Aegis

The doors were slow to open; it wasn't often that they were actually used. As a matter of fact it had been a good two or three years since they had actually been used. "This is Bot. He's a... well robot, obviously. A little drone, apparently back in the day according to what I recovered of his memory chip, he was used to assist scientists in their labs," she gave an unneeded explanation while she waited.

"I think it's about time you came clean with whatever's here, Letitia."

Her eye twitched a bit. He knew something was in there, and she wasn't sure how he knew... but then again if he was a Knight perhaps that was a thing... She wasn't really sure. She had never dealt with any other Reaper before. She turned around and tilted her head before stepping down from a platform. "Very well then.. Since you already seem to know," she sighed and nodded him toward a door to the side, walking through it with ease. "She's... I almost want to say dead... I know she's NOT but she's been inactive since I found her back when I was 15..."

She flicked on a switched and a lot of lights came on, revealing the very Reaper that she had been hiding for ages. "I found her in the same ruins I found all of the servers and computers," she said, walking over to a console that turned even more lights on. "I think she's an older model. Everything I've ever tried to do to wake it up was in vain. No movement, nothing..."

She seemed fascinated with the thing before them, head tilted and eyes on it like a school girl in love. "I've been working with a lot of Old World coding in the past few years to try and figure out what's wrong but... nothing seems to get through. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And she doesn't seem dangerous... at least the ghost of her that seems to have made its home in the lab doesn't seem dangerous..." she looked at him, probably thinking he found her insane.

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Valentine nodded at the drone - 'Bot' - and he had to admit, it was mildly endearing. That might explain where he'd seen it - working on one of the XK-series projects. Drones were preferred to human beings for physical labour there, to reduce the psychological damage that some of the things they'd been doing could inflict merely by being in their presence. Still, this one seemed harmless enough - almost endearing, in a way.

At the back of the room, eight Tracers filed in, accompanied by perhaps two dozen men wearing body armour and carrying infantry weapons of various descriptions - Valentine's soldiers. The heavy, bulky forms of the Tracers thudded around the floor, their movements decidedly ungainly and slow. They looked decidedly inhuman, with hulking legs and boxy upper bodies, massive autocannons held like rifles in hands attached to powerful hydraulic arms - more like a bipedal tank than a true humanoid weapon. Nevertheless, their movements were precise and deliberate; their pilots hardened by years of battle, the motions of combat familiar to them.

From the mass of soldiers on the ground, Atlas emerged, smoothing over his civilian clothing underneath a hastily-applied bulletproof vest. He nodded to Valentine as he approached, but then halted in place, and started issuing orders for the various Tracers and soldiers to fan out and secure the area.

Valentine spun as the lights went up, the vast chamber suddenly illuminated. Filling his vision, the massive, reclining figure of the very abomination Letitia had hidden. Humanoid and slim, almost feminine in form, its body all sharp angles, blade-like stability fins and razor-edged claws. It was much slimmer than Abyss Walker, its form almost skeletal, its upper body - where the beast's heart was contained - attached to its lower by what looked to be a simple mechanical spine, granted it a distorted hourglass-esque figure. Its large head had two massive burnt-orange sensors, dull and lifeless from decades of deactivation; from its skull, slender, reed-like antennae unfurled, likely an advanced avionics suite.

Gazing up at it, this one was new, different, a later model than he was familiar with. XK-REAPER had laid the groundwork, but its prototypes had been reverse-engineered all around the world, wholly unaware of what had become of the creators of this technology. The hardware was different; the lack of physical armour plating relative to Abyss Walker struck him as particularly odd. He saw nothing immediately in the way of external weaponry, which frankly, unnerved him more than if there had been.

He heard the swift clattering behind him of soldiers kneeling into firing positions, weapons being racked and loaded, all levelled at the monstrosity before them. It lay on its back, half-sitting, almost slouched - as though it were relaxing, taunting them to attack it, daring them to challenge its authority over this domain. Valentine realised that almost unconsciously, he'd snapped his own weapon up to face it, hilariously ineffectual as it would be.

As he gazed upon the beautiful, terrible monstrosity before him, words came to mind - the motto of the XK-REAPER project, a phrase from an Old World writer who said of things that should never, could never, have existed upon this earth.

That which is not dead can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.

He observed Letitia carefully as she gazed upon it with an almost religious reverence - no, not religious, more personal than that. Love. An empathic connection with what stood before them; an obsession, a driving desire to figure out how to awaken it. Fifteen years old - perfect time to imprint, when she'd found it. This thing was taking its toll on her, and she hadn't realised for a second. It was a miracle she hadn't figured out how to run a Contact Experiment yet.

"Definitely not dead," he breathed, stepping closer slowly, cautiously. Around him, shadows flickered, walls seemed to shift closer and then further away, individual steps on a flight of stairs changing position slightly. She hadn't noticed. This thing wasn't dead, that was for certain - and it was warping reality itself. He knew that as a Knight, he was more sensitive, but even then, everyone saw it. Letitia must've been hit hard to not see it - it had chosen its prey, and was trying to lure her in.

That, or it was trying to tell him to stay away.

He turned back from the piece of scaffolding he stood on, gazing out at the Tracers and soldiers before him, their weapons all levelled at the monstrosity. It wouldn't do them much good - they knew that, as well as he did. Killing it was out of the question - if they mishandled it, they might simply unbind the Entity inside it, and god knew what would happen then.

Valentine slowly walked back down the steps, having had a close enough look. As he made his way down the scaffolding - with a little more haste than was dignified - he felt an overwhelming sense of relief, and he stepped back beside Letitia. He realised that he'd unconsciously turned the safety off on his gun - or, at least, he hoped it had been him. He flicked it back on.

"Reapers aren't just hunks of metal," he explained, voice more shaken than he'd like. "They're alive. Inside them is bound - well, we're not quite sure. The reports I've read just call them 'Entities'. They can think, and feel - they're not of this world, nor should they be. We managed to keep them bound into the RELICS system - used them to power the 'body' of the Reaper, that massive mechanical entity you see over there. The problem... well, it's not so much that we lost control..." He exhaled heavily, trying to re-affirm his voice. "Our mistake was thinking that we were ever in control in the first place."

He took a few deep breaths, calming himself. He wasn't normally this panicked. Something was wrong - very wrong. He could feel it. "Anyway, they need a human soul to actuate their power - they can't properly affect the physical world unless they're bound to one of us. That's where the Knights come in - when you neurally interface with a Reaper, you control it, and it controls you. You move the Reaper - use the power of whatever's inside to your will."

He turned, staring back at the abomination, gazing into it.

"And in return, it slowly feeds off your soul, until there's nothing left."

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Letitia knew a lot about the world around her. She had made it her job to know ever since she had been a child; everything was worth learning, even the small things... however she could only learn what there was accurate information that was accessible to someone of her station... information on Reapers was not one of those things. They kept that under lock and key where even her brilliant mind couldn't hack into it. However she had a bit of information that most wouldn't know. As she had said, her grandfather had his secrets.

"Feeds on souls? Is that... their lifesource?" she wondered aloud, wandering closer to her monstrosity.

His words made sense though. He was a Knight, he should know these things after all... and it made things in her life make just a little more sense. "Ever heard of a project called Revolution? It wasn't a well known one, to tell the truth," she saw that all weapons were pointed at the Reaper and she wondered if they would have had any effect on it at all. Then again, she was still certain it couldn't move... She... felt it wasn't able to move yet.

"It was short lived... I think I know why, because it was a very inhumane project... I never understood what it was meant to do until now..." she turned to look at Valentine, the light hitting her just right so her face was in shadow. Staring down at her feet, she explained more. "A brilliant scientist about 25, maybe 30 years ago thought that perhaps... just maybe... it was possible to remove a human soul, if not completely, at least partially. Make them immune to Entities influence... a way to create better Knights, even maybe take further control of Reapers... The man realized he was foolish of course. Every case study ended in complete failure; all of his subjects died save one."

"The man was cruel enough to even experiment on his children... and his oldest son offered up his first born daughter for the experiment... she was really sick at the time. Only a few months old. They assumed she wouldn't survive... this was all for the sake of the greater good in their minds... part of the process worked though," she looked a bit flustered as she wandered over to the Reaper, touching it's leg as if it were an old friend. "They managed to displace part of her soul from her body... not knowing what affect it would have in the long run. They found a way to store it, and she grew up. But fate is cruel to those who try to shun her influence. Both men died, but not before the father could pass on his legacy to the half-souled granddaughter of his. He lived just long enough to see how it affected her. Greater focus, less impressionability, a bit ruthless but still caring enough to want something better for the world around her... intelligence, even a bit of advanced healing... It's actually amazing how much souls help and hinder the body and the mind at the same time..."

She looked down at her broken arm before glancing up at the Reaper. "She calls herself Eden, sometimes in the dark when I can hear her whisper..." she shook her head, sighing at her own crazy talk. "When my grandfather thought I knew enough about Revolution, he showed me what a soul looks like without its human body... I didn't find out until about two years ago, I finally figured out enough Old World code to hack into his hidden files that I found out it was mine."

A girl with half a soul? She knew it sounded preposterous but she had the research and files to prove it. "Before you can separate a soul from its body, it needs to be so broken and damaged that the soul is about to depart in the first place. I wasn't that broken though, they only got half of what they wanted out of it."

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"Feeds on souls? Is that... their lifesource?"

A question he himself had pondered often enough. Even after hundreds of years of their use, the fact remained that mankind understood next to nothing about the nature of that which lay at the heart of the Reapers. "To be quite honest, I almost hope so," he said quietly. "Given the other possible explanations, it's probably the most optimistic."

Then she continued, and everything stopped for him. His mind simply stopped processing information properly. None of what she was saying made sense - no, that wasn't it, it made perfect sense. It's just that it was impossible. None of it could've existed. He wondered if the Reaper was altering his perception of reality.

No, it couldn't alter his thoughts with such precision - Reapers were beings of emotion, not of rationale. What she said - she wasn't lying. It stood to reason, after all - the empathy of a human soul, combined with the detachedness and faintly unnerving nature of that which was soulless.

But... how? Human-PLUS was dead and buried, everything from XK was dead and buried. Phase II had never gotten off the ground - not an inch. Yet it all clicked - soullessness could, hypothetically, increase Reaper pilot duration far beyond the human norm, without the crippling Resurgence problems that plagued the last days of the Cultivator project.

A soul so broken that it's ready to be taken.

That would explain it - why the Reapers seemed to be so selective in who they took when in battle. Why some simply became hollow husks where they stood when one of the monstrosities stalked past, and others felt not a thing. After all, a Reaper at full capacity was something to be truly feared - it strained at the conceptual walls of reality, the pilot of its soul not enough to satiate its abominable hunger. So it fed off those around it. An acceptable sacrifice - that was how everyone justified it. That was how the Knights justified it to themselves.

And, most of all, her theory explained the averted, accepting gaze that every Knight dreaded.

The Valravn. The raven that consumes the heart of a child, to become a Knight.

"None of this is possible," Valentine said, stepping forward to face Letitia, her hand resting gently on the leg of the enormous, almost skeletal Reaper. "None of it. Human-PLUS died with Kyoto, Letitia. All the files - all the technology - that could possibly have allowed such a project to proceed - it's all gone."

But she was telling the truth - he knew it, felt it, the truth gnawing away at him. He wasn't great with people, but - a story so outlandish, she wouldn't dare tell it as fiction. But how? Kyoto, and everything within a thousand miles of it, wasn't even a crater - it was nothing, a broken world, reality shattering and shifting in ways he couldn't even begin to understand, a maelstrom of jagged quantum states where dreams and reality coalesced.

The Cultivators were gone. XK-REAPER was gone. The doctors and their mad experiments were gone. The world he'd known - everything he'd once wanted, everything he'd once been told - had been erased. He was subservient to nobody, not anymore. Yet it all broke, slowly, surely, things that he'd forgotten melding back into themselves. Becoming whole, yet reflecting, distorting light - changing mediums bending psychological wavelengths. Some older, denser - others far too new. Words, phrases, jumped through and disappeared. Phonological memories, just looping again and again.

"And so you abandoned mankind, to destroy it?"

Voices. Still there. History's claws, reaching back at him. Troyard. Or not - perhaps his? Or that of the relenting Abyss. The Abyss that gazed back, eyes forever glued to his. Topical anaesthesia for madness, numbing surfaces.

Names, faces, guns and needles. Shadows that shifted in the night, his back always to a wall, a wall he'd put there because - why? Answers that never came.

Selective-fire hearts, heat warping psychology, Ulysses, Leidenfrost emotions. Things he'd sacrificed, too many things. Knighthood, honour, belief, and then all taken again. "Vade Ultra Mortem."

Skin altogether too cold for life and too electric for death. Resurgence, redoing. Words that meant nothing, silences that fragmented and ricocheted. Things that were meant to be comfortable that neither were nor meant to.

Names. Words, traces. Verbal fire-for-effect. Cultivator - 'one who cultivates'. Cultivate - verb. Grow or maintain (living cells/tissue) in culture. 'Culture' (biology, science of that which died-will die); unnatural environment. Controlled conditions. Controlled consequences. Allows reproduction of results.

He spoke; it wasn't him, had too much conviction, too much bravery and self-righteousness and authority and concern. "You have no idea what you're talking to, do you?" Love, loss, yet both fragmented - too many at the table for the deck to handle, and nobody playing for keeps. A Dark (K)night's march. History, absurd myths.

"Walk away from this. Leave. You don't need to. You don't need to. Enough mistakes have been made for the two of us by now, have they not? Learn. Live. Decide what - or not, history, dictates, choiceless again. Who are you, who do not know your history? Learn. Stepping forward into nothing begets nothing."

Words not meant for anyone. Repeating. Consuming cycle. Relevant. Ravings of a madman, perhaps. Or an oracle.

More, a phrase, a sequence. His, yet not his, flashed through his mind as he stared her up and down - the half-soul girl. Didn't know if he spoke the next out loud, didn't know if he'd said it all out loud either. Past caring.

Gave up our bodies. Our minds.

Our souls.

I don't even remember why.

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Letitia stood there, her hand now off of Eden's leg and her mind buzzing with questions and wondering why her grandfather had never discussed any of this with her... of course she knew the real answer... what monster would she have thought him to be if he had told her about it while still living? The fact that he, the patriarch of the de Argentum family had once experimented on humans and Reapers was a terrifying aspect. What was worse was no one in the family knew aout it but her.

"My grandfather... his research was extensive... he was not the first in line to the de Argentum name, he had two older brothers... so he was allowed to choose his profession, and he chose science. It fascinated him greatly. He was good at it, as am I," Letitia had a feeling he was no longer listening in full, yet she felt the need to clarify more. "I don't know much about Revolution other than what his files show me. Assumedly it was the next phase in the Human-PLUS project, sort of a Project III that was being conducted on the side, long before II was even operational. Do you know much of the de Argentum family? In the family typically every male has at least two or three children; two potential heirs and one as a backup plan. My grandfather and my greatgrandfather were not potential heirs until their brothers died. But our origins are in Japan..."

There were so many mysteries she couldn't solve on her own and that frustrated the woman. She wanted to know it all and she wanted to know it all now.

As he spoke she found herself tilting her head to his words. "Walk away from this. Leave. You don't need to. You don't need to. Enough mistakes have been made for the two of us by now, have they not? Learn. Live. Decide what - or not, history, dictates, choiceless again. Who are you, who do not know your history? Learn. Stepping forward into nothing begets nothing."

"But from nothing everything grows. Once there was nothing, and then there was a world. Organism grew, evolved, changed, and when they die they become nothing again, only to reappear as something later in history," Letitia said softly, something her grandfather would often say. "And a soul is all that saves humans from being nothing, though many give up their souls to physical needs; sex, violence, vanity, money... They lose what was never theirs to give. Some give them to Entities. I give mine to no one, not even myself."

Suddenly she stood ever so slightly straighter and prouder. "I have naught to give. My soul was torn asunder before I was even old enough to realize, my body will deteriorate as my father and my grandfather's did, my mind is already warped by the experiments performed on me long before I formed conscious thought. I am what ought to be dead but still I live and breathe. I know not my purpose, what else am I do to but to let fate control me where it will?"

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Lucidity returned slowly to Valentine, the haze of the past washing away distantly, leaving him altogether a little colder than he'd been before. The safety on his gun was off again - or had he forgotten to enable it in the first place? The last few moments were just a torrent of feelings, thoughts, some his, some not.

He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, scribbling down a note - couldn't forget this. He needed all the data he could lay his hands on. Resurgence Event. 3:27pm. Duration - 30s?

If he understood this, perhaps he could stop what he felt was coming. Almost inevitably a vain hope - but hope, nevertheless. He turned his attention back to her, forcing himself back into reality, permitting her to finish speaking.

Origins in Japan.

No - the name didn't ring a bell, however much he wanted it to. 'De Argentum'. Before his time, or thereafter? Or had someone escaped - adopted the name as their own, abandoned what they once had, but kept what they once knew? There was little other explanation.

"We're both in the same business, then," he said, deciding now to place his handgun gingerly inside his coat. With that Reaper near them - he had no way of knowing what the consequences of another Resurgence Event could be here, and he didn't trust himself to have a gun in hand at the minute. "We're both hunting for answers, it would seem, more than anything else."

Still not quite the whole truth, he mused. He had answers enough. Just looking for different answers - evidence to deny the hypothesis. Talk about scientific bias, he mused, with a faintly bitter smile.

Confidence re-entered him, and he turned away from her, facing the line of his men, their weapons still ever-so-nervously levelled at the monster at the opposite end of the room, its sheer size dwarfing them a hundred times over. He gestured to them. Stand down and exit. We're done here.

"I've been on this earth for quite some time, Letitia," he called back to her. "'Purpose' is a question for you to answer, nobody else. If you want my best advice-"

It was at that moment that Valentine was quite promptly shot.

Blinding pain flashed past his eyes as he tumbled to the ground, one hand clutching his arm, the world spinning around him. Gunfire and screams slammed out from the open doors at the other end of the chamber, the haphazard echoes of soldiers shouting orders and diving to cover.

Valentine's vision blurred and refocused as he tried to stand, collapsing once before managing to make it to his knees. A quick glance downwards revealed a splatter of blood over his dark coat, but nothing else - agony pulsed through his arm, his heart hammering painfully, but he appeared to be largely uninjured. Crimson seeped through the fingers with which he clutched his arm.

Teeth grit, he forced himself back to his feet, staggering drunkenly before charging, tackling Letitia behind the massive leg of the Reaper. His gun appeared in his hand, and he gave her a stern look - stay down - before ducking around the corner, loosing a few shots at the doorway and assessing the situation.

Through the door, the familiar matte-grey armour of the Aegis Police's 'Special Division' forces flashed through, a squad of infantry charging through the haze of smoke grenades; Valentine loosed a few shots off, but missed his mark, his vision still fuzzy with pain. Valentine's men had assumed cover behind servers and crates; one Tracer was little more than a smoking wreck, and another was missing an arm. The remainder moved out from cover in unison, loosing a hail of 25mm high-explosive rounds from the autocannons in their hands, tearing apart the infantry that had moved through the smoke.

Then one disappeared, reduced to a smoking wreck in an instant - Valentine hadn't even seen what had fired upon it, the whole craft just shattered by some unseen force. Then, in the background, he spotted something - a human shape, nearly twice the height of the Tracers, a high-powered railgun in one hand and the blue-sparking glow of a plasma sword in the other. Behind it, more blue glows indicated that it wasn't alone. With a grunt, Valentine wrenched himself back inside cover, turning to face Letitia.

Sentinels.

"Okay," he forced out through clenched teeth, his clutched arm sending sharp bolts of pain through his body. "We... have a problem."

