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Kappa slipped into what appeared to be a door on the black box's side, vanishing soon before the announcement came. The Komusai's hangar released its locks, and both the Spiegel and its mysterious counterpart fell free from the holds towards the final barrier between light and dark.

"Try not to fall into the shadows." Kappa warned somewhat ominously from his box. "You may not be able to find your way out."

It had been some time since he'd met the Masters this way-- not since before his father passed --and he wasn't entirely sure it would work. Otoha was a proud man, and would if anything take this as another challenge. Raven, however...he seemed different, now. Almost innocent. Kappa Gouta hoped to find an answer before their time ran out.

"All right. Get ready. I'm going to activate a beacon. This used to be our old meeting place, so Eko shou--"

Lightning cut across the darkest recesses of the lunar landscape, its source masked by a shroud of what looked like bloodied rags. A winged creature sank into the darkness, and for a moment it appeared to have done little more than startle them...but then Kappa's box began to crack. It cracked and hissed, spilling smoke from the breaks until finally the case shattered and teh rounded, clown-like Jester Gundam stumbled out, nursing a massive gash cut across its chest. The creature stirred in the darkness, guiding the pair to it with eyes aglow.

"Amalthea, stay back!"

Kappa shook off the sting of the cut, rolling into the darkness after Amalthea. The Jester's legs spun into a top-like point, propelling the clown at high speed past the terminator and bringing it just a hair's width ahead of the flanking Spiegel.

"No! Stop! This is...this isn't human!"

The creature's eyes turned to them immediately, seeing through the shadow as clear as it would on the other side, and swung its ragged form their way. The red strands hardened and burned a bright crimson, forming wings of a glassy, ruby texture that shone bright enough to reveal their source-- a Gundam. The winged mobile suit swung its wing, summoning an ethereal wind in the vaccuum of space that whipped about, shoving the pair away from her nest and caoting them in a thin layer of lunar dust.

Fighters. A son and a daughter. Welcome.

You don't know me, daughter. But you will. All of you will.

The winged Gundam shifted its weight onto the ends of its claw-like feet, digging deep into the lunar rock as its arms rose above its head to summon the same terrible force that had ripped across the surface moments before. Lightning surged at its fingertips, forming in its violent arcs the distinct shape of a sword...and then it moved. Not the Gundam...the moon.

Awaken, my children.

The satellite itself shook as if pulled from its orbit by a godly force. It was a minuscule shift in the cosmic sense, but the power of the Heaven's Sword had only just begun to shine through. The dust whipped up around the enemy, forming a shell three suit's width between her and the shadow-dwelling pair. The Jester's feet split and touched down again, anchoring the Gundam as another unnatural wind swept across the crater field and showered both it and the Spiegel with centuries of space-traveler debris.

"I've felt this before, Amalthea! I felt this force in Eko when I saw him last, healed from the fatal wounds I dealt him! I felt this in Drifting Cyclops when you drew his strength...and in you when he perished. You must flee! Warn the city defenses!"

There was no spoken reply to the girl's warning, as the shell of lunar dust grew thick as the rock they stood upon, shielding the Heaven's Sword from any immediate harm. Half-expecting Amalthea's response, Kappa threw himself after her, joining in the attack as his own aura flourished around him. The Jester's flimsy arms stiffened, forming cutting blades out of the segmented joints equal to the Spiegel's own in lethality, and all at once the pair found themselves surrounded by remote balloon bits, shielding them from larger chunks of moon rock that now flew like missiles from the core of the Lunar Shell.

"Well, if you're going to charge, at least have the common courtesy to warn me, first!"

There was a flicker of the lightning through the Shell, and the crimson gaze of the Heaven's Sword bled through long enough to lock eyes with the Spiegel. Visions of a past life shot through Amalthea's mind-- Drifting Cyclops' tenure as an indentured miner on Luna during the end of the clan wars, his lapse into drug abuse before coming under Master Cosmos' tutelage...his life was melding with her own, becoming her memories...replacing her family with bloodied gangsters and dead politicians.

Diedrich? Is that you, my son, hidden away? Come closer...

