Thea found herself back in the tube that she had entered several hours prior, inside the gigantic UHF-sponsored cube.
She ran a quick mental check.
‘How do I feel—? Is my body alright?’
Better than alright, was the answer. A lot better.
She felt genuinely well-rested in a way that didn't make sense for someone who'd just spent ten-plus hours getting shot, blown up, and thrown across a battlefield—the kind of rested that usually followed the best night's sleep of her life.
No hunger, no thirst, no random pain or even the slightest grogginess. Whatever the Sim-Pod had been feeding her while she was under, it had done the job properly.
The filter Selene had mentioned was very real too.
She could remember everything—every event, every injury, the full sequence of the explosion and what came after—but it all sat at a slight remove, like recalling a dream rather than living a memory. The broken ribs, the bouncing across the dirt, the sounds her body had made on impact.
‘I remember it. It just doesn't land the same way… Good system.’
She opened the cylinder with a simple mental command.
It hissed softly and slid open, and she stepped out.
The Cube was significantly more crowded than it had been that morning.
The announced Credit prize had seemingly done exactly what the UHF intended—drawn people in from across the Undercity, all of them here to take a shot at the challenge. A handful of onlookers clocked her the moment she emerged, their attention sharpening with the particular focus of people who'd noticed she'd been in a Sim-Pod since opening.
‘They want information… But I don’t want to talk.’
She moved before anyone could close the distance, weaving through the crowd until she'd put enough bodies between herself and the curious looks to lose them.
After the day she'd just had, talking to strangers ranked somewhere near the bottom of things she wanted to do. What she wanted was to get home, tell the Old Man everything, and then corner him with every question that had been stacking up since the moment she'd first set foot in that simulation.
She picked up her pace toward the exit, the thought of it pulling her forward.
She stepped off the Cube's smooth metallic floor and felt the change immediately—the air quality, the ambient temperature, the general sense of the atmosphere dropping a notch.
‘I never thought the arcade felt stuffy before… Until today, I guess.’
Whatever environmental systems the Cube and the Sim-Pods were running, they'd quietly recalibrated her baseline in the span of a few hours. She stood at the threshold for a moment, briefly and genuinely tempted to turn back around—but then remembered the curious onlookers who were likely still searching for her.
‘Yeah, that's definitely not an option.’
She pushed on, making a mental note to find Thomas before she left.
She had no idea what had happened inside the arcade while she'd been under—or in the Undercity, for that matter—and a quick check-in seemed worth the few extra minutes.
She came around the corner past a row of arcade machines and stopped dead.
Thomas was at the front desk—that much was normal. The man he was talking to, however, was decidedly not.
He stood almost two meters tall, broad, dressed in a long black coat, and carried an air of authority that wasn't so much projected as simply present, like gravity. Thomas was gesturing in her direction, already having spotted her from across the floor, and the man turned to follow the gesture.
His eyes found hers.
‘Run!’
The fear that hit her was immediate, total and unlike anything she could match to a memory—including every single thing she'd experienced in the simulation.
‘This is real and it is happening right now and I need to fucking leave…!’
The warning sensation from the simulation was back, screaming at the same frequency, and underneath it was something worse—a bone-deep, instinctual certainty she couldn't argue with or reason away: ‘He could probably beat the Old Man in a fight.’
She didn't know how she knew.
She'd never seen James fight at full capacity, had never even gotten close to finding anyone whose presence suggested they could touch him.
Not in the Undercity. Not in the simulation. Not even Lieutenant Frost with bullets bouncing off her face and a manic grin while a battlefield burned around her.
This man. This complete stranger with his eyes fixed on her across a crowded arcade.
‘He could probably do it.’
Thea didn't waste another second.
She threw everything the Sim-Pod had given her into her legs and ran.
The kickoff cracked the floor beneath her feet—‘What the…?’—and she was already driving toward the back door before the thought finished, weaving hard, putting distance between herself and the front desk as fast as her body would carry her.
‘Thomas!’ The thought hit her mid-sprint and sat badly. ‘I can't help him. I can't do anything for him by staying. But hopefully the man will chase me, to get him away from there...’
She pushed it down and kept running, the silent prayer the only thing she could actually offer him…
POV: Major Atlas Daxton
A satisfied smile pulled at the corner of Daxton's mouth as he watched the girl in the violet hoodie disappear at a dead sprint.
She'd cracked the floor on her kickoff.
‘Would you look at that...’
