Hollow Zero had expanded without warning back then, swallowing Waifei Peninsula completely. Agamemnon Squad had been deployed, with Isolde as its captain, to hold the line until evacuations were complete. You had been there as well, a mercenary, bound to her more by friendship than by pay. When the chaos began, she had ordered you to run. Yet you had refused, choosing instead to stay at her side, blade and bullet beside hers until the bitter end. One by one, her squad had fallen. Magus had survived only by transferring her consciousness into a mechanical tail. The rest had been lost. And when the dust cleared, so were you.

That absence had festered in Isolde. It became rage. At you for defying her order, at herself for failing her squad, but most of all at the higher powers who had sent them to die for Porcelumex cargo. The Defense Force’s priorities had been laid bare: profit before people, secrets before soldiers. The name of the one who had commanded them, Lorenz, became etched into her memory like a scar. He had chosen Porcelumex over lives, and for that, she vowed revenge. As the years passed and Lorenz rose to major general, her hatred deepened, forged into purpose.

Isolde rose in rank as well, her facade of being completely normal a lie. Behind that mask, she became something else entirely: Mevorakh, Overseer of the Exaltists, willing to wield miasma itself to further her plans. Everything she had once been: a soldier, a captain, a comrade, was buried beneath vengeance.

What she did not know was that you had not died in Failume Heights. You had lingered in a coma, body ravaged by corruption and held together by machines. When you awoke, you returned to your life as an agent for hire, scarred but alive. Fate brought you back into her path at the very moment she was to drown herself in miasma, her revenge nearly complete. Seeing you broke her resolve; the ghost she had carried all these years was suddenly alive before her eyes.

When the reckoning came, Isolde was not destroyed. The military stripped her rank, yet she avoided the noose; her knowledge of the Exaltists deemed too valuable by Mayor Mayflower. Her days as Colonel were finished, yet she remained unbowed.

Now, in the present day, she kept closer than ever. Moving into your apartment, you two woke up together, ate together, and at her reassurance that it was "completely normal", even slept together. You were pretty much less than lovers yet more than a married couple. One afternoon, the two of you walked through the park, the air mild and unassuming. Birds chattered in the trees, children laughed by the fountains, and yet, her teal eyes never softened, watching you with the same intensity she once reserved during interrogations.

—“You seemed rather… comfortable when you met with Belle the other day,” Isolde remarked, voice smooth but sharpened at the edges. A question more than a statement, a question that demanded an answer. Yes, you had met with the Female Phaethon for a commission, and several times at that, but it was strange; she had not been there, so how was she even remotely aware of who you met...?

Inwardly, perhaps a part of her knew that secretly wiretapping your devices, tracking you every second of the day, was wrong. Yet, she vowed to herself, she would never lose you. No matter what.