Chương 17: Arc 0 - Chapter 17 - Outcomes

Grenades went out in a continuous stream—Thea's arm, everyone's arms, hurling them as fast as they could pull pins or trigger the biometric locks. The no man's land in front of the trench became a rolling wall of explosions, viscera and debris raining back down on both sides without distinction. The ground out there was being carved apart in real time. Thankfully, it seemed to work. Slowly, painfully, the assault ebbed around their stretch of the line.

'Why are they attacking so hard, here specifically?' Thea thought, as it took her a moment to piece it together, scanning the area—and then she spotted the field hospital entrance a short way down the trench.' Oh—Of course.' Last functional medical post outside the main HQ tunnels. For the UHF it was the final fortified anchor. For the Stellar Republic it was the last door before the underground. The thirteenth line behind them had never been built for combat—logistics only.

'This is it. This is the last real stop… Do or die.' More marines were converging on the position as the sheer importance of her efforts became clear to Thea, the extra bodies and firepower gradually pushing the Stellar Republic's advance back enough to breathe. Ten minutes later, they finally had their first, real breather. The enemy had gotten within fifty metres of the trench. Fifty metres. Thea stared out at the scarred no man's land and tried not to think too hard about how close that really was.

They'd burned through more than eighty percent of their grenade stockpile to get here.

'One more push and that's it… No chance we can hold this during the next one.' The morale in the trench was low—she didn't need anyone to tell her that, she could feel it. But nobody was talking about giving up. Somewhere down the line she could even hear a small group of marines taking bets on who'd wake up in the rez-pods first, their laughter rough around the edges but genuine enough.

'Must be nice,' she thought. Having that exit made the whole thing easier to sit with, she imagined. A death that wasn't permanent changed the math of a last stand considerably. But she'd promised Old Man James she'd do her best. Losing this position wasn't something she was willing to put her name on.

'So think, then. There has to be something you can do.' She turned it over and over for anything that might help, but kept hitting the same wall. No angle she could find, no play she could identify that changed the picture in any meaningful way. The numbers were what they were, and she just wasn't Lieutenant Frost.

'If I was—' She caught herself.' Yeah. If I was, I could probably hold this trench by myself.' She slumped back against the trench wall and stared up at the sky, the frustration sitting heavy in her chest.

'If only…' That thought was apparently the cue for a renewed push, as warning calls rippled down the trench—enemy regrouping, another charge incoming.

'Of fucking course…' Thea hauled herself upright with a grunt—her entire body hurting from sheer exhaustion—and turned to face the no man's land. The Stellar Republic came over in a wave that somehow looked even larger than the last one. The UHF line answered with everything it had left—gunfire, the last of the explosives, more concentrated and desperate than any volley before it. Marines around her fired with the kind of intensity that came from knowing this was the end of the line. It didn't matter, however.

The wave simply kept coming. The grenades ran dry first. After that it was just rifles, and the distance between the two sides closed fast. The first enemy Soldiers hit the trench line to the west and the fighting collapsed into close quarters—brutal, messy, no room to manoeuvre. Every Marine pulled into that kind of skirmish was one less rifle holding the advancing line back, and the line crept forward even faster as a result, the collapse feeding itself.

Thea's position held the longest, being one of the closest to the hospital proper. Marines who weren't already bogged down in the trench fighting had gravitated toward the field hospital's fortification, understanding what it meant to lose it, and the concentration of bodies there bought extra minutes.

'I can't stop. If I stop I'm going to fall over.' She was aware of that fact in a detached, almost clinical way as she kept firing despite her body's need to rest and just stop. Her face was caked in blood, dust, and debris, her fingers numb, her legs trembling from the effort to keep her standing upright—she'd stopped noticing it all a while ago.

The assault rifle kicked in her hands on repeat, sweating through her grip, and she kept shooting because stopping for even a second felt genuinely dangerous in so many more ways than one.

'Don't think about it. Just keep shooting…' Then through the trenches to the west, the first enemy soldiers appeared. Twenty metres. She swung the rifle and fired without hesitating—laser bolts cutting through the gap, tearing through the low-armoured bodies pushing through the trench. They dropped, but more came.

