Water Towers & Blooming Flowers

Torrential rain fills teardrop gouges and wide craters pockmarking the field, making silver-penny circles under brilliant white floodlights. Everything is turned to mud. Not just mud, but a thick quagmire making every squelching step some deliberate, exhausting effort to drag one foot out before the other sinks in deep and fast past the ankle. Chunks of broken stone smeared black by soot and carbon jut up into a storm-tossed sky, waving their rusted rebar tendrils in sticky, humid air.

Water made orange with oxide pools in cracks between bulging mortar until it spills over and finds its way down to the mud, streaming along broken timber spar beams that once held up roofs and upper stories. Those roofs are just steep piles of shattered tiles now, making lopsided cairns between ruins.

They should've cleared more of it away but without heavy machinery, all there had been to hand were pickaxes, sledgehammers and strong backs. In the end, it'd been backbreaking work with too few hands to pitch in. The locals understood, more at the beginning and a whole lot less now, what was at stake. They'd tolerated ugly concrete-block walls dropped along communal vegetable patches, perpetual electric daylight under huge, swinging floodlights, rationing and curfews but expecting them to help tear down their own town – some of them to demolish their own homes – pushed hospitality and necessity way past breaking point.

Free flowers and fresh bread had given way to stiff nods and curtains drawn tight.

It was necessary, though. They needed clear lines of fire and nowhere for the enemy to hide on approach or hit them first, unaware. A killing zone for the lives they were responsible for. To protect this place, they'd had to destroy some of it and change the rest. It had been necessary. Hadn't it?

"Staff Sergeant Lockhart?"

She doesn't react for a few moments. Those soon stretch out to make minutes, still looking out over the debris and the mud and the shit from her vantage point high up on that ugly, concrete-block wall ringing the perimeter. The man by her side stands patiently, hands clasped behind his back, listening to the rain.

"Everyone back inside?" Tifa asks, eventually. A warm breeze blows in from somewhere across the razed township below, making the huge lighting rigs bolted to some surviving buildings behind the wall sway. Metal creaks and sighs, more destruction flitters into view wrought by their sore hands and blunt pickaxes, as the bright beams incrementally shift left and right from centre until they settle again.

He nods and dabs the sweat from his face with the soft peak of a camouflage cap. "Counted the platoon back in myself. All present and mostly accounted for. Only a few casualties."

Her brow crinkles in a frown, but he continues. "De Vries lost his boots in the mud, then Kagasaki lost hers pulling him out."

Tifa turns at last and finally looks at her deputy. "Anything from the Company?"

They walk together down a set of precast steps until gravel crunches underfoot, passing a vegetable patch turned brown and strangled by the shadow of those ugly walls. Concrete gives way to stonework, timber and lopsided dwellings with overhanging, swollen upper stories like mushrooms that close in from all sides. The pair keep walking, under the lee of a tavern painted in white brick and black oak. Overflowing gutters dump sheets of rainwater as they pass.

Meredith shakes his head. "External wireless is fritzed again. Think the transmitter has finally gone back to the Lifestream. Got a team up on the gantries trying to rig one of the auxiliaries from the Field HQ but if we can't salvage the crypto module, won't matter. Can't risk Wutai listening in."

The buildings on either side squeeze in tight, roof-to-roof until the storming sky almost disappears above. Warm light bathes the narrow, gravelled street between, made by lamps flickering beside each of the wooden doors they pass. Silhouettes move behind curtains drawn in tight, with the occasional glimpse of half a hidden face staring back where they pass. After a while, they emerge into a wide square of smooth-cut stone paving and back into the rain.

There had been a vast fountain in its centre once, picked out in tasteful tilework and crowned by a tall figurine three times her height – a woman in white marble, some manifestation of the Planet standing on a high pedestal of gilded, copper leaves and brass petals. Pale arms outstretched, one curled down to point at the spirits beneath their feet; ancestors, loved ones … Everyone, eventually. All those who had gone to the Lifestream. The other arm raised towards all the stars that watched over that same everyone and everything that called the Planet home.

At least, there had been. Tifa's platoon spent a month dismantling the whole fountain, not long after their arrival to make way for the modular reactor that now squats on steel legs over the broken hole in the paved ground. It drinks all the water that once served the fountain, used as coolant to keep the mako engine turning and the floodlights, motion detectors, surveillance drones and sentry guns on. Satisfying a thirst for power no town this small could ever hope to meet, let alone in wartime. Thick cables gather all around the metalwork and sway in that stubborn, warm breeze. Studded Pipes erupt from the reactor's hidden guts, burrowing through neighbouring walls courtesy of ugly holes Tifa helped punch.

She looks over at the figurine standing crooked between stacks of cracked stone blocks and mounds of broken tiles, gathered at the edge of the square where everything was dragged and unceremoniously dumped. The marble manifestation of the Planet is wrapped in a dirty canvas shawl, serene face hooded like the condemned up against a wall, fabric pulled in tight enough to outline the stump of its left arm. It was broken off at the elbow by one of Tifa's troopers trying to move the figurine's entire weight by a slender marble hand. Probably De Vries judging by the so-called handiwork. 

Tifa isn't sure why she hadn't noticed during the botched disassembly, or afterwards, but the missing arm is the one pointing down to the Lifestream. Something in the pit of her gut squeezes tight first at that thought and then at the symbolism that follows up right behind. A hand closes against the pendant hidden beneath her olive undershirt. Rain and sweat in the sticky heat stain its fabric black.

That makes her jerk. Something is turning the rain black. Tifa holds a palm upward and collects a few streaky droplets. It swirls and smears her skin in dark streaks.

"Everything okay, Staff Sergeant?"

She drops her hand back down and tries to take a steadying breath, looking back at the modular reactor, but all Tifa gets instead is the stink of ozone courtesy of its arcane machinery grumbling and burbling overhead. "Standing orders stay the same unless we get an update. Keep awake and keep alert …"

"… I hate the way they smell," She adds with a nod towards the machine. In response, it belches thick clouds of green smog from clusters of fat brass pipes snaking around the superstructure. The air resonates with a shrill whistle as the reactor sings some discordant song. "It's like a stink that makes everything it touches greasy."

Meredith looks up at the bulging steelwork and slowly nods. "Can't disagree, Staff Sergeant. Hurts my head just to stand close by sometimes and listen to whatever it's doing. Am sure the folks here will be glad when this whole thing is done, and we can take it down."

"We'll all be glad when this is done," Tifa murmurs, blinking back her focus and wiping the black water from her hands. "I'll take the Northern Wall tonight. You stay here on the West. Keep an eye on the approaches and let me know if the wireless starts cooperating."

He nods. "Understood, Staff Sergeant." Meredith flicks a forefinger against the peak of his soft cap and sets off towards the edge of the square. She watches him disappear between clustered buildings, but her eyes soon find the marble figurine again and, for a while, all she can do is watch the rain stain its suffocating hood black. 

They'll all be glad when this is done.

The crumpled boom of thunder bounces against the reactor's pressure vessel, making it ring out with a tinny clang that chimes between each rolling bang from the sky above. Lightning splits the clouds in staccato flashes that steal all the detail of the town from her eyes for a moment each time. Tifa blinks back the rest of the world into view and turns north, in time to see a fork of electric white stab down and strike the nosecone of the towering vehicle that gives this place its name. Lightning lashes the rocket again twice in as many heartbeats, but it weathers the attention as well as it has weathered the surrounding war. That hot, humid breeze picks up and makes the vast support cradle rising up one side sway. Skeletal gantries and their underslung bundles of cables and ducting twist, giving the whipped wind a bass groan to carry along with the rain.

Green and red running lamps that climb towards the black clouds, marking the elevator shafts and access stairwells, flicker in sympathy with the thunder. Blurry silhouettes in those strobing lights dash along tilting walkways, abandoning their effort to restore wireless communications and making for the relative safety of the cradle then hopefully, the ground.

Struck a fourth time just above an interstage joint halfway up its titanic height and still none the worse for wear, this relic of a space age long gone by just sits and waits for something, like the rest of Rocket Town and everyone in it.

~*~*~*~

Tifa is on the northern wall for less than five minutes before troopers start dying. Those five minutes begin with correcting a functional oversight by the squads stationed there, and end in a hail of high-velocity rounds which punch through flak jackets and spall concrete in spinning chunks.

Keen to give themselves early warning of a sneak ambush through the half-cleared homes beyond, they've angled up the dozen jury-rigged floodlights spread across the parapet. Instead, all they've managed to do is make their beams too diffuse to pick out anything except more darkness, leaving the broken stonework and scorched timbers down below hidden in a thick gloom.

Tifa had jerked the nearest floodlight down in a protest of squealing joints, shouting for the rest of the squad to do the same when she'd caught sight of glinting metal against the burnt earth.

And between broken walls.

And through shattered window frames.

