[TAS] Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XXY - Worthy

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Chapter 104 - The Talk I today with no major changes.

For the Wolf Lords, this chapter IS NEW

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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More Rachel adventures!

Not sure how many Intermissions this will be, so the titles will simply increment on the number of "x"s until I know.

Likely 5 Intermissions, ending with XXYXX

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bot6kMiB1Q5p1MTDAN9dPzdS-2f-ARX98ngF8gNCUE0/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XXY - Worthy

A Masters does not fail where others can see.
Where others can see, a Masters does not fail.

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A Masters is the first to enter the fight, and the last to leave it. 

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A Masters is the beacon the line rallies to, and the bastion the enemy breaks upon. 

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A Masters shield never falters.
A Masters shield never wavers.
A Masters dies before it drops.

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A Masters does not narrate effort. 

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A Masters only ever counts the enemy after the battle. 

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A Masters offers their hand with the same certainty as their shield. 

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A Masters uses every advantage they are given, and shies away from none of them. 

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A Masters grants their enemies only one grace: A beautiful, final sight.

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A Masters may lose.
A Masters may never lose the same way twice. 

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A Masters never stays down.

—

[Selected maxims of the Masters Major Legacy (Part 1), as transcribed in "UHF Legacies: The Martial Tradition of the Vespera’s Shining Legacy” — Siniran Velaris, Vespera System Historical Initiative, PFC 901. The Masters Legacy declined to confirm, deny, or comment upon the accuracy of any given entry.] 

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PoV: Rachel Veronica Masters

Against Rachel's every expectation, they somehow held.

The sixth trenchline weathered the Stellar Republic's continued assault for another two full hours—wave after grinding wave breaking against the interlocked fire of the pillbox network, the corridors dissolving under sustained enfilade fire before they could ever mature, the trenches holding through counterfire that turned the ferrocrete facings into nothing but crumbling and charred ruins.

At last, the first real lull of the battle arrived.

The change was almost eerie in how fast it happened. 

One minute the world was its usual continuous roar—and the next, the roar markedly thinned without any real signal, then stuttered, and died away into a silence so profound it felt like a pressure change, broken only by distant, sporadic artillery and the continuous ringing in everyone's ears.

Nobody had announced it, but everyone instinctively knew that this was it.

Immediately, almost the whole squad collapsed where they stood. 

Vasska and Verren slid down the trench wall in unsettling twin-synchronisation, helmets tipping back against the compacted dirt, as Emberly practically melted over her autocannon's frame, draping herself across the weapon like it was furniture, rivulets of sweat still pouring off of her body with no end in sight. Even Urimi allowed herself to sink onto an ammunition crate, shoulders finally dropping from the rigid line they'd held all day.

Holden—having taken part the least in the thick of the actual fighting—stayed on his feet instead, already moving down the line as he understood exactly what his role in this moment was. He walked from squadmate to squadmate, handing out ration packs and canteens, making sure everyone re-upped their energy reserves before exhaustion pulled them under entirely.

"Here. Eat before you pass out, not after," he said as he reached Rachel, holding out a foil-sealed pack and a canteen. "Your body's been running an absolute marathon in that plate."

"Appreciated, Holden," Rachel thanked him, and gladly accepted both offerings.

She cracked the ration open and chowed down with genuine gusto—decorum be damned; there were no society matrons watching, and the high-density paste was, after two-and-a-half hours of non-stop combat in heavy armour, downright delectable—all the while her mind replayed the last two hours of engagements in the background, cataloguing everything and searching for moments to learn from and improve herself for the future.

They had moved pillboxes several times throughout the assaults. 

Thrice when the Republic's counterfire had concentrated too heavily on their position to sustain—the ferrocrete around the firing slits chewed down to structural failure—and twice again when their pillboxes had simply been blown apart around them by high-explosive fire, the squad scrambling out through the connecting trench with the roof caving in behind them.

Yet, surprisingly enough, none of the squad had died still.

There had been several close calls, certainly. 

Verren had taken a ricochet through the chest—just barely missing any vital organs. Emberly had been knocked flat by a lucky shot that shattered against her autocannon's gun-shield instead of her sternum, and a random shell fragment had opened Urimi's cheek to the bone at some point during the beginning of the second hour. 

