Took absolutely forever to do this. Writer's block, work and other projects swallowed up a lot of my time and most of my energy. I had originally meant to put the entire event in one chapter, but as I reached what is now the ending of this chapter, I realised I was not sure how to continue past this. I know what the aftermath will be, now I just need to write the connection. For now, admire how everything goes to shit for these poor kids.

"ETA 10 minutes" announced the voice of the pilot, detached and professional.

Vandham wanted to scream.

He was currently in a dropship, together with his class, waiting to be dropped on Istanbul to fight Sentients. Real ones this time.

They were not ready. They were most likely all going to die.

He had asked, begged really, the Military Alliance command to just use the Void Bomb and let the students develop their skills to the point of at least having a chance, but they hadn't cared. They didn't understand, didn't want to understand. These kids, ranging from 14 to 20 year old, were the only hope humanity had left against the sentient menace. And their leaders were sending them all to die without a care in the world.

Reo had found out that apparently one of the men on the alliance council, the governing body of the Military Alliance, had his family in Istanbul and had made promises and concessions in order to make command give the order to send the warframes, so as to try to save his family who would have surely died if a Void bomb was dropped.

To save one family who might very well be already dead, they were sacrificing their only hope to defeat the sentients.

If he was alive after this, Jack swore he would kill the fucker.

"Drop-point beta swarmed by hostiles, redirecting to drop-point theta. ETA 5 minutes".

Reo Hinata contemplated his class. Aside from Excalibur, everyone else was there. The best pilot for each standard warframe they could currently produce, that was his class.

They didn't have a chance in hell to get trough this alive.

Their excellent performance in their first few training exercises had made them arrogant, and like teenagers the world over they believed themselves immortal, as if nothing could touch them, above consequences. Exactly the kind of attitude that got you killed on a real battlefield.

Privately, Reo was happy Excalibur had been found passed out and with a broken arm in the showers. He was by far the most arrogant of the bunch, and without him around the others might be convinced to follow caution rather than charge in like cannon fodder.

There was also the fact that if he wasn't there, then it was one more kid who might learn from the massacre that was about to happen. A morbidly fatalistic way of looking at things, but one takes what they can get.

"Operator, we're about to arrive to the landing zone. As you instructed, we're here undetected by enemies and ahead of the Lotus classes".

"Thank you Ordis" replied Rylus, piloting Excalibur Umbra.

This was a very, very bad situation.

He had been talking with Annalisa when the alarm had sounded and the order was given to all pilots to go to their warframes. A sentient wave was attacking a large city on Earth, and the warframes had to be deployed.

Barely trained, unprepared, without any real understanding of what they were up against.

"Feels like being back with the others" murmured the boy.

As Umbra dropped from the Landing craft, it took him all of a moment to realize the situation the city was in: in a word, it was lost.

Sentient soldiers were swarming the streets, mostly idly moving about looking for stuff to kill. Whatever resistance had been found in the city, be it law enforcement or the army, had probably been neutralized within minutes of touch-down.

"Patience, my friend" murmured Rylus to Umbra as the warframe's inner voice wanted to attack the enemy. "We're not here to destroy our enemies today, we're here to save those children who are not yet ready for this war".

Umbra's mind pulsed with disapproval, his hate for the sentient boiling hot at seeing them for the first time in millennia.

"We both know what will happen if arrogant and corrupt leaders are free to manipulate these children as they wish, don't we?".

Umbra settled down at that, barely. As much as he hated and wanted to annihilate the sentients, he could accept putting the fate of these kids first.

Without any further comment, he took off, running up the closest building and taking up position at the top of a medium sized skyscraper. Pulling his Vectis Prime from his back, he used the zoom to observe the first drop-ship of the Lotus academy that came into view.

"This is gonna be a long day" he said to nobody in particular.

As soon as his feet touched the ground, Excalibur Prime took off, trusting that his team would be right behind him. Their orders were clear, they had to find a defensible position and establish a base there. Once that was done, they would go out and search for civilians, who would then be brought back to their small base. Periodically, a shuttle would pass each base to give ammunition and take civilians.

The plan went to shit pretty much right away.

Several warframes had been downed by enemy fire as soon as the doors of the shuttle had opened, multiple sentients having converged at the landing point. As soon as he touched the ground, Inaros cast out a wall of sand, smashing the nearby sentients against a wall close by.

"Scatter!" he bellowed, prepping his Braton Mk-1 as he watched the sentients get back up, slightly dazed but undamaged.

Excalibur Prime and his team took the chance and moved away, darting into an alleyway as fast as they could, Mirage Prime turning invisible as they went and jumping away, moving to scout ahead, the sound of Inaros' battle fading away behind them.

After about five minutes of running and avoiding open areas, Excalibur, Valkyr and Oberon reached Mirage, who had in the meantime found and scouted out a bar. It was small and the door had been blasted off its hinges, but it didn't stand out and they could hide in it for a few minutes while planning their next move.

