Chapter Text
The Second Eruption was a wakeup call to a lot of people, but particularly to me. Memories had been… blurry up until that point, but once the meteors started raining down things finally snapped into place.
I was only three years old at the time, and still mostly very confused. The evacuation of Budapest, along with the sight of the entire family gearing up for a bizarre sci-fi war kicked me out of it, solidified that feeling that things didn't make sense. That this shouldn't be happening.
No meteors ever rained down in the middle of February, in the year 2000. It was a solid, undeniable truth I could not shake. And at that point, I finally realised: I'd been reincarnated.
To be completely clear, in my 'past' life, I was born in the early 2000s, died somewhere in the 2020s. There were no meteors, no 'Honkai', no Berlin Crater. No Valkyries, magic powers or flying battleships. My old world contained none of these things… unless you turned to anime.
Now, that on its own couldn't quite be called a smoking gun, but consider: the heroic saviours of this world were called 'Valkyries', near entirely female. They fought wearing 'battlesuits' intended to protect them during combat. My cousin Elaine visited once whilst wearing one, and it had an open boob window roughly the size of my head.
Exposed backs, glimpses of thighs, the simple fact no Valkyrie ever seemed to wear a helmet. Since merry pragmatism had evidently flown out the window in the name of a universal fanservice quota, I'd been forced to draw certain conclusions.
To whit:
- This world obviously came from a visual medium of some sort, since I couldn't imagine a writer trying to enumerate the full degree of exposure and mechanical nonsense involved in just a single battlesuit without dying inside. They say a picture can tell a thousand words. Fully describing a battlesuit demanded a small novella, an age restriction and possibly a restraining order.
- Though Valkyries were vast majority female, they were not exclusively female. The occasional male 'Knight' popped up here and there.
- I personally was a daughter of the Schariac family, one of the three 'great houses' of Schicksal, alongside House Kaslana and House Apocalypse (yes, really), with Schicksal itself being the ancient organisation behind Valkyries in general, being a bizarre conglomeration of NATO, the UN and the Catholic Church. And an Idol Agency, because fucking anime.
- The Honkai, our ancient enemy, was some sort of corruptive energy force that manifested 'Beasts' to attack humanity, and now had started anointing 'Herrschers'; humans granted terrible powers and turning to evil. The Herrscher of Reason had been the first; they'd blown up Berlin in the fifties. The Herrscher of Void had been second; they'd been the one calling down the meteors.
Add all that up? Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is one of those midnight-hour battle harem animes no-one willingly admits to watching. Possibly a visual novel; those battlesuits had to be hell on the animation budget. The Honkai had two settings: 'mooks' for main characters to chew through, and the 'Herrschers' to put up an actual challenge and keep everyone busy for an episode or two. Three 'Great Houses' of noble Valkyrie warriors sounds the perfect setup for three different heroine routes, and I'd heard a few months ago they were even opening up a Valkyrie highschool in Schicksal's Far-Eastern branch. You know, the one where Japan is.
There's even a global conspiracy to keep the Honkai a secret from regular people. Tilt your head and squint a bit and it even still looks like the old, regular modern world out there. The perfect environment to pluck some rando schmuck out of highschool, dunk him in exposition because the Plot Scouter gave him over 9000 midichlorians or something and then drop him straight in the middle of a class of superpowered magical girls in flimsy costumes. Oh poor mister audience surrogate, we'll hardly know ye.
Incidentally, they fitted me for a trainee battlesuit at age twelve. It was a completely skin-tight leotard with multiple transparent sections that didn't even have the good grace of a skirt. Yeaaah, that writing on the wall all felt pretty clear cut to me.
Ain't knowing your place in the world fun?
- ❄ - ❄ - ❄ -
April 9th, 2009
As for me personally, well, as I said I was a Schariac, so I had to assume that automatically shoe'd me in for one of the heroine slots later on down the line. The Schariac family was 'graced with a divine blood', which sounded like your usual noble self-justification bullshit to me but reportedly Cecilia Schariac had used it at the end of the Second Eruption, so it presumably had some plot relevance somewhere. As a Great House of Schicksal, we had always provided Valkyries, and always trained our daughters as Valkyries, and naturally I was no exception.
