RP: YSS Miharu Mission 5, Part 2: The Fight For The Lost

The sudden impact jarred Nyton, forcing him to hold onto the tactical console while Miharu faded and died. With the main hull dead and Hoshi taking over everything he too had to adjust. The final words of the ship were profound but there was little time to dwell on them. The time for mourning would have to wait. Retaining his poise, the man restored his control of the weapons just as Kotori shouted her command.

There could be no withdrawal. There was nowhere to withdraw to. The only way out lay in the maw of the beast ahead. But first they had to get there and to do so Nyton had to swat away their pursuers. The chunk of the Irim was something of a blessing since it gave them a reference point for spatial distancing to better calculate trajectory and aim. "It's all or nothing now. We make these shots count or we don't make it at all." he telepathically messaged the remaining CIES while taking aim and opening fire on the remaining pods with every turret he had available.

The impact jarred Tom, slamming him into his console with a loud thud. He yelped in pain as the injury on his chest was scraped raw, red splotches staining the yellow panel of his uniform a dull orange color.

He had little time to process the pain, Miharu's death or the terrible implications of what he was about ask of his technicians. He just felt a desperate sadness welling up within him, stinging his eyes with tears which he struggled to blink away.

He sent an emergency message down to the subdeck, all hands:


His responsibility for now was trying to keep retention fields up so that Miharu wouldn't implode. That, and if time allowed, figuring out if there was any way to stop the torrents of coolant from pouring out of the ship.

"Taisa, I don't know if I can hold Miharu together! We may need to eject Hoshi!"

Yukari felt her arm suddenly die. It did not uselessly flop to her side, but it was dead all the same.

She felt the sprites die, too, blissfully sucked out into timeless space or painlessly combusted into ashes. More tears.

Hoshi was trying. Trying so hard, to fill in for the lost presence of half of their beloved home, finally done in by Melisson's evil. The demon queen had a victory.

It was more than Yukari could take.

But not more than Kotori.

Never more than Kotori.

"Race after Melisson!"

Click to expand...

The fiery pain in Yukari's shoulder burned away the fog of sadness that threatened to settle over her.

"HAI!" Yukari gnashed her teeth together and steadied the ship as best she could, Hoshi's sensors working well enough to keep hold of the trail and keep the ship on it. She jammed the ship for all the throttle it could give, no longer leashed by how much power Miharu would be left with at the end.

The burst of speed gave her less response time, but the big chunks of debris were absent; they had to be close! So close she could feel her hands closing around Melisson's supple neck!

"KEEP HER CONJOINED! WE ARE CLOSE!"

Kai felt the rattle and was nearly thrown to the floor, but managed to keep himself just upright enough to have the suit help him stay steady. The final words of the Miharu's MEGAMI core came as a bit of a shock, but he couldn't worry about that right now. They had taken a bad hit and Miharu's computer was gone for now. But as far as the Yamataian could tell, they had yet to give up.

"It seems so." Kai replied to Asher, simply, before telepathically messaging Kyou "Hurry up, Kyou, we need to all be ready to go the moment we are called. If the Juni is unable then we must leave her to her healing."

In the back of Kai's mind however, one thought floated, sparking a seed of uncertainty Was Yuzuki Allright? He wanted to ask her if she was, but somehow, he knew that at this moment, she needed as few distractions as possible, to do her part and keep what was left of their home going. So instead, he simply sent her one thought: "Good Luck"

Its front wreathed in billowing gases, Miharu got on the move again, returning to its original course by the Shlarvasseroth's engine trail.

The two bombers came into view, but Nyton was ready for them. Two turrets discharged man-made lightning and got both battlepods dead-on, obliterating them before they could visit more harm on the ship.

With the last of their pursuers destroyed, Miharu sped on. It wasn't the end of their troubles, though. After having been fired but lacking the coolant to control the heat spike, the port dorsal turreted particle cannon remained in the danger zone. Hoshi wisely took the initiative and ejected the anti-matter supply for the port turrets shortly before the dorsal one burst apart. The shrapnel from the destroyed turret scattered, some pieces plinking off the surviving gravimetric fin.

Fortunately, Yuzuki's insistence that the armor not be ejected from it saved their sole gravimetric drive from sustaining more damage; the debris just bounced off.

Overheating, though, was becoming an ever more present problem. The gravimetric drive, fusion reactor and port CFS unit were warming up, though the heat levels were not critical yet. Hoshi herself - her coolant lines undisturbed - was still running cool.

