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“So you abandoned your army to protect your family," the man says eventually.

“Technically, no. I knew my parents weren't on any of the shuttles. If they were then you may have an argument, but no. Effectively giving up on defending Mars would have no benefit for protecting my family."

“The point is you had a duty that you needed to perform. You were in charge. People listened to you, followed your orders. That means it was your duty to see that the orders given to you were followed through. Your word ended that battle at that moment, made it a guarantee to be a loss. We might not have been able to beat the entire Consortium, but if you had stayed and fought, if you had done your duty to the people in charge then we might have succeeded, or at least stall long enough for us to be able to put in a much stronger resistance over the planet, either Earth or Mars. Instead your actions might as well have doomed every man and woman that lived there. Further as a result of pulling out the bulk of your own forces and sacrificing our own, you made it very difficult for us to defend ourselves when our two sides decided to go to war against each other over the civil war and right of secession."

Anon is about to try and argue the semantics of the fact that the battle was already lost long before she gave the order, as well as the fact that she wasn't the one in charge. There'd be no way that they would have allowed to put one of her kind in any kind of position to truly have power. But to go further in that direction would only really be accomplished by explaining the politics of her kind to someone who genuinely didn't care and wouldn't accept the decision anyway. But so long as it kept him talking she'd talk her way as much as possible. But then she feels it. The power in the bar is denied to her for a split second. Technically, as the Head Guardian it'd be against all manner of regulations to ever restrict her access to the strips. The only way it could even be done is if the station had the entire outer ring cut power to the entire strip. Meaning this was a decision made in command and served to get her attention. Either she was about to blow everything or the mission was complete. Either way she was done playing and so Anon steps away from the wall and raises her hand. “I'm going to have to stop you there."

“What do you think you're doing, traitor? Don't you realize I could press a button and destroy your entire station? You aren't really in much of a position to really have much of a say on what I do and do not get to say. You said you wanted me to say what crime you committed and so I am."

“Yeah, about that. At this point, I couldn't care less. You know what, go ahead and press the button. It'll at least be more preferable to having to listen to your inane speech. Because, you know what? You have no real say in what happened. You weren't there. You weren't even alive when they came for us. Your parents wouldn't have even been alive. I doubt you know a single person that was on Mars when they came for us. So you got no right to speak of what I did. And knowing full well what they did I would have done the exact same thing. The idiots running those human ships thought they could take on a Coreward. And based on whether to defend the people that got us into that mess and the civilians that wanted nothing more than to live their lives I would have done the same thing. My parents were on Mars at the time. If I had known what the Consortium was going to do I would have tried to negotiate. To ask for time to fully evacuate the planet and then let them do whatever they want to that planet and our fleet. So you want to talk about loss? Try having to watch your parents die because some arrogant human decided to pick a fight with the big dogs," Anon states before giving him a shove with magic.

“What? But how?" he demands.

“Oh, yeah, about that," Anon says as she simply removes the cuffs around her wrist and starts spinning around her finger. “There's a reason why people who know what they're doing will come make sure that it's on properly. If too cowardly to get close, a small shove can often do the trick. I've seen too many people try and be clever about defeating these to not know how to get around them. And you're also missing one very crucial flaw in your grand plan of the cuffs. Even if they were on I wouldn't be defenseless. You never secured my familiar. I could have disguised her, had her sneak behind you and attacked when your guard was done.

The human, not at all willing to be intimidated by the situation pushes the button in his hand, only to find it not doing anything. “What?"

“Yeah, you see, I've been stalling you this entire time as we've been getting into your ship and disarming your bomb. Didn't even lose a single HAPI in the process, either. You must feel so proud that your men were so incompetent that they couldn't even do their job of defending your big threat properly."

“Oh yeah, then I can at least take you out with me!" The human shouts before pulling the trigger to the bomb on his chest. At first he grimaces, having expected to suddenly blow up, but then stares at confusion about the fact that not only is he still here but the bomb is perfectly fine. Thinking that perhaps the detonator may be malfunctioning he starts pressing it repeatedly before looking at it to make sure that there's nothing wrong with the device.

“And that's not going to work either. I'm not stupid. I know you never intended to let me leave here alive. The thing is, though, that as powerful as anti-matter is, there's a reason why it's almost never used anymore in warheads. And that is simply because of all the power sources available, it is the easiest to diffuse. With Atler energy it's far too volatile to really stop. I don't think there's a shield strong enough to stop an Atler bomb of sufficient mass. It's kind of why Atler crystals are regulated so strongly. That and you really have to know what you're doing to not blow yourself up trying to rig an Atler bomb, they tend to get very volatile when you want to use them offensively. And nuclear is just a pain in the tail to contain and deal with. But anti-matter? That's easy. Anti-matter is always kept in containment and then when you want it to blow, you expose a bit to normal matter. For a bomb you just shut off containment. Now the entire time you've been ranting at me I've been doing just that. Your trigger worked just fine. The containment of your bomb is down. It's just right now I'm also containing the bomb with Sym magic. And I've been slowly draining it, exposing it to normal matter bit by bit. And right now, it's small enough that I can put you in a dome of Sym magic and let go of the containment and the only thing that will be blown up by it is you. So have fun with that."

