The room was mostly dark and mostly empty. The only illumination came in from the window, the reflected lights of the city below, and from a few burned- down candles scattered about. There was also a fair amount of giggling and moving around going on under the bedsheets, suggesting that the only two people in the room probably weren’t likely to complain about the lack of proper illumination.

There was a sudden gasp, and the sheets moved aside as a tall, slender woman with long, pale brown hair sat up straight on the bed, completely ignoring her companion as gold light flashed within her large brown eyes.

“What’s wrong, Allys?” the young man asked, touching her bare shoulder with a look of concern.

“I have to go.” She threw the sheets aside and started moving around the room, gathering up clothes and dressing with remarkable speed and enthralling grace.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, sitting up and reaching for the handle of a long, jeweled sword which stood rather improbably on its point next to the headrest. The gems in the hilt winked slightly.

“Yes, but not like that. I’m not really sure _what_ it is,” the woman admitted, frowning as she tugged at her slightly lopsided dress, “but I know I have to check it out.” She hopped back onto the bed—and the young man—fully dressed, bestowing a long and loving kiss before she got up. “I’ll be back. I promise.”

The young man sighed. “Why is it that every time you make a promise, I start getting chills down my spine?”

The Atlanteans squinted against the glare as the dome of light collapsed in upon itself, the energy flooding back into the heart of the tiny crystal in the strange blonde girl’s hands. Eyes around the hall widened at the sight of eight young women in closely matching uniforms who had not been there when the light first filled the room. Two of them had hold of other strangers, and the first sound to go off in the room following the disappearance of the overwhelming flood of power was a violent sneeze, coming from the brown-haired young man who was the only male member of the newly-arrived group.

The second sound was the ear-piercing howl of another Dead Scream tearing across the hall. Medea had no idea who the newcomers were, nor did she particularly care; the blonde girl had somehow brought them here, and that made them the enemy.

She wasn’t at all prepared for the superhuman speed and agility the young women demonstrated. Most of them jumped out of the way with impossible ease, the one in the blue uniform carrying the young man along with her without any real trouble. The one in red jumped in front of the blonde girl, apparently intending to shield her, while the smallest of the group actually jumped _towards_ the dark projectile, swinging with both hands something that cut through the air and screamed almost as loudly as the deadly mass of energy.

Medea was ready to write the girl off as a corpse when a weirdly-shaped silver blade sliced the Dead Scream in half, its gleaming substance absorbing, dispersing, or just plain nullifying the power that should have broken every bone in the body of its wielder. Medea took a good look at that weapon and felt a cold shiver work its way up her spine as she recognized it.

“STASIS BOLT!” she shouted, swinging her staff in a short arc at the dark- eyed girl. Saturn shifted her weapon to intercept the blast, and the red energy disappeared harmlessly into the Glaive’s silver head, but Medea raised her staff before herself in both hands and closed her eyes, using the scant seconds Saturn needed to defeat the Stasis Bolt to trigger another of her powers.

“MARCH OF TIME!” Medea called out, igniting the Garnet Orb’s inner light once again. Energy spilled out from the Orb, coursing out along the lines and curves of the staff as if the jewel itself were bleeding. The spreading energy reached Medea’s hands and continued up her arms, moving further until both she and her weapon were outlined with a crimson aura. When her eyes opened, they glowed with the same light as she spoke a final command: “QUICKEN!”

The aura flared, and then Medea started to move, vanishing between one step and the next into a red blur, almost too fast to follow with the eye as she raced around behind Saturn, who turned and raised the Silence Glaive just in time to catch the downward-swinging arc of red light that was head of the heavy staff. For a moment, the red aura surrounding Medea dimmed, weakened even by that brief contact with the power of Saturn, but she pulled away and blurred again, coming out of it with the teeth at the end of her staff hooked around Saturn’s left ankle. Medea pulled back hard, yanking the smaller girl’s footing out from under her; Saturn caught herself with help from the Glaive, but then cried out as something cracked loudly across her back and drove her to the tiled floor.

Rolling away from where she thought her opponent was, Saturn took hold of the end of the Silence Glaive and swung it in a circle above herself as she lay on the floor, hoping to clear a space long enough to get back to her feet. The red blur leapt backwards as the Glaive buzzed in at shin level, then raced forward behind the thing. Saturn saw Medea reappear above her just before pain blossomed in her ribs and the breath whooshed out of her lungs. The Glaive came up to block the next downward jab, but Medea just swung her staff around over the other weapon and struck Saturn across the face with the jeweled end instead.

The physical damage from the two strikes was incidental; Medea was targeting Saturn in just the right places to prevent her from calling on her powers. The third strike crunched into the smaller Senshi’s left shoulder, numbing her arm and loosening her grip on her weapon, which Medea kicked away before raising her staff overhead for a final blow.

Though her jaw felt shattered, Saturn saw the blur coming at her head and managed to hiss “SILENT WALL” out between her teeth.

A low dome of dark energy sprang up around her, and Medea’s staff crashed against it with a bright flash of red, blur and aura both fading away, totally drained by the Wall. Medea frowned, then passed the head of her staff over the dome, calling another hemisphere of energy into existence over the first, this one made of weaving and shifting patterns of red light, with just enough space between its inner surface and the outer edge of the Wall to prevent its power from being siphoned off. She added a final twist to the thing, slowing the passage of Time within its confines to a minuscule fraction of normal, then looked over to the Silence Glaive and dropped a shield around it as well.

*There,* Medea thought in satisfaction. *That ought to hold the little...*

“WORLD SHAKING!”

Medea had just enough time to curse herself for being inattentive before something that felt like a meter-wide fist struck her square in the back and blew her off her feet.

Sword out and eyes hard, Uranus watched the woman tumble across the tiled floor. She glanced once at Pluto, said, “Get Saturn out of that thing,” and then charged at the two soldiers who had, at a sharp command from one of the robed men, moved between her and the past-Pluto.

Uranus didn’t yet have the same extent of close combat training Artemis and Luna had received, but she did have all the usual Senshi advantages of more-than-human physical strength, speed, and endurance. She was also seriously angry; _nobody_ got away with doing something like that to Hotaru while she had anything to say about it, and a couple of hired thugs weren’t going to stop her.

One guard dove at her, his sword leading point-first; Uranus jumped to the left and spun around, her right leg extended and coming down out of the completed turn with the heel in the small of the soldier’s back. He staggered forward as Uranus dropped to all fours, ducking a sidelong slash from the other guard before springing at him, turning her right shoulder to drive into the man’s chest. Given that the soldier was wearing a mail vest, the impact of the bodycheck probably hurt him less than it did Uranus. It certainly stunned him, though, leaving him open to the follow-up chop from her empty left hand to the base of his neck.

A memory-instinct went off in Uranus’ mind. Even as the guard in front of her dropped, she was spinning around to face the other, the Space Sword rising to parry a two-handed overhead blow with impossible ease. An ordinary human would have needed an arm like a tree trunk to stop that kind of force; Uranus not only stopped it but managed to push the other sword a little higher, clearing the way for a punch at the guard’s exposed face. She could clearly hear a low whoosh as her arm moved forward, encased in a bubble of storm-force wind that she’d called up without even realizing it.

Her hand struck him in the chest instead of the face, palm forward and fingers slightly curled. The blow itself probably didn’t even register through the mail, but the added force of the winds picked the man up and hurled him away, arms and legs trailing as if something had latched on to his back and yanked. Uranus couldn’t help but watch—and grin—as the human projectile crashed through one of the thin crystal double doors that led outside.

*Now where did _that_ come from?* she wondered, examining her hand to the sound of shattering crystal. The other Senshi were looking at her with expressions that clearly said they’d like to know the answer to that question as well; Uranus met their group gaze with a grin and a shrug before turning around to go after her original target.

Medea was already back on her feet and in the middle of an attack, but Uranus could run _very_ fast when she wanted to, and the Atlantean Senshi had to break off to defend herself, the half-readied energies of her interrupted attack falling away and scattering.

Of all the Senshi, Uranus was easily the most dangerous in hand-to-hand combat, even without her sword. She was stronger than any of the others except Jupiter, more of an athlete than anyone besides Venus, and that combination gave her the opportunity to dish out a substantial dose of pain to whatever deserving monster happened to cross her path.

It quickly became apparent that she was losing.

Trying to use a sword to fight someone armed with a staff is generally not a good idea. There is a reason why people put away swords in favor of axes and saws when they have to cut down a tree, and unless you have a very sharp blade—or one of those heavy broadswords designed to chop through steel armor and quickly divest people of such minor items as arms and heads—you’ll find it surprisingly difficult to chop a sturdy wooden staff apart, particularly when both ends of the thing are whistling around and threatening to break your head.

Granted, the Space Sword was no ordinary blade, but in this situation, it was up against a weapon every bit as enchanted as itself and several times larger to boot, a weapon which blocked the worst the curved sword could dish out and then returned it with interest. Uranus hadn’t yet ‘gotten around’ to reading the birthday present Setsuna had given her—a fact she was slowly beginning to regret—and so she relied, as always, on enthusiasm, natural talent, and bits of what she could recall about swordplay from her past life. The strategy had worked fine against mere mortals and the various forms of monsters she’d fought over the years, but against someone who possessed the same degree of physical ability as she did, and who had the intellect and training to back it up, Uranus found herself outmatched.

With its bizarre shape and heavy ornamentation, Medea’s staff hardly appeared practical for use as a fighting weapon, but she was proving that appearances can be deceiving, swinging the lighter end of the huge key with the ’teeth’ turned towards sensitive spots like the ribs, then bringing the head and all its glittering metal and jewels down on her enemy like a hammer. The Garnet Orb appeared to be joining in as well, surrounding the head of the staff with a brief glow whenever Medea swung it. Despite its size, the weapon was whistling around as if it were made of flexible bamboo, and each time Uranus fell back from a hit, she was moving curiously slower than before.

The taller of the two wizards made a move as if to begin a spell, and stopped short as a golden burst of light blew apart a tile near his feet. Tracing the path of the beam back to its source, Vaurinn saw Venus smiling, shaking her head, and waving her finger in a classic pose of admonishment. Anything the girls tried would have just as good a chance of hitting Uranus as her opponent—better, probably; this _was_ a Senshi of Pluto they were dealing with—but they could at least keep anybody else from interfering. Vaurinn took the hint and didn’t move again, although his mind continued to race.

While most of the other Senshi had their attention fixed on the fight, Pluto had her hands and mind occupied trying to get rid of the energy bubble surrounding Saturn. It looked exactly like the slowed-air dome she’d used to ward off the feet of the dinosaur stampede, although the Garnet Orb was telling her that Time was moving at the same speed for _everything_ within the dome, not just the air molecules that formed its outer layer. Saturn had dropped her Wall and been caught in the effect, and she was now moving at about the same speed as the air. It’d take an hour or more for her to get free at this rate, but Pluto thought they might not have any choice except to wait, as the dome was resisting all her commands for it to cease. The reason was obvious; the other Pluto was maintaining it.

*But how can she muster enough will to prevent me from dispelling the dome while she’s fighting Uranus?* Pluto looked up and asked the question again as Uranus got in a hit, reaching over the staff to punch her opponent in the face. In the same instant as Medea was shaking her head to clear away stars, Pluto directed her will against the slow-flickering barrier once more, and was met by the same resistance.

On a hunch, Pluto quickly called three tiny spheres of slowed air into being. The first, she held in existence with her own force of will; the second, she commanded the Garnet Orb to maintain; and after some uncertain magical fumbling, she managed to make the third globe self-sustaining, feeding off of latent temporal energy independently of her or the Orb. Then she brought the Orb near each sphere in turn to test its reaction, and compared those with the reaction of the jewel to the dome.

She was a little surprised when the Orb flickered, not in the manner indicating a self-sustained or Orb-sustained barrier, but one being held in place by a living mind. The same went for the dome around the Glaive. Could that woman actually be strong enough to... no, if she had enough self-control to use her powers _and_ fight at the same time, she certainly would have blasted Uranus with something by now.

Then what—who—was maintaining the shields? Pluto didn’t know, but she thought she might have a way to find out. Resting her staff in the crook of her left arm, she reached over and tugged the glove off her right hand before slowly extending that hand towards the surface of the dome holding Saturn. It tingled under her fingertips, and she hesitated, strongly tempted to forget the idea. Then she heard the low crunch of Uranus’ sword being deflected by the heavy staff of her enemy.

Pluto took a deep breath and relaxed the barriers around her mind.

