A/N: This is right after the Battle of Capella, as you should know if you are at all familiar with SupCom canon.

I treat the Zephyr Amplifier as the actual thing that fits a Zephyr Antimatter Cannon to the UEF ACU, because the arm barrels look more like plasma cannons to me, and don't do nearly enough damage to be an antimatter weapon, even a pathetically low yield one.

This fic mostly focuses on why the Fire Emblem world exists, what the dragons actually are, the search for Earth while observing the natives, etc.

Chapter 2: Lost in Blue

Ylisse Outrealm Gate Island, Archanean Calendar Year 2609, Specific Date Unknown

Inside the 52-meter-tall, almost skeletal (due to redistribution of mass to regain mobility) walker that was walking toward the biggest flat, open space she could find in these peaks, Samantha scowled as she recognized the need for an Air Factory, which, given the structure demanded a 160 meter by 160 meter plot of relatively flat land, was a pain in these craggy badlands. Clearing land for Tier 3 generators later, fi she wanted them reasonably clustered and thus cheap to shield, would require firing her plasma cannons to make room, or a lot of digging. Even the small-calibre weapon under the larger ones on her ACU's right arm (the left arm had its engineering suite there instead) might alert the nearby populace and possibly alien overlords of some sort

Hmm, perhaps she could build a naval base instead… The eastern shore of the island offered plenty of space for that at least… building one from the rocky cliffs wasn't ideal but would work, and most likely natives steered well clear of said crags. But that wouldn't do in making Engineers, as UEF engineers were tracked, and there was no good way up the crags without a long detour. It seemed she'd have to use some precious flat land to put up an air factory after all… She'd still have to probably do some blasting to make room atop the nearest hydrocarbon deposit for a Tier 1 Hydrocarbon Power Plant after that. Fortunately, the atmospheric and soil surface chemical analysis of her local area showed no signs of industrialization, let alone potential dangers to her ACU.

She needed to get back to Coalition Command as soon as possible, the morale hit from her almost certain death would be a major problem for not only the UEF but also the Cybrans and the Aeon…

Clarke didn't like thinking about the Aeon, because their Princess Rhianne had used Black Sun to teach her, to teach all of them, a horrible truth. The Cybrans wanted to use the superweapon to free their people, Rhianne's Aeon Loyalists wanted it to force people to stop fighting by way of forcing them to abandon their hatred. The United Earth Federation… for all it spewed on uniting humanity and restoring order, they built the weapon just to do their utmost to slaughter everyone who dared disagree with them. And then there was Option Zero which the Aeon and Cybrans were determined to prevent, and which the UEF had designed, essentially holding the entire Earth hostage…

The understanding of what they had been doing, instead of uniting and protecting humanity and the Homeworld, had been a bitter pill to swallow, but with the Seraphim invasion so soon after the end of the Infinite War, Clarke had been too busy to spend too much time thinking on it. Now that she was stuck on this medieval—for that was the tech level analysis her ACU was telling her—backwater with no enemy bearing down on her, scrambling to get a base up and trying to avoid potentially another bad First Contact, she had the time to think, and to regret.

To those who knew Samantha Clarke as the hard-ass zealot no less fanatical than the most rabid of Aeon pilots, they might be surprised that she did NOT, at ALL, regret arresting and then executing (not assassinating, because the Overcharge Cannon was by no means stealthy) the President. She did not deign to so much as keep her memory of his name, because ordering even Option Zero, let alone Black Sun be built was gross treason against the United Earth Federation and against all humanity, and to her sorrow she'd only seen it after the firing of Black Sun and Rhianne's forcing enlightenment on them all. The cover story that all ACU pilots stuck to was that it was the Seraphim who killed him, but since Option Zero and Black Sun were almost open secrets, Clarke was hailed as a hero by the whole Coalition for putting down the rabid dog.

