Disclaimer: Sailor Moon is the property of Naoko Takuechi. Chrono Crusade is the property of Daisuke Moriyama
Child of Hope
By Bissek
Chapter 11
Declaration of War
Eudial looked over the model she'd made of the police precinct. She was going to have to crush the enemy base in one stroke to make the impression she wanted. That would require planning.
There were roughly 400 police officers assigned to that area of Tokyo. Taking into account that many of them would be assigned to the two substations and 8 koban rather than the precinct proper. That would account for roughly half of them. Between officers who were off-duty and those on patrol, most of the people assigned to the precinct wouldn't actually be in the precinct at any given moment.
Eudial estimated that unless she hit the precinct at shift change, there would probably be roughly fifty people at the station when she launched her attack. But that was just the initial assault. She had no doubt that the moment the police realized what was going on, they would call for assistance from their comrades, and she had to assume that at least some of them would answer that call. Depending on the timing, her forces could end up getting caught between a hammer and an anvil. She would have to see what could be done to prevent that.
The first thing she needed was to be able to delay the police outside of the precinct house from learning of the attack for as long as possible. There was no way it could be concealed indefinitely, but even an extra five minutes before any relieving force arrived could allow her daimons to secure a defensive position against them. Then they would be in a position to clean up inside before they punched their way out.
Perhaps severing the phone lines would work? Yes, doing that, along with the power lines into the building, would restrict their communications considerably. Without phones or the main dispatch radio, their ability to call for help would be reduced considerably. Then any reinforcements would arrive piecemeal and be easily taken apart.
The next thing was to find the best places to intercept those reinforcements before they could interfere with the main assault. Eudial started looking over the map, trying to figure out which roads they would probably arrive by and how best to cut them off. As she did so, she jotted down notes on how many Daimons she'd need at each point. Once she worked out exactly how many troops she needed, she could go talk with her former superior Kaolinite to request the necessary number of Daimon eggs.
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"Welcome back." Chrono said as his oldest living friends entered Eden.
"It's always nice to see you again, Chrono," Azmaria replied. "Especially after you vanished for so long." Her tone softened as she offered a package to him. "This is what's left of Rosette's effects. I think she would have wanted you to have them."
Taking the package, Chrono opened it and looked at the two objects inside with a mixture of fond reminisce and sadness.
"The Clock of Life," He said, lifting the ancient and broken watch out of the pocket. "I never thought I'd see this again. I certainly hoped I'd never actually need to use it again. Not that I could even if I wanted to in its current condition." Taking the other object out of the package, he smiled sadly. "I remember posing for this picture. Satella said she'd picked up the prints the last I ever spoke to her, but this is the first time I've actually seen it."
"Who would have thought that when we posed for that it would be the last night the four of us were together?" Azmaria asked. "It was such a fun time at first."
"Watching Rosette fail miserably at that shooting game that won on your first try."
"Watching you and Rosette trying to dance."
"It was the closest that Rosette and I ever had to an actual date."
"Until Aion crashed it and everything went to hell."
Chrono growled under his breath at the reminder of his long-dead evil twin. Taking a few deep breaths, he forced himself to calm down. After doing so, he changed the subject to the reason he had invited his friends over.
"There's a friend I've made here in Tokyo that I've invited to visit tonight. I invited you two here so that you could meet her. I think you in particular would have a lot to talk about with Hotaru, Azmaria. She's a lot like Joshua was at that age."
Azmaria gasped when she realized what Chrono was saying. "You can't mean that she's."
"The current Apostle of Hope." Chrono confirmed.
"That can't be possible. I'm the last of the Apostles."
"The last of your generation, maybe. But it appears that a new generation is being born. I just wish I knew why."
"How did you meet this girl?"
"Well, I first ran into her shortly after arriving in Japan..."
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Having been to Chrono's apartment before, Hotaru was prepared for Shader's excessively friendly greeting. Once she had pried herself out of Shader's embrace, she saw that there were two very old people in the apartment with Chrono.
"These are some old friends of mine who were in town, Hotaru." Chrono explained. "This is Beth Grunberg, and this is my sister-in-law, Azmaria Christopher."
Sister-in-law? The woman looked old enough to be Hotaru's grandmother, possibly great-grandmother. Chrono was only old enough to be a significantly older sibling or cousin.
"But you're so much older that Chrono-niisan. How can you be his sister-in-law?" She wondered out loud.
Azmaria smiled. "Chrono is a lot older than he looks." Taking a picture down from the mantle, she showed it to the girl. "This picture was taken when I was twelve. That's me right there on the right. The girl standing between me and Chrono was his partner Rosette. I married her little brother back in 1932."
Chrono had aged about ten to fifteen years in the more than sixty years since that photograph had been taken. Doing some rough math in her head, Hotaru worked out a guess as to Chrono's real age.
"You must be close to two hundred years old!"
Chrono laughed. "Now, now, Hotaru, there's no need to be insulting. My hundred and fiftieth birthday isn't until next month.
"Anyway, the reason I invited you here was to introduce you to Azmaria. Remember how I told you that I knew someone with powers similar to yours when we first met? That was her husband Joshua. She used to have similar powers back when she was your age, as well."
Hotaru's confusion over Chrono's seemingly impossible age vanished as she realized that she was in the presence of someone like her. Here she had proof that she wasn't a freak. Here was proof that she wasn't alone.
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Mistress 9 was also interested in this Azmaria for reasons of her own. If she had once wielded the kind of power held by her host's body and had been married to someone who had also wielded that kind of power, then she probably knew how to use it to its full potential. If that was the case, then the woman was the key to unlocking the effectively limitless source of power that the Astral Line represented, and once Mistress 9 could tap that, the path to summoning her master would be shortened dramatically.
She couldn't risk taking over the body completely - she was still in the same room as a professional demon hunter - but she could nudge her host's consciousness a little. It wouldn't even be considered all that strange for Hotaru to ask questions about her powers to the only person around who had the ability to answer them. And nobody would suspect that there were two people listening until it was too late...
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Hotaru wasn't sure where the idea had come from, but once she had thought of it, it made sense to her. She asked Azmaria to demonstrate how to use her powers.
"Well, I can't actually demonstrate it anymore," She said. "I burned my powers out by using them too much in a short period of time decades ago. It's been more than twenty years since the last time I even tried to use them. But I can explain how I and everyone else I knew with similar powers did it.
