~April 26th, 140 AH~

~Sector Pisces, the skies above the Gold Rush FOB~

Asena Shiranui pointed her metallic phantom toward the western horizon and the stories that unfolded beyond the planet’s haze.

Presently, she led a small patrol along with Panzer and Jaeger support. Her role was simple: be wise to any secondary counteroffensives the Joint Forces might attempt, then lead defensive or evacuation efforts as needed. Simple, necessary, and… the farthest thing from what she wanted to be doing.

The month of fighting that followed her ill-fated parley with Ghata Vakta had been difficult for all involved, and Asena was no exception. She’d mourned friends, had multiple close brushes with death herself, and lost countless hours of sleep as she tried to grasp the amorphous shape of the future that awaited her and all humanity.

Today felt like the first time in a month where that ‘shape’ had solidified into something tangible and definable. Yet, today of all days, Asena found herself a thousand klicks away from the thick of the action, where she’d been relegated to—no, no, trusted with—a simple, necessary, and maddening task.

And in order to distract herself from the maddeningly simple necessity of her task, Asena turned her artist’s eyes onto the barren earth that stretched all around. She pictured and felt the edges and depths of the planet’s scars. She mixed invisible paint and watched it spread over an imaginary canvas, giving solid shape to all the tragedies and triumphs she’d shared with friend and foe alike.

Soon, she hoped, she’d be able to pick up a paint brush again. Soon, humanity’s future would settle into a shape that would allow a young artist the space to sit down and make sense of the war she’d endured. Commemorate the dead. Honour the living. And aspire toward a lasting future…

Whose face would be staring back at her then? And what title would she scribble on the back of the canvas?

“Hey, guys? I just saw… I think we’ve got incoming!”

Panzer Kari’s stop-start warning pulled Asena back to the stark reality of her task. So… that shift to ‘subtlety’ Akash had alluded to… the Joint Forces brass had finally come around, had they? Even so, she couldn’t imagine they’d send out a sizable strike team this far out from their main objective. Would this latest threat warrant a swift evacuation… or could this be a job for her and her [REVENANT] warrior?

But as Asena neared Kari’s position, she saw that something was profoundly wrong with the picture. For the markers that now filled her radar display with alarming rapidity and inconceivable density were red dots.

A swarm of Syntropy. Hundreds? Thousands? Large enough in number to drench one half of a radar display in unbroken red paint.

Asena froze. As did her fellow patrolmen. Their task had been simple… up until the point when humanity’s neglected enemy reared its sleek obsidian head.

The Alliance members hovered in the skies above the Gold Rush FOB and watched, as a writhing mass of black metal and grey ash moved across the plains to their north. The Syntropy were so many, so tightly packed, and so obscured by the ashstorm they kicked up in their wake as to render identification impossible. But the simple knowledge that these obsidian instruments of murder had never before gathered and acted together in such great numbers was enough to root a trio of young inexperienced warriors to their pockets of the sky, unable or unwilling to react with any sense of purpose.

Asena and her allies watched the Syntropy stampede across their world, past the northern plains before disappearing into the horizon. Each of them turned their Eidolons in increments to orient to the moving mass, as if drawn by some dreadful magnetism. They continued to stare after the Syntropy, even after they vanished from view, along with the ashstorm that settled back onto the barren earth.

“Whew!” Kari was again the first to break radio silence. “Well, that could’ve been ugly. I wonder what they’re going after, though. What do you guys reckon?”

Asena wondered—no, feared—the same thing. She didn’t have a concrete answer with which to assuage her Panzer companion’s nervous curiosity. She only knew, somehow and with absolute certainty, that this ‘answer’ also portended her and humanity’s worst nightmare.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Ever since Akash Varana had introduced her to the Caverns, two questions above all had kept Asena up at night, during the quieter hours when a young warrior had the space to ponder her own place in the world.

First was the obvious one that all Alliance members had wondered aloud at one time or another: who were the Cavepeople and what had compelled them to forsake their home? A riddle for which credible clues proved few and sparse... with the possible exception, strangely enough, of those found in the muddled dreams of one Zelen Athelstan. There were perhaps enough clues in those dreams for a Reiter and a Kurator to probe and tease apart, should they ever have the space to sit down and ponder their places in someone else's world.

