The desert wind bit into her cloak as Aera stepped off the transport. The Shale Expanse sprawled before her like a battlefield frozen in time. Ruined towers jutted out from the dust like broken teeth, their metal frames twisted by artillery fire and time. The sky was choked with smoke, but the horizon burned orange with the promise of morning.
Behind her, Kael's soldiers disembarked in silence. Uniformed, disciplined, efficient. No banners. No chants. Just purpose. Two squads, just as he'd promised—scout-trained, elite, and equipped with gear generations ahead of anything Aera had seen in the resistance. They moved like parts of a single machine.
And they obeyed her.
She didn't understand why Kael trusted her so easily. Or maybe he didn't. Maybe he'd already predicted every move she would make from the moment she stepped into the Bastion. But if that were true, why give her the tools to forge her own path?
She passed through the outer ruins with caution. Resistance fighters were hidden in makeshift shelters and collapsed metro lines, always watching. Some aimed rifles at her convoy from the shadows, but none fired. Not yet.
Aera raised her hand and signaled the lead operative—Sergeant Elian, calm and precise, hand-picked by Kael himself. She climbed the crumbled edge of a former office complex and waited.
The envoy from the coalition emerged cautiously. A ragged group of leaders from ruined nations—military remnants, rebel figureheads, and desperate survivors pretending at governance. They looked at her soldiers with unease, their gazes flitting from the high-tech armor to the auto-turrets mounted on their transport.
"You brought them," one of the men said. "The Black Strategist's dogs."
"They're not dogs," Aera said firmly. "They're a gift. And a promise."
"A promise of what?"
"That Kael won't crush you. Not yet. Not if we make something worth sparing."
That earned silence. The kind where trust tried to take root but found only ash.
Later that evening, around a makeshift campfire nestled inside a half-collapsed cathedral, Aera sat beside Elian and watched the fire reflect off the stained-glass shards scattered in the rubble. The soldiers did not sing, did not share stories—but they worked, quietly reinforcing barricades, scanning the perimeter, and distributing rations like clockwork.
"Do they ever question him?" Aera asked.
Elian didn't look up. "Kael doesn't give orders. He gives clarity. That's enough."
She frowned. "That doesn't sound like loyalty. It sounds like programming."
"He doesn't need loyalty," Elian replied. "He needs results."
The wind howled through broken stone arches, carrying with it the faint scent of ozone—stormfront or energy weapon discharge, it was hard to tell. In the distance, Dezune gunships crossed the sky, scouting for resistances just like this one.
Aera stood and walked deeper into the shattered cathedral, finding what remained of the altar. She ran a hand across the marble, now cracked and scorched, and wondered how many had prayed here before war turned gods into ghosts.
Her mind drifted to Kael. To his HUD, his unreadable eyes, and the precise cadence of his words. Was there anything of the boy left inside the machine he'd become?
Or had the war taken even that?
She looked to the horizon—where soldiers and rebels reinforced their broken walls with steel and hope.
This was her path now. The long road. The uncertain one.
But as the firelight flickered across her face, Aera felt something stirring in the air — a shift. Whether it was Kael's influence expanding or something else entirely, she couldn't say.
Only that the wind carried more than dust now.
It carried the weight of choice.