As the human tries to express his outrage, Anon lifts him up into the air for good measure, places as strong of a barrier as she can around him, and then lets the bomb detonate. The human screams for a split second before he's completely destroyed by his own device and the entire barrier is encased in an extremely hot white plasma. Anon had underestimated the yield of the bomb and so cracks start to form in the barrier and little sparks of white plasma shoot out of the barrier at high speeds. Thankfully, though, the area they were in had nothing vital that could be damaged, and no one there that could be hurt beyond Anon herself. Anon looks around at all of the carnage and sighs. There's still going to have to be a lot of paperwork and cleanup for all of this. Thankfully, the cleanup isn't going to be her responsibility.

“Come to think of it, I might have been able to do just as much by simply tampering with his detonators. They weren't dead-man switches so I could probably have simply toyed around the insides to remove whatever would be causing the signal," She says to herself as she begins making her way back over to a transit tube. “Ah well. That kind of precision work was never my forte. And I'm pretty sure I'd be getting an earful over all this regardless."

Knowing where the cameras are located, in particular the main ones that'd be watching the event Anon walks over to the side. It's never good to reveal all your tricks at the same time. Best to make people think you're more capable then you really are. She raises up her arm and creates a thin little bridge of Sym magic between herself and one of the cameras and a little snakelike creature begins slithering down it. She had intended on leaving Mia in the shuttle just in case. She didn't know how dangerous or volatile the weapons the human was going to bring would be and she wanted Mia safe. Her familiar, however, had gotten it into her mind that if she had climbed up and wrapped herself around a camera that since the camera wouldn't see her the human wouldn't either. Once she has her familiar back she makes a point of passing back through the main camera on her way to the shuttles back into the main station.

Anon meets up with the council, finding they're already pouring over the information gleaned by the Shadows. Fewer are present now than the last time, but then again those not really required to deal with this follow up briefing had no real need to attend. Riu nods at her as she enters and Kinou quickly bows before seeing himself out. Even though their purpose is usually much the same, the Guardians being the visible protection and the Shadows being the hidden protections, it is generally customary for the heads of those two groups to not be seen together, not that that really makes any sense beyond just blindly obeying tradition. It made a sort of sense when capturing a Guardian to interrogate and learn about all of the defense was more common. That kind of practice came to its end around the time of space travel. Very hard to hide away a high profile individual when you can't leave the station and only have so many places to be. And even less necessary with the chip precautions. But then again, Kinou is a strong believer in the Myobu religion, and as Anon is a nogistune who believes in the Three Sisters, that would kind of make them clash anyway.

“So what's the verdict?" Anon asks

“The sad part is that the level of incompetence actually ends up working against us this time. Not only is there really not all that much of a paper trail for us to follow but they were so terrible at actually writing notes and plans that you can't make any sense of what they do write anyway. They are from the terrorist group they claim to be from, but that's a group that generally had so little funding that they had been previously dismissed as not a threat."

“I would argue they still weren't a threat."

“Be that as it may. The best we can come up with is that they were doing their standard protests and everything, then the leader happened to meet someone in a bar. This person said that they'd arrange for the group to not only get a ship, but an anti-matter bomb they can use to enact their revenge. Seeing as how you blew up the leader and none of the others saw them it'll be impossible to really be able to say who gave them the ship. But both the ship and the secondary anti-matter engine were reported stolen over a month ago. As things stand there is simply not much to go on to determine how they came across such a ship," Riu says.

“That sounds like someone has it out for the station more than Anon. If they wanted just one of us dead they'd have just called an assassin. So that'll be fun to try and anticipate what they're going to do next."

“I'll make sure to keep everyone on guard," Anon sys. “But for the moment, I don't think the people who set all these things in motion really know what they're doing either. They probably intended on the group showing up and immediately blowing up. But either they were only after the fleet or didn't expect that the station could protect itself from the blast. They also had failed to factor in that they'd want to justify their actions by putting me on trial rather than simply killing me. All in all it says we have a very resourceful person or group that wants to cripple if not destroy us, but have not put in any work on how that would actually be accomplished."

“On the plus side for the diplomats we do have here we've gained quite the reaffirmation that we will be able to protect them should any threat come to the station. They all were made aware of the situation and know that not only have we taken care of the problem but did so without even needing to blow up their ship. Repairs on the area you blew up should be good again for people to go through in a day or two. Finally, we won't be able to keep their ship; it was marked as stolen after all. However, we are under no obligation to send someone to go fly it out there to return it. If they want their ship and engine back they'll have to come get it, which will give us a small idea of who we might be dealing with. In the mean time we were able to let our engineers have a crack at it and I'm sure they probably stripped it down a bit, so that'll make them happy at least," Cerise says.

“In some regards I'm somewhat happy we don't get to keep the anti-matter engine. Cause I can only imagine what sort of havoc they will cause if they had a functional anti-matter generator to play around with," Anon says.

“And you make that sound like you don't have much faith in our engineers," Majis. Complains.

“Well, you wouldn't be the one that would be testing the insane shit you all manage to come up with. Honestly, I dread the day someone tries to use an Atler bomb on us, simply because I'm sure your engineers will find some excuse to test what putting a modified Atler bomb onto the back of a fighter will do in regards to performance."

“Don't be so crass, we would never," Majis trails off, his mind switching over to what all could be done with an Atler bomb.

“You know what? I'm going to just go and do some paperwork and not give you lunatics any more ideas," Anon says as she turns and leaves.