Born to inherit the Earth.

Hannibal Chang had no time to mourn. When he made it out of the Menagerie, all he wanted to do was cry and vomit. His stomach churned, his throat stung with the bits of food and bile that was forcing its way up.

He told himself he was someone else. He wasn’t Tang Lu Kai, and that woman wasn’t his sister. It was a dumb bit of delusion that even he didn’t believe, but that denial felt almost natural to him. There was comfort in distancing himself from all that had happened down there, even as his hands were stained with her blood.

Then, the Menagerie shuddered. Not in the way that he could feel the earth shaking, but that the building physically crackled. Chucks of concrete began to pull itself away from the structure, circling around in the air, trailing red lightning. Finally, when a crimson beam shot into the sky, the Menagerie fell. Every part of the building swirled around the new beacon, quickly gaining speed until all that was left was a red cyclone.

Chang limped away. The wind was gaining strength, howling like thunder. He saw some of the military helicopters get sucked into the maelstrom, shredding into pieces to join the rest.

He had seen something similar before. A standard technique Espers used was to create a similar field in combat, whirling rubble around themselves that was both a lashing whip and an impenetrable shield. But no Esper could do this. This wasn’t a technique, this was an act of God.

And it was only growing.

The storm inched closer, slowly reaching past the confines of the facility and into the surrounding fields, tearing up the grass and dirt. Soldiers were scrambling around him to pack people onto humvees and load up their equipment. The hostages barely had a moment to grab some water and blankets before they were stuffed into trucks.

His interface lit up. “Runner Chang, come in.”

“What…what’s going on?”

“A mass-evacuation order. Not just for all personnel on Cricoid Bay, but all civilians on the Eastern Seaboard.”

“Are we expecting this calamity to get that far?”

“We’re expecting it to reach the city within twenty hours. We expect it to have destroyed the city by twenty-two.”

A lump jabbed at his throat. “Does the Bureau have a plan?”

“At this stage, we don’t expect tanks or mechs to be able to make it through. Even if they could, they don’t have the firepower to stop it.”

“It?” he asked.

“Project Leveret,” the Princep explained. “Classified.”

“Then how do we stop it?”

“Originally, that was why Clint Séquard was sent here.”

“If it’s already gotten this bad, I’m guessing that means–”

“That means Séquard failed,” she finished.

“Great, what’s Plan B?”

“A twenty kiloton tactical warhead, launched within the next fifteen minutes.”

His mind ran the numbers immediately, despite how obvious the answer was. But he had to check. Twenty kilotons would cover about a mile in explosion alone, not counting several miles more worth of lethal range from the force. Even at their fastest speed and not accounting for possible obstacles, the amount of time it would take for them to all leave that radius was…

“We’ll all die,” Chang realised. “Everyone here.”

“You’ll die for the Federation.”

“Wait.” Panic gripped him. Somehow, finding all those homunculi never frightened him, no matter how much more powerful they were. But this? The silent inevitability of it all? Chang emptied his stomach on the grass. “Wait, wait, wait. Please, just let me think this through.”

“There’s nothing else we can do.”

“If you can just get me another Triton suit.”

“You can’t kill it with a harpoon.”

“Then give me the new Mark VI prototype. With those specs, surely I can–”

“You won’t even graze it.”

“I…” He had nothing left. “Why even tell me? Why not just let me go in ignorance?”

“You’re a Runner,” said the Princep. “You deserve to look death in the face when it comes.”

His throat burned. Everything burned. The soldiers were still getting things ready to withdraw, not knowing it was all futile. They worked tirelessly, all for a chance of survival that was never there to begin with.

“Do you have any last words?” asked the Princep. “Any wishes or sentiments for any friends or family.”

“I just killed the last person in the world who loved me.”

There was a beat. “Is that all?”

Chang breathed deeply. He did his best to calm himself, even if for a moment. He wanted to sound dignified for his last minutes. “I am First Rank Runner, Hannibal Chang, and in my death, I will continue to serve the Bureau.”

A new voice spoke. He heard it behind him, and it echoed in his interface. “Give me ten minutes.”

He looked back, only to see the last blur of her purple hair in the roaring wind. She strode past him, without ever meeting his gaze.

“Colonel,” he muttered in disbelief.

“Yurinhalt,” said the Princep. “You’re supposed to be under suspension. Return back, immediately.”

“Give me ten minutes. I’ll stop this.”

“You will do no such thing. You will turn back right now.”

“And die with everyone else?”

“Then you shouldn’t have come!”

Chang flinched and lost his balance, stumbling. The wind did the rest, wrenching him to the dirt. Anger seared her voice like poison, and her words hung in the air for whole seconds. Even the colonel stopped in her steps, just at the border of the cyclone.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the Princep repeated, more composed this time. “That is a direct order. You will not take another step.”