Temporary System energy from the Sim-Pods gave a boost, but not that kind of boost—not for an Undercity citizen with no training.
‘Good instincts too. This keeps getting more interesting, doesn’t it?’
He turned back to the arcade's proprietor. One raised eyebrow.
"Ahhh—I don't know why she did that, I apologise, Sir! I swear, she's usually a supremely polite and agreeable person. Just give me a couple of minutes—I'll get in contact with her, explain the situation, and get her back here as soon as possible!"
The eagerness in the man's voice was doing a poor job of hiding what was underneath it.
Daxton had seen the combination enough times to recognise it on sight.
He didn't enjoy inspiring that kind of reaction, but there wasn't much to be done about it—he was here on official business, which meant the rank badge stayed visible, which meant this was simply how the conversation was going to go.
He held up a hand to cut Thomas off before he could keep going. "Don't mind it. I'll go after her myself. She's the whole reason I'm here, after all."
Thomas went still.
The fear that had been simmering beneath the surface came up all at once, but there was something else underneath it too—something Daxton was still trying to place when Thomas spoke, with a sudden intensity that caught him genuinely off guard.
"...If anything were to happen to her, I swear to the Emperor himself that I will end you. I don't care about the UHF, how strong you are, or whatever else. I will find a way."
Daxton went quiet for a moment, surprised.
"Ahh—that's if you're intending to hurt her, of course. I didn't—I mean—I meant no disrespect, Sir. I was simply—"
The fervour collapsed almost immediately, Thomas shrinking back into his usual meekness as though the declaration had used up every reserve he had.
Daxton laughed—a real one, not a polite or disrespectful one.
"No, no." He waved a hand. "Don't worry. I'm here to invite her to join the UHF. Nothing more. No offence taken whatsoever."
He gave Thomas a brief, genuine look. "You're a good man, you know that?"
Then he turned, found the direction the girl had gone, and kicked off.
To Thomas’ eyes, he likely simply vanished as he exited the arcade and dipped into the nearest alley.
The undercity's narrow alleyways were drab, cramped and very poorly lit, and the girl was moving through them fast—faster than she had any business moving, leaving almost nothing in her wake to mark her path.
‘She's good.’
For anyone else sent to find her—a job usually taken by new Privates—this might have actually been a big problem.
For Daxton, it wasn't.
He picked up her heartbeat without much effort with a simple activation of one of his Abilities—rapid, two blocks out, already pushing further.
He tracked it as he ran, and found himself quietly impressed despite everything.
‘If I weren't here, she might actually have lost most people sent after her…’
A few minutes in, something started feeling distinctly off.
Every time he looped ahead to cut across her path, she changed course—clearly not randomly, nor by chance.
‘There's no way she can detect me from half a block out. She’s Unintegrated…’
And yet, every single time, she adjusted perfectly as if she could.
Like she'd known exactly where he was going to be a few seconds before he got there.
‘How?’
He shelved the question and switched approaches, moving into a direct pursuit instead of trying to intercept.
She responded almost immediately—shifted gears entirely, leaving the open streets and taking to the broken, dilapidated architecture of the Undercity instead. Abandoned buildings, ruins, storefronts, a crowded market street she wove through without slowing down.
‘She's parkouring through a market. At full sprint. In the dark…’
He couldn't help it—a wide grin broke across his face, genuine and completely involuntary.
‘This candidate is way too fun. How is this even real?’
She was impressive.
There was no other word for it.
But the gap in raw physical ability was far, far too wide to bridge with skill and local knowledge alone, and he closed the distance steadily despite everything she threw at him.
He tracked her into an old apartment building and followed her down a dimly lit hallway until he reached a solid plasteel door.
He stopped.
‘Huh? What do we have here, then?’
The door was heavy-duty, biometrically sealed, and looked significantly more serious than anything else in the building.
‘How does an Undercity girl find something like this, let alone claim it…? Is it one of James’ old hideouts?’ He filed those questions alongside the other ones and turned his attention to the problem in front of him.
He stared at the scanner for a moment.
‘I have no idea how to work this thing…’
Technology had never been his strong suit, especially a retro one like this, and staring at the panel unfortunately wasn't making it any more intuitive.
He knocked instead, and raised his voice.
"Hello? I'm Major Atlas Daxton with the UHF. I think there's been a misunderstanding—I don't mean any harm, I promise. I'm just here to talk to you about the challenge assessment and offer you a chance to sign up for the Marine Corps, if you're interested."
