86th District, Eastern Ward

June 27th, Stellar Year 2146

Kaie was louder once.

Alice used to say she was like a boom-box: a small package with a large speaker. She used to carry her around like one too, hauled up onto one shoulder as Alice ferried her around the base. She would point to random members of Halberd Squadron and tell Kaie to make up some quip about them on the spot. Usually that ended up being an insult. Sometimes she was nicer.

Later, Kaie would learn, in a quiet, subdued conversation with just the two of them, that it was one of Alice's ways of bringing life back into the people under her command. Some people got angry at being insulted. Some people looked at the situation - a small child perched on the shoulder of their commanding officer, bright-eyed and smiling as she called them funny names - and laughed. Either way, anger or laughter, it was better than the flat-mouthed, empty-eyed look most 86 took on as a result of living under the Republic's abuses.

But even if Alice had never explained the reasons to her, Kaie would have kept on doing it happily. Because Alice was her sister, if not by blood then certainly by fact, and wherever Alice went, whatever Alice did, Kaie followed.

But Alice was dead and gone now, and with her went most of Kaie's voice. She still tried to smile as much as Alice would. She still tried to be a leader for the soldiers underneath her. She strove to be just as kind and caring and thoughtful, and every bit as nonchalant as Alice was, because the business of war was serious enough, so why squander your precious peacetime with tense shoulders and glowering eyes if you didn't need to? That was Alice's belief, and now it was Kaie's too.

Most of the time, she stuck to it easily enough. But she could never be as loud as Alice was, not without Alice there to guide (pressure) her into it. Kaie had just never been the shouting type.

"Penny for your thoughts?" a chipper voice asked.

Kaie turned and met the amethyst-purple eyes of Grethe Wenzel, sitting on the flat top of the brick wall surrounding Halberd's base, legs dangling over the edge. Kaie thought, in a detached kind of way, that she looked beautiful. She had no particular attraction to women as far as she knew. It was just a fact that the Federacy officer's short blond hair made good use of the setting sun. That it shone like spun gold.

"I'm pretty valuable, Wenzel-san. My thoughts will cost you a bit more than that," Kaie said.

"Two pennies, then?"

"Sold."

Kaie strolled over to the wall and leaned against it, planting her foot behind her and crossing her arms. Grethe was two feet to her right and five feet above. In the back of her mind, she thought it was unfair of her. Kaie was already short enough as it was. Grethe would have towered over her even if she weren't on top of the fence.

"I was thinking about Alice. Did Shiden ever tell you about her?" Kaie asked, smiling at her own stupid thoughts.

"She was your previous Captain, wasn't she?"

"Until about three years ago," she confirmed. "Ranks are informal around here. No one gives them to us, so we distribute them amongst ourselves. If someone wants to be Captain, they just say so. If someone else wants to be Captain, they brawl the standing Captain for it, or get enough people around them to support their claim.

"Not that Alice ever had to worry about that. When it came to her, Captain was… more than just a rank. It's hard to explain, but, well, you know how you call your mom your mom, and your dad your dad? And it's kind of like a name, even if it isn't actually their name, and it's kind of like a title too, even if it's not really a title?"

Kaie wasn't sure she was making all that much sense, but Grethe nodded and seemed to follow along.

"Well, my mom was mom, and Alice was my Captain. It meant something. To her - to all of us."

"It sounds like she left some big shoes to fill," Grethe said softly.

Kaie looked up at her. At the setting sun behind her.

"Yeah."

The light was too bright. She had to glance away.

"You gonna pay me my two pennies now?"

"Can you put it on my tab?"

"Riding on thin ice, Wenzel… but sure. For now."

Grethe smiled, and Kaie returned it.

"Tohka-san is a natural in the garage," Grethe said, switching the subject. "In just two weeks she's managed to adapt my schematics to the Juggernaut, using entirely spare parts the base already had on hand."

"Schematics? Oh, you mean the SHADE."

"Yes."

Now Kaie's smile became a grin. "You mean we're gonna have flamethrowers too?" she asked, excitement bubbling through into her voice. It was almost a return to form, like when Alice was still alive and Kaie could act every bit the child she was supposed to be.

Almost.

"Well, it's the stealth system that'll make the real difference," Grethe said. "The Juggernaut's too slow and fragile to face the Legion in open battle, but being able to stay off their radar will let you make proper use the ruins. Ambush tactics, hit and run, guerrilla warfare. That's what will level the playing field, the flamethrower is just-"

"-Awesome," Kaie concluded. "It's gonna be so much fun."

Grethe smiled bemusedly. "That too," she agreed.