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Letitia was curious as to what was going on in Valentine's head. She couldn't understand or connect his words to his sudden lucidity, but she knew whatever he had been through must have been something. She had plenty of answers at her hands, she just had yet to decode their true meaning. It wasn't like her grandfather didn't leave everything right there for her to access he just didn't show her how to access it... almost as if it were another rite of passage to be able to figure out how to. If he would have followed family tradition and let one of her cousins take over the family business before she had a chance to be heir, she would have had plenty of time to figure it out... but he had chosen her instead.

Letitia felt the shift in the atmosphere minutes before her new found comrade was shot, and was shocked to see military men walking into her lab so casually. She gave a growl before she was tackled into cover behind one of Eden's large legs. "Fuck!" she cursed angrily, slipping her own pistol out. She felt every rumble of the gun fire and her brain went into automatic mode. There was nothing more important to her than her labs. She glanced around her cover to see the smoking wrecks that were some of their Tracers and one of her servers.

"Bastards," she was about to charge out before taking notice of the one thing she definitely didn't want wreaking havoc on her sanctuary. Just as she heard him about to speak she noticed his arm. "Wonderful. Now we both have a bum arm, my labs are being destroyed and they brought fucking Sentinels down here."

Her mind and her body stilled for a moment as she found something moving in the shadows. She knew exactly what it was; her 'ghost' was not happy at its home being threatened. Neither was she. "We have a lot of problems right now, Mr. Valentine. She," there was emphasis on the word, "is less than pleased at the sudden invasion. And if they get a hold of the supplies stores I'm suddenly VERY useless to you..."

She heard more bangs and clatters as the enemy sent off some very high powered ammunition.

"Mistress, we have guests! They seem to want to destroy us!" the overly cheerful Bot came flitting around to her. She rolled her eyes.

"Protocol 7. You know what to do," she said softly before sending the drone off. It had the ability to cloak itself for short amounts of time, and she needed to make sure it got her main hard drive out of the vicinity of the damage. Her options were few, and she found herself looking up at Eden. "Well, times up," she murmured before standing up, still easily hidden behind the leg. "How do I get into her?"

She had no clue how to do this. She just knew that she actually needed to. There were no other options. A bunch of men and a few tracers were no match for the handful of Sentinels filing into the labs. "No matter what the cost I HAVE to protect this place."

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So, this is your play, then, God. Most auspicious.

The thought concluded, Valentine loosed another barrage of shots downrange as he turned to face Letitia, knowing exactly the implications of her words. Under other circumstances, he'd consider this as mad as it was wrong - to become a Knight was no small undertaking, but he knew well enough that they had no other choice.

Half a dozen Tracers and some infantry were child's play for a squad of Sentinels. Even if they managed to get away, if they lost the lab, they lost their supplies - and with them, their chance of escaping this city. From there, it was only a matter of time until Cocytus was found - if it wasn't compromised already.

"Follow me," Valentine grunted, vision still swimming with pain from the bullet - Christ, had they been using hollow points or something? - and feeling decidedly unpleasant towards the world at large. Still, keeping low, he made his way up the scaffolding, sprinting up the hastily-erected flights of stairs; darkness flickered and lurched, and he loosed a haphazard bullet into it, forcing it to recede. Not so much a physical effect as a show of force - proof that he would not suffer its indignities now. If nothing else, it appeared duly informed of the gravity of the situation by his action.

For a second, he found himself pitying her. Whatever was inside this thing - and however much it claimed to like her - there was no turning back from being a Knight. That which was lost, stayed lost - even as a half-soul, there would be no denying the effects of piloting upon her. He mentally apologised as he made his way up the scaffolding. Necessary Sacrifices - that was the phrase he'd always used, now wasn't it?

Eventually, he reached the back edge of the scaffolding, and ducked back inside the shadow of the craft. A smooth black panel at the back of its head concealed the cockpit - an odd design choice - but he saw no mechanical entrance. This thing was far more modern than Abyss Walker, and likely lacked the mechanical auxiliaries that his own craft possessed. Nevertheless...

The second that Letitia caught up to him, Valentine grabbed her wrist with his good arm, and pressed it against the centre of the back panel with a good deal more force than was due. For a second, there was a pause and a pneumatic hiss, as though the monstrous craft were irritated at the touch, and trying to decide whether to permit them entry.

Then the back of the head slipped open, revealing a cockpit; its surfaces were elegant, smooth, the whole space dark. As Letitia stepped foot inside, dim lights went up, illuminating the spartan space - just a few basic control surfaces (touchscreen, not analogue, Valentine noted) and the neural harness in the centre. He followed her, gesturing for her to step in.

Thankfully, he saw none of the familiar neural injectors that the early-model units possessed - it was all done externally via electrodes, rendering null the need for cybernetic augmentations to pilot effectively. Thank God - they didn't exactly have time to issue Letitia cybernetics on the spot, now did they?

"Hook yourself up to that," Valentine ordered, gesturing to the harness, crowned by a menacing-looking headpiece covered in heavy-duty neural reception equipment. "Take it slow; weighing a few hundred tonnes will feel odd at first. Just focus on walking for the first few seconds. First step is to bring your Shadow Field online - that'll absorb inbound fire. From there, work out weapons systems, and open fire."

He stepped closer, to help her with hooking up. As he worked, he continued, "Stay careful of whatever's in here. It will want to talk to you. Do not let it. However friendly it might seem to want to be..." he sighed, shaking his head for a minute. "Just don't. Not if you want to step out that door again."

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Every part of her knew there was no going back. While she had prepared for this eventuality, she never thought she would be in such dire situations as she had been in today. She thought she'd have more time, put in more research, maybe even have a fucking clue as to what she was doing. Now here she was thrusting her life into the hands of a Reaper that she had only vague contact with. There was no part of her that actually felt ready for this.

Fleeing up the stairs behind him, she found herself worrying about what would happen if she couldn't control Eden. At the same time though, a part of her felt like she was meant to control the monstrosity. She believed in fate. She believed that she was here to do something, and if this was the sacrifice she had to make to not only protect her technology, her legacy, but also the people that were now trying to help protect it... then she would do so.

Letitia gave a small yelp at the force of which he grabbed her arm and pulled her to the entrance. "I've check this spot a hundred times and-" she blinked when it opened, eyes wide with shock. How is it that for the last 7 years she had worked on the Reaper and had never been able to find the entrance or even get a glance on the inside? Had it really been inactive this whole time, or had Eden simply not wanted to cooperate?

She looked at Valentine as they entered, wondering what was going through his head. Was this anything like his Reaper? She didn't have time to question or even really care. Now she needed to focus on the goal at hand- protecting what was rightfully hers. "Well here goes our only real hope," she muttered, letting him help her hook it up. Vaguely she remembered something similar in her past, thought she couldn't recall where or when or why. Everything was so rushed right now.

"Got it, don't talk to the voices in my head," the human part of her tried human, despite the severity of the situation. She took a deep breath as finally everything was locked in place. "If I fuck up and everyone dies, I'm blaming God for this..."

She took a deep breath as everything was locked into place, hoping she would do everything right. She felt prickling in the back of her head before pain shot through her eyes. The pressure of it weighed down on her body and her mind and she tried hard to keep a steady breathing pattern. It wasn't as bad as she was expecting... but whatever it was that lay dormant inside the Reaper was powerful... it was only after a second of struggling did she realize that she was still standing and was able to function properly, even if she did feel heavier than normal.

A small caress on her mind reassured her she was fine, but otherwise she was left alone.

She realized that all the training, all the pressure on being stronger, better, faster than everyone was for this very moment.

With Project Revolution's inception, we aimed to make the best of the best Knights. Half-souled men and women that could withstand the pressure of piloting the Reaper without consuming the soul of said men and women.

A contract, an unreserved access the other half of the fighter's soul up front in order to maintain their life.

Passages from her grandfather's logs filtered through her mind, reminding her that yes, she was meant for this. Whether she liked it or not, she was built to be a Knight. But if a Reaper needed a soul to live, then just half her soul wouldn't sate it for long... Eventually it would wear away at the rest of her soul. They were not in control of these beings... and a half-souled human was a dangerous creature.

With shock she felt the entire world around her shift, shuddering when she realized it was Eden standing up. It took a moment to realize she had willed it so. Her brain was moving in so many different directions; she was no longer sure of herself anymore, of what or who she was, of if she was even capable of this, or what this was leading her to. So many memories and faces surrounding her mind's eye, and all she wanted to do was run.

No running.

She looked up, trying to find the source of the other voice, even though she knew what and who it was. She ignored it and tried taking a step forward, finding that it was quite easy to. Another step. And another. "Okay. I got this. How do I get the Shadow Field up?" she asked aloud, or at least she hoped it was aloud. Her voice belied how shaky and nervous she truly felt.

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The second Letitia was properly strapped-in, Valentine dashed out of the Reaper, by no means wanting to be inside once it started up. Inside was the domain of the Entity, inside which the pilot was an ornery guest; he had no place there, no right to challenge its authority where it dwelled. He dashed out of the monstrosity, and immediately took cover behind a few heavy steel crates on the scaffold behind the craft.

He swiftly grabbed his earpiece, flicking it on, praying that it worked. Gratifyingly, he heard the bleep that indicated functionality - whoever was on the other end had, at the very least, not been eviscerated yet.

"Atlas!" he shouted into the device, sounding a little more panicked than he'd intended. "Status report!"

"Pleasure to finally hear from you, Commander," Atlas' voice crackled over - a tiny bit broken with stress or pain, but otherwise, as chipper and sarcastic as usual. "Care to take over? This whole 'command' business isn't anywhere near as much fun as I'd imagined. Trust me, you can keep your job."

Valentine felt relieved at hearing his second-in-command's familiar voice; Atlas was one of the few living individuals with the knowledge to keep a Reaper in combat condition, and was functionally irreplaceable. Nevertheless, this wasn't exactly the time for pleasantries.

"I need you to patch me into that Reaper's comms system," Valentine ordered. "We're deploying it. The de Argentum girl is our pilot."

He heard Atlas pause for a second in shock, and swore that a sigh of acceptance resounded through the channel. "Copy, Commander. Give me thirty seconds, I'll route it through the facility's mainframe."

Valentine realised that there was a decent chance that he wouldn't see Atlas again after this. Hell, if this didn't work, there was no way any of them were walking out of here in one piece. And thus, he said something that he'd often been sufficiently frustrated as to refuse to say -

"Thank you, Atlas."

"Don't go letting me think you care, now, boss," Atlas said, with a slight laugh. Even through the laugh, though, his voice sounded pained. "But can I ask you something? About the de Argentum girl and all..."

"Of course," Valentine said, popping up over the crate and loosing a few shots downrange; the handgun's low-calibre armour-piercing rounds slipped through the armour of the Aegis infantry, dropping two of them.

"Are we still the good guys?"

Valentine was caught off-guard by the question, if only by its relevancy. How was he supposed to respond to that sort of thing? A question he'd asked himself often enough, but in more recent years, had come to ignore. Hope held no further place in his heart - only belief. The absolute belief in what they were doing. In winning.

"Alright, you're patched in," Atlas' voice crackled over. "Try not to flirt too much."

Valentine was about to respond with a reprimand, but before he could, the tone of the channel changed - the static on the line was gone, replaced only by an absolute, oppressive silence. For a second, he thought he'd lost the signal, before through came Letitia's slightly-frightened-sounding voice, somehow off-colour - the sound of someone speaking through their Reaper.

"-get the Shadow Field up?"

Valentine glanced up, watched the massive beast lurch to its feet, unsteady for a second as it tried to find its footing in the cramped space; cavernous as the ceiling of the laboratory was, the Reaper stood almost as tall. It dwarfed the Sentinels, easily triple their height, stabilising fins flickering and adjusting as it made its way to its full height, imposing its presence over the vast chamber.

"Just focus on it," he said; piloting a Reaper was being equal parts philosopher, mechanic and warrior, a difficult task to explain. Fortunately, as a product of Human-PLUS, she would likely possess some natural intuition from the task. "Go hunting through the neural circuits with your mind; ask for it to protect you, and it should guide you to the correct function. From there, just will it to be enabled."

He hoped that the thing was armed with close-quarters weaponry, or failing that, loaded with armour-piercing rounds. It if was packing high-explosive weaponry, this whole laboratory might come down on top of them. Not that the Reaper wouldn't survive -

Just that he wouldn't.

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It took a moment before she heard back from Valentine and his voice was a relief. Good, he wasn't dead. She couldn't say the same for a lot of the other people in the lab though. "I will make an effort at that," she sighed, closing her eyes for a moment to focus. Please protect this place. I don't care about myself, but this lab... If I'm dead who will protect this...?

If she didn't know better she would have sworn that the moment she mentioned protecting the lab, and therefore the technology and people inside it, Eden acted. She couldn't physically see the field from her point of view; she was still focusing her vision as it was, but she could feel it. She just... knew, somehow that it was there. Now she just needed weapons... She took a few more steps away from the scaffolding; she didn't want to be anywhere near where Valentine was working from when she let loose whatever this thing had to work with. Close range weapons?

Yes.

From the view of anyone on the outside they would see one long cable extending from its right hand with little grappling claws attached. With a quick hand movement she found herself using the right whip to crack at one of the sentinels. The range was amazing on these things, and it cut straight through one of the legs. There were no other noticeable weapons on the Reaper and it made her wonder if there were actually any other weapons to be used.

We are the weapon.

The voice echoed painfully throughout her mind. That would take some getting used to, but Eden didn't seem to care to actually talk right now, like Valentine said she might. Letitia could feel her determination; her sense of mission. With that push, that solid backing she found herself stepping forward even farther, hoping like hell the humans beneath her would get out of the way. With another swift movement, not clunky like some of the older modeled Sentinels and Tracers, a sword was pulled out of a hidden compartment in Eden's chest. Letitia couldn't help but smile at the familiarity of the weapon.

"Idiots. Should have known not to mess with a woman's private affairs," she smirked in confidence before taking two more steps forward and slicing at another Sentinel. They were her main focus; people were easier to deal with, but the Sentinels needed to go before they took out anything else. This was easy enough. Letitia still had little idea of what she was doing, but the Reaper seemed to have just enough power and free will of it's own to be able to carry out her half-finished thoughts. "My vision's still a bit blurry, Valentine. How many do I have left and point me in the right direction.

Her eyes wouldn't seem to clear up, as if this was too much of a strain on her mind for it to translate the light transfered from her eyes to her mind properly. She wouldn't have been surprised after all; it seemed like this entire thing was meant to exhaust her mind and body. She was sure if she hadn't been as well trained as she was, she might have failed entirely by now. Thank you, grandfather.

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Valentine watched as the craft was surrounded by the faint shimmer of a Shadow Field; down below, a Sentinel whirled and loosed a blue-tinged railgun blast at her. The only visible evidence was a spark against the shield, and dark ripples spreading from the impact as the high-velocity round ricocheted away and punched through a wall on the opposite side of the room.

The massive craft lurched away from the platform, its gait animalistic and ungainly as it moved - yet fluid, like a confused organic beast instead of the mechanical stomping of a Tracer or Sentinel. She was becoming more fluid vast, though, the movements no longer shaky; the stabiliser fins flickered and compensated for her every movement, helping to keep her on-balance. An excellent design decision.

He watched as a steel wire extracted from one hand, razor-sharp blades at its tip; he paused, confused as to its function, before it lashed out with a supersonic crack!, snapping through the legs of a Sentinel as though passing through air; the back edge of the whip struck it as it withdrew, caving in the cockpit and crushing the pilot instantly. The remaining Sentinels leapt backwards with significantly more grace than the Tracers around them, suddenly having gone from the battlefield supremacy weapons to mere toys in the face of an unrelenting monstrosity before them.

It drew a sword from its chest cavity - far slimmer and lighter than Abyss Walker's massive weapon, but in the hands of the nimble Reaper, no less deadly. The beast stepped forward, slashing swiftly, far more precisely than its other movements - Letitia's skill with a blade having already become apparent in the Sky District.

A Sentinel was cleaved neatly in half, both parts of it collapsing to the ground as the monster stepped over the wreckage; meaningless impacts flared off the Shadow Field surrounding the beast. Letitia's faintly inhuman-sounding voice came crystal-clear through his earpiece -

"My vision's still a little blurry. How many do I have left? Point me in the right direction."

Valentine checked over the battlefield; his own vision was still a little fuzzy with pain, although it was nothing compared to hers. The neural load of a Reaper took a lot of getting used to, and frankly, she was doing much better than any human should've - most struggled to even survive their first time piloting, let alone successfully drop a squad of Sentinels.

"Three to your right, closer to the exit," Valentine said, now able to stand with impunity, the enemy soldiers massacred as they tried to choose between fighting the Reaper and returning fire to Valentine's men. As he checked around, he saw that his Tracers had immediately retreated, well familiar with operating procedure from years of fighting alongside Abyss Walker. "Our forces are out of the way. Wipe them out, then set her down. I'll extract you."

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Let's go.

Agreed.

It was effortless. She urged Eden forward with just a touch of her mind and she found the last of the enemy Sentinels. A few quick movements of the blade and two were mincemeat. They had no time to react; her battle instincts took over and she took them down without hesitation or remorse. The third Sentinel's pilot was trying desperately to retreat. Part of Letitia almost wanted to let it go so it could tell the horrors of what it had seen that day... but no. No one would be allowed to live after the destruction they had caused. Her whip shot forward and pierced right through the chest armor. The blades of her grappling hook were sharp and deadly. Like her blade, she'd make it a point to keep it that way. With great force she hauled it forward close enough so she could grab it. A moment of mercilessness struck her like lightning and with no further adieu she ripped the head of the Sentinel off and casually tossed it to the side.

Every bit of her hoped that whomever had sent the military down there would see some sort of evidence of all of this and would know not to mess with the lab again. "They'll send more. Especially if they find out there's a Reaper here. We best get the supplies out of here as soon as possible. I know a lot of your men are wounded, but there's medical supplies in room A3," she turned around in her Reaper body and moved back towards the scaffolding.

Not bad, human.

She ignored the voice. Valentine said it would want to talk and not to listen. She set Eden down back near the scaffolding and let out a breath of relief.

Do you have other weapons? Despite warnings she attempted to make another bit of contact. She needed to know what this thing was capable of.

The time will come when they are useful. For now, they are not.

Letitia found herself a bit disoriented when the lights flickered out and the Reaper settled itself in the sitting position it had been in not but moments before she had entered it, as if it were comfortable like this. What???

If she had been outside she might have noticed the dark shadow that descended over the place, as if it were surveying the damage, before disappearing again. Letitia felt alone in the dark, as if she was no longer linked to the Entity, despite still being harnessed in. That's when she realized it... The Reaper was never inactive... it was merely sleeping.

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With the last few units annihilated in the space of mere instants, the Reaper settled itself down, slumping against a wall lazily, as though bored by its brief exertion. Shadows flickered and moved around it, the Entity reinhabiting the laboratory with little fanfare.

Valentine breathed a sigh of relief, the echoes of battle fading from the chamber; only the crackling of flames around wrecked Sentinels. He picked himself up off the ground, lurching down the scaffolding, vision distorted with pain; he could see well enough, though, making his way over to the Reaper. The shadows left him alone as he moved, the monster perhaps sated for now - he refused to refer to it by name, refusing to give it that much credit.

Soldiers rushed around the floor, tending to wounded; one came up to him, bearing a bandage, insisting that he be assisted. Valentine just took the bandages and wrapped them tightly around his arm; his bloodsoaked right hand stained it with blood, but he managed it. He made a note to grab some proper painkillers before leaving the lab. He could function, though - he'd been shot more than enough times. He also requested a flare, and it was in his hand in a second. His men knew better than to question his orders.

He directed his men to room A3 for medical supplies, and after a few short moments, he'd reached the leg of the Reaper. With a burdened sigh, he grabbed one of the stabiliser fins, and began the long process of clambering up its body. Flare stuffed inside his bloodied coat, he forced himself up its leg, then its spine, then its chest, before swinging around the head. Grabbing one of the sensor antennae with his good hand, he managed to thud a solid boot into the smooth back panel, then a second, then a third.

