Darkness met Emilia, pure and unbending. The world was gone, the door she had entered from—as disgusting as it had been—banished into the void.

The void—the unending, unerring darkness and silence—was better than what came after.

Sound exploded around Emilia, a battlefield ripped straight from her memories crackling back into existence. There were no people here—no allies to protect or get in her way. All that occupied this land, save her, were the monsters of war—those of physical flesh and guilt alike. At least, it had only been her until others had arrived, many of them destined to die during this particular fight.

So far into the latter decade of the war, several of the monsters they faced had been ginormous —larger than even the tallest buildings of Piketown were, their eyes stories tall and bulging out of their deformed heads. Where the monsters who had come before these monstrosities had been sleek and terrible, these were simply ugly and disturbing.

Why and how the monsters changed was yet another question, unanswered after three decades of dealing with war and the echos that followed.

These mutations had by far been the worst, however. Dangerous and dumb, they had also been nearly impossible to kill the first few times they’d shown up, a single wrong move and their hulking form could smash even the most powerful of soldiers into a pile of flesh, oozing out across the world and the monster’s skin—giving them more power they didn’t need.

Emilia glared up at the monster—at the Giant of Andir—a timer sparking to life in the corner of her vision: 10:00.

Ten minutes—she had faced down this monster for ten minutes alone during the penultimate year of the war. Alone and fearless and angry, even she hadn’t been able to defeat it. Ten minutes for reinforcements to arrive because no matter what she tried, she couldn’t kill it—not by herself.

It had taken less than a minute for the first of her allies to die, snatched up in a giant hand and squeezed until their head popped off, their friends and allies staring dumbstruck. It had been fast, at least—so fast that no one had even been able to try to interfere. One moment they were there, a moment later gone.

The fight went on—with every death, the war went on. There had been talk, during the early days of the war, when the deaths had come fast and heavy and surrounded by stupid decisions, that eventually soldiers would get used to all the death. Eventually, soldiers would view death as just another normal part of war.

The Blood Rain General, one of the few living people who had experienced a full-scale Colonial War, had disagreed. “If our soldiers become heartless to the deaths of their comrades, we will have bigger problems come the end of the war than we have with these monstrosities,” he had said, his dark eyes staring over the congregated diplomats—people from the highest reaches of Baalphorian government and all the Free Colonies currently affected by the war, or dragged in due to one treaty or another.

A few Free Colonies joined because of larger, moral obligations: kindness, beliefs that everything is connected, a love and affection for the world despite the conflict that had driven millennia of their shared history.

Most only cared once the war had touched their borders.

“Then we will deal with that when this war is over,” the then head of the Alliance had growled. It was equally stupid and admirable of them—the Blood Rain General scared most people shitless, and for good reason. They hadn’t lasted long as the head, forced out by the quiet refusal of the Blood Rain General and his home colony—as well as a handful of Free Colonies who had been unwilling to risk his ire—to entertain their nonsense.

“I doubt it,” the ancient man had replied quietly, refusing to expand on his words as he left the meeting behind, one of the young women who had accompanied the Dionese delegation to the meeting scurrying after him—it wouldn’t be until the war was over that anyone, even her closest allies and friends, would realize just who she was within the Dion Dynasty.

Across the room, one delegate, from a tiny Free Colony south of the Grey Sands, had objected to the man’s rudeness. Then, a skill had cracked through the air and the delegate’s chair had collapsed under them. The Blood Rain General and the woman walked on.

It hadn’t taken long for it to become clear what the Blood Rain General had meant, however. Soldiers became colder to death, yes, but there were few who ever reached the point of complete apathy for their fallen comrades. Nearly two decades in, people still broke when they watched their friend’s die—still froze up when death came for the people they had trained beside one after another.

The Blood Rain General had doubted they would need to deal with the apathy of broken soldiers after the war because he knew that apathy was nearly impossible to attain, no matter how hard some people tried to turn their hearts to stone.

Maybe that was why the government had become so obsessed with breaking bonds of friendship between teammates: if you didn’t like or even know the people dying around you, perhaps you wouldn’t care as much.

People always cared, and even as more units showed up to try and fight the Giant of Andir, their members having never crossed paths before, morale dropped, and dropped, and dropped. Soldiers were splatted out of the sky like the bugs they were, their skills barely leaving marks across its skin, and the strangers fighting alongside them mourned.

Some people, like Ri, Helix and Olivier, had fared better, their attacks brutal and punching holes into the giant. It still hadn’t been enough to take it out, and in the end, James had almost burnt himself out using skills that left him unmovable and vulnerable, his best friend nearly dying trying to stop his core from exploding and levelling the area. A dozen people died protecting the pair of them alone, and then another support had given up their life repairing James’ volatile aetherstores.

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James was worth more than them. Everyone knew it. Only they would voice it, never James himself.

It was no wonder the man had retreated to his home colony, tucking himself away inside his house and rarely emerging. Emilia had only seen one picture of him since the war, taken barely a year earlier at his eldest niece’s birthday. There had been so many pictures from that night, forced upon her by Rafe. James had only been in one, looking worn out and far older than his identical twin. Could they even be considered identical anymore? Emilia wasn’t sure on that.

