A/N: Hey! UPDATE: Next Wednesday's update might not be on time. Slash at all. I might opt to either update on maybe the Friday or potentially even the following Wednesday. I'm sorry! It's already written, but I do a lot of editing before uploading, and I just don't know if I'll have time to do all of that and prep for my exams. I had one today (which went…interestingly…) and have five more to go over the next two weeks. So, I'm really sorry about that, but I will definitely try my best to get it up anyway. Thank you so much to everyone reading this, honestly. I know I say it with like nearly every single update, but it's really cool to think that you guys are enjoying what I absolutely love doing. And it's nice to have something to distract me from my exam stress!

I'm a mess! Have a beautiful week (or two) and I'll leave you on this corker, where shit starts to get real.

1st May '19

Chapter 10: Breaking and Exiting

"As long as she's indebted to you," a feminine voice with a dirty husk said, "you'll probably come outta this with a valuable asset. If she trusts you, and to an extent, you trust her, maybe she'll be useful to us."

"It sits uncomfortably, though."

"It's a means to an end! Man, you'd make a terrible Turk."

"You're right there."

"Remember why you're doing this," the girl said, "and you're doing a great job, risking your life like this. But anyway. Ultimately, you're making a friend, and if she joins our cause? More power to us."

"Yeah…"

Training had become just that much tougher. Hand-to-hand got more brutal and the targets drew further away in Skill at Arms. PT was as rough as ever, and to boot, Aster's Turks sessions were getting longer and longer until she was hardly permitted any personal time in the evenings. Some days she wasn't even permitted meal times.

Sleep deprivation and starvation. That settles it. Tseng was trying to kill her. That was the only explanation.

The morning had seen the recruits battling with pugil sticks—long poles with padding at either end—in a pit of mud which was equal parts exhausting and entertaining. Tensions amongst the squad had been high, especially with the increased number of eyes on them of late, and bludgeoning each other with giant padded poles, gladiator-style in pre-determined and therefore blessedly indiscriminate one-on-one brawls, was a decent way to let off suppressed steam.

The dull thudding and smacking of the plastic batons against a hard helmet or body were sick and satisfying. Minor arguments held between recruits were taken up in the pugil fight and let go soon thereafter. Aster wished she could settle her disputes with Newberry so easily. That, though, would involve speaking to him, and she was far too proud for that.

The cadets formed two large concentric circles in a pit of thick, wet mud. After each match, the inner circle rotated clockwise and the outer counter-clockwise. It would turn when one of each pair hit the dirt.

In the centre of the circle was a tractor tyre, half-sunken. It was from here that the instructors observed, including their supervising member of SOLDIER, Angeal. At six-foot-four or so, he was already an imposing figure and didn't really need the extra foot from which he gained standing on the rim of the tyre. He appeared to be a man of few words but instilled some level of calm, unstrained control over the vicinity, as opposed to fear leading to violence, which was a good job given all the testosterone flying around the field.

Aster's favourite battle had been against Rex, the first battle where she felt she could actually talk to the person stood in front of her. Or yell at.

But to be fair, he was the one who started the trash-talking.

"What's an ice skater gonna do to a hunk like me?" He shouted over at her, flexing dramatically and grinning amongst other taunts.

"Are you kidding?" she shrieked, for a moment taking the bait. "Ice skating takes some damn strength. I could choke you with my thighs."

"Is that an offer?"

"No, it's a threat!"

"Doesn't sound like a threat to me!"

She shoved a finger in her mouth to fake gag and immediately regretted this poor decision when the taste of dirt overwhelmed her senses. "I'm gonna make you suck mud, dumbass."

"Bring it on!" He yelled with a dark grin, swinging his pugil stick into a more offensive grip.

Aster charged at him on the instant of the whistle. She lunged to jab the pole straight into his chest which he deflected easily and sturdily. The recoil after the connection left her gut open, but he didn't go for the stab. Instead, he swiped the pad up towards her face and into her block.

She shoved him back with a thrust and jabbed for his lower abdomen. It would have been a dirty trick if not for all the padding and protection provided to preserve the jewels of the cadet force. Didn't stop him calling her out on it though.

