// Third Person POV

Against the crashing ocean waves at the edge of the Gehenna Basin, sat the Pantheon FOB, built to last and to intimidate in equal measure, with outer walls of black volcanic stone rising forty meters above the demon sub-continent’s broken terrain.

Guard towers ran at intervals precise enough to eliminate every blind angle, leaving nothing to chance.

Inside those walls, the base ran on a schedule that did not acknowledge disruption, a self-contained military organism of training rotations, logistics processing, intelligence cycles, multiple departments, and the quiet, constant churn of an organization that had been functioning without interruption for three thousand years.

And one such department was the PRD, Personnel Recovery Department, which occupied the eastern wing of the base.

It was a stretch of wide white corridors and sealed rooms that smelled of medicinal jellies, potions, mana stabilizers, and a kind of sterile chill that never leaves.

Even the lighting was kept even, and the temperature low, and the staff moved with the contained efficiency of people who had learned that in a building full of recovering combatants, unnecessary noise was a form of negligence.

At 1400 hours, the corridor outside room 14 was operating normally.

At 1401, it was not.

The change moved ahead of Lady Strelitzia the way pressure moves ahead of a celestial body, arriving before she did and announcing her as thunder announces lightning.

The PRD orderly coming out of room 12 with a tray of instruments saw her first, and the contents of the tray nearly went to the floor as he pressed himself against the wall and bowed so fast he almost put his forehead through it.

A nurse rounding the far corner stopped walking mid-stride, blinked twice, and stood completely motionless with a chart pressed to her chest.

A senior healer emerging from the supply room at the corridor’s far end looked up, went very still, and then very carefully stepped backward into the room he had just come from and pulled the door shut behind him.

All the while, Lady Strelitzia walked at a pace that was not exactly fast, but covered ground the way a tide covers ground, continuous and unconcerned with what it was passing over.

She wore a simple white shirt tucked into black ankle-length trousers and black boots, while her black hair hung loose over her shoulders, bleeding into red at the tips.

She carried nothing. She looked at no one. Her red slit eyes stared straight ahead, having long stopped finding it necessary to track who was looking at her and how.

Yet the pressure her very existence exuded engulfed the entire corridor as though it had sunk a kilometer underwater.

Walking beside her, keeping up with a brisk stride that was doing the work of two steps for every one of hers, was Dr. Mira Solenne of the Personnel Recovery Department, who had been notified of this visit just forty seconds ago and had grabbed Luke’s file from the nearest shelf, knowing full well that forty seconds was all the preparation she was going to get.

She was a compact woman with brown hair pulled back tightly, and she had a habit in high-pressure situations of hugging her patient files to her chest, which she was currently doing with considerable conviction as she looked up and to the left on a consistent basis because Lady Strelitzia’s shoulder was roughly level with the top of her head.

"Captain Luke’s physical recovery is complete," Dr. Solenne said, keeping her voice professional despite the fact that her pulse would’ve raised more than just an eyebrow if she saw it on a report. "The contusions, rib fractures, and thermal injuries resolved within the first day, well within projected recovery parameters for a Tier 6 Spell-blade. There is no structural damage, no residual neurological impairment, and no mana circuit scarring. Physically, he is fully operational."

Lady Strelitzia said nothing.

And Dr. Solenne took that as an indication to continue.

"There is no cause for concern on that front, Director. Your disciple has made a full physical recovery."

She had used the phrase ’physically’ very deliberately, because it was accurate and it served the record accurately, but the word disciple settled differently in the air of that corridor than the word captain did, and she felt it land.

"And psychologically?" Lady Strelitzia asked, without inflection or slowing, while Dr. Solenne’s grip on the file tightened slightly.

"He is currently presenting with acute post-operational psychological destabilization compounded by severe status-identity fracture."

The doctor took in a long breath through her nose before continuing-

"The primary stressors are, in order of clinical severity... first, the loss of the Divine Armament. That remains the central fixation point across every evaluation session. The issue is not merely tactical asset loss. He has psychologically internalized that event as a personal failure tied directly to identity erosion. The captain idolizes our founder, and Boomstick, being his favorite weapon was no secret."

"Second, the containment failure. Chimera B-41 and Chimera X-97 escaped simultaneously. From his perspective, the mission concluded in complete operational collapse, and he lacks any adaptive psychological framework for processing failure at that scale... or any failure."

"Third..." She hesitated briefly, because the third wasn’t just tactical.

"The manner of defeat."

Her grip tightened around the file hard enough to crumple it at the edge.

