The trigger’s pull broke cleanly, sending the triggering pin into the cartridge, igniting the powder, and sending the bullet on its path to destiny.

Spinning as it accelerated, the bullet left the barrel of the gun milliseconds ahead of the expanding flare of flaming gases, pushing the little slug to speeds that no human could survive.

As the flare of gases dissipated, the bullet hit, penetrated, and ricocheted through a piece of metal, deforming it and causing pieces of the shell to peel away as softer metal began to expand from the forces exerted on it.

The bullet continued onwards, into a softer material; flesh. Tunnelling through muscle, the bullet smashed a bone into dozens of shards, many of which were pulled further into the body by the sudden vacuum caused by the motion.

Slowing, the bullet deformed as it gouged a deep slash into an artery and tore open a lung, causing the air inside to whistle and wheeze into the body, collapsing the other lung from the sudden change in pressure.

Finally, the now-totally unrecognisable slug exited the body, punching a ragged hole through another bone, tearing through some fabric, and finally ending its short flight by burying itself into a stone wall fifty feet away.

Excel stared blankly as Ilpalazzo dropped to his knees, shock making its mark on his face before he reached up and touched the gaping wound in his chest. She instinctively knew the bullet was lethal, so Excel turned away from the wavering form of Ilpalazzo, walking purposefully towards the gaping hole that had been blasted into the thick wall by a Ropponmatsu’s self-destruction.

Standing at the exit to the mobile fortress, Excel looked back into the cavernous depths of the destroyed base, wondering if she should stay with her only friends as the impressive edifice began to crumble into chunks of concrete and metal, turning into a tomb of dreams and fantasies.

"I have lost everything. Ilpalazzo is dead by my hand, Menchi is missing, and that strange woman who keeps on dying managed to escape with one of the people who found me after I had been hurt. I may as well try to make a new life for myself."

With that, Excel slowly stripped off her dust and blood-covered vest, which had once been a light aquamarine shade, but was now dull grey and brown. Despite the work and effort put into the vest’s repair work, much of it done by her own hand, Excel felt revolted by the touch of the thick, soft material, which had so often symbolized her loyalty to Ilpalazzo, and had often survived most of her misadventures without much wear and tear.

Excel did not care about any of that, as she viciously tore the vest to shreds, pausing only to pick up a picture that had fluttered out of her pocket after the vest had been reduced to a small pile of fabric. She looked at the picture, sighed, and placed the faded photo into a pocket in her shorts, before she started to walk through the wasteland towards one of the surviving buildings in the distance. As Excel walked towards the drunkenly leaning tower she had randomly decided on, the last few ruins of the mobile fortress collapsed inwards, raising a cloud of dust, ashes, and a few scraps of light purple cloth.

The wasteland was unforgiving, the dry winds leaching the moisture from Excel’s skin, and the sand blown through the air made breathing difficult. As she walked away from the devastation, Excel, for the first time in her life, was truly lost. She had severed all ties to her life as a member of ACROSS, and what ties she would have wanted to keep had been erased due to her amnesia. Her only other companion, the puppy Menchi, had been in the fortress when it had gone up like a roman candle, and Excel didn’t count on the small dog to not be blasted into its namesake.

Instead of complaining, Excel continued to walk, heading steadily south to where Pad and Dominick’s village lay. Eventually, stressed, tired, and extremely sore, Excel found an area where the air was still, she wasn’t getting constantly stung by grit being flung at her, and there was enough light to see mostly around her. Sighing as she finally sat down, Excel pulled off her boots, stretching her toes out of their cramped positions, and pulled the picture out of the pocket in her shorts. Under the moonlight, she could barely make out the picture, but she knew almost instantly what it held within the confines of the coloured paper.

The picture had been taken a few weeks after Excel had been viciously assaulted by a robot called Ropponmatsu, and as a response, Ilpalazzo had let the two senior members of the Ideological Organization ACROSS to take a break from their normal operations to further their plans of world domination. Excel smiled as the bittersweet memories of her past life flowed through her, tinged by the pain of the bullet wound that had nearly killed her. Raising her right hand, she felt the thick bandages that had stanched the bleeding from the final act of betrayal against her.

Shaking off the memories, Excel again looked at the photo, amazed that something so small and fragile could have survived everything she had gone through. The picture showed her in her casual clothes, the baggy green cargo pants and yellow turtleneck that she always wore when the weather got cool, grinning and mugging for the camera. Just beside her in the picture was a slightly shorter woman, wearing a thick sweater and a pair of jeans and also smiling, just not as widely as Excel’s grin.

"Ha-chan. I wonder what happened to you? I know you would have been concerned about me ever since the city was destroyed, but your loyalty to ACROSS would have kept you from looking for me. I wonder if you’re really dead, or did you manage to escape from the explosion? I hope you’re alive somewhere out there, because you’re my only friend out in this forsaken wasteland." Excel gently put the picture back in her pocket, wondering what she would do, then sighed and looked up at the stars above her.

"I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have to rebuild my life, but I don’t know where to begin. Maybe I’ll just try to find some other people first." Excel sighed again, leaned back against the ruined wall she had taken shelter behind, and fell asleep, curled into a ball against the night’s encroaching chill.