The Phantom convulsed against atmospheric entry, and Mana held her breath.

Not from necessity. For the silence.

"Thirty seconds to drop," came the pilot's mechanical announcement. His eyes had avoided hers since boarding. They usually did.

Her fingers traced the seals, skimmed the familiar cold edges of her chestplate, lingered on the rabbit's foot at her hip—its fabric worn thin, edges unraveling. Its origin remained a blank space in her memory.

"Twenty seconds."

Beyond the viewport, a dead world rushed to greet her—rust-carved canyons splitting ashen plains like ancient scars. The research beacon waited somewhere in that desolation. Another "simple" job.

The bay doors parted. Air howled through the cabin.

Mana stepped into the void.

Freefall embraced her. Her armor battled the atmosphere, heat crawling along her visor's edge, data streams cascading in her peripheral vision. She'd check them later.

Now, she surrendered to the melody.

Hmm-hmm-hm-hmmmm...

Something flickered at the edge of her awareness—static in the Core, a frequency that didn't belong. She blinked. Gone.

Barely audible beneath reentry's roar. Notes from a forbidden game, honoring a soldier she shouldn't idolize.

"Playing that game again, I see."

Fox connected. The Core at her skull's base warmed, a familiar sensation she'd felt thousands of times before.

She answered with continued humming.

"Mana. Your dopamine signature gives you away. Another campaign marathon?"

"...Just the final missions."

"The last mission is endless."

"He needed help."

"A fictional character?"

She adjusted trajectory as the ground approached. "An efficient one."

Fox laughed in her mind—quiet, quick. Something in her chest loosened at the sound. No matter where they sent her, that was home.

Mana sliced through the stratosphere's burning blue boundary, body parallel to the horizon, arms extended as though to welcome the lifeless planet below. Her helmet filled with the shriek of friction against polymer—not frightening but musical, percussion vibrating through her bones. She hummed along, finding her way to that triumphant theme from her pre-deployment gaming session.

She would have made the Chief proud. The thought was childish. It made her eyes crinkle at the corners, a private joy she kept hidden from external cameras while her mouth maintained its regulation neutrality. But inside her helmet, where only Fox could see her biometrics spike, she was grinning.

A glimmer on her HUD, Doppler red, warned of incoming micro-shrapnel. Mana tipped her wrist to adjust her vector, letting the debris peel off her right shoulder pauldron in a plume of white-hot sparks. Suit sensors flickered at the impact but resolved green. She exhaled—a breath measured in increments of barometric pressure and lactic acid saturation, readouts dancing in her periphery.

Above the noise, another presence: a voice, as always.

Fox murmured into her neural link. "I worry when you get nostalgic during drops. It correlates with a 12% increase in unnecessary risk-taking."

"Am I?" She toggled her external feed, letting the old hymn spiral out into the comms void. "You know, it's tradition."

"I prefer you with a full complement of limbs," Fox said, his voice a warm current against the static. "Twelve seconds to touchdown. The extraction teams hate your humming."

"They're not here."

"Fair enough. Sing if you want."

She fell silent instead. The approaching surface commanded her focus—jagged rock formations, patches of withered flora, a desiccated riverbed carving through the rust-colored landscape. Her suit's thrusters pulsed in precise intervals, shedding speed. She collided with the ground, disappearing momentarily in a crimson cloud.

Firm. Precise. Impact energy rippled upward through her enhanced frame, dissolving before it reached her thoracic vertebrae.

"Biometrics green. Textbook arrival."

"As expected."

"Uploading beacon waypoint. Two kilometers of absolutely nothing scenic ahead. I'll talk you through it."

Mana was already in motion.

She felt the world tug at her bones, the planet’s gravity like an old friend with rough hands. The surface below resolved into the jagged veins of a tectonic wasteland, red ochre and black basalt, as lifeless as a skull. She tuned the optical layer up, enhancing the dust storms that crawled along the horizon like a million pale insects. For a moment, the sensation of falling ceased to be violent; she was weightless.

Fox connected. Familiar. Safe. She flexed, arcing her body, actuators along her spine rippling in response. The suit’s microjets popped, decelerating her so sharply the world swam. Mana pointed her toes, aligning for a feet-first landing, her breath slow and steady as she cut through the haze and dust like a spear.

