Title: …For We Are Many
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: 86
Characters: Lena, Shin, and…?
Setting: Alternate followup to episode 11 of the anime.
Rating: PG for low-key body horror.
Length: 5,441 words.
Summary: Things changed after Spearhead Squadron disappeared. Lena sets out to understand why… and must face the difficult answers.




When I’m part of the Legion… whose name will I call out?



A month after the last survivors of Spearhead Squadron dropped out of contact, the Legion suddenly and mysteriously withdrew into its own territory.

Seemingly random attacks did continue to happen, here and there along the Eastern Front. Small, fast-moving groups of Ameise units carried out lightning raids, engaging in brief battles with the defending squadrons of Juggernauts, only to break off and retreat as quickly as they came… invariably causing not a single fatality among the Processors.

Within the Gran Mur, the long-complacent generals of the Republic were thrown into confusion by this sudden change of tactics. Fearing a new and unprecedented strategy of deception that disguised something far more dangerous, they searched frantically for a pattern in the timing and locations of the attacks, but they could come up with nothing. The very uncertainty of this new behavior kept tensions running high among the upper echelons of the military, even as the media cheerfully reported to the public that the Legion was being routed.

Only one person in the entire Republic Army believed she had an answer to the mystery; but for many days she made no move, as she nurtured her own agonizing suspicions in private. There was no logical explanation for the idea that consumed her mind, but only what she felt within her heart.

The recently-demoted Captain Vladilena Milizé knew things her superiors would not have dreamed of. Truths about the Legion, about the real kind of hell the Processors could be fated to, about Spearhead Squadron and most of all its dreaded Undertaker: additional puzzle pieces she alone possessed, and did not dare trust to the generals. After all, she was still under censure for her unauthorized orders in support of Spearhead at the start of their final mission.

However, that was only one reason for her silence. It was something far deeper than military politics that truly choked her at every thought of what she suspected. On a purely personal level, the picture that puzzle formed in her mind was too terrible to accept, and it gripped her instinctively with a desperate denial… even as the news of each bloodless skirmish only made her more sure.

Still, she had to know.

At last she was able to arrange a visit to Spearhead Squadron’s base, in the Eighty-Sixth District beyond the Gran Mur. She saw the way they had lived, and found the heartbreaking farewell they left for her. She met Lev Aldrecht, the chief mechanic, and heard the story of a guilt-ravaged Alba who had been unable to save his family from the fate of the Eighty-Six.

When Lena asked to borrow one of the base’s old pre-war vehicles, along with some of the excess supplies the Processors were not using as their missions dwindled, Lev did not question or argue. He merely told her very gently that she was a fool, and gave her a battered military truck loaded with fuel and rations. She did not ask for any weapons, nor did he suggest them.

Although he claimed to be as baffled as anyone by the Legion’s sudden reticence, she wondered then if his thoughts had gone to the same place as hers… or maybe he just believed she had a death wish, and didn’t mind granting it to an officer of the military that had taken everything from him.

Maybe such a guess was not so far off. If Lena was wrong in what she suspected, she wasn’t quite sure she would want to go on living anyway.

And besides that…

And besides that, if she was wrong, the remaining life of the entire Republic might well be very short.

So with no goodbyes, before dawn on a cold snowy morning, she slipped away and set off toward the heart of the Legion’s territory.



Lena quickly lost count of the days she drove through empty white landscapes. She encountered no Legion units at all; it seemed their token attacks were continuing to decrease. The snow covered any remaining Juggernaut tracks she might have been able to follow, but before leaving the Capital, she had studied every old pre-war map and fragment of long-range surveillance data she could find to chart the likely course of Spearhead Squadron.

One evening at sunset, just as her supplies were dwindling to the halfway point that would force her to turn back, the pale sameness of the scenery was broken at last by five unnatural shapes half-buried in the snow.

She pulled the truck to a stop and climbed out, making her way toward the nearest object. Patches of metal painted a dull yellow-gold showed through, and as she drew nearer, she began to make out the shape. It was an inactive and heavily damaged M101 Barrett: the support drone that carried supplies for Processor squadrons.

