It was getting late, people were getting tired, and I was getting worried. This was our last 'suicide run', throwing ourselves up against the prepared defenses all through the greater Tokyo area now. This was it, the final, big shot we were taking, against the advice of our friends in Hibakusha, who had gone back underground since our single contact.

It was kind of awful. Not just because of the normal stress of getting ready to face what could very well be death for myself or the others, but also because of what had happened to the city, what we'd done to the formerly-peaceful neighborhoods around Tokyo.

Our faces were plastered on the news constantly. Military and police walked the streets, roads were barricaded, schools and stores were shut down, all because of the insane terrorist group on the loose. All because of us.

And while none of us were superfluously destructive, there had been some collateral when we couldn't avoid it. Athan's blades burned bright, and old, stained wood was all-too-eager to burn. Karu's missiles, smart as they were, would slam into structures, especially if they were currently being used for cover. And more than once, I'd crashed right through a wall, leveraging my superior durability and strength to take routes our enemies couldn't.

The damage was gradual, but soul-destroying. Where once we'd looked out and enjoyed the trees and sky on a walk together in this new, foreign land, now we saw the all-too-familiar signs of war and strife. I thought Athan was taking it hard, even though he wasn't showing it.

He was just all-in on being focused on our last run. This one was going to be a little different, given that we had Lia and Tem in the field, we were all staying together. With luck, it'd be fast and easy, but we hadn't had a ton of good luck recently.

"It's time," I said, walking up to him. I almost regretted doing so; he looked exhausted. His clothes were cut and stained from a thousand scrapes, and too long without sleep and riding the stims had taken the color from his face. Still, at my words, he didn't hesitate, rocking slowly to his feet without my help.

"Hopefully we can rest after this," he said, giving me a reassuring smile that didn't reflect in his dark eyes. I returned the gesture, wanting nothing more but to tell him it was alright, he didn't have to do this, we could run...to Hokkaido, maybe. Somewhere they wouldn't be looking for us. Just spend a few days putting him back together.

But that wasn't how plans worked. And as far as plans went, this was one of the few I thought we still had open to us. I just silently appreciated him for working as hard as he was, and went to rouse the others.

Saga was already up of course, but she looked anything but chipper. She'd taken the existence of the toads somewhat personally, which I thought was just a personal failing at this point. Not being unable to affect them...technology was always marching forward and I knew that might happen sooner than later, or at least something like it. But the fact that, no matter how many times we fought them, she'd still try to blast them out, wasting her time and ours and endangering us all, it smacked of her petty ego.

"Ready?" I asked, trying not to let my emotions on that show. Not that I needed to worry, Saga absolutely sucked at reading emotions as far as I knew. Which made sense.

"Ready as I'll ever be. Hate this place," she commented from her back.

Karu was next, looking over Tem. She looked a bit better than Athan, but still worn-down. I had to suspect that she was somewhat used to this kind of sporadic stop-and-go fighting from her service...but I also had yet to meet a soldier who actively enjoyed that kind of lifestyle.

"We're getting ready to go," I informed them, and Karu turned and nodded at me, already in her armor though with the visor at her feet. She was seated in a broken desk, leaning over Tem on a dusty table. I wondered if the two of them had been talking.

"Shall we?" Karu asked gently, and Tem gave a small nod. While the rest of us were going on fumes, Tem was relatively well-rested, maybe even in better shape than when we'd lost her. She'd been intravenously fed and cooped up in her cell...and whatever issues she was still experiencing was nothing compared to her unadulterated joy at being back with Athan.

Though we had to walk a fine line with her because he really did need to rest without her interference, but if we told her that, she went crazy depressive on us and volunteered to die to remove the distraction. She kinda needed constant managing, and that's why Karu was babysitting. Say what you would about her, but that woman had absolutely limitless patience when she needed to.

And that finally brought me full-circle around the classroom back to Lia, apparently asleep in the corner facing the blacked-out windows. As I approached, she glanced up at me.

"I'm already awake," she lamented, all traces of her sparkling personality extinguished.

"We're almost through it," I reminded her.

