The war room is a crypt in miniature - airless, windowless, the table at its centre alive with a phantasmagoria of light. On good days, the room is a strategic womb, a place for birth and renewal; tonight, it is a tomb, and the dead are present in every breath.
Cecill Ackerman stands at the head of the table, rigid as the upended crossbars of the Rook & Pegasus emblem that looms in ghostly outline on the far wall. He does not speak immediately; the silence is curated, a display of control that allows the room to settle around him. When he does begin, it is with a clipped authority that brooks no interruption.
"Last sortie, as you all saw, cost us four Knights of Primus and three civilians." His voice is even, uninflected. The words are bullets, spent and flattened. "Overnight, Emergence activity doubled in France. Triple breach near Dar es Salaam. In Japan anomaly cluster has merged, showing coordinated behaviour. In short: the old playbook is useless."
Cecill gestures to the table, where a writhing continent of holographic colour seethes across the surface. Red blooms where the Emergence has devoured, green flickers and recedes around the shrinking islands of safety. The effect is hypnotic, less like a map than a fever dream.
Opposite him, the Knights sit in a rough phalanx—Hideyoshi at the tip, Lancelot and Agravain at his shoulders, Galahad, Noor, and Tristan rounding out the wedge. Marigold, the gold-dipped stranger, hangs at the edge of the group, light from the projection crawling up the faceted curve of his armour in sickly pinks and acid greens. Each Knight wears exhaustion as both armour and accusation: Lancelot's chest plate undone at the throat, Galahad's hands splayed and trembling on the tabletop, Noor's eyes bracketed by purple crescents of sleeplessness. Even Hideyoshi, composed as ever, betrays his fatigue in the subtle slackening of his jaw.
Cecill continues, each fact a scalpel.
"Last wave was proved that the monsters are getting stronger and powerful, they evolving and even adapt to our attacks. In last than a week we received so many emergencies call all over the globe, asking for help. So many settlements and bunkers got hit wave after wave of monsters. Our weapons are growing to become more useless than before."
He lets the words land, then adds,
"Right now, I don't have any planned to counter such attack."
He turns to Hideyoshi, not seeking any sort of opinions at the very least. Hideyoshi nods-once, curt, the movement loaded with the gravity of old ceremony.
The Knights say nothing. Each, in turn, absorbs the projected carnage on the table, the swarming motes of enemy activity, the encroaching tide. There is nothing left to say, not until the silence has been fully earned.
When at last the stillness is broken, it is by Sir Tristan, whose voice is so soft at first that Cecill almost misses it.
"We should scatter."
Cecill frowns, uncertain if this is a tactical suggestion or a metaphor for defeat.
Tristan clarifies, louder now. "We should split across continents. Each of us take a sector, break their coordination and then, defeat them. Hunt their eyes, whatever is directing them. If we keep moving as a unit, we're only patching the surface. They're growing in number and as Cecill said normal weapons just isn't working anymore but, not Us… Not our power."
Agravain snorts, the sound halfway between a laugh and a bark of contempt.
"Divide and die, then? I never know you're sucidal."
Tristan shrugs, expression as blank as a fresh wound.
"Not if we move faster than they do. Not if we stop fighting as a wall and start fighting as needles."
For a moment, the image lingers in the air—needles, sharp and lonely, piercing the fabric of the world. Galahad leans forward, his face grave.
"There is merit to this. The Anomalies always come from something, its source or nest. If we spread, we can cover more of the sources and slow down the calamity at very least. Less loss to the civilians."
Lancelot stares at the map, fingers picking at a seam in his glove.
"And when the first of us falls, there is no one to pull the body back. No one to shield the others."
His voice is soft, but the accusation in it is unmistakable.
Noor, silent until now, turns to Cecill.
"You want us to fight as an army, but the battlefield is not that. Not anymore. If we scatter, we gamble. But the odds—" He gestures to the map, to the rising tide. "The odds are already against us. Perhaps we buy more time. Or at least, we die buying it."
Cecill studies them all, his face carved in lines of frustration and calculation. "You're proposing a… a diaspora. Every knight for himself."
Hideyoshi's voice interrupts, patient but final. "No. Such selfish thinking should not exist between ourselves. But when every time I gaze on this unfortunate event, I can only imagine the tiredness and the fatigue that we have to deal if move as a pack."
"Sir Tristan may indeed have a valid perspective. By dispersing, we can cover the territory and eliminate the threat decisively, along with the catastrophe itself. I possess steadfast faith in each of your capabilities and readiness to stand alone, if necessary, to give all for humanity's survival."
