[TAS] Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XXYXX (Finale) - Obligation

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Chapter 106 - The Talk III today with no major changes.

For the Wolf Lords, this chapter has seen no changes

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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As promised, the finale of Rachel's POV adventures!

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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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-------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jM2yvO-41kCyS0QpR03Uty9MMlUhCX3IjJji3oUxOm0/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XXYXX (Finale) - Obligation

Her father was watching today.

Raymond Oleaven Masters had a window of free time in his schedule, which happened perhaps twice a year, and he liked to spend the rare few of them watching his daughter train. 

She was nine years old at the time, and she had wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything else, to be perfect for him that day.

Which was, of course, exactly why she wasn't.

She felt it going wrong within the first hour. 

Her footwork, drilled ten thousand times into flawless muscle memory, arrived a half-beat late under the weight of his gaze. Her shield lifts came stiff. Her blade and hammer forms, which she could run in her sleep, developed hitches she had never once produced when no one who mattered was in the room. 

And every single mistake fed the next, because she noticed every single one, and noticing pulled her attention off the drill and onto herself, and a Masters who was watching herself was a Masters who was already losing.

By the second hour she was making errors she had corrected at seven.

Her father said nothing. He simply stood at the edge of the hall in a plain grey day-robe, arms folded, watching with an expression she could not read and did not dare try to.

Which was almost worse than any reprimand.

By the time Instructor Waltz finally called the round to a close, she was practically vibrating. 

The frustration sat behind her sternum like a smouldering coal, climbing steadily up into her skull until her whole head throbbed with it. 

But she kept it off her face.

A Masters did not fail where others could see—especially not her father.

And then the useless maid dropped the breastplate.

It was an accident, she knew—the piece was heavy—but it hit the polished floor with a colossal, ringing CLANG that drove a titanium spike straight through her pounding skull.

The coal behind her sternum flashed white.

"Are you utterly incapable of holding a single piece of armour without embarrassing yourself?!" The words tore out of her, screeching and vicious. "Do you have any idea how much that is worth?! More than you'll earn in a—a century—and you throw it around like scrap metal, you clumsy, useless—"

A hand settled on her shoulder.

She froze mid-word. 

The instant it touched her, the coal guttered out and something cold and small took its place, because she understood, all at once, that she had gone over a line—and that her father had watched her do it.

But he did not address her next. 

He stepped past her instead, and crouched to bring himself level with the pale, stiff maid.

"Miranda," he said, warmly. "Mistakes happen to everyone. It is a breastplate of armour. If it got dented or we’d have to worry about it performing after but a small fall, it wouldn’t be particularly good armour now, would it?"

The maid smiled shakily, bowed several times over, accepted the plate with visible effort that he held out to her, and retreated with hasty steps—leaving the girl and her father alone.

"What was that about?!" she demanded.

He sighed and lowered himself onto the equipment bench. "Being a Masters does not, in itself, place you above others. Could you do what Miranda does? Keep this estate running, flawlessly, day after day—to the point that you have lived your whole life inside it without once wondering how it even stays clean?"

She opened her mouth… Then closed it. 

Because she never had.

"…No. But that isn't my job. I'm a Masters."

"No. It is not. A Masters is not a maid." He raised a finger before she could feel pleased. "You are trained to be better than everyone else. But that is not the goal, Rache. It is the tool. You must never admonish one beneath you for the mere fact of being beneath you. Until a person is shown the chance to prove their worth and squanders it, they are an asset worth protecting. Every single one of them. You are being trained to be a shield, Rache. For all of them. They are not your lessers for failing to be born a Masters. They are your assets—to be placed where they can unfold whatever they do best."

Something almost gentle crossed the weathered face.

"We have a phrase for this, among the Legacies. Never forget it—even though I can see you do not yet understand a word of what I am saying. But one day, you will. And when that day comes, I will be prouder of you than you can possibly imagine."

"Tell me!" she begged, bouncing on her heels. "Tell me and I'll understand it right away, I promise!"

He smiled at her—the one that meant “no, you won't,” without a trace of unkindness.

And then he told her.

—

She did not understand it, that day.

She did not understand it through the ten thousand hours of drilling that followed. 

And she did not understand it even after she had left for Integration, been ferried to the great grey shape of the IGS Sovereign, and stood at the start of her first Recruit Year—certain, still, that she had already internalised everything her father had ever tried to teach her.

