Chapter 17 – Grounded

There weren't many worse ways to start the day than the one Lisbeth was currently going through. Firstly, she'd had a truly terrible night's sleep, having been kept awake by all kinds of clangs and bangs as the NPC mechanics in her shop worked tirelessly to keep the squadrons running, especially as a massive shipment of experimental and captured equipment had been shipped to Canaveral over the past few days.

Some of those bits of equipment were quite small – a pair of MIG-21F-13s for one, that Lisbeth had decided would be cannibalised to keep the already high hour MIG-21s that LLENN and Pitohui flew in the air… eventually, anyway – whilst others had completely baffled her how they'd been captured in the first place – the Victor refuelling tanker was the key suspect in her confusion there! – and a third category for "things she was absolutely calling dibs on" – the pair of Su-24s and MIG-25Ps fit that one to a tee – had been added when she truly saw the haul of equipment, but alas, she was still human, so sleep was necessary.

That sleep had not helped one iota when a shipping container had been bought into her workshop, marked as "Salvaged parts – Hawker Hunter FGA.9 XG2?". She'd felt a cold chill run down her spine at that, as she had heard that Koharu had gone missing – presumed KIA, she had been told – but to have actual, irrefutable proof in front of her?

She wished she hadn't woken up now.

The wreckage contained was badly mangled in ways that only an impact with water could've produced. At a high enough speed, water stopped acting like a liquid… and more like a solid; it would hit less like water and more like concrete. This was nowhere near that high of a speed; the wings had sheared off, and the fuselage was broken in half.

Given how the bodies of players disappeared almost instantly after death – something to with an age rating, she reckoned despite how dumb that now sounded - that had told her something she hadn't wished to know; that one of her friends was now gone, and all they had to remember her was the destroyed Hunter, and whatever belongings were still left in her bunk.

Finding out that the rest of her friends had also been detained for their role in an unsanctioned mission to Sapin also hadn't helped her mood any. She'd have asked what they had all thought they were doing when they decided that was a good idea, but she was sure the answer was "vengeance", and she wasn't entirely sure she blamed them…

Though she had realised just how terrifying of a force they all were when pooled together – they had done more damage to the Belkan Navy in one night, than had been done to their Navy in the entire war so far, and that was over the loss of a single pilot…

She didn't dare to imagine what would happen should multiple people die in a mission, because she assumed chemical weapons would be involved…

/-/

A few hours had passed, and Lisbeth felt herself needing the caffeine boost of about ten cups of coffee, such was the mountain of paperwork in front of her. Sometimes, she was thankful that both Silica and Eugeo were on top of this normally, because there was no way on Earth or Strangereal that she could've kept up on her own!

Just before lunch time though, she found herself being kept company by the resident Casanova-reject, who seemed to be just hovering around aimlessly…

"I can't believe they just let you out on parole… you literally committed about six war crimes…" Liz shook her head. Trust a military to decide that war crimes were fine when they benefitted them massively.

"We have an Asuna on our side." Sierra joked. "They didn't stand a chance."

"Any particular reason that you're hanging around here like a bad smell, anyway?" She asked, politely telling him to get lost.

"What? Can't I visit the frankly stunning mechanic who keeps us alive out here every now and again?" A hint he completely failed to pick up on, as he feigned offence. "Fine. I'm bored, and everyone's off doing their own stuff. Or other people." He admitted, looking like a petulant child, rather than the adult he was.

"And I'm busy too. Need to find some paperwork." She retorted.

"Need a hand?" He asked.

"If that's a euphemism, do remember I have a big hammer for dealing with troublesome nuts…" She warned him, slightly hoping for an excuse to make use of said hammer…

And of course, he had an answer for that too. "I shouldn't be surprised that you're into that sort of stuff, but no." He said, nary missing a single beat. "I meant if you need any help looking through the paperwork."

She shrugged. Any help was better than none, she supposed… even if it was a Casanova wannabe asking. "If you're offering."

"What are you looking for, anyway?" He looked over several files before inhaling sharply. "And dear god, woman, haven't you heard of alphabetising things!" He muttered, looking through yet more files across his side of the desk.

"Records for Koharu's aircraft. Alice told me what happened, so I know something failed. I just don't know what." She answered. "And they were alphabetised. I've been here all morning looking through them."

"So, we're looking for X-ray Golf Two-Twenty-Five then, got it."

"Err, yeah! You knew that off the top of your head?"