"How soon until we can start fielding units?"

"Another two weeks, maybe. At this point we have everything we need. It's just a matter of assembly and retrofitting. It takes some work to adapt all the new tubes and pipes onto a Juggernaut's frame, so you'll want to decide in advance who's going on all the stealth missions."

"Me," Kaie declared.

"You know, 'stealth mission' might have a glamorous ring to it, but it's really not all fun and games. The SHADE functions by conducting all of the Juggernaut's ambient heat into the coolant canister, via pipes. And since most of those pipes run through the cockpit, it makes the space even more cramped than it already is. Plus it raises the temperature inside by almost ten degrees. You'll be sweating like a pig in there."

"Not me," Kaie amended. She was already short and flat. She didn't need to diminish her womanly charms any further by adding 'sweaty' to the list as well.

Seriously, I know Alice wasn't my real sister, but couldn't she have given me at least a little bit of her height? Just a couple inches, maybe?

Just as Grethe smiled, beginning to say something, probably a joke of some kind, the Para-RAID on her cheek lit up in a blue flash. A connection. She closed her mouth and listened. Within seconds her eyes went from mirthful to hardened. Their amethyst shade darkened to violet as her eyes shadowed. She hopped off the stone wall onto her feet and walked a short distance away, putting her back to Kaie, and Kaie watched her and she knew, somehow, with a palpable fear sinking in her gut, that the time had come. No more jokes. No more smiling. Just war.

"That was Shin," Grethe said, turning back. "He says there's a force of Legion moving from the east. Massive. Enough to give him headaches."

Kaie had met Shin a little over two months ago. He'd struck her as a quiet boy, even a cold one, but not unfriendly, and kind somewhere beneath his chilly exterior. She had liked him. And when she asked him what it was like to hear the voices of every single Legion drone all the way out to - and well beyond - the borders of the old Republic, he had shrugged and said he couldn't really remember what life was like before his ability. He had said it didn't bother him, and while she didn't necessarily believe him, it wasn't like she thought he was lying about it. Maybe to himself, but not to her.

She wondered just how many voices he had to hear for him to suffer a headache. She wondered how many more it took beyond that before he'd willingly complain about it to someone else.

"Can we beat them?" Kaie asked.

Grethe smiled, but her eyes were still shadowed, her expression pulled itself taut like a wire one tug from snapping. Her skin was bloodless, as pale as paper.

"We'll break cover. We'll mobilize every unit in the expedition and fight side-by-side with the 86. We won't let you stand alone."

"No," Kaie said flatly. "Don't. You'll compromise your mission and lose the advantage we've worked so hard to gain. Reveal yourself to the Republic on your own terms, when the moment is right, and you'll gain the most from it."

"But you'll die if you try to fight that many of them on your own."

"Would we live even if you were with us?"

Grethe's silence was answer enough.

—

Willem Ehrenfried was a veteran twice over, first of the Federacy's rebellion, and second of the Legion War. In both conflicts, he had fought on the frontlines in an armored exoskeleton, wielding a heavy machine-gun in one hand and a massive high-frequency knife in the other. He had carved men and Legion alike into pieces, shedding as much blood as was necessary to see the mission through, be it red or be it silver.

He was pure Onyx, black-eyed and black-haired, and the blood of champions ran especially potent through his veins. He had destroyed Legion drones with that massive knife when so many others were afraid even to shoot at them. That did not mean he had been fearless, however. Willem was no stranger to fear. It had made its acquaintance with him innumerable times throughout his twenty-six years.

But every time he had faced it, he had won out over it. Fear came only from uncertainty, after all. From being uncertain of what you faced. From being uncertain of your ability to deal with it. Eliminate uncertainty, and you eliminate fear.

Willem could be uncertain of many things, but never of his own abilities.

So he regarded the small child with the look he always used to regard uncertain elements: calculation, caution, skepticism. As if this girl, no older than seven or eight, with long jet-black hair and crimson eyes, who had come to him on the exact hour that his expedition planned to embark, were a high-yield bomb with no visible timer. Potentially useful. Definitely dangerous. And almost certainly valuable.

"I am Frederika Zimmerman! Under orders of the President himself, my esteemed father, I will be your unit's Mascot until the mission's end! Pleabedtomeetchu!"

She stumbled over her words and frowned sternly. It was a haughty, powerful expression, showing a severe disdain for her own tongue, as if she could not quite believe that it possessed the insolence to fail her. Remarkably, Willem decided that he liked the child. This was his first thought. His second was much longer: a hand-on-chin and eyes-staring-off kind of thought, spent in consideration of her supposed presidential assignment.

