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"Did you copy? You need to blow the top off the statue! There's no other-"
A grunt, some audible body blows, a loud crunch and then, nothing. The last words on record of Liz Reefer, aka Agent 3.
Every time she heard it, it tore Agent 8 up inside. The wounds were all too fresh in her mind. Callie's screams of anguish as the feed cut out. Four's glazed stare into infinity, as if separate from the world, in disbelief at how this could happen to Agent 3. Marie facedown on the desk, furious at her inability to help Three. And Agent 8's quiet sobbing in the corner, having all but lost the person dearest to her.
They'd been lucky at first. A resurgence of sanitized octarians in the Deep Sea Metro had hinted to them that something was amiss. The New Squidbeak Splatoon then set up a recon mission, that had Agent 3 infiltrating Kamabo, and sure enough, their worst fears were confirmed: Tartar had come back, and decided to take the extermination of inklings and octolings to a much more direct level. His sanitized octarian troops would storm Inkopolis and wipe out every cephaling they came across. Agent 3 had tried to sabotage the operation but found it impossible; it was too secure and too far along in preparation. So the only option? Destroy the ruined NILS statue further, and allow seawater to flood the whole facility.
Then Three had been spotted, and eventually captured by the sanitized octarians. Though she'd been caught flatfooted, she remained true to her infiltration mission to the end. She had holed up in a dead end corridor and held the sanitized octarians off for as long as she could, insisting that the Splatoon flood Tartar's base, even if it meant they had to do it with her still inside.
The four remaining members, after Pearl and Marina had left the Splatoon following Pearl's takeover of her father's corporate empire, couldn't bring themselves to do it on their own. Once they had relayed the info to a feverish Cap'n Cuttlefish, who had fallen ill during the mission, he had ordered them to do as Three had asked. Otherwise it would've been for nothing. The old man had tears in his eyes for what would be the rest of his life.
Marie ended up being the only one with the fortitude to actually launch the attack, once the Splatoon's inkstrike drones were in place. And although they had achieved their goal, and Tartar was permanently expunged, it hadn't felt like a victory to the four inklings in the room. The flashes of rainbow ink as the missiles impacted the ruined statue and reduced it further to rubble had been hard to see through Eight's veil of tears that had flooded her eyes, but she could see them clear as day every time she closed her eyes.
Eight replayed the recording of Three's last stand again. One more time, she told herself. She chuckled. As if she hadn't told herself that the last fifty times.
Things had gone from bad to worse after that. Less than a week afterwards, Cap'n Cuttlefish succumbed to his fever. His final order weighed heavily on his mind that entire week.
His best Agent, so full of life, and someone you could always count on to get the job, any job, done…gone, just like that. The Squid Sisters were by him through his final hours, and though he'd been dismissed by many as an alarmist lunatic in his later years, Callie and Marie insisted he'd stayed clear-minded right to the end. It was the only time Eight had ever seen Marie cry.
Pearl and Marina obviously didn't take the news well either. Eight had taken the responsibility of telling them, and she later wished she hadn't. Marina was near-inconsolable when Eight was done delivering the tragic news. And it visibly took all of Pearl's considerable willpower to not break down herself, trying what she could to dry Marina's tears. Though no longer an official part of the Splatoon, they had stayed in close touch with everyone, and they considered all the members of the Splatoon their own family too, to the point where Pearl too had begun called Cuttlefish 'Gramps'.
Both Three and Cuttlefish had been a rock-solid core of the Splatoon. For over a decade, nothing had wavered them, nothing had stood up to them, and yet now they were both gone. A vast, unfillable void in the Splatoon opened up with their passing, and it was left to the others to pick up the pieces. Marie and Four tried to, to the best of their abilities, and Callie would join them some time after.
But Eight didn't feel like she could. Too much had been lost. Three and Cuttlefish had both meant the world to her, and with them gone, she didn't know what to do with her feelings. Staying in her apartment for days on end, barely eating, barely sleeping, always having some TV show, no.matter how dreadful, turned on to distract her from her thoughts. But it was no good. Inkopolis held too many memories with them. Everywhere she went, everywhere she looked, would bring flashbacks of Three showing her the ropes of inkling life, or Cuttlefish taking her somewhere for recon, or some mission she'd taken on with them.
And so she had decided she could take no more. She had to leave Inkopolis if she didn't want to go mad with grief. She packed what clothes she wanted to bring, withdrew her savings in cash, threw all her major souvenirs and mementos in the trash. The only thing she felt unable to toss out, was the Golden Toothpick she'd found in the Metro, and so she mailed it to Four instead.
This left her on the dockyard, boarding the next ferry to the mainland. She took her earphones out of her ears, with Three's final words having played out, as she promised, one last time. She took a deep breath, made a few steps out of the boarding queue, and tossed her phone in a nearby trash bin. If she wanted to get away from it all, she had to ditch it all, she reasoned. Yet the action continued to weigh on her, instead of relieving her as she had hoped it would.
It'll happen eventually, she reasoned, and took her place in the queue again. Before boarding, she took one more look back at the city that had been her home for 10 years, the best home she'd known. "I'm sorry, everyone," she whispered, "It's for the best."
The phone in the bin rang. 'Marina', was the caller the screen displayed, in a desperate bid for attention.