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Not blind, naive hope — but the hard, bloody kind that grows only after the worst battles. Hope born of scars, of sacrifice, of choosing to fight for something better even when the odds said you shouldn't bother.
Nora's eyes lingered on Sico for a beat longer, her expression unreadable in the flickering light of the damaged command center. She gave a small, curt nod — the kind that said more than words — then turned, stepping back into the pool of scorched blue light.
A moment later, she was gone. The teleportation pulse flared again with a brief shriek of air and energy, leaving nothing but a faint burn mark on the metal floor where she had stood. Silence followed — the kind that settles after a seismic shift, as if even the war-torn building was catching its breath.
Sico stood still, staring at the empty spot for a moment. His pulse was still ticking too fast, his body strung taut with the aftershock of what he'd just agreed to.
Liberty Prime. Madison Li. A secret defection. A silent sabotage mission planted inside the Brotherhood's most secure fortress.
The kind of gambit that didn't just change the board — it flipped the entire table.
He didn't let himself dwell on the enormity of it. Not now. He turned away, reaching for the comms unit on the wall, about to call the others back in to regroup — when the door slammed open behind him.
It was Sarah.
Her cheeks were flushed, a sheen of sweat gleaming at her brow. Her rifle was slung over one shoulder, and her eyes were sharp with urgency.
"Reinforcements just arrived," she said without preamble, still catching her breath. "Sanctuary sent more than we expected — a full squad with gear, plus heavy support. Preston says they rolled out as soon as they got word of the Institute's attack."
Sico blinked, the weight of the past few hours suddenly making his legs ache beneath him. His relief came with a hint of guilt. They'd lost forty-six people holding Greenetech. No amount of reinforcements could undo that — but damn if it didn't help.
"Where are they now?" he asked, already moving toward the exit.
"Courtyard," Sarah said, falling into step beside him. "MacCready's with them. They brought armor, food, medkits. Even a few prototype plasma rifles scavenged from that Institute ambush on Route 95."
As they walked the winding corridors — past rooms scorched black from plasma fire, past makeshift triage stations where wounded groaned under the care of overworked medics — the sense of motion, of forward momentum, began to seep back into Sico's bones.
Outside, the courtyard buzzed with life and fresh energy.
The sky was beginning to darken to that strange, burnt-orange hue that marked sunset in the Commonwealth, casting long shadows between the jagged metal and sandbag fortifications around Greenetech. The air still smelled of plasma burns and gunpowder, but the tension had shifted — it wasn't desperation anymore. It was momentum.
They passed through the blast-warped main gate where a checkpoint had been set up using overturned APC wreckage and barbed wire coils. And there, in the wide open space beyond, were the reinforcements.
A dozen new faces, most of them hardened Minutemen veterans from Sanctuary and Abernathy, stood in tight formation while a few broke away to unload crates from a Brahmin caravan. At the center of the activity was Preston Garvey himself, unmistakable in his long coat and wide-brimmed hat, issuing quiet orders to a man securing a heavy weapon on a turret mount.
He turned when he saw Sico and Sarah approach, and his stern expression cracked into a tired, weathered smile.
"Hell of a place to catch up," he said, stepping forward and offering his hand.
Sico took it with a firm grip.
"You came fast," he said. "We didn't even finish patching up."
Preston nodded. "Soon as Sarah's report came in, we knew we couldn't wait. You took a hit that would've flattened most settlements. But you held."
Sico glanced around at the new arrivals, the supplies, the way the defenses were already being reinforced and fortified. MacCready stood off to one side, arms crossed, watching a pair of fresh recruits settle a wounded synth they'd dragged from the field. Mel was crouched by a terminal salvaged from the east wall, checking its power routing. Even Sarah had already peeled off to help oversee the gear distribution.
"We lost too many," Sico said quietly.
Preston followed his gaze. "And we'll lose more before it's over. But every inch we hold makes a difference. Every synth you pull out of their control, every survivor we save, every blow we strike — it matters."
Sico nodded slowly, then gestured for Preston to follow as he moved toward the war table under a makeshift canopy strung with dim work lights.
