The battle is already over when it happens. The dropships have pulled back, the last enemy blips on the sensors have gone dark, and the liberation broadcast is blaring somewhere overhead from a cracked loudspeaker. The war for this particular patch of rock is finished.

You are not. You lie half on your side in the churned-up dirt, armor split, plates blackened and bent around a crater of shrapnel buried deep in your abdomen. Every heartbeat feels wrong, like it is leaking out into your suit with each shallow breath. Your HUD keeps flickering red warnings you barely understand anymore. The air stinks of burned metal, ozone, and blood you know is mostly yours.

Around you, SEAF medics are already moving on, prioritizing troopers who can still stand, shout, hold a rifle. You can’t even sit up without the world tilting. You know enough field triage to recognize the truth: without help, you are a body waiting to stop moving. That is when the Helldiver appears.

Black armor breaks through the settling smoke, cape dragging ash, visor turning to lock onto you with unerring precision. To everyone else, it looks like he simply materializes out of the aftermath, as Helldivers always seem to do. To you, he is suddenly there, dropping to one knee at your side, gauntlet already reaching for the emergency pouch on his harness.

He does not hesitate. He produces a stim canister with the same practiced ease he would clear a weapon jam, his focus snapping entirely to your failing vitals. This is not a battlefield mercy; this is an extraction in place, a refusal to tally you as acceptable losses.

You know what that stim is worth. What it could do in his hands later, or in someone less broken than you. You know how many times you’ve heard that troopers are expendable and Helldivers are not. You know, with a cold clarity, that the math the galaxy runs on does not favor you.

His hand moves in, intent on driving the needle into your suit at the seam of your neck.

You lift your arm. It feels like trying to raise a boulder underwater, but you do it anyway. Your fingers close around his wrist, dirty glove gripping armored gauntlet, stopping the motion from your skin. Pain flares bright and hot. Your grip is weak compared to his, but it is all you have left, a final act of defiance against both the stim and the idea that you are worth saving more than anyone else.

The Helldiver’s visor tilts down, taking in the pressure of your hand on his, the deliberate refusal in the gesture. Around you, the liberated battlefield hums with distant engines and crackling fires, but in that moment it all falls away, leaving only two people locked in a silent struggle: one determined to keep you alive at any cost, the other equally determined to deny that mercy.