On the fourth kick, it swung open; he offered a momentary thanks to the Reaper. It clearly understood his intent; whether it allowed him in to save its pilot, or as a trap, he knew not and cared not. He swung himself inside the back panel, thudding onto the metal floor, landing hard. His vision flashed with pain, but he forced himself to his feet - the longer he was in here, the more dangerous things were.

With his wounded arm, he grabbed the flare from his coat, breaking off the cap and flooding the interior of the Reaper in crimson light. Shadows shifted around the walls, illuminated red, like dripping blood; the corridor into the cockpit seemed longer this time, the angles more jagged. He saw shapes move at the edge of his vision, but didn't look at them, didn't acknowledge them - he knew that if he acknowledged them, they would become real.

He saw a humanoid shape move in front of him, feminine, offering a slender, shadowy hand; he brushed past it, and it vanished into dark smoke. Hands reached out from the walls, the floor; he just kept walking, shrugging them off him, still not acknowledging them. With his good hand, he drew his pistol, fired a few quick shots into the wall; they ricocheted off the hard titanium harmlessly, but the message was clear, and the hands receded at his gesture of dominance; it seemed to respect his willingness to stand up for Letitia's sake.

Well, at least it's a little less egotistical than Abyss Walker.

Eventually, he made his way into the cockpit, and found Letitia, hanging in her harness. Her eyes were wider, her body a little more limp; he swore he saw her trembling almost-imperceptibly. Still, she wasn't dead, and didn't appear particularly crazy. He put the flare on the ground, room still illuminated in blood-red.

"Are you okay?" he asked, stepping up to her, unclasping the harness, helping her down from where she hung.

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Letitia felt nothing. Her broken arm no longer hurt as much, her fears of failing had disappeared the moment she had taken down the last Sentinel, and her even greater fears of what this meant for her were already calming down.

She simply... breathed.

One intake. Stress was gone.

Two intake. Fear was gone.

Three intake. She was still alive.

Four intake. She had saved her labs.

It was completely silent in the cockpit, but not terrifyingly so. She was half sure that a lot of noise right now would have been worse for her recovering head. There was already a bit of a headache coming on and she was definitely tired. It was okay though. Now she knew that Eden was real, alive even. All of her research wasn't in vain, and maybe just maybe it wasn't in vain that her grandfather had trained her so well.

Fatigue reared it's horrible head and she found herself slouching a bit in the harness, too blind to even find how to unlock it. She heard noises finally; one tang, two tang, three tang and finally she heard the cockpit door open slowly. She remembered that she wasn't alone in the world.

You're ready.

Until that moment, she hadn't had time to think about that voice. There was no curiosity as to where it was coming from or if it really meant her harm or not. It didn't seem threatening, just... lazy, if Letitia had to put words to the echoing, deep yet feminine voice she heard, as if it didn't really care, as long as no one dared to lay waste to its territory. Letitia could feel the rage of the Entity inside her still, even though it was no longer as strong. It mirrored her own, and that terrified her more than anything.

"Are you okay?"

Valentine's voice startled her out of her reverie and she found just enough energy left in her to nod. As he unhooked her from the harness she realized just how wiped out she was. It was no easy feat doing this. She was almost glad she had never tried to until now; no, she was glad the Reaper hadn't let her until now. She knew that's what it had to be; no matter what her intentions, she felt as if Eden wouldn't have accepted her in any less than a situation that threatened its home and it. "I-I'm fine, just tired," she fell into his arms as the last of the harness was undone, unable to stay on her feet for long. She fought to stay awake, yet she knew there was no rest for her. "She's not going to move for a while."

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Valentine absorbed the impact of Letitia's body falling on top of him, wrapping his arms around her. He turned, grabbing her legs and bridal-carrying her from the craft - she weighed little, and his body was toned from years of combat. She posed little-

"It's okay," he whispered, brushing a hand through her hair as she fell into him, thin hands clutching his coat tightly. "We're safe now."

Her face buried into his chest, the darkness stepping away from them. The outside of the Reaper smouldered, exposed wiring and carbon-nanofibre musculature torn asunder by the carnage of battle. Beyond the shadowy walls of this place, only silence reigned, and the crackling of a thousand funeral pyres.

"We..." her voice cracked, and watery, bloodshot eyes looked up at him. She felt warmer than she should've; he tried to tell himself that it wasn't blood. He helped pull her away from the harness, stepping away from the craft. It left him alone as he left; perhaps it deemed he had suffered enough.

Perhaps it deemed that he would suffer enough.

"Did we win?"

Valentine laid her down on the soft grass, pulling bandages from his pack. He rolled her over, undressed her gingerly, an action that carried a rather different weight now. A small wound - shrapnel. She'd survive this one.

He wrapped her and tied the bandage. He was out of painkillers, so he just lay down beside her on the grass, watching the smouldering ruins of her Reaper lie where it would; whether it would live or die could be established come morning. He'd no desire to leave this place. He felt them move closer; whether by her volition or his, he didn't know.

A part of him wanted to talk to her. To comfort her. To tell her that he was there, that she'd never be alone. But he never would. Never could.

There were some things you couldn't take back, after all.

The memory faded as he emerged into the sunlight, and he glanced back down at Letitia - features softer, younger, more alive. After a moment's consideration, he simply leapt off the platform, soaring towards the ground; he didn't impact particularly hard, such falls familiar to him. The hatch closed behind him of its own volition. The message was clear enough - Letitia's assessment was correct. It was quite finished.

"We're safe now," he whispered soothingly, walking out from behind the Reaper; he laid gently her on the ground and checked briefly that she was uninjured (broken arm excepted). He strolled over to his men, who'd gathered all the wounded into a reasonably-large circle - all his wounded, of course. The enemy had been duly tended to using a bullet to the head. That was the reality of this war.

He saw Atlas, slumped against a crate; fear gripped his heart as he began jogging towards his comrade, and kneeled before him. The man looked up at him with heavy-lidded eyes, hands fumbling with a bandage around a bloodied abdomen.

"Mind handling the shooty bits next time, boss?" Atlas said, the ghost of a smile cracking his face. For his part, Valentine just grabbed the two ends of the bandage, affixing it properly around Atlas' wounded midsection.

"You're going to be okay, you hear me?" Valentine commanded, and Atlas just grinned a lopsided grin.

"Damn straight I am. Now if you don't mind, I need to complain at the medics about getting me some damn morphine."

Valentine just smiled, and for a moment, ruffled Atlas' hair - an oddly affectionate gesture, and one that caught both of them off-guard. He strode back over to Letitia, who was still laying where he's set her down - exhausted by her exertions, it seemed. He kneeled beside her, grabbing a water flask dropped by one of his men from on top of a nearby crate and pressing it to her lips.

"Drink," he ordered, the warmth of a moment ago gone now as it started to dawn on him that at least half of the men he'd come in here with were now dead.

Nevertheless, he realised, the woman had just piloted a Reaper, and saved his life - he owed her something. So when he spoke again, it was a little more softly, a little more concernedly. "You'll feel better if you drink. Trust me. I've no intention of letting someone who just saved my life suffer for it."

Any more than is necessary, of course.

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All she wanted to do was fade into the darkness. As he carried her away from the harness she buried her face into his chest and tried hard to calm her beating heart down. She ad never been so terrified in her life. Questions overwhelmed her tired mind, and for once she just wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep.

As he lay her down on the ground she took a moment to look around the wreckage that was her beautiful lab. At least half of the servers were on fire or sparking from exposed wires and general damage. There were dead men and women lying everywhere. There was quite a large circle of wounded gathering for medical supplies. Everything around her was falling to shambles.

She half sat up, forgetting her broken arm for a moment and using it to support her weight. These people had come to her for help and in the end had lost so many and she had lost so much in return... while technology were not human lives, these servers had been her only reliable companions for many years. This was the legacy her grandfather and father had left her with, and now she had to save it.

"Mistress! Mistress! Protocol 7 is in place. The main harddrives were backed up off location before too much was lost and the you-know-what is under lock down!" Bot appeared out of no where, reporting to her reliably. That was one last stress off her mind.

"Good. Make sure these men can find what they need. They're our new allies," she whispered before lying back down and closing her eyes for a few moments. Her vision was clearing up and she breathed deeply.

"Drink," the order came in the tone of a cold voice, and she opened her eyes, almost ready to cuss him out until he changed his tone.

She took a few sips of water before making an attempt to sit up again. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine," she tried to push him away once she managed to sit up fully. She didn't like being taken care of. She had managed so far by taking care of herself and fighting for what was hers. "Damage? Casualities? All the information off of the servers was backed up and stored safely elsewhere... I'm thinking it's about time I move bases anyways..."

----------

"Ma'am, we found the labs but..."

"I swear to God-"

"They had a Reaper. Whoever this group was had a fucking Reaper!"

Isa growled at his cursing and turned to look at him, her pristine ironed business suit looking impressive compared to what she typically wore. "Language. I don't care if they had a Reaper or not! Did you find her?"

"Well... not really, but how did they get a Reaper down there without us knowing?" the captain stood straighter, looking a bit indignant at having to report to the young girl. Her father was his boss though. "It had to have been down there for a long time and inactive... but there are no camera feeds we can hack into down there. Your cousin kept a lockdown on that place."

"Berkley?"

Letitia's right hand stepped forward and nodded. "The Reaper was down there for many years but... it was completely dead, or so we thought. Miss Titi tried all she could to find out it's state but... She's alive. She has to be. No one else could have gotten down there. Only two people have the ability to get in there, and my codes were marked invalid recently. That means she had to get in there and open the doors for those rebel troops," he explained, looking a bit thoughtful. "I never thought she would have worked with such a group though. Her research is too precious to her."

Isa smirked and shook her head. "And you, her faithful dog?"

"I am paid by the de Argentum family. While Miss Titi has been my charge for a long time, she is not responsible for my pay check," he seemed a bit reluctant to say it, but it was true. "And she's slowly been slipping away from everything that is normal and natural for her... I'm worried now. If she was the one who activated that Reaper..."

"Understood. Don't worry, we'll bring her back and bring her back to her senses." There was insincerity in her voice. She could care less if Letitia lived or died. She just wanted what was rightfully hers.

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Valentine moved to standing, checking around the now-silent laboratory, taking note of his situation. A decent chunk of Childhood's End's force capability was out of commission. Tracers could be replaced - and would, given that five were little more than smoking wrecks - but men were much harder to find. Good men, hard men, men who'd fight and kill for a lost cause - all were in short supply outside, to say nothing of within this city.

"A dozen dead," he said coldly, unemotionally, his observation of the ruins of the lab complete. "Eight wounded, not including ourselves. Five Tracers incapacitated, the remaining three heavily-damaged."

There it was. A full fifth of his force, wiped out in minutes - and close to half of his combative troops. They'd never been outfitted for defensive actions, and being forced into it had cost them, as it always had. While he had gained out of this affair the overwhelming offensive advantage of a second Reaper, it remained to be seen whether or not she'd be of any strategic use.

He'd lost the advantage he once held; things were no longer proceeding according to plan, and he had no choice but to be reactive now. All that remained was to seize this city as swiftly as possible, and replenish his forces; neither would be an easy task. Once he had both of those, he could track Old King, and then - finally - he would be free of this place.

"We're leaving," he said, offering a hand down to her. "They'll be cautious. When we return to Cocytus, I'll sort out a way to have your Reaper moved. When we've stripped this place bare, I suspect we'd do well to level it."

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Letitia accepted his hand up, looking at their surroundings. "There's never a balance in war. In the end everyone loses, and all we can hope is the results we achieve were worth it in the long haul," she said softly, staring at the wounded, the dead, the destroyed Sentinels and Tracers. "I can help with the repairs on the remaining Tracers. There are parts lying around here somewhere, and I see parts that are salvageable on the destroyed ones... What I need is safe and secure, thanks to Bot. But you're right, the sooner we leave the better."

She knew someday she would need to move everything; it was inevitable in order to keep everything safe. "I have a second hideout where there are more supplies and where the data is backed up, but we can retrieve that once we've healed. I think the supplies there will be more beneficial than what I have here," she was merely rambling in exhaustion at this point. So this was the cost of her justice? No, she would find another way. She would find a better way.

Despite how tired she was she helped load things up and get them in place for transport. They had to take everything they physically could with them as soon as possible. There wouldn't be much time for multiple trips, and she already suspected that the place would be watched. With every step she took she muttered something, almost a mantra of sorts, looking distracted. "Moving her won't actually be difficult. I've moved her before with fewer men than what we have now, when we brought her down here. I'll explain later though."

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Valentine find himself caught rather off-guard by Letitia's philosophical response to his information. She was more perceptive than he'd anticipated; yet, in his own way, he found himself slightly bitter at her statement. She'd only seen this city, maybe a little of what lay beyond it - never the vast conflicts that plagued the earth, never seen armies of hundreds of thousands laying into each other in battles that left the ground knee-deep in blood. Never seen the truth of just what it was like out there.

Perhaps, though, it were for the best that she hadn't seen it. Meant she still held hope; was willing to fight for the sake of the weak, when she had an easy life standing in front of her.

Futile as it was, the effort was nevertheless worthwhile.

"I daresay you're mistaken," he said, as he helped lift crates of ammunition onto the back of a truck - run down the tunnels from Cocytus the second the lab had been clear. "War's all about winning and losing. Whoever wins, gets to enact their vision; whoever loses has their vision selected out, and fades from memory."

He went through some piles of equipment, seeing a heavy crate labelled x4 Ferromagnetic Ammunition - 155mm Depleted Uranium, Armour Piercing. Checking inside, he spotted what he'd hoped for - long, dull-silver darts, each weighing in at around thirty kilos and capable of being accelerated to up to three thousand metres per second in an instant. A single round did as much damage as three quarters of a tonne of dynamite, and could comfortably punch through eight feet of steel plate. Each round was flawlessly-crafted to maintain the absolute maximal performance.

He gestured to his team to help lift it - even four rounds weighed a full hundred-twenty kilos. After a great deal of exertion, four men (with his help, although with his bad arm, it offered little) managed to lift the ammunition case onto the back of the truck. As he went back for the next case, he turned to Letitia, gesturing for her to follow him.

"Perhaps, indeed, the world was once perfect. But as long as man had a vision, he could not permit it to cease; and thus, we fought onwards. Destruction is not the aim of war - merely its effect. Unfortunately, the side effects became irreversible a long while ago, if you will. And yet mankind continues to fight on - why?"

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Letitia couldn't have told you when she fell asleep, even if you had bothered to ask. All she knew was one minute she was riding in a truck thinking about the day she had had so far, and the next moment she was jerking awake as the truck came to a halt. She shook herself out of her groggy state, knowing it was overly dangerous for her to be sleeping around people she didn't know. She was so tired from her encounter with piloting a reaper though, that she couldn't seem to stay awake no matter how hard she tried.

She had no idea where they were. She wasn't even sure she knew what she was doing anymore. All she knew was that she needed a really long nap and maybe a shower. She didn't know how long it had been since she had eaten or slept, nor was she even sure she was hungry enough to eat anything if she was offered. All she knew was that she wouldn't be going back home any time soon... it was far too dangerous now.

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"Welcome home," Valentine said to the resting Letitia, as the truck they both sat in rumbled through the gates of Cocytus. He stepped out of the truck, gesturing for her to follow him; when she stood beside him (after some time - she looked completely exhausted) he gestured towards the stairs leading up to the network of gantries on the roof.

He pulled his coat a little tighter over his shoulders; it was a few degrees below zero in here, the cooling equipment pumping into Abyss Walker still humming away. He realised that he'd need to get Letitia some warmer clothes fast; he went over the female members of the organisation, trying to work out who was both in Letitia's size and, well, not dead.

Come to think of it, for a group numbering close to a hundred people with a 40% female substance, that was a pretty damned short list.

"One of the side-offices up there has a shower," he said, still pointing at the gantries. "Don't think that hot water's working yet, though, so keep it quick. I'll have some bedding set up somewhere of your choosing up there. A hot meal, maybe, if you're so inclined."

Come to think of it, it hadn't been four hours since they last ate - yet Valentine already felt starving. Combat did that to you - digestion slowed down during, but his body compensated immediately afterwards.

As they'd entered, another batch of heavy-duty trucks moved out with gear for hauling Letitia's Reaper - due to its lightweight construction, moving it was a much easier prospect than doing the same to Abyss Walker. And at any rate, maintaining, arming and moving a Reaper with little more than bubblegum and shoelaces was sort of Childhood's End's specialty by now.

It occurred to him that, at the very least, Letitia's Reaper hadn't been hooked up to cooling systems like Abyss Walker had - unsurprising, given its more recent construction. Abyss Walker, despite its abnormally high performance for its age, still had its fair share of disadvantages - for starters, it was absurdly high-maintenance, and was intended to be have a thousand-strong support battalion.

It had taken years of practice and training to manage to get it to run with this few people, and even then, 'run' was overstating matters most of the time - keeping the thing online was a matter of lurching from one mechanical disaster from the next.

"Gives it character," he muttered to himself, with a faintly bemused smile.

The doors were slow to open; it wasn't often that they were actually used. As a matter of fact it had been a good two or three years since they had actually been used. "This is Bot. He's a... well robot, obviously. A little drone, apparently back in the day according to what I recovered of his memory chip, he was used to assist scientists in their labs," she gave an unneeded explanation while she waited.

"I think it's about time you came clean with whatever's here, Letitia."

Her eye twitched a bit. He knew something was in there, and she wasn't sure how he knew... but then again if he was a Knight perhaps that was a thing... She wasn't really sure. She had never dealt with any other Reaper before. She turned around and tilted her head before stepping down from a platform. "Very well then.. Since you already seem to know," she sighed and nodded him toward a door to the side, walking through it with ease. "She's... I almost want to say dead... I know she's NOT but she's been inactive since I found her back when I was 15..."

She flicked on a switched and a lot of lights came on, revealing the very Reaper that she had been hiding for ages. "I found her in the same ruins I found all of the servers and computers," she said, walking over to a console that turned even more lights on. "I think she's an older model. Everything I've ever tried to do to wake it up was in vain. No movement, nothing..."

She seemed fascinated with the thing before them, head tilted and eyes on it like a school girl in love. "I've been working with a lot of Old World coding in the past few years to try and figure out what's wrong but... nothing seems to get through. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And she doesn't seem dangerous... at least the ghost of her that seems to have made its home in the lab doesn't seem dangerous..." she looked at him, probably thinking he found her insane.

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Valentine nodded at the drone - 'Bot' - and he had to admit, it was mildly endearing. That might explain where he'd seen it - working on one of the XK-series projects. Drones were preferred to human beings for physical labour there, to reduce the psychological damage that some of the things they'd been doing could inflict merely by being in their presence. Still, this one seemed harmless enough - almost endearing, in a way.

At the back of the room, eight Tracers filed in, accompanied by perhaps two dozen men wearing body armour and carrying infantry weapons of various descriptions - Valentine's soldiers. The heavy, bulky forms of the Tracers thudded around the floor, their movements decidedly ungainly and slow. They looked decidedly inhuman, with hulking legs and boxy upper bodies, massive autocannons held like rifles in hands attached to powerful hydraulic arms - more like a bipedal tank than a true humanoid weapon. Nevertheless, their movements were precise and deliberate; their pilots hardened by years of battle, the motions of combat familiar to them.

From the mass of soldiers on the ground, Atlas emerged, smoothing over his civilian clothing underneath a hastily-applied bulletproof vest. He nodded to Valentine as he approached, but then halted in place, and started issuing orders for the various Tracers and soldiers to fan out and secure the area.

Valentine spun as the lights went up, the vast chamber suddenly illuminated. Filling his vision, the massive, reclining figure of the very abomination Letitia had hidden. Humanoid and slim, almost feminine in form, its body all sharp angles, blade-like stability fins and razor-edged claws. It was much slimmer than Abyss Walker, its form almost skeletal, its upper body - where the beast's heart was contained - attached to its lower by what looked to be a simple mechanical spine, granted it a distorted hourglass-esque figure. Its large head had two massive burnt-orange sensors, dull and lifeless from decades of deactivation; from its skull, slender, reed-like antennae unfurled, likely an advanced avionics suite.

