#iii squad

 "The Wall is breached. The evacuation order came through a few minutes ago, while you were out, but I haven't been able to raise Belisar or Servius since then." He keeps his cool shockingly well as he describes the situation to her, and she offers a quick nod. They're in one of the maintenance sheds near the walls; decent cover. He must have dragged her here while she was...whatever happened to her.

 Her sense of smell is back, and she kind of wishes it wasn't. Everywhere, there's acrid smoke and ceruleum and the scent of ozone that comes with heavy spellcasting. All mixed with the scent of death. How many men did the Eorzeans throw at the wall? How many were already dead to their warmachina, for them to have breached their way through? The smoke makes her throat seize, and she tugs the bandana on her neck up to cover her mouth. It's better than nothing.

 "Get to the airship landing," she manages to say, voice hoarse and barely a rasp. She doesn't know where the rest of the squad are. She has to hope they're already evacuated, or defending the Delphinus.

 Victoria curses, dropping her rifle and drawing her service revolver in a single fluid motion. A rushing Gridanian with a spear takes one bullet, two, three, and falls. The rifle is scooped up, bolt tugged back, and she starts to reload. "We'll be overrun in a few minutes," she says, and her voice only shakes a little.

 "Then we go now." Max rolls her shoulders, stepping past him to lift the bow he'd left propped up against one of the walls. The string's still intact, as a mercy. She'd hate to have to fight through this hellsscape with knives and bad language.

 "The fastest way to the Delphinus is right along the wall," Valens notes, fingers tight on his staff.

 "Low ground's a slaughterhouse. Walls might be enemy territory but it beats an Armored Weapon cuttin' us to ribbons, yeah?" She nocks an arrow, trying to catch her breath as best she can.

 Victoria fires another round, but doesn't offer any disagreement.

 "Break!"

 They rush out, into the open. Into the slaughter.

 _ _ _

 A shard of cermet and steel propels itself forwards by conjury and will, knocking the helmet of an Ishgardian knight clean off. Max doesn't stop to check if it still has the head inside it as she looses an arrow into the chest of a Lominsan...highlander? She doesn't stop to ask his racial heritage, either, just nocking a second arrow to loose into him for good measure.

 "We're almost there!" Max calls out, stepping on the fallen man's chest and tugging the arrows free to reuse.

 There'd still been legionaries fighting on the walls when they made it up to the top. Holdouts, handfuls of them, fighting to the bitter end against swarms of Alliance troops. By now, halfway to the landing pads, it's thinned out. Mostly bodies now. Bodies, and the Eorzeans.

 Victoria's rifle has long since run out of ammo, slung across her back as she shoots another Limsan in the head with her revolver. Valens is alternating between flinging pieces of the wall at people with magic, and physically clubbing them with his staff if they get too close.

 They're almost there. Three fighters, punching through the enemy's lines to reach an extraction. It's so close, when Max hears it.

 The whine of an airship's engines. But not just any airship, and not just any whine. She knows that sound. She knows what it means. And as a ship comes into view, Max knows in her heart that it's the Delphinus.

 She reaches for her vox, yelling into it. She doesn't care how hoarse her voice is, she doesn't care what else is coming through the radio right now. "Snowbird, this is III in need of extraction! Snowbird?" The airship's afterburners spark bright, and it's high and away. "Where the fuck are you, Lee?!"

 There's no response. Nothing. Max had gambled on the wall; gambled on the airship landing. And she'd gambled wrong.

 "Sawyer, what now?!" Valens calls over the roar of battle, but she doesn't hear him. That was their ride out of here, and it's gone.

 "Sawyer!"

 "MAX!" Victoria grabs her arm, snapping her back into the moment. "We need to move!"

 "Back the way we came," she manages to say. "Make for the east exit on foot."

 Victoria nods, turning and facing the lines they'd just cut their way through; the soldiers they'd left standing in their rush, and the ones who had advanced in their wake. Max doesn't move, feet glued in place.

 "...Not without you, Max. Come on."

 Max breathes in, shaky, and turns to face their enemy.

 _ _ _

 They make it. Through fire and blood, hells and high water. Through the slaughtergrounds and the warmachina, and the Alliance forces seemingly fighting amongst themselves.

 That last part had been their saving grace. The forces had turned on one another, as far as Max could tell, beating each other to death and giving the trio room to break their way through the lines.

 As soon as they're through the great gates and into the East End, they break into a sprint. They run until their lungs burn, just trying to get away from the wall lest some archer with a grudge pick them off. They run until their muscles seize and until Max falls to her knees, lungs failing her, coughing and retching and feeling like she might die. The smoke sears her lungs as Valens and Victoria give her space, watching over her in case they need to start running again. Valens could probably carry her again, if it came down to it.

 When the worst of it has passed, she breathes. Ragged and broken, but breathing. She's a mess. Her arms shake as she holds herself up.

