(29)

It was a silver lining that the train attack had happened on a Friday night, as the brunette had spent the entire weekend all but bedridden with what she had, with Sarasa's help, convinced her parents was a bout of flu.

The first day had been the worst. Every inch of her body burned and seized as if she'd pulled every muscle, torn every tendon and twisted every joint throughout her body while simultaneously suffering lactic burn and having survived the electric chair. Every half-breath was agony, every twitch was torture.

She barely slept Saturday night, but exhaustion finally won out over pain and she drifted in and out of consciousness over the course of Sunday.

Honestly, she still felt miserable, sore and wrung out come Monday morning, but she was able to move, and she was sick of her bed. A hot shower almost did more for her than the whole weekend of recovery.

Her family had been ecstatic to see her up and around, but urged caution. Saki flatly refused to let her go to school if she was running a fever.

... Of course, the thermometer came back plenty normal, since it hadn't really been an infection she had been fighting.

On the upside, when Marcus asked how she was feeling, she could honestly answer that she felt like she'd played chicken with an oncoming train.

Reluctantly, her family let her leave, but reminded her repeatedly that if she felt weak or feverish, she should go to the nurse's office immediately. She sincerely promised to do so each time.

When Haru had laughed at the face mask they'd made her wear out of the house and threatened to doodle all over it, she left it in a passing trash can. Apparently, the deadpan manner in which she did so only amused the blonde all the more.

She made her way through the day in something of a stupor, honestly. The content of the classes wasn't difficult since she already knew the material, but if she hadn't, she doubted she would have absorbed any of it.

Honestly, she wanted to go home, curl her body around a bowl of hot soup and turn in early, but that meant returning to that bed hours before she actually had to do so.

Besides, Sarasa had called another meeting.

The call had come with a specific extra note that she could skip it if she wasn't up to it, and that just made her all the more determined to show up, anyway.

"Miss Kelly," Sarasa greeted her as she opened the club room door. She gave a warm smile, though the others, with the sole exception of Haru, looked surprised to see her. "You made it! How are you feeling?"

The brunette took a moment to look around the room. It really did look like just another club room, it was uncanny. "Well, you were all there, so I'll spare you the fifth rendition of using what actually happened as a metaphor, and just say that whatever I did, I don't recommend it. It sucks."

She flopped into an open chair more than she sat, but glanced toward Natsumi. "How about you? How's the hand?"

The redhead raised the appendage before her and flexed it, as if confirming its state. Haru had told her that Flame Witch had nearly incinerated her own hand and pretty much shattered every bone in the limb all the way up to and including the shoulder blade.

There wasn't a mark on her.

"Mine were only physical injuries," she replied, "so I was fine by morning."

"The problem with magical healing," Sada put in like the teacher she posed as, "is that it doesn't really work as well when the damage is to the paths it uses. The greatest ambulance crew in the world can't get to a patient when the road is out."

The redhead nodded at the addition, but then turned back toward the brunette. "Still, like you, I wouldn't recommend it. Doing that much damage to yourself even through a transformation is ..." She paused, considering how to describe it. "Well, how did you put it? It sucks. Haru had to transform just to heal me enough so I wasn't spilling my arm all over the car."

"I offered," Reina reminded her, but Natsumi vehemently shook her head.

"No, thanks. No offense, but your healing feels like a thousand worms crawling in and squirming about to hold everything together."

Haru and Ran both shivered at the description, no doubt having been on the receiving end at some point, as well.

The brunette decided to change the topic. "Well, you're fully recovered and I'm on the mend. I'd say I'm firmly into the, Take a hot bath and fall asleep in the tub, stage of my recovery. Not too shabby for something that was supposed to kill me."

"Now you're just being overdramatic," Natsumi immediately jumped to scold her. "Mana burnout sucks, sure, and this was way worse than your first experience with it, but it's not really possible for it to be fatal."

"I wasn't talking about the burnout," she corrected the redhead, then looked across the table directly at Reina. "I was talking about precognition."

A shadow passed over the council president's face at that and she looked away.

"Ah," the brunette noted as more eyes around the room joined her own, "so you haven't told any of them."