Instinctively, she throws herself down hard as gunfire erupts, scraping bloody elbows against concrete and scrambling into some semblance of cover behind a steel truss. She jerks instinctively from side-to-side as the unmistakable high-pitch ping of ricocheting rounds assault her ears, glancing off the metalwork behind. The light it supports overhead explodes in a dry crack of discharging current and shattered glass. Tifa shields her eyes with one hand and draws a pistol from the holster strapped to her thigh with the other.

Somewhere off to her left a figure in royal blue fatigues stumbles back on heavy legs, black chest plate rent with a half-dozen neat holes. Whoever they are, face hidden behind a closed helmet and triple-lens visor, is too far away for Tifa to read the surname stitched on their blood-spattered shoulder. Another round punches another hole clean through and they slump, teeter and topple backwards off the wall and out of sight.

Doesn't matter though. She knows it's one of hers. Something like a prayer passes her lips. Lifestream preserve their memory and protect the ones still here.

Wild sprays and precise snapshots blow out most of the remaining floodlights along the rampart, plunging everything into a dark punctuated by purple and white muzzle flashes. The soundtrack is a hot mix of violent bangs, staccato booms and screaming voices with the stink of cordite hanging in humid air. She moves on when the mass gunfire moves off, keeping low with the parapet between her and the enemy Tifa hasn't even seen yet. Along the way, she heaves the odd trooper who can still stand on their feet, stepping over the ones that can't and sending them back to reinforce the line behind.

Somewhere ahead the gut-rumbling thump of the wall's heavy weapon emplacements finally starts up, pouring heavy calibre fire down and into the darkness firing back. With the element of surprise now spent and the big guns beginning to answer, the enemy assault slackens. Tifa risks a glance through a rifle port but can't see anything more than smoke, muzzle flashes or the pitch black. She keeps moving, back arched, at times on three limbs with her fourth snapping off potshots in the vague direction of those bursts of light.

Tifa swaps the roiling noise of battle outside for the chaos of dozens of competing voices and pressed bodies inside the bunker, as she stumbles through a hatch. Slab-sided and shaped like a flat molar, sandwiched between two heavy weapon batteries spitting fury, it sits on top of an armoured gate commanding the entire northern wall. 

Amidst the desperate shouting, gesticulating and bleeding, it isn't doing much commanding.

Troopers are clustered together around isographs of brilliant green grids, each one frantically marking known enemy force concentrations with a fluorescent pen that quickly builds up to become a collective, meaningless scrawl. Others are struggling to transcribe confused reports with one headphone pressed to their ear, wordlessly mouthing the gibberish screeching between deafening bursts of static squeals and desperate shouts. A few are breathlessly shouting orders into microphone beads, struggling and failing to be heard amidst the din.

Some are bleeding. All of them are drowning in the overwhelming surge of haphazard, conflicting information flooding through speaker grilles and message runners. Process has taken over purpose, and they've fallen under the spell of doing something to feel in control instead of taking it.

Tifa pushes, then elbows through the press and into the swinging light above the isographs. One of the men hunched over the central table looks up and jerks to stand. "Staff Sargeant!"

"Where's the Captain?" She asks.

"Dead."

"What about the Lieutenant?"

The trooper gestures with a thumb over towards a figure slumped on an upturned ammunition crate, glassy eyes tracking clouds of dust shimmering in the console glow, shaken free from the reinforced ceiling courtesy of the small arms fire raking its walls from the outside. His head is bound tight by bandages smeared red and seeping pink.

"Who's ranking-in-charge?"

The trooper frowns, glances around, then looks back in her direction. His face relaxes slightly. "Think you are, Staff Sergeant."

Tifa just nods and slams her gauntleted fist down on the table hard enough to crack the plastic edge. It works, making everyone else flinch, stop their busywork in isolation, look up and over.

"Sitrep."

A corporal, blue fatigues smeared slate-grey by pulverised concrete, rifles through scrunched reams of paper. "Multiple contacts in northern and southern sectors. Enemy force size unknown, significant engagement."

She nods. "Wireless?"

"Internal is sporadic," The Corporal replies. The name on her shoulder patch is unreadable, but Tifa knows this is Kanyon. Knows her squad – and her platoon. Because it's Tifa's. Everyone in this room and all their squads are part of her platoon and her regiment on this wall. Her wall.

Kanyon flinches as something with a bit more kick strikes the outside of the bunker wall and makes the lamp above their head stutter, but she continues. "Nothing external. Still zip from the Company—"

Everything plunges into darkness with the thump of high-voltage discharge, leaving nothing but the dying glow of monitors draining the last of their internal capacitors. Voices ratchet up, buoyed on swelling panic. Emergency lamps set into the walls flicker to life, casting a ruddy red glow for limbs to flail against.

Tifa cuts through them. "Internal wireless!"

Without any desperate shouts, thrumming air conditioning or incessant buzz of equipment racks the soundtrack of the attack outside plays on alone.

Kanyon flicks a switch on the set, waits for the internal battery to cooperate and crashes a palm against the case for good measure after running out of patience. She slips the broken headset over one ear. The wall's big guns outside continue to reassure with relentless fire and rolling booms.

"Main power is out across the whole wall …" She starts to relay, pausing every few seconds to concentrate as the bang of high-velocity rounds being driven into the enemy below drowns out a tinny voice on the other end of the link. "Sounds like …"

Her eyes widen and she looks up at Tifa. "Generator house is on fire. Whole thing blew up and wiped out two squads protecting it. Secondary explosion pulverised three more who came to check out the bang and rescue survivors."

"Five squads in thirty seconds …" Kanyon highlights.

Tifa slams a fresh magazine into the butt of her weapon and cycles the action. "Ready yourselves."

Hands reach for rifles and pistols and make similar checks. Eyes look towards her with equal mixtures of fear and confusion.

"Auxiliaries should have spun up by now," Tifa clarifies, gesturing with her spare hand towards the lamp above the isograph table still dark, still swinging, and the rest of the dead consoles. She looks back at Kanyon. "Any reports of breaches? Confirmed sighting of enemy forces inside the walls?"

It takes at least three attempts to be heard and another three to understand the reply, but the Corporal shakes her head. "Negative, Staff Sergeant. All contact outside the town so far."

Sabotage, then. Tifa doesn't give voice to that suspicion – let them concentrate on the enemy they can see with their own eyes and the things in their control, but it makes sense. Outside of the so-called Company Cities like Midgar and Junon, Shinra's welcome varied from forced to absolutely outstayed. Rocket Town was someplace in-between. Had been someplace in-between, until now. Besides all that, the insider threat might be much closer to home. Tifa glances at the troopers all around. Too close, maybe …

She forces herself back on to the things they can control. Survival in war breeds experience, and Tifa's was beginning to gather in the pit of her gut, twist, and tell her something big was happening. This wasn't the first time enemy forces had hit Rocket Town, but potshots against the western defences, the ones just a short trip across the inlet to Wutai proper, was one thing …

"Staff Sergeant?"

To hit here, against the northern sector, they would've had to march south straight across miles of open prairies from the coast or scale the Lonely Mountains to the northeast. Even in its current state of disarray, the Company would have seen them coming before anyone had stepped off a boat in the case of the former, and no-one would have ever seen them again if they'd tried the latter, except whatever called those Gaia-forsaken mountains home.

So, this was no opportunistic thing. It was planned, resourced and – given the darkness inside the bunker and the fire raging in its generators nearby – premeditated. But for what? This glorified village was more important after Shinra's so-called strategic withdrawal from the island of Wutai, but it was hardly a lynchpin. It didn't even have its own permanent reactor. Just a glorified Mako engine, a battery for all the tools of war they'd brought. So why here? Why now?

"Staff Sergeant?"

Tifa looks up, reverie broken by the pleading tone and repetition. Rifle barrels glint under emergency red in hands squeezed tight, nervous eyes hidden behind anti-glare visors.

"What should we do now?"

She frowns and holds a hand up, attention just as quickly diverting elsewhere. Something has changed. The soundtrack to the bunker, made deaf and dumb by clever subterfuge and overt sabotage, is different, softer …

The heavy gun emplacements have stopped firing, and suddenly she grasps the where, what and why. "With me!" She barks, pistol raised, already turning and makes for the hatch.

Kanyon is at her shoulder as they clear the shadow of the bunker, desperate for just a little understanding to fight the rising panic. "What is it?"

"Ammo feeds," Tifa says as what's left of the command squad collectively ducks the high-pitched whistle of a round that passes by where their heads had been a moment before. "The supply up from the magazine inside the wall is dual-redundant, but if the generator and the backup is gone …"

Withering fire from down below brings Tifa, Kanyon and everyone else to a sudden, sprawling halt. They fling themselves into whatever cover is to hand. Concrete explodes in spinning shards and choking clouds of aerosolised dust. A trooper she can't catch the name patch or flailing hand of stumbles upright with a wound punched through the meat of his shoulder, takes four more impacts and falls backwards. He's dead before he lands.