"Every single one of us channeled the power through music. Joshua preferred to use a keyboard, while the rest of us used our voices. It helped in my case that I was also a professional singer at the time."
And so Hotaru found herself receiving music lessons as a way of learning magic. It seemed like such a strange way of going about it. What did proper breath control have to do with a healing spell? Before all she ever had to do was touch someone's injuries and want them to feel better. But she persevered, knowing that an entire generation of people like her had learned to use their powers this way, it must work somehow. Then, it happened.
It was like her body was filled with light, which flowed through her before pouring out of her mouth to spread out into the world as a whole. She actually felt herself rise slightly off the floor as the power picked her up. It was the single most incredible sensation she had ever felt in her life. Looking through the window, she could have sworn she saw a beautiful river of glimmering green forming in the night sky, and a pair of angelic wings in her reflection in the glass. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. The wings vanished, the river faded away, and the sensation dissipated as she dropped back down to the floor. If it wasn't for the fact that she could see feathers lying around the apartment that hadn't been there when she started singing, she might have thought it had all just been her imagination.
"W-Was that?" She gasped.
"Yes, Hotaru." Azmaria answered. "You just tapped into the power of the Astral Line. Welcome, Apostle of Hope. I am Azmaria, Apostle of Charity."
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It was a typical evening at the precinct. Roughly half the night shift was on patrol, and the other half was writing up reports about what had happened during their last patrol, most of which would end up being so mundane that they'd only be given a cursory glance before being stuck in an archive and forgotten about once they were finished. No major crimes had been reported, and the minor ones were all being handled by the officers on patrol without need for external assistance. Everyone at the precinct expected the calm status quo to continue throughout the night.
That expectation shattered when the power went out. The possibility that there was something wrong at the power station was discounted when a casual glance out the window showed that every other building on the block still had their lights on. The people there started to worry when they noticed that the phone lines were down as well.
Two officers didn't notice the suspiciously localized blackout. They were in the process of heading out on patrol when a large van with a black star painted on it blocked the entrance to the parking lot when they were trying to get out. The officer in the passenger seat got out of his squad car to address the red-haired woman in the van.
"Excuse me, miss, but this parking lot is for police vehicles only. The visitor's parking area is just down the road. I'm going to have to ask you to move this vehicle."
The woman responded by gunning the engine and running the man down. Before the fallen officer's partner could respond, she smashed the van into his car. Then the side door of the van was thrown open and a dozen daimons poured out.
The officer in the car grabbed his radio in one hand while fumbling for his sidearm with the other. He was just starting to try to get an alarm out when then daimons smashed the window of the car in and killed him.
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The sound of the crash alerted the men inside the police station that there was more wrong than just a power outage. An officer who was near a window facing the parking lot looked out and saw the daimons.
"We're under attack!" He shouted. The others had only a moment to register his warning before the first daimon smashed through the doors.
The daimons swarmed through the entryway. They overran the few men they found there, but the time it took them to do so gave other men the opportunity to get into position in the hallway behind the entrance. The narrow hall bottlenecked the daimons, preventing them from rushing the defending officers in a mass. This slowed them down long enough for the rest of the precinct to mobilize.
Lieutenant Hatanaka was the watch officer in charge of the night shift. It was suddenly clear to him why the station had suddenly lost power. With the phone lines down and no power to use the main dispatch radio, the precinct was cut off from every officer in the city. Well, almost.
"Any foot patrolmen here?" He demanded.
"I'm a foot patrolman, sir!" One man stepped forward.
"Get out your radio and call for help. The main unit's down until we can get the power back on, and making a run for one of the radios in the squad cars is suicide. Get in contact with anyone you can and have them relay the message to the substations. They can spread the word from there. We need every Sacred-armed officer in the Prefecture here stat."
As the patrolman grabbed his radio and tried to contact the rest of the TMPD, Hatanaka addressed the rest of the officers. "Okay, we've gotten them bottlenecked in the halls for now. Let's keep it that way. I want people in every doorway. Alternate between which side of the hall is firing and which is reloading so that they don't have a lull in which to rush us. I want runners from the armory to the halls to bring up ammunition. If any of the gas grenades they were working on are ready, bring those up, too. We've got to hold out until reinforcements arise."
Minutes crawled by as the police resisted the advance of the Death Buster foot soldiers. The police gunned down the attacking daimons, only for a red-haired woman who had accompanied them to take something out of a strange canister and use it to make more. The oily gas released by the grenades weakened the daimons, but upon realizing that, their developed a new tactic. Darting into the rooms on their end of the hallway, the daimons started breaking through the walls into the rooms held by the defending policemen. Suddenly flanked, the defenders found their defenses split, with many of their men diverted from stopping the main attack in the hall to guard against the monsters coming through the walls.
"Do you have any word on when help is coming?" Hatanaka asked.
"Our reinforcements are pinned down!" The radioman reported. "There are more of those things out in the city. They're blocking the roads leading to the precinct!"
This was well planned. Even if the roadblocks couldn't hold forever, they could very well hold long enough for the daimons at the station to break through and slaughter everyone here. And there was nobody else they could call for help. Unless...
Running to the captain's office, Hatanaka started hurriedly flipping through his rolodex. Surely the man who'd given the police the means to fight against these monsters had left some contact information. Finding the card he was looking for, he pulled it out and took it to the radioman.
"Find someone on the outside with access to a working phone and get him to call this number. Have him tell Chrono to get here as fast as he can. And then pray that he can get here fast enough."
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Shortly after Beth had seen Hotaru off to the bus stop to catch a ride home, the phone rang. Chrono picked up the receiver.
"Hello?"
The voice on the other end was unfamiliar, and obviously trying to keep from panicking. "Mr Chrono? This is Officer Saiyama, from the 17th Precinct. We need your help, right away. We're under attack!"
"What? Where are they and how many?"
Grabbing a notepad, Chrono quickly jotted down some notes on where the daimons were and promised to be there as soon as possible. Promising to be there as soon as he could, he hung up the phone and started flipping through the phone book.
"What's going on?" Azmaria asked.
"Daimons are attacking the local police precinct. Apparently they don't like the idea of the authorities being able to fight back."
Finding the entry he was looking for in the phone book, Chrono shifted to a slightly younger form and dialed a specific form.
"Hello? Can I speak with Rei-san, please? Tell her it's Joshua."