Red light welled up in front of her eyes. It wasn’t the wall of light and the single trail of color she remembered seeing before, but then again, this wasn’t a person whose existence she was delving into. Pluto could still see the room, only now there were bands and lines of the dark red light everywhere. Motes of it clung to each of the Senshi, clustering especially thickly around Usagi, her glowing crystal, and the Garnet Orb. The white-haired man propped painfully against the blasted wall had quite a few of the spots circling him as well, and a long red arc moved through the air between him and a ten by ten grid of the floor tiles, each of which had motes hovering above them, like bubbles rising from a glass of pop. Many more of the minuscule points of red energy were drifting about the room, some in clusters, others alone.

Tiny lines connected every last one of the spots to Pluto and the Garnet Orb, and to their past counterparts at the end of the hall. Even the energy which made up the domes was linked to her, though Pluto could see that their connection to her was thinner and duller than their link with her predecessor.

Her eyes narrowed. There were _other_ lines leading off the spots, other people in the room connected to the power of Time. Ryo and Mars both had links, neither of them to even a tenth as many of the drifting points of temporal energy as either Senshi of Time, but the lines were there nonetheless. Ryo had more connections, but they were vague, fading in and fading out from moment to moment, whereas Mars’ connections were very solid and stable. Pluto guessed that it took a certain number of connections to trigger a vision, and that Mars had more stable links because she’d trained and practiced to earn control of her gift. Ryo’s ability was probably stronger, but he hadn’t learned how to fully control it yet, and so the links shifted randomly, bringing on the visions whenever they reached the ‘critical mass.’

The two men in robes, the wizards, were both connected to some degree, though even less than Ryo and Mars. Hardly anyone else had chosen to remain in the room after Usagi had raised her crystal and all magical hell had broken loose, but there were other lines, nearly as bright as those joining Pluto and the red-haired Senshi to the power of Time, and...

“GET AWAY FROM THAT!”

Pluto blinked and jumped as hard as she could to avoid the Dead Scream she’d almost failed to notice. Medea had beaten Uranus aside with a quick series of blows and then lashed out, hard, but since Pluto had gotten herself clear, the Scream collided with the slowed-air dome instead. Though the floor tiles around it were smashed into powder, the field of red energy withstood the attack with no apparent damage.

Now that Uranus was safely out of the line of fire, the other Senshi unleashed their powers. Neptune and Mercury combined Deep Submerge and Aqua Rhapsody to create a meter-wide jet of water filled with icy knives, while Venus fired off a Crescent Beam through one of Mars’ Burning Mandalas, the golden blast somehow spearing through all eight blazing rings to create a corkscrew- shaped beam of red-gold energy. ChibiMoon had transformed at some point during the mayhem and now let fly with her tiara at the same time as Jupiter unloaded an Oak Revolution. Jupiter’s attack was swallowed up by the whirling energy disc with no apparent effect, which made her stop, blink, and wonder if perhaps she needed to recharge.

Medea saw all that coming at her and raised her staff, spinning it rapidly through a full circle before her and leaving a trail of red energy in its wake, a disc of slowed air between her and the onslaught. It stopped the ice water barrage handily enough, but Medea’s face grew fixed with concentration as the spiraling energy blast shot in behind the first strike. The thing drove into the heart of the shield and exploded, tongues of fire reaching out for and around the rim of the barrier. Both hands clenched tightly around her raised staff, Medea gritted her teeth and fought to hold her defense. The uncoiling blaze died quickly enough—and it left her shield looking decidedly ragged at the edges.

Given what had preceded it, the lowly little tiara hardly appeared to be up to the task of knocking down even a weakened barrier. ChibiMoon was pleased to note that the Moon Tiara Stardust attack she’d gone for worked exactly like it was supposed to, scattering a thousand or so glittering bits of energy in the air before the barrier, but she privately didn’t expect it to pull off any miracles.

She was as surprised as everyone else when the tiny starspecks hitting the shield began to explode like miniature supernovas, each super-electrified blast ripping a tiny but very real hole in the wall of energy. Medea strove to maintain the shield and repair the damage, but the impacts were coming too fast and in too great a number for even her to keep up, and as the shield burst asunder, the leftover sparks detonated all at once, blowing Medea backwards.

Jupiter glanced at ChibiMoon as the younger Senshi retrieved her tiara, then gave an approving nod and a thumbs-up.

“Vaurinn!” Medea shouted. She managed to make it sound like a command instead of a call for help, even though she was privately shocked by how much power these future Senshi had demonstrated.

Ordered or entreated, the wizard raised his hands, a vial of some sort in the left and a colorless prism in the other. With a practiced speed, he threw the vial at the floor and flipped the prism into the air, calling out words that didn’t sound like the sort of noises the human voice was capable of making, and which even Usagi, still wrapped in Erridar’s translation spell, couldn’t understand.

Venus launched another Crescent Beam even before the two flying objects had left the wizard’s hands, but though her aim was perfect, the shot hit the man’s right shoulder in a flash of green light and was deflected wide, streaking up into the ceiling with a crunch and a rain of tiny debris. Protected by a personal shield, Vaurinn ignored the hit and remained focused on his casting, raising his right hand as if to pull something down from the sky or to haul it up from the earth.

Coming to an abrupt and physically impossible halt in midair, one point aimed straight down, the prism flashed with inner light and projected a beam of white energy at the floor, right into the heart of the spilled liquid, which was eating away at the substance of the tiles like acid. The single beam split into three, each one emanating from a different corner of the prism’s upturned face, and they swept outwards, linked by a thin circle of light which expanded to match their movements until it was over three meters across. Within that slender ring, the floor had apparently ceased to exist, for there was nothing there but black emptiness, a pit which had no sides or bottom. The prism fired a fourth beam of light directly into that unsettling void.

Every conscious head in the room turned in shock as an agonized scream split the air. Ryo had dropped to his knees, hands to either side of his head, palms pressed against the temples and fingers curled around past his ears. His eyes were shut and his jaw clenched, but both flew open for a split second before he doubled over from a flare of pain in his chest, like an icy knife driving straight into his heart.

“Ryo!” Mercury cried out, kneeling down next to him.

Not knowing exactly what was going on but guessing—correctly—that it must be bad, Venus and Mars were both already taking aim at the small prism. But before they could fire, the thing flew down the line of the fourth beam like a rocket, vanishing into the hole without a trace. Light erupted from the glowing ring, rising towards the ceiling in a circular wall.

And something came out of the hole.

The Senshi had all seen enough monsters destroyed to recognize the gathering patch of darkness as a sort of reversal of how such terrible creatures usually flew to pieces. Glowing red eyes appeared in the amorphous shadow and regarded Vaurinn as he snarled a command in another incomprehensible language, this one far more disturbing than the first, and pointed at the Senshi. The eyes shifted around to examine the Senshi, and suddenly the cloud was much larger. More eyes appeared, closer to twenty than to ten, and then the cloud solidified, expanding its border and contracting its darkness to create discernible shapes and colors.

There were now a dozen creatures huddled on the nothingness within the circle, hideous little beasts about half as tall as ChibiMoon. Roughly human in shape, their sallow skin hung loosely from thin skeletons whose design included large bone spikes at the shoulders, along the back, and on the back edge of each arm and leg. Heads crowned by numerous horns and spikes bore gaunt faces with empty eyesockets and drooling, fang-filled mouths. Unclothed and utterly hairless, the creatures possessed no recognizable indications of gender, and their moaning, wailing voices could have been either male or female, or something else altogether. Though they lacked eyes, the creatures seemed able to perceive the humans clearly enough, as they reached their hooked hands in that direction, scratching and scraping eagerly against the wall of light.

Looming over the smaller creatures was a much larger and very different entity. The light of the hall gleamed off a polished black carapace nearly as dark as the pit below, a smoothly segmented nightmare with eight slender, many-jointed legs supporting its large, curved body. Four arms and a tail sprouted from the shell, which ended in a large jaw that had no eyes to guide it, but which sported plenty of needle-like teeth. Each leg came to a sharp point, and at the end of each arm were three claws, arranged at equal distances around small, remora-like disks of teeth in the ‘palm’ of the ‘hand.’ A crest of spikes began just behind the gnashing teeth and continued down the back, terminating in a pair of metallic stingers on the tail. The armored bug-monster was taller than Jupiter, nearly as wide, and looked as if it would be three times as long as that once it had room to fully uncurl itself. A plume of yellow-tinted mist spurted from its large maw as it gave vent to a breathy, drawn-out hiss; once again, the absence of any recognizable eyes did not seem to be causing the creature any difficulty.

Three other creatures hung in the air. Two were birdlike reptiles somewhat taller than humans, orange-skinned, with slender builds and long limbs, pointy, elongated heads held up by far-reaching necks, and hanging tails that ended in spear-like points. Wings sprouted from their shoulders, rickety things with tattered sails that didn’t seem as if they should be capable of keeping the beasts in the air, but did so anyway. Bulbous red eyes on either side of the flying lizards’ heads glared fiercely down at the Senshi, and long tongues flickered out between their toothy beaks. They looked disturbingly like small dragons, and the faint scent of sulphur which got a little stronger each time their wings beat didn’t help to improve that impression.

By comparison to the rest, the last of the airborne creatures was nearly normal. It looked like a human woman with wings, extremely beautiful and almost angelic in appearance—almost. Angels did not have jet-black bat wings, or small horns rising from their foreheads with the gleam of polished onyx. Angels did not dress in black leather miniskirts and short, tight vests, nor did they wear stiletto-heeled black boots. Angels might have bone-white skin and waist-length black hair, but they most certainly did not have that sultry, pouty-lipped, smoldering black eyes sort of beauty. The Senshi could say all that for certain because Usagi had turned into something at least semi-angelic in the past, and she hadn’t looked a thing like what was floating at ease above them now.

“Eeep,” ChibiMoon said.

Jupiter swallowed heavily, trying to concentrate on what Sasanna had taught her to block out the waves of emotional darkness coming from inside that mass of nightmares. Fighting off the sickening impulses proved more difficult than she’d anticipated, and as her control began to slip, Jupiter unconsciously stepped backwards. Then she noticed a slight pressure from inside her fuku, something small and warm being pressed against her skin, just over her heart. She felt the shape of the object and realized it was the strange little acorn, for some reason still with her despite her transformation. Suddenly, concentrating on blocking out the monsters’ psychic auras was much easier.

“Attack!” Vaurinn shouted, spreading both hands wide. The wall of light surrounding the creatures dissolved, taking the hole in the floor with it, and there was a chorus of hisses and growls as the beasts took a collective step forward.

And then a dome of red light snapped into existence over the ones on the ground, completely isolating them from the rest of the world. Finding their ground support suddenly cut off, the two draconian fliers let out startled honking sounds that—under other circumstances—might have been funny, and then circled up into the higher parts of the ceiling. The other creature smiled oddly and landed briefly atop the dome, kneeling for a moment to launch herself straight into the air, a stylish show of indifference to fact that her allies had just been reduced to an eighth of their initial strength.

Medea glared at Pluto before swinging her staff at the dome. There was a bright flash from the Garnet Orb—both of them—at the moment of impact, and Pluto shook visibly, but the barrier she had created around the beasts held. Medea struck again, and again the wall remained intact, but so too did Pluto shudder.

“Get ready,” Pluto advised her friends in a whisper. “I’ll take care of her, but the rest of you will have to deal with the monsters and that wizard.”

She let the barrier fall just before Medea’s next strike would have hit it, and the Atlantean Senshi was pulled off balance by her momentum and the lack of anything to hit. Then things happened VERY fast.

The creatures rushed forward, the claws of the smaller ones clicking against the floor tiles while the spearheaded legs of the black bug shattered a tile with each step. There was a hiss from the bug, and the sickly-looking spiky horrors spread out to the sides, forming a wall between the Senshi and the larger monster. Overhead, the mini-dragons swooped down to either side, claws extended and jaws wide to reveal a sickly yellow light building in their throats. The devil-woman stayed above and behind her two compatriots, raising her right hand above her head. Her taloned fingers closed around a bone-white baton that appeared from thin air, the black gems ringing either end glowing darkly and surrounding the device with small spheres of green-streaked black energy.

Pluto took two long steps towards the advancing beasts, planted the butt of her staff firmly on the floor, and vaulted into the air with no more trouble than Venus or Uranus might have had. She sailed cleanly over the heads and grasping claws of three of the lesser beasts, slipped under the talons and tails of the flying lizards, and rolled as she landed to absorb the impact and avoid a swing from the tail of the largest monster, its twin stingers gouging furrows in the floor as they missed Pluto.

