August in the outskirts of Arc City, the sun pouring fire down onto the ground like it cost nothing.
The asphalt had gone soft in the heat, tacky enough to grab at your soles.
The weeds along the roadside drooped, listless. Even the cicadas couldn't be bothered to sing. The whole world felt like it had been crammed into a steamer basket.
On the highway skirting the special training base, a white van stenciled with the words "Anti-Entropy Infrastructure" sat crookedly against the shoulder.
The door hung open. Half a jianbing and two empty cans of iced tea had been tossed onto the driver's seat.
The van's owner was crouched right then behind a high-voltage transformer box, some thirty meters out from the base's chain-link fence.
Siegfried Kaslana.
A bona fide Schicksal ace agent, code K-0017, an S-rank god of slaughter who could go in and out of a hail of bullets seven times over.
Right now he had a towel slung around his neck, the collar of his shampoo-gray undershirt gaping open, and a battered ballcap reading "Firmament Maintenance" perched on his head.
Sweat ran down through the stubble he hadn't shaved clean and dripped onto an insulated wrench.
The getup was genuinely convincing.
If it weren't for the way those blue eyes now and then let slip a blade-sharp glint from under the brim, anyone passing by would have written him off as some electrician uncle driven half-mad by the heat.
"Day three."
Siegfried shifted the tactical scope disguised as a multimeter from his left eye to his right, cursing under his breath.
Otto, that golden-furred old fox, had hauled him bodily out of some fish-stinking port in Southeast Asia, thrown a plane ticket at him, and told him to go to Arc City and "just have a look around."
Just have a look around?
Siegfried chewed those words over and over, and every time all he tasted was bile.
He'd read the intel briefing three times.
Anti-Entropy and the Shenzhou authorities had set up a secret joint project codenamed "Starfire Furnace," aiming to crash-train a batch of "special operations personnel" within six months.
It was still only the first month, the selection phase, and this group would keep getting whittled down.
As for who they'd be fighting, Otto hadn't said.
Siegfried adjusted the scope's focus, and the drill field snapped closer.
He recognized the exercise underway at a glance.
Weighted cross-country, full kit, tactical pack plus ammo box coming to forty kilos at the least.
High-pressure water cannons were rigged along both sides of the track. Anyone who slowed got blasted.
The finish line was a wide pit brimming with mud that had to be low-crawled through, a chain-link net strung half a meter overhead. Lift an inch too high and it would tear bloody welts into your back.
Siegfried knew this drill intimately.
Schicksal's new-recruit camps had something similar. He'd slogged through it himself twenty years ago.
But the version in front of him had clearly been savagely modified.
The track ran nearly twice the standard length.
The water cannons had been cranked to a setting that could knock a person flat.
Something had been mixed into the mud pit, whatever it was. When the trainees clawed their way out, every patch of exposed skin was covered in a fine red rash, like they'd been stung by something.
The most absurd part was the rest intervals.
Crouched here observing for three days, Siegfried had worked out that these trainees' daily workload was roughly three to four times Schicksal's, while their rest time was only half.
By the recovery cycle of a normal human body, this intensity would produce widespread muscle breakdown and hairline fractures inside a week.
But these people had already been at it for at least two weeks.
Every last one of them looked like they'd crawled up out of hell, yet not a single one had been carried off.
Siegfried lowered the scope and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
Something was off.
These people's recovery rate wasn't normal.
Either some special medical means was propping them up behind the scenes, or the selection criteria themselves had already screened out ordinary humans.
He raised the scope again, this time aiming the lens at the edge of the drill field. Someone was standing there.
More precisely, a woman holding a lace parasol.
Across thirty meters and a layer of chain-link, the image in the scope shimmered with the heat rising off the ground.
The woman wore a finely tailored dark maid's dress, its white apron blinding in the fierce sun.
She was smiling, a smile gentle enough for someone hosting an afternoon tea, but every time she raised a hand to point at a trainee who'd fallen behind, a water cannon would flip that poor soul flat onto the ground with pinpoint precision.
In the middle of a crowd rolling around in muck, the sight clashed so hard it was like someone elegantly sipping English afternoon tea in a World War II trench.
Siegfried's brow furrowed.
A maid's dress.
A lace parasol.
High heels.
In a military special-training base.
He'd seen plenty of strange instructors, but one who came dressed like this to drill soldiers, that was a first.
What caught his attention even more was the woman's stance.
It looked like she was just standing there casually, yet her weight was distributed perfectly across both feet, ready to move in any direction at any instant.
The hand holding the parasol seemed relaxed, but the angle of the wrist hinted that she could collapse the parasol and wield it as a weapon in a fraction of a second.
That was not an ordinary person's stance.
That was a killer's stance.
Siegfried lowered the scope and rubbed his eyes.
He'd been in this line of work for over twenty years.
