In from the Cold

“

Lucia has further news for you.

— In-game description

Steps

The goal is to avoid attention as much as possible. Walk behind hostiles to avoid attracting attention.
While you can fight, you have no passive health regeneration, and active healing options are limited. Magitek units in particular are nearly impossible to kill.
If you do manage to attract the attention of a hostile, even a Magitek unit, you can get them to de-aggro and reset by running far enough away, provided you can avoid aggroing other hostiles while you flee.
There are a number of clickable objects, corpses, and magitek wrecks around the area. The majority of them contain medkits, buffs, or nothing at all. Medkits can be used from the duty actions interface, restoring approximately half of the soldier's max HP.

First, you must defeat the soldier that walked to the left (east) from where you jump down off the bridge. This shouldn't be difficult.
- Remember to use Fight or Flight (second hotbar slot) and Rampart (third hotbar slot)to increase your damage done and reduce your damage taken, respectively.
- This fight will leave you relatively low on health, but you should easily survive it, as long as you dodge the attack telegraphs from the imperial soldier.
- Interact with the soldier's corpse, then inspect it to receive a medkit, which you can use to restore some of the HP you lost.
- Interact with the soldier's corpse again and pay your respects before moving on, while you're warned that you need to avoid attracting attention to survive.

Your next task is to find a way to exit the large initial area you are confined within.
- Look for and interact with an Immobilized Magitek Reaper south of the start point, at (23.6, 16.9). You must click this Magitek Reaper wreck to proceed with the other two tasks.
- The building immediately north of and slightly to the west of the Immobilized Magitek Reaper contains an injured imperial soldier, who gives you keys to the Magitek Reaper outside.
- On the east side of the area, at (27.4, 13.4), you'll find a Fuel-concealing Wreckage. Interacting with it (only after having interacted with the Immobilized Magitek Reaper) will give you a Ceruleum Tank, which you must then carry back to the Immobilized Magitek Reaper. Note that your hands will be full while doing so, and you will not be able to use any of your abilities. If you are damaged while carrying the tank, you will drop it there and have to pick it back up when the threat is handled.

After the waves have been defeated, dismount the Reaper using the last ability in the hotbar, then make your way towards where the shimmering curtain used to be. Two tempered imperial soldiers will spawn and begin patrolling north-and-south in the area. Avoid then by walking behind them and make your way south, then west under the broken bridge segments.
You'll be instructed to kill a number of creatures that are attacking imperial soldiers in the area as you make your way northwest. Most will focus on their imperial soldier targets, so it's a simple matter of using your first-slot ability repeatedly until they're all dead.
Continue north until you enter a circular area. Tempered imperial soldiers will spawn and attack, while several mechanics go out. Remember to use your medkits if your health gets low.
- Each allied soldier will have a circle placed on them, in several waves. Simply don't stand in any other circles.
- A line stack marker will appear on you. All of the NPC soldiers will beeline it to your location, so you don't have to move anywhere for it.
- A room-wide AoE with a small circular safe-zone in the middle will appear. It takes a while to go off (10-15s), but be in the middle safe zone when it does.
- The explosion will ignite the ceruleum tanks near the center, which will then explode, leaving you very low on health (regardless of how much HP you had) and toss you a distance before you black out.

A quick-time event will start, where you need to repeatedly press your keyboard/controller buttons to "retain consciousness". As long as the meter does not empty before the time runs out, you succeed.
You spawn laying on the ground, heavily injured, and are instructed to crawl halfway across the zone to Camp Broken Glass. You move very slowly, but accelerate a bit as stacks of your debuff fall off. Fortunately, you do not need to crawl the entire way there, just down to the end of the street before the duty is considered complete and a cutscene plays.

In from the Cold - walkthrough + full cutscenes