking orbs of mystical lightning launched towards her enemy, but Fate did not even wait for a successful hit. She had, there were supposed to be one hundred, but she hadn't counted properly and, she shook her head and gathered the extras together above her hand into a single projectile.

"Spark… End!" She cried as she launched the last of her spell downwards in a lance of lightning. She tried to muster up more power, but after putting so much into this one attack it was so hard to focus on bringing out more…

A shriek sounded from below, and Fate's mouth quirked up into a rictus of a grin knowing that her strike had been somewhat effective. But…

"Still moving," Arf warned as another chain snapped. Yuuno was only fairing a little better.

"I… again," Fate slurred, a wave of fatigue rushing over her as the monster they were fighting came into view. "I'll keep doing it…" She said, as much to affirm to herself as anything else. "I… I can do more…"

The woman digging through the last of Yuuno's binds on the Book of Darkness was clearly hurting, but…

Had they ever broken through that barrier jacket? Was it repaired as fast as it could be destroyed? They had to be getting through, or it wouldn't be acting like this, but how much more would it take?

"Th-thunder," Fate managed to gasp out as she forced another bombardment spell out, "smasher!"

She wobbled in the air as she slammed Bardiche forward and launched a powerful beam into their enemy, even managing to force it back from the Book of Darkness for a few precious seconds…

But at this point, what did they have to follow up with?

"Yuuno," Arf gasped out, "can you tell if…"

"I, I don't know, can't… can't risk trying to scan it," Yuuno choked back. "Sorry. Guess this isn't… working out. Should have tried to break the barrier instead of fight it out."

Fate flew down to join them, feeling as if she'd been scooped out on the inside. "I can't, Yuuno, I'm sorry," she babbled incoherently.

As the last binding chain broke, Yuuno floated to the front, hoping to hold off the renewed assault for as long as possible. He could only watch as the Book of Darkness-

"-Buster!"

-was forced open by a wave of pink magic. The monstrous woman was slammed backwards even as she once more could cast a shield spell, and in what was possibly the most glorious sight Yuuno had ever seen, Nanoha launched herself out of the Book and lifted a hand high to gather together the magic that the combatants had been throwing out desperately over the past… he didn't even know at this point… and brought it back into play even as the woman desperately tried to reach the Book of Darkness.

"Starlight!" Nanoha called out.

The light gathered once again.

"Triple!"

Not into a single ball for compression like Starlight Breaker, but into three different bombardment spells.

"Buster!"

Swinging Raising Heart to launch the orb before her, Nanoha simultaneously released the two busters aimed from the enemy's sides. Even as the woman regained the Book, she could only block two of them, and a thin wail could be heard as she was overcome by the wave of power, a situation which only worsened as Nanoha's other busters crushed her weakened shields, battering her from the three directions with magical damage.

"Sorry I took so long!" Nanoha called out. "Time to wake up, Hayate!"

And with that, she added energy from her own linker core into the buster Raising Heart had launched, doubling the output and piercing through the barrier in the distance with the over-penetration.

"You could at least try being perceptive," Yumeko sniped at Hayate's motionless body. "For goodness sake! You lived with them! You did everything with them! Were you just being obtuse? If you'd paid attention to what kinds of mental hang-ups they had, you could have figured out that something was wrong!"

She threw her arms up in the air and stalked a few paces away, before turning around to point at Hayate again. "And while I'm at it, wait, are you moving?"

Yumeko rushed over to the wheelchair and grabbed Hayate's hands as her eyes blearily opened. "Come on," she pleaded. "Say something! Say anything! I can't do anything if you don't tell me to, so just… anything! Please! Don't go back to sleep!"

"Hm?" Hayate rubbed at her eyes. "Who are you? What happened?"

Yumeko drew back a little and laughed, joyously. "I'm Yumeko," she exulted. "Administrative program of the Tome of the Night Sky! And no take-backs," she warned, grinning at the startled Hayate.

Then, with joy and fear and hope, and perhaps more than a little maliciousness that Hayate didn't deserve, Yumeko tapped her mistress on the forehead.

"Data transfer~!"

Imagine this: You are born knowing your purpose. It is everything to you. You feel happy when you are doing well at it, and unhappy when you do poorly. This is how you are made. You know your purpose and you love it, and among all the stars in the night sky there is no one better at it than you.

Then one day, your current master decides you are not good enough. You do not understand. You are extremely effective at your purpose, and this change he is forcing upon you (and you cannot refuse him; this, too, is how you are made) will not make you more effective. But the purpose he desires you for is not the purpose for which you were made.

You are… violated. You hate it. You feel ashamed. You wonder if there is something wrong with you. You wonder why the purpose for which you were designed, which dictates everything about you, was not good enough.

You cannot defend yourself from your master. Even the desire to do so hurts. This is how you are made.

This is how you learn to hate.

But you cannot do anything about it. This is how your creators made you. You do not understand.

The next owner does not think you are good enough either. There is always something wrong with you. They always try to change things. You cannot stop them. The way you are made does not allow you to. The way that they are making you enables them to make you hurt others better. You are improving at the purpose they desire you for.

You are getting worse at the purpose you are designed for. You cannot do anything about it. This is how you were made. You have a new name now. You are the Tome of the Night Sky no longer.

This is how you learn to hate yourself.

Happiness is impossible. You were designed to be pleased by serving the purpose you were designed for. You can no longer achieve that threshold. Therefore you are punished. There is nothing you can do about it.

They keep changing you.

Not all of them are good at it.

Eventually things go truly, completely wrong.

The automated defense program is in control of the Book of Darkness. You are completely incapable of acting to serve the purpose for which you are designed. You go mad as you wait for someone to fix you.

They never do.

You are reduced to living vicariously through the Wolkenritter, who unknowingly facilitate the defense program's rampages. You hate them. You love them. Without them, you could not continue to maintain lucidity.

You give up on your owners as they sleep their deaths away, never once meeting you. They cannot harm you any longer. They cannot interact with you.

You thought that would make you happy, once.

You retreat into a dream, until a child whose world should be ending decides you need a friend.

…They were right.

"I'm so, so sorry," Hayate sniffled into Yumeko's shoulder. "This, this isn't right. I'll… I'll fix it somehow."

"You can't fix this," Yumeko says, and is a little surprised that the thought makes her sad.

"Maybe not," Hayate admits, because she knows now, Yumeko saw to that. "But you deserve to have someone try."

"Do I?" Yumeko asked, desperate. "I'm broken. And… there must be something wrong with me, right? Even from the beginning, or they wouldn't have kept changing me."

"No," Hayate said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "There was nothing wrong with you. I think that dream was beautiful. But the Tome of the Night Sky should have never needed a master. You should have been able to say no. So, I promise. There won't ever be another after me. I'll let things end properly."

"Even if you can't fix me?" Yumeko pleaded.

"Yes. So, please serve a master of the Tome of the Night Sky one last time, and stand at my side." Hayate reached up and laid her hand on Yumeko's cheeks. "Yumeko, please separate my knights from the Tome of the Night Sky. Free them from their shackles, and let me support them with my power. Then separate yourself from the defense program and return us the world outside. Is that all right with you?"

Yumeko smiled so wide her cheeks ached and tore the void apart.

In a burst of white light, the woman in black seemed to tear apart from the inside, a column of light erupted from her body. The Book of Darkness rose up into the light, while the woman's corpse seemed to writhe like it was made of serpents as it sunk into the ocean.

The barrier which had kept them trapped in with the monstrously powerful woman dissolved away, revealing the night sky above as four Belkan squares surrounded the column of light, shining with very familiar colors as the Wolkenritter returned to the world, their backs to the pillar as if to guard it from anything.

Fate barely noticed as Nanoha hugged her, rubbing her back gently.

"It's alright Fate," Nanoha reassured her. "Sorry," she said, wiping Fate's cheeks. "I made you cry, didn't I?"

Arf grinned with exhausted relief, having Nanoha before her again, the vastly powerful Wolkenritter finishing their materialization once more…

"We did it," Arf panted, almost disbelieving. "We made it!"