Gaia welcome home another son and bless him …

They're about fifteen metres from one of the silenced heavy weapon turrets, its twin-barrels caked with carbon, still angled down in their last firing position before the shells ran dry and the associated fury gave out. No longer required to keep their heads down for fear of having them blown off and vapourised, the enemy are congregating, concentrating. Rounds rattle against armoured casings, sparking swirling, yellow-straked flurries that dance in their muzzle flashes.

Every one of them will be dead unless they can—

The stink hits Tifa with enough force to make her retch. She splutters and falls onto her knees, pistol clattering against the floor forgotten, struggling for something her lungs can use to keep her conscious. The sound of her pulse thunders between her ears and the periphery of her vision closes in. Before everything goes black, some shift of the hot breeze brings a little fresh air and enough awareness to wheeze. And hack.

Down below, the enemy's attack suddenly slackens. Her swimming vision picks out faceless shapes parting, creating a clearing in the rubble of the kill zone. Someone or something steps into the space, tall and lithe, long-limbed and alone. Then, she recognises that cloying stink permeating everything. It's ozone. Just like Mako, but stronger. Like Materia …

Tifa shouts a warning that dies on her lips; just a hoarse whisper robbed of urgency, hopelessly drowned out by weapons fire, shouting and screaming. Soon all of them are shouting and screaming, as the wall, the turret – everything – disappears in a spinning vortex of rolling, raging power. Stonework and bodies are flung into the air and the parapet tumbles away. Coruscating tendrils of energy lash out and punch holes through metres-thick concrete, exploding the defensive line from the inside-out.

Kanyon is lifted away thrashing, hauled up into the maelstrom where she crashes against one of the barrels torn free from the heavy weapons turret and spins away, limp and broken. Tifa's boots scramble for purchase on crumbling brick as her world drops away below. Shards of glass, metal, plastic and silicate cut her exposed skin as she falls.

It feels like Tifa falls forever right up until she hits the ground, and then she doesn't feel anything. Everything finally, blessedly, goes black.

~*~*~*~

Colour returns to her world without any sound, and a whole lot of pain to make up for the disconnect. She rolls ineffectually against the sharp stone underneath her bruised, battered body, but each wheezing jerk shifts pressure someplace else and pain somewhere new. A high-pitched squeal follows her head as it lolls left and right and filters out everything beyond the bassy rumble of stone hitting stone. Everything rings.

There are shadows and blurs jumping across the face of the new moon in the sky above where Tifa is lying. Her vision swims and that crescent stretches out in a yawning smile that starts to twist. Some of those blurs leap over the split lip of the crater she's sprawled across the bottom of and disappear. Some are thrown back the way they came, punched off their feet in a flicker of yellow and white flashes. One of them is robbed of their inertia in mid-leap and riddled with thumping impacts, crashing back against the rim and down to join Tifa with a wet crack and splintered thud.

This new, proximate blur resolves into a bloodied, slack face framed by white-tipped feathers and streaked red warpaint. Glassy eyes meet hers with no recognition, no flinch, limbs bent at unnatural angles. Not even the snarl of hatred or the jerk of an arm reaching for a lost weapon to strike with. Nothing.

But she recognises him. Recognises all the trappings and markings of a warrior from Wutai, come down here to join her at the bottom of this pit filled with shattered slabs of concrete and broken bones. Tifa gives the body a stiff kick, teeth grit together with the pain of the effort, but it doesn't move except to let its slack head roll over and stare up at the sky instead. Just above their collective heads its allies continue to leap and scramble over, desperate to do more killing or as a byproduct find somewhere to lie down and stargaze until they rot away.

Spittle flecks from her lips as Tifa sits up, grunting and braying with the world-spinning effort of just moving and sucking in air through brutalised ribs at the same time. Something hot and slick drips under her punctured flak jacket, running in a red torrent wherever her side shifts with a breath or the follow-up splutter. She roughly paws at thick, pink ropes of dust-caked saliva hanging from her chin and spits the blood from her mouth.

Absent-mindedly, Tifa touches the pendant still under her damp shirt.

Bruised and sore, it takes her what feels like hours to slowly pick a spiral path up the pockmarked, inside face of the crater. A little scrambling, mixed with sheer climbs using twisted rebar or jutting structural beams as grip holds gets her three-quarters of the way back to the churned surface. Tifa's gauntleted fingers are dragging against some loose stones on top, sending them spilling back over the lip and forcing her to squeeze her eyes shut, when a hand clamps onto that extended wrist from above and roughly pulls her up in a single jerking heave.

Tifa is fighting for her life before the soles of her boots even scrape against blasted earth. She drives the flat of her armoured foot down against his braced thigh, forcing him to drop her or topple forwards but he doesn't let go. Instead, she's dragged forwards by the wrist but leaps into the movement, adding her momentum to his to crash her free forearm and the armour plate strapped to it just underneath the chin. He reels, releases her hand and fumbles for the rifle swung around his back on a sling.

Tifa kicks the muzzle up just as the barrel swings level with her chest and he squeezes the trigger. At this range, even with the relentless ringing in her ears, she is almost bodied by the concussive boom of the rounds alone as they shriek up and away towards the watching moon. Closing the distance, she grabs hold of the sling and ducks the clumsy fist swung back for her head. In a single fluid cartwheel that leaves red fluid splashing from her side in her wake, Tifa is behind him with the sling looped again tight under his chin.

Punching arm pinned in tight against his collarbone, he desperately gropes and slaps at her with his free hand but the fight is already won, and all that's left to decide is how long the inevitable get drawn out for. She just sinks backwards, becoming dead weight that tightens the reinforced fabric strap like a noose. He turns purple, lips fat and spitting, eyes bulging. Almost too late Tifa realises he's pawing for a pistol strapped in a holster on his left thigh, but the hypoxia is already too well-established to let him remember to unhook the retaining fastener first. So he just pulls and pulls, rattling the weapon in place with fading strength.

Lifestream bring us all the peace we don't deserve up here …

She brings her knees up into the small of his back and pulls even harder. Tifa keeps pulling even after he sinks onto his knees and collapses into the rubble. She keeps pulling long after he's dead.

Eventually, cramp and the pulsing wound in her side combine to release her grip, but there's no time to catch the breath coming in raking gasps. The fight is going on all around; at range with weapons spitting death in raking muzzle flashes and up-close, with fists and fingers and blades glinting in the firing light. Silhouettes crash into the mud, dead before they splash face-first in the dust and shit. Figures dance together locked in brutal melee combat, trying to hold in their own gouged organs and strike out at their assailants'. Dozens of individual contests – and lives – are decided as part of a chain of victories or defeats that decide the whole battle.

There's no time to wait for the ringing in her ears to stop. There's no time to stifle the shaking that makes her hands jerk as the adrenaline of fight-or-flight, playing the part of rocket fuel in her veins, burns out minutes after the former concluded with a strap pulled tight around a purple neck.

She needs to get up. She needs to find the next part of the chain that will decide whether they win this or lose. This is still her wall.

Tifa scrambles to her feet, rummaging for one of the medicinal potions in her webbing as she stumbles forward, picking a path between upturned fragments and the exploded blocks of shattered defences. She downs the tiny shot of brilliant green liquid in one gulp and throws the ampule away, letting the magic of the potion dull her pain and steel her focus.

Jagged outcrops of prefabricated concrete disappear in a thick cloud of grey, detonated by raking small arms fire. Tifa disappears into the expanding gloom and uses it as cover, checking the four Materia slots on her bangle by feel. Two are empty, the crystallised Mako that should have been in them lost during the wall's collapse or the fight earlier. Or both. Not that it matters since the toll of her injuries, fatigue and everything else have combined to deplete whatever Mana she had left. The bottom of her webbing is sharp with shards of glass and sticky with drying ethers and other tonics, broken by that same fall and fight.

All Tifa has left are her fists and a pistol with ten rounds in the magazine. She pulls the weapon free from its holster, angles it up and creeps low through the dust and particles sent spinning by suppressive fire, blind shots and ricocheting rounds. The sounds of people fighting to save their own lives and take others' echoes all around. Boots scuff against stonework, fists meet guts and faces, weapons whipcrack at point-blank range – all hidden behind a grey pall.

A shot rings out somewhere close by, followed by the thump of something heavy and limp hitting the ground. Her aim tracks left, index finger snaking inside the trigger guard, but she keeps moving forward.

Homesteads emerge from a literal fog of war, huddled together like their owners inside, cowering under beds and tables. The warm glow of reading lights diffusing through painted window frames is gone, hurriedly snuffed out. Thick drapes and curtains stir through glass panes shattered by spinning debris or wayward shots, blackened by detonations and ripped by fragments.

Tifa can't see past the end of the narrow street, but the sounds of fighting are everywhere. She wastes a few seconds on wishing – that the orb of wind magic missing from her gauntlet was still there to stir this thick soup of dust away; wishing she knew which part of Rocket Town this was so she could orientate herself, and stumble through it just a bit less ignorantly.