"Good with numbers. There was a reason our squadron was the best run on the Harrier, and you're looking at him."

"And oh so humble too…" She smirked at getting the last word in for once…

"Ahem, Miss "Best – and only – mechanic at Canaveral"." …Before he managed to take that off her and insert his own last words, before seemingly giving up on the paperwork. "What's even in the shipping container over there anyway? It just says parts for a Hunter 9… wait, XG2? Wasn't Koharu's aircraft XG225?" Sierra walked over to it, before looking opening the doors and taking his own look at the wreck.

"Yeah, that's…" When even the man with an answer for everything was shocked into silence, she knew just how grim of a sight it was, and that she wasn't overreacting. "Why did they send it here, anyway? To taunt us, or something?"

"Apparently, they want me to look over why she died."

"Uhh, drowning. Next question." He answered with a sense of nonchalance, as if they weren't discussing a deceased friend. She shot him a glare to show her disapproval of that way of talking, before they carried on.

"Yes, but she couldn't get out. There's, like, four ways she could've… yet she didn't. One not working is a defect, two is bad luck, anything more than that is… well."

He addressed the tap-dancing elephant in the room. "You think someone sabotaged it?"

"Why else would everything go wrong?" She asked.

"Bad maintenance? That she panicked slightly? That she resigned herself a little too quickly?" The American suggested, taking a seat on the corner of the table.

"I double checked the maintenance myself. That plane was spotless before it left!"

"Clearly." He looked over at the wreck, and even with her defence, she had to admit he had a point. She was confident in her work, sure, but she hadn't checked over every single part – that simply wasn't feasible. She'd checked everything she thought would prove important, and that had included the ejector seat.

If nothing else, she should've been able to eject. "Look, Liz, we aren't going to get anywhere speculating. We're going to need to start taking that wreck apart, and seeing what's inside it or more crucially, what isn't."

/-/

Removing the ejector seat and canopy was usually a fairly simple task on a Hunter – the canopy was on runners, after all, and as long as you disarmed the ejector seat, there was little risk of getting shot through the roof whilst tweaking around the cockpit.

Unfortunately, the seat was badly damaged, and getting to anything was an exercise in defying death itself for the pair.

Eventually though, they had been able to remove the canopy and get a closer look at the rails it slid along, and to Lisbeth's horror, the rail had pits running along it. Pitting usually occurred with the grinding of unlubricated metal on another unlubricated metal surface, with the harder surface grinding away the softer surface, but it was usually a slow process; a process she should've noticed long before it got that bad.

Had she really missed something that obvious?

"Uhh, Liz, I may be about to eat humble pie about earlier." Sierra admitted, an annoyed look on his face momentarily.

"I thought you were sure it wasn't sabotage…" She taunted.

"Yeah, well, I was also sure that Jet and Kureha would get together, and I was very wrong on that one too. Cost me 5000 credits too." He grumbled, before pointing to one of the more extreme pits on the rail, one that simply didn't look right to her. "Tell me that was done by fatigue, seriously. It looks like someone took a Dremel to it, don't it?"

He was right – the shape of the pitting looked way off, given it was almost a triangle cut into the rail, rather than the semi-circular pitting she'd have been expecting from fatigue wear or material damage…

Holy shit, someone had cut that.

As much as she'd been adamant it hadn't been her fault that Koharu was gone, she'd not bothered to confront the alternative possibility either, despite suggesting it.

Someone was sabotaging the aircraft at Canaveral.

Someone wanted them dead.

For the first time, she'd seen the strange look of smug affability disappear off Sierra's face, replaced with a look of dawning horror. "Someone wanted this to look like an unhappy accident, didn't they?"

"I think so, yeah. We should keep looking though, just in case."

And so they did.

Disassembling the ejector seat discovered that the seat was deactivated; the rockets would simply not fire as part of the fire control mechanism had been severed. The same went for the canopy jettison system; it had been tampered with, to make sure it didn't operate as intended. A closer look deeper into the cockpit for a crash axe that Liz was sure was there revealed nothing – although that had led to a disagreement between her and the American, as they argued over whether there should've been one there in the first place. Whatever the answer was, the result was the same – no crash axe, which took out another escape vector.