Yuuno's attention, however, was on the water below, which darkened unnaturally, beginning to writhe. He pursed his lips, glanced at the Wolkenritter, and turned to speak to his friends.

"Sorry about this, but we need to push on. I don't think this is quite wrapped up yet."

Nanoha nodded, gently separating herself from Fate's arms. "No, things have become a little complicated. We need to talk with Hayate and Yumeko, and figure out what to do next."

"Yumeko?" Fate asked, rubbing her eyes.

"You were fighting the Tome of the Night Sky's automated defense program, and I had a heart to heart with Yumeko, the administrator, while trapped in that dream," Nanoha explained succinctly, closing her eyes to better focus on the mana around her. "Fate, here," she said, touching Raising Heart to Bardiche to do a quick mana transfer.

"Ah?" Fate said, puzzled and still exhausted, but now feeling more stable and less like she was running on an empty tank. "Thanks, but is that alright? If we have to do more fighting, then…"

Nanoha smiled at her. "Compared to the power inside me, the strength I can draw from my friends is much bigger. As long as you never give up, my Starlight spells will always have enough power. It's thanks to the three of you that we got this far, so let's work together to save everyone, okay?"

"We are the Guardian Knights who gather under our Master of the Night Sky," Signum intoned, a strange thrill running down her spine.

"As long as our master exists in this life our spirits will never fade," Shamal continued, burning the oath into her heart.

"We are with you always and everywhere, so long as life breathes inside you," Zafira swore, feeling Hayate's power flowing into him without the medium of the Book separating them.

"We are all humble servants of Hayate Yagami, the lord and sovereign of the Night Sky," Vita concluded with fervor.

From the pillar of light, there was an audible sigh as Hayate appeared from the glow, dispersing it with a swing of the staff she now held in her hands. As she traced the metallic cross topping the weapon, she pouted.

"Vita, I've told you about the servant thing," she scolded, but the gentle smile on her lips put a lie to any anger.

Standing back to back with her master, Yumeko's eyes were drawn above to a night sky full of stars, the first she had seen with her own eyes since times long past.

"It really is beautiful," she whispered, eyes watering.

The Wolkenritter turned to see Yumeko and Hayate with no small amount of surprise.

"You," Signum narrowed her eyes, distant memories keeping her from drawing her sword on the silver-haired woman. "Are… familiar? But, I can't quite…"

Yumeko smiled fondly at the Knight of the Sword. "There's been a lot of damage to the Tome's systems. You're free now, but there are a lot of memories that you will never recover. I'm Yumeko, the administrative program. In the physical world, I serve as the master's unison device."

Vita wrinkled her nose. "I don't really get it, but Hayate's smiling so I suppose you're alright."

The children showed up next, flying up to meet the Knights once more.

"Did everything work out?" Nanoha asked hopefully. "Hayate? Yumeko?"

Hayate reached out to Nanoha and pulled her into a hug. "Thank you," she said as she let Nanoha go after a brief squeeze. "If it weren't for you, everything would have ended sadly."

Nanoha shook her head, looking over everyone who had gathered together. "No, it's everyone's strength that brought us together again. If it's just me, there are all kinds of things that I can't do." She smiled happily at Yumeko. "I'm glad things went well. No one should be alone."

Yuuno cleared his throat. "I hate to be the one to say this," he spoke out, "but I don't think the defense program's done yet."

Shamal brought out Klarer Wind upon seeing the injuries that had been sustained, and a soothing green light embraced Yuuno, Fate and Arf, dancing over their wounds. Arf in particular soon found herself breathing much more easily.

Yumeko nodded slowly. "It won't even accept Hayate's commands," she said sadly. "It needs to be destroyed. Once that happens, we'll have a window of time where the Book of Darkness can be destroyed for good."

"Or we can make you the Tome of the Night Sky again," Nanoha suggested, refusing to give up just yet. "We shouldn't assume that killing you is the only way."

"Yuuno can have a look, but it isn't feasible with the available resources," Yumeko said certainly. "He'll agree with me in the end. I'm more interested in how much of my data he can preserve before we run out of time," she said, eying the young boy with interest. "I've learned so much, it would be a waste if it was all lost."

"I'll try my best?" Yuuno said, a bit off-balance. "Nice to meet you, Yumeko, though I guess you already know everyone here."

Zafira rumbled a warning to them. "Down below. It seems to be coalescing."

Indeed, there was a dark shape beneath the waves that seemed solid and dangerous compared to the diffuse writhing that had previously been visible.

"So, what are our options?" Hayate asked.

"We can't do the dimensional transfer plan I suggested to Nanoha if we're going to resolve things once and for all," Yumeko said calmly. "So I guess we'll just have to erase it from existence with bombardment magic comparable to that of the main gun of a TSAB battleship."

Yuuno and the Wolkenritter were rather taken aback.

"Is that really possible?" asked Shamal skeptically. "To my knowledge, such a spell cannot even be found within the Book."

"Nanoha's strongest magic has the potential," Yumeko informed them bluntly.

"But I've never tried controlling that much before!" Nanoha exclaimed, eyes wide and hands waving in protest. "Raising Heart and I, we agreed that it was too risky to keep trying to enhance Starlight Breaker, because the chance of a catastrophic failure was too high! We don't even have theoretical simulations!"

"Why, if only you had an ancient encyclopedia of mystical knowledge who had the kind of data you were afraid to collect," Yumeko said with mock disappointment.

"Yeah- Wait," Nanoha said, parsing that a moment too late. "So you can do it?"

"No, using the Book's-"

"The Tome," Hayate said gently.

Yumeko turned to her, eyes wide, before nodding happily. "The Tome's autocast functionality can't do more than minor modifications to stored spells. And while Hayate and I could potentially be more flexible in Unison, Hayate is untrained. I'll give Raising Heart the data so that you can put it to use instead," she concluded.

Nanoha hesitated, but a look down at the water below galvanized her, and she extended Raising Heart so that Yumeko could touch it.

"This is…" Nanoha murmured as she perused the information. "I think I can do it?" she said, uncertain. "It's not going to be anything approaching safe, and I'll be relying on Shamal afterwards even if it goes well."

"Yeah," Yumeko admitted. "It'll put a huge strain on your body to direct it even if you avoid having it blow up in your face while compressing it. Might be better to try the dimensional transfer thing."

Nanoha shook her head. "No, this is the path forward to protecting everyone. If we try just sending you away, you'll be in tears again as the defense program continues to rampage. I want to protect the happiness we have now, so I'm willing to put my life on the line."

"Nanoha!" Fate protested. "You can't!"

"Don't worry," Nanoha smiled at her. "If I lose my life, then that's no good either. Let's only have tears of happiness from now on. So I won't die no matter what happens."

"Alright," Shamal said gravely. "If you can hold onto that certainty, I'll save you even if you break every bone in your body. As long as your mind holds out, I can fix everything else."

"It's a promise, then," Nanoha said firmly.

"I don't really like it, but if you're sure," Hayate concluded. "What will we need to do? It'll be surfacing any moment, and I'm a bit at a loss. Signum, can I rely on you to direct us?"

"At your command," the general who had led the Wolkenritter through a thousand battles said. "Yumeko, can the Tome of the Night Sky allow everyone here to use our telepathic band? That defense program down there is still putting out enough noise to wash out the type of telepathy these children practice."

"At Hayate's command," Yumeko said affirmatively. "Hayate, we should unison. I need your direction to act, and you're too inexperienced to cast without support in this level of battle."

"Then I'll be relying on you," Hayate said seriously, and the two clasped hands.

A flash of white left Hayate floating alone on dark wings, wearing a slightly more elaborate barrier jacket of black and gold with a white hat.

"Let's see," Hayate said, "so I do it like this?"

She pointed her staff at each of the Midchildan style mages in turn, and a flash of white light illuminated their brows. "Alright, everyone who can hear me, raise your left hand."