Gazing up at it, this one was new, different, a later model than he was familiar with. XK-REAPER had laid the groundwork, but its prototypes had been reverse-engineered all around the world, wholly unaware of what had become of the creators of this technology. The hardware was different; the lack of physical armour plating relative to Abyss Walker struck him as particularly odd. He saw nothing immediately in the way of external weaponry, which frankly, unnerved him more than if there had been.

He heard the swift clattering behind him of soldiers kneeling into firing positions, weapons being racked and loaded, all levelled at the monstrosity before them. It lay on its back, half-sitting, almost slouched - as though it were relaxing, taunting them to attack it, daring them to challenge its authority over this domain. Valentine realised that almost unconsciously, he'd snapped his own weapon up to face it, hilariously ineffectual as it would be.

As he gazed upon the beautiful, terrible monstrosity before him, words came to mind - the motto of the XK-REAPER project, a phrase from an Old World writer who said of things that should never, could never, have existed upon this earth.

That which is not dead can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.

He observed Letitia carefully as she gazed upon it with an almost religious reverence - no, not religious, more personal than that. Love. An empathic connection with what stood before them; an obsession, a driving desire to figure out how to awaken it. Fifteen years old - perfect time to imprint, when she'd found it. This thing was taking its toll on her, and she hadn't realised for a second. It was a miracle she hadn't figured out how to run a Contact Experiment yet.

"Definitely not dead," he breathed, stepping closer slowly, cautiously. Around him, shadows flickered, walls seemed to shift closer and then further away, individual steps on a flight of stairs changing position slightly. She hadn't noticed. This thing wasn't dead, that was for certain - and it was warping reality itself. He knew that as a Knight, he was more sensitive, but even then, everyone saw it. Letitia must've been hit hard to not see it - it had chosen its prey, and was trying to lure her in.

That, or it was trying to tell him to stay away.

He turned back from the piece of scaffolding he stood on, gazing out at the Tracers and soldiers before him, their weapons all levelled at the monstrosity. It wouldn't do them much good - they knew that, as well as he did. Killing it was out of the question - if they mishandled it, they might simply unbind the Entity inside it, and god knew what would happen then.

Valentine slowly walked back down the steps, having had a close enough look. As he made his way down the scaffolding - with a little more haste than was dignified - he felt an overwhelming sense of relief, and he stepped back beside Letitia. He realised that he'd unconsciously turned the safety off on his gun - or, at least, he hoped it had been him. He flicked it back on.

"Reapers aren't just hunks of metal," he explained, voice more shaken than he'd like. "They're alive. Inside them is bound - well, we're not quite sure. The reports I've read just call them 'Entities'. They can think, and feel - they're not of this world, nor should they be. We managed to keep them bound into the RELICS system - used them to power the 'body' of the Reaper, that massive mechanical entity you see over there. The problem... well, it's not so much that we lost control..." He exhaled heavily, trying to re-affirm his voice. "Our mistake was thinking that we were ever in control in the first place."

He took a few deep breaths, calming himself. He wasn't normally this panicked. Something was wrong - very wrong. He could feel it. "Anyway, they need a human soul to actuate their power - they can't properly affect the physical world unless they're bound to one of us. That's where the Knights come in - when you neurally interface with a Reaper, you control it, and it controls you. You move the Reaper - use the power of whatever's inside to your will."

He turned, staring back at the abomination, gazing into it.

"And in return, it slowly feeds off your soul, until there's nothing left."

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Letitia knew a lot about the world around her. She had made it her job to know ever since she had been a child; everything was worth learning, even the small things... however she could only learn what there was accurate information that was accessible to someone of her station... information on Reapers was not one of those things. They kept that under lock and key where even her brilliant mind couldn't hack into it. However she had a bit of information that most wouldn't know. As she had said, her grandfather had his secrets.

"Feeds on souls? Is that... their lifesource?" she wondered aloud, wandering closer to her monstrosity.

His words made sense though. He was a Knight, he should know these things after all... and it made things in her life make just a little more sense. "Ever heard of a project called Revolution? It wasn't a well known one, to tell the truth," she saw that all weapons were pointed at the Reaper and she wondered if they would have had any effect on it at all. Then again, she was still certain it couldn't move... She... felt it wasn't able to move yet.

"It was short lived... I think I know why, because it was a very inhumane project... I never understood what it was meant to do until now..." she turned to look at Valentine, the light hitting her just right so her face was in shadow. Staring down at her feet, she explained more. "A brilliant scientist about 25, maybe 30 years ago thought that perhaps... just maybe... it was possible to remove a human soul, if not completely, at least partially. Make them immune to Entities influence... a way to create better Knights, even maybe take further control of Reapers... The man realized he was foolish of course. Every case study ended in complete failure; all of his subjects died save one."

"The man was cruel enough to even experiment on his children... and his oldest son offered up his first born daughter for the experiment... she was really sick at the time. Only a few months old. They assumed she wouldn't survive... this was all for the sake of the greater good in their minds... part of the process worked though," she looked a bit flustered as she wandered over to the Reaper, touching it's leg as if it were an old friend. "They managed to displace part of her soul from her body... not knowing what affect it would have in the long run. They found a way to store it, and she grew up. But fate is cruel to those who try to shun her influence. Both men died, but not before the father could pass on his legacy to the half-souled granddaughter of his. He lived just long enough to see how it affected her. Greater focus, less impressionability, a bit ruthless but still caring enough to want something better for the world around her... intelligence, even a bit of advanced healing... It's actually amazing how much souls help and hinder the body and the mind at the same time..."

She looked down at her broken arm before glancing up at the Reaper. "She calls herself Eden, sometimes in the dark when I can hear her whisper..." she shook her head, sighing at her own crazy talk. "When my grandfather thought I knew enough about Revolution, he showed me what a soul looks like without its human body... I didn't find out until about two years ago, I finally figured out enough Old World code to hack into his hidden files that I found out it was mine."

A girl with half a soul? She knew it sounded preposterous but she had the research and files to prove it. "Before you can separate a soul from its body, it needs to be so broken and damaged that the soul is about to depart in the first place. I wasn't that broken though, they only got half of what they wanted out of it."

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"Feeds on souls? Is that... their lifesource?"

A question he himself had pondered often enough. Even after hundreds of years of their use, the fact remained that mankind understood next to nothing about the nature of that which lay at the heart of the Reapers. "To be quite honest, I almost hope so," he said quietly. "Given the other possible explanations, it's probably the most optimistic."

Then she continued, and everything stopped for him. His mind simply stopped processing information properly. None of what she was saying made sense - no, that wasn't it, it made perfect sense. It's just that it was impossible. None of it could've existed. He wondered if the Reaper was altering his perception of reality.

No, it couldn't alter his thoughts with such precision - Reapers were beings of emotion, not of rationale. What she said - she wasn't lying. It stood to reason, after all - the empathy of a human soul, combined with the detachedness and faintly unnerving nature of that which was soulless.

But... how? Human-PLUS was dead and buried, everything from XK was dead and buried. Phase II had never gotten off the ground - not an inch. Yet it all clicked - soullessness could, hypothetically, increase Reaper pilot duration far beyond the human norm, without the crippling Resurgence problems that plagued the last days of the Cultivator project.

A soul so broken that it's ready to be taken.

That would explain it - why the Reapers seemed to be so selective in who they took when in battle. Why some simply became hollow husks where they stood when one of the monstrosities stalked past, and others felt not a thing. After all, a Reaper at full capacity was something to be truly feared - it strained at the conceptual walls of reality, the pilot of its soul not enough to satiate its abominable hunger. So it fed off those around it. An acceptable sacrifice - that was how everyone justified it. That was how the Knights justified it to themselves.

And, most of all, her theory explained the averted, accepting gaze that every Knight dreaded.

The Valravn. The raven that consumes the heart of a child, to become a Knight.

"None of this is possible," Valentine said, stepping forward to face Letitia, her hand resting gently on the leg of the enormous, almost skeletal Reaper. "None of it. Human-PLUS died with Kyoto, Letitia. All the files - all the technology - that could possibly have allowed such a project to proceed - it's all gone."

But she was telling the truth - he knew it, felt it, the truth gnawing away at him. He wasn't great with people, but - a story so outlandish, she wouldn't dare tell it as fiction. But how? Kyoto, and everything within a thousand miles of it, wasn't even a crater - it was nothing, a broken world, reality shattering and shifting in ways he couldn't even begin to understand, a maelstrom of jagged quantum states where dreams and reality coalesced.

The Cultivators were gone. XK-REAPER was gone. The doctors and their mad experiments were gone. The world he'd known - everything he'd once wanted, everything he'd once been told - had been erased. He was subservient to nobody, not anymore. Yet it all broke, slowly, surely, things that he'd forgotten melding back into themselves. Becoming whole, yet reflecting, distorting light - changing mediums bending psychological wavelengths. Some older, denser - others far too new. Words, phrases, jumped through and disappeared. Phonological memories, just looping again and again.

"And so you abandoned mankind, to destroy it?"

Voices. Still there. History's claws, reaching back at him. Troyard. Or not - perhaps his? Or that of the relenting Abyss. The Abyss that gazed back, eyes forever glued to his. Topical anaesthesia for madness, numbing surfaces.

Names, faces, guns and needles. Shadows that shifted in the night, his back always to a wall, a wall he'd put there because - why? Answers that never came.

Selective-fire hearts, heat warping psychology, Ulysses, Leidenfrost emotions. Things he'd sacrificed, too many things. Knighthood, honour, belief, and then all taken again. "Vade Ultra Mortem."

Skin altogether too cold for life and too electric for death. Resurgence, redoing. Words that meant nothing, silences that fragmented and ricocheted. Things that were meant to be comfortable that neither were nor meant to.

Names. Words, traces. Verbal fire-for-effect. Cultivator - 'one who cultivates'. Cultivate - verb. Grow or maintain (living cells/tissue) in culture. 'Culture' (biology, science of that which died-will die); unnatural environment. Controlled conditions. Controlled consequences. Allows reproduction of results.

He spoke; it wasn't him, had too much conviction, too much bravery and self-righteousness and authority and concern. "You have no idea what you're talking to, do you?" Love, loss, yet both fragmented - too many at the table for the deck to handle, and nobody playing for keeps. A Dark (K)night's march. History, absurd myths.

"Walk away from this. Leave. You don't need to. You don't need to. Enough mistakes have been made for the two of us by now, have they not? Learn. Live. Decide what - or not, history, dictates, choiceless again. Who are you, who do not know your history? Learn. Stepping forward into nothing begets nothing."

Words not meant for anyone. Repeating. Consuming cycle. Relevant. Ravings of a madman, perhaps. Or an oracle.

More, a phrase, a sequence. His, yet not his, flashed through his mind as he stared her up and down - the half-soul girl. Didn't know if he spoke the next out loud, didn't know if he'd said it all out loud either. Past caring.

Gave up our bodies. Our minds.

Our souls.

I don't even remember why.

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Letitia stood there, her hand now off of Eden's leg and her mind buzzing with questions and wondering why her grandfather had never discussed any of this with her... of course she knew the real answer... what monster would she have thought him to be if he had told her about it while still living? The fact that he, the patriarch of the de Argentum family had once experimented on humans and Reapers was a terrifying aspect. What was worse was no one in the family knew aout it but her.

"My grandfather... his research was extensive... he was not the first in line to the de Argentum name, he had two older brothers... so he was allowed to choose his profession, and he chose science. It fascinated him greatly. He was good at it, as am I," Letitia had a feeling he was no longer listening in full, yet she felt the need to clarify more. "I don't know much about Revolution other than what his files show me. Assumedly it was the next phase in the Human-PLUS project, sort of a Project III that was being conducted on the side, long before II was even operational. Do you know much of the de Argentum family? In the family typically every male has at least two or three children; two potential heirs and one as a backup plan. My grandfather and my greatgrandfather were not potential heirs until their brothers died. But our origins are in Japan..."

There were so many mysteries she couldn't solve on her own and that frustrated the woman. She wanted to know it all and she wanted to know it all now.

As he spoke she found herself tilting her head to his words. "Walk away from this. Leave. You don't need to. You don't need to. Enough mistakes have been made for the two of us by now, have they not? Learn. Live. Decide what - or not, history, dictates, choiceless again. Who are you, who do not know your history? Learn. Stepping forward into nothing begets nothing."

"But from nothing everything grows. Once there was nothing, and then there was a world. Organism grew, evolved, changed, and when they die they become nothing again, only to reappear as something later in history," Letitia said softly, something her grandfather would often say. "And a soul is all that saves humans from being nothing, though many give up their souls to physical needs; sex, violence, vanity, money... They lose what was never theirs to give. Some give them to Entities. I give mine to no one, not even myself."

Suddenly she stood ever so slightly straighter and prouder. "I have naught to give. My soul was torn asunder before I was even old enough to realize, my body will deteriorate as my father and my grandfather's did, my mind is already warped by the experiments performed on me long before I formed conscious thought. I am what ought to be dead but still I live and breathe. I know not my purpose, what else am I do to but to let fate control me where it will?"

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Lucidity returned slowly to Valentine, the haze of the past washing away distantly, leaving him altogether a little colder than he'd been before. The safety on his gun was off again - or had he forgotten to enable it in the first place? The last few moments were just a torrent of feelings, thoughts, some his, some not.

He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, scribbling down a note - couldn't forget this. He needed all the data he could lay his hands on. Resurgence Event. 3:27pm. Duration - 30s?

If he understood this, perhaps he could stop what he felt was coming. Almost inevitably a vain hope - but hope, nevertheless. He turned his attention back to her, forcing himself back into reality, permitting her to finish speaking.

Origins in Japan.

No - the name didn't ring a bell, however much he wanted it to. 'De Argentum'. Before his time, or thereafter? Or had someone escaped - adopted the name as their own, abandoned what they once had, but kept what they once knew? There was little other explanation.

"We're both in the same business, then," he said, deciding now to place his handgun gingerly inside his coat. With that Reaper near them - he had no way of knowing what the consequences of another Resurgence Event could be here, and he didn't trust himself to have a gun in hand at the minute. "We're both hunting for answers, it would seem, more than anything else."

Still not quite the whole truth, he mused. He had answers enough. Just looking for different answers - evidence to deny the hypothesis. Talk about scientific bias, he mused, with a faintly bitter smile.

Confidence re-entered him, and he turned away from her, facing the line of his men, their weapons still ever-so-nervously levelled at the monster at the opposite end of the room, its sheer size dwarfing them a hundred times over. He gestured to them. Stand down and exit. We're done here.

"I've been on this earth for quite some time, Letitia," he called back to her. "'Purpose' is a question for you to answer, nobody else. If you want my best advice-"

It was at that moment that Valentine was quite promptly shot.

Blinding pain flashed past his eyes as he tumbled to the ground, one hand clutching his arm, the world spinning around him. Gunfire and screams slammed out from the open doors at the other end of the chamber, the haphazard echoes of soldiers shouting orders and diving to cover.

Valentine's vision blurred and refocused as he tried to stand, collapsing once before managing to make it to his knees. A quick glance downwards revealed a splatter of blood over his dark coat, but nothing else - agony pulsed through his arm, his heart hammering painfully, but he appeared to be largely uninjured. Crimson seeped through the fingers with which he clutched his arm.

Teeth grit, he forced himself back to his feet, staggering drunkenly before charging, tackling Letitia behind the massive leg of the Reaper. His gun appeared in his hand, and he gave her a stern look - stay down - before ducking around the corner, loosing a few shots at the doorway and assessing the situation.

Through the door, the familiar matte-grey armour of the Aegis Police's 'Special Division' forces flashed through, a squad of infantry charging through the haze of smoke grenades; Valentine loosed a few shots off, but missed his mark, his vision still fuzzy with pain. Valentine's men had assumed cover behind servers and crates; one Tracer was little more than a smoking wreck, and another was missing an arm. The remainder moved out from cover in unison, loosing a hail of 25mm high-explosive rounds from the autocannons in their hands, tearing apart the infantry that had moved through the smoke.

Then one disappeared, reduced to a smoking wreck in an instant - Valentine hadn't even seen what had fired upon it, the whole craft just shattered by some unseen force. Then, in the background, he spotted something - a human shape, nearly twice the height of the Tracers, a high-powered railgun in one hand and the blue-sparking glow of a plasma sword in the other. Behind it, more blue glows indicated that it wasn't alone. With a grunt, Valentine wrenched himself back inside cover, turning to face Letitia.

Sentinels.

"Okay," he forced out through clenched teeth, his clutched arm sending sharp bolts of pain through his body. "We... have a problem."

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Letitia was curious as to what was going on in Valentine's head. She couldn't understand or connect his words to his sudden lucidity, but she knew whatever he had been through must have been something. She had plenty of answers at her hands, she just had yet to decode their true meaning. It wasn't like her grandfather didn't leave everything right there for her to access he just didn't show her how to access it... almost as if it were another rite of passage to be able to figure out how to. If he would have followed family tradition and let one of her cousins take over the family business before she had a chance to be heir, she would have had plenty of time to figure it out... but he had chosen her instead.

Letitia felt the shift in the atmosphere minutes before her new found comrade was shot, and was shocked to see military men walking into her lab so casually. She gave a growl before she was tackled into cover behind one of Eden's large legs. "Fuck!" she cursed angrily, slipping her own pistol out. She felt every rumble of the gun fire and her brain went into automatic mode. There was nothing more important to her than her labs. She glanced around her cover to see the smoking wrecks that were some of their Tracers and one of her servers.

"Bastards," she was about to charge out before taking notice of the one thing she definitely didn't want wreaking havoc on her sanctuary. Just as she heard him about to speak she noticed his arm. "Wonderful. Now we both have a bum arm, my labs are being destroyed and they brought fucking Sentinels down here."

Her mind and her body stilled for a moment as she found something moving in the shadows. She knew exactly what it was; her 'ghost' was not happy at its home being threatened. Neither was she. "We have a lot of problems right now, Mr. Valentine. She," there was emphasis on the word, "is less than pleased at the sudden invasion. And if they get a hold of the supplies stores I'm suddenly VERY useless to you..."

She heard more bangs and clatters as the enemy sent off some very high powered ammunition.

"Mistress, we have guests! They seem to want to destroy us!" the overly cheerful Bot came flitting around to her. She rolled her eyes.

"Protocol 7. You know what to do," she said softly before sending the drone off. It had the ability to cloak itself for short amounts of time, and she needed to make sure it got her main hard drive out of the vicinity of the damage. Her options were few, and she found herself looking up at Eden. "Well, times up," she murmured before standing up, still easily hidden behind the leg. "How do I get into her?"

She had no clue how to do this. She just knew that she actually needed to. There were no other options. A bunch of men and a few tracers were no match for the handful of Sentinels filing into the labs. "No matter what the cost I HAVE to protect this place."

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So, this is your play, then, God. Most auspicious.

The thought concluded, Valentine loosed another barrage of shots downrange as he turned to face Letitia, knowing exactly the implications of her words. Under other circumstances, he'd consider this as mad as it was wrong - to become a Knight was no small undertaking, but he knew well enough that they had no other choice.

Half a dozen Tracers and some infantry were child's play for a squad of Sentinels. Even if they managed to get away, if they lost the lab, they lost their supplies - and with them, their chance of escaping this city. From there, it was only a matter of time until Cocytus was found - if it wasn't compromised already.

"Follow me," Valentine grunted, vision still swimming with pain from the bullet - Christ, had they been using hollow points or something? - and feeling decidedly unpleasant towards the world at large. Still, keeping low, he made his way up the scaffolding, sprinting up the hastily-erected flights of stairs; darkness flickered and lurched, and he loosed a haphazard bullet into it, forcing it to recede. Not so much a physical effect as a show of force - proof that he would not suffer its indignities now. If nothing else, it appeared duly informed of the gravity of the situation by his action.