That had left only one possible option – her sidearm - which should, in theory, have been able to punch a hole through the canopy, and the answer for why she hadn't taken it had become obvious as they looked over the gunsight. A massive dent in the front ridge of the gunsight; quite clearly where her head had impacted during the ditching…

"Someone really wanted her dead, didn't they?" She asked quietly, horrified by what she'd discovered, and even more so by the idea that someone would want her dead, of all of them. Her Hunter had been no less secure than anyone else's aircraft, and it wasn't like Koharu went round making enemies either.

In fact, she'd have said that she was something of a social butterfly – very few people had anything bad to say about her, and even those that did were generally more of the kind who just wanted to be left alone.

Loners, but not the type to kill… probably.

Or at least, they weren't the type to do things with this level of calculation. More the type to get a gun, and well…

Thankfully, Sierra interrupted that train of thought. "We need to tell someone." He stated bluntly. "We don't know if they've done this to anyone else's planes, or even how many people we're dealing with."

Behind them, a clang put them both on high alert; Sierra reaching for his sidearm, whilst she grabbed the biggest breaker bar that she could find… only to turn round and find Sinon, having fell onto her backside trying to step away from them. "Jesus, Sinon! Could've tapped me on the shoulder…" She muttered, checking her heartbeat…

"S-sorry, but… are you saying someone sabotaged our planes?" The aquamarine haired girl asked, clearly in shock at that idea.

"Yeah."

She nodded, and a sterner look came across her face. That was the face of someone who was determined to get to the bottom of this, and who was not going to take no for an answer… "Then I am helping, Lisbeth. Someone killed my friend, and I do not take that lightly…"

"Intense." Sierra quipped, only to receive a breaker bar to the toes that she had "accidentally" dropped.

"Whoops, my hand slipped." She told him, almost inviting a rebuttal, before moving on. "But yeah, same here. We're finding who did this and locking them away."

"Too kind if you ask me." Sierra shrugged. "I'd be a-okay putting a bullet in their head and sticking them in a shallow grave. An eye for an eye, and all that…"

"I suppose you could live with yourself for doing that, could you?" The fact that Sinon was still a fair bit shorter than the American, but still managed to make herself look big enough to stand on his level (metaphorically speaking, anyway), was testament to her anger at that point. "Because it isn't something you can live with yourself for!" Sinon told him bluntly, and in her eyes, there was look of both anger… and a sadness she'd never seen anyone express before. "And the saying is "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", in case you didn't know. It's saying how wrong that type of thinking is!"

"Uhh huh. Moving on…" Sierra looked away awkwardly, like a child scolded by a teacher for something minor, rather than an adult being scolded for suggesting executing someone. "Whatever we do when we catch them, we still need to catch them first."

The atmosphere fell silent again, as all three stopped to think. Finding out what they'd done was the easy bit; finding out who'd done it was considerably less easy, and it wasn't as if they would've filled out the paperwork really, was it?

Besides, had they filled out the paperwork, Silica would absolutely have seen it – the young girl was almost freakishly good at spotting even minute details that were incorrect…

Sinon was the first to break that silence though, "Something Tiese told me yesterday makes me think she walked in on whoever was doing it. She said they'd told her to "keep quiet, or they'd make her sorry". Might be nothing though, but…"

"Worth asking her about. Certainly, it sounds like she saw something she wasn't supposed to." Sierra agreed.

/-/

After a quick search of the base, Sierra and Sinon had made their way to Tiese's hut, whilst Lisbeth continued to check the other aircraft for similar problems or damage... "Remember, she's terrified. Please try not to make her any more on edge…" Sinon told the American, who rolled his eyes.

"I'll be good, don't worry." He told her, though there was a clear annoyance at her telling him what to do. Regardless, she knocked on the door, and after a few seconds, Tiese answered the door.

"Tiese, it's me. Have you got a few minutes?"

"Of-of course. What's up, Sinon? And… oh, Captain!" Sinon sighed, as her fellow pilot offered the American a salute, whilst he clearly did his best not to look too satisfied with himself. He failed miserably, in her opinion.

"Sorry, it's not a social visit." Sierra told her. "Sinon mentioned something about you seeing something the other day, and we just want to pick your brains for a few minutes."

"N-no! I mean, I saw nothing, I promise you!"