Just getting herself turned around after the imbalancing swing, Medea saw her successor rising out of the roll, eyes hard, staff already prepared for a strike. Vaurinn saw her, too, and raised one hand to hurl a spell—and quickly pulled back hand and spell as the Space Sword came within an inch of cutting both off short, clipping the edge of the wizard’s defensive shield in a flare of green-webbed energy. Uranus pressed the attack immediately, slashing and stabbing with the blade in her right hand, landing concussive blows with the wind-force surrounding her left.

Most of the remaining Senshi closed ranks around Usagi before launching their attacks. Jupiter and Neptune sent a combined Supreme Thunder and Deep Submerge at the creatures in the air, and at the same time, Mars hurled a Burning Mandala against the advancing surface line, spreading the attack out to strike as many of the little monsters at once. As the flaming rings cut into the crowd and the serpentine blast of high-voltage water sizzled through the fliers, Venus called down a Crescent Shower, the attack blasting the reptilian monster that was too slow to get clear. The Shower also caught up the high-voltage mass of liquid and slammed it down at the floor with incredible speed, crushing everything beneath it. It would have made sense for the bullet-force downpour to extinguish Mars’ rings, but instead, the moment the fire touched the sizzling water, there was an explosion, and the hall was filled by a cloud of dust-heavy steam.

“What... just happened?” Venus asked, waving her hand in front of her face to clear away the smoky mist. There were several layers of the stuff, differentiated by the settling of the dust. Anything from about knee level to the floor was too thick to see through, providing plenty of ambush opportunities for the smaller monsters. If they could see without eyes, then fog wasn’t likely to cause them any problems.

“Chemistry, maybe,” Neptune answered dubiously, her eyes looking carefully around in the murk for signs of the enemy. “Run a sufficient amount of electric current through water, and each molecule breaks down into two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Oxygen burns, and hydrogen explodes. I guess Jupiter’s lightning destabilized some of the water in my attack, and the Mandala rings set it off.”

“Oh.” Silence reigned briefly as Venus considered the reply. Then she grinned. “Cool. I guess we’ll have to keep that one in mind for future use, won’t we?”

“Whatever makes you happy, Venus,” Neptune said in an even tone. “Can anyone see anything?”

“Not past the hem of my clothes,” Venus replied cheerfully.

“That’s ‘the end of your nose,’” Artemis’ voice corrected from some distance away, coughing slightly.

“Artemis! Where are you?”

“In a world of hurt. Usagi, is Luna okay?”

“I don’t know,” Usagi replied, her voice becoming unsteady for a moment. “She was hit in the back of the head, and there was a lot of bleeding, and I can’t see her at all in this... this... fog!” She packed a great deal of frustration into that word.

“Come back here, you sissy!” Uranus’ voice rang out, echoing weirdly through the artificial fogbank. “Ah, hell,” she added a moment later. “All right, which of you genius water Senshi is responsible for the sudden weather front?”

“Never mind,” Neptune told her. “Just get rid of it.”

They could almost _hear_ Uranus’ smile in the moment of silence which followed that non-admission.

“Haruka!”

“Okay, okay. Just give me a minute to—whoa!”

They heard a loud moan and several impacts from Uranus’ general direction; she backed into view a moment later, fending off the combined claws of three of the bony monsters with some extremely fast sword work. A Crescent Beam took the one on the right through the chest and blew it backwards into the mist; ChibiMoon’s tiara cut the one on the left in half, and Uranus made short work of the third. All three warped bodies fell into the knee-high layer of thick fog with the same dusty slither, crumbling to bits which were likely vanishing as soon as they hit the floor.

Uranus turned to thank the others, but her face shifted from its customary knowing grin to shock as she called out, “Behind you!”

The Senshi were still turning when the bulk of the black-armored creature emerged from the fog with a raspy roar. Jupiter and Mars caught Usagi by the arms and hauled her along with them in a long leap while the others got themselves clear of the monster’s charge, and when the creature clattered to a stop and looked back, only Uranus and Venus were still visible. They looked at each other, then shrugged as one.

“Cover me,” Uranus said. Grinning, Venus held up her left hand, her first two fingers extended and her thumb back to mimic the shape of a gun, and winked. Uranus shook her head and charged at the bug-monster, ignoring the Crescent Beams which began to zip past her and smash into the brute’s armored shell.

Mars was getting angry.

Fog or no fog, they had to get Usagi out of this room—hell, they had to get her out of this TIME—before something caught up to her, and never mind that she had to have used the ginzuishou to bring them all here. However healthy she looked, there was no telling what she might have done to herself in reality, or what might happen if she tried it again. Mars wasn’t about to take the risk; they were getting OUT.

But just try telling that to Usagi.

They’d had arguments like this so many times that Mars knew in advance exactly how it would go. She’d make excellent points in favor of leaving, and Usagi would refute them; she’d insist, and Usagi would refuse. They’d glare and then shout, they’d wave their hands around, make threats, and call each other names. And in the end, even after all that effort, Mars knew that her odds of winning would be no better than fifty-fifty. Talk about frustrating.

*I wonder if Mamoru has this problem with her,* Mars thought, shaking her head.

A shift in the shadows above caught her attention; the fog was thinner here, and one of the flying lizards was swooping towards them, its jaws wide, a yellowish light rapidly filling its throat. Its skin was pitted and burned, evidence that it had caught at least part of the explosive multi-attack, but the creature clearly wasn’t out of the fight just yet.

Mars tucked the Book under one arm and awkwardly launched a Fire Soul attack at the airborne enemy, aiming for its open mouth. In the same moment, a ball of yellowish-orange flame erupted from the beast’s jaws, and the two fiery projectiles collided, canceling each other out in a brief explosion.

The creature landed, snapped back its wings, and spun around, lashing its long tail at the three humans. Jupiter carried Usagi out of the way, but Mars couldn’t avoid dropping the Book as she dodged the strike.

Mars didn’t like the Book. After two months’ worth of long nights of study, she still hadn’t figured out how to open it, and while nothing curious had happened to it during her entire time in the future village, she hadn’t forgotten that still-unexplained incident back at Hikawa when the Book had apparently crossed a room under its own power. She was fully aware of the fact that it was important, but she would have been much happier if it had been taken off her hands—except that Usagi had entrusted it to her, asked her to protect it.

And so now, as the Book disappeared into the lower layer of the fog, Mars felt her temper go from a slow burn to a hot flare. She jumped straight at the monster, ducking a swipe from its claws, and pulled her right hand back in preparation for a strike at a scaly knob between the creature’s side-mounted eyes. She would have used one of her wards to paralyze it, except that she’d run out weeks ago, and hadn’t had the resources in that difficult future to make more.

Instead, she improvised, calling up everything she could, the gifts honed by years of her grandfather’s training as well as the power of Mars. An image from her disturbing dream-vision came back to her, the two fires hanging before her in the darkness, one representing the fire at the shrine and everything it stood for, and the other representing the power of Mars. She reached out and gathered both flames with her mind, shaping them into a single fireball, a single power in which the two forces that protected her burned not red, but white-hot.

As the impossibly hot fire expanded to fill her awareness, Mars remembered something Luna had said once, when Makoto had asked about all the words they kept shouting when they used their attacks. She’d wanted to know if there were a certain set number of powers they could use, or if just making up a catchy phrase would do the trick. The words, Luna had explained, served as a focus for their powers, working to sharpen the concept of a given power in their minds so that they didn’t turn loose their full energy with every attack. Yes, the attacks she and Artemis were teaching them were a standard part of Senshi education, a limited number of techniques which had been learned, developed, and refined by every Senshi back to the beginning of the Moon Kingdom, and probably beyond. But if they had the need, if they could muster the necessary power and give it the proper shape and limitations, then yes, they could also create new attacks.

Words began to form from the fire in Mars’ mind.

“MARS...” she whispered, and her drawn-back hand was suddenly surrounded by fire, an aura of red and orange which didn’t even singe her glove. Mars shivered as she felt the fire collapse in on itself, growing brighter and hotter as it became smaller and more intense, its color changing to match the white-hot force in her mind. *I can do this,* she repeated over and over. *I just need a few seconds. I can do it.*

“...CLEANSING...” The energy passed through her glove and settled into her hand, which suddenly glowed as bright as the sun, so intense that the outline of it was clearly visible through the glove. Ignoring the effect, Mars locked her wrist and drove it forward, and as she struck the tough knob on the monster’s forehead, called out “FLAME!” in a loud voice, unaware that the same white-hot energy encased in her fist was blazing from her eyes and mouth.

At the moment of contact, the white fire rushed out of her mind and body, surging through her hand and into the evil-soaked form of the monster. The reaction was immediate as, infused with something that might be called holy fire, a concentrated form of positive spiritual energy, the fiendish reptile’s body burst into flames from the inside out. It staggered backwards, shrieking at incredible volume, the white fire blazing out from its body.

Although the monster was obviously in agony, Mars knew the pain it felt wasn’t the pain of burning flesh. By combining her two separate powers, she had fused their traits, and while the fires of Mars could certainly do physical harm, the fire of her faith was devoted to guidance, protection, and healing. Her new attack was seeking to counter the negative energy of the monster, to balance it out with positive energy in a manner not entirely unlike how Usagi used the ginzuishou to restore humans who had been contaminated by negative power and transformed into monsters.

This creature had never been human, and the negative energy that corrupted and killed humans was what it thrived on, what _it_ needed to live. Neutralizing the dark force within its body would weaken the creature, not heal it, and it had already been worn down considerably by the four-fold barrage.

So instead of transforming from devil-lizard into something else, its still-burning body slid apart and collapsed to the floor as a pile of silvery ash, with a few tongues of white flame flickering among the falling embers, burning away everything and growing steadily dimmer until, as the last specks were consumed, the fires also went out.

The heat of the fire had evaporated or just driven away the mist, revealing the floor and the Book, but Mars just looked at the heat-polished tiles where the creature had been standing. She had to wonder: what would have happened if it hadn’t been injured? What if she’d been able to level out the flow of power, to somehow balance it to match the dark energy in the creature’s body? What...

“Mars? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Usagi. I was just... I’m fine.” Shaking away her speculations, Mars knelt to retrieve the Book, noting as she did so that the heavy mist was moving in to fill the space her fires had cleared. But she could see a wall, now, and if they followed it in _that_ direction just a short distance, they’d find the door... and Usagi would flat-out refuse to stand in the hall with them while the others remained lost in a monster-infested fog.

Mars sighed and led the way back into the mist. She couldn’t see, but she was sure Usagi was smiling at her back.

Venus stepped lightly through the fog, her eyes and ears open, her mouth shut, and one hand out in front of her to stop her from running head-on into a wall. She’d had to divert her attention from Uranus and Senior Bug when one of the flying lizards had tried to dive-bomb her. In the process of dodging the attack and giving the pesky thing a farewell Crescent Beam kick in the tail before it vanished into the mist, Venus had lost sight of her ally and their enemy.

She could have called out to the others, but fog, as she had learned from her time in London and numerous later experiences—most courtesy of Mercury—played strange tricks with light and sound, and this particular fog had things roaming around in it. If she called out to her friends, she’d probably be answered by a creature. Using the communicators wouldn’t have been a much better idea even if they were still working, since anybody she tried to call might be in the middle of a fight—not a good time to chat.

Thinking over her options, Venus had decided the best thing she could do was to look for Artemis. She could tell by the note in his voice that he’d really hurt himself this time, and there were plenty of things loose in this mist that even a whole and healthy housecat wouldn’t be able to fight.

There were others who could use her help, she knew, but Usagi had Jupiter and Mars with her, Ryo was with Mercury, and Luna... Luna was just going to have to hold on. Venus hated to play favorites among her friends, but when it came right down to it, a friend was all Luna was. Artemis was her partner, and after four years, she wasn’t going to leave him alone when he was hurt.

*And besides,* she told herself, *they’re both small enough that I won’t see them under this fog. Artemis will be able to hear or smell when I get near, but if Luna’s unconscious, I’ll never find her without him to tell me where to go.*

She found a wall a moment later, and almost stumbled over the white-haired man sitting propped up against it.

“Sorry,” she apologized. “Didn’t see you there.”

“I understand,” the man replied in a strained-sounding voice. “Could you please get off my hand?”

“Sorry!” Venus quickly took a step back. *I _thought_ that part of the floor was uneven.* “I am _really_ sorry about that. I’m just not very good...”