For a second, he found himself pitying her. Whatever was inside this thing - and however much it claimed to like her - there was no turning back from being a Knight. That which was lost, stayed lost - even as a half-soul, there would be no denying the effects of piloting upon her. He mentally apologised as he made his way up the scaffolding. Necessary Sacrifices - that was the phrase he'd always used, now wasn't it?

Eventually, he reached the back edge of the scaffolding, and ducked back inside the shadow of the craft. A smooth black panel at the back of its head concealed the cockpit - an odd design choice - but he saw no mechanical entrance. This thing was far more modern than Abyss Walker, and likely lacked the mechanical auxiliaries that his own craft possessed. Nevertheless...

The second that Letitia caught up to him, Valentine grabbed her wrist with his good arm, and pressed it against the centre of the back panel with a good deal more force than was due. For a second, there was a pause and a pneumatic hiss, as though the monstrous craft were irritated at the touch, and trying to decide whether to permit them entry.

Then the back of the head slipped open, revealing a cockpit; its surfaces were elegant, smooth, the whole space dark. As Letitia stepped foot inside, dim lights went up, illuminating the spartan space - just a few basic control surfaces (touchscreen, not analogue, Valentine noted) and the neural harness in the centre. He followed her, gesturing for her to step in.

Thankfully, he saw none of the familiar neural injectors that the early-model units possessed - it was all done externally via electrodes, rendering null the need for cybernetic augmentations to pilot effectively. Thank God - they didn't exactly have time to issue Letitia cybernetics on the spot, now did they?

"Hook yourself up to that," Valentine ordered, gesturing to the harness, crowned by a menacing-looking headpiece covered in heavy-duty neural reception equipment. "Take it slow; weighing a few hundred tonnes will feel odd at first. Just focus on walking for the first few seconds. First step is to bring your Shadow Field online - that'll absorb inbound fire. From there, work out weapons systems, and open fire."

He stepped closer, to help her with hooking up. As he worked, he continued, "Stay careful of whatever's in here. It will want to talk to you. Do not let it. However friendly it might seem to want to be..." he sighed, shaking his head for a minute. "Just don't. Not if you want to step out that door again."

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Every part of her knew there was no going back. While she had prepared for this eventuality, she never thought she would be in such dire situations as she had been in today. She thought she'd have more time, put in more research, maybe even have a fucking clue as to what she was doing. Now here she was thrusting her life into the hands of a Reaper that she had only vague contact with. There was no part of her that actually felt ready for this.

Fleeing up the stairs behind him, she found herself worrying about what would happen if she couldn't control Eden. At the same time though, a part of her felt like she was meant to control the monstrosity. She believed in fate. She believed that she was here to do something, and if this was the sacrifice she had to make to not only protect her technology, her legacy, but also the people that were now trying to help protect it... then she would do so.

Letitia gave a small yelp at the force of which he grabbed her arm and pulled her to the entrance. "I've check this spot a hundred times and-" she blinked when it opened, eyes wide with shock. How is it that for the last 7 years she had worked on the Reaper and had never been able to find the entrance or even get a glance on the inside? Had it really been inactive this whole time, or had Eden simply not wanted to cooperate?

She looked at Valentine as they entered, wondering what was going through his head. Was this anything like his Reaper? She didn't have time to question or even really care. Now she needed to focus on the goal at hand- protecting what was rightfully hers. "Well here goes our only real hope," she muttered, letting him help her hook it up. Vaguely she remembered something similar in her past, thought she couldn't recall where or when or why. Everything was so rushed right now.

"Got it, don't talk to the voices in my head," the human part of her tried human, despite the severity of the situation. She took a deep breath as finally everything was locked in place. "If I fuck up and everyone dies, I'm blaming God for this..."

She took a deep breath as everything was locked into place, hoping she would do everything right. She felt prickling in the back of her head before pain shot through her eyes. The pressure of it weighed down on her body and her mind and she tried hard to keep a steady breathing pattern. It wasn't as bad as she was expecting... but whatever it was that lay dormant inside the Reaper was powerful... it was only after a second of struggling did she realize that she was still standing and was able to function properly, even if she did feel heavier than normal.

A small caress on her mind reassured her she was fine, but otherwise she was left alone.

She realized that all the training, all the pressure on being stronger, better, faster than everyone was for this very moment.

With Project Revolution's inception, we aimed to make the best of the best Knights. Half-souled men and women that could withstand the pressure of piloting the Reaper without consuming the soul of said men and women.

A contract, an unreserved access the other half of the fighter's soul up front in order to maintain their life.

Passages from her grandfather's logs filtered through her mind, reminding her that yes, she was meant for this. Whether she liked it or not, she was built to be a Knight. But if a Reaper needed a soul to live, then just half her soul wouldn't sate it for long... Eventually it would wear away at the rest of her soul. They were not in control of these beings... and a half-souled human was a dangerous creature.

With shock she felt the entire world around her shift, shuddering when she realized it was Eden standing up. It took a moment to realize she had willed it so. Her brain was moving in so many different directions; she was no longer sure of herself anymore, of what or who she was, of if she was even capable of this, or what this was leading her to. So many memories and faces surrounding her mind's eye, and all she wanted to do was run.

No running.

She looked up, trying to find the source of the other voice, even though she knew what and who it was. She ignored it and tried taking a step forward, finding that it was quite easy to. Another step. And another. "Okay. I got this. How do I get the Shadow Field up?" she asked aloud, or at least she hoped it was aloud. Her voice belied how shaky and nervous she truly felt.

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The second Letitia was properly strapped-in, Valentine dashed out of the Reaper, by no means wanting to be inside once it started up. Inside was the domain of the Entity, inside which the pilot was an ornery guest; he had no place there, no right to challenge its authority where it dwelled. He dashed out of the monstrosity, and immediately took cover behind a few heavy steel crates on the scaffold behind the craft.

He swiftly grabbed his earpiece, flicking it on, praying that it worked. Gratifyingly, he heard the bleep that indicated functionality - whoever was on the other end had, at the very least, not been eviscerated yet.

"Atlas!" he shouted into the device, sounding a little more panicked than he'd intended. "Status report!"

"Pleasure to finally hear from you, Commander," Atlas' voice crackled over - a tiny bit broken with stress or pain, but otherwise, as chipper and sarcastic as usual. "Care to take over? This whole 'command' business isn't anywhere near as much fun as I'd imagined. Trust me, you can keep your job."

Valentine felt relieved at hearing his second-in-command's familiar voice; Atlas was one of the few living individuals with the knowledge to keep a Reaper in combat condition, and was functionally irreplaceable. Nevertheless, this wasn't exactly the time for pleasantries.

"I need you to patch me into that Reaper's comms system," Valentine ordered. "We're deploying it. The de Argentum girl is our pilot."

He heard Atlas pause for a second in shock, and swore that a sigh of acceptance resounded through the channel. "Copy, Commander. Give me thirty seconds, I'll route it through the facility's mainframe."

Valentine realised that there was a decent chance that he wouldn't see Atlas again after this. Hell, if this didn't work, there was no way any of them were walking out of here in one piece. And thus, he said something that he'd often been sufficiently frustrated as to refuse to say -

"Thank you, Atlas."

"Don't go letting me think you care, now, boss," Atlas said, with a slight laugh. Even through the laugh, though, his voice sounded pained. "But can I ask you something? About the de Argentum girl and all..."

"Of course," Valentine said, popping up over the crate and loosing a few shots downrange; the handgun's low-calibre armour-piercing rounds slipped through the armour of the Aegis infantry, dropping two of them.

"Are we still the good guys?"

Valentine was caught off-guard by the question, if only by its relevancy. How was he supposed to respond to that sort of thing? A question he'd asked himself often enough, but in more recent years, had come to ignore. Hope held no further place in his heart - only belief. The absolute belief in what they were doing. In winning.

"Alright, you're patched in," Atlas' voice crackled over. "Try not to flirt too much."

Valentine was about to respond with a reprimand, but before he could, the tone of the channel changed - the static on the line was gone, replaced only by an absolute, oppressive silence. For a second, he thought he'd lost the signal, before through came Letitia's slightly-frightened-sounding voice, somehow off-colour - the sound of someone speaking through their Reaper.

"-get the Shadow Field up?"

Valentine glanced up, watched the massive beast lurch to its feet, unsteady for a second as it tried to find its footing in the cramped space; cavernous as the ceiling of the laboratory was, the Reaper stood almost as tall. It dwarfed the Sentinels, easily triple their height, stabilising fins flickering and adjusting as it made its way to its full height, imposing its presence over the vast chamber.

"Just focus on it," he said; piloting a Reaper was being equal parts philosopher, mechanic and warrior, a difficult task to explain. Fortunately, as a product of Human-PLUS, she would likely possess some natural intuition from the task. "Go hunting through the neural circuits with your mind; ask for it to protect you, and it should guide you to the correct function. From there, just will it to be enabled."

He hoped that the thing was armed with close-quarters weaponry, or failing that, loaded with armour-piercing rounds. It if was packing high-explosive weaponry, this whole laboratory might come down on top of them. Not that the Reaper wouldn't survive -

Just that he wouldn't.

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It took a moment before she heard back from Valentine and his voice was a relief. Good, he wasn't dead. She couldn't say the same for a lot of the other people in the lab though. "I will make an effort at that," she sighed, closing her eyes for a moment to focus. Please protect this place. I don't care about myself, but this lab... If I'm dead who will protect this...?

If she didn't know better she would have sworn that the moment she mentioned protecting the lab, and therefore the technology and people inside it, Eden acted. She couldn't physically see the field from her point of view; she was still focusing her vision as it was, but she could feel it. She just... knew, somehow that it was there. Now she just needed weapons... She took a few more steps away from the scaffolding; she didn't want to be anywhere near where Valentine was working from when she let loose whatever this thing had to work with. Close range weapons?

Yes.

From the view of anyone on the outside they would see one long cable extending from its right hand with little grappling claws attached. With a quick hand movement she found herself using the right whip to crack at one of the sentinels. The range was amazing on these things, and it cut straight through one of the legs. There were no other noticeable weapons on the Reaper and it made her wonder if there were actually any other weapons to be used.

We are the weapon.

The voice echoed painfully throughout her mind. That would take some getting used to, but Eden didn't seem to care to actually talk right now, like Valentine said she might. Letitia could feel her determination; her sense of mission. With that push, that solid backing she found herself stepping forward even farther, hoping like hell the humans beneath her would get out of the way. With another swift movement, not clunky like some of the older modeled Sentinels and Tracers, a sword was pulled out of a hidden compartment in Eden's chest. Letitia couldn't help but smile at the familiarity of the weapon.

"Idiots. Should have known not to mess with a woman's private affairs," she smirked in confidence before taking two more steps forward and slicing at another Sentinel. They were her main focus; people were easier to deal with, but the Sentinels needed to go before they took out anything else. This was easy enough. Letitia still had little idea of what she was doing, but the Reaper seemed to have just enough power and free will of it's own to be able to carry out her half-finished thoughts. "My vision's still a bit blurry, Valentine. How many do I have left and point me in the right direction.

Her eyes wouldn't seem to clear up, as if this was too much of a strain on her mind for it to translate the light transfered from her eyes to her mind properly. She wouldn't have been surprised after all; it seemed like this entire thing was meant to exhaust her mind and body. She was sure if she hadn't been as well trained as she was, she might have failed entirely by now. Thank you, grandfather.

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Valentine watched as the craft was surrounded by the faint shimmer of a Shadow Field; down below, a Sentinel whirled and loosed a blue-tinged railgun blast at her. The only visible evidence was a spark against the shield, and dark ripples spreading from the impact as the high-velocity round ricocheted away and punched through a wall on the opposite side of the room.

The massive craft lurched away from the platform, its gait animalistic and ungainly as it moved - yet fluid, like a confused organic beast instead of the mechanical stomping of a Tracer or Sentinel. She was becoming more fluid vast, though, the movements no longer shaky; the stabiliser fins flickered and compensated for her every movement, helping to keep her on-balance. An excellent design decision.

He watched as a steel wire extracted from one hand, razor-sharp blades at its tip; he paused, confused as to its function, before it lashed out with a supersonic crack!, snapping through the legs of a Sentinel as though passing through air; the back edge of the whip struck it as it withdrew, caving in the cockpit and crushing the pilot instantly. The remaining Sentinels leapt backwards with significantly more grace than the Tracers around them, suddenly having gone from the battlefield supremacy weapons to mere toys in the face of an unrelenting monstrosity before them.

It drew a sword from its chest cavity - far slimmer and lighter than Abyss Walker's massive weapon, but in the hands of the nimble Reaper, no less deadly. The beast stepped forward, slashing swiftly, far more precisely than its other movements - Letitia's skill with a blade having already become apparent in the Sky District.

A Sentinel was cleaved neatly in half, both parts of it collapsing to the ground as the monster stepped over the wreckage; meaningless impacts flared off the Shadow Field surrounding the beast. Letitia's faintly inhuman-sounding voice came crystal-clear through his earpiece -

"My vision's still a little blurry. How many do I have left? Point me in the right direction."

Valentine checked over the battlefield; his own vision was still a little fuzzy with pain, although it was nothing compared to hers. The neural load of a Reaper took a lot of getting used to, and frankly, she was doing much better than any human should've - most struggled to even survive their first time piloting, let alone successfully drop a squad of Sentinels.

"Three to your right, closer to the exit," Valentine said, now able to stand with impunity, the enemy soldiers massacred as they tried to choose between fighting the Reaper and returning fire to Valentine's men. As he checked around, he saw that his Tracers had immediately retreated, well familiar with operating procedure from years of fighting alongside Abyss Walker. "Our forces are out of the way. Wipe them out, then set her down. I'll extract you."

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Let's go.

Agreed.

It was effortless. She urged Eden forward with just a touch of her mind and she found the last of the enemy Sentinels. A few quick movements of the blade and two were mincemeat. They had no time to react; her battle instincts took over and she took them down without hesitation or remorse. The third Sentinel's pilot was trying desperately to retreat. Part of Letitia almost wanted to let it go so it could tell the horrors of what it had seen that day... but no. No one would be allowed to live after the destruction they had caused. Her whip shot forward and pierced right through the chest armor. The blades of her grappling hook were sharp and deadly. Like her blade, she'd make it a point to keep it that way. With great force she hauled it forward close enough so she could grab it. A moment of mercilessness struck her like lightning and with no further adieu she ripped the head of the Sentinel off and casually tossed it to the side.

Every bit of her hoped that whomever had sent the military down there would see some sort of evidence of all of this and would know not to mess with the lab again. "They'll send more. Especially if they find out there's a Reaper here. We best get the supplies out of here as soon as possible. I know a lot of your men are wounded, but there's medical supplies in room A3," she turned around in her Reaper body and moved back towards the scaffolding.

Not bad, human.

She ignored the voice. Valentine said it would want to talk and not to listen. She set Eden down back near the scaffolding and let out a breath of relief.

Do you have other weapons? Despite warnings she attempted to make another bit of contact. She needed to know what this thing was capable of.

The time will come when they are useful. For now, they are not.

Letitia found herself a bit disoriented when the lights flickered out and the Reaper settled itself in the sitting position it had been in not but moments before she had entered it, as if it were comfortable like this. What???

If she had been outside she might have noticed the dark shadow that descended over the place, as if it were surveying the damage, before disappearing again. Letitia felt alone in the dark, as if she was no longer linked to the Entity, despite still being harnessed in. That's when she realized it... The Reaper was never inactive... it was merely sleeping.

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With the last few units annihilated in the space of mere instants, the Reaper settled itself down, slumping against a wall lazily, as though bored by its brief exertion. Shadows flickered and moved around it, the Entity reinhabiting the laboratory with little fanfare.

Valentine breathed a sigh of relief, the echoes of battle fading from the chamber; only the crackling of flames around wrecked Sentinels. He picked himself up off the ground, lurching down the scaffolding, vision distorted with pain; he could see well enough, though, making his way over to the Reaper. The shadows left him alone as he moved, the monster perhaps sated for now - he refused to refer to it by name, refusing to give it that much credit.

Soldiers rushed around the floor, tending to wounded; one came up to him, bearing a bandage, insisting that he be assisted. Valentine just took the bandages and wrapped them tightly around his arm; his bloodsoaked right hand stained it with blood, but he managed it. He made a note to grab some proper painkillers before leaving the lab. He could function, though - he'd been shot more than enough times. He also requested a flare, and it was in his hand in a second. His men knew better than to question his orders.

He directed his men to room A3 for medical supplies, and after a few short moments, he'd reached the leg of the Reaper. With a burdened sigh, he grabbed one of the stabiliser fins, and began the long process of clambering up its body. Flare stuffed inside his bloodied coat, he forced himself up its leg, then its spine, then its chest, before swinging around the head. Grabbing one of the sensor antennae with his good hand, he managed to thud a solid boot into the smooth back panel, then a second, then a third.

On the fourth kick, it swung open; he offered a momentary thanks to the Reaper. It clearly understood his intent; whether it allowed him in to save its pilot, or as a trap, he knew not and cared not. He swung himself inside the back panel, thudding onto the metal floor, landing hard. His vision flashed with pain, but he forced himself to his feet - the longer he was in here, the more dangerous things were.

With his wounded arm, he grabbed the flare from his coat, breaking off the cap and flooding the interior of the Reaper in crimson light. Shadows shifted around the walls, illuminated red, like dripping blood; the corridor into the cockpit seemed longer this time, the angles more jagged. He saw shapes move at the edge of his vision, but didn't look at them, didn't acknowledge them - he knew that if he acknowledged them, they would become real.

He saw a humanoid shape move in front of him, feminine, offering a slender, shadowy hand; he brushed past it, and it vanished into dark smoke. Hands reached out from the walls, the floor; he just kept walking, shrugging them off him, still not acknowledging them. With his good hand, he drew his pistol, fired a few quick shots into the wall; they ricocheted off the hard titanium harmlessly, but the message was clear, and the hands receded at his gesture of dominance; it seemed to respect his willingness to stand up for Letitia's sake.

Well, at least it's a little less egotistical than Abyss Walker.

Eventually, he made his way into the cockpit, and found Letitia, hanging in her harness. Her eyes were wider, her body a little more limp; he swore he saw her trembling almost-imperceptibly. Still, she wasn't dead, and didn't appear particularly crazy. He put the flare on the ground, room still illuminated in blood-red.

"Are you okay?" he asked, stepping up to her, unclasping the harness, helping her down from where she hung.

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Letitia felt nothing. Her broken arm no longer hurt as much, her fears of failing had disappeared the moment she had taken down the last Sentinel, and her even greater fears of what this meant for her were already calming down.

She simply... breathed.

One intake. Stress was gone.

Two intake. Fear was gone.

Three intake. She was still alive.

Four intake. She had saved her labs.

It was completely silent in the cockpit, but not terrifyingly so. She was half sure that a lot of noise right now would have been worse for her recovering head. There was already a bit of a headache coming on and she was definitely tired. It was okay though. Now she knew that Eden was real, alive even. All of her research wasn't in vain, and maybe just maybe it wasn't in vain that her grandfather had trained her so well.

Fatigue reared it's horrible head and she found herself slouching a bit in the harness, too blind to even find how to unlock it. She heard noises finally; one tang, two tang, three tang and finally she heard the cockpit door open slowly. She remembered that she wasn't alone in the world.

You're ready.

Until that moment, she hadn't had time to think about that voice. There was no curiosity as to where it was coming from or if it really meant her harm or not. It didn't seem threatening, just... lazy, if Letitia had to put words to the echoing, deep yet feminine voice she heard, as if it didn't really care, as long as no one dared to lay waste to its territory. Letitia could feel the rage of the Entity inside her still, even though it was no longer as strong. It mirrored her own, and that terrified her more than anything.

"Are you okay?"