But she had not understood it yet and would not truly for several weeks and months after…

—

[Shortened Memory Excerpt: “Grace”, PFC943]

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PoV: Rachel Veronica Masters.

The moment of frozen stillness passed quickly.

The squad continued their advance toward the sounds anyway—because there was nothing else to do—but with a marked uptick in caution in every single step now.

Running into an auto-turret unprepared was a guaranteed death sentence. 

Every Marine knew that. 

It was one of the first things Basic hammered into fresh Recruits about fortified positions: Rifles missed and soldiers hesitated. Machine-slaved targeting arrays, however, did neither.

So they made sure to carefully stop before each and every junction now, spying around the sides using the standard-issue close-quarter clearing tools included in practically every UHF armour—a selective-angle mirror surface built into the palm of the gauntlets, easily activated, letting a Marine watch around corners without directly giving themselves away with stray reflections.

Rachel was, of course, the one to take up that role.

She did so instinctively. As the Defensive Heavy, it was her job to clear their path, after all—her palm at every corner, her silhouette the first thing offered to every new stretch of tunnel, the rest of the squad stacked tight behind her plate.

Thankfully, it seemed the other UHF squad—the one that had come through this exact path mere minutes ago and had likely found the auto-turret earlier—had done a thorough job of cleaning up behind themselves.

All Rachel's mirror found, junction after junction, was the aftermath: Dead Duplicates and Stellar Republic Soldiers slumped over crates and sprawled across the tunnel floors, fighting positions that had clearly been overrun mid-scramble by the sudden attack. 

Oftentimes with their rifles still racked and rations still steaming in the alcoves. 

The Freaks had been largely hit exactly the way an infiltration was supposed to hit—before a single one of them understood what was happening to them.

The picture only really changed once.

They stumbled upon the scene of an evidently major exchange—a junction chewed apart by concentrated fire from both sides, Freak bodies stacked deep across it—and among them, two dead Marines, left where they had fallen. Their squad hadn't even had the time to pull them aside; likely a consequence of the brutal time constraints the infiltration ran on.

Naturally, Rachel's squad did the same, moving past without stopping, for they, too, had little time to waste on such formalities.

They continued following the tunnel systems toward the Command Tunnels they'd initially been pointed toward by the imbecile, every step measured, every corner mirrored, always vigilant about the potential location of the auto-turret they had heard.

Thankfully, however, they did not have to look for long or very cautiously after all.

Around three minutes after they had initially heard the sounds of the auto-turret firing, Rachel turned her mirror around a junction corner, went completely still, and was pretty certain they had just found its exact location.

She was staring at the mirrored aftermath of that one second long fire.

The junction led into a hallway that featured a T-intersection in the center—and the remains of the Marine squad were splayed against the back wall of said intersection.

Remains was the only applicable word.

There were four of them. 

That much she could reconstruct from the count of helmets, because very little else about them still resembled four individual people. 

The high-calibre auto-turret rounds had not merely killed them, but had rather disassembled them in ways that one only really saw in the aftermath of an auto-turret’s wrath. 

The Marine furthest left had been caught mid-turn and opened up from hip to opposite shoulder, the armour along that line completely shattered, plate fragments driven inward and everything soft behind them expressed outward across the wall in a fan of dark, drying arterial spray. 

The next one had lost both legs below the thigh—the legs were near the intersection's mouth, the rest of him three meters further back, dragged by the impacts into the base of the wall, his torso simply deflated in a boneless way that implied there had been very little resistance to the impacts.

The third had seemingly raised an arm in a futile attempt to shield himself. 

The arm, now, was simply gone—shoulder and all, leaving nothing but a crater of pulverised meat where it had connected—and the sustained burst had walked across his chest afterward, shattering and fusing the breastplate into his ribcage until armour and sternum had become a singular cohesive, concave ruin.

The fourth was the worst, because the fourth had likely been the first to enter into the auto-turret’s sightline—and had been wearing the heaviest armour.

They had been downright liquified in places—the centre mass reduced to a slurry of shredded undersuit, heavy plate fragments, and pulped tissue that had run down the wall and pooled beneath the body, soaking outward into the compacted dirt in a wide, black-red stain. 

The wall behind all four remains of them was cratered in tight, mechanical stitch-lines, each impact mark the size of a fist, the pattern walking left to right and back again with inhuman, metronome regularity.

It had merely been one second of fire.

Four T1 Marines were dead and reduced to barely recognizable piles. 