“...not very good in a fog,” he said, completing the sentence with her and smiling faintly. Venus was a little surprised that he’d known what she was going to say, but she had to smile back. He was _really_ handsome, even without the smile, and the white hair didn’t detract from his appearance at all.

*Keep your mind on business!* she told herself sternly. “Did you see a white cat around here anywhere before the fog strolled in?”

“Rolled in.”

“Whatever.” Venus frowned. She was getting the strangest feeling of deja vu here, but she shook her head and ignored it. “Have you, or haven’t you? Seen the cat, I mean.” She looked at him a little more closely and realized he was breathing slowly, in a manner that suggested he was trying to ease pressure on one or more ribs. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I’ve been better, but it’s nothing that Sa... behind you!”

Venus turned automatically, summoning her Love-Me Chain in the same motion and lashing out as soon as she spotted movement. One of the small creatures had emerged from the fog, its skin black and blistered and its claws raised, ready to strike. The Chain drove into its head right between the eyesockets, producing a meaty thunk and a loud crack as the front of the skull and the bones of the neck broke at the same time. The creature’s body disintegrated immediately and barely slowed the Chain’s passage, so Venus sent the heart-shaped links looping through the fog around her to make sure there weren’t any creatures sneaking up on their bellies. There had been a snake-monster in London that had gotten within biting distance like that, and the only reason it had missed its opportunity to strike was because she’d unknowingly stepped on its head.

“You remember the snake, I see.”

“Yeah, I...” She had her back to him, but the way in which the glowing length of the Chain suddenly jerked to a halt and then clattered to the floor betrayed Venus’ shock. She turned around slowly, looked at the white-haired man, and asked, “Artemis?” in a very small voice.

There was a flicker of sympathetic apology before he managed a wry smile, lifting his working right arm and its footprint-branded fingers to the side.

“Surprise?”

Mercury had already switched her visor on to try and find out what was wrong with Ryo by the time the explosion went off and filled the hall with dusty fog. He’d blacked out, either from shock at whatever it was that he’d seen or from the stress put on his system by the vision, and Mercury had put herself between him and the blast; now she was kneeling next to him, watching events all around her unfold on the rim of her visor.

The sensors in her computer and visor cut through the fog easily, and with their communicator signals to help, Mercury had located the other Senshi in no time at all—including the one Pluto was still fighting. Her visor displayed another of those time-warping hemispheres of air around the two, and from the play-by-play of swings, strikes, blocks, and counters that went scrolling past, Mercury concluded with great relief and nearly as much surprise that _their_ Pluto, Setsuna, was holding her own against her predecessor.

Besides the Senshi and Ryo, there were twenty-six other humans in the room. Eleven of them—ten men and one woman—were spread out over the floor in various levels of unconsciousness and injury, and while most of the rest were grouped near the main door, five were scattered around the hall. One was an injured man near Venus, and two more of the men showed up like neon lights in her visor’s display, surrounded by strong magical fields. The fourth, another man, had a reading quite similar to Ryo’s, showing physical traces of some sort of extrasensory ability, while the last of the five, a young girl, had a reading that indicated minor magic and something else that Mercury couldn’t pin down.

Then there were the monsters. They were definitely varieties of daimon, but fully half of the smallest ones had been destroyed in that explosion. Even as Mercury checked the readings again, the signals for the last two blipped out, not far from ChibiMoon’s location, and one of the flying reptiles had been taken down as well, by Mars, with an attack Mercury’s computer hadn’t recognized. Uranus was running circles around the biggest monster, but its armor was defeating her sword-strikes, and its multitude of limbs weren’t giving her the time to launch any other attacks. Neptune was doing better with the other draconian creature, alternating between hosing it with gouts of water and using her Mirror to bat its own fireballs back at it, tennis-style.

That left the bat-winged woman, and...

Mercury ducked to the right as something cracked past her head. She looked up and spotted the creature, hovering about halfway to the ceiling, raising the bone-white rod in her right hand. When she swung, the black gems in the thing flashed, and the whip-like line of black energy trailing from one end snapped down, forcing Mercury to jump away. The whip cracked and crackled at the same time, and the tip blew a tile from the floor as the creature drew back.

“You’re quicker than I thought” The daimon’s voice was very much suited to its appearance, low and breathy, and its chuckle made Mercury’s skin crawl. “Good. I like a little challenge.” And the whip hissed down again, exploding a row of tiles as Mercury leapt clear and unleashed a Shabon Spray, thickening the upper layers of the fog. She was momentarily grateful that the Spray had worked, but she was also fairly certain that she wasn’t up to this fight. Whatever Usagi and the ginzuishou had done might have triggered her Senshi form, but her power still had that disturbingly empty feel to it, as if it might collapse if she extended it too far.

“One for you,” the daimon admitted from somewhere up above. There was a whoosh of sound followed by silence, and Mercury felt her heart sink when the image which represented this particular creature faded from her visor. Something it had done was actually blocking the sensors! Mercury nearly jumped out of her skin a moment later when she heard that soft voice whisper, “One for me,” practically in her ear.

She turned around and saw nothing but a gusting eddy in the fog. Then the whip reappeared, from a completely different direction than the swirl in the mists, lashing lightly across Mercury’s back. It barely even stung, and might have been nothing more than a near miss which got lucky, but Mercury had the uneasy impression that the daimon had meant the strike to be a minor one. It obviously didn’t think much of her abilities—which Mercury could understand; she wasn’t entirely impressed with her powers herself, at the moment—and meant to toy with her for a while.

*Can’t track her, can’t blast her.* Mercury thought for a moment and then slipped her computer away, moving her arms out to the sides and setting her feet.

The end of the whip stung her left arm twice, and then her right, but as she’d expected, they were all light blows, and when the whip came back a fourth time, Mercury had figured out its speed, and her timing was much better. She reached her arms around the striking head and seized the crackling whip with both hands, shoving aside the numbness that went up her arms as she turned and pulled, as hard as she could.

Mercury might not be as large or as physically powerful as some of her friends, but she still had the enhanced strength all the Senshi possessed, and the daimon tumbled out of the thinning mists overhead, her wings flapping madly to restore the balance that sudden downwards yank had destroyed. The energized line had flickered out of existence almost as soon as Mercury had pulled, and she heard the weapon’s handle clatter as it hit the floor.

The daimon couldn’t stop her fall, but she managed to catch herself and land in a crouch instead of a crash. On her hands and one knee, the daimon’s head snapped up to glare fiercely at Mercury, her lips curled back in a snarl that revealed a row of perfect teeth—and prominent canines.

“Another one for me?” Mercury suggested with a sweet smile and a voice as close to the daimon’s own as she could manage; she’d seen Makoto get into enough fights to know that throwing someone’s—or something’s—taunts back at them was a good way to get the other side angry and off-balance.

The daimon charged, her wings folded back and her black-lacquered talons leading. Mercury leaned her head back to avoid the first swipe, shifted her right shoulder back as the second slashing blow came in, and swung her left fist at the side of the daimon’s head. The creature saw it coming and ducked to avoid the blow—only to go flying backwards when Mercury’s boot caught her in the face.

After a short skid on her wings, the daimon got to her feet and ran one finger through the reddish-black blood trickling from her lower lip. She examined that finger for a moment, then looked up at Mercury and smiled, running her tongue along her lips in an extremely disturbing way. She made a reaching motion with her right hand, and the jeweled rod flew back into her grasp from out of the mist, the black gems winking as the green-streaked beam of dark energy reappeared, this time in the shape of a narrow blade.

“Let’s see what color _you_ bleed,” the daimon whispered.

If anything, the energy blade was faster than the whip had been, and Mercury didn’t want to try her luck—or risk her fingers—by making another grab for the thing. She concentrated on dodging instead, hoping for a time that one of the others might show up to help her out, but she quickly realized that she had to think of something else.

*I won’t leave you, Ryo,* she thought, looking past the daimon to where Ryo was just a dark shape surrounded by the fog. The quick look was a mistake; in the next instant, the sizzling tip of the blade was at her throat.

“Game over,” the daimon said in a sad voice, mockingly shaking her head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. And here you were, doing so well. Now, what shall I do with you? Kill you here? Hardly any fun at all. Give you to Mmb’zau for a meal? Do you know Mmb’zau?” she asked in an almost conversational tone. “No, of course you don’t. He’s the large black one who came through with me. He eats with his hands, you know, little sucker-shaped bites, one at a time. I’ve seen him go on for days like that... and what _are_ you looking at?”

Mercury kept her lips pressed together even when the pressure of the black blade against her skin increased to the point where she had to tilt her head back.

“Not going to tell me, little one? No? Well, then, let’s have a look together.”

Keeping the edge of her blade at Mercury’s throat, the daimon slipped around behind her, reaching her left arm across her prisoner’s waist to lock her taloned hand around Mercury’s right wrist, pinning her other arm in the process.

“Mmmm,” the daimon purred, her chin nestled on Mercury’s left shoulder. “This is nice, isn’t it? Maybe I should keep you myself—but first, let’s see what got your attention.” From the way her body shifted, Mercury guessed the creature was craning her neck to get a better look. “Well, I can’t tell what it is from here. We’re just going to have to move closer. Ah-ah-ah,” she admonished, tightening her hold as Mercury tensed. “None of that. You’re pretty enough right now to be interesting, but if I have to cut you, it’ll scar, and then I’ll just have to give you to Mmb’zau anyway.”

The daimon kept the pressure up as she marched Mercury forward, and when they stopped, she turned Ryo over with her boot.

“Well, well, well...” The daimon chuckled. “Shame on you for not telling me.”

“Touch him and die.”

“What’s this?” the daimon asked, affecting astonishment. “Threats? And when I’m thinking about being so nice to you? Now why would... oh, I see. You like him, don’t you? Well, I can bring him along, too, and you two can be together forever—if I decide to let you. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”

“Go to hell.”

The daimon laughed delightedly, and Mercury flinched away as those cold lips brushed against her ear. “You silly girl; what you call Hell is what I call home. You won’t see much of it, of course. Some parts are enough to drive any human who looks at them totally mad, and if I let you outside, most of the neighbors would never let such a delicious little morsel as yourself get away...” The daimon’s words trailed off for a moment as she sniffed the air curiously. Then she laughed again. “And you’re a virgin, too, aren’t you? Yes, I can see I’m going to have to keep you on a _very_ short leash...”

The laughter was chilling, but it ended on a disappointed sigh. “I suppose that means I’m just going to have to kill your would-be lover, little one. He’s obviously not much of a man if...” The daimon broke off again to sniff at the air. “Where _is_ that scent coming from?” she muttered aloud. “Mmb’zau? Is that you? Brakareshkla?”

Silence was her reply. “So, it’s not from those two. And your friends already destroyed Rakjakreenok and the little spawn Mmb’zau brought with him. But no, it’s not one of us. It smells human, too, and aside from you, there’s no one close enough except...” From the shift in the daimon’s head, she was looking down. At Ryo. “Well, now... it seems as though your little friend here is more than he appears. Isn’t _this_ interesting?”

“Leave. Him. Alone.”

“Oh no, sweet one. I think he might actually be useful after all. And what other secrets are you two keeping from me, hmmm? Well, I’ll have plenty of time to find out, and once I’ve gotten you both properly trained, you’ll _beg_ to tell me every last detail...”

That did it. Mysterious illness or no, Mercury reached out with her mind and seized every ounce of her power that she could, and willed it to do something—ANYTHING. She’d had more than enough of listening to this sick alien bitch, and now she was eyeing Ryo... black energy swords be damned, enough was ENOUGH.

The daimon’s eyes widened in astonishment as her prisoner’s body softened, shifted, and fell away from her hold as a cloud of sparkling, blue-white mist. She cut through it with her weapon, but the blade had no more effect on the cloud than on any other mist. It roiled up before her in a tall pillar, little points of white and yellow light winking inside, and she slashed at it again, and again, and again.

And after the blade whipped through it for the seventh time, the cloud solidified back into Mercury, who caught the daimon’s returning weapon-hand with her own left, then punched the creature in the belly as hard as she could with her other fist. Inhabiting a roughly human form, the daimon had to obey certain rules of nature—and a hard enough hit to the abs will make _anybody_ double over and start gasping for air.

The daimon staggered backwards, but she didn’t drop her weapon, and neither did she take long to recover. She was smiling again as she straightened, a smile which didn’t reach her eyes.

“Now I’m going to have to punish you, my pet.”

Mercury snatched something out of thin air with her right hand, a handful of mist which solidified into a definite shape, an unmistakable weight. The daimon drew back and raised her weapon uncertainly, and Mercury risked a quick glance at what she was holding.