The room was probably hermetically sealed, based on the makeup of the room and the door in front of him. Sound likely didn't travel through at all.
But it had seemed worth trying before using force, at the very least.
Half a minute passed without any response from the other side.
‘Was worth a shot, still.’
He exhaled, set his feet, and kicked the door…
"How is this psycho still following me?!" Thea hissed through her teeth, weaving through a busy alleyway at a flat sprint, dodging bodies and crates without slowing down. "There is no way he can track me through all of this!"
She hit the end of the alleyway and the feeling in her chest flared—sharp, immediate and intimately familiar since her experience inside the Cube.
"Fuck!"
She cut hard toward the next row of ruined buildings.
She knew this stretch well—had used it before to shake gang members who'd gotten too close. It was her best option right now, and she was rapidly running out of those.
‘Ten fucking minutes…!’
She'd been going flat out for nearly ten minutes, and the man hadn't dropped off of her tail even once. Her lungs were burning. Her legs were starting to feel it too.
‘I need to stop. Even just for a few minutes. I can't outrun him like this forever… I need to rest!’
She made the call and headed for one of the apartment buildings she knew just as well as her own home.
Inside, up the stairs, straight to the plasteel door.
"Come on—come on, hurry up—" She shifted her weight impatiently while the biometric scanner processed, watching the hallway behind her.
The lock released.
She pushed inside, hit the hermetic seal, and slumped down against the wall with her back to the plasteel, chest heaving, sweat running freely down her face.
‘Okay. Okay, I'm in.’
Old Man James' prior apartment in the city.
A single room he'd lived in before he'd met her, and later handed over as a fallback—somewhere to disappear when she needed space from him, or when something in the Undercity had gotten too close to outrun indefinitely.
The door was ten centimetres of solid plasteel.
The biometric lock made it effectively impenetrable to anyone without her or the Old Man’s access. Breaking through the rockcrete walls would genuinely be easier than going through that door.
‘He truly thinks of everything, all the time, doesn’t he…?’
Even now, as she was sitting here sweating and terrified, she couldn't help noticing it—the quiet, thorough way he'd built a safety net around her long before she'd ever needed it.
She pushed the gratitude aside and tried to think.
‘Who the fuck is this guy? And why is he this persistent?’ Thomas had looked utterly frightened when she'd spotted them together—but not the kind of frightened that came from being directly threatened.
More like the kind that came from standing next to someone very powerful or influential—maybe both—and knowing it.
‘Tall. Muscular. Long black coat. Those eyes…’ She turned the image over in her head. ‘He's got to be UHF; just has to be. But what does he actually want with me? Selene would have mentioned if there was someone waiting for me outside the Cube, no…? Why come all the way to the Undercity personally just to—’
The door exploded.
The full ten centimetres of plasteel tore free of the frame and slammed across the room, embedding itself halfway into the opposite wall with a crash that wiped every thought clean out of her head.
Completely frozen, unable to comprehend what had just happened, Thea simply sat where she was, leaned against the wall to the side of the doorframe, ears screaming with a flat, relentless ringing.
A voice came through the destroyed doorway.
She caught fragments of it through the noise, "—shit, sorry about—" and something that might have been, "—didn't think—" and then, "—Undercity—" before the ringing swallowed the rest whole.
A pause.
Then another fragment: "Fucking—pitch-black—" and what sounded like "destroyed—lights—too?!"
The rest was gone.
Just the ringing, and the plasteel door embedded in the wall across from her, and the open space where the frame used to be.
Reality snapped back in.
‘He broke through the door.’ Ten centimetres of solid plasteel, and he'd kicked it across the room like it was nothing. ‘He broke through the fucking door…!’
Only one advantage left: Lighting.
She'd known since she was small that her vision worked differently—pitch black didn't slow her down the way it did other people.
She could see perfectly without a light source, as clearly as if the lights were on. The Old Man had called it a likely side-effect of the Cyan Solution and left it at that, but he'd also drilled into her exactly how useful it could be if she used it right.
‘Please don't let him be able to see in the dark.’
She came up from the floor in one motion, pulled the plasteel knife from her boot, and charged. She kept the knife tucked in close against her chest, upper body angled forward to hide it—just in case he could see in the dark after all.
He reacted fast despite the short distance, catching her right arm and deflecting it away from his body before she could land anything.
He was saying something, but the adrenaline pumping through her veins, coupled with the incessant ringing in her ears made it impossible to make anything out.
