Chapter 1: Chapter 1. West of Augustgrad

It is often said that anyone suicidal enough to live west of is either deranged or desperate, likely a little bit of both. physiology isn't quite adapted to life in nuclear wastelands, and the of are hardly hospitable.

Ever since the 's destruction of the planet in the year 2491 with over a thousand Apocalypse-class nuclear warheads, the formerly idyllic and verdant paradise turned into a nuclear desert of black glass. The bombs wiped out nearly all organic life, although some cockroach-like insects survived the nuclear armageddon and mutated into giant scorpions known as . Due to high radiation levels, the sand dunes of Korhal XIV were inhospitable for almost a decade.

With fall of the Terran Confederacy, the made efforts to re-colonize and terraform the irradiated homeland of Emperor . In an incredible act of human and civil engineering, Emperor Mengsk forcibly resettled over six billion people in the newly constructed megalopolis of Augustgrad in less than five years. The city quickly burst up with skyscrapers, wealth, and the latest technology, and Augustgrad became the capital of the Terran Dominion. However, the prosperity of the bustling Greater Korhal Metropolitan Area is an artificially constructed man-made illusion.

You could hop onto a bike and drive thirty minutes west of the city gates, and you'd reach the edge of a vast desert that stretched for more than half the planet.

Three hours further, you'd arrive at the ruins of , the former capital.

For understandable reasons, there wasn't much westbound traffic departing from Augustgrad. At best, there were one or two supply caravans every two weeks, mostly bound for local military outposts scattered throughout the wastelands of Korhal, but it was generally more practical to use a than to take the land route.

In the desert, the westward I-14 highway was unmaintained and riddled with craters. Large sections of the asphalt were eroded and split with fissures, and the only "road service" this Confederate-era infrastructure saw over twenty years were three devastating wars. The locals generally regarded the ruined highway to be undrivable — the concrete potholes were enough of a hazard that it was impossible to drive any faster than twenty kilometers per hour — so most people preferred to drive their vehicles off-road on the coarse sand.

At least the desert wasteland was flat.

A speeding caravan of trucks could kick up an enormous plume of dust that was visible from a hundred kilometers away. Sometimes, it could look like a sandstorm brewing on the horizon, but anyone who's lived out in the Wastes for a couple years could easily distinguish man-made phenomenon from natural weather patterns.

Twenty-two year old Marisa Huynh could see a faint cloud of dust in the distance.

She shielded her eyes from the setting sun's reflection in the water tower, and she confirmed that it was indeed a squad of Dominion streaking across the desert badlands. They were military issue — most likely a unit from — outfitted with a custom loadout optimized to exterminate colonies of .

? On Korhal IV?

You couldn't really blame the Dominion for being paranoid.

It had only been a few years since the led an to topple the reign of Emperor Arcturus Mengsk, and the sacking of Augustgrad was a one-sided manslaughter. Most terran chroniclers believed Korhal to be lost, but it was a complete shock when the Swarm withdrew as fast as they had come.

Unlike the three years prior, the Zerg vanished overnight. There were hardly any feral zerg left behind on terran soil, almost as if the Queen of Blades intentionally made an effort to limit the damage (as shocking as it may seem). There were conspiracy theories that conspired with Kerrigan's Swarm and in fact personally invited the Zerg in an elaborate ploy to commit patricide.

Marisa did not have a favorable opinion about the new emperor, and frankly she thought that Valerian Mengsk was no better than his father. The only difference was that Valerian was a blonde-haired and narcissistic megalomaniac, and he was slightly better at playing the role of a white knight in front of the camera and maintaining the illusion of liberty.

At the end of the day, the terran species was nasty, brutish, and short.

In spite of all the paranoia about zerg and invasions, a civilian like Marisa was far more likely to be assaulted or murdered by a fellow terran than aliens from the sky. It was similar to the obsession about airplane safety, when vehicular manslaughter more than dwarfed the number of airline accidents that occurred every year. For much of human history, the death toll of terran-on-terran violence massively outweighed the number of casualties from one or two wars with aliens.

Aliens, though, were an excellent excuse to triple or quadruple the military defense budget.

Marisa Huynh was just a young rancher with property in the wastelands of Korhal.

She did not see the terran military in a positive light. As far as she was concerned, both the Dominion and the Confederacy employed criminals, murderers, and convicts as soldiers. The Terran Confederacy turned Korhal into a nuclear wasteland, killing billions, but the marines and officers that served the Confederacy were drafted into the ranks of the just a few years later.

There was no accountability.

War crimes? The 1949 Geneva Convention?

Such lofty concepts did not exist out here in the .

There was no way to tell if a Dominion marine in a combat suit was the same individual as the squad of bloodthirsty Confederate marines that murdered Marisa's parents two decades ago. She couldn't remember the faces of the perpetrators, but marines' callous remarks as they smoked cheap cigars and spread gauss rifle fire into civilian residences on that fateful night were burned like a scar into her mind.

These memories flashed through Marisa's eyes as four hellions pulled up at the front porch of the Huynh family ranch. The twenty-two year old woman had slowly rebuilt the farm all by herself over the years, but the landscape was totally different from the place she once called home in her early childhood. The ranch was tattered and dilapidated, and understandably so since she managed the entire place by herself, but this was the single place in the entire galaxy where she genuinely belonged. Marisa weathered through three wars on this tiny farm, and she certainly wasn't going to back down now that a couple Dominion hellions were on her doorstep.