Rei's voice came in less than a minute later. "Hi, Joshua," She said, in a tone that made it clear that she was pretending to be talking to an acquaintance from school to anyone in the same room as her. "What's up."
"The Death Busters have launched an all-out assault on the 17th Precinct, with choke points on the northern and western roads leading to the precinct cutting off reinforcements. Spread the word to your colleagues. Hurry."
Chrono hung up the phone before Rei could respond. Turning around, he saw that Azmaria was examining a street map.
"If you set down cross barriers at these four points, the field would weaken just about all of the attackers." She pointed out.
"Unfortunately, I don't have any barriers." Chrono said as he started gathering his weapons. "I gave my only set to Hotaru in case the Death Busters realize that she's got access to all the power they could possibly need."
Azmaria pulled four metal crosses out of her pocket. "I've still got my set. If you loop around, I can set the barrier on the south, east, and north. Then you go in while I head for the west point on foot and finish the barrier. That way we won't lose too much time."
Chrono didn't want to bring his old friend into danger, but her plan was valid and it would take too much time to argue.
"Let's go."
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Eudial was pleased with the progress her troops had made. While the oily gas the police had released into the hallways weakened the daimons enough to make pushing through difficult, the daimons working their way through the walls of the gas-free rooms were making significant progress. Soon, she would be in a position to wipe out the remaining defenders. When their comrades in the city arrived to save them, they would only find a ruined building populated by the dead - a fitting lesson to those who would defy the Death Busters. It would only take one more push to break them - one she planned to make personally.
Striding down the hallway behind her troops, she laughed. "Fools who thought you could defy the Death Busters and the coming of the Silence, know your doom. I am Eudial, greatest of the Witches 5, and I am your death!" With that she pushed aside the daimons and attacked.
The gout of flame from her weapon struck the spray from a recently thrown gas grenade. That was when she realized that the reason the gas smelled so oily was because the gas contained oils that were sprayed out in a fine mist. Flammable oils. And with all the grenades that had been thrown, the air in the hallway was full of it.
Eudial had been hoping that her attack would clear the hall. She succeeded far more than she hoped she would. The entire hallway burst into flames. Everyone on both sides of the conflict who wasn't overwhelmed by the sudden fireball fled.
As Eudial hastily patted out the flames on her clothing, she assessed her situation. She had lost the daimons pushing through the hall, but the police had to have lost many of the men defending the hall as well. If the daimons continued to push through the side rooms until they cleared the flames, they could continue their mission. She could still win this. The fire might even leave a better message than just a building full of corpses. She was about to return to the battle when the air suddenly lit up.
That was the only was she could describe it. One moment the room was lit only by the flames and occasional flashlight beam from the hall, and street lights coming in from the window, and the next everything was glowing faintly blue. Eudial didn't know what the light was, but it felt rather uncomfortable to her. Judging by the shrieks of her daimons, it seemed they didn't like the light either. Then she heard the sound of sirens approaching in the distance.
Trusting her daimons to continue the slaughter without her, she rushed outside to aid the daimons she had left outside as a final line of defense against reinforcements. One of the roadblocks had been eliminated sooner than she expected, and that meant that she was running out of time to finish the massacre.
Exiting the building, Eudial saw a familiar and hated figure get off a motorcycle and draw a pair of blades so that he could engage one of the daimons. In the distance, she could see the flashing lights of approaching police cars. On the rooftops, she thought she could make out the silhouettes of people making their way towards the precinct.
She wasn't running out of time, she was already out of time. Chrono was here, the rest of the police would be here in a minute or two, and the Senshi would be arriving shortly after that. There was no way she could take on all of them at once. It was time to escape and hope that the daimons she left behind would do enough damage to make a lasting impression. She ran for her van.
Gunning the engine, Eudial hurriedly turned the vehicle around so that she could flee. As she floored the accelerator, she saw Chrono drop one of his knives and draw a gun from his coat and aim it at the van. Was he planning to shoot out the tires?
There was a flash of light and the van spun out of control as one wheel suddenly dropped out from under it. He had managed to shoot one of the tire out. Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and corrected herself. He hadn't shot the tire out, he'd shot it off. Along with over a hundred pounds of metal and plastic around the point where his shot had hit.
Eudial didn't want to even think about what that gun could do if it hit her. She fled the van, taking care to exit on the side opposite the man with the death ray. Unfortunately, a policeman noticed her trying to escape and moved his car to block her.
"Freeze!" He demanded as he got out of the car and drew his gun.
Eudial drew her flamethrower and launched a quick burst of fire at him. While the man strove to put out the flames, she grabbed him and threw him away from the vehicle. Getting inside, she gunned the engine and used the stolen vehicle to make her getaway.
Some of the police realized something was wrong when they saw a vehicle rushing to get away from the precinct they were trying to relieve and gave chase. It took her half an hour to shake them, and she had to run over three patrolmen and nearly flattened one old lady who was out for an evening stroll in the process.
She needed to lay low. Until she knew whether or not she'd successfully broken the TMPD she couldn't be seen in public. If she failed, they would be coming for her with everything they had. And even worse, her colleagues would be seeking to take advantage of any perceived failure. Kaolinite had been removed from supremacy because of her continued failures. Eudial was under no illusions that she was immune from that same fate.
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Captain Fujita looked at the partially wrecked precinct. The fires were under control and the wreckage from the damaged sections were being cleared away, but it would be at least a month before the building was fully repaired. In all, there had been twenty three dead and thirty seven wounded as a result of the attack. If Chrono and the Senshi hadn't arrived to help repel the attackers, it could have been worse. Much, much worse.
The woman responsible for the attack, Eudial she called herself, had gotten away. But every single officer who had gotten a good look at her agreed that she was the person who Fujiwara had described in the previous daimon attack on the police. That meant they now had a second name, if false, to go with the descriptions of the people responsible for the attacks on his city.
As crime scene investigators photographed the battlefield and paramedics took away the wounded, Fujita turned his attention to his allies. The Senshi had all left after the fighting was over, but Chrono had remained, talking to an old woman who he recognized as one of the two who had confronted him at the hospital.
"I'm afraid my cross barrier's had it, Chrono." The woman said in English. "Someone in a police car ran one of them over. Unless Shader can make a new set, I'm afraid I can't help anymore."
"That's alright, Azmaria," Chrono assured her. "You've been out of the business for seventy years now. I don't have any right to expect you to come back in at this point."
