War does not care who you are.
All philosophy, conviction, carefully constructed sense of self.
The man who spent thirty years building a name for himself dies the same way as the man who never had one.
The woman with seven children dies the same way as the woman with none.
Individualism reaches its lowest point inside a war. Not because people stop being individuals.
They don't.
They remain stubbornly, painfully themselves right up until the moment they aren't but because the worlds around them has stopped caring.
The man who could fix any engine. The child who hadn't decided on a name yet. None of it enters the record.
The ones who benefit are never the ones standing in it.
Somewhere outside the smoke there are people in rooms making plans that will determine the shape of the next week, the next month, the next district boundary. The soulless do not suffer. They do not lose sleep. They do not stand in the wreckage of a place where people used to eat dinner and try to understand what that belongs in.
And then there are the people who were simply there.
The nests of the old L Corp, the ones who were already fighting the city's ordinary cruelties before the war gave those cruelties a new name. Their lives had weight to them. Heavy the way cheap paper is heavy, not much on its own, compressing under accumulation, becoming unreadable fast.
Some of them made it into the count.
Most did not.
A life can be worth so little that even its disappearance goes unrecorded. The war did not invent that. It only made it faster.
So many worlds colliding at this scale and not one of them stopped it.
But no matter how significant the war is, it can never make the rare kindness fought within anywhere insignificant.
Kamina ran through the battlefield, boots pounding against rubble and ash, and grabbed an injured man wearing G Corp's military clothing. The man tried to fight back, his augmented bug arm swinging weakly, joints grinding with the effort, but there was no strength left in it. The arm fell limp.
"I WILL NEVER SPILL OUT INFORMATION ABOUT MY COMRADES!" the G Corp employee shouted, voice cracking with exhaustion and pain. "YOU WON'T GET ANYTHING FROM ME! I'LL DIE BEFORE I…"
"Blah blah blah, stop being loud," Kamina said, hoisting him onto his back. "I'm helping you."
The man went quiet for a beat, processing. Then. "Are you... are you a fixer hired by G Corp?"
"Nah," Kamina said, already moving. "I was hired by an orphanage."
The G Corp employee blinked through the haze of blood loss, trying to make sense of that sentence and failing.
Kamina moved fast, cutting through alleyways between buildings, past collapsed walls and burnt-out storefronts, until he reached a very secluded small apartment tucked between two towering structures. It wasn't on the main road. It sat in the shadow of the buildings around it, hidden, almost forgotten. Exactly the kind of place no one would think to check.
Kamina shouldered the door open.
Inside, the G Corp employee saw them: bandaged people everywhere. Children sitting against the walls, their legs wrapped in cloth torn from someone's jacket. Men slumped in corners, holding pressure on wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding. Women with their arms in makeshift slings. And fixers, wearing insignias from the opposite side, enemies by every technical definition, sitting beside each other in silence because none of them could fight anymore.
The G Corp employee was bleeding badly. A dark stain spread across his torso, soaking through the uniform.
Kamina rushed him toward a room at the back. A handwritten sign above the door read: EMERGENCY ROOM.
He pushed through.
Beds. Rows of them, packed so tightly there was barely space to move between them. Every bed was occupied. Severely injured people lay groaning, unconscious, or staring at the ceiling with the hollow look of someone who had stopped expecting to survive this.
Pioneer was working as a nurse, moving between beds with mechanical efficiency. She'd detached her right arm entirely, replacing it with a modular medical attachment, syringes, monitors, and diagnostic tools built into the prosthetic frame. She checked vitals, adjusted bandages, marked severity levels on a clipboard that was already full.
Curiosity had detached both hands. In their place: surgical tools, precision instruments, cauterizing attachments, scalpel arrays. He was in the middle of performing surgery on a man with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, close to the lung, dangerously near the kidney, bleeding severely. His hands moved with inhuman steadiness, suturing, clamping, stopping the hemorrhage one vessel at a time.