A Mascot was a specialized military role assigned to young girls, typically the second or third daughter of a noble family, high enough in the line of succession to be of considerable prestige, but not so high that their loss would be severely missed. A Mascot would be attached to a unit and deployed to the battlefield. The girl would not be expected to fight. Instead, she would eat meals with the soldiers, sleep in the same barracks, and share in their victories and defeats.

Ostensibly, Mascots were meant to instill an esprit de corps in the units they were assigned to. By having a child in their collective care, the soldiers would band together as something like a found family, united by their shared responsibility. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, Mascots were almost always political hostages of a sort. The child from Family X might be assigned to a military unit under control of Family Y, X's rival, and thus X would be coerced into obeying Y's whims. If they did not, the unit, and thus their child who was attached to it, would be sent into danger again and again until either the family fell in line or their child died.

The practice of Mascots was still legal in the Federacy by technicality, as were many of the old Imperial laws that had yet to be revised by the government's still-settling Judicial branch. But the practice was very much unused, and severely frowned upon. Willem found it unlikely that Ernst Zimmerman, ever the idealist, would simply enlist his adopted daughter as a Mascot without a very strongly considered reason. Certainly, he had no incentive to make the girl into a hostage under Willem's thumb. And he would know Willem had no current need for such a thing anyway.

So what was the real reason to send her here, he wondered?

In the time he had spent staring off over the horizon, the child had grown restless. Her crimson eyes wandered first from Willem's pensive face to the air over his shoulder, and then at their surroundings: the camp which could no longer be truly called as such. It was more of a city now, made of thousands upon thousands of well-ordered tents.

This was where the second expedition - his expedition - had been rallying for the last few weeks, gathering soldiers, supplies, and plans in preparation for its long journey to the west. She scanned over the rows and rows of Vanagandrs stretching out for exactly a mile out to the full length of the camp. There were exactly five-hundred-and-twelve. They were accompanied by half as many Reginleifs fresh from the factories, painted white coats shining brilliantly in the sun.

Willem watched what the girl watched, making mental notes of every item her gaze flitted to and the depth with which she studied them. He approved. Her ruby-red eyes were bright and deep, showing marked intelligence for her age.

"And why would your esteemed father assign my expedition a Mascot, Frederika Zimmerman?" Willem asked pleasantly. It was the first thing either of them had said after nearly two full, silent minutes.

Frederika considered the question for awhile. More silence took its place, and Willem was pleased by this. Not a girl to make noise for noise's sake, he figured. Despite her being ordered here by the provisional President himself, this expedition was Willem's operation, and he had final say on who came along. If he was going to bring this girl along, there had be a better be a logical reason for it - and she better not be an idiot, either. If she could keep quiet, it was a good sign that she was not.

Willem would not realize she had tricked him until well after the expedition's departure, after it became too late to bring her back behind the Federacy's borders.

"I am an Esper," the girl said with the air of someone who had decided to reveal a close-kept secret as a tactical maneuver. "My eyes allow me to see the present state of those I know. My brothers Shinei and Kiri left on an extra… expa-dition…" She struggled over the bigger word for a moment, but persevered admirably. "-a lot like yours many months ago. Since then, I have been watching them with my power."

"Ah," Willem said, a revelation coming over him. "So this is because of you, then?"

He gestured at the camp all around them, the hundreds upon hundreds of war-machines in waiting, the supply trucks and the cadres of engineers busy at work to construct new railway lines. This expedition was more than just a journey into lands unknown. They were blazing a trail for others to follow behind them.

Frederika nodded, a note of pride gleaming in her eyes. "A month ago, I saw that my brothers had reached the Republic of San Magnolia, and I saw that the Republic was still alive and well!"

"And you told your father. Who then told me to start work on creating a new link between there and the Federacy."

Frederika nodded.

Willem smiled. There had been a puzzle for some time behind the nature of his latest operation. Ernst had told him that the original expedition managed to confirm the Republic's survival. He had even told Willem the nation's exact coordinates and the best route by which to reach them, but he had neglected to share exactly how he'd come to learn all that. It was no small question, given that the Para-RAID's range could not reach out to the several-hundred kilometers the expedition must have trekked.

So this girl was the answer, then.

"And the reason he's assigning you to me is so you can continue to use your power to monitor ahead and behind us, and inform our actions accordingly."

Frederika nodded again.

"Hm. Maybe that old fool has a practical bone somewhere in his body after all," Willem said with an approving nod. "Very well. I give approval to your father's orders, Frederika Zimmerman. You may join this expedition as our company Mascot. We will defend you to our dying breath."