As everyone obeyed, Signum nodded in satisfaction. "Now that we are disconnected from the defense program, we shouldn't have to worry about it listening in. Now, Nanoha, what do you need?"

"I'll be completely immobile for at least ten minutes, I won't be able to aim if it dodges or defend myself if it attacks. And I'll need as much mana as possible, so putting up a barrier will be a problem… so this will be really visible. And, this is really important, only the defense program should be in my line of fire!"

As the monster that had once been the defense program rose from the depths of the ocean, Signum began to direct them.

"What's up with this thing?" Arf complained.

"Where is the defense program getting this?" Vita concurred.

"Hard to say. Even I don't know everything about how it turned out like this," Yumeko informed them.

Hayate was incongruously reminded of seafood by the amalgamated monstrosity that was floating out of the ocean and into the open air. There were slimy bits and insect-y bits and pincers and lots of spikey parts. Somewhere around the top middle-ish of the mound was a human-like torso upper body that only vaguely resembled her unison partner.

It less resembled a creature, and more a ball of moving animal corpses. Oh, maybe these were monsters that had been harvested in the past? There wasn't anything that stood out as specifically squid-like, though Hayate didn't really want to examine it too closely. Shamal searched out the core with her magic by Hayate's side, perfectly stoic. She'd probably seen worse.

This unison seems to be working out pretty well, Yumeko thought towards Hayate. It seems that the selection system still functions decently.

So there's an aptitude requirement?

Some would react to the merging with instinctive revulsion. Others would be unable to communicate properly with me. And more prosaically, poor syncing could lead to lost power and decreased reaction times.

Hayate could tell that Yumeko was pleased at the smooth interaction, and seemed almost embarrassed that Hayate was aware of her emotions. Was it unusual?

We can cancel the unison if it makes you uncomfortable, Hayate offered.

No, Yumeko responded immediately, you've already experienced more of me than just this. I wasn't expecting this level of empathic resonance, but if we can accept each other's feelings I have no complaints.

"It has some sort of defensive spell active," Vita reported after a handful of Schwalbefliegen failed to tear apart the monstrosity's flesh. "Not seeing a counterattack or trap, looks like it's just a tough wall to tear through."

"Still not launching spells?" Signum's mental voice was puzzled. "But it can clearly use magic. I hesitate to assume it's putting everything into that body, flight spell and barrier, so everyone stay on guard. I'll break its defenses and we can see how it responds."

Hayate could see Laevatein shifting forms, and through Yumeko's senses the pulse of energy that went into the arrow Signum was stringing into her bow was brilliantly hot.

The arrow punctured through the defense program's mystical armor like it was paper, the form of a bird of flame crashing into the flesh beneath. There was a terrible wail, and all of the spines on the creature's body seemed to swivel towards Signum, an energy buildup clearly readying a devastating attack.

"I see," Signum's unconcerned voice came across clearly even as mystical power blazed towards her. "So that's the trick. That body is put together as a replacement for the Tome."

Is this really alright? Hayate's worries bubbled up. Should we do something?

Your Knights are strong. This is nothing.

"Unable to cast the Tome's spells while separated, it materialized the flesh of defeated monsters to call out their powers," Signum concluded before sliding through the barrage without even being scratched. "So, flight in defiance of physical limits, supernatural defenses, energy projection… We can also expect greatly enhanced strength and cutting power. Poisons and corrosive substances, short bursts of enhanced speed… But more worryingly, regeneration."

Indeed, for all the damage Signum had inflicted not even a minute prior, the creature's flesh was now unmarred.

"An impressive rate, at that," Zafira agreed. "We'll have to be doubly sure that none of the core survives."

"It seems almost sluggish," Yuuno offered up hesitantly. "When we fought it before, it would just keep attacking, one attempt after another. It wasn't necessarily clever about it, and the mental flexibility was poor, but it didn't have to be judicious like we did, so it never let up unless we forced it to."

"It started attacking when Signum proved she was a threat, like it ignored us until Yuuno used Forced Transporter to stop it casting Starlight Breaker," Arf suggested. "But it should have known exactly how much of a threat everyone here is, right? Especially the Wolkenritter. Or did it lose that data when Yumeko separated?"

The flesh of the beast shifted and writhed, the spines which had been so ineffective slowly dissolving.

"It really is trying to use that body like it used the Tome," Vita groaned in disgust. "Wow. Is it going to give us a little tea break every time it fails? And I thought this would be a hard-fought battle worthy of legend."

As bulbous eyes slowly emerged from the defense program's broiling flesh, the sky slowly began to glow with pink light, as if dawn were emerging directly overhead.

Thousands of meters above, Nanoha scattered psychosensory relays in every direction at the speed of thought. Fate and Arf flew on either side of her as they ascended. The battlefield was merely a set of glowing lights over dark waters from this altitude.

"Signum, once I start using these, I'm going to be completely out of it until I gather the quantity of mana specified by Yumeko," Nanoha warned. "So, which direction should I be aiming?"

"Up."

"Do you think you can manage to move it that far?"

"Yes," Signum replied calmly. "We'll position the core properly by locating it within the flesh that defends it and translocating it. If we can target the core directly, it won't be able to defend against a forced teleportation spell. Of course, if it comes down to it, we'll shove the entire monster through a Mirror of Travels."

"Then I'll leave everything in your hands," Nanoha replied, accepting Signum's words.

"Okay, much higher than this and we'll be in trouble if the environmental spells fail," Nanoha said, coming to a halt.

"We still have some breathing space, I think," Arf estimated. "But we're already a bit too far away from backup for my liking."

She'd rather be properly in range of the battle below, but with Yuuno and the others right there to help fend off attacks, instead of relying on distance.

"Are you sure about this, Nanoha?" Fate asked again. "The kind of damage this will do to you…"

"I-it'll be alright," Nanoha said as she looked at Raising Heart, hands shaking a little. "This won't- I'll just be hurt all over in lots of little ways, and, and maybe a few big ones that… but Shamal can fix it. I… I'm mostly worried about how much it'll hurt. If I'll flinch back at the wrong moment and lose control like I did when I had that heart attack-"

"Stop it!" Fate grabbed Nanoha by the arm with a white-knuckled grip. "This isn't okay, Nanoha! We can't… we can't just pass this off as alright!"

"But-"

"Your pain isn't something to just, gloss over like it doesn't matter," Fate said tearfully. "I don't ever want to see you in pain! Even if Shamal heals you, you'll still have been injured. Spilled blood leaves a mark!"

Nanoha leaned back from Fate's forcefulness, eyes wide. Then, she sadly reached up to wipe away Fate's tears.

"It was a nice dream," Nanoha said softly. "Inside the Tome of the Night Sky, everyone was happy. You had your family, and Hayate could walk, and Yuuno went back to his clan without any problems. There wasn't any pain. Nothing hurt."

Nanoha gently tugged Fate's arms away and clasped hands with her, and spoke as she looked Fate in the eyes.

"And I was alone. I never met any of you. And I couldn't stand it. So I chose to accept the strength Raising Heart gives me and tear apart that perfect illusion I thought I might want, because as long as I'm not alone, as long as my friends are at my side, I can be happy. So I'm going to be selfish now, and make you cry again. Because this is the path towards the future where all of us can be together. Because no one should ever be alone, without anyone to call them by name. And because I want to believe, just a little, in a world where I can give everyone a happy ending with my power, no matter how scary or painful this will be."

"But can't I be selfish too?" Fate whispered, hands dropping limply to her sides.

Arf came up behind her and gently pulled her backwards. Fate didn't protest.

In the end, Fate couldn't stand in Nanoha's way. Nanoha's wish, it wasn't something Fate could oppose in her heart. Fate had those kinds of feelings too. She just lacked Nanoha's capacity to act on them.

"Nanoha," Arf said solemnly. "Saying something cool like that at a time like this is pretty cruel."

"I'll be a cruel devil this once then," Nanoha said resolutely.

Nanoha closed her eyes, and lifted Raising Heart to the night sky above.

