A/N: Yup, I'm still working on this one too! Enjoy!

Having only travelled digitally once, Min was far from used to the sensation. To go instantly from standing in one location to another with only a moment of that timeless pearlescent gray was a bit disconcerting. She'd been too tired previously to appreciate just how disconcerting. This time, as that pearlescent gray faded, there was a stumbling moment of dizziness and an odd weight that seemed to pull at every inch of her.

The dizziness passed almost instantly as she oriented herself to the new ground underfoot. The weight remained. Lifting her arms, she realized she was now in full armor. Two nasty looking machine pistols were on her hips and something much heavier was on her back. She reached up and drew the rifle, regarding it. It was cleaner than the one she liked to use in the Crucible, as if no one had handled or fired it before. It should have looked like a toy, with its white stock and gold-colored plating, yet somehow it both looked and felt far more serious than any other she had yet handled.

They were standing in a field underneath a sky that was bright but overcast. Behind her, Gen's ship was already lifting away, sending the low grass into ripples and waves around her feet. In the distance she could see trees, and the few tortured bones of ruins. Much closer, just a few hundred yards across the field, were a collection of canvas tents and small metal caravans as eclectic and knocked together as the people she could see moving around them.

Gen was already walking toward them, tiny dimes of dark appearing on his long leather coat. A pat, then another, appeared on the faceplate of the helmet she was wearing as rain debated falling.

She followed wordlessly, heading after the Exo as he approached a knot of people near the edge of the tents and campers.

Two unfamiliar Guardians greeted him as he approached, and as Min neared one of them nodded a greeting at her. She returned it.

"So far it's been quiet," one was saying to Gen as Minerva joined them, his voice suddenly piping into her helmet courtesy of her Ghost. "Don't know what the Fallen are looking for but they're at least sticking to Akron. We should be ready to move these people in the next hour."

"Recon?"

"There's a hunter in there now," the second Guardian said with a nod toward the distant ruins.

That must be Akron, she thought with wry amusement. Such a funny name for a city.

Not that it seemed much of a city was left. Only a few of the girders of the tallest buildings could be seen in the thick patch of woods.

"All right," Gen said, then gestured at Min, drawing her attention back from the ruins. "This is Minerva. It's her first time in the field."

The shorter of the two Guardians jerked his chin in greeting, but the taller appraised her with a half grin.

"Yeah, I think I've seen you on the feeds. Couple days ago, wasn't it? You held that flag under the northside scaffolding until final tick down. I'm Preston, this is Crash." He gestured at the shorter man. "Glad to have you in the Titans."

Min had learned a week or two before that the Crucible not only served to train new Guardians, or help old veterans maintain their edge. It was also one of only two real sources of sport and entertainment to the City at large, with bouts almost constantly available on digital stream to any vid screen that chose to tune to it. While she understood the purpose of the Crucible in helping her to gain the skills she needed as a Guardian, she wasn't sure how comfortable she was with this alternate use of it. Some Guardians appeared to eat it up, gaining almost celebrity status among the Lightless (one of the things Gen had explained in the bar was that those left of humanity- Awoken and Exo included-who were not Guardians were referred to as the Lightless).

She was unsure how to take Preston's praise. While she had held the flag in that bout he referred to, her team had still lost the contest. It didn't seem a particularly impressive thing to mention.

"C'mon Min. Let's head to the other side of camp," Gen said. "Scout should be back soon with some more information. Until they do it's best if we make sure no Fallen are sneaking in on that flank. We are not the only ones with scouts."

She followed him, her eyes straying to the people in the camp as they passed through. Most were working on packing up, loading their belongings with hands practiced at doing this often. Min thought that, being nomads, they must be. They were ignoring the few spits of rain, much heavier things on their minds.

"Why are they not in the City?" she asked Gen.

"They have their reasons, I suppose," he said. "Some think that living in the City robs them of freedom. Others just find it claustrophobic. Some families or religious groups formed these nomad clans in the Collapse and just never saw a reason to change. Believe it or not, the City itself started something like this."

"It did?"

He nodded as they drew to a halt at the edge of the camp, surveying the horizon. "Scattered camps, refugees, nomads- seeking safety they started to cluster together under the Traveler. Caravans came in, merging, growing larger. Titans like Zavala started to go out and find them, bringing them together, then protected them. They started to build the Wall to keep them safe."

"Titans built the Wall?" Minerva asked. She'd heard some of this before, but through rumors and gossip. She still found it hard to know what to believe and what was just myth or legend.

