Thea stared, mouth open.
She was completely starstruck.
Major Quinn, who she'd seen during the Cube's introduction back at the arcade, had represented something almost abstract to her—a pinnacle of intellect, grace, and strategic leadership that felt too distant to fully grasp.
Lieutenant Frost, however, was very different—more immediate and real, being right in front of her like this. And what she'd done in the brief minutes Thea had known about her existence to her understanding of what was physically possible was something else entirely.
Biologically, women were weaker than men. That had always felt like one of those rules you simply didn't argue with for Thea—lower testosterone during early development, differences in bone structure, reduced capacity to build muscle mass in the places that were important for combat.
The science was the science, not to mention having a living, breathing example of what a man could become if they applied themselves to that very pursuit in the Old Man himself.
‘Except—except she's right there.’
In complete defiance of everything Thea had filed away as ironclad, Lieutenant Frost looked like she could pick up any one of the Heavies in the squad and break their spine without much effort, if she felt like it.
Aside from her Old Man—who had at least admitted to having undergone some level of enhancements in his years—the Lieutenant was without question the strongest human being Thea had ever stood next to.
She was still stuck somewhere between awe and paralysis when the Squad Leader stepped away from the front of the trench and answered for her.
"That would be this lunatic right here." He gestured toward Thea beside him. "I don't know where you found this Void Daemon or why you sent her my way, but you've made my job real Emperor-damned hard, Frost. She hasn't even looked at what she's done out there in the past twenty minutes. I dare say she gets even more fanatical than you do when it comes to ripping apart these freaks."
He finished with a short chuckle.
That snapped her out of it.
Three things registered in quick succession.
First—’twenty minutes?!’ She could have sworn she'd grabbed those energy cells just a few moments ago. ‘That's not possible…’
Second—he'd called her "Frost." Not "Lieutenant Frost." Not even a "Ma'am" tacked on at the end. Just Frost, casual as anything, like they were old friends.
Third—she'd apparently been completely oblivious to everything around her for the past twenty-odd minutes.
Thea turned to look around her.
‘Oh.’
Two of her squad's Heavies were simply gone.
So were the three medium-armoured marines who'd been the remnants of the squad leader's original defence lineup. The Medium who'd been working alongside her during her killing spree was still standing, but only barely—multiple hits, bleeding openly from several wounds. The last Heavy still on his feet, currently the only active defender left for this section of the trench, looked like he'd eaten a significant portion of the return fire himself.
Looking out beyond the trench, the reason her squad was in the state it was became immediately obvious: The majority of the Stellar Republic's forces in this area had shifted their fire toward their position.
‘Oh no.’
Hundreds of shots were raining down on their stretch of trench every single second.
The fortifications and the dirt in front of them had been torn apart indiscriminately.
Explosions ripped through the air every couple of seconds—a constant stream of grenades, rockets, and propelled explosives all pouring down onto their location.
Her consistent killing of Duplicators, as the Lieutenant had called them, had not gone unnoticed at all.
‘I—I did this, didn’t I…?’
She'd been so locked into eliminating original bodies that she'd gone completely blind to what was happening around her. The flow-state had swallowed her whole—time, surroundings, consequences, all of it gone.
And the entire time, her squad had been eating the fallout to allow her to continue.
Fragments of memory surfaced now that she was actually looking for them.
Her medium-armoured squadmates physically shoving her out of the way and taking hits meant for her. The Heavies deliberately ramping up their fire to pull attention away from her position.
‘They covered for me. The whole time. And now they're all dead…’
She turned back toward the Lieutenant and the Squad Leader, the urge to apologise rising fast and completely impossible to push down.
"I—I am so sor—"
"You better not be apologising to me right now, Private." The Squad Leader's voice dropped to something flat and icy. "I really fucking hope you weren't about to do that."
She shut her mouth.
"Your squad members gave their lives to give you the opportunity to take out more of these scum. They recognised your ability to affect this battle more than they themselves could, so they made the choice to enable you to fulfil your role. Apologising now would drag their determination and sacrifice straight through the dirt of this Emperor-forsaken planet."