The surgery finished. Curiosity stepped back, wiped the blood off his prosthetic tools with a rag, and immediately moved to the next patient without pause.
Kamina placed the G Corp employee on an empty bed, barely empty, still warm from whoever had been there before.
Pioneer rushed over, her medical attachment already scanning him. She checked the wound, ran her fingers along the edges, assessed the bleeding. Then she marked the clipboard.
"Level 3," she said. "Major Severity."
The G Corp employee tried to sit up. "What…"
"It means you will wait," Pioneer said flatly. "There are Level 4 patients. Extreme Severity. They go first."
She moved on before he could respond.
This place lacked everything. Medicine. Medical equipment. Sterilization tools. Anesthetic. Painkillers. Bandages that weren't torn from clothing. It was not a hospital. It was a room with beds where people came to die slower.
Pioneer and Curiosity had tried to overcome it. They sent Kamina and a small group of volunteers, anyone still willing, still able to search abandoned private hospitals, looted pharmacies, anywhere that might still have supplies. Bring back medicine. Bring back anything marked for medical use.
But the sheer number of injured people kept growing. And there were only two of them.
The patient Curiosity had just finished operating on, no sleeping drugs, no painkilling sedatives, nothing to dull it had died on the bed. His breathing stopped. His chest went still.
Curiosity moved to the next patient.
He couldn't afford to think about guilt.
Kamina approached Pioneer, holding out a bag. "Found this in a private medical building a few blocks over."
She took it, opened it immediately. Painkilling sedatives. Sleeping pills. Antibiotics. Coagulants. More than they'd had in days.
Pioneer looked at the bag.
Then at the rows of beds.
Then back at the bag.
"It's not enough," she said.
Kamina moved next to Curiosity and placed a hand on his shoulder. "You need to rest too. Both of you. Pioneer, you too."
Curiosity didn't look up from the patient he was working on. His prosthetic hands continued their precise movements, stitching, adjusting, checking for internal bleeding.
"Almost done."
Pioneer finished tending the wound of the G Corp employee, wrapping the last layer of bandage with practiced efficiency. She stepped back, exhaled, and looked at the rows of beds.
"We've managed to ensure everyone's condition remains stable for at least the next six hours," she said.
Curiosity finished the current work on the final Level 4 patient. He stepped back, detached the surgical tools from his prosthetic sockets, and replaced them with his regular hands. The blood-stained instruments clattered into a metal tray.
"Done," he said.
Kamina gestured toward the door. "Break room."
They followed him without argument.
The break room was small, barely more than a storage closet with a table, two chairs, and a hot plate that still worked. Pioneer moved to the corner and started making tea. Her movements were automatic, muscle memory taking over while her mind remained somewhere else.
Kamina sat down heavily on one of the chairs. Curiosity leaned against the wall, staring at nothing.
They were too young for this.
They had been working continuously for twelve hours since they arrived in this timeline, thrown into the past with nothing but their prosthetics and whatever knowledge they could scrape together. They had seen the war's tragedy up close and felt it in their hands as they tried to hold people together long enough for the body to remember how to survive.
Curiosity's mind was full now. Too full. Thoughts layered on top of each other, colliding, fracturing into smaller questions he didn't have answers for.
How do you save everyone with limited knowledge?
He'd learned medicine as a second priority. Surgery, anatomy, health, it was all secondary to his main fields which were astronomy and astrophysics. He was a researcher, not a doctor. Pioneer was the same. She knew engineering, systems design, problem-solving under constraints. But not this.
They were improvising.
And people were dying anyway.
His mind drifted to Opportunity. To Voyager.
Where were they?
None of the Far Beyond members were capable of fighting. That had always been true. Their skills were knowledge, observation, creation, not combat. If Opportunity and Voyager had been scattered somewhere else in this timeline, somewhere in the middle of the Smoke War, they wouldn't be able to defend themselves.
He feared for their safety.
Pioneer set a cup of tea in front of him. Then one in front of Kamina. Then one for herself.
