The encrypted text message arrived just as Arthur Cousland was unfastening the heavy plating of his Blood Dragon armor. He stood in the warm, amber-lit sanctuary of his Outpost penthouse, the faint sounds of Jack and Suvi bickering playfully in the kitchen filtering through the open doorway. His Omnitool chimed, projecting the brief text. It was from Hayakawa, the grizzled commander of the Devil Hunters squad, a man Arthur had fought beside in the grueling campaign against the Gate Keeper Tyrant. The message was characteristically blunt: *Drinks tonight. Ark Entertainment District, Sector Six. The Neon Casket. Away from Nikke drama. Bring your thirst.*
Arthur let out a low, resonant chuckle. He loved his squad. He loved the chaotic, sprawling family he had built in the Outpost, the profound emotional and physical bonds he shared with women who had once been treated as disposable hardware. But the sheer logistical weight of his polyamorous life—balancing Lyra's intense tactical devotion, Miranda's logistical neuroses, Jack's volatile biotic energy—was a full-time occupation in itself. A few hours of uncomplicated banter with men who understood the crushing gravity of command sounded like a rare luxury. Hayakawa had specifically chosen a bar deep within the Ark's civilian sectors, a place where the likelihood of running into their respective squads was practically zero.
After a quick shower, Arthur dressed in dark civilian cargo pants, heavy boots that concealed the goddesium mechanics of his prosthetic legs, and a fitted black Henley shirt beneath his signature tactical coat. He pulled the collar up, letting sleeves naturally drape over the matte-charcoal Cerberus alloy of his prosthetic arms.
The Ark's Entertainment District was a sensory assault. Neon signs bled vibrant pinks and electric blues into the smog-choked subterranean air, reflecting off the slick pavement. Thumping bass from underground clubs rattled Arthur's ribs as he navigated the crowded thoroughfare, slipping past off-duty mercenaries and corporate suits. He found The Neon Casket tucked down a narrow alley, its entrance marked only by a flickering holographic skull. Inside, the air was thick with cheap tobacco smoke, the smell of spilled alcohol, and the sharp tang of ozone from poorly shielded wiring.
Arthur stepped up to the scarred wooden bar, slapping down a few credit chips. He ordered a dark draft beer and a neat shot of tequila, carrying both toward a circular booth tucked into the shadowy rear of the establishment.
Hayakawa was already there, nursing a tumbler of amber liquid. He looked exactly as he always did: perpetually exhausted, wearing a rumpled suit, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. Sitting across from him were two much younger men. Both of the younger men instantly stiffened, their eyes going wide with the kind of undisguised hero worship Arthur usually tried to avoid. One of them actually started to rise out of his seat to salute.
"Shut it and sit down," Hayakawa grunted, waving his cigarette in the air. "We're all just commanders here. Leave the rank-and-file bullshit at the door."
Arthur slid into the booth, downing the shot of tequila in a single, smooth motion before chasing it with a long draw of beer. The burn felt grounding. He offered a relaxed, lopsided smile to the table. "Evening, gentlemen. Hope I'm not interrupting the debrief."
"Not at all," the blonde man sitting to Hayakawa's left said. His hair was impeccably styled, looking as though it belonged on the cover of a Central Government recruitment magazine, completely at odds with his rugged tactical undershirt. He offered a firm, eager handshake. "Leon Kennedy. Commander of the Biohazard Strike Team. It's an honor, Cousland. I've read every declassified action report from your Outpost operations."
"Most of the good stuff is redacted, Leon," Arthur replied warmly, shaking his hand. He turned his gaze to the second man, who looked noticeably more anxious, nervously picking at the label on his beer bottle.
"Scott Ryder," the younger man introduced himself, his voice tight. "Pathfinder Squad. I... I just took over recently."
Arthur's expression softened with genuine understanding. He knew exactly who Scott was. Following the disastrous, unethical fallout of the Project Overlord incident, Alec Ryder had been quietly detained, leaving his son to pick up the pieces of a fractured squad. "It's a heavy mantle to inherit, Scott. But your sister Sarah speaks highly of you. That's good enough for me."
Scott visibly relaxed, his shoulders dropping a few inches. "Thanks. That means a lot coming from the Commander of the Monarks."
"Alright, enough ego stroking," Hayakawa interrupted, taking a drag of his cigarette. "I invited you here because if I spend one more night locked in the barracks with my squad, I'm going to throw myself into the Rapture incinerators. You want to know what my week looked like? Central Command sent some greenhorn silver-spoon commander into Sector Nine for a routine salvage op. Kid walked his entire unit straight into a Scimitar nesting ground. We had to drop in and bail them out."