Problems were becoming aggravated in the subdeck, though. Pipes were rupturing, sending deadly geysers out as the centermost CFS unit gave loud metallic whines as it kept functioning even as its temperature was reaching critical levels. When the power armored Suzume made it onsite, she glimpsed Yuzuki and Nao cringing against their consoles as they shielded themselves from the rupturing conduits. Rin was staggering around, hugging herself in a daze.

Above, the ceiling glowed bright reds and yellows in places. The casing of the CFS unit was nearly as bad with the cherry red blush that spread over its alarmingly warm surface.

...and suddenly, Miharu zipped into a pocket of normal spacetime that was larger than its own. The sudden state change was proving too much to the central CFS unit and it started to spit sparks and crackle with errant arcs of electricity in prelude to it going critical.

Hoshi's sensors was depicting a grim sight for those on the bridge. They were in a normalized spacetime bubble that was 100 kilometers in radius centered around their nemesis: Melisson's XSS Shlarvasseroth. The local time pocket was littered with ship debris from half-a-dozen Yuumi-class battleships, their broken carcasses not looking smashed like cracked eggshells so much as blasted apart by anti-capital ship ordonnance.

The Mishhuvurthyar juggernaut's triple-clawed prow was facing a single Yuumi-class vessel left to the Second Draconian Fleet's Command Group: the YSS Empire.

"Yui," Kotori breathed in sudden realization. "She went after the Yui-clone commanding the fleet first."

Kyou stumbled backward, breathless and slightly in shock from the unexpected absence of everything that close to her. As she found her footing again, she forced herself to breathe deeply, and take in what was around her. "Nakamura-Heisho, there's no one left alive over here... I'm coming back now, but unless there's someone that can be spared from engineering, there's no chance of reinforcements for us."

"Perhaps that is all she required of this dimension rather than the fleet itself." Nyton mused aloud. He kept his eyes out for more enemy pursuers or traps Melisson may have left. With such a large bubble of real space around them there would be plenty of room for more enemies to swarm them.

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Ayumu had finished placing Ichigo into a hemosynth chamber when the blast occurred. For a moment she was knocked unconscious when her head impacted the super hardened glass of the container. When she came to she quickly began to call out for any available hands.

"Azumi, are you back?" she called before picking herself up. After a moment of silence she noticed that the medlab was a lot quieter now. Less were personnel working and more wounded were groaning. "Azumi, Miko, where are you?"

Stepping outside of the lab she looked out to see the passages ahead of her were a ruin of wreckage and death. Sprites were strewn about in various states of repose. The passage ahead was sealed off to prevent decompression. "Is... is there anyone left?" the nurse then asked to no one in particular.

"Agh DAMN IT!"

The yell escaped Tom out of reflex. There was no 'grace under pressure' when a CFS unit was about to explode, sending shards of refrigerator-sized debris through main engineering, which would kill the technicians down there.

So, he was thankful for his computerized brain as it helped him multitask in the seconds that followed.

"Main engineering CFS unit going critical! Trying to fix problem! Agh!"

He shut down the CFS unit in central engineering and rerouted operations to the two remaining ones. He would thank Miyoko for her configuration that made this changeover possible later.

It's going to blow anyway! How...

A crazy idea popped into his mind. Maybe it could work. Maybe?

'Evacuate? Engineering? There was no way that I'll gi-....' Rin brought her wits back together long enough to actually survey the events transpiring about her. 'I.. I won't abandon our home.... There has to be something I can do.... But nothing I've done has made a difference so far...' she thought to herself.

The first step toward leaving the subdeck was the most difficult, as Rin has to break all that tied her to everything around her. After that step, though, she made her hurried escape as ordered, all the while body trembled at the further loss. The mind of Miharu had gone, and now they were abandoning the body.

Masako had no idea how long she had been out. One moment she had been laying on her back in the medical bay, still in her armor, and in the next moment, she was lying on the floor with just a hospital gown. Groaning, she barely made out someone calling out. "Here," Masako croaked as she slowly sat up with a grimace.

Ayumu was feeling her resolve dwindle at the sight of so much destruction. At the sound of Masako's voice the nurse wiped away her tears and moved back into the medical bay. Seeing Masako sit up she made her way over and knelt down.