She had ripped through the Shell with ease, slicing away the mingled organics and dead matter to reach the heart of the structure. She found Heaven's Sword unprepared, almost ignorant of its surroundings-- the lightning blade it had summoned out of the ether was now being pressed forcefully into the lunar crust, ripping through ancient rock to the heart of the milky-white orb. Within it, nestled in the warm embrace of the DG's pulsing tendrils, was Moira Englehart, creator of the beast that had traversed worlds to seek its mate. From Papua, from Geoffrey Falcon and his crazed Neros, she had ascended into this new form out of necessity, called to be the host of a Mother who wished only to see her children's future born from the funeral pyre of the past. She was not Mother...she was a vessel, and now, as the Spiegel's blades whipped into the Heaven's Sword's chest, she was a vessel that had outlived its usefulness.

What...what...Geoffrey? Mortimer...where...

"...where am I?" she asked, as the DG abandoned the tattered frame, leaving the naked, worn Neros Gundam defenseless in Amalthea's path. Still bearing the scars of long-forgotten battle, it carried within its core a woman who had not lived since the death of her only love many months ago. She had, instead, allowed this beast to fester within her womb, birthing an army of the dead on Earth while her children in space lie waiting for retribution. She returned to them through Moira, but left her now as the Queen's storm of blades did away with any traces of life in the gundarium shell that was Amalthea Sain's target.

Her enemy gone, the battle was done...and yet, the Shell did not fade away. Instead, it grew, re-shaping to the contours of her whipping aura, forming the outer rings of her great storm as the darkness that had birthed the Heaven's Sword found a greater host-- a purer host --in the student of the shadows. The memories of Cyclops returned, but mingled with those of others taken by the DG's hold. She saw now Eko's fall, his fight to reclaim his identity...she saw the artifact, the Dragon's Claw, hidden away in Framework City, defended by the remnants of the Five Books.

"Amalthea! Amalthea, where are you?"

Pushed away by the raging maelstrom digging deeper into the lunar rock, Kappa just barely noticed the faint speck of an approaching transport, sensing a familiar spark of ki within its holds.

"...what spectacularly bad timing. Raven."

There was no answer. The storm that had been born of her attack now swallowed Amalthea whole, far beyond her control. The swirling black mass seemed to bleed out of the moon itself, feeding the DG with raw matter it then converted into death incarnate. Kappa watched cautiously as Raven's transport approached, slowed to a crawl, and then seemed to kill thrust all together. Was he...

"No. You're not Raven."

He should've realized it sooner. The ki was familiar, but only vaguely. Practically all of the Masters seemed to share a sort of impurity in their auras, a result of the drugs or the madness, it didn't matter which. What mattered was he'd got them confused. It wasn't Raven at all. It was

"Eko!"

The sides of the rectangular vessel burst, unleashing Otoha's hidden attackers onto the world. First was the heavily-armored Kowloon, Eko's weapon of choice since before they'd even met. Next, a mess of gundarium and bandages dug deep into the ground, glaring with its pinkish eyes as a pair of snake heads slithered out between the strands of mummy cloth. The shadows that danced around his Pharoah Gundam left no doubt as to who this person thought he was.

"You brought the Puma impostor. Told the Drifter where to find me. Anyone I'm forgetting?"

"Yeah." Eko answered, shaping the twirling arcs of energy into the whip-like beam cloth he was so fond of-- the very same his first teacher, Cosmos, used and taught him with. His skill was dazzling-- so distracting, in fact, that the Jester Gundam's pilot was completely oblivious to the massive armor tumbling down from above until it had half-buried Kappa in the lunar dust. The titanic weight of a gundarium-plated nine tailed fox crumpled Jester's torso, crippling the fighter instantly.

"I called the whole gang. Solar Fox taught a lot of people, y'know."

All the while, Amalthea grew colder, pulled out of consciousness while the eternal machines picked at her mind for names, locations...clues to a riddle she'd never heard. She perceived every glance, every question as if it were her own-- the DG showed particular interest in the Smart Brain attacks from not so long ago. The Gundam revolt, the oldsmobiles...gamma glipheptin. A bastardized strain of her lifeblood. The nanite solution that became gamma glipheptin was, still was, just a simplified version of the alien material recovered from...from a ship? Her memories blended like they had before, only this time they weren't of the Masters, but of something older. Much older. A ship from one of the first Martian terraformation attempts disappeared years before the clan wars...and they found it. Smart Brain and MarsTech, different sides of the same coin, tried to salvage the ship when it returned to the Earth sphere, and that's when they found it.

