The Red Vulture ground to a halt inside a pre-corporate war bunker, its tracks chewing into the cracked ferrocrete floor with a low, protesting groan. The perpetual drumming of the acidic rain had turned into a downpour outside.

  The air inside reeked of rust and decay—empty, forgotten munitions crates slumped against walls scrawled with faded slogans of a long-dead military-industrial complex. Dim emergency strips flickered overhead, casting long shadows on the fractured concrete floor and rebars-protruded walls. Alina killed the engines, the sudden silence broken only by the flushing of water and the faint whine of cooling adamantine plates.

  She hauled Flora out of the driver's seat with a grunt, her grip firm on the warrant officer's armored shoulder.

  "Establish perimeter," Alina barked, voice raw from shouting over the autocannon's roar. She stalked toward the bunker's entrance, unfurling a plas-canvas tarp with fumbling hands. "Damn it, how did Chen set this up so fast last time? The ropes he use—by the gods, are they plant material? How the hell did he got those..." Her mutter trailed off as she glanced back at the IFV's infantry bay.

  Chen hadn't moved since they'd piled in—slumped against the bulkhead, visor opaque, hands curled into rigid claws on his lap. His chest rose and fell in shallow, erratic breaths.

  He was just lying there.

  Flora sank onto a munitions crate in the corner, her A-3 Saturnus armor feeling heavier than usual, the white plates streaked with ash and dried blood. She stared at the floor, her mind replaying the last hour in fragmented loops: the Red Vulture tearing through the undergrowth, skimmers closing in like vultures on a fresh kill. Alina's autocannon barking tungsten rounds that shredded the lead pursuer in a spray of sparks and screams. Chen's carbine whining from the side hatch, vaporizing another in a blue flash—efficient, mechanical, even as his hands shook. Firefights. Evasion. Survival. But beneath it, the warehouse lingered: the cage's cold bars, the Hellwraiths' leering faces, their words slithering like black, viscous oil.

  It started as a system diagnostic—her neural implants registering anomalous patterns. Why the elevated pulse? The tremor in her fingers? Then the packets unpacked themselves, unbidden.

  The strip-search begins, the first memory surfaced: not just humiliation, but preparation, suggestion that was rejected. In that jungle clearing, they surrounded her, rough laughter, leering grins.

  "" "" ""

  Rape. They had intended rape.

  Fear, resentment, anger, humiliation. Feelings that are primal, utterly to her, drowning her mind.

  The next memory was the gloating: not idle threats, but confessions.

  "" The enemies’ lexicon was grotesque. Corpses as beds. Blood still warm. Meatbags, footballs, heads that are softer than cakes.

  Then, the collapse: rubble burying the family, their heat signatures fading into pale background. Civilians. Innocents.

  Her mind stuttered.

  …[Heart rate: 127 bpm. Blood pressure rising. Fine motor control: degraded. Anomalous neural-psychic activities registered.]

  Warrant Officer Flora Rosenkrantz’s cortex and amygdala monitors read her neural signals, registered the rising abnormal activities. The spinal mainframe searched its micro hard drive’s tens of Petabytes of files, data, and Republican public knowledge briefs. One entry was matched, found, and validated. It extracted the file and displayed a two-sentence summary for her.

  Flora Rosenkrantz did not read the line displayed on her internal display. She was catatonic. And nor did she read the line after.

  .

  Broken. Everything broken. The Hellwraiths were dead, pulverized corpses. Unpunishable. Alina is a veteran, career soldier that enlisted for 8 years, and she is one of their own. But Chen—Chen had fired the shot. Chen, the outsider, the frozen fossil from a barbaric era, had killed the children.

  His conduct? Toxic feudal-capitalistic influence. His hesitation? Proof of unreliability. The civilians' deaths? His fault. The warehouse? His delay in rescuing her. The structural collapse? He misfired his direct energy weapon. The threats, the gloating of the Hellwraiths—all echoes of his ancient world's savagery bleeding into theirs.

  Chen Feng was from their world; he was from the same world as the Hellwraiths; he belongs to them.

  Chen Feng had killed a family. He had committed infancide, fratricide; extrajudicial killings of proletarian lives. He has negative utility value to the Republic, his functions need to be terminated.

  Conclusion: Obergefreiter Chen Feng is a class enemy.

  Flora stood, her movements jerky, shaking like an electrocuted frog. Legal authority. Article 17. Transmit the logs. Sentence him. Remove the malfunction. The Republic's verdict would come later, but it will. Yes. That would fix it.

  She marched to the Red Vulture's rear compartment.