Veterans, all of them—Rachel had watched squads of these people hold the sixth line all day against everything the Stellar Republic could throw at them. They had been specifically chosen for having remained deathless up until the infiltration—much like Rachel and her squad had.

One second was all that it had taken.

The squad could not see the auto-turret itself from their angle as they entered the tunnel proper, but the way the bodies had been thrown, the direction of the spray, the angle of the impact craters in the floor and the back wall… The geometry of the aftermath revealed the entire story with abundant clarity. 

It was located down the T-intersection's main branch, on some kind of elevated mount, commanding the entire junction with a clean, unbroken firing lane.

They now knew exactly where it was.

Instinctively, Rachel found herself holding out her arm—before she even consciously knew what she was doing—and caught Holden right in the chest with it. Hard.

He'd been moving. 

Already two steps into the hallway, diagnostic kit half-drawn, heading straight for the Marines to see if there was anything he could still do.

There wasn't. 

Any glance at that wall said there wasn't.

But he was a Medic, and Medics did not process casualties through glances—they processed them through their hands, and his hands wanted into that corridor. 

Rachel had no intentions whatsoever of letting him.

Her subconscious must have picked up on his movement before her conscious mind had—which wasn't surprising, honestly. 

This exact scenario was a fairly common occurrence, and one she'd drilled against thousands of times on Vespera: A squad member—and a Medic, especially—diving head-first into danger for another Marine before truly thinking it through. 

It was practically written into the Role’s DNA. The very instinct that made Medics worth their weight in Crysium was the exact same instinct that so often walked them into firing lanes.

She pushed him back—forcibly, one full-armoured shove that planted him in the centre of the squad—and signalled him sharply to be quiet. Then she pointed two fingers at the T-intersection's main branch, flattened her palm: “Turret. There. Lane is closed.”

Holden went still. 

His breathing stayed slightly elevated over the squad link for a few seconds longer—then evened out, forced back under control. He didn't try to walk into his own death again.

Rachel turned and signalled Urimi as they slowly walked into the tunnel, pulling her up close  to the front with her so the SL could read the scene for herself: The bodies and impact geometry, as well as the implied firing lane, drawn in blood and cratered dirt, sealing the junction shut as effectively as a bulkhead.

Then she gave her the flat, open-handed sign that put the decision where it belonged.

“Your call. What do we do?”

Urimi stared down the corridor for a long, long moment, her jaw working silently behind her visor as her eyes darted from the remains to the open hallway where the auto-turret was located, back to the far-end of the corridor that was the other side of the T-junction…

She did not look happy—which made Rachel not particularly happy either.

'We'll have to somehow disable that auto-turret, won't we?' she couldn't help but think, already putting together the same information Urimi was likely working with.

They only knew this one route to the command area—the one the imbecile had told them about. Other routes existed, of course, but they'd committed to this one several minutes ago, when everything had kicked off. 

By now, it was far too late to change course without running into veritable hordes of Stellar Republic Soldiers—and every second spent trying to find a different path would just hand the enemy more time to react to the infiltration.

Not to mention, auto-turrets were almost always located in areas that needed high levels of protection. Which meant that right past this one—just like the imbecile Freak had told them—was likely the enemy command structure for this entire area.

If they spent time trying to walk around it all, hunting for a junction without an auto-turret setup—if such a thing even existed—the enemy command would have long since had enough time to either barricade themselves in past the point of being assailable by their small team, or simply flee deeper into the tunnels.

And finding another imbecile who'd freely give away the location of the enemy command… 

"We'll have to kill it," Urimi quietly proclaimed their sentence over the squad comms.

Everyone reacted about as enthused as Rachel herself felt at those words. Fighting an auto-turret was undeniable suicide—they were going to have to sacrifice quite a bit just to get a single good shot at it.

But she also couldn't argue with Urimi's conclusion.

This was the best way forward.

If not for them, then for the UHF in this DM, at the very least.

They were not the only infiltration squad—just like the other one, the one that had first run into this turret, had not been either. The first squad showed them it existed and where it was located. The second squad would try to clear it, to pave the way for the third squad and all those following—such were the calculations that had to be done when facing an auto-turret.

'Unless you have that monstrous Scout with you, I guess…' Rachel added, a jolt of envy racing through her. 'With her at my side, I could clear this damn auto-turret in no time at all. If even fucking Callahan managed to do it in the Assessment, it wouldn't even be a speedbump for me...'

