Atria sat at her desk, staring at the framed illustration of her and Prometheus. A half finished resignation letter sat on the laptop screen in front of her. In the end, Yuri’s surgery had taken three hours, after which the doctor had taken Cap to join her at the side of whatever ICU bed Yuri had been assigned. His friends Natsuki, Sayori, and Yukari had joined them about half an hour before Yuri came out of the operating room, and then found their own way back to the barracks once Cap had been led out of the waiting room. And that left Atria heading back to the base, alone.

    She looked up as she heard a knock at her door. Meliana stood in the doorway, holding a bottle and two glasses. “I’ve got sake,” she said.

    “You don’t need to...” Atria started, and then sighed. “You wanted me gone, you’re getting your wish. I screwed up badly enough for you to fire me, but you won’t have to. I’m drafting my resignation letter right now.”

    “Well, then I’ll save you the trouble of finishing it, and refuse it right now,” Meliana said, placing the glasses on Atria’s desk. “I’d rather just clear the air. Also, I’ve got sake.”

    Atria stared at her. “I allowed a refugee to go into a place where I knew there was going to be a battle, and she got hurt. I had an obligation to stop her, and I helped her instead. How am I fit to continue in this role?”

    Meliana sat down and opened up the bottle, pouring some sake into each glass, and then slid one over to Atria. “And I ignored your warnings that it was a trap, and sent them into that ambush in the first place. As a result, the one person in this entire world who could have stood any chance against Balthazar is out of action, not that she was a combatant in the first place. If you’re not fit, than neither am I. And, I brought sake.”

    Atria stared at the glass. “I prefer scotch or brandy.”

    “Well, sake’s what I brought. Drink up.”

    Atria sipped from her glass. “Why are you doing this? I know you can’t stand me. I know you call me ‘Little Miss Bloodthirsty’ behind my back.”

    “And you’ve called me worse behind mine,” Meliana stated, sipping from her own. “But you’re very good, and you’re smart, and you don’t miss anything in front of you. So, we still need you.”

    “What are you talking about?” Atria demanded. “You don’t listen to any of my proposals! I know what ‘I’ll take it under advisement’ or ‘I’ll take it under consideration’ means – I brush people off with that too when I don’t want to listen to them.”

    “I don’t,” Meliana said.

    “You don’t what?”

    “I don’t use those phrases to brush people off,” Meliana said. “I listen to every single one of your proposals, and then I go and I champion them to the leadership of the Eastern Army. And then they give an excuse for rejecting them, and tell me that I’m the one who has to tell you ‘no’. I came from a war too – the people I’m fighting in my story razed half of the continent and killed millions! You think I don’t understand what’s happening here because I’m a magical knight? Just what do you think a magical knight does, other than fighting wars?”

    Atria sipped her drink. “I’m sorry.”

    Meliana scowled. “You’d better be.”

    Atria took a deep breath. “But the magnitude of my mistake...”

    “You think I haven’t done worse?” Meliana asked. “The first full skirmish we had was a mech fight. Our side lost – the techs here still haven’t figured out how to re-attach the arm to my mech and get it working again. What we didn’t know was that they were still evacuating three of the buildings when the fight started. Twenty people ended up in the hospital, and two died. You helped one person go to what was supposed to be the start of a cease-fire. And one of these days you should ask Lee why she sometimes walks with a slight limp – that was because of one of my mistakes too.

    “I know that you think you would have done a better job if you had been the one to arrive first,” Meliana declared. “Don’t look surprised – I may not be a ‘human lie detector’, but I’m not blind either. The damnable thing is that you’re probably right! They’d probably take you seriously – your creator served in the JSDF and gave you a uniform that looks like it could be from this world! Do you really believe the JSDF thinks that a magical knight and a mage know anything about how to wage a war on this world? Do you think that they took one look at my...costume...and saw the miniskirt and long stockings I arrived in and thought that I was a serious candidate for running a military operation? You have any idea of what it’s like to have your judgement called into question over and over again by people who have never fired a shot in anger? That’s right – the JSDF has never fought a war! And the only reason they let me do what I do here is because all of our kind involved in this war can knock bullets out of the air. So, better to let us pummel each other than to risk the lives of some actual soldiers.”

    “They don’t take me seriously either,” Atria pointed out.

    “True,” Meliana said. “But only because you resigned your commission before coming here. If you had still been in active service, they would have attached you as a foreign officer, just as they did me. They probably would have put you in charge too. And I probably would have let them. That information you brought us was the first time in weeks that it felt like we might have even a chance of making progress, and I’m sick of not being taken seriously by the people I’m trying to save.”

    Atria sighed. “Fine, I get it, I’m valuable. I won’t resign. But if you really want to clear the air, tell me the truth about why you hate me. I know when somebody is complementing me through gritted teeth.”

    Meliana glared at her. “You want the truth?”

    “It’s what you came here to get out, isn’t it?”

    “Fine,” Meliana spat. “If we survive this, you get to go home!”

    Atria blinked. “What?”

    “You heard me,” Meliana said. “You came here at the end of your story, having just won your war and full of confidence. But the rest of us came from the middle of ours. The information streams have already replaced us, and the physicists advising us are very clear on what happens if we go back – we’ll be erased by the next information stream update to remove the duplication. If we win, you get to go home to your fiancé and the people you love...but the rest of us don’t. Every time you told us about your fiancé and your plans for after the war, the only thing I could think about is that I will never hold mine again! You get to keep your future! Lee tells me that I should take comfort in having gained siblings and my creator and his wife as parents since I got here, but that doesn’t make what I lost hurt any less...and you’re just a walking reminder of it.” She wiped away a tear. “And now I’m crying. How knightly of me.”

    Atria stared at her drink. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t considered that.”

    Meliana drank down the rest of hers. “Apology accepted. Look, we’re here to save this world, and every single story world connected to it, including our own. It’s a war. We’re going to make mistakes. People we want to protect are going to get hurt. That’s what wars are like. Doing your job is your problem – making them take us seriously and figuring out some way to be happy for you once we’ve succeeded is mine.” She sighed. “They don’t even really believe that the story worlds can be collided with this one at all. And why would they? It’s not like we can measure or prove it.”

    Atria finished off her own drink, and then waited as Meliana refilled the glasses. “Well, we can’t take on Balthazar head-on,” she said. “The higher ups won’t let us take covert action against him. And now we know he isn’t going to talk to us. So what’s left?”

    “We need to figure out how he’s colliding the story worlds,” Meliana said. “Figure it out and stop it. That’s all that’s left.”

    Atria nodded and sipped her drink. “I’ll start debriefing Natsuki Toshiro tomorrow morning. She spent at least two full days in Balthazar’s base, and she’s observant, just like I am. She’ll remember every word he said and everything she saw. If he let something slip about how he’s doing this, I’ll find it.”

NEXT: “Aquila”