"Are you going to introduce me to your colleague, Chrono-san?" Fujita asked in Japanese.
Chrono took the hint and introduced them, switching over to Japanese. "Azmaria, this is Captain Fujita. Captain, this is my sister-in-law Azmaria."
The old woman held out her hand "Exorcist Third Class Azmaria Hendric Christopher, Order of Mary Magdalen. Retired."
Fujita took the woman's hand. "Aren't you a little old to be his sister-in-law?" He inquired.
"Well, we're not technically in-laws. Back when we were both with the Order, I was his partner's protégé. After we left, I married her little brother. Rosette died before she and Chrono got the opportunity to marry, otherwise we would be in-laws.
"As for Chrono's age, he isn't the first person the Order's had who's been much older than he appeared. Minister Remington, the top exorcist in the Militia back in the twenties, had been claiming to be twenty seven for fifty years when I joined."
Fujita made a mental note to have someone look into this Order when he could spare the manpower.
Turning his attention back to Chrono, Fujita inquired about how a corner of Eudial's van came to be vaporized.
"Tetragrammaton energy cannon," He said, producing a small pistol. "Most powerful man-portable anti-paranormal weapon ever made."
"So that's what happened to it," Mrs Christopher mused. "The Order's been looking for that gun for decades. Rosette had the only prototype and they lost the schematics, so they haven't been able to make any more."
"And why didn't you mention the existence of that gun when you offered to provide weapons that could fight against these things?" Fujita asked sharply.
"Because Sacreds can be produced in bulk quantities much more easily than new guns can, especially ones that operate on totally different principles than normal handguns. Because training people to use and maintain the Tetragrammaton would take time we didn't have, as I'm the only one in the area who's ever used one. And because if you're not sure of your shot, this can cause a lot of damage by accident." Chrono pointed to the van. "You see that? That was one shot, on the low power setting. Imagine what would happen if someone set it to high and then missed."
Fujita winced. Most of his men weren't very good shots. Since they were normally on duties that didn't require the use of firearms, they didn't have to be. A bad shot with that little gun could probably knock a sizable hole in the side of a building, with potentially catastrophic consequences for anyone in it. At least with bullets a missed shot can only harm one bystander at most. No, his men were not ready to handle something that powerful.
"Okay, I'll go along with that, but I can't guarantee that the government will. This incident is going to attract notice from the higher-ups, and they are going to have questions. Don't be surprised if they want you to answer some of them."
News vans were approaching the station. Fujita knew that he had to make a statement. Walking towards the perimeter, he raised his voice so that everyone around could hear him.
"People. Tonight the criminal organization calling itself the Death Busters thought that they could send a message to us. A message saying that we are powerless against them and that we should give up. They failed.
"We are not going to give up. We are going to hunt down every single one of them and bring them to justice. They have declared war against the people of Japan, and in response we are going to bury them." Turning to look at the fallen form of one of his men being zipped up into a body bag, he added "Literally if necessary."
Pointing to the broken van, he started giving orders. "I want forensics on that van stat. I want the fingerprints of every single person who's driven, ridden in, or even been near that vehicle for the past week taken and analyzed. I want the license plate and VIN run down. I want to know who owns it, where they live, where they work, and who they associate with. And I want a BOLO put out for the car she stole for her escape.
"Members of the press. We have sketches of two suspected members of this organization, one of whom was seen leading the attack on this precinct. Since we don't have power here, as soon as someone can get those sketches down to the substation we will make copies for distribution. Please post those copies in the news and request that anyone with information about said people come forward."
Turning back to his people, Fujita snapped out one last command. "You have your orders, people. Move it!"
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None of the fingerprints found on the vehicle matched any known individuals, but the vehicle turned out to be registered to a woman whose driver's license photo was easily identified as the woman who called herself Eudial. By the time the sun rose, the police had enough evidence to wake a judge and request an arrest warrant for Yuko Arimura, AKA Eudial, philosophy teacher at Mugen Gakuen and multiple cop killer.
Officers were dispatched to both her residence and her place of work, but she was long gone. Undeterred, they proceeded to search her home and question her students and colleagues in the hopes of figuring out where she might have went. They didn't find any clues to that, but they did find a different lead.
"On a hunch, I showed some of Arimura's students the sketch of the second suspect." Detective Kurosawa reported. "Every single of them recognized the woman in the sketch as a Kaoli Night, personal assistant to the principal, a Souichi Tomoe. She's been missing for some time. The last time anyone will admit to have seeing her was several hours before the Senshi supposedly knocked her off Tokyo Tower."
"So the real name of this Kaolinite is Kaoli Night?" Captain Fujita groaned. "Please tell me it's possible to charge her for having such a stupid alias."
"I'm afraid not, sir."
"That's two people working at that school with a Death Buster connection. Is there any chance that more people on the staff are involved?"
"There's no evidence to charge anyone with anything, but I suspect that Tomoe is involved in this up to his neck. I just can't prove it."
"Then keep digging into the pasts of those two women and this Tomoe. This case is not going to be shelved for any reason. We are going to close it, no matter what. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir. My partner is already working on getting a search warrant for Night's residence, but I suspect that her associates will have already sanitized her home of anything that could lead back to them by now. If I thought I could get a warrant that would let me take the entire school apart to find evidence of a Death Buster connection, I'd have tried to get one. But I doubt I'd be able to get one. Not yet, anyway."
"Then keep working on it until you get that proof or find something that tells us we should be looking elsewhere."
"Right." With that, the detective left the Captain's office.
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Father Francesco Vazzoler of the Magdalen Order picked up his luggage. His equipment had passed through customs without notice, as he knew it would. One of the reasons that he had been selected for this mission was the fact that his chosen weapon was not recognizable as such.
Somewhere in the city, a demon laired. He had thought that the Order had wiped them all out decades ago, but one of them had escaped, apparently aided in doing so by one of the most respected exorcists in the history of the Order, who had somehow been subverted into heresy without anyone noticing until long after his death. And now it was up to him to correct this grievous error.
He would find this Chrono. He would get him to reveal the location of any other demons that had escaped. And then he would purge that foul race from the face of the Earth once and for all.
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A/N: There is no official age for Chrono listed in the manga, I just made the 149 figure up.
I figure if the Catholic Church had ray guns in the mid 1920s, everybody would have them in at least limited production by WWII, so there has to be some reason the knowledge didn't spread if I don't want the weapons tech base to be totally different from our world by the 1990s. So Chrono has the only working Tetragrammaton.
