Over the next forty-odd minutes, with the steady protection of Kellerman’s squad, Thea carved through the Stellar Republic’s lines with unerring focus. Originals dropped by the dozen as she fired again and again, her rifle moving almost on instinct, like she was driven by something far colder and sharper than adrenaline.
“I don’t know how you’re doing this, but by the Emperor… It's honestly kind of terrifying. Keep it up, Private,” Kellerman muttered at one point, shaking his head.
The westernmost section of the front had begun to push back for the first time. With hundreds of originals gone, thousands of duplicates were no longer being produced.
The pressure on the UHF lines had eased enough that resupply teams could finally get fresh ammunition to the HMG crews that had been burning through it at an alarming rate.
But not everything was going smoothly.
Over the last ten minutes, a headache had started creeping in for Thea—slow at first, then sharper with every shot she took. Every time she checked a target, every time that strange feeling guided her, the pain worsened.
Before long, her vision began to blur.
She had tried to ignore it, grit her teeth and push through, but it ultimately became impossible to focus.
“SL… I—I’ve got a really bad headache… I need a break…” she muttered, her words coming out slightly slurred as she stepped back from the trench edge she’d held for nearly half an hour.
Kellerman’s Squad Medic rushed over immediately and, without hesitation, pulled her helmet off.
“Wha—hey! What are you—?!” Thea protested, weakly trying to push him away.
“Sit still, Private. Let the medic do his job! That’s an order,” Kellerman snapped, his voice carrying a hard edge she hadn’t heard before.
Startled by the sudden shift in tone, she stopped resisting immediately and sat down on a stack of sandbags, staring up at the medic through unfocused, crossing eyes.
The medic set his bag down beside her and pulled out a handheld device. Through the blur, she couldn’t make out what it was as he held it up to her eyes and tapped at the screen.
“Private, talk to me,” he said, concern clear in his voice. “Other than the headache, what are you feeling?”
“Uh… everything’s kinda blurry,” she said slowly. “Maybe I just need water… I’ve been concentrating for a long time…”
Even answering felt hard.
Her thoughts were beyond sluggish, tangled.
‘What the fuck is happening to me…? Did I get hit or something? Is this what acute blood loss feels like…?’
She lifted her right hand in front of her face, trying to focus on it, but the medic gently pushed it back down as he removed his own helmet.
“Relax, Private,” he said firmly. “You’ve most likely overstrained your Focus—by a lot, if I had to guess. What in the Emperor’s name were you thinking?!”
“...Focus…? I—”
Her words cut off as her vision collapsed into a smear of colour and light.
The ground rushed up to meet her, and everything went dark…
Thea came to herself inside a rudimentary metal shack.
She was lying on a field bed, an IV drip strapped to her arm.
“What… where the fuck am I…?” she muttered, trying to piece together what had happened before she blacked out.
She remembered being with Kellerman’s squad, shooting at the original bodies of the Stellar Republic’s army. Thinning their ranks and buying space for the defence.
And then—nothing.
There was no memory of passing out, no sense of what had led up to it.
Frowning, she looked around for clues.
It was a field hospital.
Privacy screens surrounded her bed, shielding her from view while also limiting what she could see beyond them.
They looked like semi-solid holograms, the kind commonly used in hospitals—easy to move through when needed, but still private enough to provide space for recovery. Physical barriers were rare these days, but not unheard of in high-stress or emergency setups like this.
Everything was bathed in a soft, golden light that was easy on the eyes.
The metal walls, the holographic screens, even her bedding followed the familiar UHF colour scheme of matte grey with dull crimson accents.
One thing stood out to her immediately, however: There was no smell.
That alone surprised her.
Back in the Undercity, hospitals always reeked of harsh antimicrobial solutions.
She’d complained about it more than once to Old Man James—her nose was sensitive to that stuff, and the smell always set her sneezing.
It was one of the reasons she hated hospitals in the first place.
As she lay there, trying to decide what to do next, one of the privacy screens turned translucent. A moment later, Kellerman’s squad medic stepped into her small “room.”
“Ah, thank the Emperor. You’re looking a lot better now, Private. How are you feeling?” he said right away, stepping closer while pulling a datapad from his pocket and tapping at it.
With her vision finally clear, Thea got her first proper look at him.