"Tiese, whatever they told you, or however they threatened you, Koharu died because of them. Others might die because of them…" Sinon explained, and she didn't miss the horrified expression on Tiese's face. Both Ronye and Tiese had spent a fair amount of time around Koharu, and she would have easily called them friends. To know that whoever she saw, was responsible for their friend's death…

"I didn't know what she was doing. I just saw her walking away with some tools, before she threw me into a wall and threatened me with a saw. Told me she was never there, else…"

"She'd make use of that saw, right." Tiese didn't answer but nodded in agreement. Sinon felt a rising anger that she tried to fight back, but before anything else could happen, she was reminded that she had the human embodiment of "to the point" there with her.

"Did you know her?" Sierra asked.

"No, not really. I only barely recognised her. White hair, tanned skin… and purple eyes, I think?"

Sierra pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. "Doesn't ring any bells, but we've not been here that long. Any ideas, Sinon?"

"I think I know who she's talking about, but I can't say I know her by name." Sinon recognised her by description – a girl who helped Lisbeth out sometimes and kept mostly to herself. About the only person who she'd ever seen her talking to was a very pale boy, with very light blonde hair, almost to the point of it being white… not that she knew who that was either.

As she thought on for a second, she heard a small noise outside, almost like a squeaking noise, and looked at Sierra to ask if he'd heard it too. The contemplative looks on his face up to that point had become a grimace, telling her all she needed to know.

"Maybe she's wrong though, Stress does funny things to a person, doesn't it?" Sierra hastily wrote something on the paper he'd been using to note things down.

Someone's outside.

That squeaking noise – that was a yelp that had been silenced quickly, and they'd moved to the front door, and were now eavesdropping on them.

Another written note telling them to get down, and Tiese found herself moving off to one side of the room, whilst Sinon ducked underneath a windowsill. Sierra, on the other hand, walked over towards the door, his hand on his gun as he did so…

In the few moments before the door swung open, the atmosphere in the room was tense; no one knew exactly what to expect outside – for all they knew, it could've been a bloodbath out there, and no one had chance to scream for help…

Sierra opened the door carefully, keeping himself as small of a target in the doorframe as was possible for someone nearly six foot tall, and the sight he opened the door to was not a pleasant one:

The girl that Tiese described, slightly damp and scratched up, holding her standard issue M1911 to Ronye's head, the barrel pointed squarely at her temple…

In that brief moment, Sinon felt herself freeze. Every single muscle in her body tensed up as if they remembered what had happened eight years ago. The terror of being held at gunpoint, then the inevitable crack of gunfire…

"Let her go." Sierra snarled.

"Put the gun away, there's a good dog." She sneered at him, with an unrivalled sense of condescension in her voice. "Else I have to splatter her pretty little brains across the door." She fought hard not to think back to that scene again – blood splattered against the wall, as a dying man pointed at her accusingly…

"I repeat. Let. Her. Go."

"And I repeat, for the hard of thinking, only if you put the gun away too." She answered, rolling her eyes.

The tensest seconds of her life passed by, and Sierra was first to back down, moving his hand off his gun, and to the back of his neck.

The girl laughed arrogantly. "Not just your boss with the hero complex, is it? Couldn't stand watching a pretty young woman suffer, could you?" She spat. "Pig."

"Rather be a pig, than a murderous bitch like you, thanks." Sierra rebuked angrily. As he did, she felt herself looking for any way possible to break the standoff; only to spot a pink dot heading their way…

A pink dot that Sierra had noticed too, given his entire mannerisms changed. Gone was the cornered dog that he had been before, but now a smug smirk came to his face. A smirk that evidently filled this girl with rage too… "Oh please, that was self-defence…" She rolled her eyes, as if the idea of murdering someone was just a routine to her…

"You know something, ya weren't quite as thorough as you thought." Sierra grinned, and the pink dot became rather more apparent behind her; a pink dot that was in fact a very angry (and soaked) looking Lisbeth, wielding a rather big metal rod…

"How do you-" The girl went to ask, before the rod made contact with the side of her head, knocking her unconscious immediately, and almost sending her flying…

"Told ya." Sierra shrugged, as he walked out of the door frame. "It's safe now, you can come out." Without any words, Tiese had rushed over to a horribly shaken Ronye, with both girls hugging, thankful for the last-minute rescue. Sierra, on the other hand, walked over to Lisbeth, and immediately started flirting… "You don't look so hot."

"That bitch tried to kill me!" Lisbeth shouted angrily. "Shot at me, then set off the oxygen extinguishers I installed to try and blow me up! Luckily, the water ones kicked in too!"