The harshness of it hit her like a slap, but the longer it sat, the more it made sense. If she'd genuinely put the squad at risk for nothing, the Squad Leader would have long pulled her himself, wouldn’t he?
Her squadmates had made their own call.
They'd seen something in what she was doing and decided it was worth it.
Apologising for that decision wasn't well-placed humility, but a mere insult.
"I understand, Sir. I apologise for my earlier transgression," she replied quietly, feeling the familiar heat of having made a fool of herself creep up the back of her neck.
"Now that's all fine and dandy—glad y'all made up." Lieutenant Frost's voice cut in smoothly, and when Thea turned, the Lieutenant was wearing a playful, coy smile. "I've heard there's a damned Void Daemon running around here that supposedly rivals me in ferocity. What do you have to say for yourself, Private Void Daemon?"
‘She's—wait, is she being cute right now?’
Seeing Lieutenant Frost—that Lieutenant Frost—pull off a smile like that was not something Thea had ever considered a possibility.
Not in this situation—not ever, really.
"I—I'm really not sure what to say to that, Lieutenant," she managed, barely.
Too much, too fast. Too many things turned upside down in the span of a few minutes.
Every time she thought she'd found solid footing in this place, something reached up and pulled it out from under her.
‘Just—breathe. Catch up, Thea. Try to keep pace with whatever is happening!’
The Lieutenant's belly-laugh rang out through the nearby trench—and then her hand came down on Thea's back hard enough to send her stumbling forward two steps.
"Don't worry, Private. I'm not someone that gets jealous that easily." The playful smile didn't leave her face for a moment. "Now, onto the real reason I'm here: I assume you cannot teach us whatever the Void you're doing to identify Duplicators with that kind of precision and speed—right?"
The playful tone didn't change as she said the next words, but something underneath it all did, that sent a chill down Thea’s spine.
"I really hope the answer is no, because otherwise I will have to torture you to figure it out and then Zero you for withholding vital strategic information without being specifically prompted about it."
‘She means that…!’
The voice was exactly the same—steady, even, almost casual. But there was something behind it, a cold edge Thea could feel more than hear, and every instinct she had told her it wasn't a bluff. Not in the slightest.
Flustered and running a beat behind, she answered at slightly too much volume.
"Ahhh! Yes, Ma'am—ehh, I meant—No, Ma'am! I cannot teach this! I tried with my last squad, but it's more of a gut feeling than anything else! I apologise, Ma'am!"
"Haaa… figures." The Lieutenant let out a short breath. "Nothing to be done about it. I assume it uses Focus to some degree?"
She paused just long enough to catch Thea's nod, then kept going.
"Alright. Then let's make use of you for as long as we can. Keep doing what you're doing—but don't burn yourself out completely. Focus Overdraws are nothing to take lightly. I'll make sure you get the space you need to do your job properly. Let's see how long we can keep this up before they send in the big guns."
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‘The big guns—?’
But the Lieutenant had already swung the HMG back into her hands—the one she'd been carrying the entire time like it was a piece of sporting equipment—and was already moving toward the front of the trench.
The question died before it left Thea's mouth.
She quickly let it go and followed, pulling herself back together as best she could and taking her position at the line, rifle up.
When the Lieutenant opened up with the HMG, Thea found her eyes drawn to the broad back in front of her despite herself.
‘She makes the Heavy next to her look so damn small…’ That was a sentence she hadn't expected to ever think about anyone, given how much armour the Heavy was wearing.
‘She is just like Freya.’
The thought arrived without warning and she couldn't shake it once it landed.
The build, the demeanour, the manic grin.
The bone-deep, completely unironic certainty that she was damn near invincible.
Lieutenant Frost and her favourite Ashes of Centuries character were operating from the same blueprint, and Thea wasn't sure what to do with that.
‘Maybe that's part of it,’ she thought briefly—why the admiration had hit so fast and so hard.
She shook her head and pushed it aside.
She had work to do.
‘Scope up. Find the next duplicator…’
This time around, Thea managed to keep a grip on herself.