"Kurohoshi-Juni, I believe your team members were looking for you earlier." Ayumu stated before pausing to wipe her eyes again, "I told them that, under normal circumstances, I would not recommend you be discharged. However, given the situation, I suppose that decision is up to you. Your shattered sternum has reformed itself although it is still very brittle. Your organs have also healed so you are capable of performing your duties. Mind you, there will be much discomfort so I recommend some pain killers in the meantime."

Masako grimaced at the fire in her chest as Ayumu explained the situation. "Understood," the Warrant Officer replied as she used the medic's body to aid in standing up. "No pain killers," she told Ayumu. "I think I'll need my wits if we're going into combat," the Raven-haired Neko stated as she took a deep breath to relax.

"Are the corridors stable enough for me to head to the Armor Bay?" she asked calmly. "An Armor with a hemosynth core should help me for what's to come, but I'd rather not die of asphyxiation before I can be of some use."

"Beeda bada boopa bada beeda~..." idly sung Asher aloud, looking around in the Armor Bay, becoming anxious with the increasing amount of between the battle not started and his time of not being in the thick of it. His head nodded up and down, as if he were listening to music and keeping a beat. He looked over at Kai, and the retreated his gaze back over. The sort of idle behavior seemed to signal is full-acceptance of Miharu's death with full understanding, or lack there of. Still, as he felt the urge to disassemble by force rise, he decided to stave it off by assembly.

A recollection of the events at the Meng Po revealed that all it took was two volleys of missiles to properly wipe out an unexpecting armor crew and all the unactivated armors behind them. Thus, if that was the case, then Asher had decided that the piles of munitions were too close to their armors, and as such, needed to be moved. So he walked over to one of his piles and scooped it up with his hands, as if it were a stack of explosive laundry, and carried off to the opposite end of the bay. In this way, in Asher's mind, a teleporting enemy would have to pick from two targets, instead of just one. It could save them, or it could be rather pointless depending on the enemy. Either way, it kept the ancy Asher occupied.

" — Yui-sama?!" Yukari whirled back to Kotori, then the screen, as their pursuit rested before them. She pushed Miharu onward, but she cut the throttle back down to 200 m/s while the ship continued to coast at about 2,000 m/s.

The sheer size of the flagship ... especially so close. Even at Taiie, the Shlarvasseroth did not appear as menacing.

"Orders, Kotori?" she quietly asked.

@Engineering:

"Wha-" Suzume blinked wide at Tom's order, but his imperative snap that what he said was an order had her shove her hesitation aside.

"Move!" She said on her loudspeakers for added emphasis, as Yuzuki and Nao trailed after Rin. By the time the three technicians were out of the main passageway, Suzume had reached over her shoulder to ready her plasma rifle for use.

I can't believe I'm about to- She killed the thought by pulling the trigger. The hot ball of blue-white plasma leapt out of the rifle and squarely struck the Combine Field System, stripping it of its outer cover and smashing apart the gyroscopic-like field emitters inside.

The whole assembly scattered to molten pieces, spraying semi-molten shrapnel and debris all over what had been the main gun's assembly. The base of the CFS unit sparking angrily and smoking, Suzume reported: "Target destroyed, Juni."

Tom's brute force gamble looked like it had paid off. Furthermore, with that CFS unit no longer drawing as much power Hoshi managed to normalize power allocation, allowing life support and atmospheric retention fields steady function for the moment. He could adjust the two remaining CFS unit to function in making a new spacetime bubble field at need - though they only had four minutes left of function.

@Bridge:

Kotori sucked in a breath, stalling, thinking things over now that they had caught up with Melisson but lacked any good way to interfere with her.

Yui's presence here is significant enough for Melisson not being able to afford ignoring her, even before resorting to her ship's psionic amplifiers to affect the fleet, Kotori thought. If this Yui is also a NH-23 Ketsurui Empress' Nodal Nekovalkyrja her ties to nekovalkyrja could hinder or even stop Melisson's efforts.

"Hail the Empire," the Taisa ordered. "Maybe we can-"

The Shlarvasseroth cut off Kotori by firing its forward torpedo launchers. In an eyeblink, seventeen anti-matter warheads crossed the short confines of the spacetime bubble to reach the Empire. Deprived of aether power and shieldless, there was little the Yuumi-class battleship could do to counter the incoming onslaught.

Brilliant white explosions blossomed over the venerable vessel's hull, the multiple anti-capital ship warheads packing enough firepower to nearly instantly turn the battleship into expanding flaking fragments with hull armor blasting away like feathers from a mottling bird.