Little surprise Natsumi again swooped in. "She didn't have to! Did you forget we were right there?! Except for Haru, we all heard her say that the train was going to kill Thunder Witch! And did you really want to torture her with might-have-beens?!"

"That's a very big might-have-been for a magical prophesy."

Reina forced herself to turn back to the table and meet the brunette's eyes. "We have already discussed how disruptive you are to my premonitions, Kelly. You aren't bringing up anything new."

"Oh," the brunette observed, "so that's the excuse you're using for not telling them why it was going to kill me? Why the expectation was that Thunder Witch was going to stare down an oncoming train with no assistance whatsoever, despite that it would be a close enough thing that even a single extra Witch could have changed the outcome? You aren't going to tell them why no one was supposed to help?"

"For the same reason you did it on your own this time," Natsumi nearly raged again. "We were helping the passengers!"

The brunette took a moment to look toward Sarasa, but the teacher was staying out of it, just watching the whole thing from the sidelines as if amused at what was playing out.

Instead, she addressed the redhead. "Sacred Witch and Shield Witch were helping the passengers, Red. The only reason Flame Witch was over there was because we had a macguffin that let you sever cars from the train. Without that, you would have been more use helping slow the engine."

"So?"

"So Thunder Witch doesn't have an evangelium sword," she pointed out.

Ran narrowed her eyes at the brunette like she was trying to puzzle out an equation, but her voice was still so quiet when she spoke. "What are you saying should have happened?"

She glanced to Reina, but their leader still didn't seem to want to speak. "Haru was removed from the entire situation," she explained in the raven-haired girl's stead, "so we can assume that everything she experienced went more or less unaltered. She would be on the runaway train at the time of the attack just as Tamashini's first premonition described."

Then she paused, giving Reina one more chance to step in. The older girl didn't take it. "Then Thunder Witch would try to stop the train with brute force while Sacred Witch rescued as many civilians as possible in case she failed."

Ran and Natsumi both looked at each other while Haru swiveled between them both, all three girls wearing expressions of utter confusion.

The redhead even looked to Reina for confirmation, but when, again, the older girl was averting her eyes, she wheeled again back to the brunette. "Wait, then what was I supposed to be doing?"

The brunette sighed. There it was, and Reina was still keeping her mouth shut. Fine, she'd drag the truth out into the open kicking and screaming.

"Collecting worms, I'd imagine."

...

She'd always heard the expression about being able to hear a pin drop, but she'd never witnessed such an absolute definition of such a moment.

Natsumi didn't shout or scream. She didn't swear or threaten. One moment, she was staring uncomprehendingly, then the next, her chair went rebounding off of the wall behind her as she exploded out of it, swinging a heavy haymaker at the brunette.

With an expression that reflected just how little she wanted to be bothered with something like that right now, the brunette leaned back in her chair sharp enough to send it tipping backwards as her feet came up and clamped around the redhead's torso. She locked her arms around the one being swung and twisted her core to bring them both to the ground.

"GET OFF ME, KELLY!!!" Now Homura was raging. "YOU DON'T GET TO DECLARE ME DEAD!!! GET OFF!!!"

"Both of you stop this immediately."

Even though neither of them could see Tamashini from their angle, her words landed on them like a guillotine, and their struggling ceased as if they were puppets with their strings cut.

"Get back in your chairs. This is still a school. I won't have you two brawling in the middle of the room like a couple of playground brats."

Each of them fetched their chairs and returned to them in silence, their heads down as if penitent. In the wake of doing so, the brunette wondered if she could have done anything else but what she had been told, but she decided she just didn't have the energy to be bothered even trying right now. After all, Reina wasn't an enemy.

And, in all honesty, she was right.

... Even if Red started it.

She glanced over to the aforementioned girl and saw her grinding her teeth. She was probably thinking mostly along the same lines. Probably not about whether or not she could do something else, though, since she'd only brought up the idea of Command to Reina in private.

With the room settled down, Haru finally asked Tamashini directly. "Reina, is Riko right? Was that really your premonition?"

Finally, the president forced her head back in the direction of her teammates. "... Yes. She's more or less put it together correctly."

