Callista was making short work of the remaining enemies.

That was bothering her.

She was more than happy to see the red dots decrease on her HUD. The spotters around the city were giving all-clear signs for their sectors and sending out emergency reserves to fight fires and dig bodies out of rubble. Even the artillery was noticeably slowing down. It was nice to have less computations to make for dodging and fighting, but it was all so strange.

The main enemy force was still sitting it out.

Callista had been playing around with the idea that they might be settling in for a siege, but she just couldn’t make that plan work out in her head. They’ve already basically leveled the place. Nearly all the defensive fortifications are in ruins. At this point they could very nearly walk in and plant a flag.

Callista knew she was doing well. The amount of MACs she managed to destroy today would make any accountant cry at the money that went up in flames, but she was certain her performance wasn’t ‘scaring off’ the enemy. So why aren’t they making the final push?

She was brought back to reality upon seeing one of the red markers erased from her screen and a green marker took its place. The call from Lionel came in almost immediately, “Callista, Jace sortied.”

“You sound worried.”

“Well… yes. A bit. You see,” Lionel’s voice came across sounding quite worried, “Guinevere is in a bit of a funk. Family issues, you could say. She managed to pass a bit of that issue on to Jace who, of course, was already in a difficult position as you know.” He paused for a while, “At any rate, he managed to defeat an enemy and, from what the spotters are relaying, he’s already moving on to the next one.”

Having Jace and Guinevere in such mental distress was disastrous. It was people like Guinevere that won battles, and Jace was her main tool at the moment. With both of them in such a state, and even Lionel sounding more scared than nervous, Callista realized she was probably the only person in a position to try to help.

However, Callista had a very hard time trying to figure out how to help people through these situations. How could she possibly talk them through their issues when she barely bothered talking in the first place. After all, Callista thought, wasn’t her attempt at cheering up Jace proof enough that she wasn’t the one for the job?

Jace.

Lionel.

Guinevere.

Callista liked all of them. And now it seemed like they were all falling apart right in front of her. No matter how hard she racked her brain, no matter how deep she searched in her soul, the only thing she could think to say was: “Is Jace ok to fight?”

There was another long silence, “He made it through one battle just now. He hasn’t even activated the new system yet. The reports coming in say it was a bit of a struggle, but I think we can at least try to believe in him. It seems like he believes in himself at any rate since he’s about to start fighting that next enemy.”

Callista hadn’t moved her MAC since their conversation began. Now she stared at her display and watched as the green and red dot were updated by the spotters.

It was over faster than his first encounter.

The green dot started moving again.

Callista tried to contact Jace, but he didn’t respond. She didn’t like it, but Lionel may be right. She might just have to put a bit of faith in him… in everyone.

She simply wasn’t the one for the job. Callista had her talents. Above all else, she was easily one of the best MAC pilots around. She simply wasn’t the sort of person that could help in these emotional situations. All she could do… the only thing she could do is hope that those three can bring themselves back from the brink.

There were only a few enemy MACs left in the surrounding area and all of them were far closer to Jace’s position. Callista started to toggle through the maps of the city. The only thing she could really do was use her experience to see if any of Jace’s potential encounters would be in unfavorable positions. She checked through defense emplacement maps and used security footage to try to see which streets would be mountains of concrete and which would still be open.

While trying to log and upload which buildings she knew were collapsed, hopefully being of some use to Jace, she saw the emergency distress beacon map. It wasn’t normally a map MAC pilots would use. It was essentially just for emergency services. But… Callista stared at the map.

The entire city was flashing. Nearly every shelter across the city was sending out a beacon. Beacons for cave ins, beacons for gas leaks, beacons for flooding. Callista felt a deep sense of horror.

This was what fighting at home meant. Losing your own at every turn. Not just soldiers, but civilians too. Every mistake she made ended up making the situation even worse. Even her good decisions may have given birth to these beacons. When she was killing the enemy and their units were going critical, more of these beacons must have started to flash.

Callista felt sick. She vomited a bit, but she still kept her eyes on the screen. Where were the emergency service teams?

Callista realized the answer was simple: there just weren’t enough of them.

Before she really knew what she was doing, she was already at one of the collapsed shelters. There was no one else there. No help for them. Callista stared at her screen again and watched as Jace’s green dot clashed with another red dot. Jace’s dot survived after a few minutes and moved on.

The red dot disappeared.

But this beacon was still on.

