Berlin’s morning was chilled but bright, filtered sunlight cutting through thin, high clouds. The city hummed at a modest volume—no blaring horns, no chaos. Just quiet function. Efficiency wrapped in old soul.
The Mantis, now parked in a legal heavy vehicle bay marked for “Temporary Commercial Transit,” sat like a relic in repose, watched by security drones and passersby with a mixture of curiosity and cautious admiration. Etrius leaned on the side panel with his arms folded, watching Zoey scroll through her pad.
She’d slept surprisingly well. No thrashing. No muttering. Just deep, dreamless rest.
And now, she was awake, with intent.
“Right,” she said, flicking through a list of stores. “I’ve got one shirt, no shoes, and a tail that doesn’t fit in skinny jeans. We’re fixing that.”
Etrius arched a brow. “You planning to buy a cloak or start a cult?”
“Neither. I’m building a wardrobe.” She grinned, fangs barely peeking. “Berlin’s fashion game is tight, and I am not going to walk around looking like a failed science experiment that escaped from a landfill.”
They walked the blocks slowly, Etrius matching pace, watching rooftops, alley reflections, and shopfronts as Zoey picked out her destinations with silent judgment.
She found a boutique tucked between a tram depot and a florist, one of those sleek, neon-sign places that looked like it sold either experimental vinyl or hand-sewn anti-monarchist couture. Turned out it was both.
Inside, she was in her element.
Ripped leggings with integrated tail loops. Corset-stitched asymmetrical tops in gunmetal and oxblood. Spiked collars made from upcycled aircraft alloys. Fingerless gloves with carbon mesh plating. One jacket in particular, a cropped black denim shell lined with matte chainmail underlay and purple fur trim, fit her perfectly.
The attendant didn’t even blink. She just asked for Zoey’s biometric sizes and tail articulation data, then got to work on a few quick customizations.
Etrius watched her emerge from the back room with one eyebrow raised. She looked like a punk-rock demon that had stepped out of a Berlin nightclub and into a war zone.
“Hot damn,” he muttered. “You planning to conquer the music scene, or just burn it down?”
Zoey gave a slow spin. “I feel...like me. Finally.”
He didn’t say it aloud, but he loved it. Every piece of it. The way she moved with it. The self-recognition in her eyes.
They left the shop a few hundred credits lighter and a few dozen kilograms more dangerous.
And that’s when Zoey stopped.
Liquor store. Not large. Not fancy. But old - real wood floors, glass cases, brass shelving. Bottles in precise order. Some labels were in Russian. Some Ukrainian. A few had warnings in six languages. Zoey’s eyes locked on the vodka wall like it owed her something.
Etrius immediately sensed the shift.
“Zoey.”
“I know,” she muttered, already pushing the door open. “Just looking.”
That was a lie. They both knew it.
Inside, she picked up one bottle. Then another. Then five more. She read none of them. No prices. No origins. Just caps twisted off. Liquid downed in one slow, deliberate pull each time.
The clerk said nothing as Etrius silently handed over his card. Etrius stepped in after her, his tone firm, low. “You’re better than this.”
“Don’t care,” Zoey snapped, already halfway through the third bottle. “I just want to stop feeling like this for ten fucking minutes.”
“You’ve got meds.”
“They don’t drown guilt.”
Another cap spun off. More burn down the throat. Her eyes glistened, not from pain. Not yet.
“This isn’t the way,” Etrius said.
Zoey turned, swaying slightly, eyes already red-rimmed from exhaustion and chemical blur. “What is the way, E? Huh? Pretend I’m not a biological mistake? Pretend people aren’t staring? That I’m not some stitched-together thing with steel bones and freak-show scales?”
“You’re not a mistake,” he said calmly.
She dropped an empty bottle. Glass hit tile, rolled, didn’t break.
“And yet I feel like one every damn day.” Her voice broke, just slightly. “I know this isn’t helping. I know you hate this. But I don’t care right now. Because when I’m drunk, the thoughts shut up. Just for a while.”
She looked down, arms hanging limp, tail dragging behind like a ghost limb.
“And I’d trade anything for that silence.”
Etrius didn’t touch her. Didn’t scold her. He just nodded once.
“All right,” he said softly. “Then drink. But don’t lie to me about it after.”