But unbeknownst to Willem, there had been no such orders. Frederika had tried to ask Ernst for permission to go on the second expedition, because she missed Shinei and Kiri terribly and wanted to see them again. However, Ernst had denied her, and quite vehemently at that. Thus Frederika was made to learn one of life's most important lessons: that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.

She also learned that overly serious young men were, out of all the very many different kinds of people in the world, among the easiest to manipulate.

—

It was a commonly understood rule within their erratic and yet somehow distinctive culture: An 86 who didn't wear a form of ear protection into battle was an 86 who expected to die. This was not a rule created by tradition or anyone's intent. No one had declared this for everyone else to hear. It was just a matter of circumstance.

The Juggernaut's fuselage wasn't airtight, and it wasn't soundproof either. When you fired the machine-guns, the roar of them was devastation itself. The thunder pushed straight through the aluminum shell of the fuselage and the gaps in the plating, and then it rebounded ceaselessly off the inner walls of the cockpit. The thunder deafened - literally. Squeeze off one burst and your ears would ring, and they would not stop ringing for at least an hour. Depending on the battle, you could suffer from tinnitus for days on end. Or for the rest of your life, for that matter.

To say nothing of firing the main cannon.

So those who expected to live beyond the battle wore ear plugs or headphones to preserve their hearing. Those who did not fell into one of two camps: the ignorant, who would hopefully have someone wiser nearby to slap some protection into or over their ears; or the fatalistic, who saw no point in preserving anything of themselves when they were doomed to die either way.

Today, Kaie did not wear plugs. She was not ignorant.

The Greenway was a mile-long stretch of four-lane highway carved through the lowest point of a densely-forested valley. It was so named because in the six years since it had been abandoned, the local vegetation, which had always been a never-ending battle for the landscapers, had spread and thrived.

Tall, steep rock walls flanked either side of the highway. On both sides, tendrils of green ivy overran one another in their courses down the carved stone, forming a dense viridian coat. Bushes and shrubs and grasses overran the road's shoulders. Some shoots had begun to force their way through the cracks in the asphalt, as if wrenching the stone aside. At regular hundred-meter intervals bridges ran, connecting both sides of the valley. They too were overgrown, veils of vines draping down to the road and spilling out across it like the matted hair of a witch, unfurling in trails across the ground.

Kaie stood on the top of one of these bridges. The living highway loomed behind and ahead of her, soft soil underfoot. Kirschblute, her Juggernaut, sat beside her with its canopy popped open. She looked to the east, down the rolling road. It continued on and on into the horizon. From here the valley appeared endless. If someone were to tell her the road went on like this forever, green and overgrowing, shadowed perpetually by the rock walls to left and right until the very end of the earth itself, she would have believed them.

"We won't stop them, will we Cap?" Shiden asked, standing beside her own Juggernaut, Cyclops. Her arms were crossed. The wind blew her short reddish hair from behind, wispy strands streaming over her shoulders and past her face.

"Not all of them," Kaie agreed. "I think we can kill their first scouting party, and that will slow down their approach. Might buy us a week. We might even kill the second, and that should give Grethe enough time to start fielding SHADEs. But they'll send more. They always send more."

"Hmph. And to think I told Shin things were getting easier around here."

"They were probably biding their time. Holding back the small skirmishes so they could build up their forces for one big push instead."

"So this is it, then. The push."

"Yep."

Kaie put both hands on her hips and twisted from side to side. Her spine popped pleasantly with each turn. She finished with a great big stretch, arms in the air, curving her back in a feline posture. It had been a long ride in the Juggernaut to reach this point. Hours and hours. Just standing felt great. Stretching was divine.

"Are you sure you want to be here, Shiden?" Kaie asked.

Shiden looked at her from the corner of her eye. Her expression was placidly annoyed.

"Are you sure you wanna keep asking stupid questions? Haven't I given you the same answer like ten times by now?"

Kaie frowned. "It's not too late to run."

Shiden rolled her eyes.

But Kaie wasn't going to give this up. Shiden was one of the youngest in the Squadron, barely fifteen, and maybe not even that. The fact that Kaie wasn't much older herself didn't register in her mind. To her, Shiden was Someone To Take Care Of. Alice, too, had been practically overrun with People to Take Care Of.

That meant Kaie wouldn't stop asking the question. Not even after getting the same answer ten times in a row. Not if there was the slightest chance that it could keep Shiden from sharing the same fate as the rest of them. She had asked the same of all the other younger soldiers who'd volunteered for the Greenway mission. One, a particularly young boy of twelve named Rito, she had denied altogether.

"What about Shin? Aren't you always bragging about him? Isn't he waiting to see you again?"