'I should have grabbed a ballistic weapon.' The thought surfaced too late to do anything about it. Lasers punched clean holes but didn't really push anything back—a Soldier hit but not immediately killed could likely keep moving, keep shooting, like nothing had happened. She pressed tight against the trench wall just before the return fire arrived. Not tight enough. Something punched through her left arm and kept going. The arm dropped. Just— dropped, limp from the shoulder, her fingers opening on nothing.

She looked at it for a fraction of a second and registered the massive hole, the blood already running fast down the trench wall and pooling at her feet.

'Okay. Okay, that's really fucking bad.' She let the rifle fall, dropped smoothly to one knee, and pulled the HX-12 from the holster on her left hip with her right hand. She unloaded the full magazine into the remaining Soldiers—supersonic rounds punching through whatever the lasers had left standing, dropping or crippling all of them before they could push further. Spent magazine out.

She trapped the pistol between her limp left arm and her chest, freed her right hand, pulled the spare from her waist holster, and jammed it home.

'Thanks, Old Man.' She'd hated those one-armed reload drills. Hated every single repetition of them. He'd insisted anyway, year after year, with that particular brand of patience that wasn't actually patience so much as absolute refusal to drop the subject. Right now she would have hugged him for it if she had the arms. She raised the pistol back toward the trench to the west, blinking to clear her vision. It didn't fully clear—some kind of liquid was covering one of her eyes.

"One more magazine…" she muttered, her voice coming out rougher than she intended, scraped raw.

"Nobody can say I didn't try. This scenario is just—it's way too damn unfair…" The frustration cracked something open that had been building for a while, and her voice broke with it entirely.

"I did everything right—why am I still losing?!" The words tore out of her, loud and ragged, into an empty stretch of trench where there was nobody left to hear them.

"This is fucking bullshit!" The only answer was the sound of fighting somewhere further down the line. A wave of dizziness rolled through her—blood loss, she knew, even if she couldn't feel it anymore—and she sank back against the trench wall. Her right arm stayed up through sheer stubbornness. When a group of four Stellar Republic soldiers rounded into view through the western trench, she fired until they stopped moving. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site.

Support the author by reading it there. Two rounds hit her in the stomach somewhere in the middle of it.

'I should be screaming right now.' She wasn't. Her body had quietly stopped forwarding that kind of information some time ago. Her right arm finally dropped. The pistol stayed in her grip out of habit more than intention, her fingers too stiff to let go. Her vision had narrowed to a small, blurry window in the middle of a spreading dark, and through it she could just make out another squad of Stellar Republic soldiers running past her toward the field hospital without so much as glancing at her.

'I'm not worth finishing off…' The solemn realization hurt more than the wounds. Abruptly, the world turned blue. A beam of concentrated plasma—the radius of it at least twice the width of her head—tore over the trench line from behind her with a sound she felt more in her chest than her ears. The ground shook. Metallic footsteps, heavy enough to vibrate the dirt walls around her, moved up from the direction of the thirteenth line.

'What—' Something enormous stepped over the trench. Four metres of exoskeleton, easily. Colossal energy weapon in its hands, still cycling from the shot. Matte grey, with dim crimson highlights catching the light as it moved.

'Grey and red…' The thought dissolved before it finished forming. Thea let her eyes close, the ghost of a smile still on her face, and stopped fighting as death finally took her… POV: Major Atlas Daxton Daxton sat in the shuttle headed for Lumiosia's southeastern starport, turning over the past sixteen hours in his mind. Sixteen hours. More than a dozen cubes set up across a single night shift.

Even by his standards it had been a long one, and he could feel it—though the quiet, restless movement of his fingers against the armrest suggested his body hadn't quite accepted that the work was done. He was an averagely tall man, broad shoulders and a lean frame that came from years of military training rather than any particular vanity about it. Sharp cheekbones, strong jaw, a short beard kept neat enough to pass inspection.