Child of Hope
By Bissek
Chapter 11
Declaration of War
Eudial looked over the model she'd made of the police precinct. She was going to have to crush the enemy base in one stroke to make the impression she wanted. That would require planning.
There were roughly 400 police officers assigned to that area of Tokyo. Taking into account that many of them would be assigned to the two substations and 8 koban rather than the precinct proper. That would account for roughly half of them. Between officers who were off-duty and those on patrol, most of the people assigned to the precinct wouldn't actually be in the precinct at any given moment.
Eudial estimated that unless she hit the precinct at shift change, there would probably be roughly fifty people at the station when she launched her attack. But that was just the initial assault. She had no doubt that the moment the police realized what was going on, they would call for assistance from their comrades, and she had to assume that at least some of them would answer that call. Depending on the timing, her forces could end up getting caught between a hammer and an anvil. She would have to see what could be done to prevent that.
The first thing she needed was to be able to delay the police outside of the precinct house from learning of the attack for as long as possible. There was no way it could be concealed indefinitely, but even an extra five minutes before any relieving force arrived could allow her daimons to secure a defensive position against them. Then they would be in a position to clean up inside before they punched their way out.
Perhaps severing the phone lines would work? Yes, doing that, along with the power lines into the building, would restrict their communications considerably. Without phones or the main dispatch radio, their ability to call for help would be reduced considerably. Then any reinforcements would arrive piecemeal and be easily taken apart.
The next thing was to find the best places to intercept those reinforcements before they could interfere with the main assault. Eudial started looking over the map, trying to figure out which roads they would probably arrive by and how best to cut them off. As she did so, she jotted down notes on how many Daimons she'd need at each point. Once she worked out exactly how many troops she needed, she could go talk with her former superior Kaolinite to request the necessary number of Daimon eggs.
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"Welcome back." Chrono said as his oldest living friends entered Eden.
"It's always nice to see you again, Chrono," Azmaria replied. "Especially after you vanished for so long." Her tone softened as she offered a package to him. "This is what's left of Rosette's effects. I think she would have wanted you to have them."
Taking the package, Chrono opened it and looked at the two objects inside with a mixture of fond reminisce and sadness.
"The Clock of Life," He said, lifting the ancient and broken watch out of the pocket. "I never thought I'd see this again. I certainly hoped I'd never actually need to use it again. Not that I could even if I wanted to in its current condition." Taking the other object out of the package, he smiled sadly. "I remember posing for this picture. Satella said she'd picked up the prints the last I ever spoke to her, but this is the first time I've actually seen it."
"Who would have thought that when we posed for that it would be the last night the four of us were together?" Azmaria asked. "It was such a fun time at first."
"Watching Rosette fail miserably at that shooting game that won on your first try."
"Watching you and Rosette trying to dance."
"It was the closest that Rosette and I ever had to an actual date."
"Until Aion crashed it and everything went to hell."
Chrono growled under his breath at the reminder of his long-dead evil twin. Taking a few deep breaths, he forced himself to calm down. After doing so, he changed the subject to the reason he had invited his friends over.
"There's a friend I've made here in Tokyo that I've invited to visit tonight. I invited you two here so that you could meet her. I think you in particular would have a lot to talk about with Hotaru, Azmaria. She's a lot like Joshua was at that age."
Azmaria gasped when she realized what Chrono was saying. "You can't mean that she's."
"The current Apostle of Hope." Chrono confirmed.
"That can't be possible. I'm the last of the Apostles."
"The last of your generation, maybe. But it appears that a new generation is being born. I just wish I knew why."
"How did you meet this girl?"
"Well, I first ran into her shortly after arriving in Japan..."
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Having been to Chrono's apartment before, Hotaru was prepared for Shader's excessively friendly greeting. Once she had pried herself out of Shader's embrace, she saw that there were two very old people in the apartment with Chrono.
"These are some old friends of mine who were in town, Hotaru." Chrono explained. "This is Beth Grunberg, and this is my sister-in-law, Azmaria Christopher."
Sister-in-law? The woman looked old enough to be Hotaru's grandmother, possibly great-grandmother. Chrono was only old enough to be a significantly older sibling or cousin.
"But you're so much older that Chrono-niisan. How can you be his sister-in-law?" She wondered out loud.
Azmaria smiled. "Chrono is a lot older than he looks." Taking a picture down from the mantle, she showed it to the girl. "This picture was taken when I was twelve. That's me right there on the right. The girl standing between me and Chrono was his partner Rosette. I married her little brother back in 1932."
Chrono had aged about ten to fifteen years in the more than sixty years since that photograph had been taken. Doing some rough math in her head, Hotaru worked out a guess as to Chrono's real age.
"You must be close to two hundred years old!"
Chrono laughed. "Now, now, Hotaru, there's no need to be insulting. My hundred and fiftieth birthday isn't until next month.
"Anyway, the reason I invited you here was to introduce you to Azmaria. Remember how I told you that I knew someone with powers similar to yours when we first met? That was her husband Joshua. She used to have similar powers back when she was your age, as well."
Hotaru's confusion over Chrono's seemingly impossible age vanished as she realized that she was in the presence of someone like her. Here she had proof that she wasn't a freak. Here was proof that she wasn't alone.
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Mistress 9 was also interested in this Azmaria for reasons of her own. If she had once wielded the kind of power held by her host's body and had been married to someone who had also wielded that kind of power, then she probably knew how to use it to its full potential. If that was the case, then the woman was the key to unlocking the effectively limitless source of power that the Astral Line represented, and once Mistress 9 could tap that, the path to summoning her master would be shortened dramatically.
She couldn't risk taking over the body completely - she was still in the same room as a professional demon hunter - but she could nudge her host's consciousness a little. It wouldn't even be considered all that strange for Hotaru to ask questions about her powers to the only person around who had the ability to answer them. And nobody would suspect that there were two people listening until it was too late...
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Hotaru wasn't sure where the idea had come from, but once she had thought of it, it made sense to her. She asked Azmaria to demonstrate how to use her powers.
"Well, I can't actually demonstrate it anymore," She said. "I burned my powers out by using them too much in a short period of time decades ago. It's been more than twenty years since the last time I even tried to use them. But I can explain how I and everyone else I knew with similar powers did it.