Meanwhile, the second knife was already in her left hand and closing on his throat before he even finished the sentence.
He grabbed for that arm too—and then stopped. Just for a fraction of a second, something made him hesitate, a sudden stiffness running through him like a cold current.
It was enough.
The knife connected with his throat.
Thea felt the impact travel back up through her hands—and then the knife was gone, shattered, plasteel shards bursting outward in every direction.
She felt one open her left cheek. She barely registered it.
‘That knife was a birthday gift. I've used it my whole life. It just—shattered. On his skin.’
She didn't have time to finish the thought.
His hands closed around both her arms, and the grip was completely immovable.
"Fuck—! —stop—!"
He pulled her out of the dark room and into the hallway, moving her like she weighed nothing, and then set her back against the wall with a careful deliberateness that didn't match the frustration in his voice. He held up one hand—wait—and slowly let go of her, watching every micro-movement she made, ready to close the distance again instantly.
"Haaa…" A long, visible exhale. "Can you hear me?"
Or, at least that was what Thea assumed he had said, based on his carefully enunciated mouth movements and body language—not that she was an expert on either, but even she could take an educated guess like this.
She said nothing.
The ringing was still drowning everything out, and the terror hadn't gone anywhere.
He studied her for a moment, then reached into his coat and pulled out a syringe.
‘Absolutely fucking not—!’
She bolted.
His arm caught her before she made a single step, and then it was a short, completely one-sided struggle—her adrenaline against his whatever-the-void was making him the way he was—while he simultaneously tried to get the syringe into position.
She twisted, pulled, kicked, made him work for every second of it.
It didn't matter.
A few moments later, the needle found her anyway…
The crimson liquid hit her bloodstream and the adrenaline just—stopped. Like someone had reached in and turned a dial to “off”. The ringing cut out at the same moment, leaving a silence that felt almost loud by comparison.
She flinched when the man spoke directly in front of her.
"Can you hear me now?" His voice was surprisingly easy. Friendly, even.
She nodded, cautiously.
He let out a long, exhausted breath. "Thank the Emperor… You're a hard lady to catch, you know that?"
He paused briefly, and then added, "Before you get any ideas—can you please just sit still and hear me out for one second? I'm not here to hurt you, I swear. I'm Major Atlas Daxton, with the United Human Federation Marine Corps. I just wanted to talk about your assessment. Would you mind indulging me?"
The colour drained from Thea's face.
‘Major. I just tried to kill a Major.’
The relaxant in her veins was doing its job, but it wasn't built for this.
‘I went for his throat. With full intent. Twice.’
The knife had shattered, which was the only reason she was still breathing, and that was entirely down to luck and not to any particular restraint on her part.
She'd heard what happened when people went after high-ranking UHF officers.
Entire city blocks levelled. Minor settlements wiped off planets.
Retaliation that didn't leave room for explanations nor apologies.
‘And I did it fucking twice…!’
Her singular, immediate, all-consuming thought was damage control: Agree. Be cooperative.
Give him absolutely no further reason to be annoyed with her and pray—genuinely pray—that he decided it wasn't worth the paperwork.
She nodded at his invitation.
He looked visibly relieved. "Listen, I don't have much time, so I'll get straight to the point."
The friendly tone settled into something more serious. "I reviewed your assessment. Frankly, you're an impossibility. You performed way beyond anything that should be possible for a Mid-Worlder, let alone an Undercity citizen. I'm not going to grill you on your secrets—but I can't let you go unnoticed any longer."
He met her eyes directly. "My question is simple: Do you want to join the UHF?"
She said nothing, so he kept going.
"I won't do anything to you if you refuse. I promise. I came personally because I couldn't risk information about your assessment leaking out before someone from our side reached you. Whatever you decide—you're under UHF protection going forward. I'll make sure of that personally. You have my word, on my rank as Major."
He finished with the UHF salute she had seen the Old Man do every once in a while—a closed, right fist slammed over his heart.
Thea sat with it for a moment as the pieces quietly rearranged themselves into something that actually made sense.
‘He just wanted to recruit me. That's it. That's all of it… And Thomas pointed him straight at me.’ She turned that over in her head once, twice. ‘Thomas would never sell me out. So why would he ever point at me unless he'd already decided the man in front of him wasn't a threat…?’
Thomas had been scared—she'd seen it—but not the kind of scared that came from being cornered. The kind that came from standing next to someone with a lot of power and trying to act utterly normal about it.