  The Red Vulture’s rear hatch hissed open. Flora stepped inside without a word, boots ringing on the deck plates like a judge’s gavel. Alina’s voice echoed from outside, muffled by rain and canvas.

  “Hey, what the—Flora! I told you to establish the perimeter, not to—”

  Flora didn’t hear her. Chen lay on the floor where they had dragged him, helmet discarded beside him. Flora stepped over him without looking down, knelt at the comm station, and punched in the activation codes for the long-range dish.

  [ACCESS DENIED: AUTHORITY OVERRIDE REQUIRED]

  The designated squad commander registered in the vehicle’s system is Feldwebel Alina Ludwig. Flora’s attempt caused it to send a confirmation request that automatically pinged in Alina’s tactical helmet. Her baffled voice boomed over the comms.

  “What—no! The enemies can triangulate our position if you use that! We can use some rests here, don't do it! And why would you—”

  Alina’s voice was not of panic, but more of surprise.

  Flora’s hand had already left the console. She turned, slow and precise, and looked at the motionless body between her boots. Same outcome. Fewer steps.

  Her sidearm cleared synth-leather with a soft rasp. The 10mm pistol’s muzzle dropped until the front sight rested against Chen’s forehead, right over the faint scar left by four hundred years of frost. Her finger took up the slack.

  Click.

  [WARNING: Friendly unit detected. Weapon safety engaged.]

  [AVOID FRIENDLY FIRE.]

  The pistol’s micro-display blinked. A tiny red icon pulsing on Flora’s retinal HUD as she continued aim down at the man on the floor.

  [PROTECTED PERSONNEL, DO NOT FIRE.]

  The hatch slammed wide. Alina stumbled in, boot heel coming down hard on Chen’s shin. She windmilled, somehow maintained her balance, caught the grab-rail, and only then saw the gun still levelling at Chen’s skull.

  “What the fuck were you about to do?” Her voice cracked across the compartment like a whip.

  The pistol clattered to the deck as Alina ripped it from Flora’s hand. For a moment the only sound was the rain hissing on the hull and Chen’s shallow, ragged breathing beneath their boots.

  Flora didn’t move. The sidearm was gone but her arm stayed extended, finger still curled around a trigger that no longer existed.

  “I am going to erect the long-range antenna and transmit full combat logs to Lunar High Command. We are initiating Article 17: fratricide review. Chen Feng will be held accountable.”

  Chen didn’t move. His visor reflected the red safety light like a dead moon.

  Alina’s chest heaved. She stared at the warrant officer—looked past the red, unblinking vertical silt-shaped visor of her APt-3, into the person behind the transparisteel eye-plates—and something inside her snapped clean in two.

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  “No,” Alina said, voice low. “No. You don’t get to do this.”

  Flora’s reply came mechanical, flat, the same cadence she used for diagnostics. “I hold Warrant Officer grade W-1. You will comply with my legal authority in post-action judicial matters.”

  “Rank,” Alina Ludwig spat. “You really just said the word rank to me.”

  She stepped fully inside, letting the hatch clang shut behind her. The compartment suddenly felt too small, the air too thick.

  “Everyone in the Seventh Legio knows how you got that bar, Flora. Three months in uniform. Three. Months. Eight years for me.”

  She stepped forward until their visors almost touched.

  “I bled eight years for my stripes. Four in the Academy, two in officer candidacy, two more getting shot at on the capitalist-controlled Luna while your professors were still wiping your nose in Valhalla. I buried friends in the Landing Ground Massacre. I earned every fucking millimetre of rank the hard way, in the mud, in the ashes, in the congealed blood, with people screaming my name while they died.”

  Her voice dropped to a snarl.

  “And you? You walked off a shuttle with a shiny new commission because some Academician decided his favorite prodigy deserved to play soldier with the grown-ups. One signature. One letter. That’s all it took.”

  Flora didn’t blink. “Irrelevant. My operational record—”

  “Your record is a footnote in a filing cabinet!” Alina shouted. “You have never watched a squad die because command was too slow, too stupid, or too busy protecting its own darlings. You have never had to choose which friend’s body gets left behind because the evac ‘Apollo’ shuttle only has room for four. You have never earned the right to stand there and demand a man’s life because a computer told you ‘justice’ is a tidy little percentage.”

  She leaned in until Flora could feel the heat of her breath fogging the visor.

  “Tell me, Warrant Officer. Who wrote the recommendation that let you skip the line? Who wrote the letter, Flora? Who pulled you out of the lecture hall and dropped you straight into my squad?”