She'd watched Alpha Squad's encounter with the auto-turrets inside the tunnels during the Nova Tertius assault more than a dozen times by now.

It was basically unheard of—a singular squad of Recruits taking care of not just one auto-turret, but several at the same time, and coming out the other side somehow mostly unharmed. 

While also being understaffed and missing their Squad Leader, no less.

'All because of the McKay girl's freakish capabilities… If I could just have her in my arsenal!'

But alas, she did not have the #1 Recruit of the whole damn Drive in her squad at this point in time—so she'd have to somehow make do without.

Around Rachel, the squad's preparations began.

The Twins took up positions flanking the main junction corner, exchanged one of their mirror-glances, and tossed two grenades around the corner in smooth, practiced arcs—one high and long, one low and skittering.

Neither exploded. 

Both simply rolled to a stop somewhere down the corridor and went silent, their fuses killed mid-count.

It was to be expected, honestly. 

An Active-Denial-System set up next to the auto-turret was basically standard procedure for a longer-form installation like this—either a localized suppression field that murdered detonation triggers, fuse timers, and propellant ignition inside its bubble or one that shot all grenades out of the air immediately. This one was clearly the first kind. 

But it had definitely been worth checking anyway—it always was. All it cost was a grenade or two, and the potential gains if the enemy had gotten lazy were massive.

Unfortunately, they had not gotten lazy.

'Of course not,' Rachel thought, unsurprised. 'The turret placement is downright textbook. Whoever fortified this junction knew exactly what they were doing…'

While the others worked, Rachel considered her next moves.

She had quite a few options available to her, at least in theory. 

She'd drilled auto-turret encounters many thousands of times in her youth—full-simulation runs on Vespera, with instructors adjusting parameters after every death—and she knew the exact statistics and mathematics that governed everything the machines did.

Their target acquisition could not be beaten by a human. Full stop. 

No reaction-time training, no Attribute investment, no reflex enhancement closed that gap—aside from being the McKay girl, apparently, but freaks of nature made very poor planning baselines. 

Auto-turrets showed absolutely zero hesitation: Acquisition was firing.

Meaning that whoever was caught first was guaranteed to die.

Even Super Heavy armour did not protect against auto-turret rounds at this distance—she'd just spent a long moment studying the corridor's proof of that. 

Her Bulwark could block the auto-turret’s fire for a few good seconds, but it would require all of Rachel’s power, and likely the entire grav-lock battery as well, just to keep it upright. And even then, there’d be nothing stopping the auto-turret from simply killing everyone peeking out from behind the shield at a moment’s notice.

So… She'd have to let someone else go first.

It was simple arithmetics in Rachel’s mind.

Auto-turrets would stop firing at a target after, at most, 0.1 seconds—assuming the targeting logic recognized a new, more important threat entering its cone. 

One hundred milliseconds of servicing time to guarantee the kill, then re-acquisition. 

That was all there was to the exploitable seam. It was also far too little time for a human—even Integrated and enhanced like Marines were—to genuinely react within.

'So… The Twins, maybe?'

If both of them broke cover simultaneously, on non-overlapping vectors, the turret would service one, re-acquire, then service the other. Two hundred milliseconds, give or take, of the turret's attention spent elsewhere. That might—might—be enough time for Rachel to swing out and get a shot off at its targeting cluster.

But then she'd have essentially zero time to actually aim. 

A snap-shot at a hardened alcove target, under a fifth of a second, with her life and the mission as the stake... Her hit probability on that math was unacceptably low for her tastes.

'Bring Emberly as well, then.'

The autocannon would change the acquisition order of the auto-turret entirely. 

Its threat-assessment logic weighted weapon signature above all else—Emberly, lugging the single heaviest gun in the squad, would be classified as the priority threat the instant she entered its cone. 

It would service her first, guaranteed. 

She'd never get to fire the thing, of course; the weapon was far too heavy to swing into position and properly aim in the time she'd have, which was the time it took a turret to kill her. 

But her death would buy Rachel another hundred milliseconds or so of distraction, stacked on top of the Twins'. Three hundred milliseconds… Potentially enough for a properly braced, pre-aligned shot from a known angle.

'That might be enough.'

That would leave her with Holden and Urimi to finish out the mission afterward. A Medic, a semi-marksman-SL, and herself against whatever waited behind the auto-turret. 