"We've got more coming," he said once they were alone. "Something big. I just spoke with Nora."
Preston's brow furrowed. "She made it out?"
"She did. And she brought intel." He hesitated. "Classified, for now. But if it works…"
He leaned in, lowering his voice.
"We might get a very big robot."
Preston stared at him, stunned.
"You're serious?"
"Deadly."
He explained the plan — Nora's secret talks with Madison Li, the infiltration of the Brotherhood, the deception, the sabotage.
By the time he finished, Preston was silent. His jaw clenched, eyes flicking across the battlefield horizon as if he could already see the towering silhouette of Liberty Prime striding through the smoke.
"Jesus," he said finally. "That's… that's a game-changer."
"Only if we pull it off," Sico replied. "One wrong move and they kill her. Or worse, they activate that thing and use it against us."
Preston took a slow breath.
"She'll need support. Sanctuary's safe, but if she's going undercover, she needs training, a cover story, maybe even someone embedded with her."
Sico nodded. "We'll figure it out. For now, I need you to help get these troops settled. I'll send word to Sanctuary for more secure comm lines. And Mel's almost got uplink reestablished."
Preston gave a short nod, then clapped Sico on the shoulder.
"I'll handle it. You get some rest. You look like hell."
"I'll rest when this war is over," Sico said, managing a dry smirk. "Or at least when I stop having to bargain with walking nukes."
He turned and headed back toward the command center as night fully fell.
Back inside, the lights flickered again as the backup generators whirred to life. The hum was steadier now — less chaotic than before. The surviving command crew had returned to their posts, focused and efficient. There was still a raw edge to them — bloodied bandages, hollow eyes — but they moved with a sense of unity that hadn't been there days ago.
At the center, Sarah was going over patrol routes with MacCready. Robert was checking a new map Mel had uploaded, showing probable Institute warp paths based on recovered teleportation signal decay.
Then Sico led to repaired Greenetech again after the battle, to prepare for more upcoming attack again.
The moon was up now — thin and pale, veiled behind hazy smoke drifting from the still-smoldering craters outside the walls. The stars had returned overhead, dim behind the ash-thickened sky, but present. It gave the ruins of the skyline an almost reverent silhouette, the broken teeth of a dead world crowned with distant starlight.
Sico stood at the balcony that jutted from Greenetech's south wing, hands resting against a twisted rail. Below, the courtyard still pulsed with activity. Fresh torches and work lamps had been mounted on scaffolded towers, casting wide cones of golden light that pierced the gloom and flickered across the weary faces of Minutemen, traders, and settlers alike.
They were rebuilding — again.
It was becoming a rhythm now. Survive, mourn, rebuild. Survive again. There wasn't time for anything else.
He stepped away from the railing and made his way back inside. The damage from the Institute's attack had been brutal. Half the west wing had been slagged by teleportation grenades. A third of the roof was still unstable. But in the time since the reinforcements arrived, the Minutemen engineers — working off Sarah's schematics and Mel's jerry-rigged power routing — had brought life back into Greenetech.
Not just function — purpose.
Generators thrummed again in the lower levels, feeding power to floodlights, turrets, and comm arrays. Welders hissed in hallways where metal sheeting was being mounted over blown-out walls. Even the old central elevator had been coaxed into working, albeit with a lurch and a groan.
Sico passed a cluster of younger Minutemen cleaning their weapons in the hallway near the east wing. They stiffened when they saw him, offering respectful nods. One of them — a freckled boy who couldn't have been older than nineteen — called out nervously.
"General… that was you on the line when the synths came, wasn't it? At the main stairs?"
Sico slowed, glanced over his shoulder.
"Yeah. That was me."
The kid looked awed. "Heard you took down three coursers."
"Four," someone muttered beside him.
Sico didn't correct them. He just gave a faint smile and kept walking.
Let them have that. Let them believe in something.
He reached the command center again just as MacCready and Robert were finishing a heated debate over patrol routes. MacCready had his arms crossed, his cap pulled low over tired eyes, while Robert was jabbing at the digital map with the butt of a penlight.
