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The energy signature was strange -- an unstable aura, Chaotic, and more powerful than what she'd felt with Avalon. Larger than anything she'd ever sensed before. It was certainly more than Hvergelmir was capable of fighting, and her first instinct was that she shouldn't go near it anymore -- but she wasn't a fighter anymore. It didn't matter who her opponent was, did it? She couldn't fight any of them if she wanted to.

Not that she wanted to. What she wanted was to talk, to explain the true history of the war and give them a chance to turn from their lives of fighting and killing people who should've been their brethren. And talking required being close enough to have a conversation.

Hvergelmir approached the aura with trepidation, especially when it slipped into a darkened alleyway. That was never a good sign -- nothing aboveboard ever took place in dark alleys.

What she saw was a senshi, but clad in black, bent over an unconscious victim. Up close, her aura was oppressively wild. Hvergelmir shivered.

She waited, watching -- but when she realized what the senshi was going to do -- when she saw that hand plunge into the man's chest like Schörl had done when she'd wrapped her fingers around Hvergelmir's starseed to warn her what the Negaverse would do to her if she resisted -- it was too much. She dismissed her distaff into subspace and held up both of her hands.

"Oh God, wait!" she yelled out. "Wait, please wait, you'll kill him!"

(As usual, Hvergelmir had a tendency to blurt things out in these situations that often sounded more than a little stupid -- the senshi was probably perfectly aware that what she was about to do was going to kill the man she was doing it to.)

Something in the way the senshi looked at her made Hvergelmir shiver. Her eyes were as wild as her aura, and as terrifying. She looked heavily made up, like a dark, magical parody of Dita von Teese or something like that -- something that said her image was very calculated. Beautiful, alluring, dangerous.

Hvergelmir trembled a little, trying to force herself to hold her ground. She tried to remember that it didn't matter how powerful the Negaverse was if she could get them not to fight her in the first place. Maybe this senshi just needed help, a friendly hand.

You know, if Hvergelmir just ignored all the evidence to the contrary.

"I'm not here to fight," she said, voice shaky. "I swore a vow not to attack your people. I just want to talk. I'd rather -- " She searched for the right words. " -- make friends. I want to know how this happened to you. Th-that's all."

Hvergelmir watched the corrupted senshi as she half-crushed the man's face in. The page was unaccustomed to seeing such gruesome violence in person -- she curled her hands up over her mouth and let out a quiet, horrified noise at the sight.

Was it necessary? Had the Negaverse really convinced its soldiers that that kind of open cruelty, unprovoked, towards one's fellow man was somehow needed and important? That it served a noble cause and there was no alternative?

"I don't want to fix you," she stammered, which was and wasn't true. "I want to -- " She fished about for something that wouldn't sound falsely friendly. The senshi apparently didn't like false closeness. "I want to understand you." She wrung her hands in the fabric of her skirt.

The senshi was definitely creeping her out. Her fake chipperness, her bloody-mouthed smile. The look, that terrible, terrible look in her eyes. There was no sympathy for Hvergelmir there, just an amused ruthlessness.

"Please," she entreated. "Tell me your name. Tell me how you came to serve Chaos."

There was nothing promising about the phrase before I crush your delicate little windpipe.

Hvergelmir cringed, looking backward at the far end of the alleyway. It wasn't far -- she could run, if she had to, couldn't she? She could run right now, this probably wasn't going to work out like she'd hoped --

But when she looked back, there was the man on the ground where Ate had stepped right over him after bashing his face in. The man she was going to kill.

If Hvergelmir didn't convince her not to.

She took a step back when Ate advanced, the response instinctive and born of fear; but after that, she forced herself not to keep retreating. She had to stay and try. She had to.

Her knees were knocking together beneath her dress. She hoped Ate wouldn't notice.

"Power," she repeated, voice quavering slightly, "to do what?" It was hard to gather her thoughts enough to stall for more time, to try and find a way to talk Ate down. Her tongue felt like lead in her mouth, heavy and slow. "Who -- who did you find?"

