Before the strike of midnight, I sit at the edge of a desk in a dimly lit room that used to be an equipment storage room for the base that was given to us along with the other few buildings for us T-Dolls to use. Four other T-Dolls are with me in the same room, all seated in miscellaneous positions around the room, though for the most part we sit in close proximity to one another.

DSR-Precision GmbH DSR-50 - the second-in-command of First Echelon, and the resident anti-materiel and explosives specialist. With her own little catchphrase of "Let's get dangerous!" that she utters whenever she's feeling particularly trigger-happy, she loves nothing more than putting her own life on the line in pursuit of an objective, so the more dangerous the assignment, the more enjoyment she'll derive from it when undertaking it. Perhaps logically, her favorite pastime outside of combat operations and other mercenary-related duties is gambling, since that's the closest thing she can get to the feeling of risking everything for the sweet taste of victory in the face of all odds. To her credit, though, she is a responsible gambler, unlike someone's father. And also not surprisingly, she naturally gravitates towards big guns and big damage; initially she was issued a standard DSR-1 sniper rifle upon her first deployment during the Frontline, but after a few weeks of service with it, while she had no real qualms with the rifle's performance, she wanted a bigger bullet, and thus a bigger rifle - and so they issued her its 50-caliber variant, and the rest is history. She loves being able to sow the seeds of destruction and chaos and reaping it when the time is just right in order to cause maximum havoc, and sometimes I think she really does love nothing more than seeing the whole world burn from mass explosions from the times I've seen her in combat.

Speaking of someone who loves seeing the whole world burn, KRISS Vector, the resident improvised equipment specialist, urban and guerrilla warfare specialist, and secondary explosives specialist, after DSR-50, because why have only one explosives expert on your team when you can have two for 300% more explosions. Despite her demure and subdued appearance, amplified by her relatively short height, small body frame, and short platinum silver hair, Vector is easily the most unhinged out of anyone in First Echelon, though she's trained herself to keep her unhingedness under control outside of combat; the facts that her favorite piece of equipment is the Molotov cocktail and she carries AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenades on her utility belt on her waist in bulletproof cases should be very telling of this. And if she runs out of military incendiaries, she can always cook up homemade Molotov cocktails of her own to chuck at whatever she feels like burning. With one exception, Vector has seen more urban combat than everyone else in this echelon, thanks to her home unit during the Frontline that specialized in combating Sangvis Ferri threats in urban locations around the world, and to this day, if you visit the cities where Vector has been deployed to, you can sometimes still find scorch marks from the Molotovs and incendiaries she's thrown if the cities haven't been careful enough to clean them all up. And as such, she's also one of our best martial arts practitioners and is very capable with a wide array of personal melee weapons or anything that can be used like a potential melee weapon like knives, kukris, crowbars, 2x4's, shovels, and even smartphones, somehow. Of note, when she was first deployed, Vector was issued the prototype Gen-1 variant of the Vector SMG, which she fell in love with and has kept all this time through countless skirmishes, battles, weather conditions, and damages. Even when she was issued an upgraded Gen-2 Vector SMG, instead of retiring her Gen-1, Vector has chosen to field both of them at the same time - keeping her Gen-1 strapped tightly to her side to use as a secondary weapon while fielding her Gen-2 as her primary.

FN FAL is also a Kukri user, and she's so skilled with it that she can even dual-wield them if needed, a feat not even Vector can claim to pull off herself, so she's no slouch in CQC herself, not that anyone in First Echelon is, otherwise they wouldn't be on First Echelon in the first place. Her official specialty lies in precision shooting and crowd control, providing a level of small arms fire that snipers and submachine guns can't fulfill, and between her and Vector, the two of them can complement each other's covering fire and suppressive fire capabilities even though First Echelon doesn't have a machine gun. She also has equipped on her DSA-58 OSW variant an underbarreled M-203 grenade launcher to add even more firepower and crowd control ability. But more than that, her true specialty lies in coming up with strategies and battle plans on the fly, or in the middle of a battle; during the Frontline, she was in charge of her own echelon, which was aptly named after herself, where she commanded a squad of other FN-inspired T-Dolls, and she became renowned as one of G&K's most daring but spectacularly successful tacticians during the war. This was after she'd received ridicule from other T-Dolls who were spreading rumors about her at the time that she was a poorly performing T-Doll based off the results of her first couple months of deployment and that she cared more about civilian fashion and clothes than the actual war effort itself, and that her fashion tastes on top of it all weren't exactly the best either; her nickname amongst some T-Dolls who were willing to take the teasing this far was "Fucking Fail", a rather blunt interpretation of her weapon's initials. FAL was quite sensitive to people gossiping about her, from what I remember at the time, and she definitely didn't appreciate being called "Fucking Fail", so being able to prove herself in the field pretty much erased all the ridicule associated with her name. When she became a Demon Hunter and joined First Echelon, there was a period of time in which she demanded that she be in charge of First Echelon's strategizing and shot-calling, essentially asking to be First Echelon's leader as she was in her own echelon, but after a few assignments together, FAL found her niche as our field tactician, which is a fancy title that means that when shit hits the fan, she's the one who comes up with the best plans on what to do next. If DSR-50 or I come up with initial plans for an assignment, it's FAL who refines our plans, streamlines everything is done optimally and efficiently as possible, and comes up with contingency plans and backup strategies in case our Plan A falls through. I will say though, I do agree with the people who think FAL's fashion sense is a bit lacking, because even though it's improved ever since we T-Dolls become mercenaries and FAL's had the time and opportunities to visit fashion centers across America and Europe, she's still got a lot of room for improvement.