Ran looked down at her homework, tapping her pencil against it. "... Me, too, then," she noted quietly. "That's why I wasn't mentioned, either."

Again, Reina's head dropped. "... I'm sorry."

"Stop that."

The raven-haired girl's eyes widened at the sharp tone the brunette took as she pushed back out of her chair and to her feet. She looked up at her, and momentarily started to argue. "Kelly, I told you to sit down."

The urge came to her knees to fold, but she slapped her hands against the table. "And I did! Now I'm telling you to stop this pity party." She noticed the girl's eyes widen again, but she didn't care if she shocked her. "They're not dead! Neither of them are! And neither am I! Stop treating yourself like the Grim Fucking Reaper just because we have the great news that we broke out of the bad end! That's a GOOD thing! In fact, I demand we celebrate!"

Haru gave a nervous smile. "Um ... Riko ... most people don't demand to celebrate like it's a declaration of war ..."

Finally, Miss Sada saw reason to insert herself back into the meeting. "While I admire Miss Kelly's ... intensity, I can't say I disagree with her sentiment. Knowing that Precognition believes three of you girls should be dead, and yet to have all of you here before me, alive and healthy, my heart can only overflow with elation."

She stepped forward and put a hand on Reina's shoulder. "However, we should probably wait to schedule that party. The reason for today's meeting, after all, is because Precognition has had yet more to say. Isn't that right, Miss Tamashini?"

Another vision so soon? No, the brunette reflected. That actually made sense. If they really were supposed to be down to just two Witches at this point, there's no reason that events wouldn't move quickly. The demons would taste victory on their tongues and rush for the finish line.

... But then, with all five Witches still present, if events were still going to move so quickly, did that mean that Precognition was running off of old information, or was something else driving the demons on a timer the Witches couldn't see?

Reina gathered herself for a moment, but then she stood tall before them, and the air of their leader was back around her like a mantle once more.

"It's true, I've had another vision," she confirmed. "It's vague, but sometime in the coming week, Dakunaito will seek me out. I believe he intends to eliminate me directly."

"You believe?" the brunette asked. "That doesn't sound like it's part of the vision."

"It's not," Reina agreed. "All the vision showed me of the encounter was meeting him, and then flashes of intense exchanges of dark magic, such as I've never seen from him before."

"Yeah, he doesn't really do magic," Haru added. "I mean, we all know he can, like the time he threw me across the street with it, but he doesn't like using it in a real fight if he doesn't have to."

Natsumi was mulling the idea over. "Still, the whole thing doesn't sound like him. An assassination hit isn't his style. He's more of the full frontal type."

But the brunette had a different take. "If there aren't any other Witches left, then it's not an assassination. It's a final battle. You could even call it a sign of respect, intending to send his last opponent off with nothing held back between them."

"You're right," the redhead nodded. "That sounds very like him."

Haru puffed her cheeks out in a huff, though. "That's not funny, Riko! I'm not one of the ones that are supposed to be dead! I wouldn't let Reina go down fighting alone like that!"

The brunette gave an apologetic smile. "Sorry, Haru, I didn't mean it like that. Actually, that's probably the reason for the vague timing."

The whole room was looking at her curiously again, so she explained. "The last time that Reina's precognition was so vague was when Hisoka was cursed, but the reason why it was vague was that it depended entirely on when Reina was supposed to be alone. Anything that changed that changed when Cho would make her appearance."

"Except she wasn't alone," Natsumi pointed out. "You and the entire fencing club were there."

"That's right," she nodded back, "but that was strictly because I was there. If Nariko were there, she wouldn't have been anywhere near the fencing club, and Reina would have been cleaning up after a completely normal club session alone. The conditions of the premonition triggered based on what would have been. Anything I alter isn't considered in the calculations. That's why we're able to change them."

Haru pumped her fist exuberantly up into the air. "Sword Witch's passive power is Sequence Breaking!"

She gave her a flat stare that just made the blonde giggle. "We are not making that a thing, and why are you the one acting so proud of it?"

"Because I got to name it," her friend replied cheekily, then stuck her tongue out at her. "Bleh."