"You'll live. Even if you do look like you've been in a category 5." Sinon couldn't help but agree with him on that one – Lisbeth was never the most well-kept person, but even by her standards, she looked as if something had gone horribly wrong. She was soaked, covered in oil of what looked like a hundred varieties, and slightly singed…

"Is… is she dead?"

"Nah. Just out cold." Sierra told them. "Though she'll have a nasty headache when she wakes up. Everyone else alright?"

"Y-yeah." Tiese answered, trying to comfort the very clearly shaken Ronye.

"Make sure she doesn't do anything, and for the love of god, don't let her get another gun." Sierra instructed them. "Cap's apartment is just over the way, and I know for a fact he has rope and cuffs in the apartment." The look of sheer confusion at that comment that both Tiese and Ronye pointed his way was something to behold…

"I don't think any of us needed to know that detail, thank you." She told him, a look of disgust on her face at the implication there.

"Just keep an eye on her."

/-/

That evening was spent explaining what was going on to the Commander, whilst the young lady who'd attacked Liz, threatened Tiese and held Ronye hostage, was held in custody… at gunpoint, just to be on the safe side.

"That is concerning, to know we had a spy on the base." Fanatio stated.

"Why though?" Diavel asked. "It's not like the 23rd are anything more than a standard combat unit?"

"They weren't spying on us. They were sabotaging us. If they were spying on us, they wouldn't have been tampering with stuff. We wouldn't have known until we caught them in the act that way."

"I hate to say it, but Sierra's right. If they were after info, it'd have been an in-out job. Nah, they killed someone to do something, and right now, our only answers are locked up in a cell being uncooperative." Jet explained in frustration, before the noise of starting engines interrupted them.

"Does everyone hear that?"

"This is the cells, she's escaped! The guards are dead!" Panicked radio chatter crackled over the frequency.

"Shit! Go to-"

"This is Lisbeth, one of them has stolen a MIG-25. Sinon and I are in pursuit of them."

/-/

Quite possibly this was the strangest chase in history, Sinon thought as she taxied the Crossbow across Canaveral with a deft touch, if she did say so herself. There was no real room for error here as they were already at least a minute behind the Foxbat.

In any other chase, one minute wouldn't be too much of a head start, but when speeds of up to Mach 3 were involved, it meant they could be at least a hundred miles behind the target, and whilst the Crossbow was fast… it wasn't able to keep up with a Foxbat at full boost.

Now on the runway, she opened the throttles to the twin YJ93s and felt herself pushed back into the seat as nearly 60,000 pounds of force propelled the YF-108 along the runway and up to the take-off speed of 165 knots.

"Lifting off, Black Blade Five."

As the Crossbow slipped its surly bonds into the air, Sinon was in full combat mode. She was focused on her target, and that target would not get away – she wouldn't let it.

The YF-108 was a little slower than the Foxbat; she could just about reach Mach 2.7 in a straight dash, the Foxbat could reach Mach 2.8 easily, and break through Mach 3 at serious risk to the engines, and manoeuvring wasn't going to be an issue here, straight line speed was all that mattered right now.

Sierra had told them that the escaped pilot had been stopped before they could get to an aircraft, and was again in custody, this time with a big concrete block in their lap, leaving just the other one attempting to flee, and all that stopped them from succeeding in that objective was herself and Lisbeth.

Passing through 20,000 feet, the -108 had passed through the sound barrier, trailing behind the Foxbat by about 50 miles.

Passing through 30,000 feet, the -108 was passing 1000mph, but still not gaining on the Foxbat.

It had taken up to 63,000 feet before she was approaching the Crossbow's top speed, and by this point, the MIG had opened the distance to 80 miles, and was still accelerating…

"Lisbeth, get a target lock." She asked, knowing that the -108's AN/ASG-18 radar set could indeed lock up a target at that distance.

"Uhh, shouldn't we be a bit closer – I know those Falcons are powerful, but we're still 85 miles behind it."

"Let me try something." Sinon pushed the nose of the Longbow down, the sensation reminding her of going over a humpback bridge, only at a much greater speed – the airspeed gauge spinning as the airspeed increased up to Mach 2.8, the buffeting increasing exponentially as she approached Mach 2.9. "Any faster, and we start coming apart." She told her, easing off the throttle slightly.

"Up to me now then, huh." She worked frantically to lock up the Foxbat in front as it continued to accelerate, though to no avail.

"Fifty miles to the border, girls. Hurry up!"