Hvergelmir frowned. Setting aside the vulgarity -- she was fairly certain that knights didn't have any dead queen, but that Ate was just trying to unnerve her, which was unfortunately succeeding -- Ate's answer was worrying. To join Chaos just to climb through the ranks of senshi magic, something she could've accomplished on her own . . . that was a little difficult to address through rhetoric, to talk down. To desire power without purpose, power for power's sake -- it was hard to make a good counteroffer to that.

Worse was her description of her goddess. Chaos.

Ate, if her description was to be believed, was very far from sane.

Hvergelmir shook her head vehemently. "No," she said slowly, "I don't want her power. Nothing I'd have to hurt innocent people to get is worth having. Don't you -- didn't you have friends, people you cared about? People you wanted to protect?"

This time, Hvergelmir physically recoiled. Ate's words grew more and more chilling each time she spoke. Her outlook on the world, on its own, might have just been heartbreaking -- to truly believe that people lost their virtue as soon as they gained free thought, that human beings were without worth or incapable of great good -- but in conjunction with her desire for power, to wreak havoc on the world, it was a recipe for inhuman horror.

A person like Ate, high on power and with no regard for human life, was capable of destroying the world. Was this the end result of what Chaos's influence did to people? Did they all become cold and hateful and greedy in the end?

"Is that . . . is that what you think this world is about? Fighting? Killing? Choosing where you die?" she asked desperately. "You've never . . . there's so much more in life than that. Power's not -- not -- an end goal. It's a tool -- not an end. Not a trophy. It's a tool, because you put it down when you don't need it." Hvergelmir put her hands up again, her voice rising with growing nerves. "No one's threatening you. You don't have to do this. Please."

Ate's words had gone from worrying to frightening to profoundly, dangerously irrational. Hvergelmir could sense that she'd taken a misstep in the conversation somewhere -- probably a lot of missteps, honestly -- but knowing you were screwing up a conversation was a lot easier than knowing how to not screw up a conversation. With Ate, she was out of her depth: Ate seemed to have a Chaos-borne madness that Hvergelmir couldn't begin to understand how to work with. She'd been expecting that at some point in the conversation, any Negaverse officer would slow down enough to hear what she had to say, and that once they did, they'd see there was no reason to go forward with hurting her.

That was evidently not the case. Ate seemed to have been humoring Hvergelmir out of amusement as much as anything.

And now Ate was not amused.

With her hands still held aloft in the air, bIdding for peace, Hvergelmir had no real time to react to Ate's attack the way that her self-defense instructor had been trying to teach her to do. Instead, she was knocked backwards, and all her carefully practiced lessons about how to roll with falls went straight out of her head.

She landed on her hip -- which hurt -- and scraped a big chunk of her arm against the blacktop -- which also hurt -- and she had Ate still bearing right down onto her, pinning Hvergelmir with her weight. "Get off me!" she called out, pushing backward against Ate's superior strength to try and dislodge her long enough to get some distance from the current situation. "Stop!"

There was no compassion in Ate's eyes -- just anger, there, anger and a kind of dizzy hunger which Hvergelmir guessed must come from a desire to indulge some dark, violent impulse. The page had taken a vow of truce toward the Negaverse, but she'd included a rider -- she could defend her own life if it was being threatened. Right now it was being pretty well threatened.

Hvergelmir tried a few more times to throw Ate off her, or to flip her to the ground -- but nothing worked. It was clear that the corrupted senshi had Hvergelmir bested in sheer, brute strength.

Trying to remember what her self-defense instructor had taught her, Hvergelmir curled one of her hands over into a claw shape and took a swipe near Ate's eye. Pointy things are more threatening than blunt things, when they're coming at your eyeballs, she remembered being taught. People are naturally protective of their eyes, it'll make them flnch sometimes. Don't let up. It wasn't much to go on, her few self-defense classes -- but she'd have to try.