Through laughs and mud splattering surrounding them—and also the sound of howls and grunts and swearing and impacts in the air—the Unfortunate One of each pair started to hit the deck and their partners crowned victorious.

Aster stumbled backwards after a well-placed smack into the pole of her pugil stick when the mud sucked her foot up to the ankle. Once again he avoided the stomach. He swept low, but Aster recovered her balance and used the momentum to swing the cushioned slab into the side of his helmeted head and send him sprawling into the mud.

"OFFICIALLY SUCKING IT!" She screeched, lofting her weighted baton high above her head like a champion's belt after a wrestling match.

Rex dragged himself up to his knees, scraped a cup of mud from his face and slopped it back to the ground. He waved his hand at her. "You are actually insufferable when you win stuff, do you know that?"

With a grin of mud-splattered cheeks, she took his proffered hand and yanked him up and out of the clutches of muck that had swallowed his knees and shins. He rolled his eyes good-naturedly in response and grabbed her in a quick hug that consisted of essentially the colliding of her face into his shoulder and a slap on the back before the circles turned to a new opponent.

When faced with the smallest and weakest of the group, the one to which she had already inflicted the most pain, her smile fell flat off. She had tried to catch herself, but it was too late; he had already seen her face fall.

"Hey, Sparrow," she called, as jovially as she could muster, but the added enthusiasm to persuade him that she was genuine came off as false and turned even her stomach. Newberry, to Sparrow's left, rolled his eyes out of his head and clamped his jaw, but otherwise didn't interact.

If Sparrow did indeed misconstrue her intentions, he didn't raise alert to it. "Hi, Doe."

Adjusting her stance to something vaguely offensive she awaited the whistle. She wasn't going to go easy on him just because she'd called him out on being the lowest scorer a couple of times. She didn't want to insult him that way, nor exacerbate the situation. They were of relatively equal height and stature and maybe strength, too—or maybe Aster took the edge there from all of her extra training. If the roles reversed, this is how she would want to be treated. Equally. Go no easier on Twenty-Four—no, Twenty-One after the losses to the Unhinger—than she would number One. Besides. She wanted to win. Losing to Twenty-One would be humiliating.

The whistle sang, and she jerked forward, but in a split second before impact, both Aster and Sparrow instantly froze at the gutting, wet, thunk from beside them.

The boy Newberry was opposing had already smacked the ground. It was so loud and so fast that both Aster and Sparrow had completely lost concentration on each other and shot identically horrified looks to the unlucky victim.

The boy sank about a foot into the mud, quite possibly with his back against the steel of the plate beneath, and yelled excitedly from his crater. "Bloody hell, Jack, that was epic!"

Aster swallowed and looked back to her opponent. But she was distracted. Newberry had just ripped that boy straight off his feet in one hit.

It was only when Sparrow approached with a jab of his own that Aster snapped out of her daze, blocking much too forcefully for the strength he'd used and swinging for the side of his head.

He cowered under his pugil stick, using it as a shield, and pushed her away before barraging her with an array of swift thrusts, but what he gained in speed he lost in power, and she was able to stave him away. It forced her into playing extremely defensively, though. He was undeniably keeping her prisoner. While defending, blocking his rapid swings, she was utterly unable to make her own strike.

She hummed affirmatively. "Persistent."

To break the stalemate, she blocked low, ducked under his next stab and drove her weight into a jab to the chest. The blow to his balance knocked him into the dirt on his behind.

Newberry's eyes bored holes into her cheeks, but she didn't grant them the gratification of her attention. "Good match," she said, hearing but denying the traces of awkwardness like stagnant air in her voice.

"Thanks. That was a clever thing you did, pre-empting me," Sparrow said quietly beneath the thudding of surrounding fights, but it was likely that he was just soft-spoken, anyway. "I'll have to watch out for that next time."

"Your assault was good though. I could barely move—"

"—Ugh, don't patronise him."

She snapped her head to the boy who had just been destroyed by Newberry, his shirt heavy and hanging by the weight of the sludge. "I wasn't—"

But he walked off without awaiting her response. She turned back to where Sparrow had been but now stood Newberry in his place, glaring daggers as had become the usual. Sighing, she moved out of the way of Newberry's next opponent and over to her own, Rohrbach. She remembered all too clearly—kind of ironically, given how blurry her vision had become at the time—her last encounter with the boy only six months or so her junior. With a sigh, she braced herself for the imminent barrage of attacks.