A moment of conflict crossed Shiden's face, but it was small and fleeting. It was replaced quickly soon after with the same steady resolution she'd held ever since Kaie first broke the news of the impending Legion assault.

"Whatever Shin's waiting for, it isn't me," Shiden said in a tone of bleak acceptance. Kaie was surprised, though whether it was at the words themselves, or at the voice that carried them, she wasn't sure. Both were unlike the Shiden she knew.

"Look," she added. "Maybe I am just some shallow floozy after all, catching feelings for a guy I barely know. And I know I'm not very smart. I don't even know what these feelings are exactly."

Shiden sounded disgusted at herself for even entertaining such delicateness. She had always been an all-or-nothing kind of girl, as if it violated her personal code of ethics to feel even slightly complicated emotions. So in as many things she could, she simplified her feelings to their barest level. But love could never be simple, and Kaie thought that was exactly what she felt, even if she was a little too (in Shiden's own words!) dumb to realize it.

"Maybe Shin feels the same. Maybe he doesn't. He's hard to read, ya know?" Shiden smiled distantly, probably recalling some snatch of conversation they'd shared.

"But he doesn't need me," she said, and the smile was gone. "He likes me. Whether as a friend or somethin' else I don't know, but we… get along. Maybe he even trusts me. But he doesn't need me," she repeated. "And more than that, he's probably better off without me."

More bleak acceptance. More disgust at herself. She was disappointed at the truth she'd laid out, and that itself disappointed her, made her angry at herself for feeling that way.

"He's got friends now, people looking out for him. And I bet they don't remind him of the girl who left him behind, the way I do."

Shiden could be a talker sometimes. Sometimes she was as silent as death itself. But when she was in a talking mood, she never talked like this. She was melancholic. Irrationally, Kaie hated Shin for a moment. He had made Shiden Iida melancholic, and that seemed to break the fabric of every reality Kaie had ever known.

"I'd see it in his face whenever we talked. It was a look. This kinda, not exactly sad, not exactly hurt, but… lost, kinda look. Like he wasn't seeing me, but a person who looked like me, or talked like me. Something like that. And that person went and died on him, just like Shana died on me.

"I'd feel it over the Para-RAID too. God it's even worse there, 'cause I can feel exactly what he feels. And it's cold, Kaie. It's so cold. And it only got colder the longer we talked, and I know I'm the reason for it. I know he'd never tell me that. He's actually a pretty nice guy, if you can believe it. But I know."

Her voice trailed off. The wind picked up strength, as if it was eager to keep silence from setting in, until it was not just shifting their hair but whipping it harshly forward, like it was trying to shear it from their scalps by force alone. Both of Shiden's heterochromatic eyes, one as silver and blameless as an overcast sky, the other as darkly indigo as a starless night, were set firmly east, down the Greenway. Where the Legion would come.

"I don't have a sister anymore. I don't have Shana anymore. Shin doesn't need me either. And all my other comrades are here, ready to fight and die to buy time for… whatever Grethe has up her sleeve. There's no one waitin' for me to come home. So I'll be here too. I'll die here too." She fixed Kaie with a stern look. "And that's the eleventh time I've answered your stupid fucking question. If you make me do a twelfth, I'm going to scream. And then murder you."

Kaie tried to smile. She wasn't sure she succeeded, but at least when Shiden saw her expression the lines in her face seemed to ease. Just a little bit at least. The wind simmered down and Shiden adjusted her hair, pushing it back behind her ear, and Kaie saw bright orange earplugs settled there.

She thought detachedly, as if it weren't her thought at all but someone else's carried from a great distance, that Shiden was a liar. If she really planned to die here, she'd have taken them out. That was the rule, wasn't it?

But that was silly of course. The business about the hearing protection was just superstition, and unspoken superstition at that.

Maybe Shiden just didn't want to die with ringing in her ears. Maybe she just wanted to be able to hear her own final thoughts.

Kaie did not.

—

".:Cyclops, to your right!:."

".:!:." An utterance of surprise through the Para-RAID. A whine of feedback, blast of a cannon and the pulse of machine-gun fire. ".:Fuckin' saved my ass there, Michi:."

".:No prob-:."

There was the crack of a Lowe's main gun, and Michihi was dead. But Kaie had only enough space left in her mind to register the fact. Certainly none left to grieve, or to feel anything at all beyond the hard plastic of the drive- and weapon-stick in her right and left hand, the accelerator pedal beneath her feet.

The Legion poured down the Greenway in a silver-blue tide. Hundreds at least, in such volume they consumed the road entirely, like a river of mercury running through the overgrown valley. If this was just the scouting party, what would the main force look like?