She sat down across from Curiosity, her hands wrapped around the cup for warmth.
"I keep thinking," she said quietly, "that if I just work faster and plan better, then maybe we save more of them."
Curiosity looked at her.
"But it's not about how we work," she continued. "It's about resources. We don't have enough."
"We're doing what we can,"
"What we can isn't enough," Curiosity said. His voice cracked slightly. He cleared his throat. "I'm fifteen. I shouldn't be deciding who lives and who waits. I shouldn't be the one holding the scalpel. But there's no one else."
Pioneer stared into her tea.
"I know."
This was all too much for a teenager.
But they picked up the cups anyway.
They drank the tea.
And when the six hours were up, they would go back to the emergency room and do it again.
Kamina reached over and patted Curiosity's head with the kind of firm gentleness that left no room for argument.
"Voyager and Opportunity will be fine," he said. "Trust in the Great Kamina Office. Shmuel and Imogen will provide exceptional protection for them. Those two don't mess around when it comes to keeping people safe."
Curiosity looked up at him, tired eyes trying to believe it.
Kamina leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "So. Why'd you join The Far Beyond?"
Curiosity blinked, caught off guard by the question. He glanced at Pioneer, who was still holding her tea, then back at Kamina.
"I suppose I'd have to talk about my past first," Curiosity said. His voice was quieter now, the clinical edge gone. "One of my very first memories was the death of my parents. In an alleyway. Backstreet."
He paused, staring at the table.
"I don't remember much of it. But I remember I didn't cry. Not for them. I think… I think I was told to have quite a high open-mindedness. To welcome anything into my path, no matter what it was. So I did."
Pioneer looked at him but said nothing.
"An Asan company employee found me after. Put me into the orphanage. And I suppose my active questioning got their attention rather quickly. I kept asking things. Why does this work? What happens if you change that? What's beyond the edge of what we can see?"
He smiled faintly, a small, tired thing.
"One of the main reasons I joined the research group was because I liked how ambiguous the world is. How nothing is ever quite settled. How every answer just opens more questions. It felt… honest, in a way. The ambiguity didn't pretend to be anything else."
He glanced at Pioneer.
"And I dragged Pioneer into the research group as well. She told me once she liked looking at the sky. Especially the moon, because it was the clearest thing she could see from the backstreet."
Pioneer set her cup down gently.
"I like Mars the most now," she said.
"She does."
"Mars, huh?"
"Quite."
The questions in Curiosity's mind only kept growing.
How come the world had so much color in it yet contained so much hateful feeling and death in it?
Too many people had been dying in his hands. Too many in just the past few hours. Each one added weight to his thoughts, pressing down harder, making it difficult to think clearly.
How come life can be so worthless?
A person started knocking on the door. Fast. Repeated. Desperate.
Kamina stood immediately and opened it.
"There's a group of fanatics outside the building!" the volunteer gasped, blood streaking down their arm. "They're killing the volunteers! They're killing the wounded!"
Kamina didn't waste time with words. He vaulted over the balcony railing, dropping to the ground below, and disappeared into the street.
The building shook.
Gunfire cracked outside.
Screaming started.
The patients on the beds began to get hurt again. Some from the shockwaves. Some from panic. Others, their wounds simply worsened, bleeding reopening, sutures tearing, bodies giving up the fight they'd been barely holding.
Curiosity rushed out of the break room and back into the emergency room. Pioneer was already moving, her diagnostic attachment scanning patients in rapid succession, marking new priorities on the clipboard.
"Level 4! Bed seven!" she shouted.
Curiosity was already there. He reattached the surgical tools to his prosthetic sockets, hands becoming scalpels, clamps, sutures. He worked fast, cutting, stopping the bleeding, holding the pieces together.
Another patient stabilized.
Another patient flatlined.
Burden upon burden started pouring onto Curiosity's shoulders.
He moved to the next bed. The next surgery. The patient was screaming, no anesthetic, no painkillers left and Curiosity had to hold them down with one hand while operating with the other.