She said nothing, just brought her knees in close and stared at the black windows.

And that was what we had to work with at the moment. Myself and these five horrendously broken people. It made me wonder what real military ops felt like in the moments before. How had actual soldiers felt and bore themselves before jumping out of the trenches or running up the shore or diving out of a VTOL? Was it always dread and exhaustion? If I were a better caretaker, would they be putting on false laughter and cracking wise right now?

I didn't know, and I couldn't, so I put it out of my mind. I thought of our first hours in Japan, of Athan not even knowing how to use a toilet, of our inexpert attempts at ordering food by pointing through a display case. It seemed impossibly long ago. Now those memories just brought up images of flashing muzzles and steely, bored-looking eyes, set in bodies that moved too fast and killed too readily.

"AEGIS?" Athan asked, and I realized he was standing by me. I looked around, and they all were.

"Yeah. Let's go."

Athan led us to the door but then stopped, all of us colliding and bumbling around as he turned to face us. One-by-one, he looked into each of our faces, spending the last and longest time on his sister.

"Last run, guys," he said, his voice stronger and clearer than it was a minute ago. "We all know how this works now, and I don't want anyone getting sloppy and getting hurt when we're almost through. It'll be dangerous, but that's nothing new for any of us. Stay safe, stay smart, stay alert, and we'll all pull through together. All clear?"

Tem, Karu, and Saga at least gave a hooah! while Lia and just kinda stood there nodding and looking stupid. Athan gave us an apologetic grin and then turned back to the hallway, leading us further down with his exoframe whining with every step.

And I just felt like...goddamn. I could have said that, or something close to that when I was rounding everyone up. But I didn't, because at the end of the day, no matter how hard I tried, there were always going to be things Athan was just better than me at. And you'd bet your ass that leadership was one of them -- there was a reason we were all following him, after all, not me. And seeing that...seeing the extra little spring in everyone's step after the speech...it wasn't even that good a speech, it was the fact that he stopped and made one, that he was the kind of guy who cared and who would...that kind of shit got me falling in love with him all over again. It just wasn't fair.

I dialed back those indices just a smidge so they wouldn't rise up in the middle of our op as I prepared to make the final call. We reached the end of the hall and the stairs, and Athan took us up instead of down.

"Hello, police?" I spoke into my comms in a voice which wasn't mine. There was a moment while they switched to English for me and then I was asked the nature of my emergency. "Hi, I'm outside the Okutama High School, and I just saw those wanted criminals that are on the news. They just went in the front door."

Athan led us up another two flights of stairs as I talked, finally cutting open the door at the end with his powers and leading us all out onto the roof. It was a broad, flat roof without any sort of fence or ledge at the edges, never intended as an open area for students, though the amount of empty drinks and grafitti up here made it clear how successful that policy was.

I made up some more information for the dispatcher, and when she was done and had told me to get far from the school as I could, I hung up and we all stayed standing.

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Invisible, of course. A recon team or even a gunboat would have picked us up in thermal in a heartbeat, but so far, they'd stuck to deploying strike teams only, alongside light armor. We hoped this time would be no different.

And then we all waited.

Minutes seemed to crawl by, even though we only had precious few of them. I couldn't even see the expressions of the others, they were just a hazy red glow to my imprecise optics. But still, to the others, I guess it probably felt like standing here completely alone. Except Tem I guess. And Saga.

What I wouldn't have given to have Saga's powers right now and be able to see what everyone was thinking, to be able to know the right things to say to abate everyone's worries. Instead I was just standing here useless, like a shrub. At least it wasn't cold tonight.

And then...I waited more. And longer, as nothing continued happening forever. I checked my internal clock, it'd only been two minutes, but Jesus, had it felt like more. Just standing here was driving me crazy.

And then I realized, it wasn't any fault of mine or ours that everyone was tense and beaten-down. That was just another casualty of war. I was deluding myself thinking that people would be joking around in the moments before a battle...or even if they did, it's because they all felt like this, this pit of dread gnawing at them from inside.