He'd seen Schicksal's most twisted drill officers, seen madman commanders in Middle Eastern theaters who herded recruits into minefields, seen smugglers in the South American jungle who used live people for target practice.
But someone in a maid's dress, holding a lace parasol, smiling sweetly while she tormented five hundred elite soldiers into wishing they were dead, that was a first.
Siegfried scored this maid instructor's threat level.
Out of ten, he gave her a nine.
The one point he docked was because he hadn't yet seen her fight with his own eyes.
"Since when did Anti-Entropy start hiring maids as instructors…" he muttered. "That Welt fellow's taste gets stranger by the day."
The scope's lens kept sweeping across the field and finally halted at the tail end of the track. A pair working through an extra penalty ran into view.
Three-legged, sprinting with heavy sandbags on their backs.
The little short one out front had a head of pink hair plastered to her face with sweat, her fierce glare exactly like a bulldog's about to bite.
The girl ran with her center of gravity dropped low, every step carrying a wildness that seemed ready to smash everything in its path. And the stream of profanity out of her mouth never let up.
"Run! You got legs or are they just stuck on your ass for decoration?!"
Her partner, dragged forcibly along by the strap, was the polar opposite.
Blonde ponytail, face smeared with mud, tears and snot mixing together in a miserable stream, looking for all the world like a kidnapped hamster.
"Wahh… Senior Sin, I really can't run anymore… my legs are numb…"
"Shut it! Dawdle any longer and I'll strap your pack on too!"
The pink-haired girl bellowed it, but her steps, without her noticing, slowed by half a beat.
She reached out one hand and awkwardly hooked the strap of the blonde girl's tactical pack, tugging it toward herself, taking on part of the weight.
The motion was small, fast enough to be nearly invisible.
But Siegfried saw it.
Behind the scope, the corner of his mouth twitched.
Sin Mal.
Susannah Manatt.
He'd seen both names in the appendix of the intel briefing.
One was a demolitions expert specially recruited from the border patrol, rich in combat experience, hot-tempered, terrible at following orders, disciplined twice in her old unit for assaulting a superior.
The other was a civilian staff officer from some field army's logistics department, fitness rated F, but supposedly she just managed the water cooler, her family having pulled strings to slot her into a cushy post.
One a pure brute-force standout, the other a pure crybaby deadweight.
Tied together to run the three-legged drill.
Siegfried lowered the scope and leaned against the metal shell of the transformer box.
The sheet metal was scorching from the sun, the heat boring into his skin even through the work coveralls.
Watching the two girls stumble along on the far side of the fence, some very old scenes suddenly surfaced in his mind.
Over twenty years ago.
A day just this hot.
A white-haired brute with nothing but muscle in his skull, and a bespectacled bookworm with a mouth full of data analysis, had run this same course, dragging each other down the whole way.
The brute called the bookworm a burden.
The bookworm called the brute brainless.
The two of them fought every single day, fought until the instructors got headaches.
But then what?
Then that bookworm took a rubber round for the white-haired kid during a live-fire exercise, cracked two ribs.
Lying in the infirmary, the bookworm was still pushing up his half-shattered glasses and muttering: "Your footwork was fifteen degrees off. Next time correct to the left."
The white-haired brute clenched his fist, held it in a long while, and finally forced out: "Next time don't take the hit for me. I can handle it."
The bookworm sneered: "You can't handle it. I ran the numbers."
Welt, you old bastard, what exactly are you cooking up in Arc City now?
He opened his eyes and raised the scope again.
At the far end of the track, Sin Mal and Susannah had finished the whole run.
The pink-haired girl knelt on one knee, gasping for breath. The blonde girl flopped straight into the mud, crying even harder, but the timer clutched fiercely in her hand showed they'd beaten their last run by eleven seconds.
Sin Mal glanced down at the timer, cursed, then grabbed Susannah by the back of the collar and hauled her up out of the mud.
"Wipe your damn snot. You're embarrassing."
Susannah, sniffling, caught the towel Sin Mal tossed her and scrubbed at her face a couple of times, then went rigid.
Her gaze had traveled over Sin Mal's shoulder, through the chain-link, and landed on the middle-aged man crouched behind the transformer box thirty meters away.
That man was looking their way.
And he was smiling.
Smiling so… kindly.
A chill ran down Susannah's back.
She reached out and tugged at Sin Mal's sleeve, her voice trembling.
"Senior Sin…"
"What now?"
"That meter-repair uncle outside… he's been watching us this whole time…"
Sin Mal whipped her head around.
Beyond the fence, Siegfried was still lost in his "ah, youth is a wonderful thing" reverie.
Without a moment's hesitation Sin raised her hand and, across thirty meters of heat haze, jabbed a vicious middle finger straight at Siegfried.
"The hell you looking at?!"