"Oh yes," Gen said. She regarded him a moment, then looked back at the working Lightless. Her eyes kept finding the children, of which there were more than a few.

"Where are we taking them?"

"We're just providing protection," he said, following her gaze. "It'll be up to the leaders of the camp to decide where to go."

Minerva nodded, her thoughts moving back to the City. Standing at the top of the Tower and seeing it for the first time had taken her breath away. It was remarkable what they'd been able to accomplish with a starting point no grander than these people here now, loading up their things, just wanting to be safe. It was even more remarkable when you realized that most of what was left of human civilization was contained in just that one spot, that one City- it's lives and wellbeing relying on ones like her.

Relying on her.

"I'm picking up what could be gunfire," her Ghost said suddenly, spinning toward the distant ruins. Gen's Ghost turned almost at the same time.

"Poet?" Gen asked, glancing at it.

"Confirmed," it said, the first time it had spoken anything she could understand. "I hear Fallen weapons. Quite a few."

Min listened, and after a moment she could hear a faint, oddly humming sound. Immediately she remembered the gunfire from the Cosmodrome, after she'd first awakened. Gen put his hand to his head. "Preston, Crash; we've got gunfire in the ruins," he said as he gestured at her, already starting in that direction with Min quickly following. "We've got it. Stay with the Lightless."

Just another Crucible, she thought. No reason to be afraid, it's just another Crucible.

Only she knew better. She would be fine, but if she and the other Guardians weren't able to stay between the Fallen and the people in the camp, there would be no convenient Ghost to bring the Lightless back to life.

Her Ghost sounded nervous as he spoke, zipping along with her just behind her right shoulder. "Here, I should…let me lock you in. I should have done it before."

The HUD of her helmet suddenly came to life. Displays designed to be unobtrusive glimmered with important information like ammo count, weapon cooldown indicators, oxygen, and radiation levels. Min had often wondered in the beginning how those Guardians who favored helmets that seemed to have no face plate functioned without being able to see. Of course, they could see: the helmet just displayed the visual field around them in the same way it displayed the HUD.

They reached the trees and the undergrowth, and Min marveled at how quietly Gen could move, even at speed. She felt like she was crashing through every bush, stepping on every twig or dry leaf, making enough noise that a deaf man would think an entire platoon was charging in.

The forest floor was uneven, humps of broken rock and asphalt remnants of an old road that once had probably been a busy throughfare into Akron all but lost in the moss, dirt, and undergrowth. Underneath one old tree she briefly saw a twisted iron lamp, tangled in its roots. The gunfire was growing louder, and it wasn't just the humming weapons of the Fallen; there were sharp whipcracks of more conventional fire as well as well. Then something exploded, hard enough to tremble the ground under their feet. Smoke and dust flared up in the distance.

"Hunter, can you hear me?" Gen asked, his voice clear in Min's ear. "What is your position?"

There was a crackle of static and for just a moment Min thought she heard a voice break through. Whatever it said was lost in an inhuman howl and another rush of gunfire.

They rushed into the ruins, weaving through a maze of old roads, alleys, and crumpled concrete shadowed by broken building facades and lined by the rusted hulks of cars. The louder the gunfire got, the faster Min ran.

She was out speeding even the Exo now, thoughts, fears, and hesitations falling behind her like leaves. Charging around a corner she got her first clear look at the situation and the Fallen.

Dozens of the creatures had swarmed what was left of a small square, leaping on and around a broken fountain. Swirling lances of blue light were flying everywhere like mad fireflies amid those humming growls. The creatures were man-sized and bipedal, but most of their similarity to humans ended there. They had their faces swathed in some kind of cloth, or were wearing odd apparatus around their lower heads, but even with these obstacles it was clear they were utterly alien.

Four luminescent eyes glared from each head as the Fallen gibbered and screamed and clicked and gabbled nonsensically. Several wielded guns as odd as they were, but a few had metal spears or bladed weapons that sparked and writhed with electricity.

The Hunter was pinned down between two wrecked cars, but lively. Using one of the car hoods as a brace for her rifle, every snap of her weapon was hitting home. A Fallen fell yowling with one fewer arm than he'd started with; another's entire head vanished and he actually groped upward at the empty spot where it had been before crumpling.

The Hunter's makeshift cover was a blessing but also a hindrance. She had no room to maneuver, no easy path to retreat, and the Fallen were fighting a war of attrition. They seemed to be unconcerned how many of them fell in front of her, relying on their numbers to surge closer and closer to overwhelming her position. Min noticed that two or three were even scaling up the sides of the ruins nearby with the ease of cockroaches, intending to drop in on the nest from above.