Since I cottoned on to things early enough, I put enough focus into my training and showed enough promise and intelligence from a young age to get called a prodigy. And that, unfortunately, is where I think I may have fucked up.
In the absence of a proper Anime Highschool of our own, the European Schicksal branch just sent its trainees to Schicksal Headquarters directly; a literal flying fortress hovering a good few miles or so up in the air, usually above Switzerland. Given this was also a military base, that meant you had the Valkyrie trainees constantly underfoot with the regular, active-service lot, alongside all their officers, scientists, logistics gophers, white-collar office drones etcetera. This lead to a lot of intermixing between departments and, well…
"It's nothing official yet," Lieutenant Ambria said, ruffling my hair as I exited the simulator, "but you might be joining us sooner than you think, Snow Princess~"
Even winked too. Sauntered off to the cafeteria giggling while I was left in the changing rooms to ponder fate and stare hollowly at walls. The past few days, I'd been bribing one of the station officers into letting me try out the sims for A-Rank Valkyries in the off-hours, just to see how hard my teeth'd get kicked in. Lt. Ambria was someone I'd often pass in the corridors; her Squad, 'Snow Lotus', were one of this room's actual regulars.
And, having obviously looked at my sim results, I had to conclude she'd contracted terminal brainrot.
I took a shuddering breath. Success in the sims didn't mean anything – they were literally video game NPCs I'd been fighting and the panicked 'this is nothing like the simulators?!' moment was a classic trope: why put combat simulators into your story if not to make the real thing look cooler by comparison? Honestly, play enough action RPGs and it was easy enough to fall into the rhythm – dodge, dodge, parry, go for the backstab, dodge, hail to Mother Kos and so on. But one thing I couldn't help but notice: even up to A-Rank, the simulators were all mooks, never Herrschers.
Action RPG tradition was to bodily fling yourself corpse-first at bossfights until you'd died enough deaths to learn their complete movesets, but excuse me if I'm stuck playing on Steel Soul mode over here!
Deployment? Combat Deployment?! I was still fucking twelve were the Operations Group out of their minds?! What did they expect me to do to a real Honkai Beast, gnaw its ankles off?? I'd backtalked no Beings Xes, damnit!
Shit. Fuck. This wasn't something a sane person would do, it had to be my fault; as a 'future heroine', I figured my eventual transfer to that St. Freya Academy place was just a simple, guaranteed fact. A plot beat so inevitable I never actually thought to step on it. Fuck. More fool me.
Taking deep breaths, I put my hand to my heart and focused. Right. Think. What did this mean.
...It meant, most likely, my route to St. Freya would have to be a rocky one. A child soldier at goddamn twelve – yes it's Anime but forgive my assumption that Operations had some braincells between them – right. What character arc did that plot make? It had to intersect with St. Freya somehow so… I grimaced.
Most… most likely, the answer was something along the lines of: 'military prodigy gets injured and/or last survivor'd, some higher-up belatedly remembers childhood is supposed to exist, sends them off while crying stoically into a handkerchief'. I winced. I didn't particularly know Ambria or the rest of the Snow Lotus Squad, but they didn't deserve that. Something would have to go truly, horribly wrong to force the military machine to reassess me and somehow land on highschool as the solution to all our problems. Forgive me if I'd like to keep my character development to a minimal level of body count.
So. How could I avert that narrative?
If the plot's end goal was 'get my arse in St Freya', then any means I could contrive of getting there should be valid… though I was less confident about doing that right now, given twelve. Hmm…
She'd said it was 'nothing official yet'. Meaning, no official orders had come in. I was still only a trainee; I hadn't been commissioned. Meaning, that if I ran away now, it technically wouldn't count as treason. Right?