A sudden tightness swelled in Lena’s chest. She quickened her pace, and upon reaching the abandoned machine, she couldn’t resist the urge to gently place her gloved hand upon its hull.

Their “Fido”…

As the tightness gave way to a sick feeling of dread, she snapped her gaze upward, taking in the other hulks nearly lost beneath the white drifts. At this distance, protruding twisted gun barrels and shattered walker legs left no more doubt of what they were.

Lena ran breathlessly to each Juggernaut in turn. She forced herself to look into their cockpits, fighting against the horrifying thought that she might find a headless corpse within; but they were devoid of bodies either living or dead. She brushed away snow to seek the emblems on their hulls, her heart squeezed by a bewildering mix of despair and relief as she matched images to call signs in her mind.

Wehrwolf. Snow Witch. Laughing Fox. Gunslinger.

Yet there were only four destroyed Juggernauts—and the fifth emblem she did not find was the one most precious of all to her.

Her head spinning, unsure of what to do next or even what to feel, Lena returned to Fido’s wreckage.

Even if it—he—couldn’t be fully salvaged, maybe he could still help her. If his central processor was not too badly damaged, maybe she could still connect to it via the tablet computer she had brought, and access his memory. Maybe he could at least help her know what had happened in the battle that took place here, or even where the last survivors of Spearhead Squadron might have gone afterward.

With a fresh surge of energy, she began digging into the snowdrift that had formed around Fido, trying to clear it away so she could take a better survey of the damage—

And her fingers struck a hard object that was entirely separate from the drone, judging by its careful placement in front of him.

Frantically Lena excavated the shape, clawing away handfuls of snow until she uncovered a metal box. Her hands trembled as she threw open its latches and raised the lid.

The box was filled to the top with small jagged pieces of metal—and each one was carved with a name.

Emotions welled up violently within Lena’s chest, physically bursting out of her as a short sob. She reeled away from the heavy burden that Undertaker had so deliberately left behind, and stumbled back to the truck.

It must have taken her hours to cry herself to sleep.



As Lena awakened to the sound of an approaching heavy rumble, there was a moment when she thought she was back there: on that night, in that forest, surrounded by the wreckage and flames that had killed her father.

…No. She felt only cold rather than heat, and the light that filtered through the glass in front of her was not that of fire, but the first morning rays of the sun.

Snapping to her senses, she took stock of the situation. She was in the cab of the truck, bundled up in a blanket, exactly as she had been when she let herself drown in tears the night before. Through the windshield she could see the lifeless hulk of Fido a stone’s throw away, and the metal box placed reverently before him, both surrounded by disturbed snow and her own uneven bootprints.

As for the rumbling, it was coming from a single, massive Legion unit that was marching across the open terrain—seemingly on a direct course for the truck and the ruins around it.

The heavy tank type was a monster, easily twice the size of a Löwe. It moved on eight legs like some kind of savage mechanical spider, and its heavily armored turret was bristling with guns. Lena had seen something like it just once before: a hazy, distant glimpse, just for a moment, when she had tapped into Wehrwolf’s vision to survey the battlefield where Undertaker finally faced his brother.

Lena didn’t feel afraid. She didn’t feel anything but the cold that surrounded her, inside and out… because she saw the marking no ordinary Legion drone would bear on its pristinely white, indistinguishable carapace. She knew what it was, long before it came close enough to make out the shape of the one emblem she had not found among the abandoned Juggernauts.

She was weaponless, but she didn’t try to hide. She only sat very still, barely breathing, as the behemoth came almost close enough for her to count every rivet in its hull.

…It ignored the truck and Lena herself as if they were not there. Instead, its target proved to be the remains of Fido—or rather the box of name-etched shards at his feet. As Lena watched, two streams of something like shimmering gelatinous metal flowed out from beneath the Legion unit, their ends forming the shape of hands to pick up the box with astonishing care. It was lifted and stowed somewhere in the machine’s underbelly, and the hands disappeared to wherever they had come from.

Only then did the machine seem to hesitate, and then slowly turn—giving Lena a full view of the image of a headless skeleton emblazoned on its side.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Major Milizé.”

