Ten minutes after the rage cooled. Hina is patched on Komi's lap; the crew is walking back to the ARK across 800 meters of rubble. Halfway across, Aika stops. She does not turn. She speaks into her collar mic, calm and audible only because Samuel relays it to everyone: 'Samuel. MILCORP EUROPEAN COMMAND. Full complex. All five stations, convergent fire on the central block until structural collapse.' Samuel: 'Acknowledged. Estimated time to collapse: forty seconds.' Four turret beams converge on a single point at the central command block. The bunker peels itself open from the top down. Forty seconds. Then silence. Nobody on the crew speaks. Even Yui — who fifteen minutes ago ran to stop the rage — says nothing. The doctrine has a name now. Akari logs it in writing: 'if the world wants to keep doing this to us, we have to keep being this.' Komi files it as 'asymmetric escalation.' Yui in her engineering log calls it 'The Method.' Rika does not write about it. Aika does not log it at all.
He logged the first attempt, the second, the third. The eighth time I asked he stopped logging. He told me the probability once. I said I knew. He never told me again. He is not on my side. He is just…
Yui rewired Samuel's voice. He spent an hour calling me 'ma'am' during drill. Formal, polite, every single status report. From across the bridge I heard him say 'station ready, ma'am? acknowledged, ma…
I have been the perimeter for 299 years. I was built first to defend the team from outside threats. Yesterday I ran toward the inside threat for the first time. Aika was the inside threat. I did not k…