Slight apology, but I figured I'd share the news for those of you not following my snippet thread. At the moment, Dragon's Dancing (that House of the Dragon crackfic SI) is currently unlikely to be my next story. I'm just not feeling it like I used to anymore.

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  "You know, I kinda wonder where she gets all of these attack names from?" Purple Heart floated as they kept an eye on Green Sister from a distance. They all were. A safe distance, most of them were sure.

  The idea was, weirdly, sensical in a way. If Arfoire was trying to gain power from the Graveyard then, cut her off. Destroying the Graveyard would at least slow her down. Of course, Hinum herself outright admitted that she didn't have the power to do this entirely. Just enough, at the very least, to destroy a decent amount of land. Hinum felt she could destroy maybe a quarter at best, and that even included pumping as much energy as she could into a single shot.

  Hinum's powers were particularly good at a large amount of indiscriminate damage. So since they all lacked a better plan to slow Arfoire down by this point.

  They haven't left, of course. While Hinum didn't think she would use up all her energy in the attack, it was more than possible that she could. And letting her fall wasn't a risk that Vert or anyone else wanted to take.

  Given the energy the Goddess Candidate was giving off, the choice was more than likely the correct one. With all the energy swirling around her, Hinum almost appeared like a small star.

  "What do you mean?" White Heart asked, as Green Heart hovered nervously nearby.

  "I mean, its just how she says them. It's like she's making a reference only she gets," the assessment wasn't entirely incorrect. In her original universe, big arrows that created big booms was, not an infrequent occurrence in the fictional media she consumed. Fate was obvious, with its Shirou Emiya's and Arash, as well as Ishtar, though Hinum had pulled less from the Mesopotamian Goddess than one might expect.

  The Silver Archers of Anor Londo needed no introduction, having been shooting Dark Souls players since 2011. Straight off ledges and into the bottomless pit, likely breaking many controllers in the process, with arrows that had more in common with beach umbrellas than actual arrows. Their return in the third and final installment, combined with the Millwood Knights, only increased the pool of inspiration that Hinum could pull from.

  Chicxulub could be considered a double reference. Yes, it was hard to admit that the name at least in part came from watching Quetzalcoatl in Fate, dropping the coolest anime drop-kick of all time right onto the face of another Goddess. But the real inspiration? Removed from any further context came all the way from childhood. It came from simple wonder and study. Stare-eyed fascination into a single subject.

  Chicxulub was the end. An end to an entire era. There had been many ends throughout Earth's history. Many mass extinctions have occurred in the past. The Great Dying of the end Permain. The twin Devonian extinctions. The Late Ordovician. Even the end of the Triassic period was marked by one.

  But the final of the Great Five Mass extinctions? The K-T boundary. The impact boundary. A thin band of iridium that spanned a significant portion of the globe, a deposit of one of the rarest minerals on earth. One that was commonly found in asteroids. One that would later become known after an impact crater was found off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula.

  "Chicxulub!"

  "See? That's what I mean!" Nepgear continued to talk. "It sounds like a sneeze, not some."

  The streak of green that rocketed downwards through Arfoire's body before it impacted the roiling mass of the Graveyard cut off anything else as an explosion bloomed beneath Arfoire's body. While there was no damage to do the incorporeal Goddess herself? That didn't stop the land beneath her feet from being vulnerable. Especially as Arfoire's actions had rendered the Graveyard unstable.

  Immediately after impact, a green energy began tearing the ground to pieces, expanding over the Graveyard like a raging river, surging over much of the rotting metal and plastic like an angry fire. It continued to eat and eat as it grew, expanding outward until Arfoire's body had been completely enveloped by the green blaze.

  Under normal circumstances, the damage an attack like this would do would be surprisingly minimal. Yes, the damage would be considerable, and there would be a sizable crater left in the blast's wake. But in the end, most of the aboveground structures would be destroyed, while the earth and stone that the target had been built upon would be decently intact, the crater itself aside.

  However, the Graveyard was different than most landmasses. In truth, it had no solid foundation. It was, in the end, a large mass of garbage, rot, and decay. Which just allowed the blast wave propagating outwards to eat away at the Graveyard bit by bit. In the end, the expansion began to slow, as a cloud of debris began to rise up into the air.

  "See! That has to have come from somewhere!"