Meanwhile, her body practically moving on autopilot, she had gotten the hydrocarbon plant running, the three usable mass points had extractors installed, and she was upgrading one of them to the "Mass Pump 2" Tech 2 Mass Extractor. After the upgrades to all the Mass Extractors completed one by one, with the help of her two Tier 1 engineers and ACU walking around reclaiming as many loose rocks and trees as they could find for mass, she could upgrade her Air Factory to Tier 2. They had some help getting reclaimable mass, thanks to occasional low-yield use of her plasma cannons to blast out more boulders to harvest, as well as make some more sufficiently flat ground. Hummingbird Air Scouts were already ranging over the island and the sea in all directions as distant pickets, and she had a handful of Cyclone Interceptors and Scorcher Attack Bombers. Due to the lack of any sign of hostiles, the most important thing right now was to get to at least Tier 2 where she could deploy the excellent Janus fighter-bombers, and with Tier 2 power generators could afford upgrading her extractors to Tier 3.

Due to having extra mass income (Air Factory upgrades didn't cost all that much mass, and both engineers plus her would only double its build speed) she began surrounding her three extractors with Mass Storages. Upgrading her ACU to Tier 2 Engineering Suite was not viable, especially while the Air Factory was upgrading, as it cost too much energy to be afforded for now. She assisted the engineers in ranging over the widely dispersed Mass Extractors, and when they returned, the Air Factory was working on Tech 2 Engineers, while the first one was working on her first Tier 2 generator.

A/N: I haven't tested such a scenario out in-game, but I'm reasonably sure it should look like this provided the area she's ranging over is something like 2 kilometers.

Once she had that, she could begin upgrading her ACU's engineering suites, which, given the terrain, would be more expedient than masses of Tier 3 Engineers. It was a real pity this planet seemed to be so sparse in terms of large near-surface mass concentrations, which were the only sources Tier 1 and 2 Extractors could tap. More exclusive in Coalition warfare were the rare zones where the crust was particularly susceptible to quantum tunneling to extract mass from the mantle of the planet. Those could only be used by Tier 3 extractors, though building lower tiers on them for no profit was possible, while the mass concentrations could be used by all tiers, changing to mantle extraction once Tier 3 is reached. No such weak spots were on this rather large island. Then again, it was a mountainous island, and while mass concentrations tended to be more common on mountain ranges—not this one though, it seemed to not contain much in the way of ores lodes apparently—they were not good for quantum tunnelling. This mantle extraction was also why Tier 3 mass extractors didn't cost TOO much power to run, because harvesting geothermal energy from the super-viscous fluid that mantle rocks behaved as (with some melting as they were removed and pressure was reduced, filling in the gap and preventing earthquakes sensible to the surface) helped

…What… The… Hell…

Apparently her sensors had been more damaged than she thought, since the Hummingbirds on outbound flights to the east, to look at a distant island to the east instead of the mainland of the continent she'd landed relatively near, spotted two more mass deposits with their sensors.

Samantha cursed herself for being so presumptuous as to only have her strategic overview screen and PIP windows looking at the island for unit signatures, looking at the local village, etc. Instead of the standard view, since her sensors being so damaged was quite unexpected. Then again, while ACU combat tended to begin near mass-rich regions, the distribution wasn't TOO abnormal for average planet surfaces given the island she was on was very considerable in size, with most of it unsettled almost certainly due to the annoying lack of valuable ores by local standards… i.e. mass deposits.

Maybe she really should have headed east to build a Naval Factory early on… perhaps her ACU sensors would have picked them up then, even though she was STILL down at half health with focus on bringing weapons and defences back up before the long-range sensors. She changed that prioritization right away.

Hmm, running an economy on SIX mass deposits was very doable, particularly as they all had room to easily be surrounded by storages to increase extractor efficiency, unlike three which would have her just scraping by…

And a little bit of landscaping by plasma cannon would be enough to get engineers down to the sea to start building a naval force. It was too bad the UEF had no amphibious combat units built at naval factories, unlike the Cybrans and their Salem Class destroyers. Unless…

…Damn, her Alternative and Prototype data banks were completely destroyed, even the Percival prototype that was expected to be accepted into common service relatively soon. She was restricted to the Standard Roster for now, whose compressed back-ups were inside her ACU's core systems in redundant copies. Like other well-renowned commanders, Clarke packed some niche units which, while less cost-effective at most tasks than standard roster, were still good for certain things. This included the UEF's own experiments on land-traversing naval units, such as their answer to the Cybran Salem family of designs, though thankfully the names were (marginally) less cheesy. Whichever Cybran came up with the nickname "Alum" for the land-oriented members of the Salem family should have been clubbed over the head for sheer lameness as far as Clarke was concerned.