"Every single one of us channeled the power through music. Joshua preferred to use a keyboard, while the rest of us used our voices. It helped in my case that I was also a professional singer at the time."
And so Hotaru found herself receiving music lessons as a way of learning magic. It seemed like such a strange way of going about it. What did proper breath control have to do with a healing spell? Before all she ever had to do was touch someone's injuries and want them to feel better. But she persevered, knowing that an entire generation of people like her had learned to use their powers this way, it must work somehow. Then, it happened.
It was like her body was filled with light, which flowed through her before pouring out of her mouth to spread out into the world as a whole. She actually felt herself rise slightly off the floor as the power picked her up. It was the single most incredible sensation she had ever felt in her life. Looking through the window, she could have sworn she saw a beautiful river of glimmering green forming in the night sky, and a pair of angelic wings in her reflection in the glass. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. The wings vanished, the river faded away, and the sensation dissipated as she dropped back down to the floor. If it wasn't for the fact that she could see feathers lying around the apartment that hadn't been there when she started singing, she might have thought it had all just been her imagination.
"W-Was that?" She gasped.
"Yes, Hotaru." Azmaria answered. "You just tapped into the power of the Astral Line. Welcome, Apostle of Hope. I am Azmaria, Apostle of Charity."
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It was a typical evening at the precinct. Roughly half the night shift was on patrol, and the other half was writing up reports about what had happened during their last patrol, most of which would end up being so mundane that they'd only be given a cursory glance before being stuck in an archive and forgotten about once they were finished. No major crimes had been reported, and the minor ones were all being handled by the officers on patrol without need for external assistance. Everyone at the precinct expected the calm status quo to continue throughout the night.
That expectation shattered when the power went out. The possibility that there was something wrong at the power station was discounted when a casual glance out the window showed that every other building on the block still had their lights on. The people there started to worry when they noticed that the phone lines were down as well.
Two officers didn't notice the suspiciously localized blackout. They were in the process of heading out on patrol when a large van with a black star painted on it blocked the entrance to the parking lot when they were trying to get out. The officer in the passenger seat got out of his squad car to address the red-haired woman in the van.
"Excuse me, miss, but this parking lot is for police vehicles only. The visitor's parking area is just down the road. I'm going to have to ask you to move this vehicle."
The woman responded by gunning the engine and running the man down. Before the fallen officer's partner could respond, she smashed the van into his car. Then the side door of the van was thrown open and a dozen daimons poured out.
The officer in the car grabbed his radio in one hand while fumbling for his sidearm with the other. He was just starting to try to get an alarm out when then daimons smashed the window of the car in and killed him.
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The sound of the crash alerted the men inside the police station that there was more wrong than just a power outage. An officer who was near a window facing the parking lot looked out and saw the daimons.
"We're under attack!" He shouted. The others had only a moment to register his warning before the first daimon smashed through the doors.
The daimons swarmed through the entryway. They overran the few men they found there, but the time it took them to do so gave other men the opportunity to get into position in the hallway behind the entrance. The narrow hall bottlenecked the daimons, preventing them from rushing the defending officers in a mass. This slowed them down long enough for the rest of the precinct to mobilize.
Lieutenant Hatanaka was the watch officer in charge of the night shift. It was suddenly clear to him why the station had suddenly lost power. With the phone lines down and no power to use the main dispatch radio, the precinct was cut off from every officer in the city. Well, almost.
"Any foot patrolmen here?" He demanded.
"I'm a foot patrolman, sir!" One man stepped forward.
"Get out your radio and call for help. The main unit's down until we can get the power back on, and making a run for one of the radios in the squad cars is suicide. Get in contact with anyone you can and have them relay the message to the substations. They can spread the word from there. We need every Sacred-armed officer in the Prefecture here stat."
As the patrolman grabbed his radio and tried to contact the rest of the TMPD, Hatanaka addressed the rest of the officers. "Okay, we've gotten them bottlenecked in the halls for now. Let's keep it that way. I want people in every doorway. Alternate between which side of the hall is firing and which is reloading so that they don't have a lull in which to rush us. I want runners from the armory to the halls to bring up ammunition. If any of the gas grenades they were working on are ready, bring those up, too. We've got to hold out until reinforcements arise."
Minutes crawled by as the police resisted the advance of the Death Buster foot soldiers. The police gunned down the attacking daimons, only for a red-haired woman who had accompanied them to take something out of a strange canister and use it to make more. The oily gas released by the grenades weakened the daimons, but upon realizing that, their developed a new tactic. Darting into the rooms on their end of the hallway, the daimons started breaking through the walls into the rooms held by the defending policemen. Suddenly flanked, the defenders found their defenses split, with many of their men diverted from stopping the main attack in the hall to guard against the monsters coming through the walls.
"Do you have any word on when help is coming?" Hatanaka asked.
"Our reinforcements are pinned down!" The radioman reported. "There are more of those things out in the city. They're blocking the roads leading to the precinct!"
This was well planned. Even if the roadblocks couldn't hold forever, they could very well hold long enough for the daimons at the station to break through and slaughter everyone here. And there was nobody else they could call for help. Unless...
Running to the captain's office, Hatanaka started hurriedly flipping through his rolodex. Surely the man who'd given the police the means to fight against these monsters had left some contact information. Finding the card he was looking for, he pulled it out and took it to the radioman.
"Find someone on the outside with access to a working phone and get him to call this number. Have him tell Chrono to get here as fast as he can. And then pray that he can get here fast enough."
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Shortly after Beth had seen Hotaru off to the bus stop to catch a ride home, the phone rang. Chrono picked up the receiver.
"Hello?"
The voice on the other end was unfamiliar, and obviously trying to keep from panicking. "Mr Chrono? This is Officer Saiyama, from the 17th Precinct. We need your help, right away. We're under attack!"
"What? Where are they and how many?"
Grabbing a notepad, Chrono quickly jotted down some notes on where the daimons were and promised to be there as soon as possible. Promising to be there as soon as he could, he hung up the phone and started flipping through the phone book.
"What's going on?" Azmaria asked.
"Daimons are attacking the local police precinct. Apparently they don't like the idea of the authorities being able to fight back."
Finding the entry he was looking for in the phone book, Chrono shifted to a slightly younger form and dialed a specific form.
"Hello? Can I speak with Rei-san, please? Tell her it's Joshua."
Rei's voice came in less than a minute later. "Hi, Joshua," She said, in a tone that made it clear that she was pretending to be talking to an acquaintance from school to anyone in the same room as her. "What's up."
