~March 2nd, 140 AH~

~Sector Gemini, north of Korak Valley~

Zelen Athelstan shifted his weight, jostled by the momentum of a half-remembered dream. His Eidolon mirrored his movement without question, which nearly brought him out of his cover behind a pile of rocks.

Even as reality descended upon his senses, the earnest voice of a young woman echoed inside the dimly lit cockpit of his Eidolon. Even as the immediacy of his current mission set his heart racing anew, the headache of an older man—both physical and metaphorical—lingered upon the base of his skull.

“Zelen?” A woman’s voice, but not the one from his dream. The distinctly playful voice of Feray Geyik jeered through the radio, “You didn’t fall asleep on us, did you? I thought they would’ve beat that out of you in proto-Reiter training.”

Zelen didn’t answer, opting instead to regather his bearings. To his relief, the radar still showed the same thing as… a minute? An hour? A dream ago. Three blue dots represented the strike team consisting of himself, Jaeger Feray Geyik, and Panzer Graeme O’Riordan. A dense cluster of red indicated the Syntropy presence within the abandoned quarry below them.

“We need you to stay sharp, Lieutenant,” droned Graeme’s deep baritone, sharing none of his Jaeger partner’s good-natured humour. “I’d like to think Geyik and I can handle ourselves, but realistically speaking, the success of this mission depends mostly on you.”

Zelen didn’t answer, opting instead to focus on the current phase of the mission… which was to wait. The radio’s static hummed for another second or two, as though in hesitation, then it too cut out, sending the cockpit back into complete silence.

Zelen’s pulse settled as he waited amidst the silence. In his time away from combat, he’d forgotten how quiet a battlefield could be. How peaceful. There was something meditative—almost sacred—about these quiet moments before the first exchange of fire. Something that gave shape and weight to a warrior’s soul.

He frowned.

A warrior’s soul? Is that what he had? If these thoughts were truly his own, why did they feel so flighty, so out-of-place as he turned them over in his mind? He tried to remember the sacred quietude of a battlefield, and saw only blankness where his own person should’ve stood.

A hole in his memories. One of many he could find, if he’d only thought to look for them. The headache from his dream hadn’t faded. Instead, it throbbed with renewed urgency; it became his own.

He refocused his attention on the HUD, upon the unchanged radar display. If the past threatened to confound him, then he needed only to focus on the here and now. On his mission. No need to overcomplicate matters. What else was a Reiter to do than to eliminate the enemies chosen for him?

As if on cue, the enemies finally showed themselves. They appeared first as two white dots, fast approaching from directly south. The technicians among the Apfel Alliance had managed to fiddle with the identification system after all, though they were still limited in their choice of visual markers.

No matter. This was ample information to go on. All Zelen really needed to know was that red meant Syntropy and white meant Akropolis.

Both were enemies.

As he powered up his thrusters, however, Graeme O’Riordan’s clipped speech popped back on the radio.

“Remember, Lieutenant: focus fire on the Syntropy. Avoid direct confrontation with the Akropolitan team. Engage only if fired upon first. Acknowledge?”

Zelen frowned again. Of course, he’d already been briefed on this ad nauseum. The Panzer was merely parroting Akash Varana’s blanket directives with regards to Akropolitan forces: sabotage, intimidate, but never provoke.

The Reiter understood the reasoning but didn’t necessarily agree with it. As far as he was concerned, Akash was only overcomplicating matters. Zelen didn’t like that. Because war was meant to be simple—the simplest part of his life.

And yet, this wouldn’t remotely be the first time he followed orders he didn’t like. Besides, what could be simpler than just doing as he was told? What else was a Reiter to do than to complete the objectives chosen for him?

“Acknowledged.”

With that, he jumped out from behind the rocks and flew into the quarry. His attention turned from the red cluster on the radar to the obsidian horde that swarmed the abandoned quarry. Like clockwork, the Syntropy had flocked to the Anamnium pod that was stashed here: the same pod Zelen and his strike team had been tasked with intercepting, in full view of the Akropolitan retrieval team.

Among the obsidian horde were two Kentavros units, placed back to tumorous back on either side of the objective. They identified the Reiter at the same time as he them, and their swollen right arms immediately glowed red with a menace Zelen knew well.

Quickthrust left, his instincts told him, but his body proved a touch slow to react. An unfamiliar space had opened up within the flow of his muscle memory—a space that used to be filled by a second presence that flew into battle by his side.

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Before Zelen could face the consequence of his delayed reaction, however, a second presence did fly into view. The rotund figure of Panzer Graeme’s tank-form Eidolon thrust itself into harm’s way, blue shield already raised and concentrated onto the expected point of impact.

The Kentavroses fired, one after the other. Graeme’s shield absorbed each hit of the red beam, shrinking in size from the first before dissipating altogether from the second.

“Now, Lieutenant! Charge in while the fuckers are on cooldown.”

Zelen obeyed with the alacrity of a seasoned soldier. But as he closed the distance to the Kentavroses, he was distracted by the rest of the obsidian horde. Hornets and Brutuses fanned out from the central position, surrounding the Reiter from all directions.

Once again, Zelen found himself momentarily paralyzed with indecision. Had the Syntropy always been this many? This fast?

War should’ve been simple. The simplest part of his life. And yet, even in the midst of a familiar battle, gaps in his memories threatened to overcomplicate a simple matter.