 Come on, Sawyer. You're in charge here. You need to get them moving, get them to the evac point. Specula Imperatoris, probably. But Castellum Corvi or Velodyna should still be standing, if they can get that far.

 "Okay," Max says, and the sky alights with a second sun.

 "What? It was right there. If I didn't say it, Ness would've." DeMeer defends his actions with a shrug, looking to Victoria for support. She just shakes her head in disappointment. She's not angry, just disappointed. And that feels so much worse.

 "Please. Puns are beneath me." I'xaness steps forwards, prodding at the dead Marid with the haft of her spear and humming. "...It's fresh. Only been here a day or two. Maybe less, since the antlions haven't gotten to it yet."

 "What killed it?" Victoria speaks up, eyes flicking across the perimeter. Always watching, always ready for an ambush. Checking for whatever - or whoever - killed the beast. Her rifle is held low and loose, but her finger hovers just outside the trigger guard with near-mechanical precision.

 "No arrows from the Ananta or the M." Max paces her way around the beast, checking for any trace of its killer. "Not that the snake-girls would kill 'em anyway, yeah? Basically worship the things."

 Claudia leans forwards on her Reaper, resting her forearms against the metal of the cockpit. "Reports place the M tribe camp four malms north for now. The hunting parties wouldn't roam this far, and it's too close to Ananta lands even if they were nearby."

 "Disease?" DeMeer asks.

 Max and Ness continue their walk around the beast, before pausing at the same place. They look to one another, and Ness raises the haft of her spear again. She pushes it against a point on the Marid's flank...and the haft slides into a hole pierced deep into the beast. She pulls the weapon back with a shudder. "Gross."

 "Know any diseases that leave a fulm-long hole in a beast?"

 "I'll diagnose you with one if you don't piss off."

 "Shut up, both of you!" Claudia's voice rings over the burgeoning argument between Max and DeMeer, stopping in its tracks before it can properly get started.

 "Sorry, Dec."

 "Yes, Dec."

 (Max is not the one who apologised.)

 "Was that caused by a spear, or something else? A spear could mean Resistance activity, and then we'd have to make reports and I'd have to fill out paperwork and it would be a pain, but it'll save lives." Claudia speaks loud and clear, the tone of voice she reserves for orders and speeches. And orders which are also speeches. "So I want you to be sure. Set up a perimeter, keep on the lookout. Any sign we detect could be the difference between-"

 "Beast," I'xataka replies, short and to the point in interrupting Claudia's flow about the safety of the Legion. She'd wandered over as the woman was speaking, stepping close to her tribemate and to the marid.

 "...How are you so sure?" Claudia sounds slightly deflated. Like she was looking forward to her speech.

 "The goop on Ness's spear isn't just blood. There's apitoxins. And pheromones, too. Smell that, Sawyer?"

 "Come close to me with that shite and die, yeah?"

 Taka rolls her eyes. "This marid was killed by a wespe. A big one, too. I know there's some bastards big enough to kill jhammels out here, but a this is impressive even for them." She waves Ness's spear around in demonstration, before handing it back.

 Ness wipes the haft clean on a part of the marid that hadn't been stabbed.

 Claudia breathes out a sigh of relief. A marid-killing wespe might be the stuff of nightmares, but at least it's not the Resistance. The last thing they need is guerilla fighters moving into ananta territory again. "Alright. Nicely done, Cinna. Everyone get ready to move out."

 "Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!" Taka calls, waving her arms in Claudia's direction. "Hold on just a minute, Dec."

 If one were to listen closely, they would hear the sound of Claudia's teeth grinding with a force strong enough to open beer bottles. She does, however, wait.

Laelia looked down at the can as a stray trickle of red paint ran over her trigger finger. The irony was that, six years ago, she would have been doing the exact same thing in the exact same place. Memories were still rich in her mind: the bite of the breeze and numbness in her fingers as she shimmied onto an overpass while cars rasped by overhead. The hollow echo of her footsteps as she and her gang of friends ran down the subway, one ear always perked to listen for trains. They’d tag those inaccessible walls with the first thing that came to mind – nonsense, bad art, jokes about the Galvuses that would be a pain to erase and, of course, phalli a-plenty – and afterwards Laelia would jump onto the side of a passing train, much to the horror of her friends, and ride it out into the city. Sometimes she’d luck out and catch the S-Line in passing; that was the one that took the overpass straight into the heart of the capitol. On warmer days she’d climb onto the roof and sit there, heart soaring as she beheld the city gleaming from afar. The warm lights blazed all the brighter against the black buildings, each high and mighty enough to pierce the heavens. Garlemald shone like a beacon in the middle of the frozen wastes, its rooftops exhaling vapor into the frigid air; Laelia would watch the city winking with the wind in her hair and felt free.