Kaie leaped from the bridge to the ground below. The sounds washed over her, became too much, became ringing instead. Tinnitus annihilated her thoughts like dust on a breeze. The gunfire was a dull, constant roar whose intensity rose and fell. It was more of a force than a sound at this point. A thrumming in the air.

The explosions of Feldresses. Primarily the enemy's, at least for now. The voices of her soldiers through the Para-RAID, resonance cutting through the ringing. Some of them were screaming. Most stayed collected, giving and taking their orders with the calm precision of veterancy. She did not realize, in her battle-deafness, that she was one of those voices too.

Her Juggernaut slammed upon on the ground. The actuators creaked with a long metallic moan, but she did not wait for them to settle before she burst forward, guns alight. Six Ameise led the Legion's charge, granting sight to the heavier Lowes behind them. Kaie killed these first with a long rake of fire left to right. And when they sagged, mercury blood spilling across the ground, the faster Grauwolves locked onto her with their rocket-pods. She switched armaments and aimed her wire anchors at the highest point of the valley walls to her right. She pulled the trigger.

The rockets touched down, and the blasts of smoke and light and heat scorched the feet of her unit's legs just as she flew beyond range. Pressure rattled the cheap screws pinning her fuselage together.

But the valley wasn't clear either. As soon as she landed more dragoons were on her, holding onto the wall by their high-frequency blade-arms. They scuttled like spiders to her unit. One reached her and she pulled Kirschblute back, watching dully, unthinkingly, as her maneuver was a touch too slow, and the Grauwolf's blade sliced off the barrel of her cannon. It fell like a cheap pipe and rolled down the curve of her cockpit, down onto the slope of the valley, down and down until it reached the road itself and kept on rolling.

She snapped the trigger and her machine-guns roared, shredding the Grauwolf apart until it too tumbled down.

Then two more came. Then three after them. She kept the trigger pressed down and never let go. Not until the guns clicked empty and she had to switch to her sawed-down cannon. She hoped it would still work.

It did.

She killed one. She dodged the lunge of another, then killed that too with a shot to the spine, crumpling its unarmored frame in a wash of smoke and silver blood. Then more came, and she had to run.

Wire-anchors, select and trigger. She was flying to the opposite side of the valley. Flying, but not flying fast enough. With the unhesitating calculation of AI processors, the Grauwolves switched from blades to rockets, firing at her in the air.

The 76mm warheads trailed her like godly arrows, beams of white-hot flame and billowing smoke, and in the rear-view screen she saw them, and saw that they were faster than her Juggernaut.

She saw them arcing closer and closer, and to her eyes they were slow, like they were pushing through molasses. But she was even slower.

"I don't want to die," she realized, but could not hear herself speak.

They reached her. Her world became a bright and silent white. Then bright red. Then deep, dark black.

—

"Hold goddammit, hold!" Shiden screamed into her Para-RAID, unaware that all the other connections had zeroed out. "We're almost through!"

And they were. What had been hundreds were cut almost to half now, nearly enough to trigger their retreat response. The metal corpses of fallen Legion lined the highway like a pile-up of smashed cars. It was hard to tell which ones were alive and which were not in that dense carpet. They were all the same color, and the carpet of bodies was so dense, so many of them still moving, twitching in their mechanical death-throes. It created enough visual noise that it hid the movement of the living drones altogether. She could blink and a Grauwolf would all but teleport in front of her, blades in flight.

And then she'd kill it. And then she'd breathe, calmly in and calmly out. And she'd hold her fire for more clear targets just like that one.

Even when holding fire felt like torture. Bullets and shells crashed down around her, cracking asphalt and scattering her Juggernaut with shards of debris, wreathing it in flames. But she kept her cool. There wasn't enough ammo left to waste by firing blindly.

An image of Undertaker's twin high-frequency blades crossed her mind. 'A weapon that didn't need to be reloaded' was the unspoken thought, and she shook it off. Even she wasn't as crazy as that red-eyed bastard.

Two Lowes emerged on the horizon, miles down the Greenway, stomping through the corpses of their allies with mechanical indifference. Metal screamed as huge blade-like legs punched through the hulls of those unmoving units. Shiden fixed both machines with a glare. White-hot steel from the left eye, pure-black jet from the right.

"You want me pretty bad, huh?" she whispered. A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead, curved the edge of her eye and down her cheek, off her chin, breaking on the stiff rip-stop fabric of her fatigues. "Well, sorry, but this ass is taken. Private property, get it?"