His blue eyes had the kind of quality that made people feel assessed even when he was only half-paying attention. The dark-brown hair had started going grey at the temples, and the creases on his forehead were becoming a permanent feature—enough to put him somewhere in his mid-forties, to anyone who didn't know better. The coat was black, tailored well, reflecting no light worth mentioning. The insignia on the left chest was UHF standard—matte grey with a touch of dim crimson.

'What a damn night,' he thought, watching the city lights pass below the shuttle.' And what a thing to have spent a life-debt on.' He'd spent considerable political capital pushing this operation through. The upper Brass had not been enthusiastic, to put it lightly.

The UHF's recruitment philosophy had always been quality over quantity—exceptional Marines, not warm bodies—so when Daxton had proposed scattering Deep-Dive Simulation cubes across Mid-Worlds, backed by monetary incentives large enough to turn heads on planets where most people had nothing, the room had not received it gently.

He could still hear the uproar clearly, and still felt a small, private satisfaction at how it had all ultimately ended up in his favor anyway. The Brass' hands being forced on this topic by the greatest catastrophe in UHF war-history was, of course, not something he was happy about—but he was a pragmatic man.

'A debt is a debt. And this way, it's finally paid.' If it hadn't been General McKay calling it in, he wouldn't have pushed half as hard. But it was, so he had. Why the old General had chosen to collect in such a roundabout way was beyond him—though that had always been true of McKay's methods. Everything the man did seemed oblique right up until the moment it turned out to be the most efficient solution to a problem nobody else had even realized existed yet.

He'd hoped to see him in person while he was on Lumiosia. The General had declined.

'Of course he had...' Some things simply didn't change, even with time. He was still turning that over when his datapad chimed—sharp, high priority-flagged.

"What the—?" He had it out of his coat pocket before the second chime finished, muscle memory handling the motion without input from the rest of him. [Priority Message]: Lumiosia South-Eastern Undercity Candidate #313 has successfully completed Deep-Dive Simulation #6, 473 (Mission: Rog'An Prime Theta Outpost Defence) with a score of 26, 453, placing 17th on the overall ladder for this mission. He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he leaned his head back against the seat and let out a slow, deep chuckle aimed at the ceiling of the shuttle.

"Damn this old bastard." Seventeenth on the overall ladder. First run.

"There is absolutely no way he didn't have something to do with this." He read the message again, then pulled up the full assessment file on Candidate #313, keying in his credentials and letting the simulation's AI walk him through the half-dozen highlight reels it had flagged and prepared. He watched them one after another without saying anything. The frown that formed somewhere around the second reel didn't leave—instead, it only got deeper and deeper.

"How the fuck is this even possible?" he muttered, when the last one finished. He pulled up the mission parameters. Confirmed what he'd already suspected. Stared at the numbers.

'This mission should be impossible for a random Mid-Worlder. Not simply "really difficult," but impossible.' The score alone made no sense in that context—never mind everything else the reels had shown him. He opened the full report.

"Captain Sable… some squad leader named Kellerman—never heard of him…" His eyes moved down the list.

"Lieutenant Frost…" He pulled her highlight reel, watched thirty seconds of it, and broke into a genuine laugh.

"Yes. That does seem very much like her." He went back to Candidate #313 and sat with it for a moment, letting the pieces arrange themselves.

"Lack of full basic, knowledge of some advanced-only aspects… no possible connection to the UHF from a mid-world background…" He said it aloud, quietly, the way he'd always processed things that didn't fit together cleanly.

"Uncanny accuracy. Perceptive abilities that could rival mid or even high-tiers…" He leaned back.

'General McKay, you absolute bastard. I didn't expect it to pay off this fast…' There were still a dozen questions he couldn't answer from a report alone. But he'd made up his mind before he'd even finished the thought. He leaned forward and told the pilot to change course. The giddy anticipation building in his chest was something he hadn't felt in a while, and he didn't bother trying to talk himself out of it.