I had a moment of supreme connectedness with every other soldier who'd ever lived. Maybe even the XPCA in the vehicles coming for us right now. They knew that a lot of them had already died facing us down, and they had no reason to expect differently tonight. I'm sure many of them felt the same gnawing, the same wonder...will I be coming home tonight? Will I be one of the lucky ones? Will the plan hold together?

My reverie was finally broken my a whisper. "There," Karu said, her armor shuffling as she pointed uselessly. I scanned the dark sky but found little...stars, city lights…

And then I saw it. A dark hole in the sky, where stars would disappear as it crept. It was unrecognizable as anything but a blob at of blackness at this point, but we'd seen it at least. We'd be ready.

Before long, Karu pointed out another, and then another, her optics apparently sufficient to pick out the VTOLs even in darkness at extreme range. We tensed, I could sense that even without seeing, and the craft drew in ever closer.

They were on us shockingly fast. They moved so rapidly, but more, they were deadly silent. Usually a VTOL would announce itself with its turbofans but not these. It felt like one moment they were distant, indistinct blobs and then the next, so close I could read the writing on their flanks.

The first craft to arrive split open, ropes erupting from the sides of the VTOL ahead and above us, and a dozen dark shapes slid down them towards the ground in front of the school. Only seconds behind, the second did the same, the men moving with such synchronized precision it was like watching droplets shaken from the edges of a leaf.

And then from behind, a dull whisper as a VTOL crested the building, lights off, fans silent, the cables slapped onto the rooftop near us and writhed like snakes as the passengers disembarked. We stood tense and ready as the men landed, taking their feet near us and not hesitating for a moment to put their guns in their arms and secure the door.

"The door has been breached, location is not secure," one soldier said, his voice coming out synthesized through his suit.

The others fanned out as the first two VTOLs began to pick up and haul away. The third remained for a few moments longer.

And in those moments, before the XPCA soldiers returned and stumbled right into us, each of us grabbed a rope and held fast. Lia had a pair of clamps, one in her hand and the other in Tem's, which they used to lock themselves to the cables. Athan wound the rope around his elbow and forearm...a bit bizarre looking given that he was invisible and the rope wasn't, but Tem corrected that after a moment.

There were more sounds of ropes moving as Karu got Saga situated and then herself, the only one who could both see and act readily, and as for me, I just grabbed hold.

And then it felt like the ground just left us. The VTOL went up and away, the cables retracting as the rooftop flew off, faster than any of us could have expected.

I heard Saga muttering something but none of us had comms on so that we were harder to trace. I frowned and reviewed the captured data, amplifying her voice even as I climbed up my rope ahead of the others.

"...picked up on the weight..." she'd said. That wasn't unexpected, and it was her job to make sure that if the crew were going to detect us, they didn't, instead.

Which was kind of a big ask, given how many toads there were among the XPCA's ranks right now. If one of them were in the wrong spot above us right now and they figured us out…

Well, Karu might survive the fall, if she wasn't shot down. Saga would. That was about it. And while our odds were good that there wasn't a bad person in the wrong spot...it felt insane to have all of our lives literally hanging in the balance over it.

Which is why I was scared to piss when I saw, through thermal, Saga and Athan and Lia suddenly twitch in unison. That kind of synchronicity always meant code-X bullshit was afoot, and there wasn't any good kind of that in our current situation.

"There's a toad up there," Athan informed us, his voice barely carrying over the wind whipping past. I felt my heart sinking and my mind scrambling for backup plans as soon as I heard it.

It was supposed to be a clean getaway. That was the hope anyway. These VTOL were the fastest thing they had, and if we got a head-start, we'd be away from Japan before they could scramble anything to pick us up. But that wouldn't work if we had to shoot our way into the craft...if we even got up there at all.

"What do I do?" Saga asked, though I could barely hear her, and so nobody else did.

"Saga's asking what to do," I repeated.

"What are they doing?" Lia asked. "Up there."

"Nothing yet," I relayed for Saga. "The toad isn't on any instruments that'd detect us, he's just doing his job and so are the others, for the moment."