Another life gone.
Then another.
But he couldn't stop.
A voice spoke into his head.
Smooth. Calm. Almost kind.
"This isn't what you're supposed to do, is it?"
Curiosity didn't look up. His hands kept moving.
"If I were to say no," he said quietly, "then who would be the one saving them?"
He finished the incision. Moved to the next step. The next artery. The next bleeding vessel that refused to stop.
"The burden is too heavy for you to handle."
"I don't find much problem in carrying too much," Curiosity said. His voice was steady, mechanical. "Fearing carrying too little scares me more. Who am I to decide who gets to live and who gets to die? Whose world needs to be kept and whose world needs to be left out in the trash?"
The voice shifted.
The emergency room blurred at the edges.
And suddenly, in his mind, Curiosity saw his room in the orphanage. Small. Clean. A single bed. A desk by the window. And on the desk, a photograph.
A family photo.
His parents. And him. Standing together.
He was still performing the surgery. His hands didn't stop. But the image sat in his vision like a second layer over reality.
The voice spoke again.
"There is something you remember about your parents other than their death."
Curiosity's jaw tightened.
"The happy moments," the voice continued. "The times you went on picnics. The times you had together. Do you remember those?"
"I remember no such things," Curiosity said.
The voice sounded amused.
"Then you'll need to dig more."
The building shook again. Another explosion outside. The patient on the table in front of Curiosity convulsed once, then went still.
Dead.
Curiosity moved to the next bed.
"There is a reason you subconsciously chose the health field as your second major," the voice said.
And then they were there.
His parents.
Standing beside him.
His mother's voice cut through the air like a whip.
"YOU NEED TO BECOME THE PILLAR OF THIS FAMILY AND GET THE WHOLE FAMILY, YOUR AUNT, UNCLE, COUSINS PERMITS TO LIVE INSIDE THE NEST LIKE HOW YOUR FATHER WAS ABLE TO GET ME AND YOU LIVING INSIDE T CORP'S NEST! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!"
His father stood beside her, arms crossed, face cold.
"Son, you aren't trying hard enough. I bought the seventy-two-hours-per-day package for the whole month so you'd have extra time to learn. Don't let me down next time. Don't lose top rank to that orphan girl ever again."
His mother leaned in closer, her voice sharper.
"Do you know how much we've sacrificed for you?! Do you know how much that package costs?! And you can't even maintain first place?!"
"You're wasting our investment," his father said. "Every minute you're not studying is a minute we're losing money. Every mark you drop is our future slipping away. Do you want us to end up in the backstreet? Do you want that?"
"Stop crying!" his mother snapped. "Crying is for children who don't understand the world! You're not a child anymore! You're our future! Act like it!"
"If you can't handle this, then you're not our son," his father said quietly. "You're just another failure."
Curiosity's hands trembled.
But they didn't stop moving.
"I remember now," he said quietly. "I didn't cry at that time because I was open-minded. I didn't cry because I didn't have a single thought of sympathy for them when they died."
The voice spoke again, softer now.
"Most worlds are cruel. That's why your parents were like that."
Curiosity's hands finished the suture. He stepped back. The patient's breathing stabilized.
"Most worlds do not define every world," Curiosity said. His voice was firm now. Clear. "A single gentle world is worth a million times more than a million cruel worlds."
Pioneer appeared beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't need to.
Curiosity looked at her.
And he remembered.
It wasn't just the Asan company employee who found him in that alleyway.
It was Pioneer who found him first.
Pioneer who sat beside him while he stared at the bodies of his parents and felt nothing.
Pioneer who stayed with him when the Asan employee arrived and asked if he was alright.
Pioneer who accompanied him the whole time his consciousness was open to this world.
"You were there," Curiosity smiled.
Then he turned back to the next patient.
The wall of the emergency room exploded.
Concrete and rebar blasted inward. Dust filled the air. Beds shook. Patients screamed.