It was a baton about as long as her arm from the elbow to the wrist, and the same shade of blue as her fuku. It was narrow and light enough that she could carry it easily in one hand, but also reassuringly thick and heavy, and two golden serpents coiled around it four times each, the first wide loop of their criss-crossing coils forming a sort of guard for her hand. Two white wings stretched out to either side from above the snakes’ heads, together roughly as wide as the baton was tall. The snakes’ eyes were bright red rubies, and a perfectly round sapphire stood atop the baton.

Mercury recognized the shape immediately: a caduceus, a staff or wand carried by the god for whom her planet was named, the patron of messengers and merchants, travelers and thieves—and science. Nowadays, it was a symbol associated with medicine and doctors. For all those reasons, carrying it felt right.

But it was more than that. The device felt... familiar. *I know this,* Mercury realized slowly. *Not just a caduceus. The Caduceus Rod. I remember...*

She spun the Rod around in a full circle and held it up before herself with both hands, her right on the grip, the other on the base, and called out, “MERCURY FROST LANCET!”

The rubies and sapphire glowed brightly, and a beam of blue-white light shot up from the tip of the rod, widening slightly at the base and narrowing higher up as if being focused by a magnifying glass. When the light had formed a cone the same length as the Rod, there was an audible cracking sound, the sound of ice breaking in winter, and the blue-white energy became a blue-white blade, both sides gleaming sharply. The wings snapped downwards, the ridges of the perfectly carved feathers adhering to the ridges of the looping snakes, and Mercury swung the weapon down to her right.

“Your move,” she advised the daimon.

“Does anyone have any idea where Medea is?” Allys asked impatiently.

The six Senshi faced each other in the Celestial Hall, their headquarters within the city of Atlantis. Each had reported in from whatever part of the Empire she had been at when the weird disturbance hit her. Jani and Mercury had been in Atlantis itself—no surprise there; the two Water Senshi were almost always to be found together—but the rest had teleported back from all over the system.

“She left the city earlier today,” Jani replied, “after speaking with the Emperor, but as to where she went, I can’t say.”

“Did you try to get in touch with her?” Karla said brusquely. Her sky-blue eyes flashed with barely-restrained energy, a clear warning to her sisters that, wherever she had been, she must have been woken up early. Her short black hair was sticking up unevenly, which might have been due to the lack of a proper brushing after getting out of bed, but the others didn’t dismiss the possibility that it might be due to electrostatic buildup.

“Twice, with no answer,” Mercury said in a neutral voice, brushing her hair out of her eyes. That hair was the same shoulder-length blue-green as Jani’s, as were her—their—eyes, and Mercury even looked like the other girl to the point that they could use each other as mirrors. There _was_ a visible difference between them—it had to do with how Jani’s hair was more blue than green, her eyes more green than blue, and how Mercury’s hair and eyes were the other way around—but looking at the two of them side-by-side always gave Allys a headache, the more so because she knew this _wasn’t_ what Mercury really looked like.

“She’s up to something, then,” Sara sighed, “and she either doesn’t want us to know about it, or she’s too busy to get in touch.” Sara wasn’t much better when she woke up early than Karla, but it must have been a more reasonable hour at her villa on Mars, because her reddish-brown hair was neatly braided back, and her pale eyes were clear, calm, and focused.

“How much would you like to bet that whatever she went off to investigate _doesn’t_ have something to do with that distortion we all felt?” Amarelle asked wryly. The others were wearing their formal robes of office, but she’d been conducting a military inspection of the Outer Colonies and wore an officer’s uniform instead. Her short, prematurely white hair was still a little pressed down from the helmet, while her dark blue eyes were ringed by the barely-visible impression of a lowered blast visor.

“I won’t take that bet,” Allys said.

“Particularly not in light of the fact that there was a temporal disturbance two nights ago,” Mercury added. The others looked at her in surprise.

“Why weren’t we... no,” Sara said, answering her own question, “we _were_ told. Medea was, at any rate, and she can argue that she left the rest of us in the dark because of some obscure clause in the Codices about temporal security.” She glanced at Mercury. “But that having been said, sister, how did _you_ find out?”

Mercury sighed and rolled her eyes dramatically, then raised her hands, touched her fingers to the sides of her head, and looked directly at Sara. “You’re thinking of a number between one and ten...”

“All right,” Sara surrendered. “But how did you get close enough to pick it up without her noticing that you were...” Mercury was giving her another pained looked, and Sara threw up her hands. “I give up.”

“What else, Mercury?” Allys asked firmly. “What else was she thinking about?”

“A discussion about the anomaly with the senior archmages, a city called Khairoah in northern Ahfaahri, a squad of ten guards and a mage-inquisitor she’d sent that quiet slave-girl of hers to dragoon into the mission, and a beating of sorts that she’d just administered to the poor child.” Mercury’s eyes hardened. “It’s disgusting, the way she treats that girl.”

“She takes good care of her, from what I hear,” Karla said. “Better than a lot of nobles treat their slaves, or even their ordinary servants.”

“Medea _hates_ her, Karla, and it’s as intense as anything I’ve ever seen in a human mind. I’ve scanned darklings who didn’t hate humans as much as Medea hates that girl.”

“So Medea’s a stone cold bitch; what else is new?” Amarelle shook her head. “Anything more, Mercury?”

“Contempt for every living thing other than herself, a few half-formed plans for self-advancement, and a lust for power.” Mercury shrugged. “The usual.”

“But nothing that would let us challenge that ‘temporal security’ imperative of hers,” Allys said grimly. “I guess that means we’re stuck here until something else develops, or Medea calls for us.”

They looked at each other. Fat chance of that.

“Remind me,” Amarelle asked. “How did we end up with someone like _that_ being placed in charge of us _and_ the Mobius Gate?”

“Because unless a Senshi of Saturn is activated,” Allys said, her weary tone betraying how many times she’d turned this line of thought over in her mind, “Medea’s the strongest of us in a fight, with the added bonuses of an encyclopedic knowledge of Imperial law, an older and more distinguished lineage than any of us possess, and the unique distinction of being the seventh successive member of that prestigious family to be a Senshi of Pluto. And you know how much the Imperial Court favors the use of nobility, heredity, and military capability when the question of leadership comes up.”

“_You_ could beat her,” Jani asked. “Couldn’t you, Allys? You or Sara? The rest of us may not have the necessary rank or strength, but either of you challenge her for command and win, right?”

“On a good day, with our respective worlds in the phase of their orbits which brings them closest to Earth, probably. And yes, the Court would honor the outcome of a trial by combat.” Allys shook her head. “But all Medea would have to do would be to wait a month or so, call for a second trial, and then pound either of us into the dirt.”

“And knowing her,” Amarelle put in, “there’d probably be a convenient accident of some sort waiting off in the wings if anyone so much as thought of trying it again.”

“That too.” Allys sat back in her chair. “Are you up for a little political discussion, Amarelle?”

“Since we’re not going anywhere, I suppose I am. I’ve been out of touch, though. What’s up?”

“What isn’t? The Emperor’s old and getting older, and with the line of succession in the state that it is, the Lords are scrambling to be in place for Selection when the old man finally dies.”

“Old news even on Pluto,” Amarelle replied. “And given that the Chrysmat are the last beings in the system to hear anything, and that the Shi’i don’t really care, that’s saying something.”

“Medea’s taking part.” Sara said. Amarelle blinked. Twice.

“A Senshi can’t be Empress,” she said finally. “Maybe she can _marry_ the Emperor, but she can’t be invested with the authority herself.”

“There’s no law against it,” Allys said quietly. “We checked. The only reason it hasn’t happened before was a combination of custom, lack of opportunity, and plain common sense. Medea’s the head of one of the Great Houses, the Senshi of Pluto, _and_ she’s been invested with a lot of authority by the Emperor these past few years. I’d say that qualifies as opportunity, wouldn’t you?”

Amarelle considered the news. “I trust you’ve been doing something about it?”

“It takes one hundred votes of the hundred and ninety-six in the Council to confirm a Selection,” Allys said, “and Medea’s got forty-two of the Earth Lords supporting her one way or the other, so we’ve been gathering support on the other Inner Planets and Jupiter. The Jovians haven’t cared much for Medea since that mess on Ganymede, and the Nereids seem to like her even less, for some mysterious reason.” She glanced smilingly at Mercury, who assumed a pose of pious innocence. “And of course,” Allys continued, “between my brothers, sisters, and near cousins, we’ve got a solid lock on the voting members for Venus.”

“Of course,” Amarelle agreed wryly. Venusians usually had pretty sizable families, for obvious enough reasons when you took even a passing glance at their culture. “And Mars?”

“Split down the middle,” Sara answered with a sigh. “I managed to get us about nine votes, all told, plus the planetary governor. The rest are throwing in with one of their own candidates, but we can at least count on them not to support Medea, and that’s really all we need. We’ve got thirty-nine votes for sure, and maybe twelve more. That puts us a little ahead of Medea.”

“Who’s our candidate?” Amarelle asked.

“We’ve got it set up so that we _seem_ to have a candidate from Venus, another from Mars, and a third from Jupiter,” Allys said. “Sort of symbolic, you see, and it keeps Medea thinking she’s further ahead of us, so she doesn’t get creative. Our real candidate is rallying support on his own, and he’s got nearly thirty solid backers, plus a lot of popular opinion. Once the Selection gets going, _our_ side will join _his._ We’ll have anywhere from sixty-nine to eighty-one votes at that point—over a third of the Council. That ought to shake a few supporters loose from Medea.”

“And if our luck is _really_ in,” Sara added, “Allys or I might just take up Jani’s suggestion and challenge Medea. Taking leadership of the Senshi from her might cost her a few more votes.”

“I think I can help you do a little better, there,” Amarelle said after a moment of thought. “Nobody really takes the Warden Lords very seriously, but there’s fifteen of them spread out among the Outer System moons. I’m due to check in with most of them in the next couple of months, and I think they’d warm to the idea of playing a deciding role in choosing the next Emperor. If a _third_ of the Council shakes loose some votes, a near _half_ of it ought to stampede them.”

“That would really help,” Sara said.

“Who’s the candidate, though? I’ll need to know when I talk to them.”

“Lord Arik,” Allys replied, “of House Stone.”

Amarelle looked at her blandly.

“He’s a war hero,” Allys said defensively, “so the army would support him, and the people like him. As a young Lord of an old House, he appeals equally to the older families and the newer ones, and he’s handsome enough that nobody ever stops to realize that he’s intelligent, too.”

“And the fact that you’re sleeping with him doesn’t hurt matters, right?”

“He’s still a good choice,” Allys insisted, blushing but managing to keep her voice firm. “And a lot better than Medea.”

“Empress Medea,” Jani said with a shiver. “I don’t think I could take that.”

“Don’t worry about it too much,” Mercury told her look-alike. “Even Medea can’t live forever, and we’re pretty close to the point in her life where her successor’s likely to appear, if she hasn’t arrived already. With a little luck, the next Pluto will turn out to be someone a little less problematic than the last few have been, and we can have _her_ trounce Medea to take leadership.”

“The way _my_ luck runs,” Karla muttered, “the next Pluto’s likely to be Medea’s oldest daughter, just like the last six generations of the family. Have you ever met that girl? She’s as bad as her mother.”

“Granted,” Mercury agreed, “but I really doubt she’s the one. She’s nearly twenty, and the powers would have manifested by...”

The other Atlantean Senshi looked at their comrade in surprise as she let out a startled gasp, grabbing the armrests of her chair. The temperature in the room dropped several highly noticeable degrees, and a thin layer of frost appeared beneath Mercury’s hands, causing the solid old wood of the chair to creak and groan. She seemed to turn slightly blue before she got herself and her powers under control again.

“Are you okay?” Jani asked quickly.

“That was... very unusual,” Mercury replied absently, breathing carefully.

“What happened?”

“Just a moment, please.” She made a grasping motion with her right hand, and didn’t seem surprised when nothing happened. “As I thought. The Caduceus Rod is gone. Someone called it away. Someone stronger than I am,” she added, “since I can’t seem to call it back.”

“Any idea where it is?” Allys asked.

“Not yet,” Mercury said, raising her left hand with the palm up, squinting her eyes as she did so. Her computer and visor appeared, and she began a search, linking in with other systems to expand her range. “There. The northern desert of Ahfaahri...” She looked up at the others. “In the city of Khairoah. And there are reports of a major disturbance of unknown origin in progress.”

“What is she up to _now?_” Amarelle demanded.