Ultimately nothing immediately fatal—nothing Holden hadn't been able to patch, seal, and send back to the line within minutes at most.

One of his Class Abilities, [Accelerated Recovery], had been a great help with that, of course—multiplying the target's Recovery score by a rather impressive amount, leading to an effective second-wind type situation for anyone who could—or had to—take a breather for a few minutes. It had undoubtedly been a big part of why their squad hadn't fallen apart at the seams already an hour ago—injury- or stamina-wise.

The fact that nobody had died, however, was still more than surprising to Rachel. 

It was genuinely rare to keep full squad strength through several continuous hours of defence against the Stellar Republic. She'd read the after-action statistics her whole life; she knew precisely what the actuarial tables said about days like today and they were not favourable in the least. Maybe one in every ten-or-so squads usually came out of a multi-hour engagement against the Stellar Republic with their full strength still intact. 

But, then again… the assaults had been nothing too special, either, she had to admit.

'Because this isn't an all-out-assault scenario… It never was,' she mused around another spoonful of high-density nutrient paste dissolving in her mouth. 'The Freaks already got what they came for hours ago. Before I even made it back to the fucking line...'

The fourth trenchline was the lynchpin of this entire Battlefield. 

That much had been made abundantly clear in the DM’s original parameters and then again in the mission's briefing by the Company Commander: This was officially a hold mission—and the hold had already failed. 

Not that anybody had assumed they would be able to hold it to begin with—one did not simply hold the line against a full-on Stellar Republic assault. That was simply not possible without truly cosmic circumstances all lining up for the defenders. 

Which, ultimately, meant that now, with the fourth line in Republic hands, the operational structure had inverted entirely. The UHF now had roughly two and a half days to retake it, to clear the victory condition of the DM. 

Which naturally recontextualised everything she'd watched the Stellar Republic do since.

They had never truly intended to push hard beyond the sixth line. 

The relentless pressure, the waves, the corridors—all of it had merely been a means of keeping the UHF pinned and bleeding while their engineering elements reinforced the half-destroyed third and fourth lines behind them, converting captured UHF fortifications into their own future defence. 

They had effectively just thrown bodies at the UHF to make them swim through the blood and try to stay afloat, simply to buy time—characteristically very much them.

Every hour the UHF had spent desperately holding the sixth was an hour the Freaks had spent digging in on the fourth. 

Simultaneously, however, Urimi's intel to local command had also drastically helped the sixth line's defence—Rachel had watched the proof of it land in real time. 

Not twenty minutes after the report, the UHF's own artillery teams had begun systematically blasting the suspected command locations behind sectors twenty-two through twenty-six, walking barrage after barrage across the terrain Urimi had called in.

And almost immediately afterwards, the concentrated waves had markedly declined.

Whether the area's commander had actually been killed or simply been forced to reposition was unclear to Rachel. But she had no doubt whatsoever that it had directly degraded the Freaks' capacity to keep up the relentless assault. 

The wave timing had turned ragged, then sporadic—until enough of the pressure had simply drained away to cause a full-on breakdown of the continued assault.

'And all of that, because of intel gained from somebody hailing from Kessarine Orbital…' she thought, swallowing another spoonful of paste, her eyes settling on Urimi across the alcove.

Her squad leader was doing exactly the same as her—working mechanically through a ration—while poring over the digital version of the map she'd pulled out earlier. 

Now that they finally had the time for it, she'd broken out the command datapad that every Squad Leader carried, its dim screen painting her face pale blue in the alcove's gloom, fingertips dragging unit markers and range overlays across the display in slow, methodical passes.

A waypoint-station somebody, casually out-thinking both side’s field commanders off of nothing but a folded piece of laminated fabric and a single report of Rachel’s.

The Galaxy was, occasionally, a genuinely strange place, she found.

—

The lull stayed in place for another two hours.

Then the Stellar Republic tried a renewed assault—which built, crested well short of the wire, and quickly ebbed away again under the sector's reorganised fire plan. 

They tried another three separate times before midnight, each attempt more anaemic than the last, and got beaten back each time—until finally, both Factions' armies truly settled into what everyone on the line could feel in their bones: The sixth line was now the established end-of-line. 

The fronts had fully calcified. Whatever came next would not be coming tonight.

At least, not from the Stellar Republic's side…

—

Rachel found herself half-asleep in the middle of the night, sometime around 0200.