Callista made her decision: if the main force started moving, she would be the first to meet them, but until then she had to try to do something. Her MAC might be a weapon of war, but it would make a good enough excavator in a pinch. She tuned into the emergency services frequency and started digging through rubble.

For a while she found it hard to take her eyes off the HUD. Watching every little move that Jace’s green dot made. Maybe she was feeling guilty, but with each new clash she found herself less and less worried. Obviously something had clicked inside Jace’s head. At this rate he might even come out a proper soldier like Callista.

Callista had always thought of herself as a soldier first and foremost. It was her calling. It was what she excelled at. It was what she had always done. But seeing the faces that were practically soaked in joy as she dug them out of collapsed shelters made her smile in a way that was completely foreign to her.

Maybe for the first time, she felt like she was actually doing some good.

She wasn’t fighting threats outside of the city limits and she wasn’t on foreign soil fighting in wars she didn’t understand. This time she was right there alongside the people she wanted to protect. She knew exactly what she was doing.

The thankful faces of all those people were a nice addition as well.

It was strange. Fighting at home like this was what was bringing death and destruction to all her fellow citizens. She hated that, but it was only because she was fighting at home that she was allowed to feel this way. To actually feel like she was doing something. She tried not to think too hard about these things. She decided to focus on her new goal of helping her people. It was a good goal, and Callista felt happy for it.

Maybe when she got drunk next time with everyone, she could show them a bit of this Callista. The look on Jace’s face would be to die for. If he saw her smiling? That would be an interesting night to say the least. She giggled uncharacteristically at the thought.

Of course, this was all supposing they survived. But Callista was starting to come to a pretty solid conclusion on what was happening out there. No matter the angle she approached it from, she was just coming out to one answer: The Alley was in negotiations with Atlantea for a peaceful transfer of the city. Normally getting absorbed into The Alley would mean a death sentence, especially for pilots like Callista, but Atlantea had some good ammunition for negotiations at this point. Nearly twenty destroyed MACs would hurt any country’s wallet.

Her MAC was doing a surprisingly decent job of clearing away the rubble. Callista was starting to get the feeling that these machines weren’t just massive metallic murder monsters.

Maybe, just maybe, they could be used for some good.

Then again, Callista was nearly about to laugh at the thought. The amount of money she’s throwing away by operating a MAC like this is probably enough to make any city official cry.

Maybe firetrucks are still the way to go.

Firetrucks? Actually, Callista was starting to think that might be a pretty nice job for her. She’d get to see a lot more of these smiling faces. She was also better equipped to deal with seeing the dead, so she would probably be pretty good at carrying on when things went south. And, she realized as she saw the firefighters busting through molten doors and charging into rooms packed with toxic smoke, it was probably a job with plenty of adrenaline-inducing moments.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Callista was a great warrior. She was well aware of how valuable she was in that regard, but maybe when The Alley takes over she can go for a different job. They wouldn’t want a potentially traitorous MAC pilot anyway.

She managed to gingerly guide her arm to a fifth floor opening and watched as a child climbed on. The little girl (at least, Callista thought it was a girl, the soot made it hard to tell) wrapped her arms as far as she could around the MAC’s thumb, holding on for dear life as Callista lowered her down to the ground.

Maybe being a solider was her true calling. Maybe it was what she was best at.

But still,

Callista was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind being mediocre at her next job if she could just see stupidly happy faces like these once in a while.

She noticed an open frequency lighting up. Callista thought it may have been from a shelter that couldn’t get their distress beacon to activate so she tuned in, “People of Atlantis, we have stopped our shelling. Let us come together as the dearest of friends and put an end to this needless destruction! We could make this world a far better place by saving our comrades and your citizens from more meaningless deaths.”

The message continued to repeat and continued to sound obnoxious. Callista immediately disliked the owner of the self-satisfied voice.

She took one last look at the happy face of the little girl who was being coaxed down off her thumb by firefighters. She was very cute. Callista wondered what would happen to kids like her when this was all over.

But now wasn’t the time for those thoughts. She needed to deal with the situation at hand. No one else responded to the message, so Callista took the initiative, “Please stop the recording, your voice is insufferable. I’ll meet you at the coordinates.”

Most of the communication relays were down at this point so she was having a hard time getting back in contact with Lionel. She could only access these open channels. She hoped someone at HQ managed to hear that message and dispatch a team to start talks with the enemy.