“I don’t know,” Allys said flatly, “but I think we ought to find out.”

The Senshi looked at each other, and nodded as one.

Uranus had had her fill of enemies that just ignored hits from her sword. First that red-haired former Pluto and her staff—her ribs were still smarting from a few of the worse hits—and now this black-armored nuisance.

*When we get home,* she swore to herself, *I am going to sit down and read that bloody book of Setsuna’s cover to cover!*

“Oh, shut up!” she hollered, the monster’s five mouths having opened to serenade her with another high-quality hissing scream in full Surroundsound. Uranus took her sword in both hands and swung at the nearest hand-mouth as hard as she could, and felt much better as the edge of her weapon cut deep into the monster’s tooth-ringed ‘palm,’ setting off another multiple scream as the beast clattered backwards.

Her satisfaction was predictably short-lived; the monster redoubled its efforts to bite, claw, or sting her with one and all of its many limbs, even the injured one.

“DEEP SUBMERGE!”

Uranus heard the words a moment before something large, orange, and propelled along by a blue blast of energy crashed into her foe. The black bug staggered sideways under the weight of its reptilian ally, which was thrashing and squawking as it tried to right itself and get back in the air.

“Nice of you to join me,” Uranus remarked sourly.

“I was busy with the other one. And unlike Mercury, _I_ can’t see through fog all that well. Speaking of which,” she added, “don’t you think it’s about time you got rid of all this so we can find the others?”

“Love to. Just as soon as you convince Joe Black over there to quit trying to tear my face off.” Neptune glanced at the beast, which was still struggling to get rid of its ally’s added weight.

“I see what you mean. Big, isn’t it?”

“Armored, too. My sword’s not having much effect.”

“Attacks?”

“Venus put a few dents in its shell earlier, but something else went after her, and I’ve been a little too busy staying clear of its mouths to try my own tricks.”

“Until now,” Neptune reminded her.

Mmb’zau lifted his smaller companion up with all four arms, biting in several places before he threw the winged lizard-man aside and turned to go after the human again. The daimon was greeted by hurricane-force winds and a massive blast of water energy, and he struggled against the pressure for a moment before ducking his head low, allowing most of the force to exhaust itself against his armored back. Rivulets of water ran down to Mmb’zau’s massive main jaw as he lifted his head once more and hissed a promise of slow, painful death at the two humans he could sense in front of him.

“I don’t suppose you could manage that trick you used at the mall,” Uranus said over her shoulder as they both backed away.

“No good,” Neptune replied. “Even with the fog, there’s not enough water in here, and I’m really not sure I could get it to work anyway. I’ve tried a couple of times, and I can’t seem to get it right. I wasn’t really thinking clearly when I did it.”

“I never would have guessed.” Uranus twirled her sword. “I suppose that means it’s my turn again.”

Mmb’zau advanced a step, and Uranus’ Blaster attack took that leg off at the uppermost joint. The massive daimon snarled and fell back, turning so that the next shot impacted against his shell rather than another of his legs.

Uranus paused as the daimon raised the ichor-dripping stump of its lost limb, and both she and Neptune gaped as the exoskeleton above the wound flexed outwards, allowing a huge spike of slime-coated black to shoot out from within the creature’s body. They didn’t need to see it flex and stab into the floor to realize it was another leg, just as they didn’t need to hear the hiss to know the daimon was angry.

“Well,” Uranus sighed, “that was a good idea for all of five seconds.”

“Maybe it was. Do you think you can take off a leg again?” Uranus looked at her partner curiously, and Neptune explained her plan.

“Worth a try, I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

Uranus didn’t reply, but instead turned her attention to the daimon. It took two more shots and a fair amount of dodging before she managed to hit another leg, but as soon as they both knew it was going to be a hit, Neptune unleashed a Deep Submerge—and when Mmb’zau opened his heavy jaw to scream, the attack went straight down his throat, catching the scream and taking it along for a ride back down into the innards which had created it. His entire massive body shuddered violently, all five mouths opening to cough out gobs of something black.

Uranus ignored the daimon and gathered her strength again, reaching out to the wind. She’d had a little practice at this in the future village—enough to know it was a pain in the ass and very tiring when done on a large scale, but she thought she could handle just clearing this one room of a little mist.

There was a lot of atmospheric activity in progress outside, probably thanks to what Usagi’s little game with the ginzuishou had done to the three—or four? Five, maybe?—mana nexi Uranus could sense affecting the local currents of air. Well, she wasn’t trying to shut them down this time.

*I just need to borrow a little of what they’re producing. Just take something of that and focus it, redirect it into... boy, this is tougher than I thought it would... get back here you little...!*

“Oh, crap.” Neptune looked sharply at her partner right before the bubble of rippling air Uranus had been gathering around herself slipped out of control and blew itself out. And up, and down, and in every other direction. Anything and everything in the room not currently under a shield of time-slowed air was slapped by a wall of rushing wind. Chairs fell over as silverware clattered and china smashed against the walls. The doors slammed open, and every window exploded into shards which were hurled along by the wind as it gusted outside and dispersed.

Shaking her head, Uranus got back to her feet and looked around, satisfied to see that only a few tatters of mist clung to the corners. The rest had vanished out through the windows and the doors. Jupiter, Mars, and Usagi were barely ten steps away, Venus was over near one wall—arguing with some guy with white hair and apparently not realizing the fog was gone—and Mercury was... Uranus blinked.

“Where did she get _that_ thing?” she blurted out, causing the other Senshi to look first at her and then at Mercury, who was wielding the aforementioned ‘thing’—some sort of sword—against the black weapon of the leather-clad female monster.

“We’ll ask her later,” Neptune replied. She put two fingers to her lips and whistled sharply, getting the attention of everyone other than Mercury and her opponent. “Jupiter, take out that last lizard and then help Mercury! Venus, ChibiMoon, with us!” Mars already knew what she was going to do, and Neptune wasn’t about to waste time trying to tell her to do otherwise.

The response of the other girls wasn’t exactly automatic; they all glanced at Usagi first for a nod of confirmation, but that was okay. *She’s still our leader, after all.*

That thought brought Neptune up short. She’d long ago gained respect for Usagi as a Senshi, and even before that just for being her good-hearted self, but this was the first time she’d so automatically thought of the girl as being the leader of _anything,_ let alone the Senshi. More than that, by using that specific phrasing—‘our leader’ instead of ‘their leader’—Neptune was considering all the Senshi to be a single team, instead of dividing them into Inners and Outers as she’d always done before. What was really disturbing was how good that association felt.

A battle was not exactly an ideal setting for philosophical soul-searching, though, so she pushed the revelation of unity aside and concentrated on the task at hand. The others were too busy readying themselves for a fight to wonder why Neptune was smiling as they charged in at the enemy.

Each time Mercury’s cold blade touched the daimon’s sizzling black weapon, there was a shower of sparks as the conflicting energies within the two devices tried to destroy each other. The daimon had scored a hit on Mercury’s left shoulder and cut the ribbon on the back of her fuku lopsidedly short, but she herself had taken a wide cut along the right wing, and several blue-white lines marred the originally flawless white skin of her arms.

“You’ve made me very angry, pretty one,” the creature hissed, her voice no longer low and dulcet, but strained and harsh. “But if you give up right now, I might still be willing to go easy on you. Unless, of course, you like it rough...”

Mercury answered with a two-handed swing that would have taken the daimon’s lovely head off if she hadn’t stepped back.

“Excuse me,” a polite voice said from behind her. The daimon turned, and ducked just far enough to take the incoming punch on one of her horns instead of on her much more delicate jaw. Her countering slash forced Jupiter to hop backwards, and she still got stung as the tip of the energy blade brushed across her stomach. The daimon moved to press the advantage, but then hissed as a line of cold pain cut down her back, between her wings.

“We’re not finished yet,” Mercury said, stabbing forward and aiming in the general vicinity of the heart. Even with her back turned, the daimon seemed to know the attack was coming, and she threw herself to the side, turning to spare her injured back and wings. Mercury tried to alter her thrust, and the double-edged Lancet left a short, shallow cut along the daimon’s belly, a suitable sort of payback for Jupiter’s injury, but which didn’t do anywhere near the major damage Mercury had intended. And with her next step, the daimon crouched low and leapt into the air.

Jupiter gathered and threw a Sparkling Wide Pressure up at the daimon, and though she managed to dodge the main force, the explosion when it hit the wall peppered the creature with sharp debris. She looked around; only Mmb’zau was left, and four of the other girls were tearing into him with a mix of streaking energy beams and deep-cutting weapons that even his thick armor couldn’t stand up to for much longer. The rest were dead, Mmb’zau would be following shortly— and she herself had no intention of joining them.

The daimon glared down at the girl, fixing that face and those blue eyes firmly in her memory as she pointed her weapon. “You’re right, little girl; we’re not finished. Take care of yourself and your interesting young man, because I’ll be back for both of you.”

She raised her hand, the black gems on both ends of the rod flashing darkly, and an oval of striated darkness appeared around her. Her eyes remained clear through the barrier, as did her voice.

“My name is Illecebra, pretty one, and the next time we meet, I’ll make you scream it. Until then, I’ll see you in my dreams—and your nightmares.”

The oval collapsed in on itself and vanished, leaving a few trailing lines of black energy and the daimon’s chilling laughter behind.

Jupiter shook her head with a shiver. “What’s _her_ damage?”

“Nothing compared to what it’s going to be if I ever catch her,” Mercury said flatly. Jupiter raised an eyebrow, then glanced at Ryo.

“Did she hurt Ryo?”

“No,” Mercury replied, with more than a little relief. “No, she didn’t. He just passed out from his reaction to the gateway, or whatever it was that brought all those daimons here. He’ll be okay once he wakes up and gets through the headache he’s probably going to have.” Mercury glanced at the Rod, which shifted back to its original shape, before she sat down next to Ryo and pulled out her computer again.

“Probably.” Jupiter looked around the room. The last daimon was going up in a familiar plume of dust and scattering energy. Venus had grabbed ChibiMoon, and the two were helping the injured guy with white hair to get to his feet. Usagi had settled on the floor next to a dark-haired woman, and she was holding a wadded-up strip of material from her dress to the back of the young lady’s head.

“That’s odd,” Jupiter said, half to herself. “I’d swear I’ve seen that woman somewhere before.”

“What woman?” Mercury asked, looking up from double-checking Ryo’s vital signs. Jupiter started to point, but Mercury stopped paying attention when her computer’s alarm went off.

A split-second later, the side of the room opposite to them was filled by a sphere of white light, which quickly broke down into six separate auras of different colors, and the six women who were generating them. Five of them wore robes of the same design as Medea’s, but with different symbols; the sixth was wearing a distinctly military uniform and had a curved, golden sword in one hand.

After a moment in which the members of both sides had examined their counterparts head-to-toe, Uranus sighed and spun her sword around in her hand.

“Right,” she said wearily. “Who’s first?”

The staves clacked and crunched as they struck against each other time and again. The two Garnet Orbs, burning constantly with their identical blood-red fire, flared more brightly each time the two weapons impacted. Streaks and motes of red energy filled the air as the two Plutos fought.

After seeing Uranus so soundly outclassed, Setsuna hadn’t thought much of her own chances. She’d only recovered her staff a few short hours ago, and that was nowhere near enough time to properly study either it or the Garnet Orb for whatever secrets they might hold. She had only the vaguest idea of how to handle the staff as a purely mundane weapon, certainly nothing like the skill her opponent had demonstrated against Uranus, and her understanding of her other powers was barely any more complete. She was in no way ready for this fight, but thanks to some neurochemical imbalance, some random firing of synapses way down in the bottom of her poor battered brain, she was leaping into it headlong.

She wasn’t sure which of them had put the barrier up to wall off the rest of the world. It was entirely possible that they both had, or that one or both of the Orbs had decided to take matters into their own hands—figuratively speaking, of course, since the jewel didn’t have limbs of any kind. Maybe this was what happened whenever two Senshi of Pluto fought, the force of Time Itself walling the conflict away in a tiny corner of infinity, to contain whatever damage might otherwise spill out into the cosmos.

Maybe she ought to quit wondering about it and pay attention to the fight.

That, she had discovered, was the key. Don’t think, react. When she tried to think, she came up against the empty spots in her mind where some two thousand years of memory had been neatly excised. She couldn’t help but think that with what had been in those holes, she could have ended this fight before it even began. Each errant thought distracted her for just a few fractions of a second, but those were enough for Medea to press her attack and gain the upper hand.