From her seated position, she had to look up, quite a lot—he was around 1.85 metres tall, easily towering over her. He looked a few years older than her, maybe around twenty, with golden-brown skin and short black hair, shaved on the sides with a strip left down the middle.
It looked a bit odd, as it was a style she had never seen before in the Undercity, but not bad.
‘Huh… I wonder what Kellerman’s hair looks like underneath the helmet.’
Suddenly realising she hadn’t answered him and had instead just been staring, she quickly caught herself and forced out a reply.
“Ahh… doin’ alright, I guess. What exactly happened? Why am I here? Did I get hit?”
He put the datapad away and looked down at her with a frown, hazel-brown eyes serious.
“You overused your Focus. By a lot. Frankly, you’re lucky to be alive. What possessed you to be that damn reckless with your Focus?”
“…My Focus…? Lucky to be alive? What… What are you even talking about?” Thea replied, completely lost.
“…I—what? What do you mean?” the medic shot back, just as confused. “You should know about Focus and overusing it. That’s taught on, like, day one of basic.”
Thea flushed as the mistake hit her.
She was in a Deep-Dive Simulation, fighting alongside fully trained UHF marines.
Of course they were supposed to know this.
And she’d just admitted she had no idea what he was talking about.
Before she could come up with anything to say, a sudden, crushing pain slammed into her head, like being hit with a sledgehammer.
She cried out as her body jerked and she toppled sideways on the field bed.
“What—?! What’s happening, Private?!” the medic exclaimed, snapping his datapad back out and frantically scanning her while glancing between the screen and her face.
Just as suddenly as it had come, the pain vanished.
All that remained was a deep unease and a growing sense of something being very wrong.
“I—I don’t know,” she said quickly, breathing hard. “I just had a massive headache out of nowhere, but it’s gone now. I need to—how long was I out earlier?”
The medic studied her in silence for a few seconds.
Then he let out a deep sigh and put the datapad away again.
“About an hour. Thanks to your work, we managed to push back the westernmost flank, but—”
Thea felt her stomach drop.
She hated “but”s. Always had. Nothing good ever came after a “but”.
“Unfortunately, we lost the second line of trenches,” he continued, pain clear on his face.
“While we made great progress on our end, the battle overall isn’t going our way. The central and eastern positions were overwhelmed. They got swarmed and overrun in minutes.”
He hesitated, then went on more quietly.
“We saved a lot of marines on the western side—especially thanks to you. Those extra minutes mattered. But we still lost more than four hundred Marines in the second line.”
Thea had been right.
Nothing good ever came after a “but”.
She had been so happy to see the progress on the westernmost flank, especially knowing how much she, herself, had contributed.
For a moment, it had really felt like she was turning the tide of the battle all by herself… but a war was more than just one person, she started to realize that now.
Despite her efforts—efforts that had apparently nearly killed her—they had still lost hundreds of Marines and the entire second line of trenches. It felt like everything she had done had barely mattered, even if the squad medic kept insisting otherwise.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The sense of doom in the pit of her stomach kept growing as those thoughts ran in circles.
She frowned and looked up at the medic.
“I… I need to get back to the front. Now. Something—I think—something bad is about to happen,” she said, stumbling over her words.
She didn’t even know how to explain it properly.
The mounting feeling of dread inside her chest made no sense, didn’t come with details or proof, and yet it felt heavy and indescribably urgent all the same.
The medic studied her for a few seconds, eyebrows raised.
“...Kellerman’s orders did say I should make sure you have clear lines of sight at all times,” he muttered, a grin slowly forming on his face.
Thea mirrored it without thinking.
“But,” he added, his expression turning serious again, “only on one condition. You rein in your Focus usage. I’m not risking you dying out there. You might not Zero out, I’ll make sure of that, but who knows how long the respawn queues at the vats are by now.”
“I’ll try. I promise,” she answered quickly.
Before he could say anything else, she got up from the field-bed, grabbed her rifle—thankfully placed nearby—and hurried after the squad medic, pulling her helmet back on as he headed toward the front lines.
‘Wait. Did he just talk about respawning…?’ Thea realised as she followed him through a maze of field hospitals.
‘Are NPCs allowed to respawn too?’ She had never heard of something like that in a game before. ‘Why would they even need to…?’
NPCs were usually just there to flesh out the world for the player. If they died, that was that—they’d served their purpose. So what could possibly require them to respawn too?
‘And what the fuck is “Zero out” supposed to mean…?’