There was a window, a microsecond of total silence before impact. She filled it with the memory of a controller’s touch, a laugh shared over synaptic bandwidth, a dozen tiny anchors to the world she protected. Then the ground met her boots—shock absorbers engaged, ankles flexing perfectly—and the entire planet seemed to hold its breath.

She stood, knees bent in the dust, head bowed. She waited for the blue-white haze of her afterimage to dissipate, and then straightened, flexing her fingers. No damage. No pain. Only the familiar tingle of accomplishment and the low hum of Fox’s pride on the shared channel.

“Offer’s still open,” Mana replied, dusting imaginary grit off her greaves. “Though the playlist might need work.”

The horizon here was jagged with spires of glassy rock, fractured by the collapse of ancient superstructures. Winds crawled along the plains, sculpting everything in sight into the likeness of abandoned cities and broken bridges, ghosts of a civilization that had never even existed. It suited her. Mana liked places where the landscape was as blank as her deployment records.

Fox piped back in. "Achtung, Einsatzbereit."

Mana's fingers twitched with pleasure at the familiar syllables. "Verstanden, Kontrolle aktiv," she replied, the German flowing easily between them—a language from Earth's history that few still spoke, preserved only in old archives and military databases.

"Your pronunciation is improving," Fox noted. "The consonant was perfect."

"We should use more compound nouns next time," she said, arranging small rocks in a perfect line while she spoke. "Zusammengesetzte Substantive. The structures feel... satisfying."

Her eyes crinkled at the corners, though her mouth remained a neutral line.

The world could be ending, and Fox would still be there, a constant in her ear and behind her eyes, ready to laugh at her jokes and drag her back from the brink.

She sighted the relay—a pale scar of metal in the rubble, half-buried and haloed in shifting dust. Mana jogged toward it, her movements economical but graceful, a choreography written by hundreds of identical missions and the one irreplaceable person who cared if she survived. She withdrew the beacon—a dull silver spike, unremarkable but heavier than it looked—and knelt at the device’s base.

Fox was quiet, but she could feel him: the faint pulse of his attention, the way his focus narrowed whenever she was at work. It was almost embarrassing, this level of care. If she were anyone else, it might have been romantic. Instead, it just felt safe.

She set the beacon with practiced hands, the magnetic lock biting home with a satisfying click. A green light blinked in her HUD. Task one, complete.

Fox broke the silence. "Your neurochemistry spiked during that drop. Endorphins, adrenaline, dopamine—the works."

Mana flapped her hands twice at her sides, a quick, precise motion, and rocked forward slightly on the balls of her feet. Her eyes crinkled at the corners, though her mouth remained a neutral line.

"I've monitored hundreds of drops. Most operatives just experience fear." Fox said.

"Liar," she said, smiling at the rock. "You absolutely did. All of you do. You just forget to log it."

A moment passed. Wind howled and battered her armor, but the comm link was clear.

"Maybe," Fox admitted. "But none of them hum like you do."

Mana straightened, brushing her fingers against the cold relay as if it were a living thing.

“Beacon set,” she said. “What’s next?”

Fox's tone switched, instantly all business. "Perimeter scan shows movement at the southern ridge. Get that beacon secured and prepare for extraction. We're not alone out here."

Mana nodded, feeling the weight settle over her. It was always like this: one moment she was a child, the next a weapon. The shift never stopped being dizzying, even after years of training and missions and the endless war.

She watched the horizon, dust spirals in the distance, waiting for the next command. In her ear, the voice of Fox—her controller, her anchor—remained, warm and steady. And somewhere, underneath the static of battle and the endless noise of survival, she kept humming.

The wind swept through the ruins around Mana's position. She squatted on her haunches, fingers splayed over the relay’s battered casing, and let herself drift in the hum of silence between orders. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear Fox’s heartbeat—a phantom echo threaded through her own.

The silence shattered.

Fox snapped, urgency overriding his usual composure. "Mana, four contacts approaching from the south ridge. Jäger-class. They're moving in formation—this isn't a patrol, it's a hunt."