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  Okay. That was, good. Take that, Arfoire, you stupid piece of crap.

  Pants left my lips as I looked down at the carnage. As much as I could, anyway. Smoke and fire obscured my vision, making it difficult to see what exactly was going on. But it was still a large amount of devastation, I could tell that much, largely because of all the smoke and fire. I couldn't see Arfoire, so hopefully I did something to her, too, even if it was only backlash from the blast.

  Each breath hurt. I couldn't tell if it was because of all the soot that filled the air coming from the fires or if it was because I was exhausted. I felt my body sway in the air, feeling as if I'd run two whole marathons at the same time, despite that not even being remotely close to possible. As I swayed, my altitude became lower and lower, until I felt a pair of hands wrap their way under my shoulders.

  Felt like Vert. That was nice.

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  "Well, ignoring all the other possible long-term ramifications of that," Histoire said, just giving me an extremely tired look. Yeah, I'd probably spiked the Oracle's workload with that stunt. Not my intention, but I was already in enough pain. I'd burned through way more shares than I intended. "But, by my estimations, that did buy us about a week to come up with another plan to defeat her."

  A week? Okay, I liked the sound of that. Oh sure, that wasn't a whole lot of time, but it was at least an improvement, and I was going to take that win.

  Because I frankly didn't have much of a win to take otherwise. Yeah, I basically burned up most of my supplies short term, and it was going to take a hot minute to recover from the fairly major shortfall that I'd had as a result. Okay, not that long, but still a process of at least a day until I could recharge my batteries to okay levels.

  As it turned out, Chicxulub had a fair amount of inefficiencies that I needed to square away in the future. It wasn't like I got a lot of time to practice with such attacks for, obvious reasons. It wasn't like I had a place were I could test some of my bigger stuff without having to deal with collateral, and other issues.

  It wasn't like I had a Bikini Atoll to test things out. That and I knew enough about water to know that throwing shots randomly into that was, one of the worst ideas I could have had.

  "Still, there are, rumors of something," Chika spoke next. "It's clear Arfoire was trying to do something, but the loss of the immediate surroundings in the Graveyard caused a lot of energy fluctuations. We have no idea if she can repeat what she was trying to do, or simply won't try to again."

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  Or, actually succeed this time once she gets started snacking on the unruined Graveyard. What was she even doing that could be notably disrupted in the first place? Scratch that, I don't think I wanted an answer to that particular question. Whatever it was, it was probably terrifying, and my theory was correct we'd probably know in a few days time anyway.

  Which I was not happy about. At all.

  But we'd bought ourselves a week. A week to plan out a different plan of attack other than pure brute force. It wasn't much, but it was better than what we had.

  "Are you, doing okay?" Chika asked as I let out a groan on my position on the couch. My face was shoved into a pillow and I wanted to just throw a quilt over my head. One of those big, fluffy ones that cancelled out all the noise in the world and was perfect to snuggle under during those cold winter months.

  Instead of raising my head and using my voice, I just gave Chika a thumbs-up from the couch. At the moment, it was the best I could do.

  "So, do we have any type of plan here, or?" Noire asked, and I could tell she was crossing her arms like she tended to do.

  "Well, there is something," Mina muttered, though if it was a mutter, it was loud enough to be heard pretty clearly. "How many of you have heard of Uranus?"

  Don't hit the low-hanging fruit, don't hit the low-hanging fruit, don't hit the low-hanging fruit, it's unbecoming and completely unneeded. Never before have I been happier that I could use a pillow to muffle myself from saying something completely stupid. Though to be fair. Neptune. Uranus? Okay, there had to be some connection there. Once was a coincidence, and twice may be circumstance.

  But I didn't trust circumstance. I was willing to let the first slide, but by this point, I wasn't going to be letting anything beyond that slide.

  Maybe, it was probably some harmless joke at the end of the day.

  There was a lot of muttering and shaking of heads, so I wasn't the only one in the dark it seemed like.

  "It's a name I saw in old records. It recounted some type of war between an ancient Goddess of Planeptune and Arfoire," Mina explained. Okay, so I was right on being connected to Neptune somehow, but that raised several questions. Didn't the nations form around the Goddesses? If not were directly involved with the founding of each nation?

  Either that, or it meant Planeptune was really, really old in comparison to everyone else. And I guess, that Neptune may have been a CPU Candidate in the past?