The tank-types trundled closer. They quaked the ground with their footsteps. Cyclops stood alone on its stretch of highway, straddling the median. Fifty meters ahead and ten above was a land-bridge. Fifty meters behind was another. To either side of her the walls of the overgrown valley were massive and looming, tall enough that her wire-anchors could not reach the top in one shot.

Plenty of room to move.

The Lowe on the highway's east-bound lanes opened fire. But Shiden was already in flight by the time the shell made impact. The second, on the west lanes, tracked her movement. It waited for her to land on the bridge, amid stands of dense ferns and foliage, craters and cracks from dozens of other cannon shots before. But Shiden was waiting too, even as she flew. Waiting, and watching, for the tell-tale stiffening of its legs, bracing in the half-second before the cannon fired.

She saw it. She shot anchors again, and was gone an instant before the bridge was struck. Beneath the dull whumph of the explosion was a deep, resonant crack! as a support pillar, already abused thoroughly by the battle's stresses, gave way. The whole thing seemed to tremble for a moment in an eerily organic fashion. And then it caved in overtop of the road. There was the woody, splitting orchestra of a thousand trees being uprooted all at once. There was the gut-shaking roar of tens of thousands of pounds of concrete crashing into the ground.

There was a dense, massive cloud of dust and smoke that billowed out from the crumbled bridge, flooding the valley.

Shiden grinned. Lowes had shitty enough sensors as it was, and there were no Ameise left to share their thermal optics with these two. She breathed steadily, tasting grit on her tongue. She could do this. She knew it. She told it to herself until there was no room left for doubt.

She angled her anchors through the dust and fired. She flew, and landed on the Greenway's east-bound lanes, right at the Lowe's feet.

"Ready kid?" Kaie says, her hands over Shiden's, correcting her grip on the pistol.

"Don't call me kid," Shiden pouts. "You're smaller than me."

Kaie rolls her eyes. "But I'm two years older than you, and I've been on the battlefield for two years longer too. That makes you the kid no matter what."

"Whatever. You gonna let me shoot this thing or what?"

"If you think you can."

"I know I can!"

"Then do it. It's simple. You just-"

"-aim and fire," Shiden whispers, and does exactly that.

Her shot spears perfectly through all four joints of the Lowe's right-side legs. The rear two fly apart entirely and the others crumple in. The tank-type topples on its side. Its left legs scramble ineffectually. Its cannon tries to turn, but it's pinned against the ground. Shiden finishes it with one more shot through the canopy before it can fix that.

It's instinct alone that prompts her to move. She can't see that the Lowe behind her has zeroed in on the sound of her shot, aiming its cannon through the dust-cloud. But some primeval nerve in the base of her spine flashes hot down her back. It warns her like a blaring klaxon. She fires her anchors again into the dust, where the wall of the valley should be, and flies away just as a 120mm shell obliterates the ground she stood upon.

Amid the scrambling rush of adrenaline, a clear thought shines through, like a single diamond beneath a downpour of rain.

Of all the places the Legion could have picked for their attack, they chose the Greenway? The only highway in a hundred miles surrounded by cliffs? It's like they want to be beaten.

It comes as she flies from one side of the valley to the other. It leaves after she lands, and thoughtless concentration retakes its place. She waits, perched on the stone like a great metal spider, and an abrupt silence falls. It sounds unnatural. Though the fighting had lasted ten minutes at most, it had been long enough, intense enough, that it seemed like every memory she'd ever had of silence had been buried. Like silence was something completely alien to her now.

But in that new silence, an idea comes to her. She pulls out one ear-plug - and waits.

Her eyes squeeze shut as she concentrates. She listens to the silty drift of dust over the road, and to the small tumble of rocks down the sheer slope of the valley, disturbed by the force of cannons and multi-ton Feldress legs.

And below that, only barely audible at all, is the mechanical whir of a tank-turret in motion, as the Lowe fifty feet below her scans the dust for its target.

Bingo.

Shiden grins a wide, sharp grin like a shark as she squeezes the plug back into her ear.

"You're done," she whispers. "You're done. You're dead. You're fuckin' dead."

Then she jumps, and trusts the same instinct that saved her life, believing it will let her take one as well. She hits a surface of sloped metal, and at the landing the shock absorbers in Cyclops' legs cry out with a great, metallic moan. She shoves the muzzle of her cannon into the Lowe's canopy. She squeezes the trigger and that final, explosive howl of her gun, even blunted by her earplugs, is the loudest sound she'll ever hear.

"You're dead," she says again, and it is.

