Valentine is mighty suspicious, upon a reread...

On the topic of Kyubey's... ahem... rudeness during the slumber party: I always figured the prominence of lesbian relationships within the magical girls' ranks wasn't an accident. It allowed the Incubators to reach soldier quotas, but not impact their human breeding stock. Completely logical. Totally screwed up. 100% Kyubey.

Love the part where Ryuko just marched right in expecting a vision. If there isn't fallout of some kind for THAT, I'll eat my shoes(I work on my feet in a messy place, and they've not been cleaned in a month). I feel pretty secure in my expected victory.

Finally got around to reading the update. I cherish each and every one. Every chapter is so utterly engrossing, and you never fail to blow my mind. I love the sci-fi aspect, and I love even more the sheer frustration from Simona of seeing the catastrophe about to happen but unable to do anything about it.

"jaw drop"
This is...hoo boy.

RIP Nadya.
Yuma, Kyouko, and Ryouko are all alive, but the latter is now lost in space with a buttload of scary information and now onboard a Ceph ship claiming to be willing to help her. I have a scary suspicion that the truth is about to reveal itself in a very big way and, if I'm right, it's gonna be a shock.

Good to see that you're okay, though. And sorry this took so long: things have been busy. Looking forward to Volume 4 and the Interlude before it!

holy fuck

Ohhhh that was so intense! I had shivers just reading this. Thanks for the amazing update!

And another thing! How did this ship even know where and when to be in order to pick up the Ryouko of chans? This has to be either HomuHomu or Godaka at work!

Love it! The Kyouko! Oh my god all of the Kyoukos! So it definitely took a crazy KyoYuma solution to pull this off! I mean it came at a high price, but that's not exactly unexpected with this much at stake or, you know, closing out a volume (heh). So proud of my girls!

As far as the Ryouko side of things goes, there was a hell of introspection and the like going on. I mean it's a good thing they have that quick-think bioware stuff because... much thinking was thought yo! Still, I loved all the fantastic Azrael action! I know she's not quite powered up to punch the plot in the face but damn, she gave it her all and I cheered her on the whole time! Not sure what to say about Simona. I mean it makes sense someone might do something this stupid due to a complete mental collapse but still. She basically changed the game from kinda risky to potentially certain doom just to try to get her way. How old is she again? Seems a little like a Konrushia moment there lol! And as for the chanified Ryouko? I have little doubt that the alien ship that was wait for her (and it was waiting for her, what you think some rando ship just happens to be hanging out in space RIGHT THERE?) Anyway the ship that was waiting for her is clearly under the control of the forces that were obliterated by the hostile assault force that Yuma and friends discovered last chapter. As to whether Homu to the Homu is present is uncertain, but I feel she is undoubtedly a collaborator.

Always appreciate the "science" put into this story. It's practically a novel on its own ends.

Poor Chitose.
She's lucky she's OP in her own way or she'd be a husk/vegetable.
The Goddess just gave her a nudge, I bet!

Oh come on. We set up the chapter with the info about the cubes. Of course we're going to use them! Hah!

Poor girls...

Weird how in this midst of chaos that Space is the calmer option.

Hopefully the sensors will find something while Ryouko brings the house down without going into berserk mode.
Hmm...so what does this mean for future interactions with the Cephs, I wonder.
Time to engineer some super elaborate utilization!...somehow.

So...it worked, but Azrael is like, "Nope not yet."
Yeah but Simona kinda likes them both...so of course she'd worry...if I remember correctly.
Homura...Valentin, really?
Holy crap. A black hole bomb...that's a thought.
So somehow...the Cephs were effected. Interesting.

Go Nadya Go!
She did it!
Oh hell she did it...

Really? A smear campaign? But by who?

Simona...that's a lot to take in, and the log is not unsound.
But it is to others. Interesting.
Holy crap!
Come on Ryouko...you got this.
You know with proper understanding, she might time travel.
The hell...so the blackhole thing worked, but are they still in the wormhole?
Come on!

So, umm, what happened?
24 LTM...that's not really far away. That means they don't have long to avoid the blast.
Seems even the Ceph are divided. Someone destroyed the peace before. Now perhaps there was a way...

Rereading random TtS chapters is fun. Love some of the spoilers I completely didn't pick up on earlier such as "It started with things like this" "If you ever manage to meet your grandmother, tell her we're sorry." Such good planning man. Even for very high quality fics, you can tell the authors are just YOLOing their plot as they go but definitely not you.