"The Death Busters have launched an all-out assault on the 17th Precinct, with choke points on the northern and western roads leading to the precinct cutting off reinforcements. Spread the word to your colleagues. Hurry."
Chrono hung up the phone before Rei could respond. Turning around, he saw that Azmaria was examining a street map.
"If you set down cross barriers at these four points, the field would weaken just about all of the attackers." She pointed out.
"Unfortunately, I don't have any barriers." Chrono said as he started gathering his weapons. "I gave my only set to Hotaru in case the Death Busters realize that she's got access to all the power they could possibly need."
Azmaria pulled four metal crosses out of her pocket. "I've still got my set. If you loop around, I can set the barrier on the south, east, and north. Then you go in while I head for the west point on foot and finish the barrier. That way we won't lose too much time."
Chrono didn't want to bring his old friend into danger, but her plan was valid and it would take too much time to argue.
"Let's go."
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Eudial was pleased with the progress her troops had made. While the oily gas the police had released into the hallways weakened the daimons enough to make pushing through difficult, the daimons working their way through the walls of the gas-free rooms were making significant progress. Soon, she would be in a position to wipe out the remaining defenders. When their comrades in the city arrived to save them, they would only find a ruined building populated by the dead - a fitting lesson to those who would defy the Death Busters. It would only take one more push to break them - one she planned to make personally.
Striding down the hallway behind her troops, she laughed. "Fools who thought you could defy the Death Busters and the coming of the Silence, know your doom. I am Eudial, greatest of the Witches 5, and I am your death!" With that she pushed aside the daimons and attacked.
The gout of flame from her weapon struck the spray from a recently thrown gas grenade. That was when she realized that the reason the gas smelled so oily was because the gas contained oils that were sprayed out in a fine mist. Flammable oils. And with all the grenades that had been thrown, the air in the hallway was full of it.
Eudial had been hoping that her attack would clear the hall. She succeeded far more than she hoped she would. The entire hallway burst into flames. Everyone on both sides of the conflict who wasn't overwhelmed by the sudden fireball fled.
As Eudial hastily patted out the flames on her clothing, she assessed her situation. She had lost the daimons pushing through the hall, but the police had to have lost many of the men defending the hall as well. If the daimons continued to push through the side rooms until they cleared the flames, they could continue their mission. She could still win this. The fire might even leave a better message than just a building full of corpses. She was about to return to the battle when the air suddenly lit up.
That was the only was she could describe it. One moment the room was lit only by the flames and occasional flashlight beam from the hall, and street lights coming in from the window, and the next everything was glowing faintly blue. Eudial didn't know what the light was, but it felt rather uncomfortable to her. Judging by the shrieks of her daimons, it seemed they didn't like the light either. Then she heard the sound of sirens approaching in the distance.
Trusting her daimons to continue the slaughter without her, she rushed outside to aid the daimons she had left outside as a final line of defense against reinforcements. One of the roadblocks had been eliminated sooner than she expected, and that meant that she was running out of time to finish the massacre.
Exiting the building, Eudial saw a familiar and hated figure get off a motorcycle and draw a pair of blades so that he could engage one of the daimons. In the distance, she could see the flashing lights of approaching police cars. On the rooftops, she thought she could make out the silhouettes of people making their way towards the precinct.
She wasn't running out of time, she was already out of time. Chrono was here, the rest of the police would be here in a minute or two, and the Senshi would be arriving shortly after that. There was no way she could take on all of them at once. It was time to escape and hope that the daimons she left behind would do enough damage to make a lasting impression. She ran for her van.
Gunning the engine, Eudial hurriedly turned the vehicle around so that she could flee. As she floored the accelerator, she saw Chrono drop one of his knives and draw a gun from his coat and aim it at the van. Was he planning to shoot out the tires?
There was a flash of light and the van spun out of control as one wheel suddenly dropped out from under it. He had managed to shoot one of the tire out. Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and corrected herself. He hadn't shot the tire out, he'd shot it off. Along with over a hundred pounds of metal and plastic around the point where his shot had hit.
Eudial didn't want to even think about what that gun could do if it hit her. She fled the van, taking care to exit on the side opposite the man with the death ray. Unfortunately, a policeman noticed her trying to escape and moved his car to block her.
"Freeze!" He demanded as he got out of the car and drew his gun.
Eudial drew her flamethrower and launched a quick burst of fire at him. While the man strove to put out the flames, she grabbed him and threw him away from the vehicle. Getting inside, she gunned the engine and used the stolen vehicle to make her getaway.
Some of the police realized something was wrong when they saw a vehicle rushing to get away from the precinct they were trying to relieve and gave chase. It took her half an hour to shake them, and she had to run over three patrolmen and nearly flattened one old lady who was out for an evening stroll in the process.
She needed to lay low. Until she knew whether or not she'd successfully broken the TMPD she couldn't be seen in public. If she failed, they would be coming for her with everything they had. And even worse, her colleagues would be seeking to take advantage of any perceived failure. Kaolinite had been removed from supremacy because of her continued failures. Eudial was under no illusions that she was immune from that same fate.
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Captain Fujita looked at the partially wrecked precinct. The fires were under control and the wreckage from the damaged sections were being cleared away, but it would be at least a month before the building was fully repaired. In all, there had been twenty three dead and thirty seven wounded as a result of the attack. If Chrono and the Senshi hadn't arrived to help repel the attackers, it could have been worse. Much, much worse.
The woman responsible for the attack, Eudial she called herself, had gotten away. But every single officer who had gotten a good look at her agreed that she was the person who Fujiwara had described in the previous daimon attack on the police. That meant they now had a second name, if false, to go with the descriptions of the people responsible for the attacks on his city.
As crime scene investigators photographed the battlefield and paramedics took away the wounded, Fujita turned his attention to his allies. The Senshi had all left after the fighting was over, but Chrono had remained, talking to an old woman who he recognized as one of the two who had confronted him at the hospital.
"I'm afraid my cross barrier's had it, Chrono." The woman said in English. "Someone in a police car ran one of them over. Unless Shader can make a new set, I'm afraid I can't help anymore."
"That's alright, Azmaria," Chrono assured her. "You've been out of the business for seventy years now. I don't have any right to expect you to come back in at this point."
"Are you going to introduce me to your colleague, Chrono-san?" Fujita asked in Japanese.