Her cot—a shallow dug-out in the trench wall lined with her fluffy bedroll—sat, as always, the closest to the squad leader's position. She had dug it there deliberately, the same way she had been taught to and she did on every single mission, all for one very simple purpose: Listening.

Urimi was on the command channel again, voice pitched low, and Rachel listened with half an ear from beneath the cowl of half-sleep. 

Information was key, always—whether she was "meant" to have it or not. 

Command intent filtered down to squad level hours late and stripped of all nuance. The version spoken quietly over a squad leader's comms at 0200, however, was the real version. 

And A Masters positioned herself according to all available information.

Sleep itself was also not something Rachel truly knew, when in combat, anyway.

She'd long learned, as a young child, that there was no such thing as true sleep on a mission. Only graduated shades of rest, with awareness kept sprinkled in generously like minefields around an HQ. 

She remembered the trainings vividly to this day—being forcibly kept awake for weeks on end, granted only scattered minutes to rest her eyes, yet required to keep actively listening the entire time, required to remain conscious enough to file away every piece of information spoken in the room and recite it on demand, again and again. 

Failure had simply meant the weeks started over…

They were not fond memories of hers by any stretch.

But she could not deny the results: Even now, drifting in half-consciousness with her body greedily banking any recovery it could get, some tireless sentry in the back of her mind stood watch over every word within earshot, sorting the unimportant from the relevant.

And when that sentry caught a particular turn of phrase in Urimi's quiet conversation—and slammed her brain into full consciousness so hard she nearly sat bolt upright—she couldn’t help but think, 'Legacy training is established for a reason…' 

“They want to assault the Stellar Republic's position—tonight?!”

She quickly got up and moved closer toward the SL, keeping her movements light and feathered so as not to wake the rest of the squad or startle Urimi. 

She found her sitting inside the alcove on her lonesome, both keeping watch outside the pillbox and leaning over the command datapad, frantically zooming and moving the map around while marking several things here and there.

"Volunteer us," Rachel spoke into the quiet, causing Urimi to flinch at the sound.

To her credit, she did not react too strongly and raise her rifle at Rachel or anything.

'But her general spatial awareness could definitely benefit from some additional training units…' Rachel thought.

"Volunteer us… for what?" Urimi asked, meeting Rachel's eyes head-on.

"The assault. Tonight. I overheard you muttering about it… Bad habit, by the way. Don't give away intel to the enemy for free like that, Urimi."

That, once again, made the SL flinch. Not because Rachel had been overly harsh in her admonishment, but because Urimi definitely knew that she was right—Rachel knew that much of the woman by now.

She was far from stupid or oblivious.

Urimi let out a heavy sigh, leaning back against the compacted dirt behind her.

"Bad family habits are hard to unlearn, alright? Muttering while thinking runs several generations deep," she said quietly, rubbing at the sealed cut along her cheek. "Not that you'd understand much of that—bad family habits."

That made Rachel take a step back, her eyes narrowing at Urimi.

"What, exactly," she asked slowly, "do you mean by that?"

And when their eyes met once more, Rachel could immediately tell the answer.

She knew. Somehow, Urimi knew.

Rachel had no idea how. She'd been very careful. 

Bare first name only, no honorifics, no estate mannerisms, no invocation of the doctrine that lived behind her teeth—beyond that one near-slip, but she was certain nobody had paid too much attention to that. 

She had not truly let a single thing slip—she'd made sure of it. 

She didn't have the right to be seen as a Masters right now, and she had guarded that self-imposed sentence with everything her upbringing had given her.

"Because nothing else would make sense," Urimi said simply, "than you being a Legacy. I don't know which one. Or why you aren't claiming to be one—that's your personal business, and I won't pry. But you're a Recruit, that much is obvious. You're still lacking several kinds of experience on the field, despite the—undoubtedly extensive—Legacy training you clearly hold."

"Like what?" The question came out sharper and faster than Rachel intended. "What experience am I missing? What gave me away?!"

Urimi simply grinned at her, raised a hand, and pointed directly at her.

"Well. First of all—that. I wasn't actually a hundred percent on it, but you just confirmed it for me, so…" Her grin turned smug and self-deprecating in equal measure. "Don't give away intel to the enemy for free like that, Rachel."

