~January 8th, 140 AH~

~Joint Base Akra, Main Headquarters, Conference Hall~

Upwards of fifty pairs of eyes turned to Zelen in unison as he barged into the room. Seeing this, the young Reiter’s first reaction was relief.

He was breathing hard, having sprinted through the last few hallways. He didn’t know exactly why he’d run, but somewhere along the way, halfway between Colonel Shiranui’s office and the Main HQ, he’d been seized by an irrational fear. Fear that the meeting was a sham, yet another rug-pull, and that the General would instead be plotting more ways to keep him in the dark—more ways to exploit him and his Spiegel.

As such, it was a massive relief to see fifty odd pairs of eyes—as young, old, mystified, or skeptical as they might’ve been—choose him as their centre of attention. The turnout certainly befit the occasion. Here, the General had nowhere to hide.

The conference hall was composed of three sections: a thin rectangular committee table that took up the entire elevated section at the front of the room, a smaller testimony table that faced the committee, and U-shaped rows of desks that wrapped around the latter.

Zelen’s own gaze first went toward the audience, scanning the U for familiar figures. One figure in particular he normally identified by height rather than facial features, but Makiri Shiranui was nowhere to be seen. He’d heard through the grapevine that an emergency summons had gone out to recall all Reiters from their current deployments. Evidently, Spindrift hadn’t yet made it back from his. Disappointing, but it didn’t change what Zelen had to do.

Next, he looked over the faces and uniforms perched atop the committee table.

Commanders of the Jaeger and Panzer Corps. Several Colonels from the Reiter Regiment, long retired from combat duty. Fenix Duodecim himself, of course, wearing his unseemly smile, even at a time like this. A much younger man beside him; was that… Ghata Vakta? With crossed sabres freshly stitched onto his shoulders. The man’s promotion was news to Zelen, one that washed over him without much effect. After Colonel Vakta, there were a few more faces he didn’t recognize, and then—

Zelen did a double take, hardly believing his own eyes. There, sitting at the far end of the committee table was his own father, Gerech Athelstan.

The elderly man was one of only several in the room dressed in civvies. Gerech now returned Zelen’s look of surprise with a dour frown of his own. His expression didn’t change even after their eyes met, showing no real reaction to having caught sight of his son for the first time in nearly two years.

After the initial shock wore off, Zelen quickly decided that his father’s presence here was a matter of course. Gerech was the incumbent Chancellor, after all, and even if the Council presided over Akropolis only in name, their inclusion in a meeting of this magnitude was to be expected.

Silence stretched for some time, punctuated only by Zelen’s breathing and a few coughs around the room. Then, again as a matter of course, the General was the first to speak.

“You need time to catch your breath, son, or are we ready to kick things off?”

“I’m ready,” Zelen said simply, and meant it.

“Good enough,” Fenix remarked, then beckoned toward the testimony table with a flick of his chin. “Take a seat, Lieutenant, so we can swear you in.”

“Swear me in?” Zelen raised an eyebrow. “What is this? Am I being court-martialed?”

“Of course not. It’s just protocol. To authenticate your… statements.”

Zelen considered this for a moment, but his mind was already made up.

“I’d rather remain standing, thanks. And if you don’t mind, I’ll give my sit rep from here, where I can address the whole room. I don’t care if the committee signs off on it or not. It doesn’t change what needs to be done. By me. By you. By all of us.”

Barely suppressed murmurs flowed and ebbed. For the first time since Zelen’s arrival, looks were exchanged amongst the attendees, with some lingering on the General. Through it all, Fenix’s smile never wavered, and his eyes remained fixed on his prized young warrior.

“Go on then, son,” he eventually said, with nary a shift in tone. “Tell us what you saw on your excursions, and what you seem so convinced needs to be done about it.”

Zelen did. He spared few details as he recounted his globe-trotting journey, of the remnant Syntropy he’d flushed out and exterminated, and of his chilling discovery at the planet’s southern terminus. He even gave a blow-by-blow account of his fight against the Vendetta unit, intent on impressing upon his captive audience the sheer danger it represented, and therefore the force and resolve required to meet its threat.

