Main theme: Enemy by Imagine Dragons and J.I.D
Theme: Bipolar by Lucas King

James Ironwood, general of the old Atlas now in the past, looked over his kingdom with a glassy gaze.

His was a home of twisted steel and cracked rubble, of an upturned city left to rust and rot in the sun. His was a castle of salvage, built on unstable grounds and left to be picked over by the vultures and the scavengers.

Atlas made for an ugly corpse.

He schooled his expression and looked past his faint reflection against the glass before him. His command centre, stationed in one of the few ships that he had been able to recover from the Surge and brought back to Solitas all those months ago, was a cold shadow of the former glories that Atlas once proudly boasted. Instead of the bright lights and warm air that provided comfort to the people that had served under and alongside him, the room was dark and pitted, and he could see his breath turn cloudy in the air before him. The lights had been turned off, alongside the central heating to their ships as well, in order to save the precious little dust that they had.

(All on the orders of the makeshift city below.)

Now his men were living in the freezing cold and watching the ice form on their walls and dangle down from his ceilings like daggers. Their once proud warships were now pitted and rusting over, scarred from constant wars and precariously balanced atop a mountain of rubble, their bodies turned into slapdash fortifications for the people below.

The people. The people of Shelter, this new city, this new kingdom, this New Dawn.

This false kingdom.

Ironwood felt his hands clench, but a quick rush of his semblance stopped that, allowing him to quash down that petty emotion. Pride would do him no good here. He knew that well.

But even so...

No. Not now. He had plans to see, orders from the city (the false kingdom-) to follow, and soldiers to organise.

The few that he had left.

He felt his hand - his organic hand - press against the glass. Most of his soldiers were gone, now. When he had left Atlas to protect the world against the Grimm, he had left with tens of thousands, probably even a million or two, soldiers of all sorts, ready to fight and die to protect the people of the world in the name of not just Atlas, but also Remnant.

And they had held. Across both Sanus and Anima, on every single front, against impossible odds and with the threat of extinction on their backs, they had held.

They had held fast, held strong, held the line. They had been held more so than all those others who had fought alongside them as well, and had sacrificed even more as well. He had watched his fellow soldiers die all around him. He had watched hundreds of his men give their lives for Remnant's future, and thousands more die for a sunrise that they would never see...

And for all their efforts, they had been stabbed in the back for it.

First, Atlas, their homeland, and the very thing that many of them (including himself) were fighting for, betrayed them. Cinder Ella betrayed them, casting them all out in secret and turning his home into a cruel, monstrous shadow of itself. Her Imperium was a demented parody of Atlas, a vile beast that paraded around its glories as if they were its own. She and it had taken everything that Ironwood stood for, everything that he thought was decent, and turned it against him, casting out his loyal soldiers into exile, all without him knowing until after the fact.

Second, when the tattered heroes of Atlas returned to Solitas to find their home nothing more than a broken pile of rubble and ruin, they returned to find that their own people - the citizens of Altas and Mantle that they had protected and sheltered under their watchful eye for so long - had turned them into pariahs and hate figures, something for them to pass all their anger onto. The second betrayal.

And the third betrayal... was Jaune Arc, decrying him to be something he was not.

Ironwood's frown briefly turned into a scowl before his semblance squashed that rash display of emotion. He had trusted Arc, and he had repaid it with a proverbial knife between his ribs. Back in Vale, he had trusted Arc to investigate the vigilante murders that had been plaguing the city. He had trusted Arc to do the right thing, and now he repaid that trust by turning his kingdom against him, by turning all the sacrifices he had been forced to make, all the choices that he had made in the name of both Atlas and Remnant, into a propaganda piece against him.

And he had been successful.

Beneath Ironwood's hand, the glass cracked.

He had reinforced Atlas because he knew that they would be needed. He had installed guns and cannons into the very foundations of his proud kingdom because he knew that, when the final confrontation with Salem came, they would need to be ready. He had arrested so many people back during the day and held his hand heavy because Remnant needed a unified front in the face of Salem's chaos. And he had forced himself to turn a blind eye to the corruption inside of Atlas' ranks because he knew that when the time came, they would need to stand together, no matter what.

And yet, when Ironwood tried to make this clear, Arc continuously painted him as a warmonger, of all things. As arrogant, as inept. When he tried to arrest the wanted criminals that stood beside them, he, along with those very same criminals, turned the people of his kingdom against him, and decried Atlas as something that it was not. And when he had ordered his men to arrest them for treason against Atlas, they had stalled. Frozen. Sided with the enemy in all but words.

Yet another betrayal. Betrayal after betrayal after betrayal.