Not the best outcome, not by a wide margin… but she could still earn points that way. 

The mission could still be salvaged into more profits, as long as she stayed alive—and killing an auto-turret was guaranteed to give her some major returns.

Around her, the rest of the squad was rapidly laying out their inventories on the tunnel floor—breaching strips, det-cord, a smoke canister, spare optics—hunting for avenues to take care of the auto-turret in some cleverer way.

Rachel did not bother joining them.

She'd already run the full inventory of everyone's equipment that she’d remembered from back at the pre-infiltration briefing—every pouch, every strap—and concluded within seconds that there was nothing they carried that could help them here. 

No anti-materiel launcher, no shaped charges rated for hardened alcoves, nothing with the reach and payload to matter, and the ADS killed every detonation-based idea before it even really got started. 

The math was simply the math. 

Someone was going to have to be serviced by that turret so that someone else could kill it.

There was, however, one major snag in her plan…

‘Urimi.’

Her SL would absolutely not agree to a plan in which she herself was not involved—not for a sacrifice play like this. Rachel had known the woman for less than a day and was already certain of it to the point of not bothering to model alternatives. 

Urimi was simply the type. 

She'd insist on being in the breach group, probably first in the breach group, out of exactly the kind of leadership principle that got written into commendation citations posthumously.

And Rachel could not construct a single defensible reason why, in the Emperor’s golden name, Urimi should die over the others.

She was probably the most worthwhile person in this entire squad, after all. 

Corridor-predictions of nothing but a fabric map, artillery tasking and command-location assumptions that had broken an entire assault's back, the read she'd done on Rachel herself… The woman had proven her merit more than enough by now. 

Her misplaced loyalty to the rest of the squad would unduly get her killed, and cost her the System Merit, Credits and Contribution Points she could otherwise still gain by continuing the mission afterward. Spending the squad's best remaining asset on a distraction role that Emberly and the Twins could fill identically was simply, objectively, bad resource allocation—

Rachel's own thought snagged abruptly.

'…Worthwhile… Proven her merit… Resource allocation…'

She grimaced.

'You're doing it again, Rache. You're ranking them by merit observed and spending them like ammunition...'

She sat with that for a moment, jaw tight behind her visor.

And now, of all times, a memory came to her mind.

A memory she had not really thought about in quite a while—of a day on Vespera when her father had set her aside, after she'd embarrassed herself screeching at a maid over a dropped breastplate. Of him sitting on the equipment bench in his plain grey day-robe, telling her something he'd openly said she wouldn't understand. 

Not that day. And not until much, much later.

"We have a phrase for this, among the Legacies," his voice came back to her now, calm and warm across the years. "It is passed down from Old-Terra, in a language that is long dead and lost now—but that language once held some of the most profound and beautiful wisdoms our species has ever produced. This was long before space travel was even truly conceived of, the historians say, Rache. Back then, there existed a caste, not so unlike us Legacies at all… They lived by this phrase, and they died by it. And just like them, we Legacies consider it a guiding star for everything we do, to this very day: Noblesse Oblige. In more modern words: Meritum Obligat.

"Your merit—the merit we invest in you through this gruelling training, and the merit of your birthright as a Masters—that merit is not a crown, Rache. It is a debt; an obligation. It is exactly what obliges you to show grace to your fellow Marines. To guide them. To stand as their shield in every situation where they cannot help themselves. You being better than them is not the goal—it is the tool. The very one with which you fulfill your obligation to them. They are your assets. Your charge. You protect them with your life. And if it comes to it, you lay that life down as well. That is what it means to be a Masters. That is what it means to be a Legacy, Rache. Noblesse Oblige: Our obligation, as Legacies."

She sat with that memory for quite a while.

Practically frozen, kneeling in a blood-soaked tunnel behind enemy lines, as the implications of his words finally—finally—crashed over her, almost a decade too late.

The realization that, fundamentally, she'd been completely misunderstanding just about everything she'd been taught.

'How… How could this be?'

They must prove their worth before they count—that had been her doctrine, her taxonomy, her entire operating lens for practically all other human beings she’d ever met. 

Yet her father had told her, downright explicitly, at nine years old, that it ran the other way: The proving was hers to do. The worth was theirs by default. 

Merit didn't elevate her above obligations—her Legacy merit was the obligation.

'Have I really been wrong this whole time? Was Urimi right? Meritum Obligat… Merit obligates me to put them above myself when I’m the only one that can do something. Unless there's a tactical reason not to… Is there one?'

