Fifth Angel

A few mornings later, Mia woke up to Aimee sitting on their bed and smiled.

"Ramiel." said Aimee, relevantly. (Yuruko had suggested her codeword.)

Mia nodded and let Aimee lay down with her. "What time is it?"

"Still got two hours." said Aimee, kissing her cheek. "They said that China doesn't let them use the wall Revenant, though. Gonna have to take a private flight."

They cuddled for a while, and Aimee asked if she was feeling hungry. Mia nodded and Aimee left to check everyone's codewords, and they went through Timepact's daily preparations once she came back. Saya checked every on-base employee's health, and as Matoi's host flu was flaring up again, ordered her distanced from the others. Aimee assigned her old squadron & Gamage & Charlotte groups for their next contracts, and Mia sat with Marisa while they ate breakfast from Luna.

After they finished, Aimee & Mia stepped out to the hall leading to Timepact's dock.

"Had Charlotte read Ryumi's profile." muttered Aimee as they walked. "Said there wasn't much besides a few tricks she used to do. Forming bubbles with her ice, some weak wind with hot and cold air, stuff like that."

Mia nodded. They had stopped a few lines in to her profile, and she would wait to read every incident herself, picking over them and figuring which were justifiable & not. Hopefully, they all were.

The two stepped out to Timepact's dock -

- and a familiar serpent rising out of the water.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" grunted Mia, palms readied like a gun.

Akira laughed as Mizuchi deposited him thirty feet away. "Daigo's likely shown, and you'll be dealing with him soon. I'll be acting as your and your medics' transportation."

"Been using someone from the government for months." said Aimee. "Works just fine."

"They rely on walls - something that won't be left standing after Absolute Hot. I saw Ryumi's attempt before I transported her back with FTL. With Mizuchi, Mia will form a cross-shaped puddle of water, just as Ryumi did with Nikolai."

Mia felt resentful for being forced to rely on him at all, but she knew he wouldn't leave unless she put another scar on him, and even then. "Fine." she said, hoping he would stay longer than necessary after. "What other Revenants did Ryumi have helping her?"

"The only two still alive are Mizuchi and Meteorology - and from what I've seen, Meteorology has a fuck-up for a host. Rita's spirit lives on."

"Do you stalk every student?" said Mia.

"Great writing requires great observation. When I was a teenager, I would sit in restaurants for hours, staring at people and wondering what their life was like. A woman eating alone became someone going through a divorce after a miscarriage, due to an abusive husband she cuckolded. It was far more interesting than whatever their actual life was, but art has a way of -"

" - I don't care."

" - illuminating reality."

Aimee glanced at Mia, who nodded.

"…fine." she said. "If you lay a single finger on anyone -"

"Do you think I'm a serial killer who simply kills randomly and for pleasure? I do only what you do, Mia, only at a far broader scale: I only rid the world of its most useless and superfluous elements. I don't condone the removal of valuable hosts." He yawned.

"…speaking of. Why did the Eastern League want to kill you and Magnus?"

"That's the first I've heard of it. … It wouldn't surprise me. They were already planning to murder Ryumi - something Magnus clearly wouldn't have stood for - and they knew I wouldn't stand for them murdering Magnus. I looked to him as a sort of incarnation of all the traits I try to find when observing whether a target is worthy; his only flaw was that he stifled his own development with his relationship to Ryumi. Without it, one wonders how much further his conduits might have gone. What a man wants he should take."

"Magnus's Revenant was non-lethal, though. Scourge, and you mentioned he took FTL from you. How did he murder the Eastern League by himself?"

"What are you trying to divulge from me here?"

"Did he mind control them? I don't see how Scourge could have won against the other eighteen Revenants." Mia sighed. "The government asked me about this. They thought he had outside help."

Akira laughed. "Crash's host allowed Magnus to see Ryumi before she died, and Magnus killed him before taking Worldwide. I'll never understand why people prefer a complex explanation over simplicity. The rest were dead in one afternoon."

"And Ryumi destroyed Moscow attempting to achieve Absolute Hot."

"Correct. What a difficult thing to grasp. An entire country run by a class just as clueless as the people it claims to govern."