Natsumi, on the other hand, was flat-out glaring at the brunette. "That's a very Kelly idea, but I don't like the implication that we're all running loops in a predetermined program just waiting for you to disrupt it."

But she met the redhead's gaze without hesitation. "Isn't that exactly what Precognition is? Predestiny? Predetermination? I admittedly haven't had much opportunity to see it work as intended, but it's my understanding our team's go-to strategy is to imitate it as much as possible to find demon attacks and stop them. Even if it means we die."

Wakumi, of all people, spoke up. "We do follow it very closely, as it is normally our only forewarning of attacks. It is usually a positive, but until your arrival, I don't recall a time it has ever turned out wrong. What Precognition foresees always comes to pass."

The gunmetal girl looked speculatively toward the brunette. "But now that I've had time to think about it, isn't it odd that the only death it directly predicted was that of Thunder Witch? The same premonition knew of our deaths, but strictly in the past tense. That is why Sacred Witch spoke to you the way she did. She looked at us as if seeing ghosts because, in that moment, she knew that we had already died."

The brunette couldn't resist a tired grin. "Imagine that, Red's a ghost afraid of ghosts."

Natsumi was probably about to start swinging again, but Miss Sada moved to put a hand on her shoulder next while she focused her attention on the speaker.

"Miss Kelly, I understand that you are tired, but please stop provoking Miss Homura."

She raised a hand in surrender. "Sorry, sorry, you're right. I'm sorry, Nat, that was out of line."

Natsumi was surprisingly girly when she got petulant, turning away with her arms crossed. "... not afraid of ghosts," she muttered.

The brunette let the matter drop and turned back to Ran. "To answer your question, I suspect that's due to the skill's limitation."

It was Reina who stared blankly now. "Precognition's ... limitation?"

She raised a finger toward her upperclassman. "Have you ever, in all of your life, foreseen an event where you wouldn't be present for it?"

The raven-haired girl looked down toward the table, pinching her chin as she considered it. "... No, I don't think I have. It's hard to state with absolute certainty, but ..." She shook her head. "No. No, I'm certain. There has never been such an occasion.

Haru seemed bewildered trying to keep up. "What does that mean for it, though?"

"It means she never personally witnessed the deaths of Shield Witch and Flame Witch," the brunette provided. "That's the limitation of Precognition. It can only show her events that she has personally witnessed."

She paused, wrinkled her nose in consideration of what she just said, then amended it. "Well, what she personally witnessed in the vision. What she is going to personally witness. Timey-wimey. Shut up."

Her frustration over linguistic precision pulled another giggle from the blonde, but Ran still looked like she was running numbers and Tamashini was chewing on her thumb.

"So that's why we died off-screen," the quiet girl noted. "They weren't major events the main character directly experienced."

"Damn it, Ran," Natsumi put in, but unlike her angry shouts at the brunette, she sounded more exasperated with her friend. "Stop talking about us like we're NPCs!"

"I'm concerned by this weakness," Reina admitted. "Since Sword Witch's arrival, my Precognition has already been so unreliable, and now to find out that there are whole things it could fail to warn us about just because I'm not there? Isn't that too much?"

The brunette tried to put on a sympathetic face. After all, she knew better than most any other Witch what it was like to feel like dead weight. "Any warning is better than none. We'll just have to keep our eyes open like we've always done. It's not like your premonitions have ever been the only thing we've relied on, right?"

The older girl sighed, closing her eyes. "I appreciate your intentions, Kelly, but how would you feel if you suddenly found yourself oblivious to all of the little things happening around you? And then to find out that the knife that you should have seen only didn't kill everyone around you by sheer happenstance of the actions of another who shouldn't have been there in the first place."

"Like I was suddenly walking on a tight rope without a harness where I'd thought there'd be solid ground," she answered immediately, an analogy that made the president blink. "But ultimately, it doesn't matter. We're already on the tight rope, and right now there's a wannabe samurai flying in on the trapeze that we need to concentrate on first."

Haru gave her friend a pleading stare. "Please, Riko, you're taking the circus metaphor too far ..."

Reina gave a deeper sigh, though, and nodded. "I take your meaning. All I know is that he will come to me while I'm walking home, as I'm coming up on a bridge. There was nothing to indicate an exact day or time."

