A/N: Had to make a lot of balance decisions to compress so much into less than 5,000 words while minimizing spoilers, yet at the same time using language to help those not familiar with the series or with various translation choices some made with the source material get the sense of various aspects. So where necessary I've sided with intent over strict compliance in some details.

Thank you and enjoy.


Because of a nail, a shoe was not lost.

An Alba priest looks after a young man and his little brother in the internment camp. Their parents are dead fighting the Legion's machines and the young man has just gotten the requisition form demanding his life next. It doesn't even list his name; only the serial number of a 'processor' to be delivered. It is nearly identical to the destruction notice informing him of his parent's fate and what the future holds. There is little the priest can do but he does what he can, both for the little boy just brought back from death's door at his brother's hand and for the older boy whose mind and soul is shattering from the inhumanity and hopelessness, trapped in a nightmare with only one ending for all he knew and loved.

Because life is more precious at the end of the world than in its beginning.


Because of a shoe, a horse was not lost.

A young soldier sits in his quarters with a sock-turned-puppet entertaining a silver-haired child, a girl no older than his little brother. He found her at a crash site, an Ameise scout unit of the Legion having reached the burning wreckage of the helicopter just before he arrived. Whether it was carefully sighting its machine guns on the little girl to conserve ammunition or calling in a headhunter for neural harvesting didn't matter. The pause let him put a 57mm sabot round through the machine and he had quickly evacuated the area with the little girl in his lap, snug in his Juggernaut's cockpit. The paper-thin armor of the fighting vehicle offered little protection but kept the cold wind out as he offered his comforting voice.

He had told her not to interact with the others at the base as they waited for her to be picked up, not wanting the sole survivor to be subjected to verbal abuse because of her silver hair and eyes. The color of their Alba oppressors, too cowardly to get their own hands dirty in the extermination of his kind directly. But this girl looks at him with pure eyes, as one human to another.

She is innocent in a world that has none, hurt and unable to process what she just experienced just like his little brother hadn't. Like them, she just lost a parent and these experiences will hit her later on. That he will not get any older than he is now isn't her fault and he already failed his little brother. He wants to go back to the boy and somehow make things right, but that will never happen. So he fends off the pain awaiting her with the sock-turned-puppet because if it should be the last thing he ever does, he will not fail this little girl.


Because of a horse, a rider was not lost.

She was something for Spearhead Squadron to tolerate and they would resist becoming the pigs others demanded they were by being polite to the naïve, sheltered 'princess' who was butting in on the last months of their lives. Their young handler called in over the Para-RAID neural resonance implants every night simply to help them pass the time. She reprimanded their Reaper in his delinquency in filing reports no one had ever bothered to read before. She fed them her best analyses and educated guesses on the enemy. She listened. She kept coming back, week after week while they held back the certainty of their engineered demise.

She came back after receiving the mental shock of hearing the last echoes of once human neutral networks, now repurposed as computation systems for Legion units in all its monstrous horror, knowing the feedback of the dead over the Para-RAID's shared auditory sense drove one of her predecessors into insanity and suicide and four others toward instability and transfer.

She cried the tears they held back at the loss of a fallen comrade. She listened to their criticism and took it to heart. She apologized for her failures.

She gave her all to keep them alive on their execution ground when the whole point was for them to die. Promising reinforcements that she didn't know would never come. Begging for artillery support that had never been used in a war that systematically killed so many of them that there was no one left to send to the gallows but children.

She aborted their mission and ordered a full retreat when enemy artillery rained down upon them and promised to slaughter them all.

Her heart shattered when they told her the truth and prepared to carry out their final orders. A thinly disguised death march deep into enemy territory.

The last members of Spearhead didn't hear from her again until all was lost and they looked upon death with a smile one last time; five lightweight Juggernauts to charge an entire armor battalion led by a Shepard controller obsessed with their leader. Then they heard her voice once again and an entire artillery division answered their plight like the hand of god, the automated batteries receiving hacked commands to punch out every shell they had and relinquish guidance to her station. The risk of frying her brain with a direct visual link to her nervous system through the Para-RAID and going blind meant nothing compared to guiding the final shells to the nearly invulnerable Shepard tank when someone important lay mere meters away from impact. Saving the only people she truly had in the world for a little while longer. People who meant more than family. People that both hated what she was and loved her in return just as much.

At the edge of Republic territory they had nowhere to go but forward and she begged that they not leave her. Tears of a rent soul came in clear through their shared auditory senses of the Para-RAID just before contact was disrupted as they left the Eighty Sixth Sector's battlefields for whatever lay beyond. But that was okay, for they knew she would follow in their footsteps one day and reach their Final Destination to lay flowers. She had promised their Reaper, the squadron leader whom they followed to fields unknown.

