Chapter Text
The moment they land is an explosion of everything.
The air sirens are already wailing in the fog, cutting through the stillness of the Hakone mountains. Sage doesn’t have time to admire the lush greenery or open water before she’s jumping out of the airplane with her backpack strapped to her back, rolling through the dirt and grime as fire lights up the grass.
“They knew!” Yoru yells, his voice coming in patchy through their shared radio.
“We fight!” Raze roars in return. “All we do is buy time!”
Sage takes a moment to survey the scene. She agrees with Raze; the ambush isn’t necessarily a negative. If the enemy’s efforts are concentrated on them, that makes the stealth team’s job much easier.
Only, outnumbered is not nearly enough to describe their situation.
They’d expected as much, of course; they’d known from a week ago that their firepower was lacking. Still, as Sage watches a crowd of forty men open fire on Yoru, who is only saved by disappearing into the Void, a sickening feeling widens in her stomach.
Sage brings her rifle up to her cheek, picking off three men cleanly before surveying the scene. Trees hang heavy above them, but even above hem, the smell of gunpowder is heavy in the air.
Yoru has reappeared in the back of the treelines, steadily working through a group of thirty. Raze blows a large hole in the ground with a grenade before launching herself above the crowd, throwing barely controlled explosions to the ground. Sage throws herself right out of the range of one; she catches Raze’s barely apologetic grin before Sage whirls around to pick two more men off from where they were about to shoot her.
Another round of shots.
Sage’s hand hovers over a wound on her other arm, where a bullet had just whizzed by, and runs along the side of the field. Yoru and Raze are containing the numbers quite well, she observes, though she can’t see further than ten feet in front of her.
The mass of men and dust to the left, where Reyna and Iso presumably are, Sage can hardly hear, let alone see. But she worries for them, each in their own ways, so she charges straight in, hand gripped tightly on the trigger of her gun. It’s definitely one of the dumber things she’s done, but she’s already decided that she’s not dying, so absolutely nothing is off the table.
Before she can squeeze her way through the crowd, the dust suddenly parts.
Sage registers the sound of several choppers.
She looks up into the Hakone sky, a hazy shade of gray, and sees one thousand men descending on them.
“Fuck!” Sage screams, and begins taking fire at the air.
She’s panicking, she feels it in the pure adrenaline rushing through her veins, but if the men land on top of them then there is no chance that they leave Hakone alive. If even half the number of men currently dropping out of the choppers were to surround them, Sage would only have time to look longingly at Mount Fuji once before someone would take a knife to her throat.
More than that, Sage is the captain. All these men are under her control. And she will not watch them die.
The Void ripples behind her. “Sage,” Yoru says, and he sounds a lot calmer than Sage feels.
“Yes?” Sage cries, refusing to tear her eyes off of the torrential downpour of men in rifles. Her fingers feel numb; her shoulder is definitely bruised from the kickback of her rifle. Still, she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t know how to, at this point.
“Do you have a plan?” Yoru asks. “Raze is handling the crowd behind us. Tell me what you want me to do.”
Sage tries to take steady breaths. “I don’t, Yoru. I really don’t have a plan. I didn’t expect this. We ran the numbers. This is way more than I thought.”
“You have a plan,” Yoru says sharply, though he’s pulled out his pistol to help in Sage’s shooting-at-the-sky efforts. “You have one, Sage. You always do. Tell me what you want me to do.”
This manages to ring through the fog in Sage’s brain. She takes a deep breath, shakes her head, and tries not to cry as she says, “You’re right. Tell everyone to regroup. We fight together.”
“On it.” The Void ripples as Yoru vanishes.
Sage takes another deep breath, feels the fire in her nerves calm ever so slightly, takes one last aim at the sky, and then turns, running in the direction of where she thinks Reyna and Iso are.
She finds Iso first. The dust having been blown away makes it easier to see a little farther, and Sage registers the purple of his Radianite shields, behind which he stands.
Then, she registers the gaping hole through his chest, and she runs.
“Xiaoze,” she cries as she dives behind his shields. She takes out the five closest men before frantically peeling at his shirt, trying to take a look at the damage. “Xiaoze, can you hear me?”
“I’m still standing, so yes,” he says weakly, firing off another round. “It doesn’t really hurt, you know?”
It’s no time for arguing, but Sage can’t help herself as she lectures, “It’s probably because you’ve fried all of your nerve endings.” Still, as she says that, her hands are glowing green, and she watches as his skin begins to knit together, watches as the blood begins to stem, and then stops.