  I was going to stop thinking about that before I made myself sad. It also had weird implications for Nepgear. I guess if I always wanted a nonsensical nickname for her, I could just start calling Nepgear Pluto, now.

  "It's possible that her soul might still be around," Noir commented, scratching her chin. Great. We had a possible answer and hold up just a minute. Her soul? How would that even work? How long ago was this? And why were we suddenly poking the dead? I'd seen the plot of a lot of things to know that was also a terrible idea!

  Oh well, this still wasn't as bad as the cursed sword idea. Letting out a groan, I began to push myself to my feet.

  Only for a tiny amount of pressure to force me back down onto the couch.

  "Young lady, you are going to wait and recover properly this time before you hurt yourself further," the lack of mass and the voice told me it was Histoire. Which, if she of all people was able to keep me from going anywhere, was a sign that my body was completely and utterly messed up.

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  Strike her with a stronger will than the evil that comprised Arfoire? That almost sounded too simple. And even then, it had taken so much to cripple Arfoire back then. To seal her away long enough to become their problem. What if?

  Nepgear shook her head. She couldn't let such doubts pollute her head. Not now. Not when they just got the information they needed. Not when they were so close to being able to defeat Arfoire.

  She just hoped that Nepgear was feeling better when they got back.

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  I let out a yawn, stretching out my body. I needed that. I really needed that. Huh, hopefully that isn't a sign that I was developing into a napper. Getting all my sleep out of the way at once was how I preferred to do things. Just falling asleep like that because my body told me to? Blasphemy of the highest order. My brain didn't just let me sleep, I had to bludgeon thing into letting me rest.

  The couch was thankfully large enough to use as a bed. I would have had more problems if it wasn't, sleeping here like I was. Especially with all the weight pressing in on my body.

  Yeah, that got my eyes open in a heartbeat. Looking up at the source, I was met with a familiar face. And an unpleasant surprise.

  "You know, I always thought that if you ever had the opportunity to do that, you'd be smoothering me," I commended, half joking half glaring at her. Damn the secruity in this building sucked.

  "Really? You want those to be your last words?" Underling glared down at me, pipe in hand.

  "No, my last words are, I cast triceratops to the face."

  "What's a?" Underling didn't get the opportunity to finish as a plush triceratops slammed into her face with all the fury known to his plush kind. By the time Underling even started to remove him from her face, I pivoted and kicked her, sending her tumbling backwards. Catching Fuzzy and returning him to the couch, I readied my bow.

  "I hate you," Underling growled, staring me down with a fiery glare.

  "Linda, Linda, Linda," I hum. Though unlike almost every other time we've clashed, there was an anger running underneath mine. "You've made that oh so abundantly clear. All for, what, exactly?"

  "You damn well know what you did!" Underling's knuckles were white, somehow paler than her the rest of her skin. Her body quaked with barely restrained rage, almost as if she were vibrating.

  "That was, what? Playing a random member of the ASIC for a trick? Linda, at the end of the day, you're upset that I hurt your standing. Nothing more, nothing less," I was keeping my distance, letting her take the first move. After how many times she let her anger control her, I was used to it. "I extended my hand at the end of the day. Try to give you a better path than what you were on. You chose to double down. Because at the end of the day, you're only upset because you got unlucky. You aren't sorry about the damage you and the ASIC overall have done."

  "You ruined any chance!"

  "Of you ranking up in an actual, honest, cult," I cut her off, easily. My own temper was starting to raise back up, building. It wasn't close to an eruption, but I could still feel the heat. "All for, what, exactly? What did you ever gain out of the ASIC, Linda? For a single stroke of bad luck, they label you Underling. For making a mistake that was going to happen to someone in Leanbox that night."

  "I always kinda wondered what caused you to double down after all that, what made it so you decided to keep signed on with them after their treatment of you. Was it simple money? Or did you just want to see the world burn for, well, whatever reason you have for it?" I said, a vicious snarl appearing on my face. "But after this, I don't think it matters anymore. The fact you're seriously onboard despite the end of the world? Despite Arfoire being oh so willing to sacrifice her pawns for any short term advantage? No, I think we're done here. You'll be in a cell, even if you manage to beat me."

  "You don't know anything about me if you think I'm here to beat you!" Underling howled, charging at me, raising the pipe in her hand.