  Flora’s lips parted, but no sound came. In the end, her answer came out smaller, almost a whisper.

  “Professor-Academician Joseph Hartmann.”

  Alina barked a humourless laugh that scraped her throat raw.

  “Of course. Hartmann. The same Hartmann who’s been investigated twice for ‘mentoring’ his favourites. One glowing letter and poof—Warrant Officer Rosenkrantz, field commission, no questions asked. You skipped the line, Flora. You skipped the blood.”

  Flora’s hand twitched; the pistol dipped a centimetre.

  “Blood earns rank, Flora; a thesis presentation in some orbital lecture hall doesn’t. Or worse, words spoken over the same pillow.”

  Alina straightened, exhaustion bleeding into every line of her body.

  “So no. You do not get to pull that trigger. You do not get to call in Article 17. And you sure as hell do not get to hide behind a commission you never earned while you try to murder my soldier.”

  Flora is now shaking. She attempted to retort, to regain control, but the phantoms of her horrors flashed back, scrambling her chains of logic into broken pieces. “He—he fired. Civilians... infanticide. Fratricide. Proletarian lives—terminated. His fault. All... his fault.”

  For a moment, there was quiet. Alina signed heavily. But this time, her tone was softer, albeit almost indiscernible.

  “No, he did not kill the civs. He did not, and will not, kill innocent people. It wasn’t Chen Feng.”

  Flora shrieked uncontrollably, “I SAW HIM—”

  Alina interrupted coldly, “That was an .”

  She recalled the incident, her failure, Chen’s berserk, the structural collapse. Masking emotional turmoil with clinical analysis.

  “…Chen Feng was not informed about the presence of civilian lives, he didn’t see the five civilians when you grabbed them out, there was too much smoke, and his vision was obstructed; there were too many enemies. And when he saw them, the civilians you were escorting? He yanked the gun away from that family of people. That structural collapse was an extremely low probability event. See his footage, the battlefield recorder.”

  Alina paused for a heartbeat. She took a breath of the rancid air, a futile attempt to regain her composure.

  “And what made you to shoot him? Chen saved you; he saved me before. We were surrounded by enemies, and I could not rescue you alone from these… scums. Not without him. And what did you do? He would be already dead if—if…”

  Flora bit her lips: “He, he is a murderer, I would be able to kill him, if I can just override the IFF system—"

  Alina let out a sharp exhale—the exhale that turned into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter mid-breath. The stress, the guilt, the anger, and the exhaustion had worn out all remaining of her patience—Flora Rosenkrantz’s attitude and her attempt on killing Chen was only the final straw. When she talked coherently for the next time, the words were forced out through gritted teeth.

  "Well, guess what?” Alina’s laugh broke into something feral, “I’ll let you kill him—the second you get Hartmann to write another pretty little recommendation. ‘Dear Command, my favourite prodigy says the cryo-fossil is a liability, please execute.’ and the Legion command might actually kill him! Given they'd already let you to fast-track to W-1, I bet your cunt pussy worth human lives now! Go on, Flora. Phone him. Beg him for another letter and tell me how many times of you get fucked does it take to get someone killed, you pillow-talking fuck?"

  Flora was still shaking: “I did not sleep with Professor Hartmann.”

  “Ha,” Alina laughed, “Like I care. Now shut your mouth and go to bed. I am done with you”

  She turned away, boots scraping over Chen’s outstretched leg without seeing him, and disappeared into the rancid, exterior air.

  Flora stood frozen for three full heartbeats. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, she pivoted on her heel, marched to the comm station, and punched in her W-1 priority override. The high-gain dish protruding out of the camouflaged net, unfolding with a rising mechanical whine.

  Alina Ludwig, disappearing into the depth of the bunker. She yelled as Flora manipulated the machine.

  “—fuck you—”

  Flora transmits the full black-box logs in a steady stream: Chen's suit telemetry capturing his berserker rampage, the thermal signatures of the misidentified civilians flickering like dying candles on the HUD replay, the structural integrity warnings blaring as the warehouse groaned under the plasma impact, and finally, the collapse—a cascade of concrete and rebar swallowing everything in dust and silence.

  She appended her eyewitness statement, typing with deliberate keystrokes: “Subject Obergefreiter Chen Feng deliberately fired upon non-combatants. Terminology—”

  The images of atrocities flew across Flora’s mind, again. Her fingers twitched. The same words were typed repeatedly without her conscious command.

  “Terminology: murder, murder, murder.”

  She hit transmit before the echo in her head could fade. The high-gain dish hummed, piercing the bunker's camouflage net and beaming the data packet.