But when Setsuna focused on the fight again, she not only regained her ground but slowly pushed Medea back. She was taller than Medea, with a longer reach and a marginal bonus of strength as a result. She also had a body that, while functionally only twenty-four years old, still possessed over twenty centuries of training and conditioning. Even if she could not remember the lessons she had been given or the battles she had fought, the end results—impossibly fast reflexes and superhuman endurance—were still there. Without memory, there was little grace or technique in how Setsuna fought, but that didn’t matter as long as Medea’s staff couldn’t move fast enough to get past and strike at her body.

Then there was the matter of the bolts and surges of raw temporal energy that were being unleashed all over this tiny space. Here again, Medea was the one who had all the knowledge, the understanding of what their shared power was capable of, while Setsuna had only rudimentary skills, recently relearned and less than half-understood. But she also had the Garnet Orb, and each time Medea unleashed one of her powers, Setsuna pivoted her staff so that the time-energy struck the Orb, which absorbed it harmlessly.

The Orb also analyzed the energy, telling Setsuna exactly what it was, what it could do, and how it had been formed. She blocked a Stasis Bolt and was shown the incredibly fine intermeshed weave of Time-force within it, which waited to envelop a target and almost totally cut it off from the flow of Time. She caught a red-blurred stroke on the head of her staff and realized how to gather time-energy to accelerate her own movements in the same way—and did so, empowering herself with the March of Time to match Medea’s speed. She accidentally brushed the Orb against the inner surface of the dome surrounding them both and discovered that Medea had created it, and that while it might be slowing the air, it was speeding up Time within its area. Their fight seemed to have lasted five minutes at that point, but less than one minute had gone by outside.

Far from hurting her, Medea’s attacks were aiding Setsuna, putting the badly-needed knowledge of what Pluto could do and how to do it into her mind. Moreover, Medea was expending strength with each attack, and she wasn’t recovering it as quickly as Setsuna did—and she seemed to know it.

Then why did the woman have that poorly-disguised smile of triumph on her lips?

It occurred to Setsuna as she blocked three quick strikes that the Garnet Orb on her staff was glowing more brightly than usual. Quite a bit more, in fact, and it was getting steadily more intense with each second that went by, even though Medea had stopped throwing energy at her. Not only was the Orb’s light increasing, but Setsuna was having trouble swinging the staff. Its ornate head—the end with the Orb—seemed to be getting heavier. Worried that the massive amounts of energy it had absorbed might be the cause, and doubly worried about what might happen as a result, Setsuna let fly with a Stasis Bolt of her own, hoping to get rid of some of the excess power.

The blast as the energy was unleashed nearly ripped the staff from her fingers. And well it ought to; the column of red force was nearly five times larger than it should have been. Medea blocked it with her own staff and was pushed backwards into the surface of the dome, but as her Orb absorbed the attack, she remained able to move.

Setsuna looked up at her own Orb and saw that empowering the Stasis Bolt had done what she’d hoped, putting it back to its normal light and weight. Then she looked over at Medea, and saw that the other Garnet Orb was glowing with the same disturbing intensity.

“Thank you,” Medea said with a wicked smile. “And good-bye. TIME BOMB!”

At her words, the light of the Orb contracted down to a single tiny spot of incredible intensity. Then it blasted back to its original size and kept on going, expanding outwards as a sphere of solid red, its size increasing exponentially. Setsuna had just enough time to raise her arms and staff to protect her head before the blast hit her, and Senshi of Pluto or not, she fully expected to be blasted into a billion-odd fragments all over space and time. The advancing wall loomed like a crimson supernova, it touched her, it swallowed her...

It took Setsuna a few shivering moments to realize that she’d come out the other side totally intact. She looked around, noting that the dome which had surrounded her and Medea was gone, though the domes that held Saturn and her Glaive still appeared to be intact. Except for the monsters, who were entirely absent, everyone who had been in the room the last time she’d seen it was still there. Like herself, they were coming out of various instinctive defensive postures as they understood they were still in one piece.

Something was wrong, though. The air was filled with strange ripples of color, like heat mirages rising off concrete in summer, indistinct waves whose shape, size, and shade changed steadily and seemingly at random as they drifted about. Some were tiny, and others spanned the entire hall; some passed through each other without incident while others were caught, pulling one another into weirdly twisting patterns. Medea stood calmly at the center of it all, watching and waiting from within a column of warped air. What was going on?

Setsuna heard a scream and looked behind her.

Six women she didn’t recognize had appeared across the hall from the Senshi. Judging by the symbols on their robes, they must be the rest of this era’s Senshi. One of them, a young girl with blue-green hair and eyes—or was it green-blue?—and wearing the symbol for Neptune on her robes was the one who had screamed. Setsuna could understand why.

The girl stood in the middle of one of those weird ripples, and she was getting older, fast. Setsuna remembered watching, back in the future village, as Saturn had restored youth to the ancient woman Naruno; this was the reverse, a young and healthy person becoming old and worn. Blue-green hair grew long and grey, and clear eyes clouded as previously smooth and healthy skin slowly wrinkled and sagged.

“JANI!” The other girl, the Senshi of Mercury, could have been the twin of the first. Without hesitation, she rushed forward into the disturbance to try and help, and blue energy flared. Her entire body was suddenly being traced by interweaving lines of blue light, but she ignored it as she picked up her friend and carried her clear of the distortion. The blue light faded away immediately, and Mercury didn’t appear any older than she had; her friend, though, seemed to have reached eighty or ninety.

Setsuna heard another scream and had to spin around again. One of the soldiers clustered near the door was... shrinking? No, he was getting younger, being pushed back through maturity to youth, and then childhood. The two men nearest to him yanked the now-boy away from another of the ripples, but as they did so, another of their number paused in the middle of stepping back from an approaching patch of light. He didn’t actually stop; he’d wandered unknowingly into another blotch of distorted air, and was now moving in slow motion. And there was a quite horrible sound as one of the guards laying unconscious on the floor was absorbed by a ripple and suddenly dissolved into a gruesome puddle of slime. ChibiMoon passed out on the spot when she saw that.

Setsuna understood now. They’d all made it through the explosion unharmed, but Time hadn’t been so fortunate. The blast had been directed against Time, not physical matter, and so instead of a smoking crater ringed with bits of building and people, there were instead these bits of distorted Time. Step into one, and...

Everybody had figured that part out by now, and there was a mad scramble to dodge the drifting regions of temporal distortion. Mars was trying to get Usagi to stand, but Usagi had her arms around a dark-haired young woman Setsuna didn’t recognize, and she refused to move.

“Mars, look out!”

So intent had Mars been on Usagi that she hadn’t noticed one of the shifting segments of Time drift towards her. Mercury’s warning made her look up and take a step back, but by then the distortion had rippled forward, almost like a snake moving to strike. The end nearest Mars reached out before she could pull back or try to dodge, but instead of her, it hit the Book. Quite suddenly, the distortion vanished, and there was a clearly audible ‘click’ as the silver band sealing the Book’s heavy covers shut broke cleanly into two perfectly equal halves.

“What the...” Mars began. She cut off with a curse as she shifted her balance and hopped awkwardly forward, extending her arms to bat another of the weaving ripples out of existence with the Book just as it got close to Usagi. She also executed a sprawling faceplant.

“Thank you,” Usagi said gravely, trying not to smile as Mars looked up at her from the floor.

“Medea!” the brown-haired Senshi of Venus shouted, ducking a sweeping length of shattered Time. “What are you doing?”

“It’s called winning, Allys. Actually, I’m rather glad you came. Now I can solve a number of problems at once. I’ve been considering what to do about your little playmate Arik for a while now, and it had crossed my mind to have him killed, but now that you’re here, I might as well attack the source of the problem.” Her face hardened. “Did you really believe I hadn’t realized what you and Sara were up to these last six months, flitting around half the planets in the system behind my back? You should have stuck to bedroom politics, Allys; you’re not very good at the real thing.”

“If you thought we were going to just stand by and let you claw your way to Imperial Throne, Medea, then you’re the one who’s lost touch with reality. Our power exists to protect humanity, not control it.”

“You really believe that drivel, don’t you? Well, here’s a little wake-up call for you, Allys...” Medea unleashed a crackling bolt of energy from her staff, striking the other Senshi down and withering her body through fifty years in a fiftieth of a second. “_Your_ power isn’t _my_ power. All your meaningless little elemental tricks together don’t even come close to the power of Time. Time controls everything in the cosmos, Allys, and since _I_ control Time, I guess that means I already control humanity to a certain degree, doesn’t it?”

On her knees and still remarkably lovely even at seventy-plus years, Allys raised her hands and fired a Crescent Beam. It began warping wildly as it traveled, twisting in, around, and through the distortions of Time. Allys fought to control it, but the strain was too much; the energy shattered and dispersed, and she collapsed, breathing heavily.

“You see? You can’t stop me no matter how hard you try. But you can stop worrying about the Imperial Throne, Allys. I’ve found something far more practical, and probably even more powerful.” She sighed. “Of course, I’m afraid that in the course of securing it, I’m going to have to take some rather extreme measures. I can’t afford to have any witnesses, you understand.”

“You can’t... kill all of us...” Allys gasped.

“But _I’m_ not going to be the one who killed you. You and the rest were unfortunate victims of the same temporal disturbance I came here to investigate in the first place, killed in battle by intruders from another era.” She smiled. “Convenient, isn’t it?”

This time it was the other Venus who tried to strike. Medea sneered at the Crescent Beam at first, but she still flinched back when it smashed into the ring of warped air surrounding her. The Beam was overcome, but the distortions had been twisted even further and nearly punched through by the force of that single blast. Furious and a little frightened by her second indication of the strength of these future Senshi, Medea struck the butt of her staff against the floor.

The distortions began to close in from all sides. One touched Setsuna without effect, and the Atlantean Mercury lit up blue once more as she came into contact with another segment of shattered Time. When it had passed, she was still the same visible age she’d been before, but none of the others seemed to share whatever defense she had against the effect of the disrupted temporal fragments. Sara was caught immediately, dwindling down to a baby with a very serious expression on her chubby little features, and Jupiter crashed to the ground with a scream as a patch of rippling air enveloped her legs and withered them to little more than skin and bone.

Several Senshi from either group tried to attack Medea, but Amarelle joined Allys and Jani in sudden old age before she’d taken two steps, and Neptune stumbled as a distortion passed across her face; when it was gone, she had one hand raised to her blank and sightless eyes. Uranus unleashed a World Shaking attack only to have it rewind itself and knock her flat, while Artemis turned into something that was half white-haired boy, half white-furred kitten, and looked absolutely adorable as it wrestled with the giggling, blue-eyed toddler that wore a shrunken version of Venus’ fuku. Karla, reduced to a scrawny pre-teen with a major chip on her shoulder, actually managed to get close enough to try and kick Medea in the shin, but the woman just clubbed her aside with her staff and, in the same motion, took down the Atlantean Mercury with a Dead Scream.

Mars attacked her next, and it was hard to tell which surprised Medea more -the fact that she got hit at all or the fact that she got hit by a heavy, leather-bound and silver-banded Book. Mars had been right behind Venus and Artemis, and the same distortion that had snared them would have caught her if the Book hadn’t somehow reacted to it and just absorbed the entire thing, as it had done to the other anomaly and was doing now to Medea’s shielding column of warped Time. The surprise of the absurdly unconventional attack and the weight of the Book enabled Mars to get in three more good, solid whacks before Medea’s staff swung around and cracked her in the side of the head, sending her down. Shifting her jaw, Medea raised her weapon and hit Mars in the ribs for good measure.

The ginzuishou’s barrier had roared back into existence around Usagi, Luna, and ChibiMoon the second the flood of Time fragments had begun, but while it blocked the warping energies, it didn’t have enough power to correct them without risking doing harm to Usagi and her baby. The best she could do was provide a spot for her bodyguards to retreat to in safety. Those that could reach her, anyway. Mercury carried Ryo in and then went back out to help Jupiter drag herself to safety, a tricky proposition at best with all the ducking and weaving she had to do for both of them. Setsuna, meanwhile, had moved to shield Neptune and Uranus with the small area she was able to keep clear of the badly damaged influence of Time. None of them could get to Mars, and as for the other two...

“Aaaaahh!” Venus yelled, racing in through the glow of the barrier with Artemis right behind her, running on all fours and having a rather difficult time of it because his clothes didn’t bend in quite the right ways. Venus cut to the right as Artemis pounced at her, and he went sliding along into Jupiter with the indignant squeaky growl most kittens make when confounded. He raised his head and growled just as squeakily, catlike ears laid back when he spotted his prey hiding behind Usagi.