Chrono took the hint and introduced them, switching over to Japanese. "Azmaria, this is Captain Fujita. Captain, this is my sister-in-law Azmaria."
The old woman held out her hand "Exorcist Third Class Azmaria Hendric Christopher, Order of Mary Magdalen. Retired."
Fujita took the woman's hand. "Aren't you a little old to be his sister-in-law?" He inquired.
"Well, we're not technically in-laws. Back when we were both with the Order, I was his partner's protégé. After we left, I married her little brother. Rosette died before she and Chrono got the opportunity to marry, otherwise we would be in-laws.
"As for Chrono's age, he isn't the first person the Order's had who's been much older than he appeared. Minister Remington, the top exorcist in the Militia back in the twenties, had been claiming to be twenty seven for fifty years when I joined."
Fujita made a mental note to have someone look into this Order when he could spare the manpower.
Turning his attention back to Chrono, Fujita inquired about how a corner of Eudial's van came to be vaporized.
"Tetragrammaton energy cannon," He said, producing a small pistol. "Most powerful man-portable anti-paranormal weapon ever made."
"So that's what happened to it," Mrs Christopher mused. "The Order's been looking for that gun for decades. Rosette had the only prototype and they lost the schematics, so they haven't been able to make any more."
"And why didn't you mention the existence of that gun when you offered to provide weapons that could fight against these things?" Fujita asked sharply.
"Because Sacreds can be produced in bulk quantities much more easily than new guns can, especially ones that operate on totally different principles than normal handguns. Because training people to use and maintain the Tetragrammaton would take time we didn't have, as I'm the only one in the area who's ever used one. And because if you're not sure of your shot, this can cause a lot of damage by accident." Chrono pointed to the van. "You see that? That was one shot, on the low power setting. Imagine what would happen if someone set it to high and then missed."
Fujita winced. Most of his men weren't very good shots. Since they were normally on duties that didn't require the use of firearms, they didn't have to be. A bad shot with that little gun could probably knock a sizable hole in the side of a building, with potentially catastrophic consequences for anyone in it. At least with bullets a missed shot can only harm one bystander at most. No, his men were not ready to handle something that powerful.
"Okay, I'll go along with that, but I can't guarantee that the government will. This incident is going to attract notice from the higher-ups, and they are going to have questions. Don't be surprised if they want you to answer some of them."
News vans were approaching the station. Fujita knew that he had to make a statement. Walking towards the perimeter, he raised his voice so that everyone around could hear him.
"People. Tonight the criminal organization calling itself the Death Busters thought that they could send a message to us. A message saying that we are powerless against them and that we should give up. They failed.
"We are not going to give up. We are going to hunt down every single one of them and bring them to justice. They have declared war against the people of Japan, and in response we are going to bury them." Turning to look at the fallen form of one of his men being zipped up into a body bag, he added "Literally if necessary."
Pointing to the broken van, he started giving orders. "I want forensics on that van stat. I want the fingerprints of every single person who's driven, ridden in, or even been near that vehicle for the past week taken and analyzed. I want the license plate and VIN run down. I want to know who owns it, where they live, where they work, and who they associate with. And I want a BOLO put out for the car she stole for her escape.
"Members of the press. We have sketches of two suspected members of this organization, one of whom was seen leading the attack on this precinct. Since we don't have power here, as soon as someone can get those sketches down to the substation we will make copies for distribution. Please post those copies in the news and request that anyone with information about said people come forward."
Turning back to his people, Fujita snapped out one last command. "You have your orders, people. Move it!"
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None of the fingerprints found on the vehicle matched any known individuals, but the vehicle turned out to be registered to a woman whose driver's license photo was easily identified as the woman who called herself Eudial. By the time the sun rose, the police had enough evidence to wake a judge and request an arrest warrant for Yuko Arimura, AKA Eudial, philosophy teacher at Mugen Gakuen and multiple cop killer.
Officers were dispatched to both her residence and her place of work, but she was long gone. Undeterred, they proceeded to search her home and question her students and colleagues in the hopes of figuring out where she might have went. They didn't find any clues to that, but they did find a different lead.
"On a hunch, I showed some of Arimura's students the sketch of the second suspect." Detective Kurosawa reported. "Every single of them recognized the woman in the sketch as a Kaoli Night, personal assistant to the principal, a Souichi Tomoe. She's been missing for some time. The last time anyone will admit to have seeing her was several hours before the Senshi supposedly knocked her off Tokyo Tower."
"So the real name of this Kaolinite is Kaoli Night?" Captain Fujita groaned. "Please tell me it's possible to charge her for having such a stupid alias."
"I'm afraid not, sir."
"That's two people working at that school with a Death Buster connection. Is there any chance that more people on the staff are involved?"
"There's no evidence to charge anyone with anything, but I suspect that Tomoe is involved in this up to his neck. I just can't prove it."
"Then keep digging into the pasts of those two women and this Tomoe. This case is not going to be shelved for any reason. We are going to close it, no matter what. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir. My partner is already working on getting a search warrant for Night's residence, but I suspect that her associates will have already sanitized her home of anything that could lead back to them by now. If I thought I could get a warrant that would let me take the entire school apart to find evidence of a Death Buster connection, I'd have tried to get one. But I doubt I'd be able to get one. Not yet, anyway."
"Then keep working on it until you get that proof or find something that tells us we should be looking elsewhere."
"Right." With that, the detective left the Captain's office.
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Father Francesco Vazzoler of the Magdalen Order picked up his luggage. His equipment had passed through customs without notice, as he knew it would. One of the reasons that he had been selected for this mission was the fact that his chosen weapon was not recognizable as such.
Somewhere in the city, a demon laired. He had thought that the Order had wiped them all out decades ago, but one of them had escaped, apparently aided in doing so by one of the most respected exorcists in the history of the Order, who had somehow been subverted into heresy without anyone noticing until long after his death. And now it was up to him to correct this grievous error.
He would find this Chrono. He would get him to reveal the location of any other demons that had escaped. And then he would purge that foul race from the face of the Earth once and for all.
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A/N: There is no official age for Chrono listed in the manga, I just made the 149 figure up.
I figure if the Catholic Church had ray guns in the mid 1920s, everybody would have them in at least limited production by WWII, so there has to be some reason the knowledge didn't spread if I don't want the weapons tech base to be totally different from our world by the 1990s. So Chrono has the only working Tetragrammaton.