That hit harder than any shouting would have.
Zoey’s ears dropped. Her fingers clenched. She opened another bottle, but her hands trembled.
She didn’t drink it.
She sat instead, right there on the shop floor, back against a crate of Baltic rye vodka, staring at nothing, the bottle cradled against her chest.
Etrius stood a few feet away. Watching. Waiting. Letting her come down from it at her own pace.
Because this wasn't about drinking.
It was about the noise in her head, and how loud it was getting.
The bottles, half full half emptied, were scooped into a recycled polymer crate. Etrius took it with one arm and gently extended the other to Zoey. She took it without hesitation, letting him lift her to her feet.
She was heavy with more than muscle. But he knew how to carry weight.
Outside, the sun was still high. Berlin buzzed like it always did: quiet and composed. The crowd from earlier had long since moved on, attention spans reset, the memory of the “creature from Sigma” fading with the light.
“You want to go back?” Etrius asked softly.
Zoey wiped at her eyes, smudging eyeliner she hadn’t applied that morning. “No,” she mumbled. “I said we’re shopping.”
He looked at her, gauging.
“I’m fine,” she said, this time more steadily. “I’m not drunk. Not really. I just needed to break something inside before it broke me.”
Etrius nodded. “Alright. Then let’s shop.”
The store didn’t have a name out front, just a small black plaque with a stylized eagle holding a cartridge in one claw and a wrench in the other. The interior, however, was cathedral-like.
Wood paneling. Reclaimed iron columns. Velvet-lined cases. Muzzle flashes echoing from a soundproofed underground range. It smelled like oil, steel, and memory.
And the weapons.
Rows of them. Antique rifles from the Wehrmacht era hung beside pristine AK variants, state-mandated civilian defense pistols, and weaponry so advanced it looked like it had been printed that morning in a military prototype lab. Digital sights. Carbon-fiber rails. Plasma-chambered designs on locked pedestals. One case held a set of Rexor Arms rifles, each more dangerous and beautiful than the last.
Zoey’s eyes caught on one.
RX-20 Spec “Whiplash.” Bipod-integrated frame. Side-folding rail system. Magnetic pulse reducer. Anti-materiel. 20mm.
She stepped closer.
The shopkeeper noticed.
He was an older man, heavyset but not soft, with a sharp gaze and spotless button-up shirt under a ballistic vest embroidered with an antique GSG-9 insignia. His voice was gravel.
“Impressed?”
Zoey looked up. She responded fluently in German. “You don’t usually see Rexor prototypes outside of catalog archives. I thought the Whiplash was just a design pitch.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, smile forming. “That’s because most people read about it in stolen PDFs and assume it was fake. This one came from the prototype batch they kept off-book. I got it at auction after the CEO’s grandson passed away. Nobody knew what it was.”
Zoey stepped forward. “20mm. Semi-auto. Carbon-stabilized barrel. EM counter-recoil dampener in the chassis.”
The man’s grin grew. “You know your weapons.”
She nodded once. “*I have one too. Not a Whiplash. But something better. Something earned.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Show me.”
Zoey trotted back to the Mantis and retrieved PTRS-41 from its locker, then jogged back into the store with an unusual enthusiasm. It took both arms to hold it steady, even for her. The shopkeeper’s eyes went wide.
“Mein Gott...”
It was unholy in the best way; an antique Soviet anti-materiel rifle gutted and reborn. The wood had been replaced with precision-forged composite. A KORD muzzle brake dominated the front, coupled to a thermal sleeve over the barrel. The magazine was a drum, but box-compatible. The side rail hosted a laser/thermal combo, and the underside held a bracket for a shield with internal display screens. The firing group had been replaced entirely, updated for selective fire. It was monstrous. Elegant. Brutal.
The man stepped forward, reverently. “Did you... do this yourself?”
Zoey nodded proudly. “Every mod. Every weld. Every pain in the ass. It used to kick like God’s own sledgehammer. Now it kicks like a very angry mule. Which is progress.”
He laughed, full and genuine. “You turned a museum piece into a weapon of the future.”
She gave a half-smile. “It’s killed tanks.”
“Of course it has.” He stepped behind the counter and returned with a small, velvet-lined case. “A gift. You’ll appreciate it.”