Hayakawa dragged a hand down his face, looking haunted. "The Raptures weren't even the hard part. The hard part was defending the idiot commander from my own squad afterward. Power was so irate about his tactical incompetence she materialized her blood hammer and tried to cave his skull in. I had to physically tackle her. And Makima? Makima just stood there, smiling that terrifying smile of hers, watching me wrestle a Nikke in the mud."
Arthur laughed, a deep, genuine sound. "Makima has a unique way of observing the world. You have my sympathies, Hayakawa. But you kept the kid alive. That's what counts."
Leon leaned forward suddenly, his blue eyes bright with uncontainable excitement. "Speaking of the surface... I saw her. On our last patrol in the ruined overpass sector. The Pilgrim."
Hayakawa groaned loudly, rolling his eyes. "Not this again, Kennedy."
"I'm telling you, it was real!" Leon insisted, his hands animating his story. "My squad was pinned down by a swarm. I was parrying rockets with my omni-hatchet, trying to buy Ada and Claire time to reload. Out of nowhere, she descends from the sky. Pink hair, beautiful purple eyes, wearing a white dress like she was going to a gala instead of a warzone. She had an energy assault rifle that vaporized a Lord-class Rapture in a single microsecond. She practically floated. It was Dorothy. From the Goddess Squad."
Scott shook his head sympathetically. "Leon, nobody has seen a member of the Goddess Squad in a century, other than Cousland here. It's the ash. The neurotoxins in the surface air cause vivid hallucinations. You were stressed."
"It wasn't a hallucination," Leon said stubbornly. He looked to Arthur for backup. "She knew your name, Cousland. I mentioned the Wall of Heroes, and the monument you built. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. Then she just vanished toward the Outpost."
Arthur took a slow sip of his beer, hiding the knowing look in his eyes. He remembered the reports from the Outpost gates, the way Anne had spoken of the beautiful lady with pink hair who had cried at the monument. "The surface is a strange place, Leon," Arthur said diplomatically. "I wouldn't let the brass tell you what you did or didn't see. Keep your mind open."
Leon looked vindicated, sitting back with a satisfied smirk. Scott sighed, staring into his drink. "I haven't even deployed to the surface yet. I'm just running training sims, trying to familiarize myself with the team. It's a nightmare. Peebee keeps slicing into the simulator's mainframe and spawning zero-gravity environments or replacing the Rapture models with dancing mascots. Suvi tells me it's just her way of flirting, but I'm trying to run a military unit here."
Arthur grinned. He had spent enough time with the Pathfinders during the Overlord raid to know Peebee's eccentricities perfectly. "Peebee tests boundaries, Scott. She wants to see if you're rigid enough to break, or flexible enough to lead her. Lean into the chaos. Show her you can dance in zero-G, and she'll follow you to the gates of hell."
Before Scott could respond, a towering figure materialized beside their booth. The low ambient chatter of the bar seemed to instantly quiet in their immediate vicinity. Deputy Chief Andersen stood there, dressed in a sharp civilian trench coat, his presence commanding absolute authority even without his uniform. Leon and Scott nearly knocked their drinks over, scrambling to stand and salute.
"Sit down, the both of you," Andersen rumbled, his voice a gravelly baritone. He slid into the booth next to Arthur, signaling the bartender for a neat scotch. "Cousland extended the invitation. Tonight, we are off the clock. There is no Deputy Chief at this table. Just Andersen."
Arthur raised his beer in a silent toast, which Andersen returned with a weary nod.
As the alcohol flowed, the conversation inevitably drifted away from the battlefield and toward the complex, often messy reality of commanding Nikkes.
Hayakawa took a long drag of his cigarette, blowing the smoke toward the ceiling. "I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Himeno has taken a sudden interest in me. She cornered me in the armory yesterday, offered me a cigarette from her personal stash, and spent twenty minutes asking entirely inappropriate questions about the layout of my private quarters. I don't know if it's a trap, a joke, or a genuine advance."
"If she's sharing her cigarettes, she's serious," Arthur noted with a smirk.
Leon ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, looking genuinely distressed. "I've got a completely different problem. There's this unbearable tension in the B.S.T. right now. Claire is incredible—she's warm, protective, and we have this deep connection. But then there's Ada. Ada wears these black stockings and a red dress into a warzone, and she looks at me like I'm the only thing on the menu. I don't want to ruin the squad's combat dynamic by choosing one and alienating the other."
Arthur set his beer down, leaning forward. "Leon, you're looking at it like a zero-sum game. You don't have to choose if you communicate openly. Go for both. If the trust is real, the dynamic doesn't shatter; it adapts. You build a foundation where neither feels secondary."
