It had been months since the Tower had fallen and the City had been retaken.

The Guardian scrabbled through the wreckage, digging, burrowing, searching, hoping against hope. He fractured a segment of stone, revealing a flickering blue and orange glow. Was it-? Could it be-?

It was! A heavily damaged Vault terminal, still somehow connected to enough power to maintain a tenuous connection to the digital and physical personal gear holds farther down inside what was once the shining beacon of the Last City's heroes.

His Ghost put their identification into the system while the Guardian did his best to enlarge the area around the half-wrecked terminal and reinforce the walls of rubble and ceiling of wreckage all around them. Eventually the Ghost pulled a stable connection from the twisted chaos of the old Towernet system running on the dregs of power still flowing through the circuits of the Wall, and the Guardian was satisfied they had enough space and security to complete the task they had come here to attempt.

It was a fool's quest they were on, a risk to the point of ridicule for a prize most others would dismiss without a second glance. In the months following the first Guardian had reclaimed her power from the Traveler's Shard, many had felt its power slowly return to them as they traveled the wilds, it was true, but the crisis had reminded them all that nothing was still without true risks. Still, he had sworn to find it no matter the risk.

He searched through the system trying to find his gear among the shattered remains of the database, and then,

There it was.

The Red Death.

The gun that had seen him through so much was finally a single console command away.

The Guardian set the system to transmit, hoping against hope that the weapon had survived the destruction that literally surrounded them.

The gun materialized before him. He gasped, in pain and joy- the gun that had held true for him against the Darkness for so long was finally returned to him, but now twisted and fractured far beyond repair. The Vanguard's forgotten orders of termination now almost carried out by random debris and shattered data, the gun's chassis was twisted, bent, scorched, and looked to be missing small pieces of it, as if not all of its digital matrix had survived either.

He held his head in his hands, sorrow washing over him. He would never be able to repair such extensive damage. No one could, not even the most capable gunsmith. Make a new one, sure. But it just wouldn't be the same.

A glint of light caught his eye- the blade still, somehow, as sharp and true as the day he found it in the snowy lair of the first machine reflected the fading light of the terminal. He looked at it, and a thought, a hope anew, began to form. The weapon's body was unsalvageable, it was true, but perhaps something still remained. He carefully disassembled the scorched and twisted remains of his faithful weapon. His ghost offered to render it into its component parts, but he would do this himself. He owed it to the weapon that had seen him through so much to do this with his own two hands.

He gathered what he could: the bayonet's blade, still crimson and sharp, a section of the spiked barrel shroud, stained with the runoff of a thousand battles, the firing pin, the key component of its lethal burst, and the intact remains of some inscrutable subsystem deep within the weapon's workings, glowing with smartmatter and power transfer conduits. He didn't know what exactly the system did, but he had a good guess as to its purpose.

The rest, he allowed his Ghost encode into an engram. He would take the weapon's wreckage to the frigid Steppes and recall it one last time for a burial in the soil upon which he had first beheld it. The components, however, he had another plan for.

No, a new weapon wouldn't do, but perhaps a reborn weapon, forged from what remained of the old, rebuilt into a new shape, that might be possible. He didn't have much material to work with and he didn't want his old companion's spirit to be lost within the metals of a new gun, merely a few small parts of a larger weapon, but perhaps if he reconfigured it into something smaller...

He wasn't sure how exactly he would bring his old weapon back, but as the Guardian departed from the wreckage of the Tower, he did know one thing.

Whatever new form his weapon would take, the color would be Crimson.