Mana didn’t wait for the rest. Instinct folded her into a tight crouch, hand on the hilt at her hip. Her HUD flickered, resolving the contacts: four bright motes in the pale dust, fanned out in a hunter’s crescent.

Jäger.

She felt her pulse quicken, the thrill lancing through her from the base of her skull to her fingertips. The Jäger were not animals, not even soldiers in the old human sense. They moved as if coordinated by a mind that did not sleep, each step a data point in an unfolding algorithm of pursuit and kill.

Mana watched as the lead Jäger halted at a spire of pitted basalt, head canting to the side. The others circled, keeping a calculated distance, claws flexing in the wind. They stood nearly three meters tall, armored in plates of deep crimson grown from their own skin. Humanoid, but wrong—too massive, too still. Their helms had no visible eyes, only sensor clusters that tracked her every breath—and Mana found herself almost admiring the design.

Fox said, "Mana, don't engage them yet," but his voice wavered with uncertainty. "Something's different about these. Their movement patterns are... deliberate. Almost ritualistic."

The leader shot upward, scaling the spire's vertical face with spider-like precision. Mana's fingers found the hilt at her hip before conscious thought, releasing it from its lock with a practiced flick. Her thumb pressed the activation stud.

Blue-white plasma erupted from the hilt, forming the katana's deadly edge with a hungry roar. She carved an arc through the air, the blade's afterimage burning against her vision like lightning. The Jäger dropped to the ground three meters away, its armored limbs splayed in attack position. Yet it hesitated, the dark visor of its helm capturing and fracturing the weapon's glow.

"Hold back if possible," Fox said, his voice steadier now. "These aren't typical Jäger. The way they're observing, coordinating—it's like they're sharing tactical data in real time."

Mana shifted her weight, shoulders loosening as she settled into a defensive stance. "Come on," she murmured, addressing neither Fox nor herself, but the creature that studied her with cold calculation and ancient malevolence.

It accepted her invitation. The Jäger lunged, leading with its serrated claws, but Mana had already slipped inside its attack radius. Her katana flashed upward in a two-handed strike, slicing through the junction between torso and neck. The plasma edge dissolved ceramic plating and the organic matter beneath. The creature froze in its bisected state for one perfect moment before collapsing backward, iridescent fluid pooling beneath it.

The remaining three showed no reaction to their comrade's death. They simply adjusted their formation, recalculating their approach, and advanced as one.

Mana let herself move—danced, if she were honest. Every pivot, every extension of her limbs was governed by muscle memory and the real-time overlays Fox streamed into her cortex. The HUD showed not only the Jäger’s positions, but the most likely attack vectors, color-coded for threat. Fox spoke to her in a rapid-fire staccato, too quick for words, just impulse and caution and go go go.

One Jäger dove low, aiming to cripple her at the knees; the other flanked wide right, looking for a blind spot. Mana went vertical, springing over the first with a gymnast’s grace, and slashed downward. The katana hissed through an outstretched limb, severing it at the joint. The wounded Jäger did not slow; it spun and used the detached claw as a projectile, hurling it at Mana’s exposed flank.

Fox's voice came through the neural link, calm and measured: "Behind you." She was already turning, letting the claw glance off her pauldron with a metallic screech. The third Jäger had circled behind, its throat emitting a sound like stones grinding together, jaws parting to reveal rows of serrated teeth. "Drop," Fox said, the single word delivered with quiet precision as it lunged for her throat.

She dropped, letting the creature’s momentum sail overhead. Fox pulsed a hazard warning. Mana rolled, came up on one knee, and drove the katana point-first into the thing’s ventral core. The plasma boiled it from within. For a half-second, she smelled ozone and burned organic plating, and then the thing was just another ruin in the dust.

The last Jäger stood its ground, head bowed, arms twitching with nervous energy. It made no sound, no warning. It simply waited, as if it were unsure of its orders. Mana advanced, blade lowered, watching for any trick.

Fox said quietly, "It's analyzing you." A pause. The comm line crackled with his measured breathing. "Your call." The silence stretched between them, filled only with the soft hum of her neural interface and the distant whistle of wind through the ruins.

The Jäger charged.