Well, there was nothing for it but to start assembling a navy after building over the rest of the island, being careful to remain away from the quadrant near the human village. Her sensors had now surveyed the island in its entirety in detail, and marked down land that could be built on, compared to land that couldn't be due to terrain that was simply not consistent enough. Of course, plasma fire could remedy that, but it wasn't normal in ACU warfare to do so simply because it gave away one's position to sensors across the whole planet. Due to the observed local tech level, the lack of fear or reverence toward the Gate—otherwise they'd have built a temple complex around it at least—indicating probably no alien overlords, and the relative lack of available mass deposits, Clarke had already thrown caution to the wind and did some landscaping—and rock farming for mass—by plasma cannon.

It was really too bad that the mainland seemed to mostly be farmland, since mass deposits or tunneling spots there would be detectable to the locals by walking into them if nothing else. The sizable patches of wilderness and forests on the continent, however, were potentially viable as expansion bases. The cheapest transports available should be appropriate given her current relatively limited economy, namely C-6 Couriers (air speed 720 km/h) carrying two Tier 2 Engineers and two Tier 1 Engineers each to maximize the engineering power available…

By the time an hour had passed, Samantha had expanded to the mainland, including building a base in the desert away from caravan routes in the sub-continent northwest of her initial island. She had enough mass flowing in to sustain major unit production and economic ramp-up, and had units sent on missions to expand further, to uninhabited islands off the northern coast of the continent she was closest to. The nearby continent to the west of this one was smaller, and its northern reaches were more temperate due to ocean currents. Therefore, it lacked comparably uninhabited regions to set up bases on at present.

The distant continents were too far for practical expansion for now unless she was willing to send her air units to orbital flights, which she wasn't about to risk before deploying long-ranged sensors to scan this star system. Expanding would wait until she had that AND at least until she had a solidly defended Control Node or two up and running in this pair of continents. A Control Node, like SCUs, could only coordinate "500" units counting itself, and her ACU could handle "1000" counting itself. More critically, Control Nodes made for separate economies, practically separate armies except for her still having control over them. Their destruction would result in all the units being shoved under her ACU's control and either going dormant or self-destruction depending on conditions. To be perfectly honest though, given Tier 1 defensive structures counted for only half a unit each, and her shoulder engineering drones and wall sections didn't count at all, she had far more than enough control cap and resources to work with… Even if her starting island had been absurdly sparse in mass deposits, the mainland was relatively close to Earth-standard, outside of Earth's major geologic shields. This meant there were more than enough mass deposits for dozens of ACUs to operate on the continent in all-out combat. Given the lack of need for such, things were really quite peachy.

Her current air patrol had been upgraded to Wasp Air Superiority Fighters, with a small number of Ambassador Strategic Bombers and Broadsword Heavy Gunships giving them anti-ground firepower. The bases she'd put up were shielded and stealthed, and to keep curious locals from getting anywhere even if they ran right into them, they were surrounded by Tech 2 Wall sections. These were some 50 meters tall with 4-meter battlement-like bulges regularly on top, with a parapet of at least 5 meters. They were usually backed by point defences on platforms, or filled with terrain behind them to let units move up to them and fire over them. Standard Passive Jamming would ensure the walls absorbed some of the damage with their 8000 HP for the units. This was a large HP for the mass investment, but was worse than the Tier 1 wall blocks in that regard. Suffice it to say that without ANY sensors, weapons, etc. a relatively small reactor could generate a lot of HP per mass invested. Unlike in video games, Tier 1 walls cost 4 mass, not 2, which was still trivially cheap for a 4000 HP barrier to enemy movement.