++++++

China's representative, who likely hadn't seen a corpse in years, wore his badge more prominently than most Ningsing students. There was a message there; Mia had already reasoned it out.

"And only your agency knows about this?" he said, two sitting across in his office.

"And the government." said Aimee. "Obviously."

"Of course. We've already devised a preliminary plan - when he shows, we'll evacuate the area and tell them we're concerned over a possible criminal in the area. You would be surprised how much trust the public has in us to keep them informed. Precisely because we don't tolerate conspiracy theorists like your country does."

"I'm not trying to talk politics."

He shrugged. To him, there was no use to equality of speech for people with unequal knowledge. He considered Ningsing Academy's role in quelling unrest a necessary duty in a country with over a billion citizens.

"He nuked Los Angeles last time. Any plan for that?" said Aimee.

"It's a major concern of our's, but we doubt he'll attack first unless provoked. Evacuation is the best option, and we have measures in place for it - it's standard procedure in China. Japan has a similar system."

Mia frowned. She still hadn't come up with a counter against nuclear weapons. "And Absolute Hot will destroy whatever city we're fighting in."

"Precisely why we won't be using your Revenant."

"Excuse me?" said Aimee first.

"We already have a professional with a fire Revenant - there's no need for a young woman to be involved in this. He has over thirty years of experience - even with Queen of Scarabs' Revenant, Ms. Swarm only has four, yes? There's no need for her to risk herself -"

" - I can fucking handle it." said Mia.

"With no disrespect meant, this is not one of your local criminals that you've dealt with for the past four years. As your government puts it - this is an existential threat. Existential threats need to be dealt with by professionals who have a long experience of dealing with threats to national security."

"If he's as shitty as the people you sent to assassinate me, he's not going to have a chance." said Aimee.

"Who?"

"The fucking Ningsing presidents you sent." said Mia.

"Starting to wonder if I should've reported it." said Aimee.

He shrugged. "You overlooked on our behalf - we overlooked on your behalf. Politics is seeing what you can get away with while serving your own interests. We overlook the ridiculous propaganda that comes out of your country because our economies depend on each other, and would prefer that to continue. In this case, I hope you'll overlook my comments, but allow us to deal with Daigo first."

"And when you fail?" said Mia.

"Then you can say 'I told you so' to my golden corpse."

++++++

"We flew halfway across the world to eat the same food." muttered Mia, relevantly, working on her burger at a local chain restaurant.

"Yep." Aimee winced. "There's, uh… lemme put it this way. There's a reason there was a line around the corner for this."

"It's that good?"

"No. Chain restaurants are usually better for food safety."

"…hopefully." muttered Mia, scarab burrowing in to her meal.

"Guess we'll find out in a few hours." chimed Aimee as she started eating. "Can just get delivery until they find him, anyway."

"They're not going to succeed." muttered Mia. "Ryumi mentioned there weren't any other professionals with fire Revenants."

"To be honest, yeah." muttered Aimee. "I mean, she didn't know any of China's heroes, I'm guessing, since they're so locked off from the rest of the world. But I know there isn't a stronger host in the world than my Schultzy."

Mia smiled and pat her on the head. "Good girl. I'll reward you later for that."

Aimee blushed a little. "…okay, completely unrelated thing I was gonna ask: you didn't tell your parents about Daigo, right?"

"…er, no. They worry enough about me. I will tell them... eventually, of course, but..."

"Nothing before, yeah." nodded Aimee. "I just didn't know if I'd need to make something up about that new golden eye of your's."

Mia laughed, but noticed Aimee pause for some seconds. As long as she had known Aimee, her teenage trauma had given her a persistent superstition of jinxing the good out of her life. She sometimes became withdrawn when the topic of Mia's parents came up, for she was still inhabited by some envy for her familial situation.

She would vent, of course, but never maliciously towards Mia. Even when she did talk about her parents, she would often end it by uttering: "But I mean, there's a bunch of other lesbians who have parents like that, and they don't get out of it by going to Urasaria. I just feel bad sometimes since I know I still had it easy."