Hideyoshi's gaze pierces the room, instilling a resolute determination and hope in all present.
The debate is quiet, almost reverential. Where the previous war rooms had been cacophonous, this is more a council of mourners than warriors. The division among the Knights is visible in the lean of their bodies: Tristan and Galahad pushing forward, their chairs tilted into the future; Lancelot and Agravain recoiling, arms crossed and faces set. Noor is the only one who seems unmoored, gaze floating above the table as if he is already imagining the world beyond it.
Marigold, who has not spoken, shifts in his chair. The gold helmet reflects the red surge of the latest projection—an Emergence spike on the west coast of Africa, larger than anything seen before. For a moment, it looks as if the helmet itself is on fire.
"I will go where I am sent," Marigold says, voice flat, filtered through the reverb of his mask.
"But if I may speak—" He waits, and Cecill gestures for him to continue.
"The people out there—" Marigold's head tips toward the outer ring, where the refugees gather in makeshift dormitories, the children sleep two to a cot.
"In the name of protecting the hopes and dream than I agreed."
Lancelot closes his eyes, a silent concession.
Cecill nods, slowly. "Very well."
He addresses the room: "You have until midnight to formalize your approach. After that, I expect a joint plan, with contingencies for both unified and dispersed operations. Dismissed."
The Knights rise, some quickly, eager to escape the weight of the room, others slowly, as if the act of standing up might draw more energy than they possess. Hideyoshi lingers, as does Cecill, the two men regarding each other across the dark glass of the table. There is respect there, but also resignation: the knowledge that they are alike in only one way, which is that neither believes the world can be saved, only delayed in its destruction.
As the others depart, Hideyoshi approaches the table, fingers skating over the hologram. "You are a stubborn man, Ackerman."
Cecill manages a smile, one that never reaches his eyes. "Not stubborn enough. Never enough."
Hideyoshi inclines his head. "We will do our best."
"I know you will," Cecill says. He watches as the Knights file out. Tristan already in whispered consultation with Galahad, Noor drifting in their wake, Lancelot and Agravain resuming an old, unfinished argument. Marigold last, gliding silently, the blue scarf trailing behind him like a memory of sky.
When they are gone, Cecill stands alone in the afterimage of the war room, the map still pulsing with all the places he cannot defend. For a while, he allows himself to imagine a world without Knights, without himself, without any of the burdens they all pretend are blessings.
Then, with a flick of the wrist, he erases the projections, douses the room in darkness, and goes to draft the next day's obituary.
When the meeting fractured, every knights slipped from the room so does Marigold. He walked the corridor in silence, gold-plate greaves muffled by the recycled felt of old-world carpeting. The fluorescent panels overhead buzzed with a diffident indifference, their light falling unevenly, as if even photons feared the hall's emptiness. The walls—once eggshell, now scarred by smoke and fist-marks—bowed inward, the memory of better days pressed into their very grain.
He walked on, the architecture of the headquarters revealing itself in corners and alcoves never mapped by the official diagrams. The art gallery was technically off-limits after midnight, but the digital locks had failed months ago, and now the place existed as a rumour, a haunted pocket of the past.
He entered.
The first impression was one of temperature-cold, the kind of cold that seemed to emanate not just from the HVAC but from the art itself, as if the paintings and sculptures were engaged in a silent, mutual standoff with time. The pieces had been saved from museums, universities, ruined estates. Someone, probably the staff from before, or some unnamed volunteer, had arranged them in the cavernous main room with a care that bordered on reverence.
No lights. Marigold walked the length of the gallery; the only illumination is the sporadic flash of emergency beacons through the battered windows. He paused before a fractured marble bust, its eyes gouged out by shrapnel, and let his gaze slide along the line where the sculptor's intent ended and the world's violence began.
He moved on, each step drawing him deeper into the collection. There: a small oil painting, the canvas warped by water damage but the colours stubbornly intact. The subject was simple-two children, their features vague, holding hands and watching a burning sky. Their silhouettes recalled, with painful clarity, the stories of ordinary courage and ordinary loss.
He drifted between displays. Here, a surreal tableau: bent steel welded into the shape of a rearing horse. There, a tapestry that had been rewoven to include the sigil of the Rook & Pegasus, the thread work uneven but determined. All of it said: someone tried to remember. Someone tried to leave a message for a world that might, one day, begin again.
Marigold turned a corner and saw, at the far end of the room, the centrepiece, a monumental canvas, at least four meters across. It was the only work here that had not been damaged, the only one preserved under a panel of glass thicker than a man's hand. He stood before it, the heat of his own breath condensing inside the helmet.