Now, that wind was the only thing left. The city, bereft of its usual light and warmth – of its bustle, of the stereotypical Garlean noise – was ferociously cold. Gusts howled between alleys, whistled over concrete skeletons. Her boots crunched over ice and rubble and broken glass.  And all the while, Laelia hated how...disconnected she felt. Her mind couldn’t process what she saw. She was walking in a bad monochrome dream. She had to be.

That building, there – that’d been the public library. So many kids would hang there after school, for lack of anything better to do. The good kids would do their homework and the bad kids would search for topics they weren’t allowed to discuss at home. And on the corner – that’d been Satriani’s. Their by-the-slice pizza single-handedly kept high school students alive. And this? The intersection between Via Sabbatius and Via Executor? There was a wreck there almost every damn day, usually instigated by some impatient asshole in a Sciatti.

There, at that bus stop – there was an old lady who sold knit hats every day. The police gave up shooing her away because she always came back, and she was so wholesome that the passengers began to defend her.

There was the bank that always decorated so festively for the winter holidays. Beside it used to be a news stand where Laelia would regularly filch cigarettes and gum, and a little food cart that sold incredible pirogis. She passed a bar where she’d seen more than one fight break out in the parking lot, and That One Shady Convenience Store (which honestly looked much improved now that it was derelict). On the corner was that fire hydrant that burst one winter and froze a whole block. Traffic had to be diverted, stores on the street lost business – Solus, how everyone had bitched about it! To think that life in Garlemald had been so good that a burst pipe had been the worst of their problems.

And here it was now.

Though she had two eyes trained on the past, the third remained ever on the present. Laelia grabbed her shotgun and whirled as her third-sight caught the shadows shift and something lurch from around a building. The figure shambled enough that Laelia didn’t need to ask who it was; she blew its tentacled head into pulp.

A nightmare. This was a nightmare. She shouldn’t have gone on that last hunt with Valeriaux. When she woke up she’d tell him she needed a break. He’d understand.

If nothing else she’d come into the city armed to the teeth: her rifle over her back, a shotgun in her coat, two pistols on her hip. Brutus walked at her side with her ammo and a chainsaw strapped to his back. Idiot though her precious dog was, he was still a Canis Pugnax, and he could still be a creature of hard-coded instinct; he could tell they were someplace dangerous, and did not hesitate to defend Laelia. She’d always been hesitant to put a spiked collar on him, desperate to prove that he was a companion and not a threat. That’d lasted until they’d encountered their first feral pugnax here; after she put it down she looted its collar and put it on Brutus lest he get his throat torn out.

On a normal day, Brutus would have been no match for a trained war dog. But here, where he and Laelia were fed and hale and healthy, they may as well have been the Warrior of Light. They’d encountered some few tempered, some errant war machina that was already rusting -- but so few survivors. Precious few survivors. None that she’d been able to help, anyroad.

Until at last she found a way up into Midtown, a way that, with effort, Brutus would also be able to climb.

There, against all logic, all chance, Belisar in Cucina still stood. Its windows were shattered and boarded up; a refrigerator blocked the door; its rooftop had become a rampart of trash. It was there between two plywood boards that a rifle appeared upon her approach, aiming at her in sharp rebuke.

“Quis est?!” demanded a male voice. Music to her ears.

“Who’s there your fucking self,” she called back, voice cracking as she spoke.

The rifle lowered. Pater and Verina appeared alongside Tacitus, staring in disbelief.

“Laelia?” Verina breathed.

===

Laelia shook her head, lowering her soldering tool to her workbench with a bit of a startled blink. It wasn’t necessarily unusual for her to space out while working on something, but of all memories to surface then, why that one?

Well...

She considered the four circuit boards splayed out like tarot cards in front of her. Each was of identical size and length, in roughly triangular shape. Upon the tips of each she’d attached a piece of that strange Amdapori gem she and Vicky and Val had found two turns ago.

If this project panned out...she could be more like Valens, or Tacitus: someone who did something good with their life. Someone who wasn’t just a tool for destruction. It was natural to think about Valens, she supposed -- to realize how much of an unwitting influence he’d been on her.

To wonder what became of him, like so many others in her squad.

The problem, though, was that it wasn’t panning out. She was a mechanic, not a magiteknician, and this was straining the limitations of all the engineering knowledge she had. The idea was that the four healing apperati would be controlled via gestures and a neural link attached to her temples; the reality was that she couldn’t get any of them to float, let alone move an ilm in the first place. It was so damn hard to focus on all this magicky shit, even if what she was building was, at best, magic-by-proxy.

Laelia reached for her cigarette box and paused. Her eyes strayed from her project to the neural headband she’d fashioned, and from that to the box of tea Barengar had accidentally left behind the last time he’d paid her a visit. Even Barengar had been meditating lately, trying to calm that whole punch-a-guy-through-the-wall thing he had going on.

Damn Ala Mhigans and their stupid spoony meditation.

It probably meant they were right after all.

And so, with a sigh, Laelia slid out of her chair and thumped her butt right on the floor, the same way she’d seen Valens do before.