Callista knew well enough that she wasn’t much of a negotiator.

~~~

With each fight

With each kill

Jace was getting the sneaking suspicion that he misunderstood those emotions from his first battle.

The part of Jace that wanted things to go back to normal was desperately hoping that when all of this was over, he would have nightmares and be terrified of what he was doing today.

The part of Jace that was smiling, the part of him that was reveling in the rush and drinking in the life-or-death challenge, was desperately hoping that things would never change.

Jace decided, quite rationally, to tuck these thoughts away.

He wasn’t sure who he would be when this battle was done, but for now he decided to simply enjoy this new experience in all its glory.

The MAC he had been chasing down for the last few minutes was having a harder and harder time evading him. Jace was slowly but surely turning the machine into a series of smoking holes with his laser rifle. It had pinpoint accuracy and, when he turned down the power-per-shot, the beam changed from being large enough to disintegrate the entire body of the enemy MAC to being small enough to delicately dismember it. Jace was enjoying the progressively distressed and desperate movements of the MAC as he hunted it down.

Jace turned another corner, nearly on top of the retreating beast now.

But instead of an injured and beaten enemy, he found the metal man using what little energy it had left to pounce onto Jace’s MAC.

They both went down in a mess of metallic limbs.

Two massive machines of war clawing at each other while they rolled around on the ground was almost comical. It became less comical when Jace noticed they’d rolled into one of the skyscrapers lining the street. The battered and near-broken machine was on top of Jace bringing its remaining fist down onto his cockpit over and over, shaking the world around him.

The beating wasn’t the only thing that caused the shaking. Large chunks of the building were starting to fall down on top of them. The groaning metal of the steel supports turned to screeching and then horrifying cracking.

Jace was nearly overwhelmed by the urge to panic, but his utter joy of such an outrageous fight compelled him to struggle on. When the enemy pulled back its fist for another strike, Jace flipped half a dozen switches and unleashed a volley of rockets housed in his shoulders. The explosion practically decapitated the MAC, ripping off everything above the upper torso in an explosive display of metal shards and sparking wires.

A few more switches and nudges on the control stick activated the boosters on the left side of his machine, throwing him back into the street.

Jace then had a perfect view of the sky disappearing above him. The skyscraper was tilting in and sending down a shower of glass and office supplies. He watched as the tower bit into the other skyscraper just across the street and tore its way down floor after floor until finally coming to a precarious rest.

Jace moved as quick as he could to get out from under this new canopy. He was sure that, soon enough, both of these towers would fully collapse. The shelters under both buildings had activated their distress beacons. The shelter in the now tilted skyscraper was apparently inescapable and needed assistance. The other shelter went into an automatic lockdown due to the noxious smoke released from the burning half of the enemy MAC that had drifted too close to their ventilation systems.

Jace ran a few quick diagnostics on his machine to make sure things weren’t too damaged yet. After getting the OK from the onboard computer he started making his way toward the last remaining enemy that had been spotted in the city.

Saving the people in those shelters wasn’t a job for him, Jace realized. MACs were built for war after all.

Most of the resupply points were now in ruins, the few that were still standing were on the other side of the city. Jace had wasted too much of the charge on his laser rifle and only had a few shots left at best. His main arm with the cannon didn’t have much ammo left either and, more worryingly, the barrel was visibly drooping from overheating and certainly no longer reliable.

A handful of rocket and missile batteries and a few hundred shots for his shoulder mounted autocannons was all he was left with.

But a giant metal monster can kill without weapons as long as you get close enough. Beating the enemy into submission with that main cannon shouldn’t prove to be too difficult. The main issue was actually the busted-up armor plating. Plenty of piping and tubing had been turned into mincemeat by this point. Complex internal mechanisms were suddenly assaulted by the smoke, flames, and debris of a crumbling city. The diagnostics screen showed fluid levels dropping at an abnormal pace. The white and grey chunks of armor were slowing being painted in streaks of black and rainbow-reflective fluid as the busted pipes spewed chemicals of all kinds out onto the machine.

Jace kept one of his split fingers hovering over the button that would insert the cord into his head. He wasn’t sure if it would help, but he planned on using everything at his disposal to bury this next MAC.

The marker on his map hadn’t moved in quite some time. Jace did a bit of digging in the system to pull up a defense emplacement map and overlay it. Two of the three paths the enemy could have taken to get to that spot were liberally coated with medium sized defense turrets. Jace had a renewed sense of elation as he realized his final fight would be between two busted up and crumbling machines.

