A hero on borrowed wings

where are we?

Black...

That was all I could see...

A familiar inky black abyss...

A void I had become intimate with, as it greets me every time I believe myself to be done...

After I had killed Ayre and burned Rubicon...

After I had put Walter down and saved Rubicon...

And now...

After I had destroyed all mind and iquazu...

Is this hell...

Is my reward for following through with Walter's dreams...

A hell, unlike any other, forced to meet,  betray, and kill those I've come to love and cherish...

Never moving on...

My only respite is the cold efficiency in which I now tore through Rubicon...

From the first pca helicopter to the cataphract's, from the red guns to the vespers, from Rusty and Ayre to Walter and Carla...

They became trivial...

I had burned and saved Rubicon countless times before all-mind had made itself know to me...

I had mastered combat in the ac, creating countless loadouts in which I could single handedly tear through Rubicon without even being touched...

That was at least an escape from the physical pain of fighting them all...

But this void was my only escape from the emotional pain...

A brief moment or an eternity of the void, I do not know, but here, I could not hurt them...

They were safe, from me...

But all good things come to an end...

The familiar piercing white light, of the dissipating void...

A sign of my renewed suffering...

"Raven..."

W-what?! That voice, b-but how!?

"You're awake..."

As I hear the soothing cadence of her familiar voice, my vision clears of the void. I regain feeling in my body as it slowly wakes up...

I'm in my ac, the Sterben, my most commonly used ac after I first killed walter, dedicated to him. It was using a wlt 011 in the right and wlt 101 in the left, the right shoulder a ngi 006, and the left a ngi 028. I ran a full hal 826 frame, with a wlt 001 fcs, a ngi 001 booster, and ngi 000 generator, topping it all off with an assault armor mod. A full-on coral powered build and the same build Walter tried to kill me with.

I was lying down, staring at the ceiling. It was a series of beige panels that were held by steel scaffolding lined with large industrial lights. Standing my ac up, I noticed that I was surrounded by different forms of terrain, a small pre space age boat in an artificial body of water that was currently sinking into a whirlpool. What appeared to be a small artificial mountain top and a few ruined cities.

"The coral, it carried us across the stars, and we landed here raven..."

As I surveyed my surroundings, I found that I wasn't alone. Before me was a central plaza and a long staircase. In the plaza were 34 unconscious bodies and 12 active combatants, according to my scanner. 2 of the combatants seemed to be overseeing from the back, while another 8 surrounded 2 more. The finale 2 who were surrounded seemed to be in the middle of an execution of sorts. The first was a hulking mass of muscle that seemed a fith of my ac's height. It didn't seem very human, and my scans mostly agreed. It had severe mutations and multiple invasive surgeries to alter its form, now appearing as a 2 Metter tall hulking black mass with a bird beak.