That night after she had managed to regain her composure, the Alba handler dyed a thick strand of her sacrosanct silver hair a deep red and put away her blue dress uniform for one of black. The ridicule she would receive meant nothing to her for she was resolved to carry their memories with her and one day meet up with them once again at their journey's end.


Because of a rider, a battle was not lost.

Rumor circled of a disgraceful pig loving princess too stupid to tell the difference between a human and livestock. Most processors rolled their eyes, paying little heed to some half-drunken handler's complaints of a spoiled, sheltered brat with delusions of self-righteousness trying to live with her guilt. Besides, none of it mattered. In a couple of years none of them would be left and the Republic would lose the war with the Legion. One genocidal side would wipe out the other and in their mind at least the Legion wasn't malicious about it.

The transfers between squadrons along the four fronts continued sending increasingly skilled processors to ever more dangerous posts where they would hopefully be eliminated. Among those transfers were those who served with the most atypical of Name Bearers. Someone who held a similar pride they held thanks to the renowned Reaper and Spearhead Squadron. One they regarded as their queen and they her knights. Bloody Regina. An Alba handler of all things and they did not take kindly to anyone speaking ill of their queen.

Because of her, Brísingamen Squadron had the Republic's lowest fatality rates and the highest kill counts. Theirs was a handler who demanded much both from them and herself, but who also provided her squadron real, honest to god fire support when things became dire. Even after being reprimanded and demoted they couldn't seem to keep the troublemaker from occasionally testing the artillery control systems, much to the great vexation of her superior who now simply covered up the nuisance.

They said she knew there would be a large Legion offensive coming and the Republic had lulled themselves into a suicidal sense of security. She had listened to the Reaper's warning that the Legion's true strength was hidden far behind their front lines. The Republic believed their own propaganda to the point of delusion. They rejected anything that did not fit the picture they wanted. They would not prepare in the slightest. The Alba people would not be able to fight any more than a brain-dead lamb before the slaughterer.

But she, like them, was determined to fight to the very end. Even if only death awaited her, she too held onto her pride as a human being.

And so, thanks to the Republic military's personnel shuffling, her proxies were ordered around that same organization's strict compartmentalization and throughout the chain. Her name spread to the strongest processors. The ace units. The most notable Name Bearers. Bloody Regina, an Alba handler who bore a Name.

Then one night came the most unusual call through their Para-RAID neural resonance implants. A combat alert forcing them to accept connection to their squadron's assigned handler. But it wasn't their handlers. This connection came in so strong they could feel the steel emotions in her voice. An iron determination and will.

"Bloody Regina to all processors in all combat areas. A large-scale Legion offensive has begun. You are to gather within the 85 Districts and begin combat. All personnel within National Defense HQ, remove anti-personnel mines and open the Gran Mur's gates immediately.

"Everything we've done was for this day, to protect our honor... Let's fight until the end."

Normally a handler connected their Para-RAID with only their authorized squadron, 24 processors at most and only over the audio sensory linkage. To get the message out as quickly as possible, this handler risked damaging her brain with a blatantly illegal and dangerous modification for her Para-RAID neural resonance unit to override all protocols and connect her auditory senses with every processor in every Juggernaut squadron. Every Armor Division and Corps.

Throughout the Eighty Sixth Sector a number of scattered teenagers who had been rotated through their queen's squadron and had since served as her hands and feet over the past year exclaimed the same thing to their comrades full of I-Told-You-So excitement: "We're on!"

This handler was staging a damn coup.

During that night of confusion squadrons withdrew en masse over one hundred kilometers of battlespace that had been their decade-long exile toward the mighty walls of the Gran Mur. Detours were given around newly blown bridges while rough maps and internment camp locations had been previously memorized by her Knights. New situation updates went out to squadron leaders during Para-RAID bursts. The Northern Front had been engulfed within minutes before the warning could get out and this appeared to be the main thrust while even more were sweeping around and into the West, East and Southern Fronts. An enemy 800mm siege unit of railgun design had already breached not only the minefield in the North for the main thrust but also the Gran Mur itself from deep within Legion territory. Resupply during the coming siege would soon be impossible and everything but their squadron level Para-RAIDs would be jammed to uselessness with all the electronic warfare units now filling the night sky. Therefore she was deliberately collapsing their defensive lines clear to the first and innermost sector where industry vital to their fight was located.

Their people had been declared not human and exiled beyond those walls. A sacrifice to the Legion thinking it would keep the Alba citizenry safe from the war by forcing them to fight each other to the death. Supply dependence, compartmentalization, minefields and remotely controlled artillery barred them from contemplating anything like retreat, desertion or revolt.

