It was almost ten years ago, yet she still remembers clearly.

Those streaks of light, the silence, then the deafening explosions.

That was the air raid ten years ago that leveled her hometown.

She was only eight then, yet she remembers everything like drawings in a picture book. Unchanging, etched down forever.

She remembers the cold dusk air, the crackling of the bonfire in the village square, and even the lyrics to the old folk song the adults were singing.

Then someone yelled, and everyone pointed toward the same place in the sky.

She remembers the dots of light flying towards them, trailing light whiffs of vapor behind.

Then the lights disappeared, and the hysteria ceased somewhat.

They thought it was nothing, but her mother knew better. She picked her up and hurried back to their house.

She was confused, and a little scared, and she could tell her mother was too.

They had barely made it three paces into their little wooden house before the silent warheads landed.

The thin walls exploded inwards, the fragile wood shattering into splinters as the explosions rocked the little town.

She was blown from her feet by the powerful blast and thrown against the collapsing walls of her house, the world going dark as the walls caved in.

She remembers no pain, just a numbness in her arm that confounded her. Perhaps her guardian angel was smiling that day, because the collapsing building had constructed a safety cell around her, shielding her from the rest of the barrage and destruction.

She heard screaming and the crackling of fire, which seemed to grow closer by the minute.

Then smoke began to fill the space. Thick, black, asphyxiating smoke. It stung her lungs like razors and choked up her airway. She coughed and cried, trying to get the attention of anyone outside who might help her.

In her panicked state, she must not have heard the roar of the jet engines, because just when she was about to give up hope, the rubble was pulled away from above her and the face of a man with golden hair appeared.

He reached down and picked her up, placed her down on her feet, and looked her over. The man pulled out a roll of bandages and began looping it around her arm and neck. It was only then, when he touched her arm, did the pain began to register.

It must have been terrible pain, because she collapsed on the spot, unable even to move. The man picked her up gently and brought her over to a waiting helicopter of survivors, which flew them to the city of New Asia.

Only later did she learn that that attack happened before the war had become desperate, when civilians were mostly spared and allowed to leave the frontlines via rescue vehicles.

It soon became clear that the rest of her family had not survived. Whenever she asked to see her mother, the nurses comforted her and distracted her with toys. Whenever she cried because she missed her older brother, the nurses came and sang her to sleep.

She stayed in that hospital for three months. She got her elbow fixed, a titanium joint mounted in place of where her bones were supposed to be. The amount of smoke she inhaled had badly damaged her airways, and the doctors said it would be unlikely her voice would return to normal.

A day and three months after she was rescued, a man in a black uniform came to see her. He introduced himself as captain of the twenty-second fighter squadron, and took her away from the hospital to a military boarding school meant for young children and orphans near the edge of the city.

There she began studying maths, chemistry, and physics, preparing to one day become a fighter pilot. She had no choice, but she didn’t mind anyway. She was lost.

When she felt thirsty, she drank from the fountains. When she felt hungry, she stuffed some food down her throat. She wasn’t old enough to question it, but she had nothing to look forward to, no purpose at all.

When she got bored, she would go into the simulator complex and play around with the gunnery simulator. She got good at it, and for some reason, found comfort in shooting down enemy fighters. Maybe because she felt it gave her a way to fight back, maybe because it allowed her to use her broken right arm for something, or maybe because she simply liked the moving colors.

Life wasn’t easy. Aside from the gaping hole in her heart torn open by that day, she was often bullied for her raspy voice and inward personality.

“Listen to her voice!” They would often say. “She sounds like a donkey. Come on Ying, say something. Oh wait, you can’t!” Then they’d laugh and pull her hair. Or they would all run off, leaving her alone in whatever classroom she happened to be sitting in.

Because of that, she learned never to speak louder than a whisper, so no one would be able to tell that her vocal cords were broken. No one would know about her dark past and use it against her.

Soon enough the kids got bored of her, and the constant jeering subsided somewhat. But one day, somehow, someone found out about her broken arm. Maybe they saw the scars, maybe because she always dropped things when trying to hold them with her right hand. Whatever the reason, the bullying started once more. They would poke at her scars, throw things at her arm, and call her names.

One day, a boy, a little younger than her, with jet-black hair just like hers, walked over and sat down with her while she was doing some homework. Instinctively, she tensed up, thinking he was going to make fun of her. But he didn’t.

“Where are you from?” was all he asked.

She froze, caught off guard by the seemingly sincere and harmless question. “A village, far off in the wilderness somewhere,” she whispered after a moment of thinking. “I don’t know where it is exactly.”

The boy nodded. “I’m from the factory district,” he said. “I didn’t want to work in a factory, so my parents sent me here. Where are your parents?” He asked.