Valentine's voice startled her out of her reverie and she found just enough energy left in her to nod. As he unhooked her from the harness she realized just how wiped out she was. It was no easy feat doing this. She was almost glad she had never tried to until now; no, she was glad the Reaper hadn't let her until now. She knew that's what it had to be; no matter what her intentions, she felt as if Eden wouldn't have accepted her in any less than a situation that threatened its home and it. "I-I'm fine, just tired," she fell into his arms as the last of the harness was undone, unable to stay on her feet for long. She fought to stay awake, yet she knew there was no rest for her. "She's not going to move for a while."

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Valentine absorbed the impact of Letitia's body falling on top of him, wrapping his arms around her. He turned, grabbing her legs and bridal-carrying her from the craft - she weighed little, and his body was toned from years of combat. She posed little-

"It's okay," he whispered, brushing a hand through her hair as she fell into him, thin hands clutching his coat tightly. "We're safe now."

Her face buried into his chest, the darkness stepping away from them. The outside of the Reaper smouldered, exposed wiring and carbon-nanofibre musculature torn asunder by the carnage of battle. Beyond the shadowy walls of this place, only silence reigned, and the crackling of a thousand funeral pyres.

"We..." her voice cracked, and watery, bloodshot eyes looked up at him. She felt warmer than she should've; he tried to tell himself that it wasn't blood. He helped pull her away from the harness, stepping away from the craft. It left him alone as he left; perhaps it deemed he had suffered enough.

Perhaps it deemed that he would suffer enough.

"Did we win?"

Valentine laid her down on the soft grass, pulling bandages from his pack. He rolled her over, undressed her gingerly, an action that carried a rather different weight now. A small wound - shrapnel. She'd survive this one.

He wrapped her and tied the bandage. He was out of painkillers, so he just lay down beside her on the grass, watching the smouldering ruins of her Reaper lie where it would; whether it would live or die could be established come morning. He'd no desire to leave this place. He felt them move closer; whether by her volition or his, he didn't know.

A part of him wanted to talk to her. To comfort her. To tell her that he was there, that she'd never be alone. But he never would. Never could.

There were some things you couldn't take back, after all.

The memory faded as he emerged into the sunlight, and he glanced back down at Letitia - features softer, younger, more alive. After a moment's consideration, he simply leapt off the platform, soaring towards the ground; he didn't impact particularly hard, such falls familiar to him. The hatch closed behind him of its own volition. The message was clear enough - Letitia's assessment was correct. It was quite finished.

"We're safe now," he whispered soothingly, walking out from behind the Reaper; he laid gently her on the ground and checked briefly that she was uninjured (broken arm excepted). He strolled over to his men, who'd gathered all the wounded into a reasonably-large circle - all his wounded, of course. The enemy had been duly tended to using a bullet to the head. That was the reality of this war.

He saw Atlas, slumped against a crate; fear gripped his heart as he began jogging towards his comrade, and kneeled before him. The man looked up at him with heavy-lidded eyes, hands fumbling with a bandage around a bloodied abdomen.

"Mind handling the shooty bits next time, boss?" Atlas said, the ghost of a smile cracking his face. For his part, Valentine just grabbed the two ends of the bandage, affixing it properly around Atlas' wounded midsection.

"You're going to be okay, you hear me?" Valentine commanded, and Atlas just grinned a lopsided grin.

"Damn straight I am. Now if you don't mind, I need to complain at the medics about getting me some damn morphine."

Valentine just smiled, and for a moment, ruffled Atlas' hair - an oddly affectionate gesture, and one that caught both of them off-guard. He strode back over to Letitia, who was still laying where he's set her down - exhausted by her exertions, it seemed. He kneeled beside her, grabbing a water flask dropped by one of his men from on top of a nearby crate and pressing it to her lips.

"Drink," he ordered, the warmth of a moment ago gone now as it started to dawn on him that at least half of the men he'd come in here with were now dead.

Nevertheless, he realised, the woman had just piloted a Reaper, and saved his life - he owed her something. So when he spoke again, it was a little more softly, a little more concernedly. "You'll feel better if you drink. Trust me. I've no intention of letting someone who just saved my life suffer for it."

Any more than is necessary, of course.

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All she wanted to do was fade into the darkness. As he carried her away from the harness she buried her face into his chest and tried hard to calm her beating heart down. She ad never been so terrified in her life. Questions overwhelmed her tired mind, and for once she just wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep.

As he lay her down on the ground she took a moment to look around the wreckage that was her beautiful lab. At least half of the servers were on fire or sparking from exposed wires and general damage. There were dead men and women lying everywhere. There was quite a large circle of wounded gathering for medical supplies. Everything around her was falling to shambles.

She half sat up, forgetting her broken arm for a moment and using it to support her weight. These people had come to her for help and in the end had lost so many and she had lost so much in return... while technology were not human lives, these servers had been her only reliable companions for many years. This was the legacy her grandfather and father had left her with, and now she had to save it.

"Mistress! Mistress! Protocol 7 is in place. The main harddrives were backed up off location before too much was lost and the you-know-what is under lock down!" Bot appeared out of no where, reporting to her reliably. That was one last stress off her mind.

"Good. Make sure these men can find what they need. They're our new allies," she whispered before lying back down and closing her eyes for a few moments. Her vision was clearing up and she breathed deeply.

"Drink," the order came in the tone of a cold voice, and she opened her eyes, almost ready to cuss him out until he changed his tone.

She took a few sips of water before making an attempt to sit up again. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine," she tried to push him away once she managed to sit up fully. She didn't like being taken care of. She had managed so far by taking care of herself and fighting for what was hers. "Damage? Casualities? All the information off of the servers was backed up and stored safely elsewhere... I'm thinking it's about time I move bases anyways..."

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"Ma'am, we found the labs but..."

"I swear to God-"

"They had a Reaper. Whoever this group was had a fucking Reaper!"

Isa growled at his cursing and turned to look at him, her pristine ironed business suit looking impressive compared to what she typically wore. "Language. I don't care if they had a Reaper or not! Did you find her?"

"Well... not really, but how did they get a Reaper down there without us knowing?" the captain stood straighter, looking a bit indignant at having to report to the young girl. Her father was his boss though. "It had to have been down there for a long time and inactive... but there are no camera feeds we can hack into down there. Your cousin kept a lockdown on that place."

"Berkley?"

Letitia's right hand stepped forward and nodded. "The Reaper was down there for many years but... it was completely dead, or so we thought. Miss Titi tried all she could to find out it's state but... She's alive. She has to be. No one else could have gotten down there. Only two people have the ability to get in there, and my codes were marked invalid recently. That means she had to get in there and open the doors for those rebel troops," he explained, looking a bit thoughtful. "I never thought she would have worked with such a group though. Her research is too precious to her."

Isa smirked and shook her head. "And you, her faithful dog?"

"I am paid by the de Argentum family. While Miss Titi has been my charge for a long time, she is not responsible for my pay check," he seemed a bit reluctant to say it, but it was true. "And she's slowly been slipping away from everything that is normal and natural for her... I'm worried now. If she was the one who activated that Reaper..."

"Understood. Don't worry, we'll bring her back and bring her back to her senses." There was insincerity in her voice. She could care less if Letitia lived or died. She just wanted what was rightfully hers.

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Valentine moved to standing, checking around the now-silent laboratory, taking note of his situation. A decent chunk of Childhood's End's force capability was out of commission. Tracers could be replaced - and would, given that five were little more than smoking wrecks - but men were much harder to find. Good men, hard men, men who'd fight and kill for a lost cause - all were in short supply outside, to say nothing of within this city.

"A dozen dead," he said coldly, unemotionally, his observation of the ruins of the lab complete. "Eight wounded, not including ourselves. Five Tracers incapacitated, the remaining three heavily-damaged."

There it was. A full fifth of his force, wiped out in minutes - and close to half of his combative troops. They'd never been outfitted for defensive actions, and being forced into it had cost them, as it always had. While he had gained out of this affair the overwhelming offensive advantage of a second Reaper, it remained to be seen whether or not she'd be of any strategic use.

He'd lost the advantage he once held; things were no longer proceeding according to plan, and he had no choice but to be reactive now. All that remained was to seize this city as swiftly as possible, and replenish his forces; neither would be an easy task. Once he had both of those, he could track Old King, and then - finally - he would be free of this place.

"We're leaving," he said, offering a hand down to her. "They'll be cautious. When we return to Cocytus, I'll sort out a way to have your Reaper moved. When we've stripped this place bare, I suspect we'd do well to level it."

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Letitia accepted his hand up, looking at their surroundings. "There's never a balance in war. In the end everyone loses, and all we can hope is the results we achieve were worth it in the long haul," she said softly, staring at the wounded, the dead, the destroyed Sentinels and Tracers. "I can help with the repairs on the remaining Tracers. There are parts lying around here somewhere, and I see parts that are salvageable on the destroyed ones... What I need is safe and secure, thanks to Bot. But you're right, the sooner we leave the better."

She knew someday she would need to move everything; it was inevitable in order to keep everything safe. "I have a second hideout where there are more supplies and where the data is backed up, but we can retrieve that once we've healed. I think the supplies there will be more beneficial than what I have here," she was merely rambling in exhaustion at this point. So this was the cost of her justice? No, she would find another way. She would find a better way.

Despite how tired she was she helped load things up and get them in place for transport. They had to take everything they physically could with them as soon as possible. There wouldn't be much time for multiple trips, and she already suspected that the place would be watched. With every step she took she muttered something, almost a mantra of sorts, looking distracted. "Moving her won't actually be difficult. I've moved her before with fewer men than what we have now, when we brought her down here. I'll explain later though."

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Valentine find himself caught rather off-guard by Letitia's philosophical response to his information. She was more perceptive than he'd anticipated; yet, in his own way, he found himself slightly bitter at her statement. She'd only seen this city, maybe a little of what lay beyond it - never the vast conflicts that plagued the earth, never seen armies of hundreds of thousands laying into each other in battles that left the ground knee-deep in blood. Never seen the truth of just what it was like out there.

Perhaps, though, it were for the best that she hadn't seen it. Meant she still held hope; was willing to fight for the sake of the weak, when she had an easy life standing in front of her.

Futile as it was, the effort was nevertheless worthwhile.

"I daresay you're mistaken," he said, as he helped lift crates of ammunition onto the back of a truck - run down the tunnels from Cocytus the second the lab had been clear. "War's all about winning and losing. Whoever wins, gets to enact their vision; whoever loses has their vision selected out, and fades from memory."

He went through some piles of equipment, seeing a heavy crate labelled x4 Ferromagnetic Ammunition - 155mm Depleted Uranium, Armour Piercing. Checking inside, he spotted what he'd hoped for - long, dull-silver darts, each weighing in at around thirty kilos and capable of being accelerated to up to three thousand metres per second in an instant. A single round did as much damage as three quarters of a tonne of dynamite, and could comfortably punch through eight feet of steel plate. Each round was flawlessly-crafted to maintain the absolute maximal performance.

He gestured to his team to help lift it - even four rounds weighed a full hundred-twenty kilos. After a great deal of exertion, four men (with his help, although with his bad arm, it offered little) managed to lift the ammunition case onto the back of the truck. As he went back for the next case, he turned to Letitia, gesturing for her to follow him.

"Perhaps, indeed, the world was once perfect. But as long as man had a vision, he could not permit it to cease; and thus, we fought onwards. Destruction is not the aim of war - merely its effect. Unfortunately, the side effects became irreversible a long while ago, if you will. And yet mankind continues to fight on - why?"

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Letitia couldn't have told you when she fell asleep, even if you had bothered to ask. All she knew was one minute she was riding in a truck thinking about the day she had had so far, and the next moment she was jerking awake as the truck came to a halt. She shook herself out of her groggy state, knowing it was overly dangerous for her to be sleeping around people she didn't know. She was so tired from her encounter with piloting a reaper though, that she couldn't seem to stay awake no matter how hard she tried.

She had no idea where they were. She wasn't even sure she knew what she was doing anymore. All she knew was that she needed a really long nap and maybe a shower. She didn't know how long it had been since she had eaten or slept, nor was she even sure she was hungry enough to eat anything if she was offered. All she knew was that she wouldn't be going back home any time soon... it was far too dangerous now.

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"Welcome home," Valentine said to the resting Letitia, as the truck they both sat in rumbled through the gates of Cocytus. He stepped out of the truck, gesturing for her to follow him; when she stood beside him (after some time - she looked completely exhausted) he gestured towards the stairs leading up to the network of gantries on the roof.

He pulled his coat a little tighter over his shoulders; it was a few degrees below zero in here, the cooling equipment pumping into Abyss Walker still humming away. He realised that he'd need to get Letitia some warmer clothes fast; he went over the female members of the organisation, trying to work out who was both in Letitia's size and, well, not dead.

Come to think of it, for a group numbering close to a hundred people with a 40% female substance, that was a pretty damned short list.

"One of the side-offices up there has a shower," he said, still pointing at the gantries. "Don't think that hot water's working yet, though, so keep it quick. I'll have some bedding set up somewhere of your choosing up there. A hot meal, maybe, if you're so inclined."

Come to think of it, it hadn't been four hours since they last ate - yet Valentine already felt starving. Combat did that to you - digestion slowed down during, but his body compensated immediately afterwards.

As they'd entered, another batch of heavy-duty trucks moved out with gear for hauling Letitia's Reaper - due to its lightweight construction, moving it was a much easier prospect than doing the same to Abyss Walker. And at any rate, maintaining, arming and moving a Reaper with little more than bubblegum and shoelaces was sort of Childhood's End's specialty by now.

It occurred to him that, at the very least, Letitia's Reaper hadn't been hooked up to cooling systems like Abyss Walker had - unsurprising, given its more recent construction. Abyss Walker, despite its abnormally high performance for its age, still had its fair share of disadvantages - for starters, it was absurdly high-maintenance, and was intended to be have a thousand-strong support battalion.

It had taken years of practice and training to manage to get it to run with this few people, and even then, 'run' was overstating matters most of the time - keeping the thing online was a matter of lurching from one mechanical disaster from the next.

"Gives it character," he muttered to himself, with a faintly bemused smile.

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"Home, huh? It's been a while since I called anything that," she shifted herself ever so slowly out of the truck. It was so cold, never in her life had she wanted to curl up in a ball and die. At the same time, the cold felt good on her stuff muscles and she wrapped her jacket around her tightly.

In her tired state she was barely taking anything in, she just wanted to sleep. "Shower's the least of my worries right now. I can barely stand for more than a few minutes," She was already leaning against the truck, legs still shaky. Part of her wondered if she was ever going to feel better. "Is it always this bad the first time? I haven't felt like this since I was 9 and went through my first round of boot camp with my grandfather..."

She wasn't sure she ever wanted to get back into Eden yet she knew she needed to in order to fight. It was no longer an option. This was her new reality, and it was a lot darker than she had ever imagined it. Still she tried to find some idle humor. "Well, already bringing me home after the first 'date'? You move fast sir," she teased, rubbing her temples a bit. The nap had done her more damage than good. She felt even more burnt out than she had while they were packing up and heading out. "Just show me where to sleep. It doesn't matter where at this point. Can I keep Bot with me though?"

She had brought her drone with her... it was the closest thing she had to a friend and she wanted it to stay with her if possible. Everything was changing so quickly and she wasn't sure how to handle it without some sort of stability.

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Home.

Valentine realised that the concept had never really found any traction with him. He'd spent his whole life moving, running, fighting. Killing. Even back in Kyoto, he'd slept near Abyss Walker - it was, in a strange way, the only thing he could possibly trust there.

Perhaps that was his home. Abyss Walker - the monster that loomed over them, even now, its black, angular stealth panelling shining in the dark. Far less humanoid - far less human - than Letitia's; becoming more a part of him with each passing day. Perhaps he belonged with it.

But he could not admit such a defeat yet.

"Often worse," he said, looking back at her to answer her question. "Most don't survive. If you had not been a Human-PLUS graduate, you certainly wouldn't have. It takes years of training and partial syncing to be ready. You did well."

He began making his way over to the stairway up to the gantries that hovered above the vast space - as with most of this structure, it was simple, crudely-constructed, left over from the chamber's days as a factory floor. Nothing up there but a few beds and tables, along with the bathrooms left over from before (which, at least, had saved them the protracted and awkward effort of setting up some of their own). He gestured for her to follow him; he walked close enough to her to catch her if she fell, concerned for her exhaustion.

He couldn't help but smile a little at her joke. First Atlas, now her - accusing him of being in a relationship was starting to catch on. Amusing, endearing, in a faintly childish way. Still, it made him smile, and not many things could.

Eventually, they made their way onto the gantries; the steel grate flooring gave one the occasional impression when they looked down that they would plunge a hundred feet to their deaths. Although in their several months of being here, the floor hadn't even come close to giving way, thankfully. Not everything in this world was trying to kill them, it seemed.

He glanced around, spotting a mattress once occupied by one of the Tracer pilots, a few platforms across from the rest. She'd once slept with her husband, but after he'd been killed during a gang fight, she'd just slept apart from the rest of them out of habit. He recalled surprisingly little of her, save admiring her for continuing to fight after losing so much. Her cockpit had been cleaved in two by the plasma blade of a Sentinel; from appearances, she'd been vaporised instantly.

Had she remembered him?

"You can sleep there," he said. "It's a little apart from the rest of us, so you won't be bothered. I can have you left well enough alone. We're good people here."

Just like Atlas said.

The good guys.

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For Letitia everything was different here than what she was used to. It was so cold, and everyone seemed so on edge. It was like they were anticipating a fight that may or may not come anytime soon. The young woman found it a bit sad really. Her world was full of beautiful people that were always too busy having fun or gorging themselves on food to care about what was going on outside their own little worlds... A truck could have hit 15 people and everyone would have shrugged it off and kept walking.

The walk up he gantries was no easy feat, yet she took a bit of pride in him telling her that she did well. It was a fate she knew she had already resigned herself to. All of the information she had been loaded with, everything that had unfolded thus far was making far more sense than she liked it to. Bot followed her silently, and she often found herself using him as a balance whenever she needed it. She didn't want to rely on Valentine more than she had to; the man was injured as well and she knew he had to be exhausted after the long day they had had.

She took notice of Abyss Walker; it was hard not to. It was huge, only the second Reaper she had seen before. "So that's your Reaper?" she wasn't directly talking to him of course, but she was mildly curious. Despite her tired, she was filled with questions she knew would have to be answered later. "After some rest I'd like to take a look at whatever's left of your Tracers and see if I can help fix them."

Her help was all she could offer until they got a chance to check out her secret base and collect what she had there. She was fairly sure that the events that had lead up to this meant she would have limited access to her money and resources for the moment. She had a plan for that though; her family had no access to any of it... and she had put plenty of her money away in places that no one could access but her.

The mattress that was offered to her wasn't glamorous; it was just that, a mattress. It didn't matter though. She could have slept on the freezing ground at that point if she had to. She flopped down unceremoniously, at the end of her own rope. "We'll have to make a plan. The rest of my resources are pretty hard to get to, and if they figured out about my labs after nearly 20 years of them never even suspecting anything like that was underneath the city, I have no doubts they'll find a way to find my warehouse," she spoke quickly and quietly. "If they find that, we're both fucked. I have money stored there and a few other places I can easily access which will help keep our arrangement going."

She was starting to drift off as she spoke and she laid back in exhaustion. "I'm sorry. I thought that place was secure. I should have known something like that was going to happen. I shouldn't have asked your men to protect something that was my responsibility to protect all along."

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Valentine followed Letitia's gaze up to the Reaper, its small, angular head's crimson visor of visual sensors almost completely black in its inactivity. It looked completely different to hers; where Letitia's Reaper (still unworthy of a name, whatever the girl claimed) was slim, lithe and feminine, Abyss Walker was hulking, with impossibly broad shoulders and thick, streamlined legs. Four thin wing-like protrusions of its angular flight pack poking out at angles behind it, long coolant pipes draining out of the shoulders, hooked up to the network of life support around it. One of the earliest prototype Reapers - a fusion of the abominable, preternatural hatred of the Entities and the pinnacle of conventional human warfare.

