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The Zodiac Guards were on the campus.

The Zodiac Guards were on the campus.

One, at least. The little bastards were hard to kill. He should have known. ********, he should have known. He didn't think he'd have to destroy their star seeds in the bargain; enough petrol, enough fire, and he thought their second chance would be their last. Once upon a time the Zodiacs had spread out to the far corners of the solar system, holding the line. The first line of defense, out in the cold depths of space.

It didn't matter whether one or all of them was running around. It was time to shut down. You could shut it down, and then all you would have to do would be to wait. There were dozens of youma already running around in there, who'd take care of any new, green senshi who might pop up; and then they could finish this ******** exercise in youma farming and put the little ******** to work.

But it was time to shut. Down. Everything.

The General-King dragged Nealite to the edges of the barrier that prevented the students from leaving, weakened only by its letting the Negaverse through -- time to lock everything out. He was coughing, deep rattling coughs, turning away from Nealite before she could say anything about engendering flu in himself.

"This is the first time I'm going to ask you this," he said, his voice raspy with cold. "I have -- faith in you that you can, all right? I'll be using you to -- channel." Did he sound paranoid? "Nobody in and nobody out until it's all done. I've had it up to here with these little dead ********. The next time I think it's a good idea to take all the corpses we've dumped in the woods and try to build up their energy -- well, ******** that, now these bitches won't have the grace to die."

He took her hands. For some reason, he'd hesitated. For some reason, he'd looked at her -- almost abnormally -- anything for you. Ursula hadn't been able to gauge that look. He didn't soften. But he looked at her oddly, as though re-evaluating, for a moment with an expression that foretold intense selfloathing. And that was not a Gunn Killingworth look. Charonite did not doubt himself. Charonite did not hate himself.

But he put his hands into hers, wrapped his fingers to enfold her much smaller ones. They stood there, facing each other, fingers linked. She was, however, starting to get the feeling that he liked her hands, because he raised them up to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. One set. Then the other. Not even brusquely, not any more.

"Keep conscious," he warned her, voice low. "Do not break the connection."

He'd had to learn all this s**t alone. Zoisite had never wanted to teach him. He'd known he had the potential. He'd had to do it, painstakingly, no goddamn knowing how. Goddamnit.

Charonite broke with one of her hands and pressed it, instead, towards the invisible barrier that held the inhabitants of Barren Pines in. Pressed her fingers down against it, over hers, their other hands joined. It sparked when they pushed down on it, rippling so that they could see the bubble-like illumination of the border.

"It'll be visible," he warned. "Only to us and those inside."

Kunzite was better with barriers, too.

"Now."

That wasn't much of a warning.

Energy crackled over from him into the holder of Beryl, who magnified it, refined it and grew it, more power arcing through Nealite than she'd ever had before -- it was again similar to the time that she'd received the soul in the first place, every nerve screaming with it, feeding it into the shield. It only tinted first, darkly, and then began to saturate deeper into a grey shield that coated over the campus in a massive half-sphere. It screamed through every vein and artery, boiled behind her eyes.

All the students -- youma and alive alike -- were privy to the sky starting to darken, blacken, the light from the sun starting to be filtered by the slightly transparent obsidian bubble that was forming over Barren Pines. If the inhabitants were freaking out, their voices did not reach Charonite and Nealite. He forced her fingers in deeper, drew her out more and more, used her to pump the shield full of her energy -- and only when she knew she was going to have to stop, when the pain throbbed behind her eyeballs and her legs starting to shake embarrassingly in the way that meant they were going to give -- did he pull her hand away.

There was a black shield over the school. And it had all been her; had all been done by her. It was her power, augmented with a little bit of his, the first time that the Beryl soul within her had been used to funnel anything. And it was only a speck, she could tell, only a very fraction of what she could do. There was something deeper than the Beryl soul, something absolutely hidden away, something layered behind that she somehow knew even Charonite didn't know about. Something dormant, but something that had nudged away in its sleep when she had been fuelling the barrier.

Her legs gave way. He moved to catch her up in his arms, despite his own ashen pallor underneath his skin, pulled her up and started to walk away from the barrier. "They won't last," he was saying. "None of them will last."

It sounded like something he -- hoped. As though there was a percent of him that wasn't certain. Bitter.

"It better not be ******** Ever After," he groused, his voice thorny with what she guessed was barely-suppressed pain. "I'll watch She's All That before I goddamned watch Ever After." Obviously he'd been looking through her DVDs. Maybe had a thing against Drew Barrymore. But her head was on his shoulder, and he'd agreed, and she had completed her mission.

"Let's go home."

And he was referring to it as home.

"I'm sick of this goddamned graveyard."

With that, both of them winked out of existence (ostensibly to go and watch She's All That).

The shield was complete. Now anyone who had been transformed at the time they had called it into being was stuck in that form, from guardian cat to senshi; anyone who was human at the time would no longer be able to transform at all. Negaverse could not go in. Negaverse could not go out, but he hadn't left any of them in there. And without her court, Chronos would be dead in the water, a sitting duck.

Most of the student body in Barren Pines had been a corpse, a dead body fresh from the hospital, either labelled missing or labelled -- rightfully -- dead. Barring those unfortunate transfer students, alive, whole humans, who had never seen most of it coming. Every other student's interaction with a parent had been frank hallucination; a needed hallucination the Negaverse had produced, as it kept them quiet. It kept them still. And now they would all inevitably become sentient youma of the old days, vicious and clever and able to take orders, able to blend in. The humans could just be food.

Charonite had not accounted for two things:

Astraea, horrified and stuck in the maths building;

and the Star Cauldron and a promise to Chronos, for a second chance.