Wutai's forces have plenty of targets to choose from and the advantage of surprise. They've clearly come for something specific, but what? Tifa moves through the cobbled street, crunches fragments of terracotta from an exploded plant pot underfoot and pans her pistol and her aim from left to right.

Shinra's standing orders as far as this town went were typically concise and, in that wonderfully corporate way, very much ambiguous. Maybe the Company had given their battalion or regiment hierarchy more detail, more intelligence or just something like operational priorities but with the Captain dead and the Lieutenant senseless, or just as dead, any extra context or compartmentalised information was lost. That left Tifa to come up with a better long-term plan than just trying to stay alive.

Someone lurches out of the dust pall towards her. She swings her aim around but before she can squeeze the trigger and put them down, the figure collapses onto its knees and falls forward, limply patting at an ugly, shiny patch of crimson.

Tifa doesn't need to catch the name on the shoulder patch, and crosses the distance in a few seconds, holstering her pistol. She heaves the large man onto his side, makes quick work of unbuckling a twisted chin strap and levers his helmet free, tossing it away to clatter against cobbled stones. "Kogo!"

He wheezes something incoherent. There's nothing except broken glass and sticky medicinal residue in her webbing so she looks through his instead, but everything inside is a coagulated mess of stiffening fabric and drying blood. It's useless.

"Staff …" Kogo manages, pink spittle flecking his lips. He squeezes his eyes shut and jerks bodily. She uses a nearby shard of broken terracotta to cut a wide strip of fabric from her tunic sleeve, doubling over and pressing it against the sopping wound in his side.

Kogo shivers and tries again. "Staff Sergeant …"

Tifa shakes her head, voice a low whisper. "It can wait. Use that energy to keep breathing."

He weakly paws at her shoulder, glassy eyes blinking. "Chopper …"

The rag is already soaked through, dripping onto the street underneath. She tears free another strip, but the high-pitched ping of a round glancing off metalwork nearby rings out and Tifa is caught between trying and failing to staunch the flow with one hand, all the while keeping arcs of fire covered with her outstretched, drifting pistol muzzle in the other.

Wasting the precious little he has left, Kogo finds enough strength from somewhere to take a tight grip of her shoulder and shake it – along with her aim and attention. Tifa's eyes dart between the dying man and the surrounding, sickly gloom.

"What?" She hisses, pistol jerking around at the sound of something skittering across stone out of sight.

"Chopper …" Kogo gasps again, making half an attempt to sit up and failing just at lifting his head from the ground. "Heard it from a runner … Chopper inbound."

Something thumps in the dust. Her pistol follows her best-guess, and she doesn't look down. "One of ours? Where?"

The pink spittle dripping down his chin has turned cherry red. "They used to be. Standby helipad …"

That makes Tifa glance down, frowning. Kogo starts to laugh at her expression, but it just devolves into broken coughing, rasping and pained groans between every spasm.

He only manages one more word, eased out softly with the last effort of a punctured set of lungs. "…Turks …"

Kogo coughs, takes a single rib-rattling gasp of dirty air and goes limp. He doesn't move again. Gaia preserve him.

Tifa brushes his eyes shut and climbs to her feet, just in time to take a round out of the gloom and through the meat of her left shoulder. She crashes backwards to join her friend in the dust.

~*~*~*~

Rocket Town is a burning clockface, with a towering nosecone that peeks through the drifting smoke at its centre. Whirling rotors whip choking clouds away and a sleek black shape drops, silhouetted by explosions through the fat, sudden gap. It jinks sharply, dodging yellow ribbons of tracer fire arcing up from the ground and making fast passes over the unfolding chaos below.

Alarms wail in the cockpit and warning lamps flash urgent orange and panicked red, competing to highlight a machine pushed beyond its limits. Over-temperatures and under-pressures. Low altitude and low fuel. Excessive descent rate and torque values. Empty hydraulic lines and ammunition hoppers.

A glancing round smacks against the canopy window and breaks an ugly mosaic of cracks already spread across its reinforced plastic. The high-pitched whistle of wind forces a way through those jagged edges, adding to a discordant melody of bleating and trilling. The underlying bass is the grind of metal-on-metal and the roar of struggling engines.

The gunship, guns spent, gives the rocket that lent this place its name and surrounding support facilities a wide berth, moving west and meeting nothing more organised than potshots from the frantic fight below. It swings around, circles a small clearing of stone and starts to sink.

Twenty metres from touchdown one of the engines coughs, sprays a rainbow of shimmering oil into the rain, belches blue smoke and disintegrates with a clattering bang and the screech of shearing turbine blades. They rip free in whirling shards of superalloys and bury themselves into the surrounding brickwork, buildings and bodies that were already dead.

The gunship, strength spent, crashes down to the pad below and breaks its back with a boom of exploding tyres, as hopelessly outmatched landing gear turns inside out. The fuselage distorts with rippling force and the tail boom bends, sags and shears off – sent catapulting away by the telescopic force of the still-spinning tail rotor. With nothing to stabilise it the helicopter rolls over until the main blades strike sparking gouges into the concrete and shatter in lethal, shrieking, fragments.

The wreckage settles, that lone working engine comes apart in a drawn-out rattle of hot metal-on-metal and the last dregs of fuel leaking from split tanks flashes to bright, raging fire.

Rude kicks free the twisted remains of the starboard hatch and stumbles clear of the burning, turning, smoking, mess. He falls to one knee, a gloved hand pressed to the shredded ground, the other clutching a singed, thread-worn suit jacket. The double-beat crack of a dozen rifles all cycling their actions and chambering rounds makes his head snap up, narrowed eyes hidden behind cracked shades.

When he stands, a dozen muzzles all rise to track him at the same time. Rude slips the jacket over his broad shoulders, tugging the hem of each sleeve down into place. Just ahead, a crescent of troopers reflexively slip fingers inside trigger guards and take up the slack …

She comes through them like some limping hurricane – one arm hanging slack at her side, the other up straight and staying on a target line that starts at the muzzle of her barking pistol and ends straight through his chest. Rude is already moving, whirling, twisting and jerking. Rounds whistle past, disappearing into the raging inferno behind him or gouging a serpentine line of pockmarks in the chewed-up concrete at his gliding feet.

Rude is good, but he's still just a man and no man can dodge a rainstorm of high-velocity, armour-piercing brass. He is good though – great even – and the barrier, sustained by his equipped defensive Materia and raised before those dozen rifles had even sighted him escape the burning gunship, paints the air in multicoloured panes.

Eventually, the limping hurricane runs out of fire and the boom of discharging rounds gets replaced by the dull clack of an empty, cycling action. Still, she's not short on fury and keeps coming in a halted, jerking walk, pistol forgotten and dropped. Blood runs thick and wet from a sopping wound in her shoulder.

Rude frowns. "Listen—"

Tifa stops almost nose-to-nose. She doesn't listen but he thinks she might, which gives her the break in that polished combat awareness needed to crash her gauntleted fist against the side of Rude's head and send him tumbling over. He lands in a stinking pool of hydraulic fluid and engine oil and rolls onto his back, coughing to clear his lungs. When he sits up, a single teal eye narrows through a shattered lens.

He presses a gloved palm against his cheek and cracks his neck with a sudden twist. "Good hit, those were my last pair. I assume you're in charge?"

"Shoot him!" Tifa barks, starting to turn away. A dozen wavering rifle barrels suddenly snap up in unison, waiting only until she clears their arc of fire.

Rude fixes the open collar of his stinking shirt straight, apparently unperturbed by how poorly things are going for him so far. "Orders from the President."

She whirls back around, cradling the ruin of her shoulder. "Rufus is dead!" She spits from teeth that grind together with equal parts pain and frustration. "He's dead, and the Turks are disbanded. Finished. Gone!"

He smirks. "Says who? Reeve? He's not running the show, and we don't answer to Urban Planning."

Tifa makes a fist with her one good hand. "Who's We? Reno's dead, Elena's missing. Guess Tseng was buried with his master so they can follow each other around the Lifestream. You're all that's left. Who offered you the better package? Heidegger? Scarlett? Who's dishing out your dirty work now?"

"The Board haven't selected a new President yet," Rude replies, bristling at the mention of the others and making fists of his own. He looks up at the storm-tossed sky, takes a few moments to let Reno's name settle back into that twisted pit in his gut and forces himself to relax and regain that shield of practiced indifference. "Until there's a majority vote on a replacement the orders of Rufus stand, alive or dead. That's why I'm here."

He smears a film of oil carried down by the rain between gloved fingers. "There's something you need to know."

The constant background chitter of small arms fire disappears in a sudden, rolling boom that shifts the wreckage of the gunship where it burns on the pad and makes everyone take a jerking step. Heads crane around to watch a thick black column of smoke, lit inside by flickering currents of orange, billow up over rows of silhouetted and thatched roofs. Any streetlamps still standing and the lights shining through windows of nearby townhouses, stained sooty black by burning jet fuel, gutter and die.