“—with all that in mind, I hereby request the immediate formation and deployment of a strike team. Myself and Spindrift to begin with, then I’d say… at least five more experienced Reiters. Major Shiranui’s absence today is inopportune, but I’ll be sure to personally brief him as soon as he returns to base. If we can fly out within the next three days, I’d say that gives us a reasonable chance to—”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Fenix cut in, his mask unchanged, “for that in-depth report. Certainly gives us a lot to think about. I foresee some busy days ahead for all of us. Collima”—he turned toward a member of the audience: his own nephew—“what’s the current status on proto-Reiter conversion?”

“Sir!” Captain Collima Duodecim sat up straight with a stricken look, clearly caught off guard by his own inclusion in the proceedings. “We just had eight graduates from last year’s class. They should be going off on their first missions within a month or so.”

“And this year?”

“This year, sir? I mean, we’re only a week in, but… yes, I’d say there are a few promising cadets. Expect maybe… anywhere from five to ten conversions?”

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“Excellent. Keep up the good work. Ishmael”—the General now leaned forward to seek out the Panzer Commander who sat on one end of the committee table—“Sector Libra. The Extreme South. What do you reckon? Think your scout drones could handle it?”

Even a seasoned officer of the Panzer Corps looked obviously discomfited by the General’s direct address. The older man cleared his throat to buy time, which gave enough of an opening for Zelen to re-insert himself.

“General,” he cut in, voice slightly raised despite the calmness he tried to portray, “what does any of this have to do with the task at hand? Proto-Reiters? Scout drones? The Mothership is being rebuilt as we speak! The time to strike was five days ago, when I first discovered it. No, even before that. We’re losing—”

“Shush, son. Give your vocal cords a well-deserved break and let the rest of us do the talking for a while. You know I get antsy when I don’t hear the sound of my own voice for longer than a minute. Ishmael, you were saying?”

“Yes, about scouting in the Extreme South. We’ll need to… collaborate with the Jaegers and make some adjustments to the existing design, but it should be doable. With… with some Reiter support, ideally?”

“Ask and you shall receive. We got a time estimate on this, or…?”

“I’d say…” The Panzer coughed again before venturing, “Ei—six months?”

“Six months?” Zelen blurted, incredulous. “With all due respect, sir, we don’t have six months. We’d be giving the Syntropy a chance to reinforce themselves, shore up their defenses. I know where the Mothership is, and I know how to destroy it. I don’t need intel, I just need help. Give me six Reiters, and I’ll—”

“Six months, eh?” Fenix said, almost to himself and completely ignoring Zelen. Then he turned to address the whole audience. “We can work with that. Six months to draw up full intel. We Reiters also need to give ourselves time to blood the young boys. Refresh the ranks. Who knows, maybe by then, Sherwin will have a brand new Eidolon model for us to play with, hey? Overly hopeful, maybe, but a little optimism never hurt anyone. We’ll hammer out the details as we go, but let’s set a tentative target of nine months. We’ll reassess in September, see where we are in terms of operational readiness. Anyone have anything to add at this stage or…?”

Zelen was left speechless. He’d come into this meeting fully expecting to fight for his plan to be taken seriously. If it were up to him, he would’ve left tonight, with fresh supplies and however many other Reiters might be willing to tag along. His ‘three-day’ estimate had already been a compromise in the hopes that the General could be enticed to negotiate in good faith.

But nine months? And after nine months, the plan would be to reassess? The notion was so comically absurd that he half-expected the entire room to burst out laughing at any moment.

And yet, as Zelen stood and watched, first the committee members, then the rest of the attendees got to their feet. Subdued chatter started up all around the room, until the conference hall sounded no different to the canteen on a lazy morning.

At some point, Zelen became aware of his father watching him. Gerech was one of few others who’d remained silent after the meeting had ended, and he now turned his dour frown back onto his son. Yet as soon as their eyes met again, Gerech averted his gaze, instead becoming interested in the documents scattered on the table before him.