"Blade Five, Fox Three!" Liz pulled the trigger, and the behemoth of a missile dropped out from the bay beneath them into a dive to clear the aircraft, before it pulled up ahead of them and gave them a view few pilots would ever see – an AIM-47 under full power.

At the range the Foxbat was now at, 99 miles and putting the distance between them, Sinon could do little but hope the missile flew true, and that the Foxbat would slow down upon reaching Belkan airspace. Whatever distance they would be at, the time elapsed between firing and success, or failure felt like an eternity… in reality, it may as well have been an eternity in military aviation – one minute had elapsed when the dot disappeared from the scope.

"Girls… you just got a kill at 111 miles. He's off scope now, so I'm pretty sure that's a world record at least."

"Maybe I should tweak the missiles on this – see just how far we can actually hit something…" Lisbeth mused from the backseat, and she let out a sigh of relief.

It was over.

Finally.

"Uhh, you guys are still on a direct course for Belka, so… you've only got 20 miles." Sierra pointed out, and she pulled the YF-108 into the tightest turn she could manage – which, at Mach 3, meant it was coming dangerously close to crossing the border in a descending and decelerating turn. The airframe was never really rated for dogfighting, and given its sheer size, it probably wouldn't have been any good at it anyway, meaning it had a 5G structural limit imposed on it.

Lisbeth had told her that was purely so no one got smart ideas about dogfighting in one, but given the creaking of the wings in the turn, she wasn't so sure…

Thankfully, the turn back towards Canaveral was relatively short, and so, the wings stayed attached to the aircraft – though she did decide she would have Lisbeth give them an overhaul to ensure that would be the case as they carried on…

/-/

After some time had passed and the Crossbow had returned to the base, the decision had been taken to interrogate their surviving infiltrator. The room they were using for it had clearly once been a prison cell, though it had been a long time since had been used for that purpose – the bars on the windows were rusted beyond anything he'd ever seen, and he was fairly sure that trying to use the original door handle would end up with a trip to a doctor for a tetanus jab, so rusted was it – and it was now being reinforced by a very big metal rod across the door when they weren't in it.

What they had learned though, was the identity of the two infiltrators – mostly through letting the MPs look through their stuff. Both were pilots of the 23rd Fighter Squadron, and Diavel had confirmed as much, that they had been flying since the Fall of Rechlin some months earlier, and that their names were Notte and Rano.

Well, had been, in the case of Rano; the boy now scattered to the wind as a direct result of the destruction of the stolen Foxbat.

None of what they found had answered why they were trying to kill them though, and so, they had been forced to resort to interrogating the girl for that information.

"So, missy, you're going to tell us why you tried to kill us." Bercouli started the interrogation, though if they'd been expecting this to be a quick and easy task, they were sorely mistaken.

"Or what? You'll kill me?" The girl sneered back. "Then you'll be just as dumb as you are now. Maybe even more dumb, because you'll have killed your only lead." She smirked, knowing they wouldn't just take her out back and shoot her in the head.

"You killed one of our friends." Sierra reminded her.

"Innocent until proven guilty." She shrugged.

"You murdered two of the guards and injured five of the others. You attempted to murder Flight Lieutenant Arabel and Captain Shinozaki. This could take a while to list all the shit you pulled; you know?" Bercouli reminded her.

"Oh please, a good lawyer could get me off on technicalities for all of those. You detained me illegally, you know."

"She's not going to talk." Itsuki pointed out, an uninterested look on his face from his side of the room.

"Well, at least one of you has a brain…" She rolled her eyes.

"Oh, I am not defending you. I am saying we should take more drastic action to deal with you." It was subtle, but the look on her face was shifting to one of dawning terror; that some of them actually would harm her in more brutal ways than simply executing her…

"Itsuki, much as blowing her kneecaps off sounds therapeutic right now, we're trying not to break the laws of war here." Jet told him, though his mention of the laws of war seemed to ignite something in the girl.

"Did the civilians in St. Calippo see it that way too? As they burned, and they screamed…" The girl snarled back. "You want to know why I tried to kill you? Because all of you, you play the heroes and everyone else never matters… much less those on the ground. People die around you, and you don't care…"

"She's lying." Itsuki answered immediately. "Do you want to know how I know this?"

"Enlighten me."

"Because Koharu died the day before. If your anger was truly about the attack on St. Calippo, then you would not have killed her, would you? Predicting the future is awfully tough, wouldn't you agree?"