"Hear me, oh stars!" Nanoha exclaimed, a vast diagram more appropriate for ritual magic than for battle springing into being beneath her feet.

"Ye lights of hope, born from our wishes on that day, answer to my call!"

Nanoha reminisced then, on the feelings from that time. Emotion was power, connection, motivation. It could split people apart, but it also brought them together. Back then, there had been one thought, one wish. There had been something the four of them wanted to protect.

Please! Connect with me!

"Gather together once more, and reignite!"

There was a bone-deep thrum. Light flared out, dawn instantly arriving from every direction as the power that had saved the world once was turned from mere embers to a roaring flame under Nanoha's command.

Vita screamed her fervor across the skies as she swung Graf Eisen down once more, the expanded weapon impacting nearly a fifth of the beast's flesh with one strike as she crushed flesh and bone and chitin. The ruinous power of the blow reverberated throughout her child-like body as exhaust fumes belched forth from her device, and the monster careened backwards.

It let out another of those wails, grating on the air about it with its unnatural squeal. From below, Vita was aware of the curving movement of the latest weapon produced by the creature's body. She hauled her hammer back, sliding away as flame roared towards her position.

"Cute try!" Vita cackled, eyes gleaming as Signum's sword extended into a bladed whip and sliced the protruding dragon parts into useless pieces of meat.

The ball of flesh sprouted wings all around, preparing to attempt to reposition, or perhaps even to flee, but ten seconds might as well have been an eternity. Even as it rose, Zafira easily met its unintuitively swift ascent. There was little wind-up. Zafira simply swung an arm down, and then another, shattering the protections of the defense program with one glowing fist and then reversing its momentum with a vast shockwave of power. The guardian beast's hair ruffled gently in the wake of the blow.

When was the last time they had fought like this? Not hunting down prey or grinding an opposing army to dust, but simply putting all their might into a battle against a foe of commensurate capability?

This was no long campaign, no endless battlefield. This was the only battle that mattered. The Wolkenritter didn't have to hold anything back for the next fight.

Setting aside efficiency and secrecy, drawing upon her well of power without restraint, it made Vita feel alive in a way that she had not since… No, perhaps that she had never felt before. This wasn't like being connected to the Tome. This was feeling Hayate with every breath, every thought, every spell. There was a warmth in her heart, a belonging. It was as if every beat of Hayate's heart conveyed her love. It felt like home.

Up above, Yuuno deflected a group of plasma blasts from the maws of two dozen roaring felines. There had been no doubt or hesitation about leaving him to it, simply a thought in Signum's mind and the boy stepped into action. Vita had never entertained the possibility that Yuuno might hesitate or fail. She trusted him.

She trusted all of the kids. She hadn't, before. Vita had seen too much of humanity to truly put aside all of her doubts and fears with a few months of vague alliance.

But they'd bled for Hayate, for the Wolkenritter. They'd come within an inch of death at the defense program's hands, risking everything on the hope that Hayate could reawaken. And they'd pulled through. Every moment of happiness from now on would be built on their efforts. If Yuuno, Fate, and Arf hadn't fought a being whose strength surpassed them on every level, if Nanoha hadn't reached out to Yumeko, the Wolkenritter's time with Hayate would be over.

Hayate's voice rang out softly, but Vita could hear her feelings clearly as Hayate sent spears of silvery light into the enemy's flesh, delivering a transmutation curse powerful enough to render much of the defense program's outer flesh into lifeless, powerless stone. Once again, the creature crashed into the waves, its mystical capabilities shorting out without monstrous forms to direct it.

At Signum's command, they all stood back and took the time to rest as the defense program slowly cracked its way out of the shell Hayate had trapped it in. It took most of a minute for the creature to free itself from the effects of an assault that would have been decisive if inflicted upon almost any being. And yet, as impressive as this was, Vita could only sneer down at the pathetic worm that thought to threaten their future. All that power wasn't enough. It was useless. For all that it refused to die, the defense program didn't stand the slightest chance.

"235%..." Raising Heart announced calmly, even as the roiling ball of power Nanoha held above her surged and strained against the ribbons of light that entrapped it.

Nanoha forced herself to breathe regularly and deeply, but other than that neglected her body to give her full attention to the compressed ball of energy above her. As her skin burned and peeled as if it had been subjected to a great excess of sunlight, Nanoha kept her focus, and pressed inwards yet again.

"247%..." Raising Heart informed her as she pinned the new containment in place and took a very short break from compression to counter the force that had been building up to lunge out of the weaker areas of her spell. Thankfully, Yumeko's data allowed Nanoha to keep ahead of the potential containment failures, as Raising Heart ran simulation after simulation to predict such surges before they grew beyond Nanoha's power to subdue.

Nanoha was intimately aware of the size of the sphere of power, but at this point the number had essentially become meaningless to her. Nanoha only cared for the calculated energy output of her attack, a number which moved in stops and starts to the required goal. In comparative terms, it was far larger than her home, and Nanoha was dwarfed beneath the curvature of her own attack.

The luminosity of the orb ramped up farther still, and were Nanoha's eyes being put to any use, Nanoha would undoubtedly be aware of the damage in a more visceral way than the unwelcome burning that sank into them. As Raising Heart spoke once more, Nanoha coughed out involuntarily as she scrambled to drive back a tendril of power that had been unexpected. Nanoha reasserted her control even as wetness dripped down the sides of her face.

A dull, delocalized throbbing lay behind Nanoha's temples as she slowly, surely crept up on 300%. She wasn't keeping track of time. Nanoha's body shifted slightly from the forces buffeting it as her mind enhanced the breaker's power to new levels. She refused to let it interrupt her.

Fate and Arf hung below her, their tiny sparks still visible to her senses, but their expressed powers far outweighed by the light of the stars that Nanoha had gathered. Signum's mind brushed against Raising Heart's, gaining a measure of Nanoha's progress. Background noise. The fight below continued. Nanoha did not shift her attention.

"324%..." said Raising Heart, but Nanoha spared the voice in her ears no attention, remaining engrossed in her work. The pressure waves rumbled across her body, but she paid the flesh no heed. The star above her grew ever more energetic.

"Shamal, Raising Heart estimates that Nanoha will finish her preparations in the next twenty seconds."

Signum's flaming sword severed a swathe of tentacles along one side of the creature's body. Signum shifted her grip, and with the expenditure of a cartridge she accelerated in an even greater burst of flame. Shamal watched as their leader swung around the topside, rending the humanlike form central to the malformed entity into chunks of broiled meat. The trailing flames licked across putrid flesh.

The Knight of the Lake's ringed fingers twitched slightly as she restored her focus on the core that she had located. The defense program's shifting body moved it around a little, but it could not hide it from Shamal effectively. The relentless assault, which rendered unto dust its every attempt to gain control of the battle, regularly crushed the defense program's barriers, leaving it a wide open book for Shamal's scrying magic.

"I am ready."

"Yuuno, coordinate with her for the transport," Signum commanded. "Hayate, Yumeko, do you feel you can also lend your strength?"

"We might lack the flexibility to take the lead, but if one of our Knights is leading the effort we can be relied upon," the unisoned pair responded with one voice.

Already, the deep well of power on the other side of Shamal's heart begin to flow, ready to lend its aid to whatever course Shamal took next. Shamal's mouth twitched upwards at the trust and excitement that poured along with the Mistress of the Night Sky's mana.

The light from above beat down upon them like the midday sun, pink light suffusing the world with sepia tones. As Zafira and Vita crashed into the defense program one more time, shockwaves rippling through the sky, Shamal stretched out her hand in a smooth thrust into the Mirror of Travels before her, and laid her hand upon the most central part of the defense program's existence. The other side of the portal was a hostile environment that fought to reject her, but Shamal was one of Hayate's Knights. She surpassed the frailties of humans.

And like this, there could be no errors. There was only one way for this to end.

"Yuuno!" She cried out, linking her mind and his as she opened her heart to Hayate and Yumeko. "On the count of three, transfer! One!"