Her chest was heaving and sweat mingled with the mud on her neck, and sharp aches were beginning the claw themselves through her muscles from the weight of the pugil stick.

The boy was enormous, well over six foot even at a relatively young age; he loomed along with the treetops with those like Angeal and that angry man Barret that Aster had met in Seventh Heaven. But then she considered that Rohrbach had neither an enormous sword on his back nor a cannon connected to his elbow, and remembered that he was as much a human among humans as she was, and not some kind of higher being just because he was number one on some arbitrary scoreboard. But she totally wasn't bitter, or anything.

The instructor blew the whistle.

On the beat, she bounced back a few steps to force Rohrbach to overstretch and weaken some of the blow. She batted it away and held her stick low and ready to snap it up to defend her face. The back and forth ate at her stamina.

He stabbed for the stomach which she blocked stably, heels digging into the mud. He lifted his weapon for a devastating overhead swing, but Aster was quicker and swiped her baton into his exposed abdomen. Recoiling from the blow, he crashed the pugil stick into her bent state, cracking into her back, taking advantage of the opening she gave him in a moment of thoughtlessness. The impact surged through her spine and down to her knees. She buckled but didn't give.

She swung upwards with a crack into his chin, but he was tough and recovered as quickly as ever. He slammed into her block with such force that her wrists screamed and released on reflex to protect themselves from snapping—or that was what it felt like—knocking the weapon clean from her hands. It stuck upright in the mud. With the shift of his body weight, he connected the padding firmly with the side of her head, sweeping her body from her feet and slamming her face-first into the mud.

She lay there for a moment like a starfish, some kind of unfortunate, messier version of a snow angel she might have made when she was a kid. Kinda stunned. Kinda awestruck. Kinda embarrassed.

Strangled laughter escaped her although no one would have heard her so deep in the dirt. They'd only have seen her shoulders and back rattling and lurching. Could have thought she was crying. The indignity of which would have torn her ego to shreds.

A hand reached into the sludge to grab her shoulder and another under her ribs; Rohrbach yanking her from muddy clutches. It clung to her, grasping every inch of skin and clothing, wet and sloppy. Thanking him, she clawed clumps of mud from where her eyeballs used to be and wiped it against her combat pants. The ones that used to be blue.

"You look as fresh as a freakin' spring chocobo chick," she said. It was a bit of an overstatement, but it was clear that the only dirt on his clothing was there as a consequence from the splashing of footwork and collision of dirt-caked pugil sticks. "Has anyone knocked you down?"

He shook his head.

"Not even Newberry? Rex?"

"Didn't face either of 'em," he said flatly in a heavy accent.

"Damn," she muttered, then met him with a skeptical blue eye. "You human?"

"Last I checked," he said with a shrug and a general air of nonchalance. Under his mighty brow and set face, Aster wondered if maybe he just came off as moodier than he really was, just because his face was naturally inclined that way.

The instructor—insultingly clean compared to the cadets surrounding him—from his position stood on the tyre barked, "Inner circle versus outer circle. Inner to my left, outer to my right, behind the lines, NOW!"

The recruits shot to their respective positions as Angeal and the DI alongside him stepped just outside of the mud pit to a safe distance. Aster and her team of Inner Circlers made up the middle ten of the leaderboard and the Outer Circlers comprised of the top five and bottom four.

The instructor boomed, "The team that gets that tyre over their line gets to go to lunch. The team that does not make it over their line spends lunch in PT after washing the shit off all these uniforms, do you understand me?"

"Yes, Staff!"

Angeal alongside him looked mildly amused with arms folded across his chest. He watched his colleague lift a starting pistol in the air. "Ready?"

BANG.

And so that was how Aster came to lose her lunch that day in particular. Turned out that the middle ten couldn't beat the top five and bottom four after all, although that could very well have been influenced by the raucous laughter that was erupting from the majority of what had essentially become a giant pile on in the middle of a sludge pit. It was meant to be like tug-of-war...but was more like mud wrestling. It was a bonding exercise despite its base in competition, and Aster wondered how many activities like this she had missed, and if that had any bearing on why she was finding it so hard to fit in.

