Chapter 59 – My Profound Gratitude.

"Grave Arc - !!"

Letaria's soul-deep cry sent what felt like a shockwave through the vacuum.

The supreme energy blade released from Arden's right arm blazed first in a dazzling pure white - then shifted, rushing through colors as the torrent of photons poured out: a raging deep crimson, then a boundless, freezing blue that looked capable of glaciating space itself. It was exactly what it was - light of judgment, spun from one girl's fury, rewriting the laws of the world.

As the guillotine blade drove deeper and deeper into the malevolent colossus Restful's red-black frame, Restful's armor gave way under the extreme energy pressure and exploded apart in pieces. The fragments of heavy plating became high-velocity rounds and rained down on Arden without mercy. A terrible chorus of metal struck the cockpit, carving deep wounds and damage into the deep-violet armor.

But Letaria never once loosened the grip of her arms as they pushed through the limit.

"Aaaaaaaahhhhh - !!"

What came out of her could only be called a war cry. As though answering it, Arden's generator surpassed its ceiling and amplified the light further still. The blue photon blade found Restful's core completely - and the absolute vortex of energy it produced shattered and disassembled the red-black colossus's entire mass, down to the atomic level.

In the middle of the collapse, from beyond the sea of light, the clear androgynous voice flowed into Letaria's mind one final time - carrying something that, in its way, sounded almost like satisfaction.

"-- Lunect Protocol, final sequence. ...With the complete realization of resonance unit 'Arden', all stages of this project are fulfilled. ...All systems will now conclude --"

"-- My profound gratitude. ...To my dear subject, 'Letaria' --"

The moment that cursed voice was swallowed entirely by the explosion of light, the red-black colossus that had held such overwhelming mass ceased to exist - scattered to luminous dust and lost in the abyss of space, completely and without remainder.

...What remained was a silence so complete it was almost painful.

Every storm of light had stopped. The permanent dark of space enclosed the battlefield quietly.

Letaria, reining in her breathing through rapid and ragged breaths, reached through the rapidly cooling sensation of her own magic and strained to feel for a single presence.

"...Grain - !"

She searched for Shuel - the machine that had thrown itself in front of her, taken the direct hit meant for her, and been reduced to something barely recognizable as a machine at all. Was Grain still alive?

"-- You're there!"

The final explosion of Restful's detonation had sent Shuel's wreckage hurtling far from the battlefield. But Letaria's sharpened senses had caught it - a scorched cockpit block, drifting with attitude control fully lost, beside a slowly tumbling mass of rock.

"...Well. Seems I managed to fail to die after all..."

From the shared channel, a voice through heavy noise interference. Grain. It carried exhaustion and pain that couldn't quite be hidden - but it was a strong voice.

"Safe. Good. You're quite a man."

The exchange observed, Ethan's Ribast - which had maintained its perimeter watch throughout - closed rapidly and gathered Shuel's cockpit block into its solid arms with careful deliberation.

"In all my long years with the corps, I don't think I've been this reckless all that often... I'm lucky to be breathing. ...Though the young lady over there seems to have come out of it looking rather the worse for wear as well."

Ethan turned Ribast's main camera toward Arden and put the full picture on his display.

"Are you aware, Miss Letaria? Your Arden is missing its right arm - cleanly, from the shoulder."

"-- Pardon?"

Only when he said it did Letaria actually look - status monitor, then external camera feed, back and forth.

Exactly as Ethan had said. Arden's right arm - the one that had produced that maximum output - was gone from the shoulder joint, weapon included, with perfect completeness. Beyond that, painful sparks were coming from the left leg's drive joint, and the armor there had been torn open badly.

Arden, which had never once taken a clean hit from an enemy throughout everything up to now, had finally, here at the end, taken damage that was genuinely grievous to look at.

The missing right arm was almost certainly the cost of Grave Arc's enormous recoil, combined with the energy of Restful's collapse being more than the frame could withstand. As for the serious damage to the left leg - she genuinely had no idea when she had taken it. The moment in that extreme combat when it had happened was a complete blank. That was how far her mind had been pushed and sharpened past its limit.

"Oh... oh my...? My most magnificently beautiful Arden, looking so terribly battered..."

Letaria murmured it to herself in a daze - and yet there was something strangely clean about the feeling underneath. A sense of having seen it through.

Seeing her expression, Grain's voice came from the recovered cockpit block with something that sounded almost like exasperation.

"...You're looking remarkably untroubled, Ethan, considering."

Compared to Shuel and Arden, both barely holding together, Ethan's Ribast was coated in black scorch marks from missile interceptions - but showed no critical frame distortion or missing parts anywhere. The corps' strongest veteran was not that title in name only.

"I was just lucky. Honestly - seeing that monster's firepower up close? I genuinely didn't think I was coming back. The cold sweat hasn't stopped yet."

"And - you were the only one who could land the decisive blow on it. Miss Letaria. You alone."

Ethan said it, and without loosening his arms, turned Ribast's heading toward Seldia.

"In any case - the work is done. ...Shall we all go home?"

Grain's quiet signal. Letaria and Ethan both gave a deep nod.

Arden fired its remaining thruster - one leg's worth - with careful control, balancing itself as it went, keeping pace alongside Ribast just a step behind.

As the heat of the combat faded completely and the clarity of cold thought returned, a face surfaced in Letaria's mind - a woman who was almost certainly waiting in Seldia's hangar for them to come home.

"...That said, Grain. After causing a scene of this magnitude - and losing Shuel on top of it."

Inside her cockpit, Letaria's brow furrowed in something between concern and amusement, and she opened her mouth.

"Milea is going to be absolutely furious with you, is she not?"

At those words, from inside the cockpit block cradled in Ethan's arms, Grain could do nothing but resign himself - and shrug.

In the darkness of space ahead, the faint lights of the vigilante corps' Rude frames and the city of Seldia began to glimmer, as though reaching out to welcome the three machines home.