Natsumi had already gotten to the point she was snacking, and spoke around a pocky stick. "But if it's really because we're dead, since we're not, are we even sure it's actually going to happen?"

"Every time Reina has a premonition," the brunette replied, "even if it's already been altered, the major event still happens anyway. Someone still came into her office carrying papers at exactly the same time. Cho still showed up when she would have. I still went nose to nose with the train. We were only able to change those events slightly, or alter their context."

She poked the table for emphasis. "The only variation now may be based on what happens to Haru, but even if we keep her safe, sooner or later, all other conditions will line up and the event will occur, anyway. Dakunaito may have slightly altered motives for why he picked that time or place, like how Cho was inspired by her admiration for Reina, but we have absolutely zero grounds to assume it won't happen."

She turned to Reina. "I'm going to stick to Haru like glue all week. To and from school, we're going to be joined at the hip. Anything that tries to get to her is going to be getting a blade in its belly. In the meantime, Miss President, I recommend you find an alternate route home that doesn't involve a bridge. That'll at least put this off as long as possible."

Haru looked to her friend with worry in her eyes. "I won't say no to the company, but ... is it really so inevitable?"

She returned her gaze with a deathly serious one of her own. "To a point, yes. Obviously, we can change elements of it, outcomes from it, but insofar as Reina's visions show an instigating event? I've got a strong hunch those are set in stone."

* * *

Her failure was complete. They'd looked up to her as their leader, and what had it gotten them? All of them were gone, and now she was alone. Again. Just like at the beginning.

At least then, things had been hopeful. She only had herself to worry about because there wasn't anyone else. Well, there was Miss Sada, but she was always going to be there. That was some small comfort, at least, for what it was worth. The demons couldn't take the fifth-dimensional being away from her.

But they could take her away from Sarasa, and she knew the woman blamed herself for their deaths as much as she blamed herself.

Ultimately, though, that was just the nature of war, as cruel as it was to force that reality on teenagers. Maybe she could hold out until reinforcements were found again. Keep fighting for another year, and another. Find a way through all of the attacks that would come her way now.

But each failure was another chain bolted into her soul. How many dead could she leave behind before their ghosts dragged her down with them? How much sooner before then would she be unable to lead anyone?

Her feet stopped as she felt the seal go up, but she was neither frightened nor surprised when the dark warrior stepped out of nothingness to appear between her and the bridge.

...

The blaring of a car horn startled Reina out of her recollection. There was no demon in front of her, no barrier, and no bridge. She stood on the sidewalk ahead of an intersection.

The bridge in the vision, like most of the surroundings, had been indistinct, but merely turning her head allowed her to see the one she usually crossed on her route home from school. It passed over a river that turned, following the curvature of the hills, before it reached the road she was currently on.

For the last four days, she'd followed Kelly's advice. This path added six more blocks to her route home due to the detour, but it had no bridges. She didn't mind the extra walk, but she had honestly expected something to happen today, some sudden construction or road work that would force her to detour to a route with a bridge.

That hadn't happened. Sure, Reina wasn't home yet, but she was already past any route that could have detoured to a bridge. This intersection was the last one, and was why she'd gotten lost in the memory of her Precognition. She had come up on it expecting this last hurdle to be where something inevitably happened.

It was Friday, after all, the last opportunity for anything to happen. It had to happen now.

But nothing had happened to Chiaki, either. Every day that week, Kelly had met the girl at her home instead of the usual reverse, and every day, she walked her back there. She sent Reina regular updates, too. Every morning, like clockwork, she received a text message that they were leaving Haru's house, then another when they'd arrived uneventfully at school.

That process repeated in reverse every evening, and she'd already received the notice that Kelly had successfully dropped Chiaki off and was on her own way home.

Reina forced herself to take a deep breath and exhale it slowly. They were officially off the edge of the map now. All they could do now was keep moving forward and hope there weren't actually dragons waiting in the fog beyond.

She took five steps toward the crosswalk before her phone rang, but the call dropped before she could even get it out of her purse.

Her feet froze, rooted in place, when she read the display.

MISSED CALL - Kelly, Nariko