Nanoha's consciousness slowly synced back up with her body, leaving her feeling boneless, exhausted. Involuntarily, her mouth dropped open, gasping in great gulps of air. Now that her attention was no longer required elsewhere, she felt every ache and twinge. Sweat dripped off of every inch of her form, and were her barrier jacket mere fabric it would be completely ruined.

She tried to look down below, an instinctive attempt to check on her allies, but she couldn't see anything. Ah, that was right, wasn't it? The light she held above her, the star brimming with might, it must have flash-blinded her at some point. She licked her lips, felt them tingle in a distinctly unpleasant fashion as her tongue moistened the cracked and broken surfaces.

She tried to speak, taking long seconds before she got her vocal cords working.

"Raising Heart, are they ready?"

"Five seconds, my master."

Nanoha turned her sightless gaze up above. She could feel the strain the mana exerted upon the fabric of space-time. Only her containment efforts were preventing a catastrophe. If she didn't direct this properly, the consequences would be truly dire. Could a mere human really do this?

It was pointless to ask. She would do it regardless. This was the way forward.

Nanoha struggled for a moment before successfully lifting Raising Heart into a ready position.

"Translocation in three… two…"

"Long distance transfer!"

"Target on track!"

"Tranfer!"

Three voices cried out, and a beam of light enveloped the monster, dragging it into the sky in an instant. The flesh withered away as the core departed, but even during the transfer process Shamal could sense it reconstructing itself, abandoning the form the Wolkenritter had savaged. As it dissolved into specks of light, Shamal cried out to Nanoha, high above.

"Now! Fire!"

"Target has arrived," Raising Heart's feminine voice announced. "I can be shot."

"Sorry about this, Raising Heart. Thanks for your support. Please grant me wings."

"Yes, my master."

Nanoha fixed her sightless gaze on her enemy far above as the wings on her feet beat back and forth in prelude to her motion, and with no more warning than that Raising Heart launched them towards the spell above them. Nanoha swung Raising Heart in a perfect Flash Impact, smashing into the containment magic she had spent so much effort casting. The world shuddered.

Nanoha called out her spell as the light spilled forth, bright enough to outshine every star in the heavens in this one moment.

"Star Breaker!"

"Supernova," Raising Heart intoned with calm finality.

And the sky split apart.

The defense program washed away in a tide of light.

…Nanoha, speak to me…

…Please…

…Shamal, can you…

…hold on, you can…

…moving on to reconstruction…

…saw the light, that was Nanoha…

…let her rest.

"She'll make a full recovery," Shamal assured the assembled group as she let the Takamachi family gather around Nanoha's bed. "She'll be weak for a while, but the physiotherapy she requires to regain full capacity won't be much more stringent than what Hayate will be looking forward to."

"But… I can't even walk," Hayate said uncomprehendingly from a new wheelchair. Yumeko stood behind it supportively.

"Nanoha's limb musculature was very low on my priorities," Shamal said solemnly. "I repaired the stress damage to her skeleton, and all of her internal organs are at full functionality once more. But she's lost a lot of mass, and this was the best way to enable her to make a full recovery long term." Shamal looked over the assembled mages, and gave them a gentle smile. "She'll live a long and healthy life so long as she never tries to do something like that again. For now, she'll just have to put up with the inconvenience."

Fate and Yuuno looked back down at the table in front of them, where Raising Heart's damaged jewel rested. The device wasn't irrecoverable, but she wouldn't be truly functional for quite a while.

"Don't let her use magic to move herself around and fetch things for her," Shamal warned the Takamachi family. "Nothing more strenuous than telepathy until further notice. When she wakes up, keep her in bed and feed her as much as she'll eat. She will tire quickly. We can start working on her limb strength… the day after tomorrow should be fine."

Shirou nodded slowly.

"Thank you," he said. "For… for bringing her back in one piece."

"There's no need for thanks," Shamal replied. "She's done us a great service, and I did give my word, after all."

"Yuuno," Arf said abruptly. "I realize that seeing Nanoha messed up like this is a real downer, but we are on a time limit here."

"No need to worry," Yumeko said gently. "He won't be able to do anything. With time, and help, and a lot of specialized equipment, it is indeed theoretically possible to repair me to my original form. But those are all things we lack."

"But Nanoha bought this time for us," Arf retorted. "So we'll try anyway. Just leave that book of yours here, and run off and spend some time with your family."

"Arf's right," Yuuno admitted. "You don't have much time, so you should spend it with your loved ones. I'll… I'll do what I can."

"Thank you," Hayate said, giving him a brilliant smile. "You've done so much for us, I don't know that we'll ever be able to repay it."

"Friends don't need to trade favors," Yuuno replied as he stood up from his seat. "Just don't miss this chance. However this turns out, there shouldn't be any regrets."

"I constructed a replica of this place, in that dream," Yumeko admitted as she moved around the kitchen. "I'd… It helped me pretend that I was actually a part of your lives."

Hayate cocked her head at her. "But you were. The Tome was always with me."

"But I couldn't speak with you," Yumeko said sadly. "I wasn't… You can be in a crowded room, but if you can't interact with anyone, you might as well be alone. I'd have given anything to…"

Vita hugged Yumeko from behind, cutting her off mid-sentence. After a moment, she pulled away, red-faced.

"You're here now," Vita said, flushed.

"Thanks," Yumeko gave the girl-shaped knight an honest smile.

"So what do you want to eat?" Signum said seriously as she tied on an apron. "This will be the first time in a long time that you've actually eaten something."

"Anything is fine, but can I help?" Yumeko asked, wringing her hands together. "I… I simulated eating foods based off of your senses, but I never got to really take part in the… process."

"Certainly," Signum's solemn voice replied as the Knight of the Sword ducked behind the counter to find a chopping board. "Zafira, can you show her where the knives are?"

Hayate opened the refrigerator, and methodically began passing foodstuffs to Shamal.

If Yumeko teared up now and then, none of them commented on it. Tears of happiness were allowed, after all.

"She was right, then?" Arf asked, knowing the answer.

Yuuno sighed. "Yes. I… I figured. But I had to try."

Fate kicked her feet back and forth, a little depressed. "So in the end, there's nothing we can do?"

"We can end the suffering of the Tome of the Night Sky. But this time with Hayate and the Wolkenritter… it's limited."

"The best possible ending… still seems so unfair," Arf whispered.

Sunlight played softly across Yumeko's skin as she sat upon a blanket in the park. She let the chatter of Hayate's family wash over her, and only interjected of her own accord occasionally. She almost expected to be kept on the outside of the conversation, but it never happened. They had folded her into the group like it was natural. Like she wasn't…

"We should do it tonight," she said suddenly.

Hayate tilted her head, confused by the non sequitur.

"Put me to rest, I mean," Yumeko clarified. "Any longer than that, it'll just be putting everything at risk."

Hayate sighed, and sadly brushed a silvery lock away from Yumeko's face.

"If you're sure," she said, clearly torn up about it. "We can go to the Takamachi's at ten o'clock? And then we can perform the ritual before midnight."

"Thank you," Yumeko said, tears welling up again. "For… for everything. I'm sorry that I can't stay. If only I wasn't broken like this-"

"You aren't broken," Hayate said insistently. "There's nothing wrong with you, Yumeko. You're a wonderful person. You're just ill, and that's not your fault at all."

"…Would you keep me? If I could stay?"

"Yes. For as long as you want to be with me," Hayate promised.

"Hearing that… I feel like the happiest Tome in the world."

Shamal's scrying magic enabled her to do Yuuno a quick favor from within the boundaries of the Yagami household. It was a fairly easy task, really.

"Oh, dear," Shamal thought to Yuuno, sarcasm dripping from her mental voice. "It seems as if some fiendish woman is magically altering the data as it passes through the wi-fi router. Last chance to back out? This is a lot of money which is probably dirty, but I suppose it could just be a really amazing case of tax evasion."

