“Hart,” the captain barked and brought me up out of my hungover daze, “Were you even listening?” 

I let out a deep sigh and rolled my eyes before leaning back in the cheap office chair and looking over his shoulder to my friend waiting for me just outside the window on the far wall. 

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, “Simple job, not many details. It gets boring.”
He scoffed at me, “This is life or death, Hunter, or have you forgotten that?”
“Hunter,” I quoted, “It’s funny,” I stood and started towards the door, “You think degrading me to a rank will break me.” 

I briefly turned back to him only to catch a sucker punch to the jaw that knocked me on my hands and knees. I clenched my fist as I thought about how easy it would be to just pull my sidearm and blast him into five pieces… but I was trained better than that. 

“I’m not here to tell you how to do your job!” he shouted, “But I’m starting to feel like I need to with you incompetence these past few outings!” 

I let out a silent huff as I pulled myself to my feet and turned to him. Emotionless and calloused, I stayed blank because I didn’t want to display the intent I had. 

“East wing,” he started, “You let one of them go and it destroyed fifteen units! All you had to do was pull a goddamn trigger!” 

Something about that snapped me. He really just simplified my job, taking fucking lives, to pulling a trigger? Maybe I was confident because I knew they couldn’t replace me, but I saw no reason not to cut this dick a piece of my mind. I put my hand on the handle of my pistol and felt the slick plastic casing that guarded the energy coil without allowing the user to get zapped with every shot, but caught myself and played it off by hooking my other hand into my holster on the other side to make it look like I was just resting my arms on my hips. Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve shot him… if he didn’t have a point. All it got was a shipment of food, but it was still a preventable loss. 

I shook my head, “Fuck off,” I hissed at him before turning around and heading out the door, “I’ll secure the wall, just stay off my coms.” 

I grit my teeth as I marched out of the worn down apartment building and nearly kicked open the door. I’d never hear the end of that one, but I didn’t give a damn. Humanity was pushed to the brink of extinction and that prick still finds time to yell at me daily. The chain of command only let loudmouths hide from the front lines these days. Ever since the sponsors took over, there was less emphasis on effectivity more on making money. Hell, we had the city sectioned off into priority levels based solely on tax income. It was disgusting. 

I quickly made my way to my friend who had been watching through the window. 

“Hey, Z,” I said as I sat on the curb next to him, “Not much time for chatter.” 

I looked up at him and frowned as I noticed the deep gash across his arm he got in our last scrap with an attacker. I needed to get him patched up, but we didn’t have time for now. Besides, it was just a punctured armor plate. Hydraulics were fine and he still piloted like a beaut. Still, it made me look bad being the only pilot with a damaged mech in the hanger. I glanced back up to the sixth story window where I could see the commander glaring down at me and smirked as I turned back to Z and started up the ladder. Damn good thing I wasn’t scared of heights. 

After the climb that always wore out my arms, I popped open the cockpit in Z’s chest and sat down in the cushy leather seat before adjusting my feet into the locks on the pedals and slipping my hands into the control gloves that immediately buzzed to life with a dull whirr. With base control established, I leaned my head back in the chair and felt the small needle shoot into the base of my skull. Suddenly, I was seeing through the eyes of an eighty-four foot tall mech and could feel the gash in Z’s arm. It just felt like a scrape, but it stung, I wouldn’t lie. 

It was a quick walk to HQ’s exit, but I wasn’t stepping into the usual cityscape of giant buildings glistening with sun and polluted with citizens watching the mechs, no, it was a wasteland. It had been ever since the sponsors ordered us to secure the wall instead of defending the city. It wasn’t stupid, just heartless. Thousands, if not millions, of casualties later with no resistance, we got the wall back and cleared the city. It was more of a junkyard now, honestly, but it boosted the companies as the “savors” of the last city. Made them billionaires. It was always a somber walk to the wall through the broken city, but it got easier the more you took it. 

I got to the wall and, just as reported, there was a gap, a big one too, but no hostiles. Maybe this job would be easier than I thought. I put my arms to my sides, closed my eyes, and felt the needle slip out of the back of my head as I entered manual control once again. Quickly slipping out of the control gear and climbing down the side ladder that stretched down the leg of the mech, which was a much harder climb, I moved up to the wall and pulled the pistol off my belt. With the turn of a dial, I had set the intensity to a much shorter range flame that was essentially a wielder and got to work repairing the wall with a quick patch before engineers could get out here. 

“Grunt work yet again,” I muttered, “At least I’m not alone, ay, Z?” 

