Ramona had already lived through the ash.
In her first life, she had been a fragile, foolish thing obsessed with surviving the collapsing world by playing by the old rules. She had believed that if she stayed quiet, followed the protocol of the high command, and pretended she wasn't a child of the military junta, the upper districts would spare her.
She had been wrong.
She had sacrificed her strength, swallowed the toxic air of compliance, and surrendered her agency to commanders who viewed her only as leverage against her parents. By the time the perimeter breached and the monsters swarmed the inner walls, it was too late. Ramona had died beneath a blood-red sky carrying one overwhelming regret:
Why had I spent my entire life trying to be a polite civilian for people who threw me to the scavengers the moment the gates closed?
Then she opened her eyes again.
Not in the radioactive dust.
Not in the void.
Years before the collapse.
Years before the final siren wailed.
She had been given a second chance. This time, Ramona remembered everything. Every food ration stolen by the aristocracy, every tactical betrayal in the bunkers, every humiliation, and every person she had trusted who had eventually left her to rot in the wasteland.
And she remembered her bloodline, too.
Her mother, Lina—the ruthless logistics mastermind who held the sector’s supply lines in a vice grip.
Her father, General Gary—the apex warlord of the northern defense sector, a man whose scorched-earth strategies kept the mutant hordes at bay.
The family everyone in the capital feared as tyrants, warmongers, and the villains of the old regime.
In her first life, Ramona had spent years trying to distance herself from their brutal legacy. She had begged her father to lower his weapons. She had apologized for her mother's merciless requisition orders whenever the high council called them monsters. She had desperately tried to shrink herself, shedding her military training to become the delicate, obedient lady the dying world supposedly wanted.
It had gained her nothing.
Civilized people had been the first ones eaten when the breakdown came. Only apex predators survived the wasteland.
So this time, Ramona had made a decision.
She would not hide from her heritage. She would not bow to a corrupt high command that traded human lives for political comfort. She would not sacrifice her father's tactical advantages or her mother's grid to satisfy hypocritical politicians.
And she certainly wouldn't spend another lifetime apologizing for being a General's daughter.
If the capital wanted to call them villains because they hoarded weapons and trusted no one, so be it. This time, Ramona would pick up a rifle alongside them, and nobody would ever breach their gates again.
Which brought her to the present, testing the heavy calluses on her palms as the acrid scent of sulfur drifted through the reinforced steel command-post windows.
“Mother, please dismiss the medic. I'm fine now.”
Ramona pushed herself upright against the iron-plated cot and gave the shivering garrison doctor a cold, authoritative look that mirrored her father's.
“If he checks my vitals one more time, the outer squads will think we're losing our edge. And I'm never wearing those decorative dress-uniform corsets again; if the perimeter is about to fall, a general's daughter needs to be able to draw her sidearm without fainting.”