“They’re… they’re… not here anymore.”

“Not here anymore?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh…” The boy mumbled, a little taken aback. “How did…” he began again but halted his words when he saw tears well up in her eyes. “Ahh, I’m… I’m sorry!” He panicked. “Please don’t cry! I didn’t mean to make you sad!”

“It’s alright…” She replied, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “It was a long time ago.”

“I see…” the boy mumbled. A silence fell between them that seemed to last forever. Finally, to break the awkwardness, the boy spoke up once more. “How about I tell you about where I’m from? Then maybe you can tell me about your village far off in the wilderness.”

“Sure…”

So he began talking, and talking, and talking. They talked for a long time, longer than Ying had ever spoken to anyone else.

They talked about the boy’s home, the factories in New Asia, and the deep rumbling of jet engines as the fighters and bombers took off. They talked about Ying’s village, the rich green hills that surrounded it, and the plump fruits that hung from the trees every autumn.

The next day they talked again, this time about games, about what they want to be.

“I want to be a commander!” The boy shouted. “I want to soar the skies and be a brave warrior!”

She asked him for his name; it turned out to be June.

The first month of summer, when roses bloom.

“What about you?” June asked.

“Ying.”

“Ying… I like it. It’s a nice name.”

“Thank you…”

The next day they talked again, and the next, and then the one after that. Before long, they had become great friends, best friends even. Every day, they would sit together, play games together, and do homework together.

She had a person who cared for her and one who she cared for.

One day, the other kids decided to have another go at her. They cornered her in a hallway and threatened to break her arm apart to see what her special joint was like.

A few kids pinned her down while another tried his best to break her elbow. Luckily for her, the titanium joint meant she felt no pain and was easily strong enough to endure the beating.

“Get away from her!” A voice shouted. June’s voice.

The other kids turned to look at him, their hungry eyes like wolves.

“I’m going to tell the masters. Hey… stop… don’t come near me,” June faltered. He knew he stood no chance against a mob like this. But he stood his ground.

“Her arm is strong ‘cause she has a machine elbow. But what about you, huh?” The leader of the mob shouted.

“Pick on someone your size!” June retorted. “Bastard.”

The bully stopped, heaving with rage. “No swearing allowed, June.”

“Tell on me then.”

“You…” He gritted his teeth before charging June.

The mob pounced like lions, fists flying.

“No!” Ying shouted, her fragile voice breaking into a strained whimper.

“Hahaha!” The kids roared. “Listen to her voice!”

Luckily, they were just kids, and the worst damage to be done was just scratches and bruises. June fought back to little avail, but he never backed down.

Soon, the masters came and pulled the mob apart. June freed himself before running to Ying and kneeling before her.

“June…” she whispered. “You’re…”

“I’m okay,” he replied. “As long as you’re okay too…”

His cheeks were swollen and his nose was bloody. There was blood on his fingers too, blood that wasn’t his own.

“You fought for me…”

June nodded.

“Thank you…”

“Let’s go to the nurse,” said June, taking Ying’s hand and lifting her to her feet. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah…”

From that day on, June became her angel, her protector, the only thing she valued in the world. She was so glad to have him by her side and wanted nothing more than for him to be happy.

But soon, June had to leave. He had been selected to enter the cadet program and would be sent off to a fighter academy.

“Come find me, okay?” June told her with tears in his eyes. “You’re a good gunner. You’ll make the cadets.”

Ying nodded, her eyes stinging a little.

So she worked even harder, hoping to one day enter the cadet program and find June. But as time went on, she slowly lost hope. They would probably never meet again, the tides of war too turbulent to bring them back together. She filed a search request but found only names on the MIA list.

Again, she had lost who she cared for. Again, she was left all alone. The rest of her early years passed like a boring diary. Nothing of importance happened, nothing that she cared about anyway. She poured her pain into gunnery, hoping to one day protect someone important.

Her hard work paid off, and at age fifteen, she was enrolled in the cadet pilot training program for her incredible performance in assessments, where she met the rest of her team.

It was then, when she walked up to them, and they took her in with open arms, that she decided she would protect these three with all she had, even if it meant death.

She didn’t want to lose another person who mattered to her, because she had already lost too much.

But now, it was going to happen all over again.

As they plummeted from the sky, flames engulfing the ruptured fuel tank.

For a moment, she froze, unable to do anything as the memories came flooding back to her. It was going to happen again. She was about to lose everything.

“Lenn! Eject!” shouted Rei, snapping her back to reality. “Lenn’s hurt bad, he can’t pull the ejection handle. You two override and eject first. I’ll try and fly this plane down.”