She ran the math again, even though she already knew there wasn’t.

She could, single-handedly, take at least 200 milliseconds of the turret's attention. 

Maybe even 300. 

Her armour would hold longest, her movement patterns were the only ones drilled against acquisition logic, and she knew how to work the machines... If she went first, most of her squad could survive the clearing attempt.

And she could not teach the others any of it. 

Not here, not right now. 

Maybe not ever, given how long it truly took to internalize. 

It took thousands of repetitions to get it all just right—to buy just a fraction of a second longer against a machine that did not miss. 

It was a layer of education and training the others had simply never received and likely would never either.

Because they were not Masters. They were not Legacies, blessed with decades and centuries of accumulated teachings, with educational manuals written by the brightest minds of every generation and passed down across bloodlines.

They were just Marines, doing their best.

And they really were doing their best, weren't they?

The Twins had been genuinely impressive all day—their accuracy, their seamless mirrored teamwork, their distinct lack of needing to be told how to be useful... 

Not at Legacy levels, no. Of course not. 

But still. 

Emberly had somehow survived an entire day of this meat grinder despite her frankly deranged armour choice—which, viewed honestly, spoke of serious skill within her chosen setup rather than luck. 

Urimi… well. She really didn't need to list Urimi's achievements again.

And Holden…

Well… Holden was Holden.

He was also there, and still alive—which was more than could be said about most other Marines at this stage of the DM. 

That alone counted for something, didn't it?

'It does,' she decided. 'It counts. It has always counted. That's the entire point, Rache… That's what he was trying to—'

"Rachel?! Are you listening? Hello?!"

Urimi's urgent voice crackled in her ear, cutting her ruminations short.

Rachel took a moment to recenter herself, then got up, and took point.

"—if we stack a doubled breach on the left angle, then maybe—" Urimi was saying into the squad channel, sketching something with her hands into the dirt.

"No," Rachel interrupted, stepping past her. It was not a good plan. She didn't need to hear most of it to know that. "Here's how we’ll do it."

She laid it all out, in as much detail as she could muster given the time constraints of potential Freaks showing up at any moment now.

"I go first. I draw the turret with the Bulwark and hold its fire. Twins, Urimi, Emberly—you stack behind me, and we advance to the junction's center as one. You stay perfectly inside my shield's shadow. One shoulder out of line, and it turns into that." 

She didn't bother to gesture at the corridor's contents—not that anybody had likely needed her to. They all knew what giving an auto-turret even an inch meant.

"At center, on my signal: I raise my Cyclone and take the turret's main aggro, as I cover Emberly's silhouette with my body while she raises the autocannon. It likely won't be enough time—the turret will very probably get her too, I’m sorry to say. But it's the best we've got. Her raising it forces the threat-reprioritisation we need to buy time for everyone else. Twins—you kill the turret in that window. Target center mass of the housing. Your accuracy's been on-point all day; I have no doubts you will come through again. If you do somehow miss, Urimi's the final backup." 

She took a deep breath. "If it costs me and Emberly, the squad is still strong enough afterward to keep paving the way to enemy command for the rest of the infiltration squads. That's the plan. If there’s no questions, get in position."

She cut her explanations off exactly there and moved to the junction mouth, settling the Bulwark, waiting for the rest of the squad to fall in behind her.

Which… They did. Without any further discussion.

Rachel had been prepared for arguments, for retorts, for Urimi pulling rank on the sacrifice order—she'd even been prepared to reveal her Legacy background if that was what it took to force the point through. 

But apparently, none of her squad members had any better ideas than hers.

Or maybe Matron Vane's oratory lessons had finally come in to show their true worth, and she'd simply been convincing enough to get out of this without back-talk.

Either way, she was glad about it.

"So… Which Legacy are you, then?"

Urimi's voice crackled over a private channel in her ear, making her flinch slightly.

Rachel smiled after a brief moment of thought.

"Masters," she answered. "It's the reason I know my shield will not fail to keep you safe, Urimi. A Masters does not fall where others can see."

A static chuckle, before Urimi replied, quietly:

"Where others can see, a Masters does not fall, indeed."

A torrent of heat rushed through Rachel's chest at that.

Urimi knew one of the Masters' doctrines! 

Even all the way out on Emperor-forsaken Kessarine Orbital they knew of the Masters!