Mia loved Aimee, but this was not one of her better traits: she simply could not understand why her wife felt any binding to her rat bastard parents or any of this religious guilt shit she had been raised with. Why temper her guilt with comparison? If Aimee had asked Mia to kill her parents, she would have done so easily: she was no longer moved by that. She disliked the wallflowerism she sometimes observed in female students, particularly first-years.

But she felt she could only understand Aimee's guilt through the remembrance of things past. There had been a student she was friends with as a teenager, who when Mia had first approached her had refused to walk her home; only under a bit of pestering did she relent. She learned that this student had once gotten into an altercation with a civilian for walking their sister home, and that she had felt like shit over being accused of pedophilia by another woman.

She learned that many civilian lesbians did not really consider host women to be women or men. They consider hosts, generally, a third sex with which they have little in common; they have never been socialized for any job but Urasaria or the military, their values tend to be of Urasaria rather than of the nation. The public views them as a mediation of caricature and real differences of host; cliches like 'killing machines' abound, as they believe a poor relationship with a host will end in murder; male or female, most students are left with no one but other hosts.

When confronted by the existence of hosts, it seems many civilians have retreated into their most animalistic of views; sexist men think female students are penis-hating dykes and sexist women think that female students are men. When told about Maria, a group of women had once said that Maria could not really be that abusive to Sylvia, because if a host was being abused they would just murder their abuser. And they weren't joking. Really.

Yet we are usually pulled towards what others believe we are. Not all or most, but a few students have confessed that they do not even really take pleasure in overt violence or aggression, but that they attempt to embody these Urasaria values because they know every civilian thinks of them in terms of it regardless.

Of course, many hosts do enjoy violence and aggression, and Daigo Yashukure was no different. Before his Revenant activated, he was known as a radical environmentalist of interest, and several bombings of hydroelectric dams can trace their origins back to groups he had been involved in. He was an exceptional maker of bombs and at social engineering, and his ability to exploit the naivete of others would prove useful as he aged. He had once managed to bomb a nuclear power plant purely by convincing one of the employees that he lost his keycard, and the likes.

But unlike many eco-terrorists, he never seemed to care for animals. No evidence has ever been found linking him to the more typical targets for these types of groups -- factory farming, laboratories that test on animals or instances of animal cruelty. His alliance with ecological terrorism seemed a thing of mutual methods rather than goal, but what drove him beyond a general misanthropy was unknown to Codex, and subsequently his profile of Daigo that Mia later read. He had never seemed to form connections with anyone, and his parents rarely spoke of his childhood.

In the 1980s, Daigo had moved to Los Angeles. As typical with men of this type, the government had already been tracking him and was aware he was planning some sort of action, but with no contemporary evidence, it was thought better to allow him to go through with it to ensure his conviction. An undercover federal agent had provided his group with several materials, rigged to explode prematurely, and as such, the planned bombings of several coal-powered plants would never occur: all but one of the men were found dead in their leader's living room.

It remains unknown whether Daigo's Revenant had activated then. While unlikely a freshly awakened host could survive an explosion, little was known of Revenants in these years. Another theory was that he had prematurely known about the sabotage and avoided it so as to kill off the rest of his group, and his general paranoia was later confirmed by former collaborators who commented that he had never seemed entirely 'for the cause'.

But paranoia was a boon for Daigo. He came to view all others with distrust & malice, and in 1990, he finished codifying the beliefs that he had built over his first twenty-five years. He believed that technology had regressed the human race into dependent rodents. It had given many weak the chance to live, and bred out the viciousness that had once gotten mankind down from the trees millions of years ago. Force made right to him. There was no guilt to murdering those who had devolved, and those who let themselves be devolved; he took it as an unfortunate fact that some of his Los Angeles victims had survived due to modern medicine.

It was this type of vermin that his former groups had been filled with, as well. They wrote manifestos and theories: they did not act fully against the slow closure of circumstance around them. Their hesitation towards their dedication made Daigo despise them all the more.

His later involvement with terrorist groups was then softer, if no less vicious. Even if he did not think much of the religious cults he often aided, a mutual desire to destabilize the world in some fashion was as good as any, and his Revenant made for easy separation from any nation. Rare as humans he respected were, he knew that some still possessed the bifurcated passion for deviousness & brute violence that locused the first or second resurrected man the world had ever known.