The second question was of a somewhat subtler nature, one that revealed itself only to those curious and patient enough to sift through the piles of unintelligible reports and journals that lay strewn on the floors of abandoned buildings. For even though the Cavepeople communicated in a foreign script that Akropolitans had no way of deciphering, they did use the same number system. And through her curious and patient siftings, Asena had happened upon one number in particular that seemed to hold significance for herself and the Caverns’ former tenants both.

140.

The number 140 appeared again and again, embedded in the headings to journal entries or scattered amidst lengthy military reports. That by itself mightn’t have been remarkable enough to arrest Asena’s attention, were it not for the concomitant absence of larger numbers that should've followed in sequence. No 141, 142, nor 143. Everything stopped at and ended with 140. Almost as though…

This was a question Asena had shared only with Akash. The Gaertner himself had arrived at the same realization, long before her, but he’d been uncharacteristically hesitant about digging into it further. It was as if even he knew this to be the one thread that must be left well enough alone. For to pull it would be to unravel an entirely different set of questions, ones whose implications neither he nor Asena nor anyone else on the planet was prepared to wrestle with.

Presently, as Asena watched an obsidian horde vanish into the western horizon, she was reminded of that question again. She herself couldn’t be sure of the connection between this latest Syntropy sighting and the number ‘140’. She only knew, somehow and with absolute certainty, that this ‘connection’ also portended her and humanity’s worst nightmare.

“Attention!” Kari again. “More units incoming! Just what the hell is going on?”

Numbly, and as if in a daze, Asena shifted her gaze back onto the radar display. New dots blinked into view, though these were far fewer and more spaced out. And perhaps more significantly, these dots were coloured blue.

“Huh, that’s strange,” Kari muttered into the radio. “Were we expecting a rendezvous with another team? Where are they coming from?”

The sight of ‘friendly’ markers on her radar failed to offer Asena any relief. She pointed her SPU toward the northern plains, then watched with mounting dread as her naked eyes gave observable form to the blue dots of mysterious origin.

They were Syntropy.

There was no doubt about it. This latest procession consisted of about a dozen units, with enough space between individuals to allow for visual ID. Hornets that flew ahead of the pack. Brutuses marching in a defensive formation. The latter appeared to be ‘protecting’ a third unit type that glided at the centre of their formation.

Asena frowned as she adjusted the zoom on her HUD. This third unit had a morphology she couldn’t readily identify. Small. Not much larger than the Brutus units that served as its guard of honour. A roughly spherical central chassis, from which jutted four mismatched limbs of varying sizes and coloration. And was that… a pair of wings atop its SPU?

Yet, as inexplicably bizarre as this chimaera was, Asena’s attention shifted again and locked onto a fourth unit, one that brought up the rear of the procession.

A sleek, almost humanoid frame, with an unmistakably crimson base underneath layers of ash, rust, and scars. Svelte muscular limbs that could only belong on an Eidolon, except… what should’ve been its right forearm was instead a bulky obsidian extension: a flexible tubing of some kind, segmented and coiled—like a centipede lying in wait.

This second group of Syntropy—with their Hornets, Brutuses, chimaera, and centipede—traced the path of the initial horde almost perfectly. They flew at speed and with purpose, clearly in pursuit of the first group, and they too ignored a trio of Eidolons watching from the distance as they disappeared into the horizon.

Then and only then did Asena finally make her move.

She pointed her faded-gold M-024 into the western horizon and the questions that unravelled beyond the planet’s haze. She paid no heed to the shouts of alarm and protest from her teammates. She ignored the suddenly yawning chasm within her chest, and the mass of black paint that threatened to erupt and drench her world.

For no matter what answers—what nightmares—awaited beyond the planet’s haze, Asena Shiranui was determined to bear witness, not by picking up the fragments of someone else’s memory, but from inside her own cockpit. She was determined to be the pilot of her own destiny.