She stood there, alone and quiet, as the world burned around her. Finally, and resolutely, she spoke. “Futility is always better than apathy,” she quoted. “That’s the tragedy of the virtuous.”

With that, Jin Yurinhalt stepped into the storm.

❖

Every breath of the wind threatened to topple her. For every step, she had to fight tooth and nail to maintain her position, conquering the storm inches at a time. The Princep kept trying to contact her, but the maelstrom must have been disrupting their signal as her voice came as buzzings in her ear.

Where there had once been steppes of green, there were just fields of dirt, and where the Menagerie had once stood, there was nothing. Nothing but sparse bits of broken concrete that stuck out from the ground, jagged towards the darkened skies.

To be honest, Jin had little idea where she was going. Her knowledge of the Menagerie went only as far as the underground component; something that the general public, and even most Runners, had no knowledge of. Her best and most obvious guess was the red beacon that pierced the clouds, stretching so far up that she wondered if it was visible from space.

However, the closer she came to the beacon, the stronger the winds grew. When she glanced up, a giant slab of concrete came whirling towards her.

Jin raised two fingers at the projectile. Her heartbeat drummed in her ears and scrambled against her ribcage. She felt a burn accumulate in her blood, travelling through its stream until it reached her fingertips.

“Axiom,” she whispered.

The car lit aflame, and then almost instantly, crumbled to ash. Those remnants gathered around her, floating. As more of the wreckage came flying in her direction, she turned each into ash, until all the pieces that orbited her formed into a barrier to part the roaring winds.

With the above-ground facility destroyed, the entrance to the lower sects was just a massive pit, with the red beam blasting out from its centre. Jin lowered herself into the crater, a few floors at a time. Even if her reinforced legs could withstand the force of the plummet, she couldn’t risk the entire structure collapsing afterwards.

At the lowest level, she directed her ash at the border of the beam. They stuck to it, burning away the barrier for just long enough for her to step within. She stood within a column of crimson light, fizzing and shuddering all around her. In its centre was Project Leveret.

It was just a child, and it was crying.

It was huddled tight into a ball, neither homunculus nor man. Its bone-white skin and skeletal proportions were distinctly homunculus, but it lacked a full second jaw; what remained was just a vestigial flap. The more she looked, the more human it seemed, yet somehow also more homunculus-like.

“What are you?” Jin uttered.

It sobbed. “I don’t know.”

“You…can talk. How can you talk?”

It kept its head lowered, tucked tight into its chest. The air was warm within the beacon, but it couldn’t stop shivering.

Jin stepped closer, and knelt down beside it. “Do you have a name?”

It shook its head. “I don’t know. I-I was afraid.”

“Listen...I want to take this slow, I really do. I know you’re scared. You’re distressed. All of this…it’s so new and strange to me, I can only imagine what it’s like for you. But we just don’t have the time.”

“I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want any of this to happen.”

“I know. But you have to stop it.”

“I don’t know how.”

Jin held up her hands. “When I first took up cybernetics, I couldn’t control my Axiom. I could burn everything around me, turning them into ash, and it was easy. So easy. It was a blessing in the battlefield, sure, but I stayed alone whenever I wasn’t fighting. Stayed far away from anyone else. I was too afraid of burning them…the same way I had burned her.

“But I’ve gotten better. I’m still getting better. Even if nobody else trusts me, I know it deep within myself that when it really comes down to it, I won't lose control again. You can do the same.”

“I can’t stop it,” it cried. “I can’t.”

“You have to try.”

“I’ve tried. I’ve really tried.” It lifted its head, and finally, their eyes met. They were the same darkened pits of homunculi, but they burst with such emotion. Such depth, even with the lack of pupils or irises or even a reflection of the light. Sorrow, pain, solitude. Was it a unique breed of homunculus? Or had all of them been like this, only that nobody ever cared enough to notice?

“Please make it stop,” it begged.

Jin pulled it close, and held it tightly. The same way she had held Maria. It was tense at first, but very quickly loosened into her embrace. They had never heard of each other; more foreign than even strangers. They shared not blood, nor time, nor even species. And yet here they were, in each other’s arms, silent and forgiven, while all the world died around them.

Its tears wetted her shoulder. “Will it hurt?”

“Not for a moment,” said Jin, as she summoned the ash.

Neither of them would know, but in their last moment together, without speaking a word, they had shared the same thought. They thought, perhaps they weren’t wholly different. They were two lonely souls, born of the same tiny blue planet. Born to inherit the Earth. Perhaps, that was enough. It had to be.