Personal History

       Hannah was a sergeant major in the 501st Long-Range Reconnaissance Team, a member of the 4th Motorized Infantry Division's Long-Range Reconnaissance Company. Selected for the team as an outstanding athlete with exceptional physical abilities, she possessed not only the ability to maintain athleticism and mental clarity during prolonged, uninterrupted combat, and to overwhelm the enemy with strength and agility in close-quarters combat, but also a remarkable skill: the ability to swim underwater for over 150 meters for four minutes without diving equipment. Of course, this wasn't particularly difficult for an Olympic champion.

       After the August 29 Incident, almost everyone on Earth prayed with trepidation that the escalating propaganda offensives and military probing by both the Entente and the Union sides wouldn't escalate into a real war. However, Hannah remained calmly convinced that war was inevitable. She paid no attention to the threats and bargaining of the Entente Treaty, focusing instead on mastering the use of various weapons with world-class efficiency, as well as the skills to operate various optical and electromagnetic reconnaissance equipment. Since sports competitions are a form of war without gunfire in peacetime, it could be said that Hannah had already fought alongside them on and off the field for several years before joining the military. She was fully prepared mentally, and therefore remained remarkably calm in the face of actual war.

       On the world stage of sports, Osterheim is a sporting powerhouse comparable to Vespuccia and the Union, having long achieved athletic success with a population of less than 20 million, a feat that leaves other populous nations, especially those sharing the same language and culture such as Schmalkalden, far behind. World sporting championships are a symbol of Osterheim's patriotism and the superiority of the Phalanstery's system. However, the Entent believes Osterheim possesses unique doping and cheating techniques, the specifics of which remain undetected by the Entent's sports technology. But for Osterheim residents who have direct contact with professional athletes and coaches, the answer is more straightforward, mundane, and trivial: a scientifically systematic training method and meticulous selection of athletic talent.

       At the 1992 Seville Olympics, Hannah, making her debut, won the gold medal in the individual synchronized swimming event with an overwhelming advantage. Commentators, stunned by her performance, predicted that Hannah might dominate the individual event for the next 10 to 15 years. However, this prediction did not come true: immediately after the Games, the IOC, at the urging of Vespuccia, canceled the individual synchronized swimming event for the next Olympics, replacing it with a team event. This was followed by obstruction from the Vespuccian's Anti-Doping Commission. They claimed that due to Hannah's Nox heritage, she could use her ego to adjust her hormone levels to "unnatural" levels, thus equivalent to taking performance-enhancing drugs, and that her gold medal should be stripped and awarded to the second-place Vespuccian athlete.

       Over the following year, she was forced to halt her training entirely, occupied instead with contending with the independent media of the Entente nations. She witnessed firsthand the myriad ways they speculated about and criticized her, much like the inventive tactics they used to stoke hatred against the Union and Ostheim and to incite war. Her world-class mental fortitude enabled her to navigate this hostile environment, yet deep down, she had already shifted her view of the Entente nations from mere "rivals" to outright "enemies."

       From a young age, Hannah knew she was a child from another planet, having crossed the universe with her parents. Her dream was to become an astronaut, or, as the posters put it, a "bridge between two planets." However, after her first swimming lesson in elementary school, Hannah was taken by her homeroom teacher to a kind "physical education teacher." This teacher told Hannah that she had exceptional talent in water sports and, with systematic training at the swimming center, had a good chance of becoming a world-class swimmer. The "physical education teacher" seemed to know everything about Hannah's ambition to become an astronaut. He patiently explained that although the astronaut corps was hundreds of times larger than in Gagarin's time, the competition was still fierce. Sometimes, taking a roundabout route was necessary to achieve one's goal. If she could bring honor to her country, all the coveted positions would open up to her, including astronaut.

       What Hannah couldn't have foreseen was that when the opportunity to become an astronaut was finally offered to her, she would choose a more circuitous path: a path leading to the battlefield, a place exceptionally far from space. But she believed it was the only, and inevitable, path.