This, Jace knew, this would be a test of pure skill.

Who would be the better pilot?

Who would be the better fighter?

Who would kill whom?

Jace turned the corner and fired off both main weapons. The laser’s output was maxed out and the shot was wide enough to cover the whole four-lane street. The shell thrown out of his cannon went erratically off course, but the dust that was kicked up, when mixed with the suffocating smoke, made it impossible to see even a few meters.

Even if the melted enemy beast could lash out with its dying breath it wouldn’t hit anything.

But, Jace’s perfect plan had a fatal flaw, as tends to happen to those that make plans in the midst of their own bloodthirst. One of the maps Jace neglected to check would have shown him the status of watchtowers across the city. All of which were destroyed in this sector. The marker on the map was stationary due to it being the last known location, not due to the enemy being immobilized.

Jace had no time to think these things through. Instead, the back of his machine was very nearly blown open, sending sharpened spears of torn machinery from the back to the front of the cockpit, completely destroying the monitors to Jace’s left and right. Only the reinforced ejection chair stopped the debris from skewering Jace and his main monitor.

Jace’s MAC was thrown forward with all the force of a tempest and the compromised cockpit filled with the choking poison of the burning hellscape that was the city. A well-placed outstretched arm kept the cockpit from feeling the full force of the fall. Instead, the metal man was propped up on two knees and the arm that had now dropped the laser rifle.

Jace’s mind was no longer his own. It started to operate without any real cogent thought. It simply moved in the ways that would ensure survival.

It became the mind of a warrior.

He detached the cannon arm and the sudden shift of weight rolled his MAC onto its back. It was still impossible to see anything, doubly so due to the streaks of blood that now poured down from his head. His machine had rolled right over the cannon, flattening it, but it was now sitting within easy reach of his remaining arm.

His main monitor was now essentially useless. The eye-watering smoke had fully consumed his cockpit and rendered Jace virtually blind. He pressed the SOS button, and it did two things: it lit up his position with a distress beacon and it also blew out the frontal armor of the cockpit for an emergency escape or, more often, pilot corpse recovery.

The smoke didn’t change, but now it was truly an endless sea in front of him. However, rather than smoke being the main worry, it was the heat that now assaulted Jace. Without the barrier of that frontal armor, the heat of the melting city poured directly onto Jace. He shut his eyes, but they still felt as if they were burning. His pilot suit did little to hold back the elements. If anything, it felt as if the specialized fabric was being welded onto his skin. Some small and distant part of Jace wondered if they would be able to get the suit off when they recovered his body.

The rest of Jace was purely focused on one thing: sound. The enemy MAC had been slowly approaching but was obviously unsure of the state of Jace’s own machine. The movements were cautious. Well, as cautious as an eighty-ton weapon of war can be.

The machine came to a sudden stop. To Jace, it seemed as if the whole world had frozen in time. Somehow the roaring flames and steady gas explosions faded into nothing more than background noise. Static. The only thing that mattered was the next sound from the approaching steel beast.

The first step came down with much more force, literally shaking Jace in his seat, and the second step came soon after.

It was running now.

Charging forward like a wild animal set on finishing off its weakened prey.

Jace, long ago, had heard of people going boar hunting. There was a technique where you would surround the boar’s habitat and wait for a comrade to scare it. When it came charging out, mad with rage and fear, you would plant the butt of your spear in the ground and let the boar impale itself.

The barrel of the cannon, by some miracle, was sturdy enough to not simply bend or snap when the MAC came running into it. Instead, it punctured the cockpit of the machine, being pushed through the thick armor plating by the sheer weight and speed of the enemy.

Jace held his breath for the explosion or the ultimate crushing weight as the enemy fell onto him, but it didn’t come.

Jace’s consciousness faded as he heard the screeching of tires nearby.

Days later, when the smoke had cleared and a recovery team was sent to attend to the MACs, they were greeted by a wretchedly beautiful monument. Two MACs that were little more than internal support frames and loosely hanging armor plates, with hoses and piping slithering out like snakes from a corpse, were frozen in time. Stalled in that final moment with one on its back holding a cannon-turned-makeshift spear and the other with two empty mechanical hands outstretched and desperately trying to reach the last few meters for a killing blow.

To those that had never seen a battle between MACs before, it looked frighteningly animalistic. Not at all like the pirouettes and tour en l’airs that they had come to expect from the ballet-like dances against hypersonic missiles.

This was savage and disgusting.

And yet, the two MACs locked in such a violent scene still seemed to possess a beauty of their own.