...the Artifact. Where is the Artifact?

All three fighters watched in awe as Amalthea ripped herself out of the DG's dark hold, burning with a light that Eko had not seen in almost ten years...

"So...so beautiful. Just like her..."

"NO!" roared the suddenly enraged pilot of the Jester Gundam, lunging a now razor-edged limb at the Kowloon to cleave its ribbon-wielding arm off. Eko had no time to react, stunned by the beauty of Amalthea's fire as it peeled back layers of the Spiegel's armor, overloading the mobile trace with energies it was never meant to contain. Above them, beyond their capacity to feel or see, help had arrived; first, the shuttle upon which Hanging Raven and Artemis Fowl prepared for a final conflict. Behind them, blending into the void, was the Longinus, called back in response to an emergency situation in Framework City. None of them knew what awaited them now.

Otoha Eko realized too late what was happening; the blade that ripped through his shoulder now spun to stab at his chest. He lowered his own arm to defend, but watched in shock as Kappa Gouta's hand ripped through his forearm and impaled the Kowloon in a single thrust. There was nothing-- just fire and a strange cold that enveloped him as the Jester pushed through the cockpit block and ended the life of Steel Phoenix once and for all. The fire that burned within Amalthea had pushed away all the darkness, but also seemed to be pushing away everything else-- the Spiegel's sensors flickered out, and her mobile trace suit seemed unable to withstand the purifying force of her inner light and melted from her skin.

She watched Eko die, and a second later saw the Pharoah Gundam ripped in half with brute force unlike anything she'd ever thought Kappa capable of. As pure as she'd wanted to be now, the Drifter's powers had left her, as had the ones gained through facing the impostor in the colonies, and even those learned from Kappa. She retained only what she had made herself-- the only pure aspect of her life. As the masters died, the last of the DG left her, joining the darkness that now swirled around the Jester.

"None of you deserve to live after what you did to me and my family...and now, none of you will! All the Masters will die by my hand!"

From Hanging Raven's shuttle, the storm began to take a shape familiar to Raven-- an X etched into the lunar dust, with the roaring Jester at its heart.

"Uh, kid...something tells me we're going to need a lot more than two suits."

"Someone..."

The Jester began to warp, forming sharp, jagged edges where there had once been rounded forms, darkness where there had been light. It stretched, growing leaner as the DG soaked into the armor, and its foolish clown hat split into two long horns as thick as the Jester's old bladed arms. Its new limbs, while smaller, housed deadly machinations within, forging chain-like whips out of the energy that flowed freely out of its frame. The remaining student of the Masters charged in his Bound Fox, releasing its nine tail-mounted wired beam guns in an attempt to smother the Gundam with fire.

"...someone I want to protect...?"

Kappa stood still as the whips surrounded him, deflecting the blasts and chasing after the novice like maddened cobras. They stung his armor, pierching and tearing until the Bound Fox was no more, torn to ribbons in a matter of seconds and joining the remains of the other floating corpses. A video feed filled every side of the Spiegel's sensor screens as Kappa shed his Trace suit. Still in total control of the mutating Gundam, he revealed his bare hands. The familiar flow of his shadow fist illusion technique wiped away the lies, and what she saw then was the truth behind the Stone Rhino. On the left hand he sported the sigil of the Solar Fox-- Ace of Clubs. On the right hand, he bore his first, the one he had used to fool them all-- the Black Joker, symbol of Twilight Puma.

The chains began to swirl around him, matching the storm that had formed around the Spiegel only moments ago, but Amalthea could see nothing of it-- all eyes were on Kappa as he tore open his shirt to reveal a third crest-- the King of Hearts, stolen from Otoha Eko, and granting him dominion over four of the deadliest arts in the universe.

"...too late. There's no one left."

That final revelation was cut short by the flash of an incoming vessel-- another transport, identical to Eko's but carrying the first of the much needed reinforcements. The Skull Gundam descended in a pillar of fire towards the lunar surface, followed shortly by a burst from two of the Longinus' forward guns. The Black Joker ignored them, enveloped in a force born from the remains of the most powerful evil. Artemis and his new teacher arrived just in time to watch the storm explode in a ball of red flame and vanish all together-- Kappa had others matters to tend to.