Chapter Fifteen: Some Kind of Evil Counterpart

Ren waited at the gate leading to the old schoolhouse. When Beccca didn’t show, he presumed she’d already snuck inside. He gave it five minutes more than he otherwise would have, then snuck in as well.

The door to the old schoolhouse was already ajar. How… unstealthy. But it proved someone was already inside. The fortress shouldn’t activate, so Ren went in as well.

Showa-era wooden paneling fell away as cold futuristic metal flew up around him. At once, Ren was back in the Temporal Fortress.

Odd, he thought. Did Becca not go in?

Ren grabbed his Power Pendant.

“Castellan, run a scan. Let me know if anyone is present in the Temporal Fortress.”

The call ought to go out to any other ranger with their Power Pendant on their person. With classes well underway, it was questionable whether any of them would be in a position to come help. The castellan, however, was always on duty.

“Scanning… scanning…” the telepathic announcement came over the group comms.

Before this scan could complete, Ren saw a familiar green flash out of the corner of his eye. He turned to the right. Ren henshin’d then took off in pursuit.

“There’s somebody in here!” he said.

Turning a corner down a hallway he hadn’t been down before, he just spied a gold-trimmed boot and sash amidst a blur of green.

“Scanning complete! There are… two… mahourangers in the Temporal Fortress. Kermes Ranger and…” the castellan’s voice died down.

Lights flickered, and the metal halls of their secret base seemed to shudder.

“Sabotage! Sabotage!” the castellan blared. “All rangers report to the temporal fortress. Transporting in five…”

Only then did the other rangers chime in.

“Wait! Wait. I’m in the middle of class,” said Miyu, in a whisper. “People will see.”

Yuto and Sakura responded similarly.

“I’m at the athletic field,” Haruto said. “Give me a few minutes to find some excuse to go to the bathroom and I’ll double back to the old schoolhouse.”

Five minutes alone with an intruder. Great, Ren thought. Just great.

“Can I get a map of this place?” Ren asked. “Maybe I can find wherever they’re heading for. Cut them off?”

The helmet materialized in Ren’s hand. He donned it, noting the slight golden resin where it had been repaired from the waylaying Red Oni had delivered. A new overlay appeared over his vision, to be toggled on and off at will.

“Emergency cartographic delivery, initiated!”

What once appeared like procedural generation was revealed as an elaborate layout of false-turns and redundant pathways that looped back around towards the entrance. Armed with this guide, Ren went off after this supposed intruder.

This wing of the fortress ended in a deep, elaborate silo complex. Runic text appeared on the map, auto-translated to Japanese.

“Power Chamber… what’s that?” Ren asked.

Whatever these silos were for, their saboteur was headed right for them.

“It’s the generator room,” the castellan said simply.

Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Ren didn’t want to know what kind of magical utilities were used to power this place. Did magical crystals produce radiation?

“Emergency temporal shift!” the castellan announced.

At once, the map changed. The fortress could be reassembled, at least by broad segments. The generator silos were not on the opposite end of the complex while Ren’s hallway was now leading him to the Power Command Center.

The castellan was waiting at a terminal.

“Intruder is still on the loose. On the loose!” said the spectral frame.

No sooner did Ren reach the room than did another figure come running down the hall. It was Haruto, still in the school’s requisite athletic outfit.

“We’re under attack?” Haruto asked. “By who?”

“I know she was headed this way,” Ren said. “Unless swapping the layout around separated us. And I’m quite certain she’s a she—has a gold skirt type thing around her waist, I think?”

“Rogue rangers can’t be tracked directly,” said the castellan.

“A rogue what?” Ren snapped. “You said there weren’t any others!”

Further debate or explanation was cut off as an emerald streak rushed through the halls at the very edge of human perceptibility. A figure in green armor with gold boots and a skirt performed a flying leap and hit Haruto with an open-palm strike. The unarmored ranger went flying into the wall and collapsed in a heap.

“H-hey!” Ren said, already in a defensive stance.