A sound of dismay caught in Kotori's throat at the swift destruction of the Empire. The light cast by the vessel's destruction had not yet waned off before her Signaler abilities slammed into function by her body's own accord as an unpleasant confirmation that the Yui-clone directing the fleet had indeed been a NH-23 as the latter's disembodied PANTHEON presence sought out the nearest (and only) available PANTHEON node she could: Hoshi's Compact Integrated Electronic Suite.

"Damn!" Kotori grabbed the sides of her head as she dropped to her knees. Only she stood in the way of Yui being able to respawn in Hoshi's medlab. She gave a primal groan as she felt Yui's presence start to fray away, and the knowledge was made all that more awful by understanding that if she at all went along disposing of Yui's mind would be as trivial as a child carelessly destroying a spiderweb by batting an hand through it.

Kotori's hands left her head, one snaking down to draw her NSP30 pistol and the other setting the weapon to the lethal setting. "Yukari," she said, her voice labored as she placed the muzzle of her weapon under her own chin. "Choose between Taisho Yui, or me. Quickly."

"If that is the case, then come back here and get as many weapons as your armor can hold, we need to be ready to fight at a moment's notice." Kai answered to Kyou, watching as Asher began rearranging the pile yet again.

He then decided to contact Tom: "Freeman-Juni, do you have any sprites available to help the armor team? I know there is much to do, but we currently only have three members, and I do not believe that is enough to combat a Shlarvasseroth, even if we fought well beyond our usual abilities." As he said this, the Heisho looked at Asher- The one person on this ship who would even think about taking on that large a foe by himself.

"Yes, sir." Kyou went ahead and ran as fast as she could safely, being careful to watch out for decompressed areas and the like. No need to chance the ship breaking even more by opening more areas to space. She wasn't sure whether or not any of the crew was still outside of their areas, but she figured anyone who was would probably hear her coming well enough to get out of the way.

Nyton immediately turned around and stood up. It had not taken him long to figure out just what it was Kotori meant to do by sacrificing herself. Nor did Melisson's action not seem all too well timed. He looked to both Kotori and Yukari with stern eyes. "Shosa, I must insist that you do not suggest Kotori-dono to kill herself." he said sharply.

"Taisa, I regret that we cannot save Yui-Taisho but if you die now then you risk sacrificing the other Yui, along with the Empress, and untold scores more. Melisson knows what you are capable of and is playing on that! You must not die!" he shouted.

The sight of Kotori holding a pistol to her chin was making every fiber of Nyton want to dash out and snatch it from her. The situation, however, was delicate. If he ran out and tried to grab it there was a chance the pistol might go off and kill or further maim Kotori. If Kotori was seriously putting all her faith on Yukari's decision, a move which stung him slightly, then he had to argue his point. Rather than attack Yukari he had to address Kotori and hope that his argument would persuade the Shosa in the process.


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Ayumu shook her head. "I have no idea. I have not ventured out to see for myself. Nor do we have any Armors in here. We were transferring medical supplies to here when-" A shudder suddenly went through the nurse as she realized the ramifications of what just happened. Many lightly wounded sprites had been helping along with other nurses. "When we got hit.... and lost all of them...." she sputtered before tears began to stream out.

Yukari was not paying attention, her gaze having dashed back to the main screen to see the Empire be reduced to ash and debris. Only when she heard the gentle click of Kotori's NSP did she realize what was going on.

Kotori's pained face also told her how little time she had.

Nyton's words weren't lost on her, but there was so much more to consider. So many reasons for and against. So many possible outcomes. So many choices.

Yukari spared half a second for all of it. She firmly pushed the pistol away from Kotori's head and made sure her eyes held her friend's.

"Kill Yui-sama," she said. "Our true prey awaits."

As Asher continued to heave moderately sized piles of munitions by himself. Though, as he worked he looked over at Kai and noticed he was looking at him. In the short time that he knew him, the Malifarian figured the Tamian not one to stare at people. So why would he be looking at Asher?

Wait... thought the red-eyed dynamo. Was it possible? Was Nakamura staring at him for a more... personal reason? Hinoto would flip upside down should she know it to be true!

"Hey, Naka-boss." Asher raised up a hand as if signaling for a halt in movement. "I know emotions is runnin' a lil' high right now, but I'm juss' gunna' tell ya right now. I ain't inta' dudes." With that he continued on to the next pile, to pick it up, and move it to the other side of the room.