"Anyone else is really glad out bodies are still on the moon, safe and sound?" asked Valkyr. She was obviously trying to act cheerful, but it sounded hollow even to her own ears.

"Forgot about the somatic feedback, have you?" pointed out Mirage, with some irritation.

There was a time and place for jokes, and this wasn't it goddamnit!

"Senhoras, please;" came Oberon's voice, trying to play peacemaker; "we can argue and fight once we find a safe place to settle down. Right now, we need our heads in the game."

The two looked at him, then at each other, then Valkyr snorted and walked off to go lay down on a nearby mostly intact couch, while Mirage sat at a half-destroyed table that had miraculously remained upright and started checking her rifle.

Oberon internally sighed in relief and started looking around for a place to sit down, but all three jumped up when Excalibur slammed his fist on the wall and then leaned his head on it.

"Excalibur?" asked Oberon, worried about the outburst.

There was no answer.

"Hiro?" he tried again.

Excalibur didn't reply. He didn't hear him.

His mind was moving at the speed of light, remembering and re-analysing and re-considering everything they had been told, and everything they hadn't.

Every direction he tried, every line of thought he followed, they all went back to the same inexorable ending:

They didn't have a chance. They were all going to die.

"How do we fight them?" he finally demanded, his voice growing in volume with every word.

"How do we stop them? How do we find civilians in this hellhole? How are we supposed to survive any of this?" he finally screamed; "We barely held our own against practice dummies without any of the adaptive shielding of the real sentients. We spent less than a hundred hours linked up to our frames! Our homeroom teacher could easily kill all of us with both arms tied behind his back, and he said himself that he couldn't take more than a couple sentients at a time on his own!"

In anger, he grabbed a nearby chair and threw it towards the counter, where it smashed against the bottles of most likely very expensive liquor, raining glass and alcohol on the floor.

"What can we do?" he asked after a moment, his breath laboured.

All his anger had left him, and now he just felt tired and hopeless. He couldn't look at the others, wasn't brave enough to.

"You can hold your head high, raise your sword, and face the storm head on!" came a voice from the doorway.

Banshee Prime was waiting. Hidden behind a half-collapsed wall, her entire body holding as still as possible, silently praying to a God she had never believed in, she was waiting for the three sentients her team had fought to pass, hoping they would not find her.

Through her sonar, she could feel them move, painfully slow, right in her direction. Their bodies constantly gave out a deep, low, rhythmic pulse. The vibration of it was relentlessly pushing against her skull, drowning out all other sounds, anchoring her in place, incapable of moving a centimetre while those wretched machines kept coming closer.

As the pulsing grew beyond what she could bear, its continuous rhythm like a tortured melody, she suddenly realized they were right on the other side of the wall.

"Come on Ash move out of the way" she told herself, trying to will her body to move without success.

"Come on girl move away please please please..."

The sentients moved their arms into position.

"Please move please move come on come on come on..."

They started charging.

"Come on come on please please I don't want to die please..."

Suddenly Braton fire could be heard, and the three Sentients lowered their arms and turned towards the Loki that had just appeared on the scene.

Banshee looked towards the Loki. From her position, she could see him at the end of the street, on the left of the Sentients who were about to blow up the wall she was standing behind.

He was looking at her.

Then he nodded at her, and sprinted away, turning invisible as he went, the Sentients in hot pursuit.

The machines gone, the pulsing leaving with them, the girl slid down the wall. She had almost died.

Breathing hard, she thought about her savior.

She didn't know his name.

He was a standard Loki, so part of another class. Maybe even Class A. Ash had barely bothered to learn the names of her squad, the rest of the class' had gone down as non-important, and the rest of the academy as insignificant.

She was broken out of her thoughts by a tortured scream, coming from the general direction the Loki had run towards. Slowly, on shaking legs, she got up. She had to leave. Now that the other warframe was dead, the sentients would return to look for her. If she was still behind the wall once they were back, she would not get another chance.

As she slowly walked away, her thoughts went back to her days before the academy. Days spent getting yelled at by a mother who believed her love for music was nothing but a meaningless distraction. Nights spent with an obsessed policeman father calling her a useless delinquent and a criminal in the making. Hours spent at a school where people hated her because she was different. Because she'd rather spend her time playing music rather than talking gossip or play sports or join after school clubs or work or make friends or a hundred other activities that were expected of her.

She hadn't cared. Not about her father obsession with his so-called honourable conduct, not with her mother narrow minded view of how life was supposed to be lived. Not for her peers' scorn, not for her teachers' hate. Music was all she needed. All she wanted. There was no need for people in her world.

She had never imagined that her father would be contacted by the government. That they would offer him to "make his daughter a hero this country can be proud of". He had taken that, hook, line and sinker. Signed her off to the army without a second thought. Without asking her mother. Without asking her.

Instead of a garrison, she had ended up in a laboratory. Instead of marching through the mud, she had been strapped to a table and bombarded with Void energy.