She suspected there were a few reasons for that though.

So, while she daydreamed of the well-earned lunch that Rex was getting to enjoy in her absence, she was performing squats with another recruit across her back in a fireman's carry while an instructor screamed in her face, spittle flying everywhere.

They were gifted with the blessing of ten minutes to shower before hitting Hand-to-Hand with Tifa for the afternoon.

A recruit approached her jovially. Politely, but a smidge too informally, and asked her to easy on them after the exhausting day they'd already had. Aster was certain by the smile on her friend's lips that Tifa was going to ramp up the session from one hundred and ten percent, the usual standard, to one hundred and fifty percent in spite. Boy, was she wrong. Two-hundred percent was more like it.

Bodies ached all around as Tifa inflicted nothing short of punishment upon the recruits. She introduced a full burst of speed training in the shape of agility drills and two million beep tests, each harder than the last.

Aster forced herself to only think cone by cone because if she considered how many laps she had left to go and how much harder she'd have to work to get within the beep time, she'd have fallen into a weeping heap in the corner of the room already. The insides of her thighs screamed raw at the burn, sweat ran from her face, and she wasn't the only one groaning in pain.

When she briefly looked up while adjusting her helmet she saw Tifa in deep conversation with Angeal. Scribbling something quickly on one of the three clipboards she was hastily shuffling through, Tifa stepped forward.

"Cadets!" She said, pushing the stop button on the dreaded beeping machine—Aster could still hear it going in her head—and pacing to the front of the room with the grace that only total command of muscle in the body could give. "Good footwork. You need to apply this level of control over every movement in battle."

"Before it started to really burn, anyway," she tagged on with a devilishly dark grin. She reeled off a new set of instructions, demonstrating an exercise with her glamorous assistant, Angeal, involving focus sparring and lateral shuffling.

Tifa's demonstration was beautiful, in some kind of horrifying way. It was as perfect as one would expect from someone who had practiced her art for three-quarters of her life, connecting her feet, knees and elbows to the target pad wherever Angeal held it for her, spinning in some kind of violent ballet.

"You need to be facing your partner at all times," she said with just a trace of breathlessness, her hair twirling into her face at her quick stop. She pulled it away from her lips. "Understood?"

"Ma'am."

The lights flickered off. Tifa furrowed her brow and stared up at one of the lightbulbs. It was silent for a moment, an eerie calm.

"Actual causality. Actual causality. HQ security breach, repeat, HQ security breach. This is not a drill. Central to Training and SOLDIER Floor."

An emergency lamp bloomed in red, and a wailing siren accompanied it.

Aster flinched at the noise and flicked her eyes from the lamp to Tifa, to Angeal, to the door as it buckled against a shock that rattled the floorboards. She froze to her place. Angeal ripped his sword from against the wall—a standard steel model just like Zack's, despite the beast that hung from his back—and brandished the blade in wait. Licked by red light.

Fear and anticipation that jittered the nerves of the cadet force could almost be confused with excitement. It rippled through the room like an electrical current, stunning each man and one woman in turn, ramping up the heart rates that were shaking the floor. Wait—the floor was literally shaking.

The intercom blared orders, demanding support for the instructors on the training floors. But Tifa barked her own laws, snapping because they hadn't time to wait for back-up. The door bulged under a second, louder collision.

Tightening the straps on the wrists of her gloves, she took up a stance a good space between the door and the recruits. "Line up! Rohrbach, Surrexit and Newberry behind Angeal and I—rest of you, filter in rows according to ranking!"

The sound of metal stretching pierced the air as a huge impact crater formed in the door under the weight of the ram on the other side. Angeal booted the dent, and it cracked back into place with a bang, and a scream from the other side of the door suggested he'd hit something. And it didn't sound human.

Aster couldn't help but jerk towards Tifa. "I want to help!"

"Get back in position. I need my best," Tifa said, uncharacteristically sharply, her head duly in business. She commanded to the room, "Four to six take reserve for one to three! The rest of you, stay out of the way!"

Pride smarting, Aster stepped back, gritting her teeth in frustration, but Tifa grabbed her arm with a grip so tight it hurt and yanked her back toward her. "You're six. Get over there!"