Lena’s heartbeat quickened, yet her body felt so strangely numb as she stepped out of the truck and strode forward to face the machine directly. She was a housefly confronting a tarantula: in her mind she was aware that it could kill her in a blink, with its crushing legs or its ghostly hands or with one simple bullet to the head.

Yet now she knew that wasn’t going to happen.

The reason why was exactly the impossible, horrifying notion that had crawled into her brain ever since the Legion’s behavior changed. When she had time to fully process it, deep down, she knew this confirmation would carry a grief that would tear her heart to pieces; but she couldn’t deal with that right now. Not until she understood the how that accompanied the why.

“But you knew I would,” she answered the deadly metal construct that towered over her, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice and gaze. “Of all the officers in the Republic Army, you knew I was the only one who could begin to guess why the Legion suddenly became too inept to kill a single Processor… because I was the only one who knew you.”

Astonishingly, the reaction to her words was the sound of a quiet, rueful chuckle. It was deeper than it should have been, shrouded by a reverberating metallic distortion, but the tone of it was unmistakable.

“I never should have told you so much. …I’m sorry.”

In one sense, the voice was painfully familiar: even through the synthetic distortion, Lena recognized it as the same one she had shared so many thoughtful evening conversations with, across the miles on opposite sides of the Gran Mur. Yet at the same time it seemed to be layered with another voice, a little bit lighter and softer. That second layer tugged insistently at her consciousness in search of a memory, but she couldn’t think about that mystery yet.

“You’re still you,” she breathed, and it was a question even if she didn’t phrase it as such.

This earned a darker, sharper short bark of a laugh, but there was no humor in the sound. “Who knows, Major. From the inside, even I don’t know if some trace of a soul still lives inside this shell… or if I’m just a machine that thinks it was once human because it carries human memories.”

Even in that dangerous sense of self-deprecation, Lena heard exactly the man she knew better than he had ever meant her to.

“I think you know. Better than anyone.” She stared up at what she could only interpret as the “face” of the machine, and the unseen lens that she could feel watching her, somewhere amidst the glaring barrels of cannons and machine guns that were likewise inevitably pointing straight at her head. For her part, she was certain enough of the being she was speaking with to let the metaphysical question drop; what mattered first and foremost was still the how. “What happened to you?”

Strangely, there was a genuine body language to the way the machine moved. The subtle shift of its vast weight, the slight turn of its turret, that in a human would plainly express awkwardness and discomfort.

“It was Rei. At the moment I destroyed the unit that was his host, he was able to transfer himself to a backup. A transfer performed in the field like that is unstable, so he knew he wouldn’t last much longer, but he wanted to spend whatever time he had left… watching over me.” A faint tremor that was all too human quivered through the double-layered voice. “During our battle, the programming that suppressed most of his identity and memories was broken somehow. He didn’t want me to become part of the Legion anymore… but he knew he couldn’t stop it from happening. So he made a different plan.”

A pause. The monstrous metal shell was still, but somehow Lena could sense the emotions roiling beneath that silence, and waited patiently.

“When Spearhead fought its last battle, Rei… had to stand back and let me be taken,” the story continued at last, in a heavy tone. “He couldn’t fight the numbers we were facing, any more than we could. He knew there was no way to save me with my human body intact. All he could do was watch me die again—and wait for whatever chance he had to save my mind.”

“Are you saying he hacked the assimilation process somehow?” Lena breathed, her eyes widening. “How could that even be possible for one rogue unit?”

“It wasn’t. Not in the literal sense, anyway. Rei couldn’t interfere directly in a new Shepherd’s programming. Instead, as my brain was being assimilated, he uploaded all that was left of himself into me. He hoped to pass on to me whatever it was that broke the programming in him, or at least sacrifice himself as a buffer between me and the memory suppression. But what actually happened…”

The ghost within the machine trailed off, evidently struggling for words to express the change he had gone through. Yet over the course of his quietly horrifying story, Lena realized the mysterious second layer of his voice had been growing stronger—and suddenly she knew where she had heard it before. She remembered soft kind words that made her feel safe: an offer of chocolate, a story of a family from a long-lost country, and a somber resolve that had taken root in her heart to guide her through all the years since.