"But once we get up there…" Lia added, looking up nervously. The cables were still slowly retracting, but we had a lot less time and room than it felt like we needed.

"If we can get close enough without being detected, I can cut him out," Athan shouted.

"The others will react," I said. "The VTOL might even go down."

"Can you engage the autopilot?" I asked Saga. "And then put them all under?"

"Only if you can tell me which of the fucktillion buttons it is," she bitched back. I sighed and rolled my eyes. She sure was a lot more pissy recently, and between that and her diminished usefulness, I was finding it harder and harder to justify keeping her around. At least Tem could follow orders without lip.

Tem. It was hard to remember that we suddenly had her on-hand. I considered the new possibilities with her onboard, and then grinned wickedly.

"Okay. Karu, you and I are going to detatch. You hover there for...let's say six seconds, and then dive in and take over the controls. I'll handle the toad. Tem, make it pitch black up there, and Saga, knock 'em out."

"And me?" Athan asked.

I couldn't exactly hang off my rope and give his cheeks a pinch, but I gave it my best shot, missing him only by eight or nine feet. "You hang out and look pretty, stud."

He scowled at me and I laughed again, but we were out of time, the ropes would be retracted in the next fifteen or twenty seconds, and we needed the toad incapacitated before he found us all scrambling to get in. "Saga, Tem--go!" I shouted, and threw myself up the cable at max speed.

Karu was opposite me, and broke off from her rope, flying upward, wobbling a few moments as she got her jetpack stabilizing her to match the speed of the VTOL. Which...she couldn't, she began floating away as though cast overboard in our wake, her engines roaring at maximum pitch to try to keep up.

It didn't matter. She'd served the purpose I needed. I finished my upwards flip, landing on my feet inside the craft and righting myself. As I'd hoped, through thermal, everyone was just a slumped-over blob in the dark, everyone except one, who was standing at the opposite door, listening for Karu.

I kicked him in the back of the head, full-force, and he went spiralling out of the bay, his arms and legs askew like a starfish as he whipped past Karu and towards the ground a hundred feet below.

I shouted for Tem to turn the lights back on and pulled the pilot out of his chair. It took several tries, but I eventually got the VTOL to slow, which let Karu come in and actually know how to pilot the thing. The rest came aboard without incident, and Athan even thanked me for a successful plan.

And then we had a brief discussion on what to do with the other passengers before we outvoted Athan and decided to shove them overboard.

"We won't even wake them?" he lamented, looking down at the face of the pilot and co-pilot through their helmets. Unlike the soldiers, they weren't in exosuits, which I think was making it easier for him to sympathize with them.

"Oh they'll wake up," Saga confirmed. "Ever had a dream where you were suddenly falling?"

Athan shivered and I gave her a glare.

"We're losing fuel because of them," Lia confirmed. "Empty VTOLs can move a lot further than full ones, and if we want to make it all the way to China without crashing, we'll probably need every drop we can get."

I saw Athan thinking, and could see the gears in his head turning. Enemy combatant or not, these were helpless people he was sending to their deaths. And we kind of needed to, we needed to go as fast and as far as possible before the other thousands of VTOL out there caught our scent and turned this from a flight into a fight.

He knew. He wasn't arguing, just doing his best to come up with any alternative he could. But there wasn't much of one, just varying shades of bad.

"You don't have to do it," I told him as he got up. "And it's dangerous. Let me."

He shook his head at me. "The least I can do is do it myself. These men and women deserve to be mourned.

"I can mourn them," I protested. "I'm not crazy about killing them either, it's just what's necessary." But Athan steered me back into my seat and gave me a brief kiss on the top of the head, before going back and beginning to drag the bodies by himself.

I watched, feeling useless and wondering how each body weighed on him as he systematically unbuckled them, hauled them to the door, and after a moment, rolled them out into the whipping winds.

He'd been so strong recently, had made so many hard decisions, and had made them well. And even so, he'd clung to his compassion, somehow.

But the two were in opposition, more and more, and I had to wonder how long before one of them broke the other. It wasn't something I wanted to discover. And I was glad we were on our way out of Japan.