Aster's eyes widened infinitesimally as the boiling of her pride settled into a simmer—sixth—and nodded. She took her place not too far behind Newberry. If he had less than an ounce of professionalism, he would have stuck his fingers up at her. Good thing he didn't because Aster hadn't the capacity to take it laying down.

The door burst from its support at the fourth impact. The clatter thereafter drowned out the sound of the alarm but didn't mask the screaming of the beasts from beyond it as they charged into the room.

Lunging through the door were canine beasts with crimson-red, mask-like faces and yellow tusks that curled out from the sides of their jaws. Bared lips showed fangs and otherwise human teeth, and green ribboned tongues dripping with blood and saliva. She could place their names—they were Foulanders, and they were in the monster encyclopaedia from Tseng. The Wutaian encyclopaedia. A knot pulled in Aster's chest. This was bad.

The first beast launched at Rex. Tifa lunged into it, driving her fist up into its gut and knocking it straight into the wall. Its whimpers were shrill, but it stood once again, and a barrage of oversized bugs swarmed into the room at the call.

Angeal carved his sword in an arc through the wall of beetles, each the size of a watermelon at least, smattering the floorboards with blood and carcasses. With the common sense to stay out of the way of swords, Rex and Rohrbach lunged towards a Foulander that got past Tifa and Angeal at the front, while Newberry aided Tifa.

It was a bloodbath. Slashing and punching and kicking and yelling and the incredible sound of a sword slicing through the air and dragging against bone. A Foulander bit into Rex's arm with blunt teeth, piercing, crazed blue eye staring into its victim. With a disgusted yelp, Rex kneed the dog in the throat, and Rohrbach socked it in the side of the head with a well-placed punch. It screeched and launched for the latter's throat with jagged circular saws for claws. Rex threw his weight into it to shove it from its trajectory. It was clumsy, but it worked.

The beast landed a few feet away, digging its claws in the wood to come to a stop. A ball of energy, a small sun, gathered between its tusks, and Tifa tackled the dog to the ground, forcing the fire spell to miss and smash into the ceiling. Rex and Rohrbach cowered under their arms beneath the small explosion and debris as Tifa rolled to recover and slammed a model roundhouse into the Foulander's chest. Its back splintered the mirror like a spiderweb before it collapsed to the floor.

Aster's eyes fixed on her, on her movement, her power. Tifa's glove glowed slightly yellow. So she had used the assistance of some kind of command materia. Incredible.

More monsters flooded through the door, bugs and beetles and beasts. Fiends she recognised as a Jayjujayme—oversized, greenish cockroaches with rings of sputum-coated teeth—sidled towards the recruits at the back of the room.

Aster launched for them, but they jumped like fleas for her face. Each tooth a short razor, ringing a gaping, chasm-like mouth. She screamed and ducked, kicking one into the skirting board as it landed, another getting too close to Angeal's sword. She chased the survivor murderously and stamped her boot into its carapace, crunching its exoskeleton like a pile of sticks. Her own brutality caused her to stumble, but she could only watch in disbelief as the carcass did not bleed, but oozed. A small amount of dark, thick liquid seeped under it.

"Wh-what—?" she spluttered, snapping her head back and forth, searching for other lifeless bodies that had a similar effect. None. Or maybe no one else noticed, or no one else cared.

It felt like hours and it felt like seconds all at the same time, but eventually, numbers dwindled, and Rex stood with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath with a slash of skin gouged from his upper arm. Aster ran to him and took over, kicking a beast upside the chin with a dirty snarl when it dared to get too close to her friend.

Angeal laid the last Foulander to rest with an unceremonious stab through the head as Tifa, Newberry and Aster swept through the remaining Bizarre Bugs, tearing off their wings like shredding paper and squashing the smallest ones with their boots. A humanoid enemy with scarlet red, leathery skin and a metal mask covering its face burst through the door, spewing Mako-blue bullets rapid fire from the steel prosthetic grafted onto its arm. Tifa threw herself to the ground to avoid the assault, and Angeal swept his blade through its shoulder, slicing the arm clean off. With a scream so human-like it was disconcerting, it launched for Rohrbach, who without missing a beat, grabbed its face and smashed its head into the floor. Dead.