A wireless set cradled in the hands of a trooper – a corporal – kneeling behind Tifa screeches to life, urgent voices washed-out in warbling, popping static. He grabs the headset and presses it against one ear. "Authenticate Foxtrot-Foxtrot-Seven! Repeat last transmission!"

Another tower of flame and smoke drifts up from somewhere west of their position, with a rumble that reverberates against falling stone walls.

Rude steps closer. "Sounds like you need to know it right now."

The trooper glances up and locks eyes with Tifa. "Multiple major engagements reported," He manages between whatever update mixed with gibberish is barking through the speaker held against his head. "Modular reactor's offline. Rocket launch facility is under heavy fire …"

He frowns, trying to pick something out from the overwhelming noise of battle. His eyes widen. "Wutai reinforcements have broken through the perimeter! They're advancing on the Rocket pad, urgent support required—"

A deafening mess of static makes the trooper rip the headset away. Grimacing, he checks the spectrum analyser built into the wireless set itself, adjusting frequencies and gain responses but nothing quells the meaningless, electronic roar.

"They're jamming us, Staff Sergeant. Won't get anything more."

She's already moving – limping away. The pain in Tifa's shoulder turns to numbness that creeps through straining muscle and bruised bone and makes her fingers feel cold. Her heart gets tired and the blood still seeping leaks faster.

 "Everyone with me, get ready to move out for the launch facility now," Tifa orders and gestures at two troopers nearby. She jerks a thumb back towards Rude. "You two, stay here and keep watch on the Turk. If he takes so much as a nap, shoot him."

Rude tries to take another step forward, but two rifle muzzles aimed square at his chest at point blank range leave his scuffed leather loafer hanging in the air. "Listen to me, that's not their real target."

Everything – the troopers, the explosions, the burning metal carcass of the gunship, Rocket Town itself – takes an abrupt shift off level and starts to spin. Tifa splays her legs, struggling to keep her balance when she realises it isn't the rest of the world struggling to stay standing.

It's her.

Fingers fumble for that pennant again and press down on it tight. One of the troopers stops and offers out a hand. "Staff Sergeant?"

She shakes her head, forcing herself to stand straight. That icy cold spreading through her veins makes anything like a deep breath impossible, and she starts to pant just to keep that turning world in colour. "Give me your sidearm …"

The trooper's mouth opens to say something, but the words die before they escape his lips, killed with a simple, strained follow up. "Now!"

Tifa takes the proffered weapon in hand, ratchets the slide, thumbs the safety off and points it the Turk's way. She slowly, painfully slowly, hobbles closer.

"I won't get involved in any of this," She hisses, aim never wavering even as her balance does. "Not your stupid power plays, not your boardroom dirty dealing. I don't care who's President or who wants to be – I'm here because of what Wutai did to my hometown. I'm here to stop them doing it anywhere else."

She jerks her head back towards the assembled troops. "Just like all of them are. So, whatever your orders are, you can climb back in that burning helicopter and fly it back to the corpse that gave them out. For all the good it did him or anyone else."

"Better yet," Tifa offers, finger snaking inside the trigger guard. "I can shoot you now and send you back to the Lifestream, all expenses paid."

Chewing at the corner of his lip, Rude lets the silence mixed with gunfire and explosions linger for a spell. The wireless set nearby spits and squeals and screeches. "You're the 7th Nibelheim Regiment, right? Or what's left of it?"

Tifa takes up the trigger pressure but doesn't say anything. Blessed are those whose memories dwell within the Planet. Saved are those who are born from it and return to it …

"That was tough," He nods. "What happened in Nibelheim. I saw—"

A round explodes against the remains of his conjured barrier before he can even flinch, shattering the ward in a kaleidoscope of torn colour that leaves him unprotected. Depleted. Vulnerable. The next one will hit flesh and bone and go right through.

Smoke coils from the pistol's cooling muzzle. It hisses in the rain, still held up in Tifa's steady aim at Rude's head. She forces the words that come through bared teeth, "You just saw what was left and who was left alive. You didn't see what happened. You couldn't step over those bodies fast enough to get up the mountain and secure the reactor. We fought and died for that thing. It was supposed to give us a future, and it just ended up making us a target, making us part of this war."

Her finger doesn't lift from the trigger. "Now we're fighting and dying here in a war you started and, somehow, we're all losing."

"Wutai made you a part of this, but sounds like you've got an easy way out," Rude gasps, bent over, still struggling to find his equilibrium after it was blasted apart along with his barrier. "Just stop, let Wutai take Rocket Town. Switch sides if you like, get some of that sweet revenge I've heard tastes so good from so many people …"

He dabs at a trickle of red running from his ear, rubs it between his gloved fingers and looks up straight into the weapon barrel pointed at him. "Why are any of you even fighting for the Company?"

Some of the surrounding troopers scoff. A few give gruff laughs; Tifa just shakes her head. "We're fighting for everyone who died defending Nibelheim. We're fighting the people who gave the orders and pulled the triggers that killed them. Shinra started the war, but Wutai brought it to our doorstep. For us to finish."

Rude nods, "… And now they've brought it here. They'll take it everywhere else given a chance. Nibelheim yesterday, Rocket Town today, North Corel tomorrow. Maybe Gongaga. Maybe even Midgar, eventually."

"The enemy of my enemy and all that," He adds with a shrug.

Tifa jabs the muzzle of her pistol forward. "Shinra is not our friend!" Once we've dealt with Wutai, once this war is over, there's going to be a reckoning. Going to be a price to pay for all the things they've done. All the things you've done."

Another rattling boom shakes the cracked concrete beneath their feet, and a new pillar of black smoke and whipping flame rises high into the grey sky.

"If you want to be on the winning side giving you that chance," Rude shouts, fighting to drag the troopers and Tifa's collective attention away from a timely reminder, "You need to listen to me. The attack on the launch facility is a feint. Wutai is after something much more useful!"

She lowers the pistol a fraction of an inch but doesn't say anything. Rude risks the silence as permission to continue. "Standing presidential orders direct the Public Security Forces to store Huge Materia at specified locations as wartime contingency. Places where it can be quickly used to deliver strategic effects."

He glances up at one of the twisting pillars of smoke in the distance. "Effects Like launching it on the Number 26 Rocket and then bringing it down on Wutai's head."

"The Rocket isn't the target," Rude says. "The Huge Materia is. Specifically, a company warehouse on the east side of town."

Another detonation rattles the landing pad, sending wreckage tumbling on cordite winds. Tifa's finger stays inside the trigger and she shakes her head, now aiming down at the Turk's scuffed shoes. "It's not on the protected list. There's nothing sensitive listed on the inventory."

"Not that you have clearance to see," He shrugs. "But it's there. Hiding in plain sight, though not for much longer by the sounds of it. If you want to get a head start on stopping this war so you can get to whatever you think is going to happen after, now's the time."

The pistol drops another few inches, and Rude risks a step forward. "Whatever you think of me, of the Company, of all this, you can't let Huge Materia fall into enemy hands. The 7th is here to defend Rocket Town, right?"

He gestures all around. "So do your jobs."

Tifa swallows the blood she can taste in her mouth and hefts the pistol up, feeling its weight and balance. For a few seconds she seriously considers just shooting the Turk dead and taking their chances at the launch facility. Strategic weapons and secret orders be damned and buried six feet under along with everyone else they've lost in all this killing.

That numbness has crept down her legs, making each step heavy. The surrounding troopers watch her closely as she moves, weapons still aimed at Rude, fingers squeezing around stocks and grips reflexively. Waiting.

"Seventh Heaven," Tifa manages after a few of the deepest, shallow breaths she can manage. "Fix yourselves and move out. We're going east."

With practiced discipline, they make quick work of stowing gear, checking weapons and forming up. "Staff Sergeant?" One of the troopers calls, rifle still pointed squarely at the Turk.

"He comes with us," She replies. "Depending on how it goes, he can die with us too."

Rude doesn't say anything. He just tugs each glove down towards the wrist, flexes his fingers and waits for the squad to move out. Ahead, Tifa takes another heavy step forward but stops.

She checks the magazine, pushes it back into the butt of the pistol and ratchets the action. "How did you know we're the Nibelheim 7th?"

"The Turks kept a close eye on certain units," Rude begins. "Units with questionable loyalties or flagged for potentially suspicious activities."

Tifa looks over her shoulder but doesn't need to say anything to prompt him to continue. "Your regiment's been involved in a lot of mishaps, reversals and tangential defeats for the Company. Losing our last beach head on Wutai, the smuggling rings and insurgent attacks between Nibel and Corel, some of the highest desertion rates in the Security Forces …"

"… Surprise attacks with communication blackouts, resupply missions somehow intercepted," Rude lists each one with an extending finger. "Assassinations well behind our own lines, classified data breaches. A lot of things seem to go wrong when the 7th is close by."