Rachel simply stared at her for several long seconds.

… Then barked a genuine laugh.

That—that was very well played. She could not deny it one single bit. 

Baited with a vague provocation, and she'd lunged straight into it, confirming the hypothesis with her own mouth inside of two seconds. She'd fucked up on that one, plain and simple, and the matrons would have whipped her for such an obvious social blunder. 

Interrogation-by-implication was a game she'd been drilled in since she could talk. She absolutely should know better than this.

It was one of the cheapest tricks in the book. 

She’d just not expected it here, of all places. 

"There are several tells with you, though," Urimi continued, mercifully moving past the moment. "Aside from just the lack of experience. Most of it comes down to this: You're incredibly smart, incredibly perceptive—and yet you frequently miss immediate things around you in the midst of battle. You have a keen eye for people needing protection. Genuinely, one of the best I've seen. But you don't properly extend that same perception beyond immediate danger." 

She gestured vaguely toward Emberly's sleeping form down the trench. "There were several moments in today's battles where you switching position closer to Emberly would have let her fire far more capriciously. Better angles, better cover for her exposure windows. But because she wasn't in immediate danger at the time, you seemingly never even considered it. I thought about telling you mid-fight, a couple of times. But I can't micro-manage everyone's positioning while also doing my own jobs at the same time."

The SL sighed then, shaking her head slightly, before looking back up at Rachel towering in the middle of the pillbox.

"Don't take this next part the wrong way, alright?"

Rachel nodded without hesitation. 

This was great intel, after all—an outside audit of her own blind spots, free of charge. 

Why in the Emperor's name would she ever be angry about receiving it?

"Your greatest lack of experience," Urimi said, "is that you don't consider other people's strengths enough. Which is likely part of the Legacy viewpoint on things, no? People who aren't Legacies aren't worth particularly much—until they've proven themselves. Isn't that right?"

Rachel froze up at that.

The words landed with a pin-point precision that felt downright invasive—this random Squad Leader from a waypoint station nobody had ever heard of, reading her that exactly, after less than a single day of combat together... 

Rachel had spent her entire life being assessed by professionals: Tutors, matrons, her parents' circle, rival Legacies probing for weakness across dinner tables. None of them had ever articulated something like that to her, as far as she could remember.

Urimi smiled at her—and Rachel detected a hint of sadness in it. And… pity?

'Why would she pity me?'

"The thing that truly gave it away though," Urimi said, "was that you asked for my birthplace again. After learning from me about that Command-spiel." 

She let those words hang for a few moments. "We all shared our birthplaces and hailing sectors at the start of the DM, Rachel. The whole squad, standing in a circle, first five minutes of the mission. You clearly didn't pay attention to a word of it—given that you needed the full rundown again. And you only asked after I'd proven 'worthy' of the question. That was the biggest tell, honestly. It's very typical for Legacies, in my experience. You often disregard those of 'lesser' pre-Integration training." 

She raised a placating hand. "Which isn't necessarily a bad thing either, don't get me wrong. It has its upsides—it lets you focus on your own actions far more completely, and it's the sole reason Legacies almost always become truly remarkable Marines. But there are times where paying more attention to your 'lesser' squadmates results in vastly improved outcomes, too. Beyond even what you can achieve yourself. And that, fundamentally, shouldn't require a lengthy worthiness process with evidence submitted first. Not in my eyes, at least. Every Marine is specialised in something, Rachel. Every single one. Dismissing them all until they find the time to prove it to a Legacy like you is a waste of everybody's time—yours most of all."

Rachel had no idea what to say to that.

She wasn't exactly dismissive of other Marines. 

She protected them all the same—had knelt in a breach and been crushed half to death for a squad of strangers not twelve hours ago. Sure, it was true that she didn't particularly know where the ceiling of each of her current squadmates' capabilities sat, but that also wasn't exactly critical information given the DM's nature, was it? The Stellar Republic's wave-like attacks wouldn't change. The tactical problem was fundamentally static in nature. 

But Urimi had also proven that her words were worth considering—

She stopped herself mid-thought.

'"Proven herself…" That's the phrasing you just reached for, Rachel… The exact thing she just dissected you for.'

She was only weighing Urimi's perspective as valuable because the woman had already demonstrated her worth.