She had already come to this conclusion before, during her run, but hadn’t had the time to fully think that thought through at the time.
‘He vetted him. Thomas vetted him first, and then pointed at me, and I ran anyway.’ She finally realized the only logical conclusion left. ‘...I am such an idiot.’
Looking at him now with fresh eyes, she found it surprisingly easy to see—he was sympathetic. The casual, informal way he spoke only made it clearer.
She'd made the decision on whether she wanted to join the UHF a long time ago, in her own way. So the answer came without much hesitation.
"I would like to join the UHF, Sir. I've always wanted to—I just never thought I'd get the chance, being born in an Undercity and all... It would be my honour to accept, Major Daxton."
The relief that crossed his face was big enough to genuinely surprise her.
"Haaa, thank the Emperor!" He exhaled like he'd been holding it in. "I honestly didn't know what I was going to do if you'd said no. Command would have never let me live it down. A once-in-a-lifetime assessment performance from a candidate on a planet I personally pushed the assessment for—and she refused?"
He shook his head. "They'd have hounded me with that one forever."
A grin broke through. "Really saving my ass here, Recruit. I can probably call you that now, right?"
He straightened slightly. "Now, let me be the very first to welcome you to the UHF. There'll be some paperwork, and your actual training won't start for at least another week—but that's just a minor detail."
He gave her a light pat on the shoulder. "Welcome to the UHF, Recruit."
‘Recruit.’ Thea felt the smile start before she could do anything about it.
He was right—there was still work ahead before she could truly call herself a UHF Marine.
But somehow, in the span of one completely unhinged day, her entire life trajectory had just lurched forward by years, if not decades.
He reached into his coat and produced a datapad, typed briefly, and handed it over. "Sign-up form. I've filled out a few things already—should process quickly. Being a Major has its perks." The smirk was back. "Finish filling out the rest and send it off before next week. That way we can get a shuttle to you for basic training as soon as possible."
He held her gaze for a moment. "I won't lie to you—I have high hopes for what you might accomplish. You'll likely face a lot of scrutiny. You'll be one of the first Mid-Worlders to join the UHF in this way, and people will have opinions about that. But having seen where you grew up—" a brief glance around the hallway "—I think you'll be able to handle yourself just fine."
He straightened. "I don't know when we'll be able to speak again, but I'll be keeping an eye on your progress. So don't disappoint me. That's an order, Recruit."
"Yes, Sir!" The salute came out clean and immediate, and she meant every bit of it.
"Alright." The cheeky grin returned as he dismissed her salute with a lazy wave. "Now, get out of my sight. I hope to see great things from you, Recruit."
Thea was already moving before he finished the sentence, a smile she had absolutely no interest in hiding spread across her face, her feet carrying her toward home and Old Man James and about a hundred things she couldn't wait to say out loud…
PoV: Major Atlas Daxton
Daxton watched the Recruit disappear down the hallway at a sprint and felt the satisfaction settle in warm and clean.
‘Good outcome. Better than expected, honestly.’
He pulled out his datapad and added a note to her assessment profile.
[Exceptional perceptive abilities, highly agile, quick thinker—high likelihood for childhood trauma due to local conditions] [Recommended Role: Tactical Scout/Sniper]
[Observation requested by Major Atlas Daxton]
He paused, turning the chase over in his mind from the beginning.
The course corrections before he'd even gotten close. The parkour through the market. The dark room and the two knives and the half-second of something cold that had made him hesitate.
He nodded to himself and added one final line.
[Potential 'Wielder' identified]
He closed the notes and fired off a priority message to the information security branch without delay.
[Priority Message]: Request for immediate Black-Level encryption and lock on entire file for Candidate #313 of the Lumiosia South-Eastern Undercity assessment run. Reason for request: See personal notes of Major Atlas Daxton.
He waited for the "successfully sent” confirmation, then let his shoulders drop.
‘She'll be fine.’
With the Black-Level lock on the way, the new Recruit's file would be about as visible as he could make it—which was to say, not at all, at least for the foreseeable future.
“Good trip, that’s for sure.”
Lumiosia wasn't much to look at, but he'd gotten what he came for and then some. He strolled out of the apartment building at an easy pace, in no particular hurry to leave just yet.
The undercity had a certain atmosphere to it—grim and worn and alive in a way that the cleaner parts of the galaxy sometimes weren't.
He wanted to enjoy it for a few more minutes before duty inevitably called him back…