Either way the best course of action became clear. They had entered an open area between four towers arranged in a diamond, each with sleek reflective surfaces and pyramid spires so that they looked like prismatic crystals catching the dwindling sun to create dazzling arrays of light across the air. The openness, with no unusual protrusions or nearby walls around which Akemi could dart, made the locale perfect.

She flung herself from the bubbles and did not angle her trajectory at Akemi but rather the space behind her while she raised her katana overhead. She closed her eyes and emptied her mind of needless noise, attracting and collecting the energies that buzzed inside her into a neat and tidy sphere of thought, streaks of indigo and celadon ricocheting across the firm but translucent confines of their prison, gaining velocity and speed and power.

Her eyes opened and the powers she visualized with her mind's eye appeared around her katana. They brimmed with fluorescent pulse, shivering up and down the length of molecular steel. The power blossomed into a neon halo around the katana's tip, a halo that swallowed her sight and plunged the skyscrapers and the sky into effaced whiteness. Homura Akemi remained, a dark smudge on the purity of her mental landscape, wings of lazy inksplots and a body like that of a salamander wriggling itself from Jurassic tar mires to touch land for the first time.

"Bourrasque," said Erika.

Her bones adopted the lightness of a bird's. The wind billowed at her back and gave her strength.

"Denouement."

The whisper of breath that issued from her lips bid the power in her sword to release. From her body burst a stellation of copies of herself, built and fibered with thick strands of wind. The copies formed exponentially and soon littered the entire space between the four skyscrapers with their eyeblink movements and sword slashes. Made of no solid matter, they could travel far faster than Erika herself, faster even than Akemi despite her swift gliding motions across the stagnant air. Hundreds, thousands of the wind-borne forms streamed through the area. They encircled Akemi and fenced all avenues of escape, at least on a horizontal plane. One tremendous beat of her wings and Akemi dropped beneath the onslaught, dipped into a nosedive and bombed toward the concrete roads below.

Erika's thousand wind clones pursued, buzzing about Akemi like a vicious cluster of wasps. Erika herself dropped, the energy transferred from her soul to the spirits outside. She allowed herself to fall in a perfectly rigid and straight position. Even if she hit the ground she had withheld enough power to stick the landing without harm to herself. Her hair rustled behind her as the wind rose to greet her.

(Chapter 41)