"I wouldn't say that it's mine," he said, looking up at it, voice soft and contemplative. "Possession implies control. I'm not so arrogant as to presume that I can control it."

She flopped down on the mattress; scavenging that which was once another's. That was all this world was. Nothing new was made here. Just trying to get whatever use they could out of a secondhand planet.

"Your assistance with the Tracers would be most appreciated. We've also got some Sentinels in need of a serious overhaul before they're in combative condition," he said, thankful for her help. He knew the basics of mechanics, but most of his knowledge was in how to maintain a Reaper - skills that didn't exactly translate to the far less esoteric units.

After she was finished, he found himself sitting down, leaning against the railing on the gantry; he himself was exhausted, although by no means to the extent that she was. "We'll go looking for your laboratory tomorrow. I'll find a way to do so without getting half my men killed this time."

He caught himself then, realising how tactless he'd been - especially given her subsequent statement. It clicked - she wasn't used to this. He didn't know if she'd ever killed anyone before today. Thousands had fallen to him, either by his hands or acting on his orders. He'd watched countless men march to their deaths, sacrificed them universally and willingly.

He wanted to tell her that it wasn't her fault, but he didn't, because it wasn't true - not entirely, at least. If she'd been a little less confident of how well-hidden her lab was, his men would still be alive. But at the same time, they'd gone there in his orders - and that didn't bother him in the slightest.

"This is war," he sighed, voice cold; he wasn't angry, probably too tired for that, but couldn't keep the iciness from his tone. "People die. It's what happens. Get used to it."

He forced himself to his feet, looking out over the gigantic chamber; he momentarily hoped that the trucks didn't get caught out while transporting Letitia's Reaper. Dark eyes flickered over the men scurrying about, working coolant lines and treating wounded.

"Men lost friends today, Letitia," he exhaled, looking away from her. "I lost friends. If you want to make it up to us, then stand by our side. The second you woke that Reaper up, this war - this world - became your problem."

He turned back to her, staring into her, through her, voice bitter and detached - harsher than he knew he should have been, but unable to summon up the will to cease.

"Make sure it's worth the price we paid."

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The coldness should have upset her, but it didn't. She recalled him mentioning he had been around a long time; he was probably used to war and death and destruction. She stared at him tiredly and waited for him to end his monologue. She just wanted to sleep... the sooner she slept the sooner she could begin working on whatever she needed to work on. "I'm pretty adept in working on Sentinels. My mom was a pilot. She did a lot of the upkeep for it herself. Paranoia, didn't trust anyone else to touch it. She taught me pretty well despite being batshit crazy for most of my life."

She took a moment to fully take in her surroundings. Chill was just starting to settle in now that she had stopped moving, but she didn't even care. She knew this was a war. She knew people died. It didn't mean she had to like it when it was directly caused by her. She also knew she couldn't prevent it, no matter what her resources were... she just cared a lot more that her uncles had ever cared about their servants or military dogs. "I know what war is, Valentine. War is what made my mother lose her mind after watching her brother's Sentinel get cleaved in half when she was only the same age as me. I may not have lost a lot of people to this war, but that's because I don't have friends or much family that I give a shit about to lose. I never let myself get that close to anyone... I knew someday it was going to be taken away from me, whether it be because I threw myself into the fight or because my asshole of an uncle decided to take it from me."

The woman sat back up with effort and stared at him. "I swore I would do everything I could to put an end to this war, and if piloting that Reaper gets me any farther than what anyone else has gotten so far, then I'll do it until there's nothing left of me. I'm not all false hope and innocence. I know this will probably be the death of me, but I have a lot less to lose than most people and a hell of a lot more to give than some... Don't doubt my intentions or my alignment. I made an enemy out of my family today. I don't have anywhere else to go."

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She's cold. Again, interesting - a common effect of XK-CULTIVATOR had been a lack of ability to grow truly attached. He'd liked the men who'd died, for certain - he would've counted them as much friends as anyone he'd ever known. But he didn't care. He'd already accepted their deaths; his first thought had been how to replace them. He didn't connect, not with anyone.

And that suited him just fine.

And was she the same? That was the question at hand. Perhaps she could be, in time. A terrible, terrible thought - but a necessary one? Maybe. Another Reaper could be exactly the edge he'd been looking for in this quest. But a Reaper was only ever as good as its pilot.

He let her finish talking, taking careful note of her phrasing. So, she was one of them, then - that was her statement. She was on their side, by virtue of having no-where else to go. From a given perspective, this was his doing - his approaching of her being what started this chain of events.

Necessary sacrifices.

"Then you've shown me your answer," he stated, walking away; he'd check over the situation, debrief the fireteam from the Sky District, and then sleep. However, at the last second, he stopped, and turned back to her, his voice a paradoxical mixture of smirking and solemn.

"Welcome to Childhood's End."

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Sleep was restless for her that night. Worries plagued her young mind and more than once she startled awake from nightmares- no, not nightmares... shadows of nightmares, and was glad there was no one nearby to hear her cry out. It wasn't unusual for her to have troubled sleep, no far from it... So many things she had seen and had been told over the years had made her dreams less than pleasant. At least she was alive to dream- she thought.

The fourth time she awoke it was nearly dawn and she found herself sweating harder than she had in a while, getting up and actually pacing around the mattress. The cold didn't bother her in this state, she was glad for it and her arm ached like hell. She was still exhausted, then again she didn't intend on getting proper rest any time soon. This time around she had work to do. Pulling on her jacket once she cooled down enough, she found herself quietly wandering around. Her hair was matted to her face with sweat, and she was pale from her exhaustion and injuries. Anyone who hadn't met her before would have thought she was merely a ghost wandering down the gantry. She needed to do something, her hands needed to be occupied. Out of the corners of her eyes she saw shadows, heard whispers, but they were not real whispers. No one was currently awake on the platform she found herself on when she finally had to sit down and close her eyes to rest.

Darkness.

She was surrounded by it. The silence was deafening. She couldn't hear herself breathe,she didn't know if she was alone or if the men that had been with her when the ceiling collapsed were still there. The expedition had gone terribly so far. The ruins were in very bad condition.

Letitia searched for something, anything... her pack had been tossed quite a ways away from her, but in it there were matches, a flashlight, her water canteen among other things. She needed to find that pack... but she had no idea where it had fallen. For what seemed like hours she moved a few inches at a time, searching thoroughly for a strap or SOMETHING to help her. The 15-year-old was terrified for the first time in her life. Never before had she felt anything so strongly; not love nor hatred nor fear... She didn't know why, but she just didn't feel things the way others did.

Nor did she care to.

Her hand brushed against something, it felt like the strap of her pack. Attached to it was the canteen which she drank from.

"Someone get Valentine."

Letitia drank just enough to quench her thirst before digging for her flashlight or her matches.

I wouldn't do that.

The voice echoed in her head, causing her to jump. "Who's there?" she rasped out of her still-dry throat. There was no moisture in the desert and little oxygen to be had in here. There was no reply.

"She's burning up."

"Man did you see what she did? She jumped into that Reaper with another thought? Was she even trained to use that thing?"

"Just fucking get Valentine."

Letitia tried to stand, but her legs were weak from the shock of adrenaline she could feel leaving her body now.It was so hot and dry. Even her sweat felt like it was evaporating faster than she was producing it. She fumbled with a match, just hoping to get a view of what was down here.

You'll die.

The teenager squeaked as the voice pulsed through her body. It felt like a shock to her system and she was on her knees again.

I can help you live.

She was confused.

"She's blacked out. I can't wake her."

The source of the voice had to be in the chamber with her. She stumbled forward reaching out to stabilize herself on a wall. She walked forward with her hand in front o her until she hit something.

If you help me find peace, I can help you live.

She dropped her pack, grabbing the flashlight and turning it on. It flickered, the battery extremely low, but what she saw before her was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The machine, if that's what it was, was huge. It sat against the wall as if it were taking a nap.

I'll protect you if you protect me.

What are you?

The One With Half of a Soul. Do you want to live?

Yes.

Then help me find peace. That is your due to me.

I don't know how.

Then let us find it together.

She had woken up with sun in her eyes and the entire cavern exposed to the sky, cradled in the arm of the Reaper. The guys claimed there had been an explosion and they found the Reaper still sitting there, shielding her.

Wake up Letitia.

Letitia's eyes shot open and she sat up with a cry, a pounding headache and a shudder. She looked around, dazed and confused as to where she was, but feeling better rested than when she had sat down... wait, where was she? Why was she here? What had happened to the steps? She had only sat down to catch her breath...

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"Reaper surge; she ought to be fine," Valentine said, with barely a look at the woman lying on the ground; he'd just checked behind her eyelids, and then walked away, knowing full well the situation already. He'd been here often enough himself - it was why he had so many coolant pipes running into Abyss Walker all the time. He'd hoped that Letitia's Reaper was going to be a little quieter.

Apparently not.

"Is she dreaming?" Ghost said, looming next to Valentine, the blonde-haired soldier easily a head taller. His thick arms were folded; it was odd for Valentine to see his comrade unarmoured, in a way. The man had always seemed somehow more than human - a walking lump of steel with a full-auto battle rifle in hand, ready to follow out every order to the death. Always unflinching, no matter what the world threw at him; his eyes, always somewhere else.

In a way, he and Valentine got along for that reason - they both understood what it was to outlive one's use-by date. They were both temporally anomalic soldiers. Ghost old before time, Valentine young long after his.

"Hallucinations?" Ghost asked, looking down at her; he'd carried her here, what with Valentine's arm quite thoroughly out of commission. She now lay upon the table that they used for planning operations, the maps hastily swept away - all the stretchers were occupied by wounded.

"Far more than that," Valentine said, turning around on the gantry, staring out at Abyss Walker. He swore that in the dull line of sensors, he saw a singular flare of light; he glanced down and away, towards where Eden had been brought in on the back of a group of trucks, occupying the remaining floor space in front of the rows of coolant pumps.

What are you two up to?

"It's taken her soul out of time itself," he explained. "Back to a moment in her past, I'd suspect, although the future isn't unheard-of either. The Entities bend time and space to their will. Once linked, they can touch you, wherever you are. When the energies of Reapers surge, it can tear one's soul from their body. They always bring you back, though."

Ghost's eyes fogged over. Valentine knew why well enough - he'd seen enough things himself, fought things that should never have been fought. No Sentinels nor Reapers to protect him - just heavy combat armour and a brace of shotgun shells on hand. The two of them didn't talk about their pasts much; a mutual understanding. But he knew that whatever Ghost had seen, it had imbued him with an eternal hatred of the preternatural.

He heard a cry behind him, and spun, stepping towards Letitia swiftly. The momentary temptation to place a comforting hand on her shoulder grasped him, but he forced it aside, and looked her up and down; she appeared to have managed to avoid injuring herself in any way, thankfully, nor did she have any mysterious cuts (the mark of such surges). She was fine enough, for the minute.

"When were you?" he asked, his tone soft and understanding.

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Letitia took deep breaths, calming herself down the best way she knew how.

"When were you?" her eyes snapped to Valentine. Her suddenly bright blue eyes slowly faded back to their natural black color as her breathing evened out and she seemed to come to her senses.

"A promise," she breathed, sitting fully up and swinging her legs off the table. Carefully, she stood, trying to catch her balance. She had experienced this once before, but it had been a long time. "When we met, I was dying. Trapped in ruins that collapsed. I was stupid and young at the time and lit a match underground, eating up a good portion of my oxygen. Eden warned me not too, but I was hot, terrified and wounded."

Her voice was still distant, but as she seemed to finally settle back into her body. Her eyes deglazed and she was suddenly very focused. "We made a deal back then, if I help her find solitude and peace, she'd protect me. Without a pilot she blasted us out of the ruins. I don't remember much, I passed out due to lack of air just before it happened. They found me sheltered in her arms when they managed to get down the crater she created to investigate," She turned to Valentine, her voice strong and her posture full of purpose. "She protected me. In return I took her back with me and protected her. After that she never spoke to me again, until recently when she started to occasionally whisper her name or strings of code that I was struggling with. I think she used a lot of her power saving me back then, and has only just recovered recently... I forgot about all that..."

Back then she swore it was a dream; she hadn't told anyone about the large machine that spoke to her. They would have thought she was insane. Instead she kept their agreement to herself and eventually it faded into her subconscious. "I think she's trying to tell me it's time to keep my end of the bargain."

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Solitude... peace...

Lies. Valentine felt it. Reapers only existed insofar as they were in motion - when there were no souls to claim, then they did not, could not, exist. Human suffering was the very air they breathed. War was their existence - and, perhaps,

What form of Reaper could want peace?

Still, at least it was a reasonably harmless memory. Abyss Walker appeared to have taken up the hobby of bringing Valentine back to things that he decidedly did not wish to recall. Not born of hatred, though - Abyss Walker was a creature of pure hatred, as were all Entities, but they did not hate those whom they fed off. Valentine was too much a part of it now for it to ever consider hate.

No, rather, it all seemed to be birthed of curiosity more than anything.

"Ignore what it demands," he said, nodding over at where Letitia's pet abomination lay, skeletal limbs haphazard upon the floor. "You owe it nothing. It'll collect its dues from you in time."

A sombre statement, but one that needed to be made. That was the reality of their position. The more you used a Reaper, the more it took from you.

Until it had nothing left to take. Valentine almost loosed a bitter laugh at the thought.

How profoundly human of them.

"If I were you, I'd try to get as much done before that happens as possible."

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Letitia was listening yet not listening. Her head was still very far away, though what part of her soul that was still in her body was in tact. She turned to him, understanding him completely. "She's not demanding it, that's the problem. Something's coming, even if she doesn't know what it is... I know as long as I'm a part of this the chances are I'm going to die an early age," she told him, finally able to stabalize herself in the here and now.

For a moment she blinked and then sighed. "Sorry about that... according to my notes it's a side effect of only having half of my soul in my body. A soul's natural state is being whole, so when she takes me out- and no this isn't the first time, the half that she takes tries to find its way back to its other half," she explained. "It takes a few minutes for me to gain back my ground. I've slept long enough. It's time to get to work. Show me where the Sentinels are, I'll start with those. Later we'll talk about the rest of what I've promised you in resources. As soon as I can get to those, the better chance I have of being to help you repair whatever else needs fixing."

The airiness was gone from her voice. She was ready to continue on. She had a war to fight after all.

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Valentine found himself impressed by Letitia's request to begin work. He frankly hadn't expected her to be so driven, especially so swiftly after what she'd been through.

"With me," he stated, beginning the walk towards the stairwell. Within a few moments, they'd reached ground level, standing among the forest of coolant pumps and half-scrapped Sentinels.

"Start with whichever you please. Anything you require, you only need ask."

As she set to work, he thought back over what she'd said. Something's coming... an ominous statement, if there ever was one. Valentine wasn't the type to believe in the premonitions of abominations, but on the other hand, he knew better than to ignore what could be a dire warning. He turned to Ghost, who was still dutifully following him.

"Arm your men," he ordered. "Put your team on guard, concealed out in the tunnels. I think something's coming for us."

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Letitia looked at what she was given with to work with and a sudden grin crossed her face. "You sure know how to get a girl excited," she said before nearly diving into the half scrapped Sentinels and the parts that were just lying around them as if no one could figure out where to start. A minute later she popped up besides Valentine, looking as if someone had just given her the greatest gift ever. "Three questions: how many are there supposed to be? What are the minimal number you need? And do you have any WHOLE Sentinels to begin with?"

She loved mechanics. It was something she had spent years studying, always up to date on the latest technology but just as effective with older technology as well. She was thrilled to be given a project she could easily accelerate at. If it hadn't been for the circumstances surrounding her upbringing, she might have been a mechanic or even followed in her mother's footsteps. She was happier around machines and computers than she was around people; people were volatile and very few people were the same as one another. Even the fake spoiled kids had held some things deeper than others. She was a prime example of that. So much of her life had been spent in a room full of computers putting together ancient robots and retrofitting new technology into things. For her, recreating a few Sentinels was child's play, yet she knew it was essential.

Knowing what she had to work with was the first step to succeeding. She had been genuine when saying her alliances lay with them; she had no where else to go, and even if she did she wasn't sure she could get there on her own. Not only had she no knowledge of a Reaper's capabilities, but despite her years of combat training, even she couldn't face a whole army alone. She needed to work with Childhood's End if she were to get even close to her end goals.

"I can scrap a couple of the really bad ones and rebuild at least two of them based off of what I see. This is a cakewalk," there was no ego in her words, just an innate understanding. It was like there was a computer in her head calculating how much time it would take to scrap and rebuild and which of the parts that lie at her feet were still usable. For the first time in years she felt even the slightest at ease and felt like she could make a place for herself here.

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"To be honest, I'm not quite sure myself," Valentine half-grinned, with a small chuckle at how excited Letitia seemed to be working on the Sentinels. It was endearing, in a way; watching her run around, digging through piles of scrap for anything that looked useful.

"I think we've got four and a half - I loosely remember one of them getting bisected and dragged back here. There's one that's sort of whole," he nodded at one which was only missing a single arm (he mused that 'only a single arm' was an odd thought indeed), "but other than that, we're more or less left with a pile of scrap. If you can get even two of them back into combative condition, you'll have the thanks of every man here."

He was certainly appreciative of her will to work. He gestured around, calling the various mechanics over - he'd selected them for their talent in operating a Reaper, not in repairing Sentinels. Given that the technology in Abyss Walker was a few centuries older than these Sentinels, they'd been struggling for a good while. He was thankful for Letitia's aid.

"Help Letitia with whatever she needs," he said. "She appears to know what she's doing, but her arm is injured. She will require assistance, I should think."

He turned to Letitia, nodding. "My arm is still injured, but I will do what I can to aid you. However, I fear I will be of little use in physical tasks." After that, a slight grin crossed his face.

"Tea or coffee?"

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Letitia was already directing the mechanics before Valentine offered her tea or coffee. She was focused, determined. "You three start deconstructing the half Sentinel. We can repurpose the arm to fit the other one that' only missing an arm," She ordered, clearly knowing what she was doing.

Still, there's always a naysayer in every group. "Um... miss, that one is missing its left arm, and this other one only has a right arm and they're not even the same mode-"

"Then I guess I'll just have to reprogram it and adjust to make it function as a left arm. Models make no difference, if you know what you're doing. In the end wiring is all the same and all manageable. Let me handle that, you just work on pulling it apart," she said with a roll of her eyes. She had done it before, and had watched her mother do it a few times. As Sentinels got older it was hard to find replacement parts and Letitia had quickly learned that retrofitting parts was quite easy if you had to.

She turned to Valentine. "Tea would be nice. Don't worry about the physical aspect. There's enough people to help me with this. I should have the Sentinel up and running by tomorrow," she gave a rough estimate, but as long as the team worked with her it was an accurate estimate. "I need Bot. He's very efficient as an assistant. I think he's still where I left him by my mattress... He'll be able to test parts to see what's still functioning and what's unusuable.

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Valentine watched her issue orders swiftly and pragmatically; beautiful in her brutal efficiency. He began to wonder if there was more to this girl - she was, after all, Human-PLUS. Perhaps she was not merely a living being, but a weapon - bred not just to live, but to fight and lead and kill.

Yet... something just didn't add up. XK-CULTIVATOR, Shape Memory Effect, the Ulysses Report - it had all proved that any attempt to control a Knight was impossible. Not mechanically, but conceptually - fate itself conspired, by some unknown mechanism. Whoever had created her, whatever connection they'd had - the timing meant that they had to know what had happened to the original Human-PLUS program. Had to know the state Kyoto had been in leading up to the accident. Had to know the probabilities, the explanations for the Incident.

It didn't add up. Why was she built? Did they hope to, in stripping something of its soul, create a being that they could control? Nobody capable of creating Human-PLUS was a fool.

Unless, of course, they hadn't intended to control her...