He shrugs. "Nothing concrete, but it keeps happening despite bringing in dozens of recruits from Midgar and selecting several senior officers outside Nibelheim for key positions, so enough to warrant investigating."

"And? What's the verdict?"

Rude cracks his neck and falls into step alongside Tifa. "Still investigating. Could take a good long while."

~*~*~*~

The 7th loses six more by the time they reach the outskirts of the warehouse, which sits right in the middle of a square of neat, terraced houses and towers over their terracotta-tiled roofs, red picket fences and neat grassy verges. Not all six are dead – some have shattered femurs, or concussions that mean all they can do is blink up at the rain dumbly, but it doesn't matter. They can't continue, so they're left behind alongside the ones with burst hearts and shattered skulls.

Tifa knows all their names, but not much about any of them. All six were recruited from Midgar, and even though they passed the Regiment's trials on and over Mount Nibel and earned their place just like her, or anyone else born in its shadow, there had always been a clear divide between the troopers born and raised in Nibelheim and everyone else.

We are all brothers and sisters in the Lifestream.

Everyone else who, it had turned out according to Rude, were at least partly there to keep an eye and a measure of control.

One useless arm and shattered shoulder strapped against her stomach with a repurposed rifle's shoulder strap, Tifa gestures for what's left of the group to hold position as they move into the burnt-out shell of a house. The thick grey face of the warehouse looms high above across a street doubled up as dead ground and no man's land.

A thin, smeared band of cream dotted with stylised petals still clings to the base of the inside walls, all that's left of the original décor gutted by fire. There's no furniture, no glass ln twisted window frames, nothing left above waist height except the open sky overhead and toppled piles of bricks that make for a decent defensive position.

Rude comes up level with Tifa in a crouch, smearing soot across his shoulder. "This is as close as we should get to the warehouse. It's heavily defended."

"By our side?" She says, unable to avoid phrasing it as both a statement and a question. Nothing was certain when it came to the Company's special operations or the people – like the Turks – who made them happen or stopped people who tried to stop them from happening. "I'd prefer to do my shooting from behind those much thicker walls and their much bigger guns. Feel free to stay out here."

An explosion, muffled by the surrounding buildings, rumbles nearby. He risks a glance over the shattered wall not towards the warehouse itself, but out across the likely approaches and the rubble-strewn maze probably filling with Wutai's forces out of sight.

"Automated defences," Rude clarifies as he ducks back in. "I've got the crypto but unless you've got working wireless yet …" He looks back at the trooper hugging the radio set, who just shakes their head, "We can't authenticate. No way to tell friend from foe, so we'll all be foes."

Tifa checks the rounds left in her magazine and shrugs. "Didn't know they'd already met you." She sets the pistol on the blackened floorboards, gestures to the three compass points facing away from the warehouse with her palm and divides up the remaining troopers to cover associated firing angles. 

Her voice drops to a whisper. "Nobody shoots until I do. We let them get past us before we open up …" She bangs her one good fist against the wall and checks it for give, but it holds. "Grenades first. Then make every round count because once it's gone, we're punching, kicking, scratching and clawing. Then biting."

Rude and the other troopers nod. Tifa picks the pistol back up and hunkers down. She can't feel anything below her other elbow; its hand strapped into her gut tight is the same colour as the tattered remains of the wallpaper at her feet.

Still, those little flowers make her think of home. Memories of a blooming mountain of living colour and timeless stone. She thinks of a water tower, in a cool breeze, under starry summer nights.

Wutai comes in a palette of much more muted colour that creeps over and through the surrounding ruins. Bronze helmets, blood-spattered bandages and silver blades flash above and between broken brickwork, struggling to stay out of sight as they jostle and shift and skulk. The occasional lens on top of a long barrel or binocular set glitters in light from nearby raging fires, checking the way ahead.

Nestled out of sight, Rude flicks open the cover over the detonator of the grenade in his palm, feeling its weight. All around, the other troopers do the same. Hunched shapes move around the shattered walls behind their backs. Dozens more sweep through the smouldering remains of demolished homesteads, closing on the warehouse and its harsh grey slabs.

Boots scrape against debris; tired lungs take wheezing breaths. The rain falls harder, filling craters and pockmarks in the brick and spills over to run down the inside face of the walls and stain the paper flowers dark red. Tifa presses down on the detonator switch, wastes a precious few seconds of four and hurls the first grenade overhand and behind.

Small arms impacts and the echoing thunder of distant detonations easily mask where it lands, but the detonation might as well be the only thing that's ever happened in the entire world. An all-encompassing boom jerks everyone and everything – first by concussive, bludgeoning blast wave and then by deafening, bursting pressure. Ten of the attackers die outright; packed in and blown-up shoulder-to-shoulder. Someone, either in surprise or agonised reaction, squeezes a trigger and their directionless hail of gunfire punches bloody holes in another two and shatters the leg of a third.

Before the stink of cordite can even spread on the whipping wind, thirteen are dead or wishing they were.

Tifa and the rest of her troopers are already up to exploit pandemonium. The pistol in her one good hand barks, punching through a stylised helmet crowned with red feathers and the solider wearing it. He takes a single awkward step forward and topples, limp. To either side her troopers open up with automatic fire, mowing down the handful too concussed to drop to their bellies and live a few moments longer.

With well-drilled fluidity they kick their legs out and drop abruptly, out of sight and the incoherent potshots, back behind the shattered wall just as Reno's grenade sails over.

This time, with the element of surprise gone, the fire and fury make for less impact and Wutai's forces better weather the spinning shrapnel and supersonic blast. Surviving officers and seniors shout and shake sense into their stunned soldiers, and the enemy's fire suddenly is suddenly coherent and focused.

Tifa flinches as a round clears the broken lip of the wall just above her head and ricochets too close to her face for comfort. She glances at Reno, a bright red cut scored deep across his cheek, who just nods. With a grunt of effort, she rolls onto her feet and brings her pistol up.

The narrow gap ahead that might once have been an alleyway between houses disappears in a blinding flash. Wutai's soldiers, the ruined timber frames – everything – is consumed in blooming petals of brilliant orange and yellow explosions. A millisecond later and Tifa is lifted up from her scrambling feet by the pressure differential of so much something being suddenly compressed and vapourised into nothing.

She whirls, stopped from crashing into the wall opposite by Reno's grip on the bicep of her useless arm. Whatever musculature is still attached to that ruined shoulder tears. She screams but in the roar of detonation, it's just her lips split wide and silent.

Slumped in the corner, Tifa can finally see the cause of all this through wet eyes. Beams of coruscating energy lance down from automated sentries on the roof of the warehouse high above. Their glowing barrels cut burning swathes through what's left of the surrounding homes and streets.

Through the shattered perimeter wall of their impromptu picket post, she watches another white-hot spear of light punch through thick smoke and brickwork. It starts to track backwards, a shimmering, incandescent scalpel that cuts anything in its path apart; neatly bisecting thatched roofs, stone arches and flailing bodies. Four enemy soldiers are caught by it trying to cross a melting courtyard as Wutai's forces try to flank an approach to the warehouse ahead; armour, leather, flesh and bone instantly boiled to a stinking steam.

Tifa watches a flurry of singed feathers float free from vapourised helms and headdresses, before thermal updrafts generated by the blistering temperatures send them spinning up and out of sight.

Still, the beam keeps tracking backwards. Towards them.

It takes precious seconds just to stop hacking and wheezing at the effort of sitting forward. Numbness floods every sinew. Her vision swims, and all the grit and dust and shock make it hard to pick out anyone – or anything except the blazing light getting bigger and more brilliant in her blinking, streaming eyes. There are voices nearby, shouting to be heard over the din of boiling stone, but she can't understand them. All she can do is paw at the dirt with heavy legs, and feel her skin start to blister under the searing heat of a pencil-thin sun inching its way closer. Someone or something hauls her away just as everything goes blinding white.

~*~*~*~

Tifa's eyes jerk open at the sound of someone screaming, but all there is to see is storm-tossed sky and whisps of coiled, black smoke. Flat on her back, the best she can manage is to let her head drop to the side. Reno sits nearby, head slumped, breathing ragged. Her numb hand is still in his limp grip and his filthy dress shirt is slick bright red. There are bodies and parts of bodies scattered all around, crushed under collapsed arches or draped with broken backs over ruined walls. 

Two halves of a wireless set spark, entombed deep in mud flashed to glass, next to the two halves of the corporal still wearing its connected headset and the source of that screaming. Her legs jerk again, scattering chunks of masonry, but she doesn't move. She just hurts. After a few minutes kicking debris, Tifa manages to rock enough to let momentum send her crashing over onto her one working arm.

The sickly-sweet stink of cooked meat makes it hard to take a breath without retching, but she sucks in as much humid air as her sore lungs can hold. Those heavy legs get drawn in, knee to chest, one at a time and she crawls forward on a single bloody forearm, slithering inch by inch through glass and carbon and agony.