Kamina skidded backward through the debris, boots scraping against the floor. He was locked in combat with a woman wearing full-body, light-weight industrial-style power armor, white overall with red patent lines running down the plating. No helmet. Her face was visible, grinning wide, laughing like a maniac.
She swung a white longsword in a wide slash.
Kamina blocked with his katana. The impact rang through the room.
She pressed forward, laughing harder.
Three more figures rushed in through the hole in the wall. Same armor. Red lines. White plating. But these three wore helmets, single glassed hole in the center, reflecting nothing.
Kamina pivoted, putting himself between them and the patients.
He swung at the nearest one. The blade connected with the armor. Sparks flew. The figure didn't stop.
Kamina ducked under a counter-swing. Rolled left. Came up slashing at the second figure's leg joint. The armor held.
The woman with no helmet lunged. Kamina blocked again. His boots slid backward.
"COME ON!" Kamina shouted, keeping all four of them focused on him. "THAT ALL YOU GOT?!"
The third helmeted figure moved toward the beds.
Kamina threw himself sideways, intercepting. His katana caught the white longsword mid-swing. The clash sent vibrations up his arms.
He was struggling. Four opponents. All armored. All armed. All pressing in.
The voice spoke into Curiosity's head again.
"The burden only gets bigger and bigger. The weight of others' worlds."
Curiosity finished the suture on the last patient. His hands moved methodically. Precise.
"The man you just finished working on," the voice continued, "has a daughter waiting for him outside. But that daughter was injured by the fanatic who just exploded into this room. He will wake up seeing his daughter crippled."
Curiosity tied off the thread. Stepped back. The patient's breathing stabilized.
"And the man before him?" the voice said. "His family has been wiped off. Gone. What world does he wake up to?"
Curiosity detached the surgical tools from his prosthetic sockets.
"A moment like that would define a person for a moment," he said quietly. "But not forever."
He looked at the voice or where he imagined it to be.
"You and I would never truly know how ambiguous the world truly is. If one world is shattered, then a new one will form out of that one. It might be lost forever. Or reborn from the ashes of the old one."
He turned.
Kamina was still struggling. The woman with no helmet was laughing, pressing her sword against his guard. The three helmeted figures circled him, cutting off escape routes.
Curiosity spoke clearly.
"Depending on what your answer is, I might turn into a problem or become the solution."
Kamina blocked another strike. Sparks flew.
"Tell me, Kamina," Curiosity said. "Should the world be filled with the predictable pain of people who couldn't go against anything at all? Or should it be filled with the unpredictable pain of people who would give out everything they can just to go against everything—to embrace the ambiguity of all the worlds there is?"
The answer was obvious.
Kamina grinned, teeth bared, sweat dripping down his face.
"BE DAMNED WITH THE PAIN!" he roared. "ALL SHOULD BE LIVING LIFE LIKE NO OTHERS! FOR ALL SHOULD BE ABLE TO APPRECIATE THE WORLDS OF OTHERS FOR IT IS HOME TO SOMEBODY! BUT NOT ALL WORLDS SHOULD BE PROTECTED WHEN SOME OF THEM ARE TOO DIRTY! AND THE WORLD IS FULL OF AMBIGUITY SO WHY BURN YOUR WORLD UP TILL THE ONLY THING THEY REMEMBER ABOUT YOU IS YOURSELF?!"
Curiosity smiled.
He rushed to Kamina's side.
His clothing began to change.
Jagged terra-cotta armor erupted across his body, stratified stone plates that flaked like efflorescent salt. Vents hissed thin Martian dust from the joints. The helm rose like a sharpened mesa, cracks seeping an eerie amber glow. A tattered mantle trailed behind him, blown by an unfelt wind.
The medical gear in both his hands twisted. Shifted. Became wheels, massive, grinding, ready to run over worlds.
[Effloresced E.G.O :: Aeolis Mons]
Curiosity stepped forward.
The woman with no helmet turned toward him.
She laughed.
Curiosity didn't.
He moved to the ambiguity of the world had offered him.