Now they had been ordered into the eighty five sectors inside those walls and to fight. Those same remote artillery units had blasted further gaps through the minefields for them and then turned on the sealed gates of the Gran Mur. But most of them didn't know this handler; only the tales spoken by her believers. So it wasn't what had been said that had them moving. It was what hadn't been. Bloody Regina had never told them whom to fight. She gave them the space to make that choice. To fight with her to live one more day with human pride until the very end or to take revenge on the people who deserved what was coming before the end came. Together or alone, if she was to die then she was determined to be proud of the person she had been right up to the end. The choice was theirs and she freely placed her faith in their pride as human beings.

In the north, Legion formations massing themselves to pour through the breach of what should have been a defenseless exploit fell to a division's worth of anti-tank fire by those choosing to hold the Gran Mur's wound closed for as long as they had ammunition. They sealed the breach with burning machines until following waves of Legion pulled the debris away and flowed through once again. In the East, West and South others hastily diverted to internment camps along their path of retreat where they had once been exiled and then requisitioned as mere Juggernaut processors to hold the line for the silver haired Alba. That exile was now reversed, backed with the authorization of 57mm cannon, by doubling up inside those Juggernaut cockpits just as a ten year old Alba girl now known as Bloody Regina had been those six long years ago.

They fell back to the first sector as squadron leaders were briefed on the densely populated capital where the voice was calling out and guiding them to where she was organizing infinitely condensed defensive lines to hold the Legion back. They passed panicked Republican officers fleeing in terror at the armored machines and the unending streaks of long range shells arcing through the sky, their official military behind the walls long having deteriorated to the usefulness of a soup line and nothing more than an implement to manipulate a decade's worth of unemployment and social enlightenment propaganda to cover their government's crimes.

For seven days they held their fracturing lines, the burning capital a hellscape of urban ruin and carnage as they fell back. Yet the Legion could only concentrate their overwhelming tsunami so much in such a small region and it was the only thing that gave them a chance being so catastrophically outnumbered. Cannon shells and energy packs were pulled straight off the production lines and run out for resupply as Juggernauts were cycled on and off the circular defensive front.

For seven days they were guided by a steeled voice shaking from a lack of sleep and pumped full of stimulants to keep going; even if she had desired otherwise hers was the only illegally modified Para-RAID unit that could serve as their command network after everything went to hell. Heavy mortars from her mobile units turned riverside parks and fashionable shopping vistas into charnel houses without hesitation, keeping her frontline units from being overwhelmed or cut off. Centuries old and manicured boulevards were slathered in cannon fire as the machine's heaviest armor marched forward. Machine guns chewed through humanoid Self-Propelled Mines hunting through buildings and then fled moments before retaliating Lowe armor units and their 120mm cannon blew the whole structure apart.

For seven days they held before they finally were forced out of the capital entirely, exhausted and depleted yet that voice continually reorganized around their losses and fatigue until finally directing a breakout to the south like a herd of elephants. Non-combatants of all kinds drove anything capable of hauling ammunition in the center with remnants of the equally traumatized military police giving what direction and order they could. Meanwhile the screening bubble of Juggernaut battalions simultaneously held off the machines trying to breach their perimeter as well as punching them all a hole through the enemy's weakest formation.

For two months they held against the tsunami with their backs to the wall. No sleep, starvation rations, the stench of decay blanketing the winds. Press ganged and shattered civilians working until they dropped to survive another day in the remaining factories besieged by encroaching battlegrounds and turning out as much supply as they could as stocks dwindled and enemy artillery tried to zero in. All knew if they lost those last factories they too were lost. Yet ever present was that steel voice over the combatants' Para-RAID, demanding their all and giving her own until the very end.

Then the tsunami retreated, focused on consolidating their gains after having depleted years of buildup for this offensive. The Republic was no more. Out of the ten million of Alba citizens behind their hallowed walls less than one million remained. They blamed the Eighty Six who were forced to build those walls and then thrown outside it to fight the Legion's machines for they knew nothing but the whitewashing of their fallen nation's lies. But ten thousand Eighty Sixers remained as well. They looked no more than children, and though still teenagers after years of forced conscription where only one in a thousand survived the impossible, they were the most skilled and experienced combat veterans on the continent.

They held that impossible line with their bloodstained queen in their midst. She wasn't one of them. She had the silver hair and eyes of the Alba who had orchestrated a genocide against them. She wore the uniform of their oppressors and had been a handler to boot.

Yet she was theirs. They paid for her with their blood. Despite all that had been thrown at them they hadn't lost when that was the only outcome left for them. Ten thousand dehumanized 'processors' survived because of her. And like them she had lost her home, her family and her homeland. She was no older than they, having sacrificed her childhood to hone herself and graduating from the academy at a mere fifteen years of age to support the frontline units as a handler. She was nothing like those silver haired bastards. She was their damn bloodstained queen and they would follow her to the end, wherever that may lead.