All hail Hieronym! So happy volume III is done as well :D. Didn't realize vol 5-6 will be short so I am sooo looking forward to finding out the conclusion of TtS!

Holy shit. Talk about a wild ride. So many lost. Nadya’s dead, without ever finding Misa.

Ryouko’s lost in interstellar space, aboard a Ceph ship, yikes. Simona had a breakdown, and got tossed through the wormhole by her scruff, and Asami now (probably) thinks Ryouko is dead

Yikes, I can see why this chapter took extra time

I have been waiting for 8 months for this moment, and you do not disappoint.

Yuma's battle. The plan was to escape by interdicting the alien ships so that they could not follow while the girls fled to their reinforcements. If they did not, the aliens would have jumped on top of the MGs reinforcements and killed everyone anyway. The aliens must have realised that something was wrong when their stealthed ship stopped responding to hails and realised that the MGs were going to target it, but in doing this, the aliens had to divide their forces into 3 parts, which greatly weakened them and let the MGs beat them 1 wave at a time. Losing Nadya is painful, but I love how you had her go out the same way canon-Kyouko did by detonating her soul gem. Losing Charlotte was painful as well, but not so much because we have spent less time with her than Nadya. Mami will probably be upset as well at the loss of her old friend.

Ryouko's battle. If Homura was really Valentine, then someone needs to answer how can she split her soul gem between bodies that are so far apart? Could Valentine be Homura's clone? When the cloning was revealed, there were concerns that the bodies inside were sentient and alive, so Ryouko's father's company made sure that certain neural pathways were clipped so that the clones were brain dead. What if that was not done for certain clones? There would thus be magical girl cloning facilities on Earth, inside Valentine's facilities. The same facility that Ryouko was revived in. Perhaps Valentine and/or Simona was grown in there, from Homura's DNA?

For that matter, I suspect that the cloaked alien ship is either:
1. Unmanned, it detected a friendly magical girl signature (it's pretty much established that aliens have their own magical girls) and kept trying to ping her so that she would come to it instead of needing it to try and get her through a bunch of hostile magical girls. It also leads to the question of why would it be there in the first place? Was it there to listen in on human plans through Ryouko? Just watching a highly valuable asset? How long has this super stealthed ship been watching them?

2. Homura is on board that ship. Simona saying that Homura would burn 15 years of resources on Ryouko just to throw her away at this point could be wrong because she never really knew Homura in the first place, only the face that Homura put on around her. If that is Homura's ship, that would be Homura rescuing a highly valuable asset before the pulsar exploded. The ship did not come to collect Ryouko as it needed to charge its drive and could not move while doing so, but then why could Homura not talk to Ryouko through normal telepathy but had to use alien telepathy instead?

Another thing that I want to point out is why would the magical girls reject Simona's request to remove Ryouko, when Simona's wish was to protect her AND her wish was telling Simona that Ryouko was in imminent danger? There is extra irony because Simona's name means "Listen to the magician", which everyone here did not do.

There are also very obvious parallels between Simona and Homura. Both of them have similar magic as they boost other magical girls, and both of them have similar wishes to protect the one closest to them. Homura wished to protect Madoka and Simona wished to protect Ryouko. Perhaps Simona is a clone of Homura's?

What a chapter! Though, I'm curious if you can top it for climactic big ending material. Blowing up a Pulsar is... pretty big.

I'm almost sad that we're getting another interlude next, 'cause darn but I don't want to wait a year to know what happens next for Ryuko. You created an interesting - though needed, I think - break from the formula of Ryuko leaving Earth at the start of a book and returning at the end. And, I'm curious about what the Ceph are like when not in the middle of a war.

Are they far bigger than we ever imagined, with the soldiers humanity has been fighting as a radical splinter group forced onto the edges of the empire by political policy and social disdain? Their technology, and how they only implement "the next big thing" when humanity pulls out a new trick leads me to think something like this might be going on. Their level of technological advancement is clearly beyond ours, at least in some fields. *shrug*

I'm rambling.

Standard praises of "great work!" apply.

Now, it's time to go make dinner(... at midnight...)

I always love seeing a message in the inbox saying this story has updated. By far one of best written and one of the most thought out worlds of any fanfic I've read. Many thanks for your work, great read.

I just can't get over how much I love this mix of remotely realistic physics and fantasy. This is probably my single most favorite story on the entire site, and that number is in the hundreds.