Zelen didn’t know why, but the sight of his father—of his impotence—filled him with sudden rage. A man he barely knew, yet in this moment, he represented everything that was wrong with Akropolis. Everything that was wrong with Zelen’s life.

Twelve years ago, a ten-year-old boy fresh off his Ascension Standard had stared up at the statue of Ernst Athelstan the First Reiter. That boy made a promise to his father then, a promise he barely understood.

Today, Zelen understood perfectly. He understood also that the cards had been stacked against him from the beginning, that the promise was impossible to fulfill. That the promise he made to his fraud of a father had been just another in 140 years' worth of lies.

140 years of a war in which mankind had long surrendered.

“I’ll do it myself.”

Only those that were closest heard him then. Chatter stopped in one corner of the room. The General himself looked up from a conversation with Ghata Vakta and turned his unseemly smile toward Zelen.

“If you won’t lift a finger, then I have no choice. I’ll do it myself.”

More of the chatter died down, corner by corner, until the entire assembly’s attention was once again focused on the young Reiter.

“Every day that goes by, what’s left of this planet crumbles to ash and fades into the haze. I’ve seen it. I know. Every day people die and suffer, up and down the three Akras, and in places the eyes don’t reach. And for what? What has any of this been for? How could you just sit here… sit here and plan and wait and reassess, when there’s a war to be won? A future to fight for? How could you be content to have done nothing for 140 years, content to do nothing for 140 more? I ask you, how?”

Breathing hard again, Zelen scanned the silent faces scattered around the conference hall. Some were full of contempt, others merely bemused. Still others avoided his eyes. Yet in the end, his gaze fell upon the man that commanded the largest presence of them all. The ringleader. The apex predator.

The General’s smile was well and truly gone, replaced by what could only be described as a neutral expression. Yet within his set jaws lay the indisputable strength of a leader of men. Behind his flat eyes hid the decades of killing that had led him to his own brand of truth—one that, at least in this moment, was diametrically opposed to that of Zelen’s.

“If you were looking for a reason to be court-martialed, Lieutenant Athelstan, you’ve certainly found one,” Fenix spoke softly. “But believe it or not, I’m in one of my better moods, so I’ll humour you. Just this once. I want you to think about what you just said. Really think about it. Then I want you to look around the room, stare into the faces of every one of your Reiter buddies here. Go on, I’ll wait. I’ve got time.”

And just like that, it was Zelen’s turn to avoid meeting eyes. Despite his simmering anger, and despite the General’s ‘orders’, he kept his gaze pointed squarely upon the latter.

“You can’t even do it, can you?” Fenix continued. “You can’t look at your fellow Reiters and claim that the years they’ve given to this war have been for nothing. You can’t possibly look up at heaven, at the boys that lost their lives, and tell them that their sacrifices had been for nothing.

“You’re only young, Lieutenant, so you can be forgiven for having a short memory. I, on the other hand, have been at this long before you clawed out of the innards of some Lower Akran whore. And my memory is long. I remember the names and faces of every boy I sent out to die, and I carry them with me always as I lead this war, as I plot ways to ensure that their sacrifices hadn’t been for naught.

“Maybe one day you’ll be sitting in my seat, plotting your own ways to honour the sacrifices of your fellow Reiters. But until that day comes, it’s your job to be my soldier. And it’s my job to ensure that your sacrifices won’t have been for nothing. Who knows? With any luck, there won’t be a need for anyone else to take over for me once I’m done.”

The General was the first to leave the room, brushing against Zelen’s shoulder as he did. Then the hall emptied, one by one, until only the two Athelstans remained.

Gerech hesitated at the door, watching his son, who in turn stared at the floor. Zelen wasn’t sure, nor did he particular care, what his father waited for. For Zelen to speak? For himself to find the right words? And would those words perhaps come to him, if only Zelen would turn and meet him in the eye?

But the Reiter continued to stare at the floor, until his father too left the room. Until Gerech’s limping footsteps faded into the corridors.

Until Zelen was well and truly alone.