It’s been a long time since Hikari last felt this kind of pain.

She crawls out from beneath a mound of broken stone, wincing from her own broken bones. Then she's seized and thrown again, smashing right through the floor.

We’re going to reach the castle foundations if we keep going like this.

She hits the ground and rolls, managing to get up before Gier 11 can cave her head in with a table leg. She puts up her umbrella and blocks the next swing. The leg explodes. Hikari turns away from, umbrella in front of her.

The kick comes from behind.

Hikari crashes through the wall and into the adjacent room. She topples, world churning, into a row of bunk beds.

For the first time in a long while, she tastes her own blood.

“Stop!” she cries, as the God Gier grabs onto her leg and swings her headfirst around the room, tearing apart railings and desks and beds. “Stop, you goddamn maniac!”

The God Gier hurls her out into the hallway. Hikari tries to land on her feet but the God Gier is there already, fists ready to punch her lights out. The android has already fully analyzed Hikari’s fight patterns and is countering the moves Hikari hasn’t even thought of making yet.

Hikari suddenly feels very angry. Even with a thousand years of battle experience, she is unable to do so much as hinder getting her butt kicked by her sister.

It’s not fair.

Another flurry of the God Gier’s attacks and the hallway collapses, taking them down into a spacious ballroom. Hikari senses the entire castle beginning to cave in, starting the process that will bury them both alive. 11 comes at her and Hikari just barely dodges in time.

“Onee-chan,” she says, panting, “we need to get out of here.”

The God Gier does not seem to be listening. She strides across the polished wooden floor, blue eyes flashing with red murder.

Hikari backs into a grand dining table and starts to run around it, leading 11 into a crazy game of tag.

If I can stall long enough for the program to work, perhaps neither of us will have to die today.

Hikari starts grabbing chairs and throwing them. It does little to slow the God Gier, who seems to grow impatient as she swaps them down. 11 gives the table a great kick, sending it spiraling at Hikari. The oak wood table is long enough to seat forty people and offers Hikari no room to escape. She raises her umbrella, takes aim, but before she can activate anything the table bursts apart and 11 flies through with a cannon emerging from her arm.

Hikari feels dread grip her. She unfurls her umbrella even as 11’s cannon whirls with a mechanical roar. She tenses.

The high-intensity beam punches right through the nanomaterial. Hikari’s left shoulder explodes in pain and fire consumes the left side of her body. She screams, stumbling. The agony is unimaginable, something Hikari has not expected to ever feel again. It takes a hold of her mind, forcing itself on every single strand of thought until nothing makes sense but pain.

Hikari is on the floor, sobbing and clutching her torn, missing shoulder, when she feels a stiff boot step down onto her throat.

She gasps and tries to struggle but the God Gier pushes her cannon into her face.

“That was 10 percent.”

Hikari stops moving. The noise of the cannon is deafening, like she’s pressing her ear against a jet engine. She can see the energy particles whirling inside the barrel, their light blindingly blue, and can smell the fire coursing through the nanomachinary as they swirl around inside the God Gier’s body.

“No,” she chokes out. “Don’t. Not. Yet.” She pleads with her eyes, with her tears, with her blood. “I just… wanted you to remember.”

The God Gier tenses. “It doesn’t matter who we were. What matters is what we are now.” Her eyes are red hot but colder than any eyes Hikari has ever seen. “If I’d known you would kill so many people, I’d have killed you much sooner.”

The cannon roars once more. Hikari screams, “NO!” But the world is encased in noise and heat.

The ballroom goes quiet. Hikari opens her eyes again. The cannon blast has torn through the floorboards next to her head but left her untouched. She stares at the cannon in confusion and shock. Smoke rises from the barrel as it winds down, and with a series of swirling particles it resembles back into the God Gier’s arm.

11 lifts her foot off Hikari’s throat.

“I can’t do this.”

The God Gier looks sad. Her eyes have turned back into blue and Hikari can see sense starting to come back.

Did it work?

She licks her fangs, activating the nanobots inside them.

Now I just need to bite her again, and she’ll remember everything.

11 steps away. “Is it true?” she asks. “The ships, the hospital. You.”

Hikari clutches at her shoulder, where the blast ripped out a chunk of it. Blood seeps from between her fingers, pooling around her head. “Why don’t you find out for yourself?” She glances up, past 11’s shoulder. The God Gier turns, following her gaze.

Up on the ceiling, Hikari’s umbrella spins with its head facing the both of them. From its tip, two holographic red gears appear, spinning within each other. Hikari whispers a command and the gears multiply, covering the entire ceiling of the ballroom in a crimson clockwork. Then with another command, a turret emerges from each of the gears until one hundred gun barrels are pointing at 11.

“Hikari,” 11 says, her voice quiet as she stares at the turrets. “Are those… anti-personnel turrets? How… how are you doing that?”

Just then, the doors to the ballroom slam open and a group of knights appear in the doorway. “Stop!” they start to shout when they see 11 and Hikari. “Surrender yourselves, in the name of the King!”

11 whips around, alarm in her pretty blue eyes. “Get away from here!” she yells at the knights, “Quickly, before-”

An ear-splitting groan cuts her off. 11 looks back up at the ceiling to see the turrets turning towards the knights.

“Hikari!” Her gasp of horror is delicious. “Please, stop this before-”

“Rosso Phantasma.”

Hikari smiles, watching the clockwork on the ceiling ignite like a galaxy of brilliant stars.