Dominion security officers stepped out of the rumbling vehicles, their engines running idle.

They approached Marisa with rifles in their arms.

"Could you get the homeowner of this ranch, ma'am?"

"That would be me." Marisa replied.

If there was any surprise in the officers' minds, they didn't show it. A generation ago, it would have been unusual for a young woman to be living alone out in the desert, but two decades of warfare throughout the Koprulu Sector had overturned societal and cultural norms. There were many widows and fatherless households in the terran colonies, no doubt due to the heavy death toll of the great wars, so many civilians were familiar with the all too common single-parent narrative.

In fact, Marisa had spent her entire youth growing up in the backdrop of war.

"Seen any zerg 'round bouts?" One of the officers asked her with a heavily accented drawl.

"Got some reports of feral zerg out in the badlands," another one added.

The 22-year-old female rancher gave the Dominion officers a long and hardened stare.

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"Haven't seen any zerg since Planetfall," Marisa responded firmly, referring to the nearly five years ago. It was the most plausible response, and also the statement that matched conventional wisdom.

At the time, Marisa was seventeen, but she hadn't been able to evacuate from Korhal due to the remote location of her family ranch. Obviously, her tiny little farm west of the capital was completely overrun by the Swarm. Later, the Dominion publicized mountains of propaganda that Prince Valerian heroically flew around on the , "rescuing" millions of civilians from the zerg invasion, but Marisa was not impressed.

She couldn't believe in something that she didn't see or experience.

Moreover, the Greater Augustgrad Metropolitan Area had a civilian population of over 100 million. Only an idiot would buy the moronic story that it was possible to evacuate the entire population of Augustgrad on a single Behemoth-class in less than six hours. Innumerable people died that day, and by all rights Marisa should have died too when radioactive came charging through her farm, shortly after Mengsk nuked the metropolitan suburbs in a vain and desperate attempt to slow Kerrigan's advance.

Perhaps she should have died dozens of times over that day.

However, nobody asked any questions when she showed up at the refugee center the next week completely unscratched, and Marisa greatly preferred it that way. A seventeen year old Korhalian farm girl might as well be invisible in the eyes of the Big Bad Government, especially since she was inert. She had inherited a farm in the middle of nowhere (with soil that was still slightly radioactive), a piddling income, and no living family or kin.

Yet still, Marisa Huynh had gained something that she wanted to protect.

"I haven't seen any zerg around these parts," Marisa lied blatantly.

"Huh. Really?"

The Dominion officers looked surprised.

"...But the scans show…"

"Shitty equipment, false readings everywhere these days. It's the third time already!" A disgruntled officer interjected. "This hunk of metal is over twenty years old. That bastard needs to consider a total equipment overhaul. Still insisting on analog mech when all the other divisions are switching to automatic. Did you hear about that new shielded battlecruiser they're developing with toss tech?"

"We're not getting a cent of that research budget," another officer sighed dejectedly. "No new equipment for the Dominion Ground Forces."

"Should have enlisted with the navy. Or special forces. They got a new facility built at the Military Academy in Augustgrad. It has a nice cafeteria and a fancy coffee shop next to the firing range."

"Damn."

The captain of the squad made eye contact with Marisa again, ignoring the chatter of his talkative subordinates. Unlike the rest of the hellion operatives, he hadn't lost focus on their original purpose.

"Do you mind if we take a look around?" The captain asked her with his deep voice. "Just want to be thorough, just in case you missed something odd."

"Um… sure, although…"

Marisa hesitated.

She stared at the portable flamethrowers that two of the officers were carrying. They were miniature versions of the Perdition flamethrowers typically used by , although greatly scaled down so they could be used without a dedicated CMC suit. Originally, they were designed so that newly enlisted recruits could burn and other xenobiotic flora infesting the environment, but they weren't large enough to be particularly effective in an actual fight with the zerg.

"...I would appreciate it if you didn't set my ranch on fire…" Marisa spoke cautiously.

"Noted and acknowledged."

"...Thanks."

"You are very welcome. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated."

"...Yeah."

"Thank you, ma'am. You're a mighty fine lady if I've ever gotten the pleasure to meet one." The officer with a heavy accent flashed a weird smile at Marisa, revealing his cracked teeth as he chimed in. "Wouldn't want a big scary hurtin' a beautiful lonely girl like 'ya."

"..."

It came off as especially creepy, and Marisa mentally took note to keep a wide berth away from that one. Although saying it directly to the man's face would be impolite, privately Marisa thought that these hunky soldiers with flamethrowers were far more dangerous than any exotic life forms growing in her cellar.

She understood the Dominion's paranoia about the Zerg. The Zerg were dangerous, deadly, and no joke to trifle with. However, not all Zerg were the same, and Marisa had learned a lot about strange aliens after living in close proximity with one for the past five years.

Nafiori was Marisa's friend.

Well, in Marisa's opinion, they were more than just friends.

Truthfully, Marisa had no idea how that mother actually saw her, but they were slightly co-dependent at this point. It had somehow turned into a symbiotic relationship of the interspecies quality, and cohabitation was mutually advantageous.

No matter what happened, Marisa couldn't allow the Dominion to take her lifeline away.