"They're not going to warp in the same spot twice," Robert was saying. "That's suicide. The Institute's smart — they'll shift patterns."
"That's why we reinforce the south wall," MacCready argued. "Because it's too obvious. They'll expect us to pull guards from there. So when they drop another kill squad in, they think we're thin. And instead, we're waiting."
Sico cleared his throat, stepping up to the table. Both men looked up, and their disagreement dissolved instantly.
"What's our coverage?" he asked, looking over the projection. The map showed Greenetech in the center, overlaid with blinking motion trackers and heat zones showing field data from the last four hours. Several red zones glowed faintly, indicating probable Institute entry paths.
"Better than it was yesterday," Robert said. "Thanks to the new gear Preston brought in. We've got recon drones up now, too. Sarah's handling aerial sweep rotations. And Mel finished linking the north sensor grid to the tower array."
Sico nodded. "What about evac points?"
"Three ready," MacCready said. "North corridor, the service shaft near the old reactor, and one out the roof access. All cleared, sealed, and tagged."
He tapped a section of the map near the rear exit. "We stashed medkits and spare ammo packs along each route."
Sico leaned on the table with both hands. "Good. Then we're not just surviving anymore. We're preparing."
He straightened up, his voice a little louder now — enough to carry to the rest of the room.
"Everyone in this room, take a look around. This isn't a tomb. It's a fortress now. The Institute thought they could erase us here. They were wrong."
Silence followed — not cold, not expectant, but absorbed. Sarah glanced over from the comms station, and MacCready gave a subtle, approving tilt of his head. Even Mel, halfway under a power terminal with wires coiled around her arms like tech vines, looked up and gave a rare, faint grin.
"Keep building," Sico finished. "Keep watching. Keep fighting."
As the team got back to work, he stepped away from the war table and made for the secure storage room off the central hallway. He punched in a code — one they'd just updated after the attack — and the reinforced door hissed open.
Inside was the stash from Route 95.
The prototype plasma rifles Preston had mentioned lay across reinforced racks, still half-disassembled. Their design was sleeker than the standard Institute models — lighter, but with strange concentric chambers near the focusing lens. Sico picked one up, feeling the strange warmth in its core, even unpowered. He wondered briefly if it was the kind of thing Nora had carried once, back when she was still theirs.
Not anymore.
Not since she stepped back into that teleportation flare.
He set the rifle back down and took one of the handheld disruptor grenades instead, clipping it to his belt as he turned and left the room.
Outside, the air had grown colder. Greenetech's courtyard flickered with the glow of braziers and motion-sensor floodlights as the night deepened. Sentries paced along the perimeter, their silhouettes sharp against the faint mist curling up from the cracked asphalt. In the distance, an explosion echoed — not near, but not far either.
The Commonwealth never slept.
Sico walked past the medbay, where settlers and synths alike rested in makeshift beds. A young woman with bandaged arms was humming quietly as she peeled a bloodied shirt from a boy's wound. Two synths in civilian clothing stood guard nearby, unarmed but alert.
Further along, near the engineering tent, he found Sarah again, crouched over a terminal, calibrating drone paths.
"Robert's pushing for deeper recon patrols along the Charles," she said without looking up. "I think he's right, but it means pulling a scout team off the northern ridge."
"We'll find more bodies," Sico said. "Preston's already sending a request to Tenpines and Oberland. Word's spreading."
Sarah exhaled and sat back, rubbing a smear of grease from her jawline. "Still feels like we're one breath away from breaking again."
"We won't," Sico said. "We're past that now."
She looked up at him, tired but resolved. "Because of Nora?"
"Because of all of it," he said. "Nora's just the spark."
Sarah rose to her feet, brushing off her pants. "You trust her? Really?"
Sico hesitated.
"Yes."
The pause had been brief, but not short enough for Sarah to miss.
"She's walking a blade," she said. "You know that, right?"
"I know," he said. "But if anyone can make it to the other side, it's her."
They stood in silence for a moment, the night sounds of Greenetech settling around them. Somewhere above, a Minuteman scout called out a change in watch. A distant dog barked twice, then went silent.
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• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-