Static.
The crackle of a transmission clawing its way through fried circuits, broken relays, systems that had every reason to stay dead and refused.
Then a voice tore through.
"Well? Don't just hover there like a flock o' gulls waitin' for a fish-head! Are ye goin' to haul me out o' this ditch, or does a Captain have to walk home through the mud?"
The sky answered first.
A shadow slid across the crater, the medical transport, smooth and quiet, passing overhead like a heartbeat in motion. Its hull cut the smoke and its engines didn't roar.
Inside, lights were white and clean.
Yoon sat strapped to the wall, helmet off, hands still shaking. Nakamura held Montoya's shoulder, pressure wrapped tight around his torso, IV already running. No one spoke.
Across from them, Fiona lay on a suspended litter, cocooned in cables and light.
Her chest rose. Once and again.
A medic adjusted a monitor. A nurse murmured something low.
Below them, Caelestis lay half-buried in pulverized concrete, one wing torn, hull cracked, systems bleeding sparks and smoke like a wounded beast.
"Aye, I see ye! Flyin' off with the injured and the heroes while I rot in a hole like yesterday's catch! Very noble! Very inspiring!"
His sensors flickered. His hull groaned.
"Oi! Medical bird! I'm technically a casualty too, ye know! Structural trauma! Emotional damage! Severe injustice!"
Static answered.
Then another voice.
Flat. Female. Breathing hard.
"Dision?"
"Aye, who else would it be? Saint bloody Nicholas? I'm sittin' in a crater with half my systems fried, my hull's cracked open like a bad egg, and you lot are standin' around havin' a moment. Get me a recovery team before something decides Caelestis looks like salvage!"
Irina was already authoring the way this ends.
Her words didn't slow. Her lungs didn't catch up. Her hands were already sketching geometry on the holomap. Collapsing zones, erasing vectors, drawing invisible lines that would soon become graves.
"Collapse perimeter delta-seven, reroute Knights Three through Nine into null corridors, disengage aerial escorts, suppress all outgoing telemetry, begin asset recovery at Caelestis' crash site, and for the love of God keep General Karinka inside the geometry or she'll turn this entire continent into a footnote."
Dísion's voice crackled back, wounded pride somehow intact.
"She's still a ship, thank ye very much. Just… needs a bit o' work. And by "a bit" I mean "extensive." And by "extensive" I mean ye might need to rebuild her from the keel up. But she flew true when it mattered, didn't she?"
Irina didn't answer.
She was already speaking to five other units at once.
"I need no witnesses. No survivors. No stories. We end this here."
The battlefield was still loud but it was no longer alive.
A goliath raised its weapon.
It never fired.
The space where the shot should have been ceased to exist. The goliath followed. Another turned, adaptive armor shifting, recalculating. Then gone. Removed from the battlefield.
Knights moved like corrections in a space that collapsed after they had passed through it.
A mechanized unit attempted to lock on. The lock dissolved and the unit followed. Short bursts. No flourish. No anger. No hesitation. The knights didn't fight, they concluded.
Irina's breath hitched once but she didn't stop.
"General, please stay inside the geometry, you're expanding the zone, Israel is not the enemy."
The reply came not in words but in smoke and fire in the distance. The mechanized units that remained didn't just flee, they had just received new data.
The battle was over.
Karinka didn't slow, didn't speak and didn't acknowledge their surrender. She moved through them like a storm moving through tall grass. Armor crumpled, frames folded and weapons bent away from her as if embarrassed to exist. She did not chase, she just passed through and when she was gone, nothing behind her remembered how to stand.
Irina's voice cut across the chaos like a blade across silk.
"Recovery team, take Caelestis away now. Knights, erase attack vectors. Aerial escort, suppress all signatures. Medical transport is outbound." Inhales hard. "No one touches that sky."
Her lungs burned, her hands shook but she didn't slow down.
"Move people, we need to pick General Inverse or she will start World War Four by herself."
High above, the medical transport cut through clouds.
Inside, Fiona's monitor spiked. Then dipped. Then steadied.
Below, the battlefield returned to sand where machines had been. Just silence where war was fought.
Irina finally stopped, just long enough to breathe. Just long enough to bleed oxygen back into her brain. Then she spoke again.
"Sweep complete. Everyone, RTB"
The battle had happened but no one would ever prove it.
And in the dust, Karinka stood. A goliath rose beneath her, broken, half-buried, its frame twisted wrong, one arm dragging itself upright out of coded function. Its weapon lifted.
It fired.
But the bullets did not reach her. They curved. Skipped. Shattered sideways. Tore into debris, into air, into nothing. The space around her rejected them without ceremony.
She stepped and her foot came down.
Final.
The goliath folded inward having lost its reason to exist. Metal screamed. Then the scream had nowhere left to go.
Silence settled.
Above, fusion engines cut the smoke.
The dropship descended, shadow sliding over her like a closing door. Irina's voice cut through the channel, breathless.
"General… can we leave, please?"
Karinka did not answer.
She turned to the horizon.
To smoke.
To light.
To two directions that had been pulling at each other longer than memory had patience for.
She stood between them. Still. The way she had stood before, when standing was all she was allowed to do.
Her hands closed, just once.
Dust lifted around her boots. Heat shimmered. Something far away exploded but she did not go toward either side. She just turned away and walked.
The ramp opened, light spilled. Inside, the air was clean. Too clean. The violence ended at the threshold.
Her face gave nothing but her eyes gave everything.
Irina stopped breathing and the pilot's hands tightened on the controls without realizing. Neither of them spoke, they had seen that look before in places where power had once been chains instead of armor.
Karinka's jaw tightened. Just once. Her fingers flexed, not quite into a fist, then stilled, as if catching a memory mid-motion and refusing to let it finish.
"Good work, Specialist," she said.
Irina's breath left her in a rush she hadn't authorized.
"The commander should already be en route to the Accelerator," Karinka continued. "We'll meet them there."
Irina nodded then looked up, past the canopy, past the clouds. Toward the line Sky and the surviving pilots were already burning across the atmosphere.
The ship lifted and below, the battlefield forgot itself.