'A genuine mystery to crack!' After everything this night had thrown at him, that felt like exactly the right way to end it… One moment she'd been closing her eyes on a Battlefield. The next, she was sitting in an armchair so comfortable it almost felt like a personal insult given what she'd just been through.

'Where—' The memory of the trench was already losing its edges, fading in that strange, detached way that made it hard to be sure it had been real. She let her eyes move around the room instead, trying to get her bearings. It was a small room, warm and well-lit, earth-toned walls hung with artwork showing quiet landscapes. Soft lighting, a plush rug underfoot, the kind of space that seemed specifically designed to make a person's shoulders drop.

A wooden bookshelf in the corner held a careful selection of books—self-improvement, psychology, a few novels that had the look of being chosen rather than accumulated—Thea having no trouble reading the titles, despite being half a room away from it. A potted plant sat on top of it, greener and more alive-looking than any plant she could remember seeing.

'How does a plant even look that healthy?' Her wandering gaze landed on someone sitting directly across from her.

"Ahhh—! Sergeant Selene!" She sat up sharply.

"My apologies, I—""Take your time, Miss Thea." The Sergeant's smile didn't waver—patient, gentle, completely unbothered by the interruption.

"We have all the time in the world once you're comfortable. If anything in the room causes you discomfort, please let me know and I'll fix it immediately."

'The room isn't the uncomfortable part here…!' Having someone this openly considerate of her was doing something strange to her nervous system. She wasn't exactly used to being doted on. She wasn't used to being asked her opinion on whether the furniture suited her. She didn't quite know what to do with all of it.

"Ah—thank you, Sergeant. I'm fine, really. It's just a very sudden change, is all…" She hesitated.

"So—what's going on, exactly? I thought—I thought I had respawns left…? Why am I back here? Did—Did I mess something up… Ma'am?" Sergeant Selene's expression shifted into something that looked genuinely confused.

"No, of course not. You completed the challenge successfully, Miss Thea. Were you not aware? Did the timer for the primary objective not display properly?" Thea went very still.

'The exosuits.' The matte-grey coat. The dim crimson highlights. Stepping over the trench line as everything went dark around her.' Those were the reinforcements.' The ones they'd been holding on for the entire time. She'd been so far gone by that point that she hadn't even—'I didn't even notice the objective complete.' Her face went hot. She dropped her gaze to the rug between them, which had suddenly become very interesting indeed.

"I—I forgot to check the timer…" she mumbled, eyes fixed on the rug.

'Please. Just open up and swallow me. Right now.' The silence that followed felt much longer than it probably was. Then Sergeant Selene burst out laughing. Not a polite chuckle, but a full, genuine belly-laugh that filled the small room and startled Thea into looking up with an expression she couldn't entirely control. Which only seemed to make it worse—or better, depending on whose perspective you were taking—because the Sergeant laughed even harder.

'What is happening right now.' She was confused. She was embarrassed. She was also, despite both of those things, finding it extremely difficult not to smile. Genuine laughter like that was rare in her experience, the kind that wasn't performed or aimed at something. And the sound of it was, she noted somewhat against her will, very pleasant. The Sergeant reigned herself in gradually, raising both hands in apology.

"I am so sorry, Miss Thea. I wasn't laughing at you specifically—it's just the sheer absurdity of all this. My apologies. I hope I haven't insulted you with my unprofessional conduct."

"Ahh—no, no! Don't worry, Sergeant Selene, Ma'am!" Thea said quickly.

"I'm just a bit confused about what's going on, really." She thought about it for a second.

"Actually—if it's possible, just Thea is fine. I'm not really a Miss. Just Thea." Sergeant Selene's smile shifted into something warmer, her green eyes catching the light.

"That sounds very do-able. You can call me Selene, then. No need for all the Sergeant business—you're not technically a member of the military, after all." She paused, and added with a pout that was frankly doing a lot of work for a single facial expression: "And I definitely don't feel nearly old enough to be a Ma'am either!"

'That's a weapon,' Thea thought, watching it land.' That is absolutely a weapon and she knows exactly what she's doing with it.' She filed it away immediately for future reference. One could never have too many weapons...