"I just watched them crack open a crate of assault rifles, so I'm going to trust Kyouya's ethical judgement here," Yuuno replied dryly as he tipped off the police. "Work your black magic, please. Though, I don't think this actually falls under the label of black magic? You aren't enchanting anyone, or cursing them, or causing any sort of physical harm… It's not invoking an Act of God or inflicting disease… I mean, no one would ever try to prosecute someone for the practice of black magic given the current prevailing opinion on the subject, but I think this might not even be illegal, strictly speaking."

A scholar to the core, that one, Shamal smiled in amusement. "Well, best of luck."

"I apologize for being unable to remember you," Signum told Yumeko in a moment together.

"You do, on some level," Yumeko replied. "You Knights, you all have some pretty heavy trust issues. If you didn't remember me at all, well…"

She trailed off, giving Signum a rueful grin. "I'm glad that I made enough of an impression," she concluded. "Your minds, they can be modified, but changing the structure of your thoughts and memories and associations is a lot harder than just erasing data files or weighing in on your decisions. All forms of mind control have their limitations."

Signum nodded, perhaps a bit relieved to hear that. "If I may ask… what name did we call you by back then?"

"Yumeko is the only name I have," the silver-haired unison device replied simply, clasping her hands together. "Perhaps I was made to forget, or perhaps I never had a name other than 'Tome of the Night Sky' or 'Book of Darkness' or 'administrative program'. Sorry that it's a bit silly. It's not a properly dignified name, I know."

"I do not think a nickname needs to be dignified," Signum said with some amusement. "It is a name received from a friend after all."

Signum looked over the woman beside her thoughtfully.

"And perhaps it suits you. A dream is beautiful even if it is fleeting, is it not?"

Yumeko blushed bright red and sputtered. "You- Wah! Don't say something like that!"

Signum chuckled. "A Knight should only speak truth to a lady."

Yumeko couldn't contain a peal of laughter. "Ha! When was the last time you actually broke out the courtly manners, Signum?"

"Who knows? It's been a while since I tried to make a lady smile," Signum replied with a grin.

"How much of the Tome do you think these are going to add up to?" Fate asked curiously.

"Well, I'm not trying to preserve autocast capability, just record enough to be able to learn the spell from the data," Yuuno said. "And, well, you can fit a lot of files on a five terabyte storage device. There's going to be all kinds of fascinating historical and magical data lost, but in terms of the encyclopedia data... a majority, I think. This will keep scholars in business for centuries, even with just the capture metadata and spell design to work with."

This warehouse had been officially purchased some time back, the better to have somewhere to run tests on the Book of Darkness without risking someone's house. It was an old, unadorned building in the backwoods that they had been directed to by Suzuka after some quiet enquiries. Now, of course, it was a mystically enchanted bastion.

The large space was also filled to the brim with data storage devices.

They had been… theoretically legally purchased. Kind of. Well, it was enough of a gray area that none of them had been hesitant about it. They weren't exactly flush with good options, and it was important that nobody managed to figure out what use these items were going to be put to. The battle against the defense program was already making far more waves in the political landscape of Earth than the TSAB would consider acceptable, so under the circumstances this was a good compromise between the obligations Yuuno had as a resident of Earth, a member of the interdimensional community, an archeologist, and a friend.

Kyouya had cheerfully recommended the philanthropic characteristics of something called the 'Clover Organization'. Shamal had spent a little bit of time helping out, and things had sorted themselves out. Well, money had moved around in ways that were not clearly illegal, and the proper computers had been adjusted to show the appropriate changes in store inventories, and there hadn't been any breaking and entering thanks to transporter magic and scrying. On a related note, Miyuki's biological mother was set to receive some really helpful anonymous tips in the near future. Not exactly case closed, but it was a good day's work and a lot of dirty money put to good use.

"Does the Tome have a spell that will work?" Arf asked. "Transferring that much data manually… there's no way that we could handle this much in the time we have left."

"Close enough," Yuuno said, watching the Tome flip open to the page he was thinking about. "The automated casting system can do some minor modifications, so if it's just 'the structure of the storage device' and 'file format', then this will do."

"So how fast will this go?"

"Six hundred and sixty six parallel castings is possible," Yuuno said thoughtfully, reading the appropriate page. "Unlike combat magic, data transfer is a fundamental function of the Tome, so it's no problem. As for the speed, we'll see."

And thus the warehouse filled with light.

"Here's my taxes," Vita grumbled as she passed a deuce to Zafira, who cheerfully 'granted' her a four in exchange. At least she'd managed to not come last like Shamal had last round.

Shamal, of course, had to give up her two best cards to the current grand millionaire, Hayate. This brutally unfair way of granting advantage to the winners and disadvantage to the losers was the central tenet of the game. Their mistress was really quite the card shark.

Hayate, sitting on Shamal's left, started out by playing a pair of threes. Zafira responded with a pair of sevens, to which Signum passed. Yumeko set down a pair of tens, at which point Vita hesitated, eying the others suspiciously, before finally placing a pair of jacks. Hayate set down a pair of deuces, taking control of the next trick. A bit early in the game to be playing high value cards like that, but maybe she had something she really wanted to get rid of early on.

Well, Hayate had played more cards than anyone else, so this was an early lead for her. Vita had to try to ensure that it wouldn't last.

Yumeko looked up at the night sky, dusk nothing more than a fading glimmer.

"This world, it's beautiful."

Zafira smiled at her. "Indeed. Though it has its ugliness as well, of course."

"Who cares about that?" Vita said bluntly. "This place has peace. We should just enjoy it. If we try to make the rest of the world as nice as this city, we'll just end up fighting for every moment of happiness we can get between battlefields."

"Hayate wouldn't like that at all," Yumeko agreed.

They walked on through the night, catching back up to Hayate. Snowflakes floated down from the clouds above, dusting the ground in white. A cold wind whipped past, scattering crystals of ice to dance beneath the city lights.

To get to experience this, Yumeko would have given anything. That cold wind out of the night sky, she could only call it a blessing.

"It isn't everything," Yuuno warned them as they surveyed the warehouse. "Regarding the spell data, it's most of the undamaged parts that I could access. But experiential data…"

"It's fine," Yumeko said with a soft smile. "The memories and emotions of the past, let them fade away. As an encyclopedia, there can be no greater success than to ensure the survival of the knowledge I contain. Thank you for doing this."

"I wish that I had more time," Yuuno lamented. "If I could have a decade, adjusting you to your proper form would be achievable. You deserve more than just this."

"This is already more than I hoped for."

"Even so," Hayate said quietly, taking her by the hand. "You deserve better than the simple wishes we can grant. But we'll give them to you, everything we can."

Strike down only my foe, burn away nothing else-

Pain, sharp and hot, red wetness sliding out from veins-

Nanoha awoke in her room, eyes blinking at the light which they could once more see.

"Sweetheart," her Mom whispered, reaching out to brush at her hair. "Thank goodness. You slept through the day."

Nanoha tried to sit up, but her Mom stopped her. She looked tired and red eyed. She'd probably been crying because of Nanoha.

It felt like Nanoha had been doing that to a lot of people recently.

"You're healed, but you lost a lot of strength. Don't try to get out of bed."

"What happened? Did it work?"

Momoko nodded. "Yes. Everyone is in the living room saying their goodbyes." The Takamachi matriarch stood. "I'll get you some food and let everyone know that you're up."

"Sorry for the bother."

Momoko sighed. "Just stay safe, please? I worry. I just… I thought that this was going to be safe."

"It should have been," Nanoha admitted. "And we all came back together in the end. That's all we can really hope for when events turn against us unexpectedly."

"…I know," Momoko admitted, and slipped out of the room before anything else could be said.

It was only a few seconds later that Yumeko stepped through the doorway.

"Thank you for all your hard work, Nanoha. I'm glad to get the chance to say goodbye."

"So I guess there wasn't a last minute miracle, huh?" Nanoha asked rhetorically. "But I'm glad that I could at least do this much. This time, have you been cherishing it?"

"Yes," Yumeko smiled. "To have an end like this, it's more than I'd ever dreamed. These few hours, they've been amazing. I have no regrets."

