Arabelle

reality checks itself as you land. belregor stands, flies even; with a spread of his wings, he takes to the skies. how is he not dead? you are more flight in instinct now. your footwork hammers up dust from sand. in the distance, jomei echoes his surprise as a few other combatants stall, noting a familiar interface tied to their target now absent. you don't look. your dash brings you past the frontliners who, amidst gawking, have forgotten their sole operative: if the boss remains alive, the fight isn't over yet. you jump after belregor, dam

belregor descends. arabelle, halfway to the sky, falls with him. she charges blindly into the dust cloud, disappearing from her team’s view, and belregor’s transformed chain sword winds around her. it misses… without her input. the system’s assist phases her through the interwound segments, as somewhere at the end of the line, jomei takes the attack and deflects it. the black flame pays her comrades no heed. she can’t even name them in the thereafter. she bypasses the coil, furious, and reaches belregor the moment his form starts to shimmer back into visibility. around her, the front

they’re running. running as fast as they can, the ground shaking beneath their feet. belregor had only drawn in the breath of the sea but the imbalance is felt, the land protests and shudders at the weight of the power that is being pointed at it from above. from the safer distance, acanthus is facing both arabelle and night and she’s screaming someone’s name. lessa is sliding down the hill they are climbing, her boots muddied, her face stricken in horror. they are asking nothing of her. so anyone else’s safety bedamned, arabelle only whirls around at the last moment. her eyes widen at th

arabelle blinks the rain out of her eyes. there’s acanthus with team 3, harried and desperate, directing everyone to attack the correct target as cardinal melts off belregor’s disguise. night lunges forward to execute her orders, and glimpsing the girl’s stoic mien in the aftermath of her failure, arabelle feels cold. hollow, then overflowingly hateful. to what, she can no longer tell. the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. arabelle rushes after her teammate, but they misalign each other. night, now withdrawing, jerks

the light fades and so does everyone else. arabelle walks toward her, holding a bright, burning blade. margaret is rooted to the ground. her eyes drop to her empty offhand. she feels nothing — it’s not her — then everything — it’s not her — all at once. an angry, broken sound she can’t name rises up her throat. and she’s running forward to meet the other halfway before the wiser side of her can remind her that she’s here for a purpose. we’ve answered this question before: her devotion is part iconoclasm. it only looks bad, because along margaret’s path of destruction is jom

the walls are unscalable and so high one can only see a strip of floor 25’s ceiling directly above their path. arabelle and yuki’s steps echo, and when they reach a split in the maze, it is shaped like the upper half of an asterisk — six branches in six directions. dim, past the first few meters. arabelle points to a white chalk mark on yuki’s left. “there!” it’s so small that anyone other than arabelle would have struggled to follow the trail itself. they don’t talk this time, either. every moment spent in the maze carries the risk of one or four of its monsters popping up

ARA: Thank you! I’ll wait here. ARA has shared her current location. she doesn’t answer the question right away. the typing indicator flashes once or twice, then vanishes for a longer interval. everything? she settles for something safe. ARA: Senbei. Not the sweet type. not long after, someone is calling out to her from a distance. “hello! it’s been a while.” arabelle raises herself from the ground and wiggles her fingers in a little wave of greeting as yuki approaches. even without the benefit of her memory, the paladin is an eye-catcher. pink hair and cute

arabelle primes her scythe for another swing. another. another. another! until it's dead! until she's cut the head off its neck and the rest of him is in pieces at her— unwilling, she's forced out of the fray. belregor is quite close to person-sized, even restored to his full height, and there are more than a dozen damage dealers trying to land a sword art on him before the turn is up. arabelle restrains herself and hangs her head, impatient. then her mind bends to a sudden curiosity and her focus shifts across her vision until she finds jomei and lessa at the corner of her eye.

this is all new to her. she had just scarcely learned the man's name. "attack dogs? familiars?" even with the question voiced, arabelle can't resist cutting her teeth on it herself. freyd carries them, hayate said, and it is strange to refer to human bodyguards in that way unless she were to consider the uncomfortable alternative. (she will not say a word about the woman on a chain; the frontlines are the saviors! not they.) so they are companions. the system allows one per. there are fringe cases, like herself, but her friends' souls are moored to her house and she would struggle to

pity for the both of them. she meant it as an offering and a slight. the longer of arabelle’s nails click on the table, dissatisfied, as hayate pours his tea first and drinks. the next he breathes, it’s with her name. margaret. somewhere, in some long forgotten archive, the record of that old trial must still exist. when the strongest of them clumsily declared themselves justice, pinning the totality of a crime on its first confessor, they extended to her a feigned mercy in signing it underneath a name she could so easily discard. they didn’t tell her their authority hinged on condem