“No fair,” he complained. “You moved when I wasn’t ready.” Jupiter and Mercury looked at the little cat-boy in shock as they realized who he had to be.

“Nyah!” Venus intoned, making faces at Artemis with the sort of enthusiasm only a little girl can muster. “Give it up, silly! You’ll never catch me! Eeek!” She scrambled back behind Usagi as Artemis started bounding over to show her what he thought of ‘silly.’ “Usagi, help! Save me!”

With the gangliness of the immature would-be hunter multiplied by the bizarre imbalances of his hybrid body, Artemis tripped over his own feet and skidded into Luna with all four paws in the air. He righted himself quickly and cast a hasty glance at Luna to make sure she hadn’t seen his clumsiness, but when he realized Luna hadn’t moved even after being run into, Artemis frowned. Catlike, the feline boy butted his head against the dark-haired woman’s shoulder, trying to get her attention, and when it didn’t work, he sat down on the floor and looked up at Usagi with a confused, hopeful expression and a twitching tail. It was the look of the child who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that whatever is wrong, the adult will make everything all right again.

Usagi thought she might start crying.

“If you had come along quietly in the first place,” Medea told her, “none of this would have been necessary. But you made your choice; now it’s time to live with the consequences.”

Artemis turned around, bared a mouthful of baby teeth—of which at least half were fangs—and growled at her. Venus hugged Usagi’s back a little tighter as she glanced around it at Medea.

“I don’t like her,” the little girl intoned solemnly. “She’s not a nice lady.”

“Shut this off and turn everyone back to normal,” Usagi demanded in a steady voice.

“I don’t think so. And don’t count on your red-eyed friend being able to save any of you; even _she_ can’t undo this power. Can you?” Medea asked mockingly, turning to Setsuna. “I know you’ve been trying. Frustrating, isn’t it, how the pieces of it all just slip away from you? All tangled up like yarn after a cat’s been playing with it.”

“I was trying to think of what this reminded me of,” Setsuna said suddenly. She nodded at Medea and smiled. “Thank you.”

She raised her arms, staff in her right hand, and concentrated as the Orb shone again, revealing scattered fragments of red energy all over the hall. To Setsuna’s mind, they did indeed look like bits of yarn or string, tangled up with each other, frayed at the ends, and generally in need of being sorted out.

And she was a seamstress, wasn’t she?

Each of the myriad broken bits of Time sent a curving stream of energy towards Setsuna, thousands upon thousands of crimson threads which looped wildly about on all sides before disappearing into the heart of the Garnet Orb. Together, they looked like the life’s work of some huge, insane arachnid.

“What are you doing?” Medea demanded, suddenly sounding a little less certain of herself.

Setsuna ignored her and continued to connect to the segments of Time—not just the broken ones, either. She was linked to the domes imprisoning Saturn and her weapon, to Medea and her staff and Orb, and to still more lines of red that were flooding into the room from all directions, from _outside._ Setsuna imagined a pattern of red light filling the sky and penetrating through the entire planet, expanding out into space, going on and on into infinity, and it somehow felt correct. She had the broken threads, she had _all_ the threads. Now she had to bring them back together. But how? What was she supposed to...

*Wait.* There was something about the lines, the way they were arranged, that tugged at her mind. It was... she almost had it... there was... it was almost like there were instructions written into the pattern of Time. How to change it, how to break it, how to mend it again. She looked at only a small section of the pattern, and it was all just meaningless lines across infinite space. But when she looked at the entire picture, all of Time at once, a definite meaning—a message?—emerged.

*Yes,* Setsuna thought, wondering if she was speaking just to herself, or to who—and whatever had left that message there for her to find. *I understand.*

A look of absolute peace and determination settled onto Setsuna’s face as she closed her eyes and began to chant. Her voice grew with each word until it was no longer her own, but a chorus of millions that was deafening even though the words were spoken barely above a whisper:

ALL SHAPES OF SPACE, IN THE PATTERN OF TIME,
ARE ORDER BORN OUT OF CHAOS, TO ETERNITY BIND.
SO THAT ALL THINGS MADE MAY CRUMBLE AWAY,
THAT EVIL BECOME GOOD, AND NIGHT BECOME DAY.
SO THAT LIFE MAY END AND DEATH BE UNDONE,
LET BALANCE BE MAINTAINED AMONG ALL THAT WAS ONE.

In the moment of silence, the fingers of Setsuna’s right hand opened and released her staff. Rather than clatter to the floor, it drifted to a spot in front of her and hung there, perfectly upright, as she began to speak once more:

THE SHAPING IS BROKEN, AND REALITY SHORN,
BY THE HAND OF SPIRIT, THE PATTERN IS TORN.
LEST INFINITY UNRAVEL AND ETERNITY END,
THE WEAVER OF TIME SEEKS NOW TO AMEND.
AS THE WOUND WAS MADE BY THE CHOICE OF A MIND,
SO BE IT RESTORED, REPAIRED, AND ALIGNED.

Setsuna’s eyes flashed open, and her voice dropped back to normal to speak two words: “MOBIUS SPIN.”

The staff began to rotate, slowly at first, but it accelerated until it became a featureless blur except for the red jewel at its head. At that point, the lines between the Orb and the broken pieces of Time flared. The ripples in the air shrank and were drained away into the lines like water sucked up by a straw, after which the lines themselves collapsed into the Orb.

Wide-eyed, Medea brought her own weapon around and fired a Dead Scream. The howling attack streaked towards Setsuna and collided with the whirling blur that was her staff. The Scream fell apart; the staff continued to turn. Medea’s next move was to let loose a volley of Stasis Bolts, trying to overload Setsuna’s Orb again. That had an effect—it made the thing rotate faster, undoing the damage of her Time Bomb even more rapidly than before.

Those who had aged returned to youth; those who had grown young now matured. Sara, Venus, and Artemis all returned to their normal sizes, their magically-created garments thankfully altering with them. Venus still had her arms partway around Usagi, and Artemis—now fully human again—was still sitting on all fours, with his knees up near his ears as a result. He and Venus looked at themselves, at each other, and then blushed and quickly got to their feet. _That_ had been a disturbing experience.

Elsewhere, as Mercury helped her up, Jupiter was shivering as she stomped her feet several times to make sure they were working normally again; Neptune was blinking her eyes slowly and deliberately for the same reason. Platforms of red force lifted Mars, Uranus, and Karla from floor and gently bore them back to their companions. Even the guard who had dissolved was returning to normal, his liquefied body reconstituting into solidity.

In the middle of coming to, ChibiMoon happened to glance over and see this process of slime becoming human when it was about halfway complete. Her stomach twisted and burbled, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and she passed out a second time.

Her eyes shining with red light, Setsuna watched the restoration proceed for several minutes before she turned to Medea. “And now for you.”

Medea looked down at herself in horror as a dark aura appeared around her, a field of crimson light darkening almost to black at the edges.

“What... what are you...”

“Testing a theory,” Setsuna replied. Her own aura had appeared, solid crimson and every bit as strong as Medea’s, but nowhere near as dark. She glanced at the two slowed-air domes and extended her hand, making a pulling sort of gesture with her fingers. The slow-shifting webs of red light gave a combined lurch as their defined shape was lost, the domes breaking up into free-floating force and being drawn to Setsuna’s Orb like all the other errant bits of temporal energy in the hall. She plucked them out of the air before they reached the Orb, though, holding the energy in a roughly spherical mass with her left hand while her staff continued to spin and repair the damage Medea had caused.

When the last of the lines of Time had vanished into the Orb, the staff ceased to turn. The halt was not gradual, but all at once, and it was accompanied by a bright flare from the jewel. After that light faded, the only traces of Time-force in the chamber were the energy in Setsuna’s left hand and the auras surrounding her and Medea.

“I don’t like you,” Setsuna said calmly as she retrieved her staff. “I think you’re the first person I’ve met so far that I genuinely dislike. Of course, I have the luxury of being able to go back with my friends and know that, in our time, you’ve been dead for several thousand years, but I’m also slightly curious about something. I admit that I’m a little new at this, but I happen to agree with your era’s Venus about why we exist. We’re here to defend, not dominate, and from what I know of my friends, it goes beyond a simple calling of duty. We don’t just protect people because we have to; we do it because it’s part of who and what we are. And yet you, somehow, seem able to operate on purely selfish motives without even batting an eyelash, and you’re ready to kill your allies for your own convenience over those same motives. You don’t _think_ like the rest of us, and I’d like to know why.”

Medea glared at her. It was mostly anger, but she also seemed afraid. And in the next second, she blinked out, teleporting away. Setsuna sighed.

“Saturn,” she said politely over her shoulder, “would you please bring her back?”

The Atlantean Senshi jumped when they looked over and saw Saturn, and her friends gave a collective wince. The right side of the girl’s face was one solid bruise, forcing her eye shut and twisting her mouth into a snarl. Or maybe she was snarling because she wanted to. Her open eye was so thick with energy that it appeared to be a bottomless hole or a piece of a starless night sky.

She gestured at the spot where Medea had been standing, and she was there once more, materializing out of a purplish mist and stumbling as if she’d been walking or running somewhere when Saturn had reached out for her. The blank look on her face turned sick as she recognized the one responsible for bringing her back.

“Thank you, Saturn.” Setsuna turned back to Medea. “Now, as I was about to say, I’d like to know what it is that allows you to behave the way you do. I’ve got a guess, and I think it’s a good one, but I’d like to do this scientifically, so we’re going to conduct a little experiment and see if my guess is right.” She looked back over her shoulder at her friends. “Any objections?”

“We need Saturn to do some fairly extensive healing,” Usagi replied, looking at Mars, Uranus, and Luna, and at the guards the two transformed cats had taken down earlier; none of them had been restored by the removal of Medea’s distortions. “And we can’t kill her,” she added, indicating Medea with a sharp look.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Then go ahead.”

“Thank you, Princess.” Setsuna looked at the Atlanteans next. “And you?” The six Senshi looked at each other carefully.

“Is there anything in the Codices about a situation like this?” Sara asked hopefully.

“Actually,” Mercury replied, “there is. ‘What has been and must continue to be as it has been must and shall be given precedence over that which is yet to be.’ Direct from the Mobius Accords, section five, paragraph nine.”

“And it means... what?” Karla demanded, shifting the shoulder Medea had busted.

“It means,” Allys replied, “that a Pluto from the future has authority over a Pluto from the past when it comes to matters of temporal security. It may be a part of _our_ future in question, but it’s a piece of _their_ past.” That had the sound of a concession to it. “Besides,” she added glumly, “I don’t think we could stop them anyway.”

“Thank you,” Setsuna said, nodding gravely. She turned back to Medea, who again vanished. She returned even faster this time, appearing upside-down and about two meters in the air, at which point she fell to the floor with a thud and lay there groaning.

“Hotaru,” Neptune chided.

“Not now, mama.” Her attention fixed on Medea, Saturn’s tone was absent. Then she nodded. “She won’t be able to get away again, Pluto, but you might want to do something about her staff. I can’t take it away from her.”

“That’s a good idea,” Setsuna agreed. She stepped closer to Medea, hooked the end of her own staff onto the ornamentation at the head of the other, and pulled it out of Medea’s hand.

“Oh no you don’t,” Saturn muttered, seeing Medea begin to reach for her weapon. She snapped a Silent Wall into existence around the woman, and then did the same thing to her staff once Setsuna had moved it off to one side and stepped clear. That done, Saturn dissolved the barrier around Medea, nodded at Setsuna, and turned her attention to healing, pausing for only a moment and a suspicious look as she realized the life-energies in the white-haired man and the dark-haired woman perfectly matched those of Artemis and Luna.

Setsuna watched Saturn start to work, then turned to the task at hand. “I’ll start with a list of the various inconsistencies you’ve displayed that I’m aware of. In chronological order, of course.” She paused. “And don’t try any more tricks, or I’ll take steps to restrain you. Understood?”

Medea didn’t move, but Setsuna was sure she wasn’t going to make any trouble; without the staff and the Orb, Medea was simply no match for her, and they both knew it. Setsuna cast back in her mind to the point of their arrival, and then began:

“Item One: You attacked us on sight even though you had to know who I was and, by extension, who the others were as well. I don’t know your laws, but I doubt immediate violence is the accepted means of handling such a situation. But you were obviously fighting with Usagi before we arrived, so you might just have been making a hasty judgment. We’ll let that one go for now.”