The UEF Tier 1 Wall Section "Calcicrete" only had a mass of 8 tons in a 10-meter tall 20-by-20 meter overall space. Despite the fact that it didn't occupy nearly all this space (only about 75%) it was still a density of 0.002667 grams per centimeter cubed (it is that many times the density of water) if one ONLY looked at the mass cost. This density was a little over twice as dense as sea level air on Earth. The reality was somewhat different as a wall section naturally needed to have a solid foundation reaching into the ground, which basically meant the wall section, while still very low density and reliant purely on its structural field to have any resistance to weapons fire, was not in fact barely denser than some atmospheres the Coalition fought in. It was more than ten times that dense. In the distant past, it actually had been made of Calcicrete, but as it ended up obsolete to the point of becoming a Tier 1, the technology had been changed to be cheaper and cheaper to try to keep up…

A/N: Tier 1 Wall Sections have been rebalanced (read: nerfed) from in-game, as you can tell. It's still far less dense than goddamned Styrofoam which has a density of 0.05 relative to water.

The Tier 2 Wall Sections were far more expensive and slower to build, but very importantly, were also vastly larger, could actually be used as cover against direct-fire weapons, and were immensely harder to capture or reclaim by enemy engineers (the Tech 1 walls were trivially easy to reclaim or capture). They would keep over-curious locals from even potentially climbing over them, unlike the Tier 1 Wall Sections which might reasonably be scaled. They could activate Active Camo, like all Coalition units, and in this particular case had Active Stealth coverage, since Clarke had built Scattershield Stealth Generators near the wall line in addition to the standard shield generator farms. That should make them far more than completely impervious to native sensors, but she'd still built the walls just in case.

Now she would upgrade the perimeter land patrols in the desert from groups of Titans, Sky Boxers (unfortunately less effective than any of the other flak pieces, but sturdier) and Parashields to the slower shield emitters that Fatboys could serve as. The seismic signature dampening systems would ensure that the locals didn't notice unless they ran right into a unit under Active Camouflage. The mountainous island she started out on couldn't take Fatboy use due to lack of space (the mobile factories were 170 meters long, 150 meters wide with the guns pointed out to the sides, and 50 meters tall) unless she was willing to level more mountains, so the patrols would have to remain weaker there. It didn't matter, she would have to tolerate it as her main base until her northern peninsula base was up to full capacity, and then she could relocate there by transport, teleportation, or by building a groundside Quantum Gate at both locations, as passive listening did not reveal any traces of the Quantum Gate Network in this region of space. The QGN had been destroyed after Black Sun fired due to the Cybrans, and that had thankfully vastly slowed the Seraphim advance. However, there remained a network, linking the groundside gates by a lower-traffic version of the system, re-established due to dire need in the face of the Seraphim onslaught.

Once she had bases up and running, it was time to pay attention to the meagre scan data on the gate on this planet, what little was available from when she'd first arrived here, and to analyze for where the hell she was in the galaxy. That would require stellar cartography…

…This should be Coalition territory, but there was no sign of the Coalition? Even barren worlds were fought over bitterly in the present war…

…It seemed she would have to send ships out toward the nearest Coalition fortress worlds then, to get a report on what the hell was happening. If they weren't there, then the ships would have to head to Earth and figure out what was going on.

While waiting the weeks it would require for that check-in at Earth—given the lack of Coalition tech on this planet she had doubts if humans even existed at such a tech level here—to occur, Clarke paid some attention to the natives. Coalition FTL technology was vastly slower than use of Quantum Gates, hence the absurdly long time relative to the speed at which ACU warfare could be conducted.

…Why the hell were Psionically animated… zombies, for lack of better terms… pretty much falling out of the sky at random across the nearest two continents?

She dialled back the data logs to when she'd first begun assembling her base… that would explain why the scout party came for her relatively late, they'd had to fight off a minor zombie attack before investigating. The speed at which they came meant they probably thought she was related to the appearance of the zombies, a reasonable thought for what seemed to be a medieval tech level.

Hmm, let's test a Psi Disruptor on them… no effect due to internalized Psi influence? Well, then, this might actually be an interesting month-long vacation while the computers tried to work out how to get back to Coalition Space…

A/N: And there we go with the Risen.

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