By the time they passed the last line of field hospitals, she realised they had climbed all the way to the top of the UHF fortifications, close to the underground tunnel system she’d arrived through with Captain Sable just hours earlier.
Looking out over the battlefield, the scale of it hit her again.
She was just one singular soldier in something absolutely massive.
Everywhere she looked, Marines were running, firing, hauling supplies.
Thousands of them—far more than she’d ever thought were stationed on this front.
Lower down, the sight was even worse.
The fighting had pushed close to the third trench line, and it was fiercer than ever.
Stellar Republic soldiers were throwing themselves at the UHF defences, using their duplication ability to soak up fire while inching forward, minute by minute.
From the bottom of the hill up to the third trench line, the ground was buried beneath corpses.
It was impossible to tell where the earth ended and the dead began.
As they paused behind a group of marines hauling a massive ammo crate, Thea zoomed in with her scope—and froze.
Some of the bodies below were starting to… dissolve.
She checked twice to be sure. Many of the corpses—and their gear—were liquefying into a strange, grey goo that spread across the older parts of the battlefield.
‘…At least cleanup might be easier than expected, I guess.’
Her head was full of questions, but she kept them to herself.
She wasn’t about to expose her lack of training yet again.
So she stayed quiet and followed the medic toward the first line of trenches.
‘I’ll grill the Old Man about all of this once I’m out of this damned simulation…!’
As they moved toward the seventh line of trenches from the bottom of the hill, where Kellerman’s squad was supposedly positioned now, Thea kept scanning the battlefield without pause.
The sense of looming dread hadn’t faded since the sudden headaches in the field hospital.
If anything, it had only grown stronger the closer they got to the front, knotting her nerves tighter with every step.
Nothing she could see stood out to her yet, however.
She tried to prod that strange sensation—the same one that had flared whenever she locked onto an original body—hoping it might point her toward the source of the unease.
It wasn’t easy.
She didn’t even really understand what these feelings were yet.
They never felt like they were fully part of her.
The dread sat like a pit in her stomach, but she could tell it wasn’t actually there. It felt separated from her body, as if an invisible barrier stood between the sensation and her physical self.
It had been the same with the scouts and the originals—the sense of wrongness never truly came from her body, even if it felt somehow anchored to it.
Trying to poke at that feeling, or interact with it at all, proved similarly almost impossible.
Worse, focusing on it made another headache start to build rapidly.
She was probably using that strange Focus thing the medic had mentioned, pushing against that invisible wall without even knowing why or how.
Frustrated—and out of options that didn’t include revealing her player-ness to the NPCs of the simulation—she came to a sudden stop.
The squad medic turned around almost instantly. “Private? You alright? Why’d you stop?”
Even in the middle of a war zone, running flat-out through tight trenches, his awareness impressed her.
“I… this feeling won’t go away,” she said after a brief pause. “The closer we get to the front, the worse it gets. I don’t know why, I don’t know how to control it, and trying to focus on it just gives me a headache. Is there anything you can do to help?”
Despite his helmet, she could tell he was frowning. His shoulders sagged slightly.
“…I don’t know what your deal is, Private,” he said slowly. “You’re the strangest Marine I’ve ever met. You don’t remember basic training, but you know things from advanced courses. You don’t understand Focus, yet you burn through it like liquor. Add your ridiculous accuracy, and I’d almost call you a spy.”
His tone hardened.
“And I’m still not convinced you aren’t one. But… you’ve killed a lot of freaks today. You’ve saved a lot of our people. Kellerman trusts you—so I will too. Just this once.”
He leaned closer.
“If you fuck this up, I’ll put you down myself. You understand me, Private?”
Thea was completely blindsided by his response.
She had only wanted something simple—maybe a painkiller, or advice on dealing with the Focus issue—but instead she’d gotten far more than expected.
Not only had he admitted that he’d suspected her of being a spy, he’d also explained why.
Annoyingly enough, it cleared up a few questions she’d had about how she must look to others from the outside.
But the last part of what he said sent a chill down her spine.
‘“Put me down”? I guess if I appear to be a spy, it kind of makes sense… Even for a Medic.’
“I… I’ll try my best not to disappoint,” she said after a moment.
If things really did go wrong, she could still respawn. Or fail the challenge.
It would suck, especially after everything she’d done so far, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
‘After all, it’s just a simulation.’