And she had found it.

A rhythm. A pulse. A low, deep, primal sound moving through the Void like ripples through water, reverberating in the endless abyss of it.

She had accepted it. Embraced it. Internalized it to the point that her own heartbeat felt like it was in sync to that primordial rhythm.

Soon after, she had been assigned to the Banshee Prime warframe and promptly shipped off to the Moon. She had though the cycle would just continue there. More teachers to scold her, more peers to scorn her. It was not new, she knew that life well.

But it was not so. Her homeroom teacher and the one from Class A accepted her. The other teachers at worst ignored her. Her peers casual acceptance of her musical habits moved her more that it should have. The first evening, when she had brought her beloved guitar to the common room and started playing, having nobody yell at her to stop it and leave was such an amazing thing that she had almost cried. Why did this suddenly matter so much? She didn't understand herself.

Her teammates had come the day after. She had expected many things from them. For them to enthusiastically accept her was not among them. She had cried then. Without understanding why, the tears started to fall and she couldn't stop them. Her team had not reacted outside of putting their hands on her shoulders, a silent show of support. Because they understood. Because they all had their stories, and knew she had hers.

And finally, Hiro had arrived. A shy guy, jumping at his own shadow. And yet, he had reached out for her music. She had noticed almost right away. While her classmates accepted her music, they usually didn't stop to listen, busy as they were with their own stuff.

He had stopped. He had sat down, as unobtrusive as possible, closed his eyes and just listened.

It had felt… intimate, somehow. He actively chose to listen to her music, to her playing. He had taken the time to listen to her. Anything she played, he listened. She had played classical music, he was there. Played rock, he stayed. Played country, punk, metal… he was always there. And so, she had bared her soul to him, giving him everything she had through her music. She had been naive, to give herself away like that to the first guy to genuinely love her talent, but she had also been lucky. Because he had listened, always a soft smile on his lips, his eyes closed.

And so she had approached, using the excuse (real as it may have been) of needing help with schoolwork. She had brought him to her room. They had studied together. Laughed together. And then she had played for him, just the two of them. This time, his eyes weren't closed. They were looking straight at each other. They were two souls, bright flames within the Void, with music connecting them. They both understood something had fundamentally shifted between them, though neither of them had dared to give name to it.

As he had left, a scant three hours before the call to action came, she had kissed him. A simple, quick peck on the lips. He had said nothing. She had said nothing. Then he had left and she had gone to bed. But that something, that connection, was there.

Banshee was pulled from her thoughts by the hated pulsing of sentient machinery. Raising her head, she saw four in front of her, arms raised and prepared to fire.

Looking back she saw three more, most likely the ones she was running from, had caught up to her.

She was surrounded. She had no backup. There was no way out.

She was going to die.

Inwardly, she smiled sadly. Strange how, as death came closer, her first thought was that she didn't get the chance to spend more time with Hiro.

She heard the sentients' weapons charging, the soft whine intermingled with the atrocious pulsing from their cores.

The pulse was what bothered her the most. She didn't want to die while listening to THAT!

And so she dove deep within herself, seeking out the rhythm the Void had left within her, focusing on it in an attempt to drown out the pulsing of the sentients. She would gladly embrace oblivion while listening to it rather than those sour notes.

And so she focused all of herself on it, and slowly but surely it grew stronger, filling her ears and her mind, making her body vibrate in the rhythm of power. It was as the strength of the Void reached its climax that she felt the impact, and everything went black.

Nidus was breathing hard. Down on one knee, his warframe's body covered in injuries that were slowly regenerating, he took that one moment of calm to consider their situation.

Their shuttle had never made it to the landing zone. Several members of the class had died during the crash. Many more had been killed by sentients swarming the wreckage.

He had given the order to disperse. Some had tried, few had succeeded. Most had remained paralysed with fear, easy pickings for the enemy's weapons.

Now what was left was him. His back to the crushed shuttle, a swarm of easily over twenty sentients before him.

Slowly, he rose up. Even with Nidus' quick healing, he was struggling to stay upright. He assumed a ready position, his Lato gun in hand, pointed forward. He knew it wouldn't make a difference now, but he would be damned before he showed his fear to these monsters.

"Not coming home this time, pal" he murmured.

As he saw the sentients raise their weapons, fear left his mind. There was nothing else to do now.

He was ready.

In an alley somewhere in the city, a Loki was on the ground. His left arm and left leg, as well as a large chunk of his chest, had been blown off.

Back on the moon, the pod containing his pilot was flashing red, vital signs flat-lining. Nobody came to see, there was nobody left who could. All the medical staff was already busy with many of the other pods, the entire room tinted red by the pods' lights.

And above all of them, inside the control room, General Creed closed his eyes and sighed deeply. He was watching as their so-called "leaders" might very well have just wasted humanity's last hope.

"If any gods are left to watch us" he finally said "then I beg you: just give them a chance!"