Emilia glared up at the Giant of Andir. It hadn’t noticed her yet, but as the War Censor the raid had brought back into existence for her whirred to life, it seemed to realize something wasn’t quite right.

Hundreds of times—Emilia had replayed this battle hundreds of times. Seven hundred and thirty-two, to be exact. She’d run through it inside the training simulator, Ri, Helix and Olivier occasionally joining her because none of them could let this night go.

There had to have been something they could have done differently—some strategy or skill that would have aided them in winning, in sparing the dozens of lives that had been lost that night. It had been the single worst battle in years, and a single monster had been the cause. There must have been a way they could have won without James nearly killing himself.

There hadn’t been—not then.

It had been comforting, in a way, for them to realize that no matter what they did—no matter how many things they did differently—the result would have been the same. People would have died, no matter what. James had needed to push himself that hard, no matter what.

The Giant of Andir had been the first of its kind—a surprise that they hadn't known how to face. A monster they couldn’t conquer without a death toll.

It was comforting, frustrating, and most importantly, inspiring.

New skills had popped out of that night, and hundreds of rounds of testing later, most of their unit had been capable of using the skills necessary to destroy those giants. Of course, by the last years of the war, the monsters were mutating so quickly that they’d rarely been offered the chance to use their new techniques against those giants.

The reality was, by the final days of the war, the Giant of Andir was nothing. The few giants who had popped out in the final battle were wiped off the planet with nary a thought, Censors casting skills designed to destroy them from the inside out like they were now the bugs being swatted away.

Nuisances to be given only the barest of thoughts.

In those last days, their unit members were the monsters of war.

Emilia examined her Censor. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as awesome as the setup she’d used during the war was. They'd had their CierSuits during the war, though, designed to keep their brains and cores from burning out with the skills they forced upon their bodies—although even those suits could only protect them so much.

As a result of her lack of CierSuit was, her Censor’s abilities had been reduced. It wasn’t so much that she wouldn’t be able to destroy this thing in the nine minutes remaining on the timer, it was just that it wouldn’t be quite so easy.

It would actually require a little thought, annoyingly.

Still fine. It hadn’t been that long since she left the kids, a couple of minutes wouldn’t make a difference.

It would—or could—of course, but Emilia… Emilia wasn’t thinking about that as her Censor offered up to her what it could: a collection of skills for killing this thing, but on the slower side. No skill that slipped through the aether itself to create a bomb inside the thing, a powerful technique that had unfortunately only been usable on it and one other variety, due to how powerful their shells were: you couldn’t just go around blowing up enemies with toxic blood, not unless their shells were virtually indestructible.

This one’s was: the whole problem with fighting the Giant of Andir had been how difficult it was to penetrate its shell. Small injuries had limited effectiveness, especially when it took heavy and aether intensive skills to even inflict those small injuries.

So they’d reduced the cost of those skills, skimming them down into brutal shots that barely took a second thought. It would still take hundreds of shots to kill a giant, but a single member of their unit could do it alone with the refactored skills. Then, they’d had to lock those skills down, just like they had so many other skills they’d created over the decades of war.

That had been a terrible realization: that many of the skills they had worked so hard to create couldn’t be widely distributed. They were too dangerous. They would save lives on the battlefield, but after that? After that… no one had been willing to risk those skills getting out, set loose for criminals and the more hostile and authoritarian Free Colonies to utilize in wars against their enemies—against innocent civilians.

The Blood Rain General had been right: the consequences for the things done to win the war would have long-lasting consequences. They needed to be careful of what they made public, lest the world the war left behind be a mangled, unfixable thing.

It hadn’t been unfixable, however, no one could argue that even the skills that had made their way to the public had changed the way people functioned in the world. The criminal organizations that had arisen in the days following the war—yes, it had literally only taken days for new organizations to pop up—were nothing like those that were burnt out and disbanded during the war. That was only with what had been made public, and Emilia feared what the world would become if some of their more terrifying creations were ever leaked.

No one in their unit would ever do that—not purposefully, anyways. Everyone knew some organizations—whether The Black Knot or various criminal organizations or a collection of Free Colonies—had ways to force information about of people. That was part of why most of their unit had kept their identities a secret, even when they could have faced the world to acclaim and fame.

Nettie and Olivier were the most famous Baalphorians of those who had publicly outed themselves, and both had private security. Even then, Emilia worried about their safety. She read the news—had heard from Rafe about people arrested for stalking Nettie. Allegedly, they were fans. Some probably were. Not all of them.

Even now, her Censor setting up a sequence of skills for her to take this monster of her memory down, Emilia worried. Someone could be watching. Someone could swipe up the skills she used and leak them through the aethernet to the general public—to people who were more likely to blow themselves up because they wouldn’t understand the manual tweaks that needed to be done to their Censor before they could use the skills. That had been an added security measure, just in case they ever did get out.

Better to blow up a few civilians than risk criminals getting their hands on this stuff.

{Star Shoot ver. Halo} shuddered out of the aether, a ring of stars surrounding the Giant of Andir in a constellation of mirrored points. It finally looked towards her, huge eyes spinning like they weren’t connected to anything inside its brainless head.

“Hello there,” Emilia said by way of greeting, giving it a tiny wave before a thousand beams of light exploded through the aether, splintering through the monster.