“Rei merged with you,” she gasped, staring up at the machine with a new sense of terrible wonder.

“…Yes.” Both voices now resonated equally. “I’ve been speaking to you as Shin to help make it easier to understand. But the truth is, whatever I really am… both of the Nouzen brothers are one within me. We’re finally together again, after all—and now there’s nothing that can ever separate us.”

For one fleeting moment, Lena heard such peace and warmth in the entwined voices of the brothers that she couldn’t help responding with a faint, sad smile.

“I’m… glad you at least have each other again.” Her cheeks abruptly reddened as she thought of her brief acquaintance with Rei, and the helpless child she had been when he rescued her. “But does that mean you both remember—?”

“A very brave little girl.”

With those words, Rei’s voice became the dominant one; and Lena saw that one of those haunting liquid-metal hands, albeit much smaller than before, was slowly emerging from the underside of the machine. Her heart skipped a beat, but she did not move as it cautiously rose toward her.

Inhuman fingertips touched her left cheek with the utmost gentleness and care. The smooth pliant substance was cooler than flesh, but far warmer than the snow-chilled steel of the machine’s hull.

“I’m so glad I was able to save you that night—because it meant that all these years later, you were there to save Shin from me. Thank you, Lena.”

The girl swallowed hard. In that moment her face was flushed and her emotions brimming, as embarrassment and a tiny note of subdued gladness flickered through the horror and sorrow of it all. …Perhaps it was something about hearing Shin’s voice finally echo her given name beneath Rei’s.

With a will, she wrestled her own personal feelings down. Vital questions remained unanswered, and she knew there was far more to the story.

“But your merging… it did more than just reunite you this way, didn’t it? Much more. Because of… Shin’s power?”

The hand on her cheek demurely withdrew, and when the combined Nouzens spoke, it was Shin’s voice that assumed dominance again. Perhaps Rei’s presence in their shared being was the weaker one now, after the multiple transfers of whatever comprised his essence; but a part of Lena hoped it was merely in deference to Shin’s familiarity with her. Although they had never met face to face while he possessed a human body, he had grown closer to her in months of long-distance conversations than Rei ever could in the short time he looked after her.

“I can’t explain what happened. Somehow, when we became one, it unleashed a power that changed everything. It didn’t just break the programming of all the other Shepherds—it overwhelmed the entire collective consciousness of the Legion itself. Even the White Sheep, the units that never had their processors upgraded with human brain structures, all just stopped… and they didn’t move again until I willed them to.”

“Then it’s true.” Lena drew a deep, shuddering breath. “You really are controlling the Legion now…”

“I am the Legion.”

For the first time, something hard and unsettling crept into the double-voice of the merged Nouzens. The machine’s turret swiveled ninety degrees, as if to look away from Lena.

“It goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. If the assimilation had run its course normally, the mind of Shinei Nouzen would have been just one more drop in the ocean of the Legion’s collective. But combined with Rei, and the connection to it he already had… it’s as if there was some kind of feedback wave that consumed the Legion’s AI, fusing it too with this thing we’ve become. In milliseconds that felt like an eternity, mind and machine bled into one another, until…” A physical shudder rattled through the heavy armor. “Until the Legion itself was assimilated into me instead, and beyond the confining shell of this host unit, I could feel the entire sum of its forces like one vast second body. It isn’t only their voices I hear now. Every last damn Ameise and Eintagsfliege is a part of me, and I’m a part of them, feeling them through senses nothing human could ever know… There are no words to describe it to you.”

Lena’s stomach twisted. Through the Para-RAID, she had experienced a small taste of what Shin’s former extrasensory powers subjected him to. For that to be multiplied by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of points of perception that the full numbers of the Legion represented…

“How can you endure it?” she asked in a trembling voice, and felt a chill in spite of herself as the turret with its lethal armaments swung back to face her.

“Because I’m not human. I only have human memories—but I am a machine now. …Please remember that for your own sake, Major.”

Instinctively Lena shook her head in denial. “You’re more than just your memories. Your humanity is still—”

“And there’s one more reason.” The interruption was slightly brusque. “I can also endure this because… I’m not alone.”