She stayed close to the edge of the flow without tipping fully into it—just enough focus to keep doing her job, not so much that the world disappeared around her again.
It was because of that she noticed, about ten minutes in, that she was getting close to her limit. Thirty-odd minutes of near-continuous Focus use, and the early warning signs were starting to creep in—the same ones she'd picked up on from her previous experience pushing it too hard with Kellerman’s squad.
‘Five more minutes. Maybe ten. Then I'm going to start paying for it.’
She made a mental note to flag it to the Lieutenant soon.
With her head clearer this time, she'd also been watching how the Stellar Republic was responding to her renewed offensive. Just like the Squad Leader had said—a large chunk of the nearby enemy lines had redirected their firepower onto their small stretch of trench, trying to shut her down.
It had worked last time. It wasn't working now.
They'd lost most of their squad in the previous stretch of fighting, but what they'd gained in return was Lieutenant Frost, and Lieutenant Frost was, as far as Thea could tell, a fortress that had somehow learned to walk around.
The firepower seemed almost magnetically drawn to her.
She stood at the front of their formation and absorbed it—bullets, lasers, projectiles, all of it hammering her position—and only a handful landed clean hits.
That alone was astonishing. What was more astonishing, however, was that she didn't have a scratch to show for any of them.
‘I watched a bullet bounce off her face...’
Not deflect off armour. Off her face. Like it had hit reinforced durasteel.
If Thea hadn't seen it with her own eyes she would have flatly refused to believe it.
‘Just what the fuck does it take to make a person into that kind of a monster…?’
She couldn't reconcile it with anything she understood about human limits.
The speed, the strength, the resilience, the way the Lieutenant casually sidestepped incoming fire like it was a mild inconvenience—every single aspect of her had been cranked up so far past normal that "enhanced" felt like an embarrassingly small word for it.
The Old Man had hit her the same way, all the way back then, when she had first met him.
But he was over two hundred years old by his own account—enough time to accumulate Void knows how many genetic alterations, physical upgrades, and whatever else the UHF had managed to develop for their best marines across two centuries of active service.
Lieutenant Frost, on the other hand, looked thirty. Thirty-five at the most generous estimate.
‘How? How does someone that young get to that level?’
And right behind that question, quieter but burning just as hot:
‘Could I?’
Something lit up in her chest at the thought and refused to go back out: She wanted it.
Not vaguely, not abstractly—she wanted to be that fast, that strong, that untouchable.
The kind of person bullets simply bounced off of.
‘Figure out how she did it. Then figure out how to do it yourself.’
With that thought, Thea turned her attention back to her rifle and the enemy lines stretching out across no man's land and while scanning for her next target, something caught her eye that didn't belong.
She zoomed in further.
‘Oh fuck me… That's not good at all.’
A man stood in the enemy lines, clad in thick armour buried under a sea of coloured rags.
He was holding a riot shield that was closer in size to an industrial gate than anything a human being should reasonably be carrying, and in his other hand was a gun she didn't recognise—bulky, wide, with two barrels at the front that were each roughly half the size of her entire head.
She was still trying to work out what she was looking at when his head snapped abruptly toward her—straight through her scope.
Visor locked onto hers like he'd known exactly where she was.
Thea stumbled back from the parapet, eyes wide.
‘That’s not a damn coincidence!’
"Private, what's wrong?" Lieutenant Frost's voice came immediately — that unnerving, total awareness of everything around her on full display.
"I—there's a man, Ma’am." Thea tried to pull her report together. "He looked at me. Like, straight through my scope. I think—I don't think it was a fluke. He's huge, Ma'am, easily over two meters tall, shoulders maybe as broad as yours—maybe broader. He's got a massive shield and some kind of double-barrelled, bulky gun. I—I don't know what it is. He—he feels dangerous, Ma'am."
Lieutenant Frost turned her head.
The grin that spread across her face was wide and manic and full of teeth.
"Looks like the big guns have arrived," she said, the elation in her voice completely unconcealed. "Guess I'm up."
She dropped her weapon and vaulted clean over the shoulder-high trench wall before Thea could get a single word out, landing on the other side and fully exposing herself to the entire Stellar Republic line.