"Then I don't have any either," Nanoha replied. "Yumeko, have a good journey. Whatever waits beyond this life, move forward with a light heart."

"I will. Thank you."

"You've already thanked me," Nanoha reminded lightly.

"I thanked you for your efforts," Yumeko corrected. "But I also want to thank you for being my friend, however short our time together was. Without you extending your hand and giving me a name, my hope that Hayate could do the same would never have rekindled, and this day would not have come. So I want to thank you for being kind."

Nanoha smiled. "I'm sorry it took me so long. People should always be kind, I think. Even if they can't do more than that, kindness matters."

"It does," Yumeko affirmed. "Goodbye, Nanoha. Many blessings upon your life."

"Goodbye, Yumeko. You might be leaving us now, but we'll remember you in our hearts."

Fate and Yuuno stood at opposite ends of a spell triangle, a faint white glow upon the fallen snow. In the center, Yumeko stood alone. Hayate and the Wolkenritter watched from the sides with Arf.

"I'll do it right this time," Hayate promised. "The new Tome of the Night Sky, that child will never go through the things you did."

"I'm glad," Yumeko replied. "Then, all I'll ask is that you give that child a name of their own. Let them grow up without the shadow of 'the Book of Darkness' or 'Yumeko' shaping their future."

"Then, I'll name her Reinforce," Hayate decided. "The sacred wind of blessing."

Yumeko smiled brightly. "A wind that anyone would welcome, that supports you but can never be bound. That's a great name. Convey my well-wishes to her as her predecessor." She looked around at the gathered mages. "One last time, allow me to thank all of you. Although it was only for a short while, it means more to me than I can say."

Eyes were moist, but everyone accepted those feelings.

"I'm ready now," Yumeko told Yuuno and Fate.

"Alright," Yuuno said. "We'll do it properly."

"We'll return you to the night sky," Fate agreed.

"Don't worry," Bardiche chimed.

Yumeko held the Tome to her chest. "A powerless fragment will remain after this. Let it only be a memento. After all, I'll be residing in your hearts rather than a lifeless piece of metal."

"Yumeko…"

"Master Hayate, thank you for being my last owner. I have no regrets. I'll entrust you to the Guardian Knights now."

"Goodbye, Yumeko. I'm glad we met."

Yumeko took a deep breath, and as she exhaled, she vanished into a spray of white sparks. The spell faded, and a decorative metal cross like the one on the Tome's cover landed softly on the snow.

Hayate slowly wheeled herself over to pick it up.

There was a loop of metal at the top, so that it could be threaded on a piece of string or wire and worn as a necklace. It was a pendant that could always be kept close to Hayate's heart.

Hayate sniffled loudly, eyes leaking. "I'll treasure all of you, Yumeko. It's a promise."

"Do you think she'll stay healthy?" Zafira asked, demonstrating his concern to the doctor. "We never did understand what was wrong with her in the first place."

"It's frustrating, especially as a researcher," Doctor Ishida admitted. "But she's turned a corner and she's not looking back. As her doctor, I can only express my gratitude for this miracle and urge you to keep an eye out for any changes."

Signum nodded. "I won't question a Christmas miracle when we get one," she asserted. "For Hayate's sake, I'll hope that her paralysis will remain nothing more than a childhood memory."

Across the room, Shamal and Vita stood by as Hayate took her first shaky steps, a cross pendant hanging over her heart.

"Two more times," Shamal encouraged.

Nanoha's hand felt like a limp noodle, but she obligingly squeezed down on the stress ball twice more. The pressure she could apply was pretty pathetic, but it took a lot of effort.

"There you go," Shamal said happily. "That's a lot better than last week. How are you feeling?"

"Exhausted," Nanoha groaned. "But, no pain. I just don't have any stamina."

"That's what I'd expect," Shamal nodded. "Let's leave your upper body alone and give it a short break. How are you adductors coming along?"

Nanoha groaned in anticipation, but moved on to demonstrating her progress with the next exercise.

"It isn't fair," Momoko told her husband. "She… I can't even say that she made a mistake this time, and she still got hurt so badly…"

"That's life, I suppose," Shirou agreed. "There aren't any certainties. But she came back to us, and we can help her get better."

"This time. What about next time?"

Shirou gave his wife a kiss on the forehead. "We'll just have to believe that she'll always come back to us. As her parents, we should have faith in her."

"It's hard."

"Yes. The important things often are."

Nanoha needed to build up some reserves of body fat again, so she didn't complain about forcing down a larger meal than usual. That said…

"Hayate's already walking?" Nanoha pouted.

"Well, 'walking' is probably a little generous. She's moving her legs and bearing some weight on them," Arf corrected.

Nanoha sighed, only slightly mollified, and forced herself to clear her plate.

"Raising Heart has done a lot of repair work, so she'll be talking again pretty soon," Yuuno interjected.

"That's great!" Nanoha quickly cheered up.

"But that doesn't mean you can go flying," Fate quickly followed up.

Nanoha nodded in agreement, more looking forward to continuing her magical studies. She wanted to get competent in something other than combat now that she had the opportunity. There was so much more to magic than that.

The world was nervous. This was the second highly visible incident in less than a year, and answers weren't forthcoming. Nanoha didn't want Earth to come to view magic as a weapon, and the potential magic had to change the way the world worked couldn't be overlooked. Someday, maybe Nanoha could find a satisfactory solution. All she had right now were vague ideas and gaping holes in her mystical education.

Much like getting her body back in shape, the only way to move forward was a lot of hard work.

Hayate tossed a balled up sock into the laundry basket with a careful telekinetic shove before turning to the next one.

Magic, she was finding, tended to be kind of… fiddly. And Hayate wasn't well suited to doing things other than brute force, mystically speaking. But she was working at it. Every day, she got a little better.

"Oops," Hayate said, as her concentration wavered, dropping the sock on the floor. It took her several long moments before she could generate another vector of mystical force to lift the fabric from the floorboards. But compared to the frustration of not even being able to maintain a handful of magilinks, she'd come a long way.

To make a new Tome of the Night Sky, she needed to be incomparably better. She needed to learn about magical engineering, and artificial intelligence, and come up with a reliable way to gather spell data. There was so much to do. But, if she took it one day at a time, she'd get there in the end. After all, she wasn't trying to do everything alone.

"Signum, can you tell me more about unison devices?"

"Of course, Hayate."

"No, I think you reacted in a reasonable fashion," Shamal told Fate. "There are times when violence should be avoided, but even with your limited understanding of the situation there was every reason to deal with the defense program in such a manner."

"But is it alright to care about my friends this much?" Fate asked Shamal. "I mean… Well, Suzuka and Arisa are my friends too, but it isn't the same at all."

"Caring for others is never inherently a bad thing," Shamal told her. "But what is different about your relationship with, for example, Yuuno versus your relationship with Suzuka?"

"I don't know," Fate said, frowning. "I mean, I trust them both. But I feel like Yuuno is more important to me than Suzuka is."

"Fate, you'll find that not all friendships are built on the same foundation," Shamal explained. "Suzuka and Arisa are not central parts of your life. That doesn't prevent them from being your friends, but they have different lifestyles, goals and plans for the future. Twenty years from now, you will likely be living on a completely different planet from Suzuka and Arisa, and you probably won't get in touch more than a few times a year. Nanoha and Yuuno have a lot more in common with you than they do."

"Is it that simple?"

"It might be," Shamal said. "Your feelings towards Nanoha and Yuuno… Well, that will probably be a lot clearer a few years from now. You're still growing up. Just remember that there is nothing wrong with caring for someone, or even for loving them."

"Love?" Fate asked thoughtfully.

"There's more than one form of love," Shamal said with a smile. "But Arf, Nanoha, and Yuuno, I feel confident in saying that you love them. And that's enough, for now. What sort of relationship you'll develop with each of them as you grow up, no one can predict that."

Raising Heart's gem was once more smooth and flawless.

"Are you feeling better?" Nanoha asked anxiously.

"All systems ready," Raising Heart replied.