A-As long as I wound up at St. Freya in the 16-18 age bracket, anything goes, right?!
My head rested against the wall with a solid 'thunk'. Guess this Schariac heroine would have to be the 'rebellious princess' archetype…
- ❄ - ❄ - ❄ -
Fourteen minutes past midnight. I checked my straps, map and local train schedule. Wind speed minimal, plenty of cloud cover. A perfect night for some stunning heroics.
Two days had passed since that conversation at the simulator, and I'd been busy. Making plans, re-checking plans, gathering tools and equipment. Backpack, check. Suitcase, check. I double-checked the time on my watch. One foot on the ledge. Now or never.
When you stop to think about it, it's actually really easy to escape a flying military base. The only way off is down.
I leapt.
Wind whistled as I plummeted like a stone. Inky blackness sprawled out below me; the open-countryside on a clouded night. No stars, no moon; the rivers and lakes I knew to be present had nothing to reflect, the only lights those of Kolosten's streets far off in the distance. Not my destination. No, that would be-
-There!
I angled myself, spreading my arms to maximise drag… or as much drag as a flying twelve-year old could muster at any rate. My target meandered through the countryside at a deceptively slow pace; a thin ribbon of light weaving a random path through the black.
This was going to be a little bit tricky.
Another funny thing about flying military headquarters; they were blatant set-pieces. The only reason (narratively) for one to exist was for it to crash or explode at the most dramatic moment. That gaudy thing was blatant Herrscher-bait; think about it. The darkest hour, the humanity, the Schicksal Headquarters going down in majestic flames. Someone would solemnly confirm the Overseer had gone down with his ship, only for the slimy little greaseball to pop back up with a dramatic new eyepatch in the aftercredits or something. You could only crash the thing once, so presumably one of the later Herrschers would do it, but I still took parachute training very, very seriously.
So did everyone, who made the mistake of walking to an edge and then looking down.
For a military low-opening jump, the lowest altitude for popping your parachute from terminal velocity was around ~3000 feet. Law of g-forces versus the regular human spine. But we weren't dealing in regular humanities, and we weren't talking about regular materials. Schicksal HQ was up to its eyeballs in hovering, sci-fi drones, so acquiring one meant for scrap as a 'hobby project' was pretty trivial; I'd actually nabbed it months ago for more-or-less this exact possibility. Digging out the float device wasn't too hard, and hotwiring a basic 'on/off' button was mostly just babby's first electrics (literally, I followed a 'how to wire your lightbulb' tutorial written for, um, actual twelve-year-olds). Wrap the whole thing around multiple times in duct tape to ensure nothing flies loose and off you go!
I tilted carefully, adjusting my course to match the winding of my target. Closer now, its actual ground speed revealing itself faster and faster. I was still ahead of it, but only for the moment.
I looked at the distant train, looked at my watch's altimeter, cross-referenced what I remembered of the train-track's squiggle upon the map, clicked my teeth and dived.
Closer.
Closer.
Now.
My fist clenched, the switch closed and the float device clunked and sputtered, a warm heat igniting at my back as it whined into life. An immediate lurch like I'd been caught on a hook, making me exceedingly glad I skipped lunch that evening. The rumble of the roaring wind gave way to the rumble of the oncoming train, and as it passed below me-
Some desperate, final adjustments to better match our speeds. For a moment, the clouds split and the moon shone; lighting the world in silvery hues. In that instant, my breath froze.
Jumping from two miles high with a hobby project for a 'parachute' to land on a moving train might sound insane, but consider: this would make an insanely cool CG.
My boots met metal, and I rolled off the last of my momentum. This was a simple freight train, all containers, not required to go particularly fast, not required to have an overhead electrified wire. I slid myself down carefully along the length of the train until I could climb down the back of the container car and out of the headwind, the pitch-black countryside still whistling past my ears and the bright light of Schicksal Headquarters receding into the sky like an ever more distant star. I grinned. Laughed. Breathed.
And finally noticed my backpack was on fire.