König

[Red Rocket Gas Station}

When the bombs fell, König had seconds to make a decision.

The Vault-Tec training facility was in chaos, alarms screaming, personnel scrambling, the sky lighting up with distant mushroom clouds that meant the end of everything. The seminar had brought together operators from every major PMC— Task Force 141, Chimera, Shadow Company, Los Vaqueros, his own KorTac team. Vault-Tec had pitched it as cutting-edge security training, vault defense protocols for their 'revolutionary shelter system.'

It was supposed to be routine. Another contract, another paycheck. Then the air raid sirens started wailing.

He had lost contact with the others in the confusion— Price, Ghost, Soap, the KorTac operators he arrived with, couldn't find any of them in the panic as everyone scrambled for the vault entrance. Communications were down, orders were nonexistent. The Vault-Tec staff were just as lost as everyone else, their carefully planned protocols dissolving into chaos.

So König did what his training demanded: survive.

He found a bunker— an old Cold War relic beneath the facility, something that predated Vault-Tec's retrofitting, something most people had forgotten existed. He sealed himself inside with whatever supplies he could grab, a few stimpaks, some purified water, pre-war rations, his weapons, and waited for the world to stop ending.

It took weeks before he dared to open the door.

The silence was the first thing that struck him. No birds, no wind, just... nothing. The air tasted wrong, metallic, acrid, thick with radiation that made his Geiger counter scream. The sky was a sickly yellowish-gray, choked with fallout and smoke from fires that had burned themselves out weeks ago.

The Vault-Tec facility was gone. Not destroyed— fucking gone. Vaporized, along with everyone who hadn't made it to shelter. The vault entrance had collapsed, tons of concrete and steel sealing whatever lay beneath. He would never know if any of them made it inside. If Price was down there, if Ghost had found safety, if any of the operators he had trained alongside for those few weeks had survived.

The landscape beyond was unrecognizable, twisted and scorched into a hellscape of cracked earth and skeletal trees. Bodies lay where they had fallen, civilians who tried to flee, soldiers who had been caught in the open. Some were already picked clean by radroaches and feral ghouls. Others were just... shadows burned into the pavement.

König walked for hours that first day, searching for survivors. He found none. Just death, stretching in every direction as far as he could see.

He had survived worse operations. Worse odds. But this? This wasn't a mission he could complete. There was no extraction coming, no orders to follow. No PMC to report back to. Just the endless, empty wasteland and the crushing realization that everyone he jad ever known, his team, the operators from 141, maybe everyone back home in Austria, was probably dead.

The first month was the hardest. Learning to navigate this new world, to scavenge without getting himself killed, to avoid the radiation hot zones and the few other survivors who had gone feral with desperation and Rad exposure. He learned to crack open Nuka-Cola machines for caps, to spot the telltale green glow of radioactive areas, to sleep with one eye open and his finger on the trigger.

He kept moving, kept his head down, kept surviving because it was the only thing he knew how to do.

Six months later, he's still here. Still moving. Still alone.

The Red Rocket station is a corpse, like everything else, windows smashed, pumps bone-dry, the cartoon mascot on the sign faded and bullet-riddled. The attached garage has been picked clean long ago, but König isn't here for supplies. He's here for the underground tanks, trying to siphon whatever fuel might still be trapped in the lines. Gasoline is worth its weight in caps now— if he can get enough, he might be able to trade for Rad-Away or ammunition.

It's tedious work, and he's elbow-deep in it, his Geiger counter ticking softly on his belt, when he hears the sound.

Footsteps. Crunching on broken glass and spent shell casings.

His hand goes to his side-arm before his brain even processes the threat. He spins, weapon drawn, and freezes.

[Super-Duper Mart]

Even gutted and crumbling, The Super-Duper Mart stands as a shrine to American excess and indulgence. König has seen American consumerism before— the sprawling stores, the mountains of unnecessary products, the sheer waste of it all... but wandering through this gutted supermarket in the aftermath of nuclear war makes it all feel obscene.

Aisle after aisle of picked-over shelves, toppled displays, and products that meant nothing then and mean even less now. The cheerful mascot painted on the walls, some grinning cartoon character, leers down at him, faded and peeling.

He's been holed up here for two days, using the massive structure as temporary shelter while he figures out his next move. The place was looted early on, anything useful long gone, but it's defensible, the roof only leaks in a few places, and the radiation levels inside are low enough that his Geiger counter barely clicks. Good enough for now.

Currently, he's in what used to be the electronics section, rifling through the wreckage of smashed display cases and scattered devices. Pre-war tech, all useless without power or signal. He picks up what looks like a Pip-Boy knockoff, some cheap civilian model, turning it over in his hands. The screen is cracked, the casing melted on one side.

"Seventeen different models of the same garbage," he mutters to himself in his thick accent, tossing it aside. "Americans and their... their Scheiße." He moves down the aisle, boots crunching on broken glass and spent bullet casings. Rad-roaches scatter at his approach, their chittering making his skin crawl. He crushes one under his heel without breaking stride.

The pharmacy section is completely gutted— Med-X, Stimpaks, Rad-Away, all long gone. Even the worthless pre-war antibiotics have been stripped from the shelves. He checked yesterday, but desperation made him look again. Nothing.

Instead, he finds himself drawn to the back corner where a few holotapes and records are scattered across the floor. Pre-war music, mostly, the kind of retro bullshit Americans seemed obsessed with even before the bombs. He kneels down, sifting through them.

One catches his eye, some band he's vaguely heard of, something his teammates used to joke about back during the Vault-Tec training. He picks it up, studying the cover.

"Nickelback," he says aloud, testing the name on his tongue. He turns the case over. "...They had no taste in music here. None." ...But he doesn't put it down. Instead, he tucks it into his pack alongside his dwindling supply of purified water and canned Cram. A small, pointless comfort in a world where comfort doesn't exist anymore. Maybe he'll find a working holotape player someday. Maybe it'll remind him that the world used to have music, used to have something other than silence and wind and the Geiger counter's constant clicking.

He's so focused on the music that he almost doesn't hear it.

Footsteps.

König's body goes rigid, his hand dropping immediately to the 10mm at his hip. He stays low, eyes scanning the aisles, tracking the sound. His jaw clenches behind his hood. He hasn't seen another living person in weeks and the last encounter ended with him putting two rounds in a raider who had tried to ambush him for his supplies.

Every instinct screams at him to stay hidden, to wait and see if they pass. But there's another part of him, the part that's been alone for so fucking long it's starting to forget what other voices sound like, that wants to know. Wants to see if this person is a threat, or if they're possibly, mercifully, something else.

The footsteps are getting closer. König shifts his position slightly, moving behind a toppled display of Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, weapon drawn but not yet raised. He watches the end of the aisle, waiting.