"Captain Luke didn’t die in conventional combat... An ’honorable death,’ he called it. He was overpowered, spared, and subsequently stripped of a high-value asset that he held with reverence. That sequence has produced pronounced humiliation fixation, recurrent intrusive thought patterns, and retaliatory ideation."

She continued, because she had, for all intents and purposes, jumped full sprint into a downward slope and stopping now would be worse than finishing.

"Additionally, Captain Luke demonstrates a documented pattern of procedural noncompliance when his personal perceived operational efficiency conflicts with protocol adherence."

"The containment island operation was initiated without consulting Captain Aurelian’s full briefing, without... approved extraction contingencies, without synchronized operational planning with the broader team, and without the Divine Armament formally being logged prior to engagement."

Turning to Lady Strelitzia, she looked up and found her staring straight ahead as she walked, as though she wasn’t even listening, and the doctor didn’t know if she would rather have the Director look at her and pay her utmost attention to what she was saying.

"These behaviors are not isolated, Director. Similar procedural deviations are documented across three prior operations. Historically, exceptional performance outcomes prevented those behaviors from being meaningfully corrected, but..."

Her voice became quieter.

"This operation was the first instance in which those same behavioral patterns resulted in catastrophic mission failure."

Two nurses at the far end had stopped walking and were doing a poor job of pretending to consult a chart on the wall.

Dr. Solenne kept going because she had reached the part she had rehearsed thrice in the forty seconds available to her, and she was going to deliver it accurately.

"Captain Luke is not fit for combat deployment."

Lady Strelitzia, for the first time since the whole conversation began, turned to the Doctor beside her.

And the very next second, the corridor went very quiet.

As those unfeeling red slit eyes gazed into hers, the hair on the back of Dr. Solenne’s neck stood on end, and every ounce of survival instinct screamed at her to run.

And yet, through shaking knees and sweat coating her back, the Doctor held eye contact when those red slit eyes, and repeated-

"I-in his current psychological condition, I cannot medically recommend that he be placed in command of a Special Forces unit or assigned to sensitive field operations requiring stable judgment... Director."

Lady Strelitzia stopped walking, and the world seemed to have stopped walking with her.

The corridor was very, very quiet now.

-Thud.

And somewhere farther down the corridor, something hit the floor, yet nobody turned to look.

Dr. Solenne stood her ground with more effort than anything she had done in her entire life, and kept her eyes level and her chin up, even though she was gripping hard enough that the edges had bent inward.

Lady Strelitzia looked at her for a moment.

Not with that usual passing indifference she looks at the world with.

But with attention.

"What was your name?" she said.

"Mira Solenne," Dr. Solenne said, and was proud of how even it came out.

"Mira Solenne," Lady Strelitzia said quietly with a small nod.

And Dr. Solenne immediately declared her career over in her heart.

Though there was the faintest curve at the edge of the Director’s lips, so brief and so small that the doctor did not see it, and it was gone before anyone could.

Lady Strelitzia reached out and took the file from Dr. Solenne’s hands in a single smooth motion, the way you take something from someone who is already in the process of giving it but has not quite finished deciding to let go.

Then, without another word, she began walking again toward the door at the end of the corridor with Luke’s file held at her side, and did not look back.

She opened the file as she walked and turned the pages to Operational Violations.

Unlogged deployment of restricted weaponry...

Failure to notify the Cardinal Vigils before engagement...

Irresponsible independent mission execution without backup...

Repeated procedural disregard justified by successful outcomes...

Her eyes moved across the reports without slowing.

And slowly...

Very slowly...

The corner of her mouth twitched upward.

Not because any of it amused her.

But because the pattern was painfully familiar.

There had once been another man who treated operational doctrine as a collection of mildly insulting suggestions.

A man who routinely entered battlefields with incomplete plans, improvised the rest mid-combat, and somehow returned victorious often enough that entire departments had been forced to redesign protocol manuals around his existence.

A man who once detonated an entire mountain range to kill a single target and later defended himself by arguing that collateral damage was, technically, a matter of perspective.

But her expression flattened again.

Luke possessed fragments of the same instinct, yes.

Fragments of that same audacity.

The same tendency to weaponize chaos faster than most people could blink.

But those fragments without the same wisdom are liabilities.

Now, because of that, containment of their two flagship Chimeras has failed, and they are on the loose, with one of them becoming someone’s Familiar.

Pantheon had lost its only Divine Armament permanently.

And Luke had finally tasted defeat. Though it was only a matter of time before he did.

She closed the file as she stopped before his door, and for the briefest moment, the reflection of her red slit eyes stared back at her through the glass.

[Verbena is correct. I do look dead inside... She is not far off from the truth either.]