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A small blip on the other side of the world sped toward the archon: Fargo. Her jacket billowed behind her as she soared through the asteroid belt of pruned roots, the barrel of her gun awhirl and burning with light energy. Winnipeg tried to move her arm, failed. Her body sailed as if in zero gravity, although she harbored the distinct impression of downward descent. It was all up to Fargo now.

Winnipeg bumped into something, changed direction. She revolved in midair, unable to see the archon or Fargo anymore, unable to control her flight. Her turn was slow and lateral. She saw what she had bumped into: Regina-Saskatoon, a bloodied mess interspersed with flecks of white, either skin or bone. Her eyes were empty, her mouth slightly open. One arm missing entirely.

The gem fastened to the brooch on her shoulder had shattered.

Winnipeg's uncontrolled revolution continued until again she faced the archon and Fargo. The timing was impeccable, as at that moment Fargo unleashed her attack.

Winnipeg had turned too late to see if Fargo had charged her gun again or if she had used some other technique. Fargo did not strike her as the kind of Puella Magi who employed very many techniques. Her one technique was usually effective enough.

The archon reared back as gallon after gallon of pure light bombarded it. The light flared out and repainted the walls, drowning the orange and green and other violent colors with all-purifying white. The fabric of the bizarro dimension began to shatter before the archon did, or not so much shatter as fade; through the walls osmosed images of earthen rock, of a real world somewhere that may on some plane of existence overlap with theirs. The archon itself lit up along its thin tubular body with the effulgent cannonballs force-fed it by Fargo as her gun whirred with unstoppable force. Its tricks stripped away, its roots, its limbs, its everything, the archon was not so strong. Winnipeg clenched her fist, felt blood vessels return to her veins. She perhaps could still stand to fight herself.

But allow Fargo that glory.

She revolved again. Regina-Saskatoon had retreated to a small motionless dot in the distance. Winnipeg did not see the archon finally die, did not see what spectacular explosion or implosion or conflagration destroyed its body. She did not see much of anything as the light from Fargo's gun swallowed the world, until not a strip of orange or green remained. She did, however, hear the beast roar with a final, tragic scream, a scream that seemed to carry a physical corporeality in its absolute sorrow and despair, a scream surprisingly knowing, devoid of animalism, a scream that seemed to lament the end of life rather than a primal instinct of survival.

Then the scream ended. And the light ended. And Winnipeg hit the ground in a small dark cave.

(Chapter 11)