  Alina had stormed off into the bunker's depths, muttering about perimeter checks and camouflage repairs, leaving Flora alone with the humming consoles and Chen's catatonic form sprawled on the deck. He hadn't spoken since the warehouse, hadn't even removed his helmet until Alina had done it for him earlier, revealing eyes hollowed by whatever abyss stared back from his four-century-old soul.

  47 minutes later: Priority burst-reply from Lunar High Command, War Crimes Review Board – Sierra Channel.

  The verdict is terse, clinical, and devastatingly bureaucratic:

  []

  Flora stares at the screen. Her jaw tightens. The verdict reads like absolution. To her, it reads like cowardice.

  Alina burst back into the compartment just as the message finished scrolling, her uniform sodden from the rain and dust, hands streaked with mud from wrestling the camouflage net. She glanced at the console, her face hardening as she pieced it together.

  “You broke radio silence for nothing,” she snarled, crossing the space in two strides. Her hand cracked across Flora's cheek—once, hard, the sound echoing like a rifle shot. Then again, harder, leaving a red welt blooming under the pale skin. “Now Erebus and Teodulo know we’re alive, wounded, and talked to the Command. You just painted a target on our backs.”

  Flora rubbed her cheek, feeling the swell of bruised tissue. And maybe for the first time in years, her tears started to pool.

  “He is still a killer.” Flora whispered.

  Alina's eyes narrowed. She glared directly into Flora’s eyes, “Go check on him then. What are you waiting for? Do you have any idea what he is going through? Just ask him the prescribed meds he was taking. Or better, see it yourself.”

  She snatched Chen’s medical bundle from a storage locker and shoved it into Flora’s hands, the pouch clinking with vials and analyzers.

  Flora fumbled open the bundle, her gloved fingers pulling out a blister pack of pills. She slotted one into her suit's portable analyzer, the device whirring as it scanned the chemical composition.

  “The pills,” she read off the display, fast, clinging to the data like a lifeline. She read it out loud. “Republic-issued SSRIs for Major Depressive Disorder, only for diagnosed patients. Taking this drug is…an acceptable practice for combat personnel under related protocols. Under the letters of the law.”

  Alina crossed her arms, leaning against the bulkhead with a weary sigh. “See? Do I need to remind you what happened to him? His entire family is dead, the entire era was gone, and he was drafted into our army. Do you think he was a volunteer soldier like us? No, think again. He did not have any other choice. You show so much empathy for these people—as a matter of fact, we all do. Why don’t you have some passion for your own?”

  Flora’s gaze flicked to Chen’s prone form, then back to Alina.

  “He is not one of our own—besides, there is a non-zero chance of him intentionally overdosing prior to the mission, impairing himself.”

  Her voice was low, . “And th-that, will make him a killer, liable—"

  Alina stared at her, dead in the eyes. “Racism, how cliché. I bet if he was blonde and spoke Valhallan accent, you’d be writing medals for him already!”

  Flora’s implants logging another neural spike. “…Outsiders rarely show any positive human characteristics. He is still under pending—red-flagged for psych-eval for lack of reaction post-atrocity. He had overdosed himself, impaired himself, and that will make him a murderer.”

  Alina’s expression didn’t change, but her voice dripped with uncaring disdain. “Did you see him overdose himself? Have you talked to his doctor—do you even know what his clinically prescribed dosage is?”

  Flora’s response was a quiet admission. “…No.”

  Alina turned away, her voice was thick with contempt. “Then go fuck yourself.”

  Suddenly, the radar panel lit up with a shrill alert. Three signatures blinked into existence on the screen: fast-moving, low-altitude contacts. Scavenger skimmers, their hulls likely jerry-rigged with radar-absorbent mesh, closing in from the west.

  Alina slammed her fist on the console, the impact rattling the loose panels. “We could’ve slept. We could’ve fixed that damn hole on the bulkhead! But no—you had to scream into the void for judgment that doesn’t exist! Now they’re on us again. It is all your fault!”

  Chen hadn’t moved through the entire exchange. His helmet was off now, discarded beside him, and he stared at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.

  Flora glanced at him, then climbed into the “…I will… man the cannons.”

  Alina didn’t argue. She hauled herself into the vehicle’s driving compartment, powering the vehicle’s anti-grav engines with a series of sharp hums, and toggled the comms to silent mode. The Red Vulture's main engines roared to life, the IFV lurching forward and grinding over limestone shards as it burst from the bunker, vanishing into the blood-red dusk. The rain-slicked jungle swallowed them whole. The hunt was on again.