Would she have even listened to her to this degree otherwise? 

… She would have. 

Because Urimi was her SL, and chain of command existed for a reason.

But if she hadn't been? If this exact analysis had come from Holden, or Emberly, or some other random Marine in the medbay?

‘... I probably wouldn’t have,’ Rachel admitted to herself. ‘I would have filed it under noise from the unproven and moved on without a second thought…’

Maybe there was something to what Urimi was saying after all. 

Maybe she was missing out on important experience and lessons, with her current approach—entire libraries of specialised knowledge walking around her in unremarkable armour, unread because she'd never once considered the covers worth opening.

While Rachel wrestled with that new, potentially important revelation about herself, Urimi brought the conversation back around to its opening.

"So... Why do you think we should volunteer for the assault, then?"

Rachel packed the self-examination away for later dissection—there'd be time enough to itemise her own failings once the shooting stopped for good—and answered immediately.

"We're a full-strength squad. We haven't lost a single one of our mission revives yet, and we have the squad setup—especially with Emberly and myself—to punch far above our weight class in terms of raw firepower. Which is exactly what matters for a surprise assault: Overwhelming violence at the point of contact, before they can organise a response. Holden and the Twins are also still surprisingly fresh, all things considered." 

She nodded toward the sleeping shapes down the trench. "Put all of that together, and we're easily sitting in the top few percentiles of squads remaining anywhere on the UHF line. I don't need to consult Command's rosters for that one. It's just simple statistics."

Urimi slowly nodded along, visibly chewing through the arguments one by one.

It was abundantly clear to Rachel that the SL did not want to assault the Freaks.

Nobody really wanted to, honestly. 

There was only one thing in this Galaxy genuinely worse than getting assaulted by the Stellar Republic—and that was trying to assault one of their fortified positions. 

Attacking into that many guns, that many bodies, that much patient, grinding attrition doctrine… Every Marine on this line had spent the entire day learning first-hand exactly what defensive fire did to attacking infantry. Volunteering to stand on the other side of that equation—while also being vastly outnumbered—was not a sane person's idea of a good night.

But Urimi ultimately looked back up at Rachel—and then a teasing smile played across her face.

"Aaaand?"

Rachel simply stared at her for a few seconds, an indignant heat rising in her chest.

'Why is this commoner being so chummy with me? Teasing me? I am a—'

She stopped her thoughts dead in their tracks once more.

'…No. Urimi is not a commoner. She's your Squad Leader. And somebody who has already proven her worth many times over today.' 

Then, begrudgingly, the newer correction reared its ugly head as well, 'And even the proving shouldn't have been the price of admission, apparently… She's a fellow Marine, at the very least. A rather pleasant one, at that. Start there.'

Rachel sighed, taking a half-step back, physically conceding the ground along with the point.

"And I really need to get as high a score as I can," she admitted. "I have a Challenge coming up soon—to get into Alpha Squad. I need every Contribution Point, System Credit and System Merit I can pull out of these DMs."

"There it is," Urimi smiled, her teeth showing now—one of them freshly chipped, likely from the shrapnel that had opened her cheek earlier. "Fine. I'll throw our hat in the ring, Rachel. But we won't start for another hour or so at the least—so go get some more rest. And maybe think about what I said, yeah?"

Rachel nodded, then turned around and started walking away—

—before stopping herself once again.

She turned back toward Urimi.

"Actually… No."

Urimi raised both eyebrows in surprise.

"You go. I haven't seen you rest once yet, and I can't have my SL be sleep-deprived during an assault. I'll take over the watch and organise everything non-strategically-critical with Command."

Their eyes met once more, for a long, silent moment.

… Then Urimi smiled at her again. A genuine and warm smile—the very kind Rachel had only ever seen extremely rarely in her life, and didn't really know how to interpret beyond the textbook definitions she'd been taught. 

There had been an entire curriculum module on reading expressions throughout her childhood: Muscle groups, sincerity markers, duration analysis… None of it had ever quite covered what one was supposed to do when such a smile was aimed at oneself. Especially freely, with nothing obvious attached.

"You know what? You're right. Thanks, Rachel."

With those words, Urimi got up from her spot, shouldered her rifle, then handed over the command tablet and headed back into the darkness of the trenches beyond, leaving Rachel alone inside the pillbox…

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