He mused over this as he put the tea and coffee together in the small kitchenette they'd set up on one side of the gantry; a skill he'd practiced back at Golgotha Base, many years ago. A different time; more peaceful, in a way, living in a delusion, deciding to pick his vision of the future, instead of the inevitability. Knowing it would all come down on him, and ignoring it.

Eventually, he was settled; a half-dozen espressos for the team and himself, and a rather strong Japanese tea for Letitia. He handed out the drinks comfortably, leaning against a wall and taking a sip from his espresso - one of the old habits.

"I trust I'm not too rusty with the tea?" he asked, before deeming to move onto more serious matters. "You have my thanks for getting it operational. Once you're feeling a little more experienced, I might enlist your help in repairing Abyss Walker - assuming that it lets you near itself, of course."

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While Valentine made tea and coffee, Letitia found herself walking amongst the wreckage after someone located Bot and brought it to her.

"Well mistress we actually have a fair haul of workable parts. They're in shambles, but we have at least three functioning Sentinels here... If we count in that thing at the warehouse there's four..." Bot made about testing parts to make sure they worked. Despite it being a drone the personality chip she had discovered made it talk and seem like a human, and it even had a certain degree of free will.

"Good. We'll retrieve what's at the warehouse soon enough. We really need these working though," she replied, a wrench in her hand as she loosened parts up enough to pull the apart so they could be reassembled later. Already she had an organization system going and there seemed to be dedication piles of parts, weapons, and miscellaneous nuts and bolts. And it hadn't even been a half hour. The half Sentinel was being pulled apart, its arm being relocated over by the armless Sentinel and the rest of the parts all going to the respective piles.

"The good news; we have the parts for three functioning Sentinels here with plenty of spare parts for repairs," Letitia approached Valentine and took the proffered tea. She sips at the hot substance and nodded her approval. "Not too bad. Its drinkable."

She didn't mean to sound like it was disappointing. It was actually quite good, but she had spent so much of her life drinking tea the way her grandfather, and she, had made it that anything else was hard to swallow. However she enjoyed the taste and warmth. "I have another whole Sentinel in my warehouse. Its missing some things, but it just lucks out that those components we have extras of here that I can put in it. We'll have four whole functioning Sentinels at that point. Its a bit on the older side, but its pilot keeps it in good shape."

She turned to look at him, a wistful smile on her face. "Though I might have to fight her to relinquish control of it. Its my mother's..."

Officially her mother was dead. There had been news reports of her suicide all over the city a few years ago, an unfortunate casualty of war. No one had ever found her body, then again it was assumed that throwing your body off of one of the tallest buildings in the sky district to the world below didn't leave much to find.

In truth Letitia had kept her far away from the city as possible. Her mothers insanity and obsessive need to fight had driven the family to attempt to get rid of her, and the young girl wasn't anywhere near ready to be a true orphan. So she had hidden the woman away and the Sentinel she was dedicated to even more than she had ever been to her daughter and made sure they couldn't go anywhere. "Your people are efficient. I like this. Its the first time I haven't had to do EVERYTHING by myself just to get results," she commented as everyone took a few minutes to drink their coffee. Bot came floating around to her.

"All scraps have been separated from functionary parts Mistress! Plenty of scrap metal to play with if needed!" It chirped before scooting off to go help with reprogramming of the arm.

Letitia knew this feeling of calm wouldn't stay. She could feel the already familiar hum of Eden in the back of her mind, prodding curiously to see what was going on.

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An extra Sentinel... and her mother's, at that. Further conspiracy? Perhaps. Still didn't add up. He'd done the research - knew who her mother was. A battlefield legend, more or less; born outside the city, having slain thousands of enemies over a career as illustrious as it was bloody. Married into the wealthy de Argentum family, finally safe - a fairytale ending.

Hardly the truth. Valentine knew that well enough. You didn't just go home. Once you stepped foot in those wastelands, you were stuck there forever - under a searing sun, the ash-tasting wind in your lungs, the ground crumbling beneath your feet, looking up at a stained sky. Always asking - why?

No, she hadn't come home, any more than he had. Gone mad and ended her own life. Just another tragic casualty of a war that had already claimed so much from this world.

But it never quite added up. Why Letitia, of all people? It was almost too good. Daughter of a battlefield legend - a concept not dissimilar to a Cultivator. It fitted too neatly. Had it been arranged - her birth itself? Was she created to be a weapon, or was it coincidence?

He knew now that he needed to get to the bottom of it. He needed answers as to who she was, if he was going to trust her. It was all just a little too convenient. Something was off, even if she herself hadn't realised it.

And he was going to find out what it was.

"We should go and see your mother," he said, sipping the last of his coffee; his statement was matter-of-fact, absolute, more an order than a suggestion. "I'd like to speak with her. After that, we can obtain her Sentinel. Will you be capable of issuing instructions to the engineers here? We can leave your 'Bot' behind to guide them."

His decision to go to find her mother was more than just curiosity, and a desire for a new Sentinel. If anyone knew how to get to Old King, it would be her - from his research, she'd've arrived at around the same time as him. Given the weight of Old King's arrival, and how high-ranked she'd been in the family tree, she had to have some idea.

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Letitia watched him for a moment as he seemed to mull something over. She figured he was wondering how and why she had a Sentinel stored away. Honestly, at the time she couldn't explain her decision to remove it from existence; no one really noticed a missing Sentinel. Some whispers on the street put her mother's missing body together with the missing Sentinel and swore that Mora de Argentum had simply managed to fool the idiot doctors at the hospital into thinking she jumped and had taken her Sentinel back out to the battlefield she loved so much.

The young woman had very few fond memories of her mother. The woman was always trying to force her into combat classes she didn't want, or dragging her out by her hair from her books and her computers. Her mother had been strict, when she was around which was very rare. Neither of her parents were around a lot, but when Mora had been around she bordered on abusive to her own child.

She looked up at him as he suggest- no, it was in the tone of an order- that they go pay a visit to her mother and the Sentinel. "Well we don't really have a choice if we want to have another Sentinel on our side... Though like I said, my mother won't give it up easily. The only reason she isn't out running around with it is because I made sure it can't run without me there to supervise. My mother is a bit... destructive," she said softly, looking at her feet with a bit of sorrow. "I'm going to need a few more weapons. My mother has a tendency towards trying to kill me, especially when it's been a while since she's seen me and she doesn't recognize me. Not fond of strangers in her deranged state. She seems terrified of someone taking the Sentinel away from her. I think it's because she's been piloting for so much of her life she feels unprotected without it."

It wasn't easy to admit. No one liked having a homicidal mother. "Giving these guys instructions should be fairly easy, and I have a headset at the warehouse that lets me communicate through Bot, if need be," she said before quickly sketching out some plans in the dirt and explaining to one of the engineers what she needed the team to do. "If you can at least get this far, once I get back the rest will be easy. I'll have the rest of what I need then to retrofit what I have to and make the rest of it work for us."

"That sounds easy enough. We can have it done in a day or two, ma'am," The man nodded and started issuing directions to everyone else. Letitia was impressed by how efficient everyone was around here.

"We can head out now if you want. The sooner we get there, the sooner we get back... though if you don't mind I'd prefer we travel lightly and only take a small number with us if you're comfortable with that... Less noticeable, and less likely to aggravate my monster of a mother."

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Valentine contemplated Letitia's request. On one hand, he was heavily disinclined to leave without a fully-armed guard; on the other, the young woman had a very good point about her mother. Letitia talked of the woman as one might a distant, faintly-disliked acquaintance; dispassionately, with the faintest tone of disdain. She was far less dangerous without a Sentinel to pilot, but could well be a threat - the mad were always unpredictable, especially one so well-trained as Letitia's mother. It would be a mistake to underestimate her.

"Then we go," he said, nodding firmly. He began assessing their proceedings of the situation - he'd need to get Abyss Walker repaired before offensive action was a possibility. Letitia's Reaper was powerful, but as-yet unproven in large-scale open battle against a foe that was prepared for its strength. And there remained the possibility of the city's guns having a wider range of turning than anticipated - even a craft so well-armoured as Abyss Walker would fall if slammed by enough high-powered rounds from those cannons. They'd need to disable them discreetly if they wanted to seize the Sky District.

Behind him, he heard Ghost move to fall in behind him, the heavy ceramic plates of the man's armour shifting as he walked. He raised a staying hand, turning to the man and shaking his head.

"Just her and I, this time," he commanded. He saw conflicting loyalties tear within Ghost; the man's desire for battle and his belief in his commanding officer colliding. Perhaps there was also a hint of protectiveness in there, although Valentine found himself doubting it. The man was a warrior - born and bred. He knew better than to form personal attachments that might put him at risk - or had he become so weak, so quickly?

The armoured veteran paused, considered his position, and then drew his handgun - a high-powered military-issued type, chambered for 8mm armour-piercing rounds capable of punching through a solid half-inch of ceramic plate. Valentine started a second, before the taller man flipped it around and offered the grip to him.

Valentine accepted it graciously; it slid inside his coat neatly enough, leaving only a small bulge in the loose garment. He'd already put on his bulletproof vest when he'd gotten dressed - a cautionary measure, in case Cocytus was compromised. It wouldn't do to die of a mere shrapnel wound to the chest, now would it?

"You need to start carrying around a proper gun, commander," Ghost nodded; beneath the grim visor of his helm, Valentine could almost feel the man's taunting smile. "That little five-millimetre is an embarrassment to our entire group."

"I'm not even going to bother making the 'compensating for something' joke here," Valentine smiled to the soldier; but in truth, he was grateful. Without a team at his back, it was best to be prepared, and Ghost's weapon was of a decent bit of sentimental value to boot. Where Ghost was from, the surrendering of one's weapon was a gesture of absolute trust.

The two men were not quite friends, even now, but Valentine knew that Ghost counted them as such, as so, returned every smile he could. He turned to Letitia, his voice returning to seriousness in contemplation of the task ahead.

"Do you require anything?" he asked, now feeling a little safer with the heavy weight of a loaded weapon inside his coat. "We should endeavour to leave as soon as possible."

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Letitia was still weaponless, her weapons laying where she had left them when she had passed out. Bot came floating over. "Mistress I have your sword, ma'am!" it said, pulling the sword out of a compartment in its abdomen before returning back to its job.

"Well apparently not," she said, looking a bit surprised yet not surprised at all. Bot was fully equipped to be able to 'think', per se. While he wasn't capable of human thought, he was programs to notice things like Letitia's weapons not being on her. That was a rare occurrence in itself. It could even activate its own 'Protocols' if she was absent. With her sword reattached to her hip she found herself a bit more at ease. "The sooner we leave the better. After yesterday I have little trust in my own security measures, though anyone trying to enter the warehouse through any of the normal entrances are in for a few nasty surprises. That place is very well sealed, for safety reasons."

The last time her mother had managed to escape had ended very badly for a few unfortunates that were a bit too close and curious. "My mother is highly trained in hand-to-hand combat as well. Last time she went 'adventuring' there were some incidents that took a lot of cleaning up on my part. Do you realize how easily blood cleans up and is hidden in a sandstorm? It's quite terrifying, really," she said, a tone of detachment in her voice. "Let's go. The sooner we go the sooner we get back."

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"I'll say this," Valentine said, leading them out of Cocytus; the side entrance to the chamber felt tiny compared to the gigantic double doors that encompassed on entire wall, "I've never much liked robots, but I'm starting to see the advantages."

He'd had enough bad experiences with machines; insofar as he was concerned, they removed a distinctly human element from war. An unusual prospect, given the extent to which he wished war itself to end, but he felt that any death should have a human touch - after all, a living, thinking human being could take responsibility for their actions, would have to live with the weight, even a little.

The only robots he'd ever met, aside from the most basic maintenance drones, were designed for combat. Still, it was nice to see one that had some modicum of capability, yet wasn't designed explicitly for killing things. He had to admit, Bot's design was rather endearing.

"Cleaning up blood's never been my responsibility," he said, a little unnerved by how detached she was - how was she maintaining this detachment? She sounded more like Ghost than anyone, saying things like that - and Ghost was a former child soldier, for crying out loud.

"But of course, I've never stayed in one place long enough for that sort of thing to matter anyway."

They emerged into the tunnels, and jumped a little as the armoured personnel entrance of Cocytus slammed closed behind him. The sound was bizarrely close to that of a gunshot, always had been; he didn't leave much, nor did anyone. Indeed, yesterday's foray to find Letitia had been his first in a few weeks; before that, he'd spent his time trying to repair Abyss Walker.

Eventually, they made their way to the surface; they emerged through a manhole onto a deserted street. It was still the low hours of the morning, and the night shift at the factories had not yet ended; the only sound that filled the streets was the booming of heavy machinery, like the sound of a vast monster thudding in the distance.

"Where to?" he asked, looking around warily - yet another soldier's habit. God, I'm getting jumpy in my old age...

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Letitia smiled. "Most Robots aren't as useful as Bot is. A lot of the 'lab assistants' are so... over programmed to do one job they can't do anything else. That and humans hate putting personality chips into anything that doesn't need it. I however, had a bit too much time on my hands and a spare personality chip and ended up with a very reliable assistant. He's also programmed for more than just one task. Multiple tools help him weld, scan and studying, plan out, and he's got a very advanced engineering program that I created when I was 12 and bored that helps him be able to assist me in retrofitting parts."

She looked around the empty street, trying to get her bearings for a moment. They were quite a ways away from where her warehouse was, but that was okay. She had quick ways to get there unnoticed. "Come on," she whispered, heading towards the north end of the city. "There's a relic of an underground exit to the outside of the north end of the city. I found it when I was younger. The warehouse is a bit of a drive outside of the city, but I was always prepared for the event of having to relocate everything there in case of emergency."

The walk didn't take half as long as she anticipated, but the uncovering the exit was much more difficult. She was still one-armed though she was happy that her arm had ceased hurting. "Stupid broken arm," she ground out as she shifted some junk, just enough that she could get the door open and they could slip through. Underground they went again. It was very dark until she flicked a switch and a trail of ancient lighting flickered to light. Half of the lights along the tunnel were broken or burnt out after so much time. "I hardly ever come down here. I left the city once a year in the last few years to check the warehouse and make sure my mother lay undisturbed... it's been a bit longer than a year this time around though."

After another 20 minutes of walking they popped out into another wider series of tunnels, though it was a fairly linear path and soon they were popping up pretty far outside the city. "This is an advantage point by the way. Not many people know about it, but not many people have access to the city's security plans," she pointed to the wall. "The guns aren't functioning on this side and they haven't bothered to fix them in the last two years. There's about a 5 kilometer span of wall that's protected only by a few armed guards who are too damn lazy to give a shit. The dumbasses we have for a 'city council' didn't see a need to pour money into it and instead upgraded the more frequently hit places with better guns and more troops. If we had a way to say... place some heavy weaponry or a Reaper here, it'd be a very weak spot to hit and we could gain the upper hand."

Letitia knew a lot about the security of the outer wall. For a short time she had been on the council, which had given her access to a lot of things that most people didn't have access to. "I have a lot of information about things like that... Rich people have too much time and not enough cares in the world. When a prodigy child comes along that awes them they tend to get too lax about it. No one ever noticed my paying attention to their conversations, or my stealing of security codes and cards. I honestly don't think anyone cared," she admitted, heading away from the city. "I have transportation hidden out here that's been here for two or three years and has never been touched. It took them 25 years to discover those underground labs.... they were there in my grandfather's time. Everyone believes my mother is dead or that she somehow escaped and took her Sentinel with her. No one ever suspected me of taking it. It's sort of pathetic really."

The day's heat was already quickly building and she found herself slipping her red coat off. She couldn't wait to get a change of clothes when she got to the warehouse; she was still covered in sweat and blood from the battle the day before. As they approached a sand dune it was quite obvious that something was hidden there; small turret guns turned on them until she pulled her dataslate out and typed in a code. This far outside the city it should have been inactive; most things didn't work unless they were connected to the city's network, yet the turrets stood down and they were safely passed them before they activated again, this time protecting them. "Thank you. Despite the complete fiasco most of this has been, you got me out of that city and gave me something to hope for. I'll make it worth your while as best as I can," she looked at him as she uncovered a truck hidden by a sand-colored tarp. No, it wasn't sand colored- it flickered as it moved reflecting the sky for a moment before it returned to looking like sand... she set it aside, pinning it down with rope and metal pins that seemed to be deeply embedded in the earth. The technology was rare but not unheard of: it used light sensors to reflect its background into the eye of the viewer, almost like glass. It was typically used in armor back in the older days, but after someone realized it could be used in a thin tarp-like sheet it had been used to hide troops or weapons in coups for years until it faded out of style.

"It's about half a day's drive from here. It should be midday by the time we get there, and hopefully if things go smoothly we can be back with the Sentinel by the middle of the night, when it's dark," she told him.

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In a word, the wasteland could only be described as 'desolate'.

This edge of it was sandy, like a vast beach that stretched thousands of miles inland. In the distance, he thought he could see the ocean, although he couldn't tell if the far-off shining was just desert haze. The wind that blowed should have been warm, but was just cold, and not fresh, either. It tasted ever-so-faintly of ash; there was no life, no cool sea breeze, because the ocean itself was so stained with blood and radiation as to no longer support life.

Not natural life, at least.

The optical camouflage flickered as she shifted it, the matrix eventually collapsing in on its own complexity as she folded it, revealing its nature. It had once been used for combat armour, and he'd been meaning to procure some cloaks of the material for Ghost's unit - unfortunately, these days, it was generally deemed too expensive to be worth issuing to soldiers. Weight of numbers tended to prevail over survivability, these days; the longer this war continued, the less human life meant.

Inside was a light truck, sand-camouflaged and frankly, about a thousand years old, by the looks of it. It wasn't badly-outfitted, and looked neatly enough preserved, but he had no goddamned clue where she'd found that sort of relic - its aesthetics were archaic and utilitarian, its panels solid metal instead of boron carbide plate or hard polymer.

Still, it looked like it would still run, and he walked over to this, tapping it on the hood a few times; the mere fact that the metal didn't crumble away into rust astounded him in and of itself. He nodded to her to get in, walking over to one of the sentry guns she'd set up.

A quick poke around it revealed it to be a standard-issue type, favoured by militaries worldwide; a pattern that had been used since the mid-21st century, little more than a servo, a simple fire control system, a laser sight and a belt-fed machine gun. After some investigation, he pulled his weapon from his coat, detached the slide and retrieved the firing pin from its mechanism. He used the edge of the slide to pry open the casing on the side of the servo, and a few solid taps of the pin caused a shuddering click and the whining of the unit powering down.

He grabbed the gun then; it wasn't hefty, an infantry-issue support weapon no different to the billions like it used around the globe. He quickly checked the action while reassembling his own substantial sidearm; it'd need some sand cleaned out of it, but otherwise, it looked perfectly functional. A surprise, after all these years of disuse.

"Old soldier's trick," he said, sliding his pistol back inside his coat and hefting the large machine gun. "Mechanism's terribly-built. Falls apart after just a few taps to the right places. Figured we could do with some backup firepower."

He was in the habit of grabbing weapons wherever he went; a little irrelevant, now that they had one of the wealthiest and best-prepared individuals in Aegis backing him, but it was still a comfort. If, for some reason, they ran into some bandits - or, god forbid, an actual military force - in these godforsaken wastes, a decent 7.62mm machine gun would go a long way towards keeping the both of them alive. Besides, tinkering with it would give him something to do in the long car trip.

He set himself inside the passenger seat; ordinarily, he'd prefer to drive, but he hadn't the first clue where they were going, so that much was best left to Letitia. He found himself looking around the car's interior when it struck him - why he'd recognised this thing so quickly.

"Hey, I think I used to have one of these!" he said to Letitia as she climbed in, a grin crossing his features. "Must have been ages ago. Watch the clutch, it's a little on the heavy side."

Wait, what? How? He realised that it was just a fragment - he just remembered the interior layout, nothing more. Yet it felt so familiar - from an older life? He'd lived a damned long time, but his memory span was only human. The early days were just fragments. He must've had an entire life that was lost to history by now.