And she knew now, with complete certainty, that she was on the right track. 

This was, undoubtedly, what her father had meant all those years ago. 

Urimi would never have asked that question—never have shared this moment with her—if Rachel hadn't spoken up like this. 

If she hadn't stepped to the front of the breach and claimed the cost as hers.

'Meritum Obligat… This is what it's all about. Showing them that the Legacy deserves every bit of the praise hoisted upon it—by being first into the breach. Every single time...'

"All ready?"

Confirmation beeps came back from everyone.

Then she stepped forward into the hallway, Bulwark raised and braced.

The turret acquired her in under ten milliseconds.

Rachel’s world collapsed into a well-worn rhythm.

The first round hit like a collapsing building—the Bulwark's face screaming, her braced skeleton ringing—and she'd already gone to start unlocking the grav-lock the instant before impact, letting her whole frame roll with it, then lock, plant, step. 

The second round arrived; unlock, absorb, lock, step. Third. Fourth. 

The turret's fire rate was mechanical, metronomic, and that was its one, single exploitable grace: Rhythm could be learned. 

Unlock half a fraction after the impact to bleed some of the force into motion, lock in the gap to anchor the advance, half-step, angle-shift, repeat—the capacitor gauge draining at a genuinely dangerous rate, alloy peeling off the shield's face in glowing strips and parts breaking off towards the top, the four Marines behind her moving as one organism inside the shrinking, dancing shadow of her protection.

A single mistimed lock—ten milliseconds early, ten late—and the round would either shatter the drained lock outright or blow through the unanchored shield… Then they'd all die.

But she didn't mistime.

She'd done this thousands of times.

By the time they reached the junction's center—around two seconds after stepping into the hallway, two seconds containing perhaps forty distinct save-or-die timing windows—Rachel was dripping with sweat from sheer exhaustion, her arms trembling inside her plate, the Bulwark's face already chewed down to structural lace.

'You’re at the center. Now, Rache. Now!'

She gave the signal—and raised her Cyclone, angling her whole body sideways to cover Emberly's autocannon-silhouette with her own armoured mass, as she let go of the Bulwark entirely.

Its bulk took a few more hits standing—then the grav-lock finally failed, and the shield was flung unceremoniously past them all, cartwheeling down the corridor and smashing into several pieces against the back wall where the remains of the other Marines still lingered.

Cyclone rising, body exposed, the auto-turret naturally found her as the first target.

It fired.

She felt her chest evaporate—the round tearing through plate, sternum, and everything housed behind it in one obliterating instant—but [Redundant Organs] kicked in immediately, backup organs seizing the load, keeping her standing, keeping her moving for one more borrowed moment. 

She stepped away from Emberly, manipulating the turret's threat assessment with her final assets: Completing the Cyclone's raise—armed threat, active—while widening the distance from the new highest-priority target rising beside her.

The turret tracked the armed threat.

It fired again, and the right side of Rachel's torso liquified, the arm holding the Cyclone going with it.

Rachel screamed—pain and defiance in equal, indistinguishable measure—and pushed off the floor with everything her remaining body still held, rushing the auto-turret head-on. 

Close targets. 

Its assessment prioritised close targets, if it deemed them threats—

A shot rang out. Emberly cried out behind her.

'That was always going to happen—'

An instant later, the barrel was back on Rachel, and fired—

—and the world froze around her.

Mid-stride, mid-scream and the instant as the muzzle flash hung in the air ahead of her like a sculpture of light, while just behind her, two shots erupted in perfect unison, racing past her frozen shoulders toward the turret's targeting cluster—which hung there too, twin streaks suspended in crystalline time.

'W… What's happening?'

She tried to look around, but couldn't. 

She couldn't move, couldn't blink, couldn't even—mercifully—feel the ruin of her own body.

A moment later, things became clear, as a Notification flashed across her HUD.

[System]: Emergency Recovery to the Sovereign's DDS has been initiated.

[System]: Digital Mission for Recruit Rachel Veronica Masters has been cancelled. No penalties will be applied.

Her eyes widened—or would have, if she hadn't been completely frozen.

An instant later, the world around her simply ceased to exist.

—

Rachel found herself abruptly materialized back on the Digital Mission Deck aboard the Sovereign—whole, unwounded, both arms present, heart hammering hard inside an intact chest—

—alongside several thousand other Marines that popped up around her, who were all looking around exactly as confused and out-of-sorts as she was…

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