Without another second to spare, Sage picks up her gun and begins to fire again. The men are advancing on them; Iso’s shields are slowly getting battered and worn. The men from the sky swarm with the men on the ground, inching closer and closer despite their best efforts.
“Where is Reyna?” Sage yells.
“We got split up a long time ago,” Iso yells in return over the din of the machine gun he’s pulled out. This seems to help, but not much. “We need to retreat. I can’t hold this spot much longer.”
The Void ripples, and two hands reach out before pulling the two of them backwards.
Sage barely has time to register being in the Void before she’s spit back out, onto the other side of the battlefield. Iso follows through.
“Raze!” Sage cries at the sight of a grenade.
“We’re all grouped,” Yoru confirms from her right. “I couldn’t find Reyna, though?”
“Fucking seriously?” Iso asks incredulously. “Do you think she’s run off?”
“Impossible,” Sage yells, and fires a round into the air. Iso follows suit with his machine gun, and Yoru pops back into the Void.
“There’s a lot of men!” Raze yells. “This doesn’t mean much because I’m a lesbian, but still!”
“As a gay man, I concur!” Iso shouts back, and pushes his point by firing yet another round into the surrounding space.
Sage whirls around. “Xiaoze. You’re gay?”
“I figured I would come out, considering I might not come out of this alive,” Iso shrugs.
Sage blinks once, and then twice. Decides that the men pouring out of the sky is her bigger concern, yells, “I support you!” and then fires into the sky again.
A ripple. “Still no Reyna,” Yoru says into her ear. “What do we do?”
This sobers Sage up.
Sage thinks that she would rather die than be wrong about Reyna. Would rather pull her own skin off her body than return to the base with the news that Reyna has betrayed Protocol, has acted in the interests of some other.
“We hold faith,” Sage says firmly. “We hold faith that she has a plan.”
“We don’t have much time for holding faith,” Iso yells over the din of his machine gun. “They’re gaining!”
“How much longer do we stall for?” Raze yells back.
“At this rate, it isn’t a matter of stalling, it’s a matter of making it out alive,” Yoru points out. “I can only take so many into the Void with me. You all can only survive for so long in the Void.”
Sage grits her teeth. “We hold.”
“Jie, I love you, but I’m not dying over your love affair,” Iso retorts. “That’s not fucking fair.”
“We hold!” Sage roars, because she can’t be wrong—won’t be wrong about Reyna.
Raze takes a bullet to the shoulder, flying back into Iso’s shields with a shriek. Sage sprints over, hands glowing, and narrowly avoids a bullet to the head as she drops down to the floor.
“You’ll be okay,” Sage says firmly, and watches as Raze’s skin knits together.
“We’ll all be dead soon,” Iso feels the need to yell.
“The flare hasn’t gone off yet, so we hold,” Sage shouts. “We hold, we hold!”
Still, Sage feels a sense of desperation tugging at her gut. The men are rapidly gaining on them, the crowd swelling with gunpowder and fire and explosions and bullets as they inch ever so closer to Iso’s shields. They scramble over the bodies of the fallen with alarming speed.
As they get closer, Sage sees a glint of purple in their guns.
“Fuck,” she breathes.
“What is it?” Yoru says beside her ear.
“Foxglove,” she says faintly. “In their guns.”
“We have protective equipment, like you asked,” Yoru points out.
“Yes, but,” Sage says, and cannot quite put into words the fallout of being hit by foxglove bullets. Instead, she says, “Please don’t get hit.”
“We won’t,” Yoru promises. “We’ll try, at least.”
“I don’t like this,” Raze yells with a tremble in her voice as she boosts herself up above the crowd. “I don’t see an end to these men.”
In the next second, Iso’s shields shatter.
Sage feels a deep fear crawl up her throat as she screams.
-
They fight, tooth and nail. Sage loses sight of all others as she charges with a bloody scream of murder, because she will not allow Protocol to fall here, will not allow all their preparation to be in vain.
Still, she knows she’s outnumbered. She knows they’re all outnumbered, all of them. Exhaustion crawls through her veins like a fast-racing poison, like a shot of brandy that permeates through her system. She can only do so much. Can only watch herself from so many angles.
Slowly, slowly, she becomes overwhelmed. Sees more men than sky, more bullets than hands or feet.
Slowly, she loses vision, and feels herself begin to fall.
-
There’s a low seated rumble that echoes through the field.
Then, magenta lightning, purple blood, and violet eyes that pierce through the surrounding air.
Reyna.