The painting depicted a battle. A battle that he remembers, old memories start flooded back. On that day, The knights and soldiers were fighting none stop to take back Marseille in France after a sudden attack from the ground. The anomalies merge from the ground of the earth itself.
They were overwhelm by the high class anomalies but in the end Hideyoshi save them with incredible coordination of both knights and soldier to counter the anomalies.
Marigold stood there for a long time, transfixed.
He sat, knees locking as the servos hissed into relaxation. For a moment, he can let loosen his shoulder. For a moment he can find peace in this dark hour.
He stared at the painting until the colors lost their meaning, until all that remained was the echo of a possibility: that the Knights might endure, even in their separate solitudes; that each might return, someday, to finish the story together.
He stood. The bench creaked in protest, and his armour caught the half-light, filling the room with a reflection so sharp it seemed to slice the world in two.
For the first time in months, Marigold smiled. Not because the future was brighter, but because he now understood the shape of the trial before him. He believed the others would come to see it as well, each in their own time.
There are hours in the compound when the entire world seems to run on the fumes of last night's disasters, the corridors filled with a restless energy that makes every errand feel both urgent and absurd. Isabella, arms weighted with requisition forms and the pale blue folder that marked medical priority, speedwalks toward the administrative core, rehearsing in her mind how best to argue for extra supplies. She rehearses it because Cecill Ackerman, the unyielding director, is not a man easily swayed by feelings or by anything short of raw calculus. But the number of new patients in the infirmary—and the faces that won't be leaving—suggests there is nothing rawer than what she has seen in the last twelve hours.
She cuts through the minor crossway near the C wing, pausing by a window to steady her breathing and, in the process, catching a slice of light through the nearest portal. The windows here are thin, rimed with salt and condensation, but through them she can see into the annex that houses what's left of the compound's art collection.
For a moment, she is annoyed; it feels so pointlessly decadent, these relics of the old world, when so many in the new would trade a Rembrandt for a single pack of morphine. But then she notices—actually notices—the figure inside. Alone in the gallery, gold catching every spill of light, stands Marigold. Even at a distance, the helmet is unmistakable, as is the strange, almost shy stoop of his shoulders. He moves between the frames with an odd delicacy, the gesture of someone who is aware of his own mass and wishes to do no harm.
She should move on, but she stays. Perhaps it is the incongruity—knight and painting, violence and beauty—but Isabella finds herself riveted, watching through the glass as the golden knight stops before a huge, shadowy painting at the far end of the gallery. She cannot see his face, or even his eyes, but there is something unmistakably human in the way he stands there, not rigid like a soldier at attention, but pliant, open, as if the scene is speaking to him in a language only he can hear.
He likes that painting, Isabella thinks, and then, surprised by the sudden heat in her cheeks, shakes her head as if to dispel the notion. It's ridiculous. The knight is a knight. He is myth, not man. But even from here, she can see the way his armour picks up the hues of the canvas, gold reflecting the reds and blacks, the whole figure pulsing with the subtlety of a living thing.
Her eyes drift, and the world outside the glass drops away. There is just her, and Marigold, and the painting between them—an axis of longing, of memory, of something blooming despite everything that is broken.
She is not prepared when he turns, the mirrored visor sweeping the window's line. Isabella ducks, mortified, pressing her back to the cold wall. She holds her breath, half-expecting the Knight to come charging through the door and demand an explanation, but when she finally peeks again, Marigold is standing as before, the smallest tilt of his head suggesting a smile or, perhaps, a secret kept.
In that moment, the page comes alive in her hand: the forms, the complaints, the numbers—all suddenly lighter, as if she could carry the whole weight of the world and not feel it at all.
But Marigold is not alone for long. She sees his posture stiffen, the helmet's tilt now alert, as though listening to some distant call. He turns with military efficiency and strides from the gallery, pausing once to survey the corridor with a sweep so practiced it must have been drilled into him by a thousand years of discipline. Isabella, pressed flat against the wall, nearly drops her folder as he passes beneath the window. She counts to ten, then fifteen, before daring to move again.
At the junction, Marigold glances back—just once, just enough—and she thinks she sees, in the shimmer of his armour, not just a reflection, but an invitation. To what, she cannot guess.
She smooths her hair, tucks the folder under her arm, and heads for Cecill's office, her pulse racing for reasons she will not permit herself to name. In the far end of the hall, she catches the faintest echo of gold, already receding, already lost in the endless motion of the day.
But for a single breathless moment, she feels as if the world is something that could be watched, admired, even cherished. Not just survived.
Isabella straightens her back, finds her pace, and walks on.