She had lost too much of her already slender bodyweight to the doubled penalty of stimulants and a starvation diet, endured migraines from the strain she put on her neural tissue with that accursed Para-RAID, and sweated and shivered from withdrawal as she lay on a cot within a ruined stone building.

So the self-proclaimed Queen's Knights, both from before the offensive and after, sat outside that building as she finally allowed herself to sleep through the beginnings of her recuperation. They could take it from here and a guardian vigil of a dozen of their best Juggernauts facing outward guarded her healing slumber. Others scrounged through the ruins for anything she might need as she slept past her twentieth hour. They guarded her dignity for she too knew their pride as a human being and they would not let their Bloody Regina be seen in any condition other than one reflecting that pride.

Only her single childhood friend was permitted inside to tend to her as she cried out softly in her sleep. Their queen, the personification of purpose all throughout an apocalypse and had finally allowed herself to collapse, was now trying to reach her dear departed Spearhead and had been for who knew how long.


Because of a battle, a world was won.

If she had been thinking clearly, she would have realized immediately that she had kept her promise. She would have realized that the surviving members of her Spearhead Squadron so long ago had made it. Cut off for a decade and without long distance communications, she had not known at least three other nations had been surviving Legion's war as well. Likewise there was no way those nations would have known they were still alive to send a relief force to the former Republic.

Someone had to have told them and their story. Only one small group had managed to escape beyond the Republic.

She supposed she was grateful in a way as she would have broken down instantly at seeing her Spearhead alive and well in the field where they both reunited and laid eyes on each other for the first time. She wasn't sure she would have survived that kind of embarrassment in front of the squadrons who had accompanied her on her journey.

Yet the survival of Spearhead set the foundation for the rest of the ten thousand Eighty Sixers who survived. Many were receiving help after emigrating to the Federacy, but yet they were also ill thought of despite most of the focus being the pariah state that had once been the Republic.

They had trouble fitting in. It wasn't that they were teenagers with maybe an elementary school education at best or all of what had been lost. It was that they were children who didn't want to leave the battlefield and thrived in it. Some thought of them as monsters who couldn't lay down their arms; to turn back from all the pain and suffering and rest at last within the sheltered, civilized areas in peace. They had done enough. Endured enough. So others looked upon them with pity and sorrow for what happened to them, wishing to help them recover from their traumas.

Very little could make the Eighty Six angrier. Their pity was an insult. To sit back and let someone less able do the fighting while they sat back and watched? Let someone else do the dying while they enjoyed peace? They knew what the Alba had done and yet they insisted they do the same thing to someone else? To wait like the Alba for the Legion to break through and do nothing but wait to be slaughtered? Unfortunately they just didn't have the language to express such feelings and the other nations didn't know what questions to ask.

No one knew how to deal with them. The ones to enlist with the Federacy's military didn't fit in there either. Their units were far too slow and cumbersome, too concerned with pilot safety which from their perspective also got people killed. The machines the Federacy made for them based on the old Juggernauts would kill ordinary pilots simply by being utterly insane in mobility and uncontrollable. Yet they were tailored perfectly for the Eighty Six.

Then there was the fact that they, as mere children, would take on Legion at ten-to-one odds and call it nothing. It kind of irked the other soldiers while labeling them as berserkers.

So now they were an independent and international unit. Designed to be a rapid response force and a unit to perform strikes against high level strategic Legion targets deep in enemy territory.

They had started out with about seven squadrons, all who had followed her beyond the Republic in Spearhead's footsteps to fulfill her promise that became a reunion in that field. Now there were two thousand pilots in the Eighty Sixth Strike Package. Mostly former processors plus a small handful of other volunteers and supporting units from other nations. And it was she who guided them as the Tactical Commander of their four armor divisions. None of them would have it any other way.

At the conclusion of the large-scale offensive, the three other nations had survived but at a cost that was catastrophic. They were going to lose the war of attrition as they held onto their battered defensive lines and the Legion rebuilt its strength. Something she knew all too well. Yet they were not equipped to hold out doing anything else. Then came the Eighty Sixth Strike Package and a hope for the future.

Thanks to those who survived the Republic's crimes they were now winning the war. The legion still held attrition on its side but was staggering after a series of strategic losses to such an extent the next operation's goal was to shut down the Legion for good.

She was proud of being part of that. They all were. There was light at the end of the tunnel for everyone because of them.

Afterwards and as soon as possible, she planned on being taken to the sea with Spearhead's Reaper. It took so long for him to reach a point where he could actually want something. Wish for something. Long for something. And all he wanted was to show her the sea. Show her something neither of them had ever seen before.

She treasured that and almost felt as if building a cabin at that future spot would be nice too. A land to belong to. A place where they could have a future. Their Final Destination where they could be happy and learn to live for a long time to come.

And all because of a horseshoe nail.