Franchi SPAS-12 is our heavy-duty, our vanguard. If it's not Vector, SPAS is the one getting her feet wet first, and in many situations where Vector just can't be the first one into a firefight, SPAS is there to take the first few hits. As a shotgun T-Doll and armed with the physical power and fortitude to do the title of Shotgun T-Doll justice, she's fearless, cold, and efficient; I've seen her kick a car down a street for a whole block in order to stop a getaway car in one of our early assignments together. Indeed, she was one of the shotguns on the ATLAS Shotgun Squad, an echelon made up of nothing but Shotgun T-Dolls who specialized in combating large groups of the Sangvis Ferri's mechanized infantry and armor, like the Aegis, Nemeum, Tarantulas, and Manticores. The constant frontline duty also put SPAS in situations where many T-Dolls have never been, one of which I alluded to in my conversation with Welrod the other day at the skyscraper in San Francisco, and she's outlasted horrors and stresses of the Frontline that would have easily broken many other T-Dolls. Correction: they did break her, but she was strong enough to bounce back, but she needed a way to deal with the stress and trauma of war, which she found in eating. I don't know if it's her experiences in the Frontline that are the cause of this or if she was just built this way from the beginning, but SPAS possesses a shockingly darker side to her, one that only surfaces under very specific or very stressful circumstances, and the only way you could tell that she possessed this is if you paid close attention to the way she operates a fights: because ordinarily she's a ditzy, food-loving T-Doll who doesn't like to think too much and prefers just beating enemies over the head with her shield, her gun's stock, or her bare hands, which probably fits her job description to a tee, but when she gets into the action, she's anything but ditzy, always being efficient in everything that she does and never hesitating to do whatever it takes to get the job done. She is also, most surprisingly, the only T-Doll in First Echelon to possess her own human name, Sabrina Franchi. While T-Dolls typically don't care to use human names, since we all know we've been constructed as T-Dolls and the only names we need are the weapons we're associated with, SPAS was named as such when, as the story goes, one of the engineers from Franchi who'd worked on the weapon's development requested to meet SPAS-12 when she finished construction and asked to christen her as such. To this day SPAS doesn't know who that particular engineer was, as she'd never met them personally and was only told this after the fact when Kalina accidentally let her tongue slip and called her Sabrina, so one of her life goals is to meet the person who gave her a human name, an opportunity that hasn't yet come to pass. Sometimes we call her Sabrina to tease her, though it's clear that she's not quite sure how to react to being called as such, so we don't do it often lest she gets annoyed and starts shooting rubber rounds at us to shut us up.

And finally, me. Carl Walther GmbH Sportwaffen WA-2000, shortened to just Walther or WA2K, depending on your preference. I am the leader of First Echelon, the Demon Hunters. I am among the very best, if not the very best, that G&K has to offer. Every theater of war that the Frontline has been fought, I have been there, even if no one knows about it. I've led dozens of echelons, even entire companies of T-Dolls at some points during the war against the Sangvis Ferri, I can safely claim that if it were not for me at several key moments during the war, the Frontline would still be raging to this day, and who knows if the Frontline's existence would have been leaked to the public by then and made the situation exponentially worse. I'll admit that a good portion of my success has to be attributed to the fact that G&K and Lukenstor specifically developed me as one of their most capable and advanced T-Dolls, so I had high expectations to live up to within the chains of command, but the rest of it was my own hard work and ability. It's not to say that I am perfect, and in fact during my own first year of deployment I made many mistakes, some minor and many costly, but that year was the year that I worked to become the best that I knew I should be. And by becoming the leader of First Echelon, I cemented that status as the cream of the crop, the best of the best. Whenever we receive challenging assignments, the first question that is asked is, "Do we need to send in Walther?" And indeed, the most difficult jobs are left to me, because it's thought that I'm the only one who can reliably get those jobs done, and at times I am. You get what you pay for; I am the best, so I cost more.

I've seen many Demon Hunters come and go over the last few years ever since First Echelon's inception; some who fell in the line of duty, and others who succumbed to themselves and the tragedies of war.

This is a fact that I am always reminded of every time I look at the faces of those who hold this title, for I am the first Demon Hunter. And this fact will not change.

Looking at the faces of my squadmates, I hop off the edge of the desk that I've been sitting on.

"Enough chips, Spas. Let's get to work," I declare quietly, and SPAS quickly stashes her almost-empty bag of Lay's Baked Barbecue chips behind her on her seat.