His green counterpart was dressed in a thematically appropriate armor that was nonetheless more sinisterly angular than the mahourangers.

“For the Kagehime or… whoever!” this emerald-tinted menace cried.

+++

Rangers Smalt, Snapdragon, and Mauve warped directly into the control room in response to a frantic distress call from the castellan. Miyu, Yuto, and Sakura arrived and immediately transformed into their mahouranger armor.

Sparks flew from every terminal and flat screen. Haruto remained on the floor on the opposite end of the room. The castellan itself wandered around without its helmet. A sixth ranger danced around with twin daggers and sliced gnarly gashes into Ren’s uniform. Ren front-flipped onto the floor in front of the main control panel.

“Hi!” the enemy ranger waved nonchalantly. “Now, where’s that map…”

A green-tinted glove danced around on a terminal.

“There we go!” she said. “Off to the garage!”

With superhuman speed, the green streak ran off.

“Who was that!?” Yuto asked.

The castellan leaned down to pick up its head.

“Malachite Ranger! Malachite Ranger!” cried the castellan. “A Power Token stolen from another worldline long ago!”

They barely had any time to respond to that. The castellan urged the rangers onward. Miyu went to check on Ren. The Malachite Ranger’s knives had torn massive gashes into the Kermes Ranger’s suit. It would have to be healed in the pods. But first…

“I can still walk,” Ren said with a groan. “After her.”

Haruto had by now transformed into his own suit and ran down the hallway with an obvious limp. The other rangers ran after this new saboteur.

“Did anyone even know we had a garage?” Yuto asked.

The map was beamed down to all the rangers, now. An extra wide room, double or triple the size of the command center or training room, awaited to the ‘south’ of the facility. The team didn’t even know what they were heading for!

“Hello, fellow rangers!” A new, feminine voice invaded their comms. “So it turns out these Lifestream Regulator Automated Adaptive Mecha will take the form of a creature from your ancestral mythology…”

The squad of five gasped, though they didn’t know what that meant.

This voice was unmodulated. It was very obviously Becca. But how did she get a ranger transformation?

“She’s going to steal the Automated Adaptive Mecha!” the castellan said.

“So my full is, like, Svenson. Rebecca Svenson. I know I mostly go by Becca-san here, but it turns out the adaptive mecha identifies that ancestral touchstone as Norse Mythology. Come to the garage. This thing is huge!”

Despite this invitation, a door closed shut before the group. The castellan took several precious seconds to hack the door back open, by which time alarms blared throughout the Temporal Fortress.

“Emergency temporal shift. Emergency depressurization event. Emergency worldline manifestation.” This droning voice was far different than the castellan, more robotic.

The ‘garage’ as it was loomed before them, plummeting down several stories. Not five, but countless building-sized robotic mechs waited in the wings, with many more embedded in divots in the walls. It was a bit like a maintenance bay, but what kind of crews could possibly maintain these massive mechs escaped Ren and the others.

“She’s there!” Yuto pointed to a hunk of metal dead center in the room.

A portal loomed on the far wall—they could see Tenshigurobu far below.

“We’re in the air!?” Sakura asked.

They only appeared to be in the air. The Temporal Fortress existed in some strange pocket dimension. The portal happened to open above the city, creating that illusion. Ren didn’t have time to dwell on that, preoccupied with the transforming mecha before them.

Six limbs emerged from a bare-bones silverish frame. These ‘legs’ warped immediately into hooves while a front-facing cockpit jutted upwards and began to turn into a very horse-like muzzle. At the nape of the neck, dwarfed by the surroundings, was the Malachite Ranger.

The other rangers looked to Ren, awaiting guidance.

“Uh… after her!” Ren yelled.

The group of five—yes, even injured Ren and Haruto—jumped onto the still-forming robotic mega-horse with acrobatic leaps. They held onto fiber-optic-looking cables on what passed for the mech’s ‘tail’.

No sooner had they landed and grabbed on than did the six-legged robo-beast go rocketing out of the Temporal Fortress and into the skies of Tenshigurobu.