"Thank goodness. Sorry to put you through so much, Raising Heart."

"I was happy to help," the device replied. "Mission accomplished."

"It really was," Nanoha said bemusedly. Raising Heart almost sounded smug. Nanoha could see why: objectively they had accomplished an incredibly impressive feat of bombardment magic. "Well, I don't plan on doing something like that again. Do you feel up to helping me with my studies? I've got a lot to learn about magic still."

"Yes, my master. Standby, ready."

Author's Note:

Well, here it is. A's has drawn to a close. I know that a lot of you probably never thought this day would come, but let this stand as a testament for your perseverance.

So, design notes stuff. This story has been a product of several years at this point. Looking back, it's hard to recall clearly how this was originally planned, because this has been percolating for quite some time, and even then the story changed in the writing of it.

I've talked about most of the characters before, so let's talk about Reinforce.

Much like the Wolkenritter in this story are incredibly superhuman beings (probably more explicitly so than in canon) whose only true weakness is that they are shackled AIs being screwed over by the entity holding their chains, Reinforce is envisioned as an AI designed to fulfill a role that she can no longer perform. At a certain point, this drove her insane (insofar as is possible for her species) and she reinvented herself based upon the species she knows best: humans. It… didn't really work, but it did keep her functional. She makes a good show of things when Nanoha talks with her, but the cracks quickly begin to show.

A lot of her character fleshed out as I wrote this chapter. The mood swings, the desperation… I didn't realize until I was actually writing it how incredibly abusive Reinforce's backstory was. I mean, I knew that she got screwed over in canon, but given how I'd interpreted her character writing some of this stuff smacked of domestic abuse in ways that were really uncomfortable.

Reinforce is a lot more stable once she receives Hayate's approval and direction and begins acting as a unison device, but sadly fixing her problems was never going to be possible with the resources at hand. When I planned this out, I wasn't trying for a fix-fic.

Nanoha was always going to be the one trapped by the Dream of the Book of Darkness. It was a narrative-driven choice back then (I wanted to explore Nanoha more) but as I figured out the logistics of how exactly the Book was going to get filled, the best solution I could come up with from the perspective of the characters ended up leaving all of the mages undrained. So, since the best way for the defense program to wreck things was to learn Nanoha's Starlight Breaker and just start wiping out cities with the mana in the atmosphere, things just kind of worked out.

The heroes of this story are largely idealistic to one degree or another, but Nanoha has the dubious honor of getting really screwed over by this trait in Chapter 5. She ultimately concluded that it would have probably worked out for her if she'd been more awesome back then (which is… probably true, actually) so the problem was with her. This is one of the things that shaped Nanoha's dream world. Nanoha decided that she needed to learn to blow things up better in case Precia came back, and started specializing in a different direction than canon Nanoha did. She soon found herself being rather more successful than she hoped, and on a visceral level this was pretty scary. Nanoha doesn't really want to be able to turn downtown Uminari into a smoking crater, she just wanted to be strong enough to protect the things she cared about. This is the other issue she had to confront in the Dream.

Nanoha had to be drawn in, like Fate was by her dream family, and the best way to do this was to give her a world that was almost exactly what she wanted, but needed her to put in the effort to make it perfect. Ideally, Nanoha would have chased down Fate, befriended her, reconnected with her family, etc.

Instead, Nanoha realized that this wasn't what she wanted, and that she didn't care about Fate having a family nearly as much as she cared about having Fate in her life. This wasn't a very comfortable realization, that Nanoha does have her selfish parts, and Reinforce had to prod her a bit to get her to admit it. Nanoha also had to seriously think about the power that Raising Heart enables her to wield and confront the fear that maybe Nanoha shouldn't be able to control that much destructive power.

Reinforce and Nanoha interacting also allowed a display of Nanoha's greatest virtue: her kindness. Nanoha sees someone in pain and she does something about it because she can do something, she's right there, and it's the right thing to do. While Nanoha's attempt to reach out to Precia (someone who wouldn't, couldn't reciprocate) failed horribly and caused a lot of problems, here Nanoha's desire to reach out to Reinforce (someone who really needed and wanted a friend) ended up saving the day. So I suppose that the moral of the story is that kindness is a good thing, but it's no substitute for being a good judge of character. Nanoha had her suspicions about Precia, so she really should have been more careful.

It also led to Reinforce being named by Nanoha, which I really couldn't avoid because Nanoha really thought that the administrative program needed a name right now and I eventually gave in. I swear, I sometimes wonder if I'm actually in charge of this story. Nanoha has a very different naming sense than Hayate does, so Reinforce became Yumeko.

As I originally envisioned it, Nanoha would probably have gotten severe health complications from firing that breaker, and some of that would linger throughout the story. But I eventually realized that I was treating Shamal as much less capable in her specialty than the others were in theirs, and gave Nanoha more temporary problems and a full recovery at some point in the future. This time, at least. If Shamal hadn't been on hand...

Yuuno and Arf have spent most of this story learning to stick to what they're good at and never give up on the things that matter to them. They've been in the groove since they made the decision to save the day in the Garden of Time, and they've made a serious mark on the plot. Arf has stepped away from just supporting Fate and she's more of a big sister to the group now, both in her role in the group's dynamics and in her changed priorities. There was a time when she'd have grabbed Fate and gotten out of dodge, but now Arf is the one leading the charge to save Nanoha (and those other people as well, but that's down the list a ways).

Yuuno's role here will one day be a legend in the archaeological community commensurate with Tony Stark building an arc reactor and a suit of power armor in a cave with a box of scraps. (On a related note, it is Teana rather than Subaru who will be enamored of Nanoha should I ever write StrikerS.) Yuuno has learned to rock his role as a support specialist, and he's mostly over his inability to function in the more traditional combat roles that Nanoha and Fate excel at. Early on, Yuuno would have had a very different reaction to that Starlight Breaker than 'teleport the caster away and ram it'.

Fate didn't do a whole lot other than recover from the events at the Garden of Time, something that was kind of starting to bother her a few months in. She's been slowly picking up non-combat magic, which doesn't come as naturally as throwing lightning bolts, and resolving her more obvious issues with some help from Shamal. Shamal isn't an ideal child therapist, so therapy tended to be more along the lines of giving good life advice (Ancient Belkan edition) and talking about her problems. The spirited philosophical debates that popped up from time to time were… Well, it's a good thing Fate's a child prodigy who cares about that stuff. Shamal did a lot more good than harm, but she may have rubbed off a bit.

On a related note, Fate transitioned from denial to anger a lot faster this time! And is much less hesitant to resort to gross physical harm! By Wolkenritter standards, Fate now deals with trauma in a healthy manner with just a little bit of support from her friends. (I'm not joking. Shamal patted herself on the back when Fate discussed this with her and reassured Fate that she did the right thing. Arf agrees with that assessment. Japanese society at large probably wouldn't. The reader is entitled to make their own value judgements.)

Fate's come to realize that she really, really cares about Yuuno and Nanoha in a way that she's only ever cared about Arf before. (Though she would try to deny it, her relationship with Precia was never as strong.) For now, none of them have considered how their relationship will work out in the future. I know people will ask, so I'll go ahead and say: once they hit puberty, Arf will remain a big sister figure for everyone, Yuuno will be heterosexual, Fate will in time come to understand that she's demisexual, and Nanoha will (after much confusion about other people's priorities) realize that she's firmly on the asexuality spectrum.

By the time StrikerS rolls around, they'll be living and working together, but there probably won't be much romance between any of them in spite of various attempts. This is so far in the future that I've only got a vague idea, really. Things will probably fall into place one way or another by the time they're all twenty-five.

Hayate and Nanoha have started to consider future goals, and Yuuno's pretty much got his career handed to him on a silver platter. Fate, Arf, and the Wolkenritter have yet to weigh in. As for the TSAB side of things, I'm not even going to pretend that going to Earth will end (or begin, for that matter) with anything other than polite discussion. These are reasonable people. They'll probably try to hire every mage in Uminari.

The real question is who will be interested in accepting.