Those same men were gone, now. They had left his side months ago, gone to try their luck in Shelter. A few good men and women, originating from Atlas, had remembered their roots and how much he had sacrificed for them, and had joined his forces once more. They had been put to work, dismantling as much of the old ruins of their once proud home as they could before the vultures from Shelter could scavenge the mountainous ruin's hidden treasures.

He barely had any men left to his name. Winter and Marrow (for the most part), his personal guard, and a few thousand of his soldiers remained loyal to him, and they had all been loyal to Atlas and Remnant as well...

And this was the thanks they got? To be pushed away into their ships and left to rust and rot atop the desiccated throne of Atlas? Everyone that they had lost, everything that he- they had sacrificed, and now they were to be treated like demons - like villains - by the people that they had once protected, and left to die in the cold of Solitas, exiled to the ashes of their former home.

His frown threatened to deepen. His semblance squashed down that emotion once more. It felt like he was running on his semblance more than food drink, or even the air that he breathed nowadays.

It wasn't fair.

His men had done more for Atlas - and more for Remnant - than anyone else on the planet. They had been on every significant front, and in every significant battle, and had bled and died for the future of all four kingdoms, and this was to be their reward for their service? To be treated like gutter trash and left to die?

He wouldn't allow it.

"You're welcome to stay and live in Shelter anytime you want," Robyn and the rest of the supposed heads of state in Shelter's senate - in the New Dawn alliance - had said to him and his men, "And become part of our new defence force, so long as you move on from the old dreams of Atlas and let it go. We can't allow ourselves to repeat the mistakes of the past, James. We need to be better than Atlas ever was, lest we fall just like it."

Lies. All of them. All of them stood in the way of Atlas' future.

Many of his soldiers had heard their silver-tongued words and left for Shelter, for the false kingdom that built itself up in Atlas' shadow, but Ironwood, loyal patriot of the greatest kingdom on Remnant, would not bend or break, not to the howling winds of Solitas, not to the broken heaps of metal and stone that stood beneath his balanced ships, and certainly not to the serpent-tongued lies of the criminals and salvagers below.

The cracked glass against his hand turned into a spiderweb.

James Ironwood, general of the Atlas to come, looked over his kingdom with a stern, resolute glare, and allowed himself the slightest hint of emotion.

Atlas would rise again.

Oh yes.

Atlas would rise again...

Reviewer response time:

ReDestrobo: Yeah, I figured you'd like that chapter. Thanks a lot for the kind review as well! However, unfortunately, Cardin's mother is deceased in this story. She died in the first short story. Sorry about that. I was writing off the seat of my pants for a lot of the first months of Ascendancy, so back then there hadn't been much thought put into individual characters and their narrative worth in the story.

smolhauz: Big sad all around, my friend. Big oof there.

D: I actually liked Volume 9, including how it ended. I was nervous at first, and especially nervous about the ending, but I thought that it was a massive step-up from Volume 8, and even though the ending didn't tickle all of my bones, it was still a good ending that I enjoyed, and I like to think that's how a lot of people thought as well.

So here we have General James Ironwood, hardball player and Atlesian patriot through and through.

As a general (no pun intended) rule, I tried to give Ironwood the benefit of the doubt, and show some sympathy to his plight in Solitas due to how he was in the earliest parts of Ascendancy. I didn't want him to be just a one bit character, and I like being able to show different sides to people than what is already shown in my stories.

Plus, to be fair, the situation that he and his fellow soldiers of Atlas are in right now... is fairly shitty. He and those under his command went off to fight a war that spanned across multiple continents. They fought, bled, and died, and when they came back home, they found their kingdom in ashes, and its people scorning them. It draws parallels to how veterans were treated in the United States after the Vietnam War, doesn't it?

However, it should be noted that Ironwood's perspective as a whole is skewed, mostly by his own biases, patriotism, and nationalism to Atlas and himself, and also because of his own semblance. Everyone remembers Mettle, don't they? So be sure to take whatever he says with a pinch of salt.

On a completely unrelated note, what are your thoughts on Volume 9, especially now that it's ended? Personally, I've really enjoyed it, especially the ending, and I've found it to be a major step-up from the quality of writing that Volume 8 was boasting a few years ago.

On another completely unrelated note, does anyone else know about the fact that people in War Thunder's discord servers have been leaking CLASSIFIED MILITARY DOCUMENTS in order to get the developers to make their game more realistic? Forget international spy networks, the biggest threat to the U.S.'s national security is apparently bored teenagers and gamers with too much time on their hands and a need to win arguments!

But anyway, with all of that said and done, please leave a review, follow and favourite, stay safe, stay healthy, and I shall see you all next time!

Titanmaster 117 out!