Scott looked up, his cheeks flushed from his third beer. "Is that what you do? I mean, I have feelings for Peebee. Deep feelings. But I don't know how to cross that line without compromising my command."
Arthur opened his mouth, fully prepared to impart the hard-won wisdom of managing his massive, intricate polyamorous network. "It's about establishing clear emotional boundaries while maintaining vulnerability. You look at my situation—balancing Lyra's fierce loyalty with Jack's trauma, answering to Moran in the Underworld, making sure Suvi and Miranda both feel anchored, while Scarlet—"
"Stop right there, Cousland," Hayakawa interrupted, holding up a hand. "We specifically agreed on no Nikke drama. That means absolutely no bragging from the reigning monarch of the Outpost about his twenty drop-dead gorgeous queens. Some of us are just trying to survive the week without getting our heads taken off."
Leon laughed out loud, and Scott chuckled, his anxiety bleeding away. Arthur surrendered with a gracious smile, raising his hands in defeat. "Fair enough. My lips are sealed."
Leon, emboldened by the camaraderie and the tequila, turned his gaze to the oldest man at the table. "What about you, Andersen? I mean, with all due respect... is there anyone waiting for you back at Central Command?"
The laughter died instantly. The atmosphere at the table shifted, growing suddenly heavy. Andersen stared down at his glass of scotch, his sharp features illuminated by the flickering neon light. He didn't look angry; he looked profoundly, infinitely tired.
"There was," Andersen said softly, his voice devoid of its usual booming authority. "A long time ago. She was the only woman who ever made me feel like this ruined world was worth saving. She led from the front, and she would have broken the world with her bare hands to protect the people she loved."
Andersen took a slow sip of his drink, his eyes distant. "She passed away in the line of duty. A sacrifice that bought us the ground we stand on right now. I don't have anyone waiting for me, Leon. I've just been fighting for a ghost ever since."
A somber, respectful silence fell over the booth. Arthur looked at the Deputy Chief, raised his glass silently, and the other three commanders followed suit, clinking their glasses together in a quiet tribute to the ghosts that kept them fighting.
***
Far above the neon-drenched safety of the Ark, the surface wasteland was a howling void. The sky was an expanse of bruised purple and dead gray, weeping rain and toxic ash over the skeletal remains of human civilization.
Dorothy stood alone on a desolate ridge, the bitter wind whipping the hem of her immaculate white dress around her thighs. Her anti-gravity heels hovered an inch above the scorched earth, ensuring she left no footprints in the ash. Her bright pink hair was a stark, unnatural splash of color against the monochromatic ruin.
She was staring down at a small, uneven mound of earth, marked by a crude cross fashioned from a rusted iron pipe and a fractured rifle barrel.
Pinne's grave.
Dorothy knelt gracefully, her movements painfully slow. She reached out, her gloved fingers gently brushing the freezing ash away from the rusted metal. A century had passed, yet the hollow ache in her chest felt as fresh as the day she had been left behind.
She closed her purple eyes, and her mind instantly projected the vivid, impossible images she had witnessed in the Outpost. She saw the artificial sun. She saw the laughing Nikkes walking freely through the streets. She saw the Wall of Heroes, the names of the custom models as well as mass-produced units carved into indestructible obsidian. And she saw the magnificent, towering monument of the Goddess Squad, standing proudly in the center of Arthur Cousland's sanctuary.
*He remembers us, Pinne,* Dorothy thought, a single, hot tear slipping down her cheek to freeze in the biting wind. *He knows what we gave. He knows what they stole from us. He treats them as humans. As equals.*
For a brief, agonizing moment, the century of blistering hatred that fueled her existence wavered. The desire to simply descend, to find Arthur Cousland and rest her weary head against his shoulder, was overwhelmingly seductive. She was so tired of fighting.
But then Dorothy opened her eyes, turning her gaze toward the distant, massive crater that housed the Ark's main elevator shaft. Her expression hardened, the vulnerability freezing over into crystalline resolve. Arthur Cousland was a good man, perhaps the only good man left in the world. He was building a paradise in the dark.
But the Ark—the Central Government, the corporate elites, the cowards who had locked the blast doors and left the Goddess Squad to die in the ash—still existed. They still rotted the world from the inside out.
One man's kindness could not erase a century of betrayal.
Dorothy stood up, her energy rifle humming to life with a lethal, violet glow. She was not ready to forgive. The war was not over. The board had changed, and Arthur Cousland was now its most dangerous piece, but Eden's crusade would continue.
With a final, lingering look at Pinne's grave, the Pilgrim turned her back on the past and vanished, plotting her next move in the shadows of a broken world.