From something in the tone of those last words, Lena realized they referred to more than the reunion of two brothers. She exhaled a soft gasp that steamed in the wintry air, feeling warmth rise behind her eyes.

“The other members of Spearhead Squadron…?”

A quiet sigh vibrated through the hull of the machine.

“Theo is still having some trouble adjusting. Raiden, Anju, and Kurena… They’re coping a little better.”

“No,” Lena whispered, her heart dropping as she thought of the other vivid voices that had so often chimed in on her past conversations with Shin. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how much a part of her clung to the hope that their fate was different than his.

“When the last battle came, I tried to leave them behind—but they followed me anyway, because they’re idiots.” A faint chuckle followed, but it carried only a tone of sadness and regret. “I never had the chance to save them from this. They’d already been assimilated too by the time I… ‘came online’. I can only be glad they don’t remember anything between the death of their human bodies and the moment the Legion’s control was broken.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Lena insisted automatically. “I’m sure they know that too. And even the way things have turned out… I know they must still be glad to be with their captain.”

“I don’t think I could have made it through this without them. …I discovered that I can delegate my control over a portion of the Legion’s forces to other Shepherds. That way, they’ve been able to take some of the strain when it became too much. Since they were already used to hearing the Legion’s voices through me, I think that made it easier for them, at least in part.” A grim pause. “And besides the last of Spearhead, even a few of the older Shepherds who were freed from the suppression programming are with us. A small handful were strong enough to adapt… but once they truly became conscious of what they were, and the things they’d done while slaved to the Legion, most of them still suffered too much. There was only one mercy we could give them.”

The implication hung clear and heavy in the air, recalling the very reason why Shin had been known as Undertaker: the Reaper of the Eastern Front. Lena drew a slow breath before directing her next question specifically at his part of the Nouzens’ intertwined soul, because only he could answer it.

“Tell me the truth, Shin. Even you didn’t know, did you? Underneath this ‘suppression programming’ you’ve described… more of a person’s self could survive within the Shepherds than even you were able to sense.”

“…I only understood fully when I heard Rei come back to himself, and apologize to me—at the moment I pulled the trigger.”

There was nothing Lena could say to the guilt and pain of those words. Her eyes brimmed with a dampness that she quickly scrubbed away against the side of her glove. For the Nouzens’ part, they were silent for a long moment, and she could only imagine the bittersweet glow of mingled apologies and comfort being shared in some electronic innerspace.

Now more than ever, it was understandable why she had heard the distressing sound of Shin bawling his guts out that day. If for even a moment he had made contact with Rei’s true soul beneath the Legion’s corruption, he must have felt he had murdered his brother—and just when there might have been a chance to save him instead. The defection of a Shepherd that had regained free will would have changed everything.

As things stood, perhaps it was for the best. If Shin hadn’t destroyed Rei’s original host unit, Rei might not have resorted to the measures that saved Shin in the only way he could, finally bonding the brothers forever… and leading them to attain an unknown power that had conquered the Legion from within.

Even so, none of it should ever have had to happen in the first place.

Impulsively she offered them an apology of her own. For being a part of the society and the military that had cost them their home, parents, friends, and finally their own flesh and blood; for being so naïve and thoughtless when she first became the Handler of Spearhead Squadron. For being powerless to undo the hurt of millions, even though she herself had never wanted to cause it or see it.

“You both suffered so much… and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of it.”

Gleaming muzzles tipped upward just slightly to focus on her again. It fascinated her to notice how not unnerved she was at that by now.

“You have nothing to apologize for. In the end, you’re the reason we lasted long enough to gain this chance to stop the bloodshed—and not only that of the Legion.”

And there it was: a lead-in to the last question that remained to be asked. Once again, Lena did not need an answer so much as mere confirmation.

“Now that you have the Legion’s power at your command… you’re planning to liberate the Eighty-Six, aren’t you? Before the Republic Army slaughters them to push its crimes under history’s rug.”

It was decidedly odd to see a hundred tons of murderous steel twitch in surprise, but that was exactly what happened.