By the time Tifa makes it close enough to fumble an x-potion out from the corporal's webbing with a numb hand, he's stopped screaming and by the time she offers it up to his slack, pink-flecked lips he's dead. She paws at his pale face for a few moments, wheezing with every rattled breath, but the bisected man stays just as quiet and just as dead. 

Gaia welcomes you home.

With the chaos of a war as a soundtrack, Tifa swallows down the potion instead and rests for a while in the remains of her trooper's lap. Somewhere behind, Rude moans softly but doesn't manage anything more helpful.

Something like feeling starts to flow out from the pit of her gut, pushing back the icy numbness that makes it impossible to do anything but crawl along the broken ground like a snake with a broken back. Eventually, she makes it up onto one knee and pulls free the pistol still strapped to what's left of the corporal's thigh. Tifa uses a blasted chunk of waist-high wall to help her up to standing, sways and checks the magazine. Another boom shakes everything and pulverised brick dust whips and scratches across her face, forcing her to stumble back blind.

When she opens them, she's standing in what must have been a street between two gutted houses. Tifa spins, trying to place Rude or anyone else who'd made it out of their impromptu stronghold alive, but the whole world is grey and wet and on fire and her body feels so heavy. She takes one heaving step after another, lurching and staggering. Somewhere up ahead the flat face of the warehouse looms, pockmarked with small arms fire and streaked by rocket impacts but still standing.

It rolls into her swimming vision from behind the shattered façade of what had been Rocket Town's library, just about an hour before. Each of its six steel-rimmed wheels are as tall as Tifa, hauled across broken ground by two hulking fiends of slabbed muscle, curling horns and billowing steam. The beasts wear crudely hammered plate armour, strapped to their flanks and skulls and slathered with black paint that spills onto matted fur. Rounds strike and ricochet all around them, and they strain and rage and roar.

One of the creatures turns its bulbous head and regards Tifa with hungry eyes and a slavering, dripping maw of splintered teeth. She raises the pistol in her one good trembling hand but before she can squeeze the trigger a lashing whip cracks across the fiend's back from behind and forces it to continue to plod on.

The carriage it helps tow is a towering thing of shining metal and bright red wood. Tifa's swaying aim and focus struggles to take in the spectacle as she stumbles after it. The discrete details – statuettes of whirling dragons trailing tails of fire, braziers of burning coal that waft pungent incense – all of that complexity and subtlety is lost to her bruised brain. All except one.

Tifa stares up at the enormous cast-bronze bell atop the carriage and frame. Wutai's soldiers crowd around the base, clutching onto guide ropes and cross-beams for dear life as every shell crater or mound of brick its huge wheels trundle over threatens to send the whole contraption tumbling.

Something whip-cracks past her ear and she jerks what's left of her attention away from whatever-this-is and towards the feather-clad figure lining up for a second shot. Tifa doesn't take nearly as long to squeeze the trigger and reply and the solider doesn't live to regret it – head snapping back as they fold to the ground. She's moving forward again, what's left of the potion in her veins giving her hobble just a little more impetus.

By the time Tifa catches up with the carriage, it's turned to face the warehouse front. Instinct, liberated from the boring work of just keeping her alive with a little medicinal help, guides her gun hand true and she puts rounds in three more of Wutai's sons or daughters. The weapons which almost cut them all in two finally take notice of the ornate carriage trundling ever closer, conspicuous in all its finery, polish and bright red paint and open up. Brilliant beams lance out from the warehouse, striking ground just in front of the contraption, turning mud and stone to glass and steam.

She's already scrambling for cover when the lances of energy make contact with the armoured beasts braying and pounding the broken cobles with their steel-plated hooves. Everything washes out in white and disappears and Tifa squeezes her aching eyes shut, cradling her head with her pistol. The tumbled remains of the dividing wall at her back shift, creak and threaten to bury her before something finally works out for the better, or just breaks at the right time, and it simply falls backwards.

None of this makes a sound, or if it does, nothing rises above the static-laced, rasping roar that accompanies all this blinding nothingness. After a second, or ten, or thirty, what had felt like the sun come to pay them all a personal visit retreats and what's left of what was left of the world comes back into colour.

Tifa crouches on the lip of a shallow crater fifty feet wide, churned earth flashed to a black and crystallised glass. At its centre, the carriage and its enormous bell stand untouched and just as brilliantly decorated. The stink of ozone and cordite mix with the heady incense and drift in pink clouds out from those burning braziers. It makes a choking perfume that squeezes out the oxygen, sending her onto her knees to retch and gasp.

An inappropriate calm settles over. Withering, massed rifle fire and cavalcades of corkscrewing rocket-propelled grenades peter out. A breeze stirs dust and debris around the crater and dilutes the sweet-smelling poison in the air. Tifa wheezes, heaves herself up and stumbles towards the centre of the crater. She passes scattered bodies, flung by the titanic clash of an irresistible force meeting an apparently unmovable object. Every step is stilted now. That familiar numbness spreads, taking back the sensation in her legs, replacing it with nothing.

The sounds of battle start up again. After barely ten metres she stops, hunched over, grunts with the effort and manages to lift her head up. The crowd on the carriage is gone – either fighting in the surrounding ruins or lying around her here, dead. There's one figure left, kneeling on an iron platform that juts out from the rear of the carriage. Tifa can't make out any details beyond their finely stitched cloak of flowing gold and ruby, but at last she's close enough to see that the enormous bell that hangs above her head isn't just made of brass.

It's cast from Materia.

Nearby explosions cast flickering light that makes the bell shimmer, iridescent in a way no mere metal could ever be. The three bands of looping brass that hold it together are inscribed with words of power written in a language she doesn't know, but Tifa knows a written incantation when she sees it.

She takes another faltering step forward, and the figure on the dais ahead stirs. They stand smoothly and reach out a hand to touch one of the two pillars holding the bell up, each one carved to make an elaborate, stretching dragon etched in gleaming silver and polished gold. With a free hand they tug their hood back, tracing some specific pattern in the dragon's jade crystal scales.

Tifa can feel static building in the air, making her teeth ache. The beasts in front of the carriage stir and whine, rhythmically stamping and shattering the glass-flashed floor of the crater. Revealed, a woman – features briefly clear in the light of surrounding explosions and framed by short, black hair and a white headband – reaches into the folds of her robe and pulls free a knife. She cuts the flesh of her palm with the serrated edge and makes a fist. Tifa is close enough to see. For just a moment, that the skin is riddled with the scars of a dozen lines.

The robed woman takes a deep breath and throws a bloody fist forward, splaying her fingers out and crashing the fresh wound against the jagged crystal of the sculpted dragon's belly.

The rain stops and Tifa tastes iron in her mouth. Above her head, the thick blanket of cloud begins to shift and, too quickly, spin. A twisting vortex forms, spitting lightning that dances and arcs across the skyline. Unable to look away from the whirling sight, Tifa doesn't see the woman on the carriage cut through those taut ropes that hold the vast bell from swinging on its pivot but when the last line severs, she hears it. lives it.

Hear the Song of the Lifestream and rejoice!

Tilted at an angle by the uneven floor of the crater, the bell shifts to find its equilibrium with just enough force to make its clapper inside softly strike. Tifa feels it inside her skull before she ever hears the gentle toll; a pressure explodes against her senses, making the whole world narrow and grey as her optic nerves compress. Something warm and wet trickles down her cheeks and chin and she paws at her face, wiping at the blood that streams from her eyes and nose.

She just stands for a minute, bow-legged, swaying, until the pressure eases up and the blood stops flowing. As the sound of the world filters back into her overwhelmed mind, Tifa hears screaming over the sound of detonating munitions. Finally, she looks back at the robed woman, raises her shaking pistol, and fires.

The effects of cumulative concussions and who knows what else pulls the shot wide and high and the round strikes the bell instead. The psychosomatic ring rattles her bones from the marrow out, an undulating wave of pain that somehow drives the numbness out of her failing body. Her target doesn't fare much better, hands clasped tight against their ears, lips spread in a silent scream, a red trail splashing over bared teeth.

Tifa is already moving forward and makes the most of the agony-driven feeling returned to her legs. The other woman recovers just as quickly, though, and has already turned to size up the interruption. Closer now, Tifa can see the flowing robes hide a slight figure, almost swallowed up by all that gold and ruby thread that billows up and out and fills her vision just as she reaches the carriage. 

When the fabric storm settles and drops a moment later, the target stands only in fitted silver armour, each plate hand-painted with script and scenes of some distant home, decorated by white roses. Her face is suddenly hidden behind a polished Sōmen mask, fixed in some rictus metal grin split too wide for any person to match. In both hands the woman holds a burnished brass rod thicker than her forearms, and topped by a chunk of hewn, shimmering Materia that rests on the carriage floor.

Tifa doesn't even try to scramble onto the platform and surrenders the high ground. Instead, she just brings her pistol to bear and squeezes the trigger. At this range she can't miss, and it only takes one point-blank shot to shatter a conjured barrier. Round after round gouges deep pockmarks in the armour and obliterates a painting of a Moogle, astride a pagoda, over the left pauldron.