"Oh, you don't understand, do you? I didn't hate her, I didn't single her out to die… I wanted you all to die. I hate everything about you bastards! Everything that you symbolise, all that hope, that shit about being the best… I wanted to destroy it. And guess what? I did. She died, as human as the rest of us. Face it, I won."

"How pathetic. To kill someone for something as petty as jealousy." Fanatio scowled at the girl.

"Shut up, bitch! You lot aren't any better! You killed people too!" Notte snapped back, clearly losing it now…

"I've met people like you before, those who just want to spite people and don't care about the ashes they leave in their wake." Bercouli said, remarkably calmly.

"Shut up old man! Do you have any idea what it's like to suffer in agony as your body atrophies, as you constantly get given false hope, get lied to that "oh it'll get better, we promise" and that "last time was a fluke, we promise" … Face it, that little bitch had it coming!

"For what? Daring to live a normal life in front of you? For daring not to be a hateful, bile filled wretch like you? Maybe life dealt you a shit hand, Notte, but life's what you make of it… and what you made was a prison for yourself. Quite frankly, you don't deserve help, you deserve pity."

"Just like the rest of them." She snarled. "You want to punish me, then kill me! You took away the one person that understood me, and now you expect me to cry that I didn't mean any of it!? That I swear I won't kill anyone else, that I won't just-"

"Oh shut the hell up already."

"You wanna be the heroes? Then kill me! It'll be the kindest thing to do-"

"Kindest?" Jet almost snorted in derision. "Because yeah, that would be the kindest thing to do – put you out of your misery. End all that suffering that is your pitiful little life…" Sierra looked over at his captain, one of his best friends, and saw a darkness in his eyes that he'd never seen there before. "But unfortunately for you, I don't think any of us are feeling too kind. I'll offer you a merciful way out though…"

"And what does that mean then?"

"We throw you in the deepest, darkest hole in the ground that we can find, lock it and you away from the world, and leave you alone with your thoughts for as long as you can take it. We'll spare you, but don't you dare think for one moment I won't make you wish for the release of death every single second of your continued existence…"

That threat had soon shut her ranting up, he noticed. Not only that, but she looked genuinely terrified of him, and for once, Sierra could absolutely see where she was coming from. That wasn't an aura of anger around him, that was something else entirely…

He spared a glance at Itsuki and noticed the concern on his face too.

Something that even Bercouli had noticed too, as he dismissed him from the room. "Captain. Leave her to me."

"Fine." He muttered under his breath as he walked out.

"I shall check up on him." Itsuki nodded to him as he left the room in pursuit.

"He was right though. That's what you'll be looking at if you don't cooperate with us."

"Then I suppose I had better get used to talking to myself, hadn't I?" She maintained a sneer at the three remaining people in the room.

"Suit yourself. Fanatio, Sierra, with me please." The three of them left the room as Notte mocked them for their failure to get any information out of her. "Well, now we can use other methods to get her to talk."

It didn't take a genius to work out what Bercouli was suggesting, and that unnerved him a little bit. Was torture really a thing in this game… and why was an NPC of all people suggesting it?

He looked over to see Fanatio, ever the stoic, looking just as troubled at that development as he was. Something told him that either she'd seen this done before, or more horrifically, it had been done to her – and based off what Eydis and Liena had told them about the Rectan Conflict, he really wouldn't have been surprised at the latter…

"Now, I'm going to go get a drink, captains. I'll be back in a few hours to see if she's talked then." The Commander said, seemingly apathetic to what he had just ordered.

He wanted to say that this was war at the end of the day, and she had killed someone, so it was hardly like she was an innocent, but… this? It didn't feel like information extraction – and even if it was, he would have pointed out that it was scientifically proven that torture didn't work anywhere near as well as people thought it did – it felt more like cruelty for the sake of it…

Was that what they were fighting for?

That evening, that thought was all that was on Sierra's mind, even whilst he spent the evening laughing and joking with the rest of the group in celebration of Sinon's record setting kill…

{Author's Comments}

Second chapter in a month - I'm making up for lost time...

Next chapter should be up at the end of June, and I'll probably be using that as the new release time for ACES from now.

If you're enjoying this, I have a Discord for ACES: https: double slash discord dot gg / NVZMbuKG38 (replace the words with the respective characters), and any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks for reading,

Midland 2541, signing out.