“You know that’s their plan?”

Lena smiled bitterly. “My own uncle said as much to me himself.”

It was her turn to be surprised by the faint, incredulous laugh in response. “You never did miss anything… Yes. If there’s no war to accomplish their dirty work for them, it won’t be long before your superiors decide they’ll have to eliminate the evidence of their crimes by themselves—even if it means committing genocide firsthand. That’s why—”

“It’s why you continued to stage fake Legion attacks, without actually killing any Processors,” Lena interrupted, nodding firmly. “You had to keep the generals thinking they still needed their cannon fodder. You’ve been buying time to create a plan—but time is running out before they realize the Legion is no longer really a threat.”

“We already have a plan. One that could remove every last Eighty-Six from harm’s way without firing a single shot at an Alba, or spilling any more blood. We just needed some time to prepare. To adapt to our new bodies, to make sure we could control the power of the Legion without hurting anyone by accident—but now we’re almost ready. …There’s only one thing we’re still missing.”

“You need someone on the inside,” Lena inferred coolly, and was rewarded with another inarticulate noise of astonishment.

“How did you know everything before you ever came out here?”

“Don’t blame me if you’re predictable,” Lena smirked. “So what’s the plan? Getting the access you need might not be easy for me after the things I’ve already done, but—”

“Hold up, Major. Helping us could make you the one person most at risk—and that from your own people, if you were to be caught before we can pull it off.” A beleaguered sigh. “I argued with Raiden for weeks about contacting you. He insists you’re the only choice we have, but… I didn’t want to involve you.”

“I’ll involve myself, thank you,” Lena retorted, squaring her shoulders as she gazed steadily up the gun barrels of the machine. “The only way I can deal with what’s happened to you is to believe there’s a purpose for it all. It must be to save the Eighty-Six—and I want to be a part of that. When you’re still thinking of saving others after all that’s been done to you, how could I ask myself to do anything less?”

A hesitation. And then, much more quietly: “I also didn’t want you to see me like this.”

The earnest confession made Lena’s heart break, but she forced a wan smile past the lump in her throat. “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of. You never asked for this… and besides, I’m not afraid of you.”

“Major…”

“Incidentally, I was demoted to Captain for that little assist I gave you—and besides, I’m not your Handler anymore. Just call me Lena.” Her smile turned crooked as she appraised the monstrously powerful marvel of engineering that loomed over her. “Anyway, all things considered, it could have been worse. Instead of this, you could have ended up in just a plain old Ameise unit.”

Despite any superhuman processing power the conjoined minds of the Nouzens had access to, it must have taken a full three seconds for the grim mischief in her tone to register. However, once it did, the attempt at gallows humor seemed to be welcomed as the accepting gesture of kindness that it was.

“Careful,” came the answer, with its own rather delicate wryness. “You’re going to insult Kurena with talk like that. …She’s an Ameise now, herself.”

Lena smiled a little wider to hide the pang of hurt. “I want to finally meet her. I want to meet all of them.”

“I’ll escort you to the Legion’s home base. It’s sort of an honor, actually; you’ll be the first living human ever to set foot inside it.” There was something sweetly awkward in the words. “After we discuss our plans, you can stay for the night, and start back in the morning. For obvious reasons, we have no food, but we can offer you a warm shelter.”

“Deal,” Lena agreed, and followed as the machine turned to stride toward the truck. Those eight massive mechanical legs could have easily outrun that vehicle, much less the girl herself… yet it moved beside her slowly and with great care, matching her pace as she trudged through the snow.

There was still so much painful reality to process. The full tragedy of her friends’ fate, their loss of flesh and blood, had still not truly sunk in; but Lena knew it would come, and it would devastate her when it did. Yet in the meantime, and far more urgently, she had also found an improbable new hope to pursue: the hope that the very engines of destruction they once fought could become the key to securing safety and peace for the oppressed. The future beyond that mission was impossible to predict, but if they succeeded, perhaps the changed survivors of Spearhead Squadron would finally be able to feel their sacrifice was worth the reward.

Lena intended to do all she could to make certain of it herself.

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2021 Jordanna Morgan