“If we eject, we do it together,” Ying whispered. “I don’t want to lose anyone anymore…”

“I agree,” Kang echoed.

Rei sighed. “You guys… Fine… Ying, you take over control. Kang, try contacting base for rescue. I’ll start sorting out the system failures. We have to take her down fast before the fire takes away everything.”

Ying turned to look back.

Lenn looked to be in bad shape. He was the closest to the explosion and had taken a lot of the explosive shock, knocking him unconscious.

She turned back to look forward and began trying her best to fly their plane using the little backup joystick on her armrest. She wasn’t the best flyer to begin with, and with their badly damaged fighter, it took every ounce of her power to keep them from falling out of the sky.

She tried her best to maneuver it parallel to the valley and began descending slowly. There was a patch of open land ahead, and she tried to wrestle the plane in that direction. So long as they avoid the trees, the landing gears should absorb the impact.

“Transitioning to vertical flight mode,” Kang called out as their speed slowed. “Gears coming out as well.”

The plane shuddered and shook heavily as they approached the tree line. But soon Ying realized they were going to fall short. She pushed a slider on the joystick forward to increase power to the engines, but there was a metallic pop followed by the sound of the engines spooling down.

“Shit. Lift jet one flamed out,” cursed Rei.

“We’re not gonna make it…” She panicked. The trees came up at them.

The first branches shattered against the belly of their aircraft. Then, the thicker trunks crunched into the nose of their plane with a sickening thud.

The canopy cracked, the splits in the acrylic spidering out all around them. Ying feared that the canopy would shatter altogether, and they would be impaled by the limbs of the trees.

Luckily, the weight of their plane and its rugged construction allowed it to plow through the branches as they fell toward the forest floor. They slammed into the soggy forest floor hard, the landing gears collapsing under the impact.

“Ejecting canopy, cover your head,” said Rei, pulling a red lever.

Explosive bolts blasted the acrylic canopy away, and they began unbuckling themselves. Ying felt something warm running down from her forehead. Blood, most likely.

Rei and Kang got out of their seats and tried to pull the unconscious Lenn out of the wreckage, but his seat belts were stuck together.

“Is he okay?” Asked Ying, barely able to raise her voice enough to be heard.

“I don’t think he got hit by fragmentation,” Rei replied. “But he hit his head pretty hard.”

Ying looked up at the fire and smoke, towering above them into the sky. Though it looked bad, it was still mostly confined to a hole in the upper surface of the wing.

“Knife!” Rei shouted.

Ying grabbed the field survival kit from her waist pouch and searched for her standard-issue survival knife.

“Here,” she whispered as she tossed it to Rei.

Rei and Kang then began trying to cut through the fabric of the seatbelts with the knife, but the kevlar-reinforced belts proved a formidable obstacle. Every pass or two would sever only a few fibers, and the rough fabric was quickly dulling the edge of the knife.

“This isn’t working…” said Rei through clenched teeth. “Ying! There should be a cutter in the toolbox.”

“Got it.”

Ying went to hop down onto the ground, but a massive explosion threw her off her feet as fire torched her skin and sizzled her hair. Kang and Rei yelled in shock, ducking down to avoid the fireball.

She hit the ground hard, the impact knocking the air out of her. But she still managed to look back towards the plane, gasping in horror as the burning fuel dripped into the cockpit and spilled across the grass.

“Come on, come on,” Rei grumbled, still sawing away at the seat belts, flames licking at his legs.

Ying scrambled back to their plane, trying to climb into the cockpit, her nails scratching against the smooth fuselage.

Fuel was pouring in from the cracks in the bulkhead, turning the floor of the cockpit into a sea of fire. The sloped flight deck directed the burning fuel away from Lenn and towards the gunner’s station, saving him from being burnt.

It was getting desperate.

Fear pulled at her heart; fear of losing another person precious to her. She dove into Lenn, grabbed his flight suit, and tried to pull him through the seatbelts.

“What are you doing!”

“Need to…” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Save…”

The heat must have melted the belts, because Lenn came free with another hard tug, causing Ying to lose balance and land painfully on her back against the the headrest.

“We have a problem…” Kang mumbled.

Ying looked up, flames filling her vision.

The front of the cockpit was now ablaze with fuel, growing by the second. The sloped flight deck which had saved them a moment before would now be their death.

“We’re trapped...”

Then, a cloud of white foam blasted into the fire, lunging at the dancing flames, wrapping around it like a snake and snuffing it out.

In a second, the fire was gone, and a familiar face in European flight suit greeted them.

“Erwin?!” Shouted Kang in shock.

“Yeah.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’ll explain later.”