"Watch and learn, my pretties!"
The voice that floated back was bright and cheerful and entirely too sweet for someone who had just walked out into an active no-man’s-land unarmed.
Thea's head whipped around looking for some kind of explanation.
The Squad Leader was slowly shaking his head.
The battered Medium beside her looked every bit as lost as she felt.
‘Okay. Okay—covering fire. Do something useful, Thea!’
She shook herself and stepped back up to the parapet, rifle raised.
Then she looked through her scope and forgot about the covering fire entirely.
The Lieutenant was strolling through no man's land. Not sprinting. Not pushing forward under fire. Strolling.
Her body blurred constantly as she shed incoming projectiles by fractions—hundreds of them per second—and every dodge looked almost lazy, like she was mildly inconvenienced by the trajectory rather than threatened by it.
‘She's enjoying this.’
It lasted only a few seconds before the Stellar Republic's side went silent all at once.
Thea found the reason almost immediately.
The armoured man had climbed out of the trenches too.
He was moving through no man's land toward the Lieutenant with a long, measured stride—unhurried, deliberate, radiating the kind of confidence that came from never having had a reason to doubt himself. Just like the Lieutenant's.
A metallic voice rolled across the battlefield as he raised his bulky weapon toward Lieutenant Frost.
"You dare face me in the open, whelp? I am Captain Xander Ionheart of the 37th Legion. Don't think I will go easy on you just because you're young and have a pretty face. The Emperor would simply not allow such leniency."
A bright red laser ripped through the air, aimed straight at the captain's helmet.
He flicked his wrist.
The giant shield moved into the path of the shot and deflected it into the dirt beside him without breaking stride.
Thea's rifle was still cycling the heat from the shot.
‘What! Did he just—what?!’
A laser beam. Near the speed of light. And he had not only reacted to it, but moved a two-metre slab of plasteel into its path in time to deflect it.
‘That's—that’s just not possible.’
She knew the physics. She'd always known the physics.
There was no framework she had for what she'd just watched happen.
‘I'm not even a factor here, am I.’
She'd fired the moment he announced himself, thinking it was an obvious opening—an easy, efficient end to this side of the problem.
Now, however, watching the heat shimmer off her rifle's exhaust ports, the full weight of how wrong she'd been settled over her like a cold blanket. Her laser rifle wouldn't do a thing to either of them.
It didn't matter how well she placed the shot.
‘I am completely irrelevant to whatever is about to happen out there.’
"I will get to you soon, pest—just you wait." The metallic voice swung toward her like a weapon of its own. "You've done quite a number on my guys. I don't appreciate that. Not. One. Bit."
The malice in it was thick enough to feel.
A heavy pressure settled over her at the promise buried in those words.
"Funny you should say that, Captain." Lieutenant Frost's voice floated across no man's land, conversational and completely unbothered. "I don't appreciate you talking to my cute Private like that, either. As her commanding officer and overly amazing Lieutenant, I can't have you going around intimidating my Marines."
She paused, then beckoned him forward with one outstretched hand.
"I'm Lieutenant Frost—otherwise known as your worst fucking nightmare. Now, get your slow ass over here so I can beat it into the ground. This Battlefield doesn't have all day to wait for you and your damn theatrics."
Thea pressed her lips together hard to hold back a laugh and failed.
‘She's treating him like an unruly child.’
The full black armour, the metallic voice enhancer, the terrifying double-barrelled weapon—Captain Ionheart had clearly put real effort into being intimidating, and Lieutenant Frost was looking at him the way you'd look at someone who'd shown up to a fight with a plastic knife.
The Captain didn't answer.
Instead, he kicked off the ground, threw up a veritable explosion of red-brown dirt, and charged—crossing nearly a hundred metres in under two seconds, heavy armour and all.
Moments before he reached her, both barrels roared to life at once, unleashing a torrent of molten metal-looking projectiles that blanketed a thirty-metre-wide stretch of ground in lava-like pellets and turned the air in front of Lieutenant Frost into a wall of fire…