Suddenly, I heard a shuffling from the other side of the wall and quickly silenced my gun. I clicked the dial back into the default blaster mode and raised it to the gap in the wall. While I doubted one of them could fit through the only ten foot wide hole, but I didn’t want to stick around long enough to find out. I turned around to head back to Z, but a sudden impact on my back knocked me face first into the grass with a heavy weight on my back that kept me down. 

I could barely crane my neck around to see my attacker and was met with a set of razor sharp teeth tearing into the shoulder of my, thankfully, armored vest. They had some fancy scientific name, but us pilots usually called them Death Hounds because they were pretty much just giant dogs in their structure, but they didn’t have fur or eyes. Imagine a really buff naked mole rat. I barely managed to reach my pistol, but as I dragged it back to me, the dial clicked to places away from the blaster. 

I pressed the barrel into its top gum before pulling the trigger, but I didn’t get a blast of superheated energy like I wanted, no, I got a quick and sudden jolt of electricity that stunned the creature enough for me to push it off with a solid elbow and a roll, but I couldn’t get my other arm up the gun to move the dial before it jumped on me again. I was face up this time and my neck was wide open. I was screwed. I clenched my eyes shut and was practically writing my will in my head when the Death Hound was pulled off me. 

I slowly peeked one eye open to see something that sent despair through my bones like the very marrow they housed. Three inch wide ribbons. I know, but you didn’t know those meant like I did. They wrapped the hound and pulled it back through the gap before more of the snakelike satin came back through and wrapped me like a mummy before pulling me out of the safety of the wall. I was in no man's land. I was hoisted into the air before my torso was freed from the grasp of the attacking force and I looked ahead to see my attacker. 

I was locked up in a sense of shock and couldn’t even work my hands to set my pistol back to the blaster setting. I took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. I was staring death in the face. An ironically pretty face. Ahead of me stood an eighty foot tall outline of a woman wrapped from head to toe in skin tight ribbons that were all colored a different pastel. The only area I could see was her head as the ribbons that would’ve normally been masking her were currently in use either holding both me and the Death Hound up in front of her face or sitting ready to lunge in and rip me to shreds if I tried anything. 

Her eyes went from the most pristine white to a light pink iris that was heavily contrasted by a black pupil in the center and a baby blue iris on the other side, separated by a narrow nose that led down to thin lips on a sharp chin. Bangs of lime green hair covered her forehead and cheeks with a sorta tacky bob cut that emphasized her jawline. Her pale, freckled face seemed to hold some sort of relief behind them and I struggled to understand why, but couldn’t form a single word. This was the enemy, a Centress. 

I recognized her actually. The ribbons were hard to forget. She was the one I spared that then came back around to destroy a shipment of food that the sponsors were riding on to supply, and I quote, “tactical relief.” 

“You’re lucky I found you,” the Centress stated, “Anyone else would’ve let you die.”
Silence passed, but I got enough confidence to ask, “Why didn’t you?”
She scoffed, “Because you’re, like, a mythical creature. A human that actively chose to not kill a Centress? That doesn’t happen. That hasn’t happened. Ever.” 

I felt a twinge of pride in my actions then, but also a guilt for the war lasting this long being mostly due to humanity refusing to bargain a treaty. We wanted everything. 

“So,” I started, “We’re even?”
She dropped her smile before poking me in the stomach and insisting, “No, we’re friends. Anna, pleased to meet you!”
“Valence Hart,” I introduced with hesitation, “Friends?” I asked.
She nodded, “It’ll be like, oh, what’s that human book? Romeo and Juliet!”
“You do know they all die in that, right?”
“Okay, so not exactly like that.”
“And they were lovers.”
“Okay, so not at all like that,” she admitted with an exaggerated frown that showed dimples on her cheeks, “Man, humans aren’t nice!”
“I coulda told ya that…” I griped. 

Anna lowered the Death Hound and casually scooted the creature away with her foot before watching it scurry away. To her, that beast was only the size of a rabbit. She gently put me down on her hand and let the ribbons rewrap her face and contain her hair to a tightly wrapped bun on the back of her head, making her seem much more like a monster than she had been before. I swallowed the lump in my throat as I tried to remember how kind she was being before, but she was just so intimidating like this that I almost couldn’t look past it. 

She seemed to notice my anxiety as her mask dropped to a scarf-like collar that hid her chin just slightly, but left the rest of her face exposed. 

“Relax,” she quipped as she poked my chest with her free hand, “Still me.” 

A silence passed before she noticed the hole in the wall. 

“So,” she started slowly, “Need a hand with that?”