Inside, a custom-machined scope; long-range, multi-optic, wind-compensating, with digital feed integration.
Zoey blinked. “That’s worth more than my APC.”
He shrugged. “And your rifle’s worth more than my pension. Call it a trade of mutual respect.”
She stood straighter. Tail flicked slightly.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it.
He gestured toward the range stairwell. “Want to give her a proper test run?”
She nodded once, solemn. “I always do.”
When she came back upstairs an hour later, smelling like spent brass and joy, she was smiling.
Not sarcastically.
Not bitterly.
Just proud.
Etrius was waiting at the counter, arms folded, watching her approach.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Zoey said, still in German. “I built something good. And someone understood.”
She paused, looking out the window.
“And for a moment,” she added softly in English, “I wasn’t a monster. I was just… me.”
Etrius smiled faintly.
“That’s the part of you I always see.”
By the time she returned to the Mantis, the scope gifted and mounted, she'd found something solid to hold onto again.
The grocery store was... brief.
They lasted twelve minutes inside before Etrius gave up entirely on the concept of a “local palate.”
Zoey wandered off to inspect a rack of pickled herring that came in black glass jars shaped like submarines. Etrius stared at a wall of processed meat products labeled only in stylized compound nouns that gave him existential dread.
“Wurstsalzfleischkäseextrakt,” he muttered. “That’s not food. That’s a threat.”
They left with essentials: fresh bread, stewed vegetables, cured meat, and two large bottles of neutral-calorie electrolyte paste that Zoey claimed “tastes like unseasoned regret.”
Etrius carried the bags.
Zoey yawned.
The next stop was a sleek, half-buried auto shop built into a slope of the residential tech district. The place looked like a modernist bunker, stainless steel panels, auto-lifting bays, robotic arms suspended from ceiling tracks, and an AI receptionist that greeted them with a voice too chipper to be trusted.
“We’re looking for parts,” Etrius told the human tech on shift, showing him the Mantis’s maintenance logs on a hardlined datachip.
The guy, a lanky kid with neon hair and a HUD interface half-glitched across his cornea, scanned the logs, then blinked slowly.
“Yeah, no. We don’t carry prewar military-grade APC suspension hardpoints. That stuff’s museum-tier. Closest we get is maybe some armored courier trucks from the 2080s.”
Etrius nodded, not surprised.
Zoey stood off to the side, blinking slowly. Her tail dragged slightly on the floor. The vodka had caught up with her, bleeding through her system like molasses over hot coals. Her eyes were half-lidded. She leaned against the Mantis, mumbling something about soft blankets and nap grenades.
Etrius chuckled, thanked the tech, and guided her back inside the vehicle.
By 5pm, the sun was a warm smear across the Berlin skyline. Streetlights flickered awake. The Mantis hummed faintly with onboard systems warming up for night mode. The windows dimmed automatically.
Inside, it was soft and golden.
Etrius moved quietly in the kitchenette, heating sliced vegetables in oil, dicing the cured meat, mixing it with the paste and herbs Zoey insisted "didn’t smell like ass.” He’d found a way to make it edible, turning it into a thick stew with crusty bread on the side.
Zoey sat on the cot, barely upright, wrapped in his cloak again. Her head lolled forward until the smell of food brought her back to the present.
“Y’cookin’ again?” she asked, voice hoarse but content.
“Mm-hmm,” Etrius nodded, spooning a portion into a steel bowl.
She reached out, then paused, prosthetics twitching.
“Same problem?”
Zoey nodded weakly. “Can’t get a good grip. Prosthetics aren't responding correctly.”
Etrius knelt, resting one knee on the floor, and held the bowl for her, same as before. Warm. Steady.
She leaned forward, eating slowly, carefully.
“Thanks,” she murmured between bites.
“Any time. I understand, trust me,” he said.
They didn’t speak much after that. Just ate. The Mantis was quiet. The air smelled like roasted garlic and bread and machine oil and home.
After the food was gone, she didn’t try to move. Just slumped sideways, head on Etrius’s shoulder, breath slowing.
Etrius shifted to sit beside her on the cot. He pulled the blanket over them, letting the weight settle.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.
In the heart of a foreign city, inside a machine older than the streets outside it, they just sat. Safe, warm, and still.
And for a few precious hours…That was enough.
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