Anne Mayer
Special Economic Zone — Planet Daian
Off her guard and unaware, Anne didn't notice the bomb until it was already too late. The explosion caught her dead-on and flung her across the room, hard enough that she cratered the reinforced concrete as she crashed back-first into the nearest wall.
This made it... Three. Three times people had tried to kill her since she'd landed on this planet. She was meant to be here as a mediator, a neutral party helping to end a military uprising before it could begin. Instead, it seemed like many of the would-be rebels had trained their sights directly on
her.Anne Mayer. The woman who'd murdered Leah Zail, and effectively shattered the entire Northern Order in doing so. There were people who wanted her dead for political reasons, to light a fire in the remnants of the Northern forces—and others who were just out for revenge, who truly loathed her for what she had done. Thinking back on that scene, the way the severed head of her onetime friend had rolled across the ground... Anne couldn't help but feel much the same.
Even so, she couldn't fall here. Not while she was still able to fight.
With gritted teeth, she stumbled back to her feet, pain racing up her spine from where she'd made impact. The initial blast had taken out the barrier on her coat, and her ears still rang from the noise, her balance dangerously off-kilter. Through the clouds of dust she could make out voices, the shadows of armored figures now sweeping the area for any signs of her presence.
Should she hide? Fight back? She wasn't sure if her body could hold up in the latter case, especially if the enemy had Knights among them. Escape seemed like the best option: get out of the building, lose her pursuers, and rendezvous with Aegis before they figured out where she'd gone. The bombing couldn't have gone unnoticed, and her allies on the
Alcyone would already be on their way by now.
She drew in a breath, took a step forward, and barely stopped herself from doubling over as a fresh wave of agony shot through her legs and stomach. Her vision blurred, and in her moment of vulnerability she almost missed the telltale ripple of a sonic boom, the cyborg soldier accelerating full-force towards her.
Almost.
She caught him reflexively, grabbing hold of his extended arm before she fully realized what she was doing. Her throw slammed him headfirst into the wall at the exact center point of her previous impact, and drove him into and
through where the structure was at its weakest. Concrete shattered, the wall crumbled inward, and her aggressor was left stunned and half-buried under a mound of rubble and twisted rebar.
There would be more coming. Without pause, Anne forced herself to clamber up and over the wreckage, doing her best to ignore the tortured screams of her body telling her to just
give up and
die already. Bullets whizzed past her, and she ignored them—there really wasn't much she could do about them at the moment. And if one of the rounds were to hit her, well, she couldn't say that she didn't completely deserve it.
Through the wall. She could see the sky up above, now, the clouds of smog, the small aircraft zipping by. Urgency pushed her forward through the pain, towards the nearest alley, anything she could use as cover. She threw a glance over her shoulder to check for pursuers, and in doing so stumbled straight into the trap.
There was no pain as the white light washed over her. Only a sense of relief, like a vast weight was finally lifting from her shoulders. She'd fought all she could, but death had finally caught up with with her, an ignominious end for the woman once hailed as a savior of humanity.
Her last thoughts were of the ones she was leaving behind, and the burdens she had placed upon them all.
Amy, Leo, Yung. I'm sorry...
Unknown Region — Unidentified Planet
Cool air blew across her skin. Her eyes cracked open, and all at once the weight came crashing back, her body now aching head-to-toe.
Still alive, then. She swallowed the bile that was rising up her throat, and tried to focus, to get a sense of her surroundings. She must have been picked up in the aftermath and carried off somewhere to recover, but... Where? And by whom?
This wasn't the
Alcyone. Nor did it resemble any kind of modern hospital or treatment facility. If anything, the structure reminded her of a church, though it was in a state of such disrepair that it had to have been bombed at some point. Not a surprising sight, for someone who'd spent half her life in one battered warzone or another.
What really caught Anne's attention were the
people. A gathering of colorful strangers, each one entirely out of place in the crumbling ruins they now found themselves.
A green-haired girl in a fanciful blue-and-white dress, waving around some kind of narrow rod. Three children, accompanied by someone suited up in damaged power armor. Two young men with the look of Knights about them, one displaying some kind of Paranormal Power. And then a bright green... Machine?
Nearly all of them were speaking, and most of it came through as nonsense to the veteran Knight's ears. She recognized a general air of confusion, questions accompanied by bewildered looks that matched her own feelings on the situation. The stout woman in the hat stood out to her the most, the one who referred to herself as
Knight Witch. Anne's expression stayed carefully neutral, but she quietly tensed up at those two words, the implied threat in them. To call herself that... Could she be a Knight from the Vista family? Or, given her appearance, the Rata clan?
Both of those groups had every reason in the world to hate Anne Mayer. For that matter,
any of these people might try to murder her on sight the moment they recognized her. And she was hurt, exhausted, not in any state to fend off an entire group of enemy Knights.
Rather than join in the chatter, she backed away, and found a shadowed spot to slump against the wall. Drenched in sweat, still breathing heavily, she squinted at the scene and tried to make sense of it all, to find any thread of logic in her surroundings. Someone was firing arrows at the outside of the church, and her first thought was that it was children, playing some kind of innocent game with toy bows. Why else would anyone use projectiles that slow, and so obviously fragile?
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