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13:07 aincrad standard time. three messages drop into yuki's inbox. it's from a contact she has only met once. ARA: Hi. ARA: [b7e9c24f.jpg] ARA: Can you help me kill? ( •̯́ ^ •̯̀) like a frightened wife pointing out pests for their husband to dispose of, the blurry shot of floor 25's maze weaver, front appendages raised and charging at the retreating camera, is meant to speak for itself. as she would tell yuki later, arabelle had been unlucky this time. she is ordinarily a competent boss hunter. but the twists and turns of the maze and her dwindling consumable hoard had formed a

there are cats in the endless caverns. they just happen to have owners. murderous ones. she laughs, soft and almost dismissive. "oh, no. i'm just the exception." for lack of a better place to go, or partly by arabelle's insistence, they do start for the river first. she continues once they are far past the dragon gates, her weapon nowhere in sight. "my family ran a funeral home. i helped them since i was able -- administrative tasks, mostly, but as i grew older and my responsibilities expanded, i had to spend more time in the place itself. if you've ever been to one, you'll understan

"miss luka..." eyes to the ground. "...he will see you now." the paper screen door slides open and the lady of the house of bones next door bows. not as low as she used to, in the long years of their working relationship where she asked after and practiced every formality hayate brought from his old place, knowing it would leave him pleased, but at an off-angle that would have confused a dilettante. deliberate or a sudden careless mistake? does she appear careless to you? she straightens, a coy apologetic smile on painted lips, then settles into a seiza position across

the knight doesn't answer. instead, as arabelle is trying to keep an eye on it between the dozen attacking bodies of the frontlines, it changes faces and suddenly, it's lessa charging straight towards a wide-eyed jomei. the strike lands. the violin's bow stutters, the last of jomei's song plummeting beneath the noise, and before morningstar could catch on, arabelle is moving to intercept, the spear point of her scythe puncturing the woman's armor. "red cursor," she reminds. she wouldn't do that. she rips damocles free and stabs lessa again. her pulse is in her ears, her eyes br

arabelle blinks owlishly at morningstar's familiar food. "a cat?" "you could come along," he offers all of a sudden. and arabelle's hand comes up to twist at the ends of her bangs. did he know he was stephen star, world renowned actor, casually inviting along a woman who had already introduced herself as one of his admirers? for a moment, her control fails to catch up, and arabelle in morningstar's view appears a very familiar blend of flustered and hopeful. then her eyes turn somewhere else and her expression smooths over to comfortable neutrality -- if only because stephen star had

floor 29 held its breath. a black knight emerged from the sea. water sloughed off its armor as it marched toward the shore. a bright red gleam pours from its visage —furious? —[maddened]? and the thing beneath struggles for breath but its killing instinct is alive and well. belregor -guardian of the sword-, facing eighteen of aincrad's strongest, takes a stance. arabelle gnashes her teeth unconsciously, confused. a knight? out of all the unsightly things this floor could throw at them, it thinks the worst of it is a relic of its old age? is it time for her to look at the quiet sixth

like an abyss, morningstar. like you’re staring down a 14.4 kilometre hole and the bottom is made out of human viscera. but with her eyes closed, arms crossed over her middle, almost bent over herself in laughter, she looks just the part of an ordinary girl. "sorry…! so sorry, oh my gosh, i’m so sor--" arabelle presses the back of her hand against her lips, shoulders shaking, trying to dampen the rest of it as morningstar catches his breath. his scream might have scared the actual ghosts off. in that moment, he was perfect. "i was about to greet you normally, but you looked so nervou

"arabelle. tell them to bring it over themself." or: conversations that could have happened. (accepted.)

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"i stand corrected," she quips back. arabelle's second raid starts with her losing morningstar in the dark. her red eyes alighted on a bright nervous figure holding itself steady against a pair of frontline elites; not bright in a way that invited admiration like morningstar, she amends, but in a way that commonly drew condemnation and ire. the woman is an orange cursor. criminal by cardinal's decree. team 4 from the last raid had one themselves but pinball kept his distance and was merely tolerated. arabelle has a sense that this one is a friendlier face, and the tableau the trio paints

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there's jomei, talking to himself. then not-doe-eyed acanthus, diligently hacking away at the lion. arabelle brightens at her appearance -- their last interaction had ended abruptly and she had been wondering if she should just cut to the chase and send her that text. "okay!" she cuts in front of the lion and swings damocles down from overhead. the blade pierces its skull and rips through the bone and flesh in its path, leaving the mob gaping open from crown to jaw, and an ensuing shockwave from a sword art blasts the rest of it in roughly the same halves, sending shudders through the gro

a strike from behind -- weaker than morningstar’s but still packing a hefty punch -- and the nemean lion whirls around furiously and its paw comes within inches of colliding with the fluttering white of its attacker. here is where she’s supposed to take the hit. …just kidding. she’s picky. getting tossed around like a ragdoll is never a good look. arabelle tears damocles out of the lion’s hide with a sunny smile. she switches her grip and bats its head back, and it recoils when it makes contact with the spear point at the reverse end of her scythe. “i’ve fought this mob a couple

arabelle took one glance at the message and sent it straight to her spam folder. the next morning, morningstar invites her to hunt and talk, a prospect she would have found infinitely attractive were she not sleep-deprived and in the middle of reassembling dozens of her wounded pets. still, arabelle considers it over a cup of coffee, her chair turned toward the artificial sun, and sends back a prompt response. ARABELLE: Ok! she returns to the infirmary and supervises a trio of skeletons in medic jackets reattaching another's leg. the patient stands, wobbly at firs