Then several Brutuses on Zelen’s left side went up in flames, gunned down by blue ammunition that hadn’t issued from the Reiter himself. Next, the ordnances that approached from his right side exploded in midair, caught again by Panzer Graeme’s shield.

“Don’t worry about the mobs!” Jaeger Feray yelled into the radio, sounding entirely too pleased with herself. “You just focus down the big guys, big guy.”

That was when it finally clicked for Zelen. This hadn’t been a familiar battle after all. It was an entirely new way of fighting, one where the gaps in his reaction time and decision-making were filled in by two smaller Eidolons that flew by his side. Satellites orbiting a midnight-blue phantom. Three units covering each other’s gaps and working as one.

The triumvirate advanced into the quarry, with the Reiter at the helm. Now freed to focus his attention on the Kentavroses, Zelen’s battle-honed instincts kicked back into high gear.

RS [HARPOON], straight into the first Kentavros’s central chassis. Follow the chain and close the gap. Shockwave incoming. Tuck behind LS [SCUTUM] and dive deeper into melee range. Beam attack charging. Disable with a clean hit of LA [BLUNDERBUSS]. Now burst down the enemy with a full load of RA [GATLING].

The Kentavros staggered heavily under Zelen’s barrage, but remained standing. With all four of his armaments on cooldown, the Reiter transitioned smoothly into unarmed combat: the mechanized and amplified version of his human CQC skills. A low sweep to bring the Kentavros to its four knees, then a savage fist into its SPU to finish it off.

The red light of the Kentavros’s optic faded, along with what remained of its life. The job wasn’t done, however. There was still the second unit to—

Along with a messy explosion of blue and black, the lumbering figure of the second Kentavros crumbled onto the rocks at its feet. Someone had done Zelen’s job for him, but he sensed right away that someone hadn’t been either of his teammates.

From the black smoke emerged a fourth Eidolon, a model ES-V. Painted pale green with dark blue accents around its joints. Zelen didn’t recognize the decal. Someone he’d never fought alongside. A fresh graduate?

The two model ES-Vs faced each other across the carcasses of their shared enemies, unable to communicate, and with neither moving a muscle.

As Zelen contemplated his options, he was overcome by a surreal realization. Here, at the height of a deadly battle, the silent metallic giant across from him looked no different to the Syntropy: just one more enemy for him to kill. He’d already done the same to obsidian imitations of an Eidolon. He’d even killed one bona fide Akropolitan: a charcoal-grey menace that had called itself ‘Ashborne’.

He could easily do it again. If only it were so simple.

“Do not engage, Lieutenant! I say again, do not engage. Focus on our primary objective. The Anamnium pod now, if you please.”

Zelen ground his teeth in annoyance but moved to obey. He nevertheless kept his senses trained upon the model ES-V and noted its shift in posture.

Reaction. Instincts. Hesitation. Zelen imagined the same doubts and overcomplications clouding the mind of the other Reiter. Perhaps he too had voices reining him in, contradicting what he’d been trained to do all his life.

As Zelen bent in search of the Anamnium pod, the ground at his feet exploded in sprays of rocks and blue energy. He looked up to find himself staring down the six barrels of his counterpart’s RA [GATLING]. A warning shot. Perfectly reasonable, given the circumstances. Though if it'd been up to Zelen, he would’ve gone for the kill.

“Am I cleared to engage?” He radioed his team. “A direct confrontation was always inevitable. What else did you think was going to happen, waiting for them to show up and compete for the same objective?”

Hesitation. Overcomplication. Naivete. Panzer Graeme, for all his sincerity, lacked the instincts and experience needed to make difficult decisions on the battlefield. He’d been saddled with an impossible task, that of somehow antagonizing a group of seasoned warriors without provoking them into retaliation.

“Wait,” he hedged, sounding obviously flustered. “Let me see if I can open a comms channel. Maybe we could start negotiations right—”

That was when the picture muddled further, in the form of another Akropolitan Eidolon that flew down to join its companion. Crimson frame broken up by the dark spirals of a coiled centipede. Spindrift.

Clearly acting on command, the pale green Eidolon backed away and out of range, letting Spindrift take its spot. Zelen watched this exchange as a strange glow of recognition filtered through the gaps within his memories. The base of his skull throbbed with both warning and yearning. He himself had been that pale green Eidolon once, blooded under the wings of a veteran warrior.

Spindrift stood across from the younger Reiter, well within melee range but maintaining a neutral non-aggressive posture. He too was waiting. For escalation? For dispersal? For anything to simplify this farce of an interrupted battle.

Ironically enough, it was the Panzer among them that took this new development as a sign from god. As his cue to improvise and adapt, to make the difficult decisions that could swing the tides of war.

“New objective, Lieutenant,” he announced breathlessly. “This is too big an opportunity to pass up. You are cleared to engage, with the express purpose of capturing Makiri Shiranui alive. Geyik and I will back you up.”

“You will not.”

“What?”

Zelen powered up his thrusters, and saw Spindrift do the same. Even if he was accustomed to following orders he didn’t like, there was a limit to how much naivete he was willing to tolerate. And a fight against the killingest Reiter in history was no place for anyone who wasn’t ready to kill or be killed.

“Stay out of this if you value your lives,” he asserted. “This is my fight and mine alone.”