With an incredibly deceptive strength to size ratio, the bastardised hammer heaves up and swings at Tifa's head. She lurches forward to come inside that murderous arc, and its fizzing head of Materia flashes by and crashes into one of the carved dragons holding the bell up. Wood splinters, ceramic cracks and metal shears.

"Fuck!" The armoured woman spits, just as the stanchion buckles and the cross-brace that supports the entire mass of the bell creaks and sags under strain. She looks down at Tifa and kicks out with a steel-tipped boot, sending her sprawling backwards to hit the rubble hard while she tries to free the head of the hammer still buried deep in the buckled wood.

Tifa's spine meets broken brickwork, and her pistol tumbles out of a limp grip. All she can do is bray like the restless beasts at the head of the carriage with every rattle of her seized lungs, struggling to get useful air into her aching chest. She rolls onto her side and coughs, stippling the cobblestones frothy pink.

Let those who have returned home give you strength to find your way.

With a grunt of effort that morphs into a scream of raw frustration, the hammer tears free in a cloud of shards and its wielder looks up to the rippling sky, shoulders heaving with effort. The woman steadies herself, braces a foot forward and looks down at Tifa with a grin that's visible from just her bright eyes. "Better cover your ears!"

With the x-potion in her blood all but spent, Tifa has just enough instinct to jerk her head left and paw at the body of a Wutai soldier lying face down nearby, part-fused into black glass. Numb fingers close around the melted chin strap of a dented helmet and haul it closer. A hammerhead hewn from Materia, trailing pastel ribbons of energy, strikes home just as Tifa forces her head into the upturned helmet and squeezes her eyes shut.

The bell tolls, and reality itself gets concussed. A rolling wave of punishing pressure radiates out, twisting the rain and the air and the smoke drifting across the ruins together into black, shining rings. Rubble and loose tiles rattle, spin and launch skyward, catapulted out of sight without so much as a breeze. Fragments of blasted concrete the size of boulders and half buried in the mud are pulled free, launched in irresistible ballistic arcs that see them disappear to crash through the few roofs still intact nearby.

What's left of walls and balustrades still standing between the carriage and the slabbed front of the warehouse just crumple, imploding in fat clouds of aerosolised dust. A killing ground clears itself in moments. Cobblestones and burning flowerbeds explode up, making a furrow five feet deep that races towards the warehouse's barred gates.

The impact is a hammerhead all its own – making reinforced steel plates balloon out and cave in, wrenching free from sheared hinges. Armoured panels cartwheel into the front face of the building and carve webs of deep cracks. Reinforced concrete spalls, splits and falls to leave behind a rebar skeleton. Shinra troopers stagger through the jagged holes, spilling from the exposed upper floors with hands pressed against their ears, screaming.

Metal grinds against metal, and one of the warped double set doors now exposed by the shattered gate creeps open. Desperate boots thump against that metal and force it wider until it jams into the stone steps on broken runners. More troopers squeeze through the narrow gap, stumbling, retching. Blood streams from eyes, ears and mouths. Most don't make it more than a few lurching steps before they jerk and collapse into the fresh furrow that doubles as an impromptu mass grave. A few get further and their red-flecked lips work silently until their bodies acknowledge their liquified brains and they finally, blessedly die.

An almost gentle shower of small-arms fire, from the roof and through ragged holes in the shattered wall, patters harmlessly against the protective wards of the carriage.

Tifa sees the world in muted shades of grey, from the shell scrape where her broken body crashes after the bell sends her tumbling through a monochrome sky. The clouds are still riven by white streaks of lightning, over a torn landscape of fractured stalagmites made from mud flashed to black glass. There's no pain, no numbness. Just nothing.

There's no strength, but the crushed rock at her back collapses into powdered shards, letting her head fall back enough to look up and out of this defensive ditch-turned-promising final resting place. The helmet that saved her skull from being burst is gone, wrenched free while she tumbled to wherever this is, but it couldn't save Tifa's hearing.

And so there's no pain, no numbness. No sound. Eardrums exploded in the liquifying, concussive toll of a Bell-shaped bomb made from Materia. Worse, it's a bomb that can go off again and again, and it silently rolls into view just a little way above. The woman riding its brightly painted carriage appears, not quite as animated, resting her weight on the upturned shaft of the hammer. The plates of her armour have lost their lustre and decoration; dented by the rolling boom struck by her own hand and scoured clear or altogether torn off and sent spinning into the smoke and mud and screaming.

The Sōmen mask she wears is split, part of the leering, stylised face of a grinning dragon missing like a broken tooth in a perfect, polished row. Tifa can just about make out blood streaming from the gap. Planting a boot firmly against one of the cross-braces, the woman starts to heave the hammer up from the wooden floor. She sways with the effort, struggling until the bell slowly disappears from Tifa's sunken view on its massive wooden wheels.

The Planet will call you home when it is time.

Tifa shifts and feels her pendant dance across the sweat-slick skin of her torn chest.

There's no pain, no numbness, no sound … But there's something else now. Tears make the smeared skin of her cheeks tingle as they track along and fall to the sharp, black glass below.

It isn't time to go home.

There's still no strength in her broken body, but there's something else masquerading as it, pretending to be something like the will to move. To get up. So she does.

It takes so long for her to scramble up the slope and out of the shell scrape. Every shaking, halting step is that much harder when she can't feel her own weight or her own feet. Trembling fingers sink into the mud-turned-ceramic and where it shatters, her palm gets cut deep and raw. Every metre climbed is that much slower when she can't feel her own touch or both her hands.

Tifa can't feel both hands, because one of her arms ends at the bicep. Ribbons of shredded muscle and flaps of wet skin slap against the black glass as she goes, but there's no pain.

No numbness. No sound. She slumps over the lip of the shell scrape and looks up.

The ruined front of the warehouse is just ahead. Spectral flickers of sickly green make its ruined face light up from inside, and they leak out of holes punched in its split face to blanket the battlefield. Whatever still urges Tifa on has little spare capacity for complexity, and she struggles to understand the strange, cerulean light show spilling through the building's broken façade. On her last hand and knees, she crawls stiffly through the debris and over the corpses, until she dimly remembers why they've all died – or in her case are about to die – for this nondescript concrete box.

The Huge Materia inside. Unsettled, insulted, energised and desperate to get out.

The Miracles of the Planet are both Boons and Weapons.

Ahead, in absolute silence, the woman on the carriage lifts the hammer and its hewn head high with an arched back. Tifa finds her mouth moving, trying to shout some kind of warning about the insanity of doing this again, of unleashing the stored Materia within, but all she does is trail blood down her chin and retch. Whatever is pretending to be her strength is waning, and the monochrome world starts to dim to black. She sinks back onto her haunches and her last five fingertips rake sluggishly through the dirt and shit, mindlessly kicking up plumes of dust.

Those last five fingers brush against metal and close around a rubberised grip, half-buried in smouldering ash. Pink teeth grit with effort, Tifa lifts the pistol up in a shaking grip. Everything that's not the contrasted sky melts together into uniform, indeterminate blackness and she doesn't so much aim as guess. What's left of her used-up instincts get redirected from making precious heartbeats to making sure.

Tifa squeezes the trigger and puts a round straight through the woman on the carriage ahead, right where a missing armour plate should protect her back and just as she reaches the apex of her swing. For a few moments, everything is fixed in place. The long, burnished shaft of the hammer stays perfectly aloft, and the chunk of Materia fashioned into its head is frozen stark against the white sky in Tifa's rapidly failing vision.

It stays still like an impressionist painting in charcoal on white canvas, permanent, until the armoured woman twitches. She breathes in shallow, rasping gasps but she's still breathing. She shakes and strains at the massive weight held over head but she's still holding.

Tifa fires again. And again, and again until the trigger answers with a dull click and the action stays locked open, empty. The first from three hits protective plate and ricochets off, the second punches into meat and the last just misses from a tired grip and a failing aim.

That second hits the stranger a few inches up from the first and right between the back of the ribs, splintering bone.

Tifa doesn't see the detail of what happens next. She sees a black silhouette stagger back in silence in front of a dark arch, framed against the brilliant white sky. She picks out a mass held up in the air that starts to waver, as the silhouette holding it trembles and quivers.

Something heavy in Tifa's hand slips free, forgotten.

The contrast breaks down as she comes to the missing heartbeats spent on making her aim true and the end of her life. The blurry shape of a person, on what was once a carriage painted cherry red, finally succumbs to their wounds and falls. Falls forward, falls with momentum and brings the head of a hammer Tifa can't see anymore down against the lip of a bell swallowed up in onrushing, all-encompassing blackness that eats the whole sky.

Tifa doesn't feel what happens next, either. She just gets lifted up like everything else in existence and carried away. There's no pain, no numbness.

It's time to come home.

Just nothing.

To Be Continued …