The thud of the skull contacting the wooden floor and an explosion from beyond the walls echoed in the room. Aster's neck blew hot with nausea, and then she noticed, faintly, a black liquid collecting beneath the humanoid monster's neck.

Her jaw fell open to speak, but she was interrupted by Angeal. His sword glistened with a tinge of blood. He looked at it and turned it in the light pensively. "I'm going to see how Zack is doing and assist the others. Remain here until you receive further orders. Look after the squad. Don't leave until it's safe."

Tifa nodded and tucked one foot behind the other. "You got it."

With that, Angeal disappeared through the gaping hole that had once been sealed by a door.

Aster surveyed the destruction in the aftermath of the assault. The bent, unsalvageable metal sheet of the door laid against the ground, rocking faintly from the disruption of recent impact somewhere. Shards of glass scattered the floor near the mirror where it had splintered, and Rex and Aster's reflections stared back, distorted and fractured. They looked at one another, hoping it wasn't a bad omen. The blood that pooled against the floor, unnaturally dark in the waning red lights that began to flicker back to normal, was only something that Aster could look at because she knew it—the majority of it, anyway—didn't belong to her comrades. Just monsters.

"Those of you who have injuries, line up near the front of the room. I've got some potions," Tifa said before approaching the door gingerly, though not fearfully, and poking her head outside of it to check the vicinity.

When Rex didn't move, Aster nudged his elbow. "Might as well get your arm fixed up."

He shook his head autonomously. "It's no big deal."

She scrunched up her nose and threw her arms behind her head, pointedly eyeing the gash across his bicep. "Get over yourself," she said. When he didn't laugh or even smile, Aster frowned and merely led him over the front of the room by his good arm.

"Hey, As—Doe," Tifa said, remembering to be professional and receiving a snap to attention from the girl she called. "Can—uh—ahem. Dispense the potions," she said, stumbling over her words again, remembering she was supposed to give commands, not ask favours. "I'm going to keep watch by the door."

"Ma'am," Aster said with a salute and a more personal smile before the martial arts instructor left the room.

Aster rubbed her hands together and pried open the first aid crate beneath the counter. Atop of said counter, she spotted the clipboards she had seen earlier.

She ran her fingers across them, spreading them out from on top of each other. Data. Signatures. Scales and figures and notes. Pages and pages. It didn't take her long to notice that her name wasn't even on there. It was a list of prospective SOLDIER members.

She scratched her temple absently. Guess she wouldn't have to worry about Zack finding out her name after all.

T he men stood at attention while they waited for authority to return. Aster noted the cadets' collective inability to make decisions when there were no instructors barking orders at them. It was probably how Shinra wanted them, so the drill staff must have done an excellent job of breaking the backbones of each man in the squad. The military academy—one of the branches of training that could be chosen after they became fully fledged infantrymen with control over their careers—was likely where they would go on to re-develop their leadership skills from the ground up. For now, they were perfect blank slates.

She frowned. Then what did that make her? She wasn't a perfect blank slate. Not the ideal. The infantry didn't even have a file on her.

Tifa never returned. In her place, one of the DIs returned to give them something vaguely like a debrief, to settle unsettled minds. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, clad in the less-than-SOLDIER-but-still-iconic red uniform of the captains and up of the infantry.

He cleared his throat. "There have been two fatalities."

Aster's heart hit her stomach. Tifa hadn't returned—she hadn't seen Zack—

"Both were researchers in the labs at the time of the break-in."

A sigh of relief rushed through her lips, and with it, a new knot pulled in her stomach. A knot of sickness that she could so easily be relieved by the death of a human being, simply because it was not one she knew personally. Her palms grew clammy, clasped together.

"We are told this was an attempted break-in. The enemy is Wutai," he said. The silence of the room became palpable when every man instantly became aware that he could hear even the dangling of the set of keys at the DIs hip, and every breath dared taken in the room.

"We are still very much within the grip of war and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There will be no further information to grant. It is for the Investigative Division to come up with answers."

He and a good handful of cadets stared into her dumbstruck face, but the realisation didn't dawn over her until Rex looked at her, sympathetic toward the increase in her workload this would inevitably cause. Oh. Some of the colour sank away from her cheeks. The Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department. Administrative Research. The Turks.

She chewed her lip. "…Right."