Over the next minute, the medic pulled her to the side of the trench and stopped. He removed the armoured glove from his left hand, revealing the golden-brown skin beneath.
“I’ll share some of my Focus with you, so do whatever you need to do to get yourself back on track,” he said, stretching his arm out toward her after motioning for her to turn around. “And remember—if you try to use my Focus to mess with any of my Marines, I will snap your neck before you can do anything about it.”
Thea was confused all over again, but she took the warning seriously. The medic was clearly far stronger than she was. She had no doubt he could follow through on that threat.
At the same time, even more questions piled up in her mind.
‘How, exactly, is he going to share his Focus with me? And how can concentrating somehow mess with other people? What the fuck is he even saying…?’
Before she could dwell on it further, she felt a warmth spread from her back into her head as the medic’s hand pressed against her armour between her shoulder blades.
‘Wh—what is this?!’ she thought, forcing herself to stay still.
She really didn’t want to get her neck snapped over a reflex.
‘It’s helping…! The headache’s easing up! Is this the “Focus” he was talking about? Some kind of technique…?’
She’d heard of things like this before.
In the Undercity, people often turned to strange, half-mystical healing methods when proper medicine was too expensive. Most of them were scams, but the Old Man had always said a few of them were actually real things that existed and he had seen first-hand in his travels.
Whatever this was, she didn’t have time to question it.
She had a job to do—and judging by the medic’s tone, her life might very well depend on it.
She focused again on that sinking pit of dread in her stomach, trying to push against it, to wake it up somehow. She pressed and strained against the invisible wall that kept the feeling separate from her body—
—and then something gave way.
It felt like a dam bursting.
Her mind filled with an image of herself, sitting in the foxhole she’d dug hours earlier, west of Kellerman’s trench line.
She saw herself looking through her scope, aiming toward the battlefield as the fighting crested past the first trenches.
As she tried to focus on the scene, her point of view shifted.
She was no longer watching herself from the outside.
She was back inside her own body, looking through her own eyes.
She recognised the moment instantly.
Everything was playing out exactly as she remembered it—right before she’d figured out how to identify the original bodies.
‘Why… am I seeing this? What is the point of this…?’
She let the vision play out, forcing herself to stay calm, spreading her attention wide to catch every detail, in the hopes of figuring out what exactly this vision was supposed to do.
There had to be a reason for it.
She watched her other self fire the overcharged Mjollnir into waves of duplicates, swapping energy cells and cursing under her breath at how pointless it felt.
She saw herself stop after the third capacitor mag, exactly like she remembered.
That had been right before she realised some of them were duplicates.
Then the view unexpectedly shifted, her head turning west toward the steep slope beside her old foxhole.
‘Right… I completely forgot about that slope,’ she realised. At the time of the vision, she had still been scanning it out of habit, the same way she had since the start of the challenge.
The vision froze just like that.
Confused, she tried to look around for any hints, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t even turn her head. She was stuck watching through her own eyes, with no control over the point of view at all.
‘Why show me this?!’
She scanned the frozen image again and again, memorising every detail.
The rocks. The shadows. The shape of the ground. Everything.
There had to be something here. Something she’d missed so far.
Then it suddenly hit her.
‘No, that’s impossible…!’
Abject terror slammed into her chest.
Roughly two kilometres out, down the western slope, deep in the shadowed valley of red-brown dirt, something was wrong. Very wrong.
She knew this valley. She’d stared at it for the past few hours.
She’d scanned it hundreds of separate times, burned every major rock and outcropping into her memory, even using them as distance markers to zero her rifle without thinking about it.
Those shapes that were supposed to be fixed. Perfect markers for someone in her role.
But now… those shapes weren’t where they were supposed to be.
The rocks had moved.
Not all at once. Not enough to stand out in a single glance.
But compared to the image now etched into her mind, the differences were unmistakable.
A boulder that used to line up with a cracked ridge was now off by metres. A jagged cluster she had used as her two-kilometre reference had drifted quite a bit closer together.
Piece by piece, with every single detail she carefully examined, the picture no longer matched with her lived experiences of keeping an overwatch on the valley.
It was as if the entire hillside had been slowly inching forward—too gradual to leave any obvious tells, yet steady enough that it was now nearly within range of the UHF frontlines.
Almost in range for whatever twisted plan the enemy had set in motion hours ago…