Loud enough for the whole drill field to hear.
"Keep it up and I'll climb over there and gouge your eyeballs out to play marbles with!"
Susannah shrank behind Sin Mal in fright, then couldn't resist poking half her head back out to sneak a peek.
Behind the transformer box, Siegfried froze for a second.
He didn't get angry. Instead he quickly ducked his head, hiding his face under the brim, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably.
Trying not to laugh.
The way this girl spat venom, it hit just right! It was practically a carbon copy of his younger self.
He rose unhurriedly to his feet, waved a hand as if nothing had happened, and ambled around into the transformer box's blind spot.
"Young women these days really are full of spark."
He said it to himself.
It wasn't just a musing. It was a veteran's confirmation.
Confirmation that in this godforsaken world, there were still young people like this, tough-mouthed and soft-hearted, who'd prop each other up and crawl back to their feet even after being beaten down.
Just like him when he was young.
Just like Welt when he was young.
Siegfried fished the last can of iced tea out of his toolbag, twisted off the cap, and took a swig.
The ice had long since melted.
He tossed the empty can into the back seat of the van, leaned against the door, and tilted his head up at the sky.
The sun had begun sliding toward the west, but the heat showed not the slightest sign of relenting.
The shouting, cursing, and crying on the drill field blended together, churned by the hot wind into a blur of noise that drifted over from the far side of the fence.
Siegfried's eyes narrowed slowly.
Three days of observation, and he'd already pieced a few fragments together.
First, this training base's intensity far exceeded any conventional military training.
The trainees' recovery rate wasn't normal. Something had to be supporting it behind the scenes, some technology beyond current medical understanding.
Second, that maid instructor was no ordinary person.
Her physical conditioning, her Reaction Speed, and her command of the training's rhythm, there was no one fiercer in the entire Schicksal organization. Since when did Anti-Entropy have talent of that caliber?
Third, and the point that unsettled him most.
These trainees spanned a wide range of ages, from early twenties to their mid-thirties, but without exception they were the elite of their respective fields.
The Shenzhou authorities had pulled people who should have been their backbone and thrown them into this meat grinder to be worked half to death.
For what?
That line in the intel, "the apocalypse in six months," what exactly did it mean?
Siegfried spun the iced-tea cap between his fingers twice, then closed his fist around it.
Crouching outside in daylight watching people play in the mud only revealed so much. The real answer wasn't on the drill field.
It was in the archive room.
He pulled open the van door, dropped into the driver's seat, and dug a crumpled floor plan of the base out of the glove box.
He'd spent three days assembling it, piece by piece, by observing patrol routes, the angles of the surveillance cameras, and the patterns of logistics vehicles coming and going.
Main building, three floors, administrative offices.
Medium security level, patrols every fifteen minutes.
Training area, open-plan, round-the-clock surveillance coverage. No blind spots.
Logistics warehouses, two buildings, guarded twenty-four hours.
The underground level.
Siegfried's finger tapped the bottom-right corner of the floor plan.
There he'd penciled in a question mark.
Over three days he'd noticed that between two and three every morning, an unmarked black box truck would come and go through the base's side gate.
The windows were tinted dark. You couldn't see what it carried.
But judging by how compressed the suspension was, it went in empty and came out loaded with something heavy.
The direction the side gate led toward showed no building at all on the surface.
But there was something underground.
Siegfried folded the plan and tucked it into his chest pocket, then started the van's engine.
The AC vents blew out a gust of hot air and only started turning cool after a good while.
He adjusted the rearview mirror. Reflected in it was the drill field behind the fence.
The lace-parasol maid instructor was saying something to a trainee, the smile on her face exactly the same as before.
When she finished, the trainee's face went about as pale as a corpse's, and he turned and dove back into the mud pit.
Siegfried drew his gaze back, shifted into first, and the van rolled slowly off the shoulder.
In the mirror, the training base's fence grew smaller and smaller until it became a single blurred line shimmering in the heat.
Tonight.
Two in the morning.
He was going in to see what exactly was hidden at the other end of that line.
The van swung onto the highway back into the city.
Steering one-handed, Siegfried pulled his phone from his pocket with the other, scrolled to the contacts, and paused two seconds on the entry labeled "Golden-Furred Old Fox."
He didn't call.
He tossed the phone back onto the passenger seat.
Some things were better understood for himself first before he said anything.
If it really was something big, he'd have to confirm first whether Kevin had gotten tangled up in it.
The kid had worn a "the whole world owes me money" scowl his entire life, but he was his son all the same.
Siegfried stepped on the Throttle, and the van accelerated down the empty highway.
Outside the window, Arc City's skyline was gilded gold-red in the setting sun.
Beautiful.
But to a veteran like Siegfried, that color looked exactly like the great blaze just before the world was set fully alight.
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