And with it, the last of the Legion drones turned to retreat, having hit their casualty limit. As the smoke and dust slowly cleared, Shiden watched them in unfeeling silence. They were unhurried, and utterly unconcerned. Somehow that seemed to slice a vein in her triumph. The feeling of victory bled quickly out of her when she realized how indifferent they were to her, to their losses. It left her cold and empty.

It took a long time for the adrenaline to flush itself out of her system. And when it was gone, her limbs were shaky. Her stomach felt simultaneously tight and watery. Her hands jittered so violently that when she tried to pick up her water bottle it slipped out her trembling fingers and spilled its contents across her lap. She didn't even mind. Her whole body was running fever-hot, and though the water was lukewarm at best, it felt heavenly cool on her skin. At least until she realized she'd have to sit in her soaked pants without a towel in a hundred miles of her.

That thought - the banality of it, anyway - struck her as funny somehow. She began to laugh. In small fits at first, trying to tamp them down by force of effort, flattening her mouth with a physical strain. And then, when that effort failed, it became a continual stream of laughter, the sound echoing unpleasantly inside the shell of her Juggernaut. Her earplugs made the sound seem like it wasn't coming from her.

All the better then when her laughter turned to sobs instead, as the realization settled in, not gradually but all at once in one enormous jolt like a lightning bolt to the brain - that everyone else was dead.

She didn't actually cry. No tears left her, and later she would wonder if that meant she could even cry at all. If maybe the part of her responsible for tears had broken at some point, after her younger sister's death, or after Shana's. All she made were sobs. Great sobs like moans from deep within her chest. Husky, racking things that stripped her throat raw. They came like a summer storm, furious and rapid and downpouring, before dissolving into silence just as quickly.

And in the silence she sat. Leaning back into the hard bakelite of her Juggernaut's chair, she thought about her friends. She thought of the last things they had said to her. Michihi, who had saved Shiden's life and tried to tell her 'no problem', but was cut off by a cannon-shot before she could even finish that small sentence. Kaie, who had spoken over the Para-RAID in a hollow, empty voice claiming 'I don't want to die', just a moment before she did. Was that how she would remember them from here on out? For the rest of her life?

'No problem.' 'I don't want to die.'

She mouthed the words noiselessly beneath her breath. She sobbed again, just once, and tinily, a hitch in the throat more than anything. It had happened again. She'd been left behind. She'd lost more people.

That sob was the last. She forced it to be.

Just as she was asking herself what she should do, turn around back to the empty shell of Halberd base, or push forward into certain death, she heard a noise to the east. A heavy, clomping, stomping noise, impacts so forceful they made the corpses of the Legion drones shudder violently. A destroyed Juggernaut that had been clutching stubbornly to the cliff was loosened. It tumbled end over end down the rocks and onto the highway where it shattered spectacularly into desert-toned shards of metal. The broken frame released a body onto the pavement. It was red and wet and torn utterly apart.

Shiden stared eastward, and it was there.

A larger Legion drone than she had ever seen before, easily twice the size of a Lowe, probably bigger, on eight trunk-like bladed legs. The bore of its cannon was dark and huge like the head of a mineshaft, dark like the pupil of an oracle's eye, one who portended death. Its silver-blue frame was heavy and sloped, a blue optical sensor at its forefront glowing bright even under the daylight. Wings of cooling radiators fanned behind it like the wings of some nightmarish peacock, sharp and jagged.

A Dinosauria, she registered faintly. She had never actually seen one before, just heard of them from stories.

But what struck her more than the sheer size of it was how gently it moved. As it stomped its way forward, the retreating Legion drones flowed around its legs like water around a boulder. It didn't leave so much as a scratch on them, despite its massive size. It didn't stomp over its fallen allies as the two Lowes had before it. It moved gingerly through them, hovering its pointed legs in the air until it could find a free spot to place them without damaging the corpses. Whenever it could not, it gently shunted bodies aside instead. Shiden couldn't believe that a Legion could show respect or grief for the dead, but somehow, in some abstraction of the Dinosauria's posture, its stance, its movements, respect and grief were exactly what she saw.

Shiden didn't have Shin's gift, of course. Before meeting him, she didn't even know the Legion had voices, to say nothing of being able to hear them, or of recognizing the person they once belonged to. And yet somehow, in some unspoken, horrible way running deeper than intuition, deeper than the membranous halls of instinct, she did recognize this one. It was a knowledge that shot all the way down to the soul itself, if that even existed.

She murmured.

"Alice."

Happy Wednesday!

Well. maybe not so happy. Alice is a Dinosauria now, after all. Poor girl. in the end, she just couldn't shake off her death flag... I hope you enjoyed this extra chapter! Have a great day!

- Verbosity