Min's rifle snapped twice as she ran, the two closest to dropping on the Hunter falling from the wall overhead. One slammed into the hood of the car and limply rolled off, pulling the rifle out of the startled Hunter's hand as she recoiled backward. She drew a pistol in its place as Gen's gunfire snapped past Min's helmet close enough to alert her HUD.

A shadow emerged from one of the upper ruin where Min had just knocked down the two cleverer Fallen. As it dropped through the air Min's breath seemed to seize in her chest.

This one was huge, dwarfing the other Fallen that scattered around it. If its fellows were roughly the size of a normal human man, this one was companion to Shaxx, or Zavala. Heavy armor gleamed from its chest and all four (four!) arms, its head crowned with an ornate helmet fanned with spikes.

It hit the ruined car in front of the Hunter and the metal crumpled like paper under its weight. The Hunter fell backward, lifting her pistol up toward the monster who did not seem to have noticed she was there. The four searing eyes were fixed on Minerva.

It stepped down from the car, its foot landing between the ankles of the Hunter on the ground beneath it. She fired her pistol upward at it, bullets sparking off the air in front of it in flares and flashes of red. The pistol fire drew its attention and it looked down.

Minerva found new speed in her legs. She was still holding the rifle but all thought of firing it had vanished. For a moment she felt like she was back in the Crucible on that first day, watching Nara torment the newly-born. As then, red seemed to be filling her head but this time it was not just the red of anger, and it was not replaced with pale blue. She could feel that light pouring into the rest of her, blazing crimson and gold. It raged through her, over her. She was not consumed in it, she consumed it. It seethed in her mind like a sun and it felt…good.

The giant Fallen, hand momentarily reaching out toward the Hunter, looked back up at Minerva and the lifting golden light reflected on its helmet danced. The Hunter ducked as the Titan leapt from the ground and tackled the giant.

For a moment before she hit him, Minerva could see her arms wreathed in flames, but she had no time nor thought to wonder at that. She hit the beast around the waist and the force of the impact threw them both back over the car. The pain of her shoulder dislocating was a passing thought as they crashed to the ground in a smoldering skid, tearing up some of the old asphalt in a trough and sending the monster's smaller charges scattering.

Two sets of hands tore Minerva away and then threw her. She hit the car again in a crumple of metal and more pain spread over her shoulders and down her back. Somewhat surprised to see she had kept hold of the rifle throughout, she opened fire on the giant as he struggled back upward. The bullets sailed through the area where he-

-had been? She gaped in shock as the giant shimmered and vanished the moment before the bullets would have struck him, only to reappear instantly several feet away, still in the process of getting up. Instinctively she pulled her aim toward him again, the bullets taking out another couple of his compatriots as she swept the weapon around.

A dark purple streak of light blazed past her and formed a writhing ball of energy near the Fallen's feet. As if it were rope, light whipped out from this ball and coiled around the monster. He howled and struggled, trying to tear away from the sudden tether.

Min had seen this effect before, in the Crucible. While she herself had only managed to 'light up' twice before- once while fighting Nara in her first bout, and just that morning as she cushioned her fall from the Tower- she had seen the other Guardians do so frequently. This particular effect was formed of Void energy, and Min had been on the receiving end of it herself in more than one match. It served as a trap, a snare- bounding around its target and anchoring them to the spot.

Some part of her realized that she must have just lit up again, thinking about that red and orange light, the flames along her arms- but she had no time to think over it now.

Her bullets reached the ensnared monster and this time they tore into him, punching through cloth and armor, fans of blood filling the air. The smaller Fallen howled, several breaking and fleeing into the ruins, others moving forward as if intending to help the giant. Gen, having reached them now, efficiently picked these ones off, and sent shot after the fleeing others.

The snare was fading as the Void power feeding it died away. Min lifted her aim and fired at the brute's head, determined to take it down before it had freedom of movement again. More than one bullet whined back past her as the helmet deflected them, but it soon gave way under her barrage. When that happened, the monster quickly collapsed.

Min let off, and a ringing silence flooded in. The giant let out a gurgling, rasping sound and one three fingered hand dug into the dirt as it made a feeble effort to rise. Then the Hunter was suddenly there, stepping lightly on the hand and emptying her pistol into the beast. Only when it had stopped moving completely did she turn toward them, and Min realized she knew her.

"Wow, Mini," Kalina let out a breathy laugh and shook her head as the rain started to fall in earnest. "Do you make an entrance or what?"