The issue starts with Erma recovering from her injuries she sustained during the Battle of Derzon, while her comrades-in-arms went to pay a visit to her in the hospital. Meanwhile, Erma herself was busy reading the battle report and she cannot avoid to curse the ILR for all the damage they caused in Derzon, as the civilian casualties went about more than 5000 people who died there. After her comrades left her room, Erma had a brief dream in which she remember both past and future events, but before she could make some sense on this, an EDF officer, named Vilso, speaks with Erma, trying to get her impressions about her participation on the battlefield, but the things soured quickly when Vilso made the mistake of questioning her battle performance taking into account her fallout with Tavas and her emotional state during the battle.
After recovering from her wounds, Erma talks with an EDF commander, who warned her beforehand about the political implications of a woman participating in the battlefield, while explaining to Erma the benefits of being sent to Ekosiak, a backwater planet at the edge of the ConFed space. After some small problems after reaching the planet, Erma meets Shato, a secretary in charge of the EDF Home Guard in Ekosiak, and after showing the capital city, he presents his aide, a Vulpine (fox) girl hailing from Erma's Dornthant named Dea-Htuhok Kho. Dea quickly explains both to Erma and Shato about some serious incidents happening in the planet, including terrorism and anarchy, but both Shatoo and Dea quickly noticed Erma doesn't know anything regarding the political situation of Ekosiak. Shatoo doesn't seem to mind about that anyways, since he trust Erma due of her credentials rather than blindly put his trust on the EDF.
After receiving her briefing about the situation on the planet, Erma went to meet Colonel Onni Hitzok, the main man behind the armed forces of the planet, on a club downtown. While meeting him inside the club, Hitzok quickly warns Erma that he doesn't trust her but he must work with her anyways, something she quickly agree with him.
Tropes:
- Berserk Button: We're shown many of Erma's buttons: she doesn't like being pitied and she doesn't like receiving help from other people for stuff she could do easily.
- Bilingual Dialogue: Somewhat subverted: We see both Erma and Dea speaking in untranslated Standard Language, despite in theory there's only a single language in-universe and there's very few dialectual variations, but the language itself is basically a cypher for English, rather than an elaborated language.
- Cool Old Guy: Shato, as he tries to at least help Erma and he puts his trust in her rather than the rest of the EDF's top brass.
- The Dead Have Names: While reading the battle report at the hospital, Erma reads the names of all the dead soldiers who perished in Derzon.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: There's a brief scene when Erma is taken in a ride inside a flying car. According with Word of God, flying cars doesn't exist in the Albedo universe for the same reasons why those does not yet exist in real life. That car was included because most of the established rules regarding the setting didn't exist in that time.
- Funetik Aksent: Many of the Ekosiaki soldiers speaks with very thick Southern accents (via Translation Convention) but Erma doesn't seem to have problems to understand them.
- Number Two: Dea is this for Shato.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: As a way to prevent Erma to become a dangerous precedent inside the EDF regarding women in the battlefields, she is sent to Ekosiak, a backwater planet, as a way to get rid of her easily.
- We ARE Struggling Together: Col. Hitzok doesn't want to work with Erma, but he doesn't have a choice on this matter.
