Damasa had been quiet.
Too quiet, in the kind of way that never lasted. Like the eye of a storm where even the air forgot how to breathe.
By week four of peace, he'd gotten used to the rhythm of desk work, late reports, the occasional barked order, and watching Berta pretend to fill out logs while drawing increasingly creative porn on requisition forms. Rus should've known it wouldn't last.
Reed called Rus into his office one morning. He stepped in, saluted just enough to be respectful, and he pointed at the chair like he was a dog with muddy paws.
"Sit."
Rus sat. Because he liked his job, or at least, liked not being court-martialed.
Reed didn't waste time. "First Lieutenant Wilson. Tiered Counter Operative."
He said it like it was a job promotion, not a threat.
Rus grunted. "Don't remind me."
He slid a folder across the desk. "New assignment. Eastern coast. You'll be leading the Cyma Unit to create a supply line from Miron to Victoria. Longview Bays. The estuaries."
I flipped open the folder. "Sounds scenic."
"It's a mud-choked hellhole with too many non-humans, Lieutenant."
"Ah. Just like home."
There were maps, satellite images, briefings. Standard recon chatter. Then he reached the middle of the file and stopped. There it was, stamped across the top in big, friendly letters: FOR EYES ONLY.
And beneath that, the drone footage.
Winged creatures. Big. Fast. Not your standard mutated birds. These things moved like they had coordination. Purpose. They flew in formation, broke into staggered flanks, then disappeared behind cloud cover.
He closed the folder.
"You want to fly the supplies in, but these things won't let you," Rus guessed.
Reed nodded. "We don't have air superiority. And until we do, no flights."
"So you want us to roll in on the ground, set up AA defenses, and pretend we're not just giant screaming targets."
Reed pushed a second folder toward him. "This is what we know about the creatures. Minimal. Which is why you're the tip of the spear. Cyma goes in first. Other units will follow once the perimeter's secure."
"And why us?" Rus asked, though he already knew.
"Because you're a Tier Three Counter now. The brass wants results, not promises. And you've got a track record of surviving."
"Great," Rus muttered. "Being alive has officially become a liability."
Reed just grinned like the smug bastard he was. "You leave in seventy-two hours. Get your unit ready."
He gathered Cyma for the debrief later that evening. They met near the east motor pool, where the sunlight died behind the storage silos and the oil-stained gravel smelled like hot metal.
They gathered around the Humvee with Berta, Dan, Gino, Foster, Kate, Stacy, and Amiel, all half in uniform and fully skeptical.
Rus held up the mission brief. "Eastern coastline. We're going from Miron to Victoria. On wheels. Not air."
Foster groaned. "That's three hundred klicks of shit terrain."
"Four," Rus corrected. "And half of it's estuary swamp."
Gino frowned. "Wait, what happened to the swamp op being someone else's problem?"
"They lied."
Kate leaned against the vehicle. "And here I was, finally getting used to the sound of printers instead of gunfire."
"Enjoyed the chair too," Rus admitted. "Had lumbar support."
Berta, naturally, smirked. "So we're going sightseeing with guns?"
"Not exactly," Rus said. "We're laying down the framework for anti-air defenses. There are creatures out there. Winged, organized, and hostile. Until we take the skies from them, UH can't airlift anything. So we go in. We scout. We set up. We hold."
"And when they attack?" Amiel asked, voice flat.
"We hold harder."
Berta leaned over and grinned at Rus's gunblade, Salvo, hanging across his waist. "So do we get to watch you wave your HEWS around and play hero, Sir?"
Rus gave her a look. "You crack another innuendo and I'm assigning you to latrine logistics for the next month."
She raised her hands in mock surrender, but the smile didn't fade. "Sir, yes sir."
Rus walked around the back of the Humvee, checked the gear list, and started running through the departure schedule.
"Gear up. Full armor loadouts. Mounted weapons calibrated. Vehicles fueled. We leave in forty-eight."
Foster whistled. "Going to be one hell of a road trip."
"Less road trip. More potential suicide mission."
"Semantics," Dan muttered.
Kate crossed her arms. "Are you sure we're the right unit for this?"
He paused.
"No," Rus said honestly. "But we're the one they picked. And we're not dead yet."
She nodded. "Then let's not fuck it up."
Over the next day, Cyma prepared. Weapons were checked. Armor reinforced. Salvo was recharged, polished, and sheathed like the prized tool of destruction it was. The drones were preloaded with terrain maps. The vehicles were packed with enough ammo, rations, and supplies to start a small, angry country.
Berta even refrained from sexually harassing half the squad for a full twenty-four hours.
It was almost alarming.
At one point, Rus found her actually helping Amiel with weapon maintenance.
"You're unusually quiet," Rus told her.
She glanced over, eyes narrowing. "This isn't like the swamp, Wilson. Or even the Ridge. This is… new."
"Good. I prefer new problems. I've solved all the old ones."
She snorted. "You know what I mean."
"Yeah," Rus said. "I do."
The night before they left, he stood outside the barracks with his helmet tucked under his arm, looking out over the base.
Damasa was quiet again.
The lights hummed. The wind was gentle. Even the distant sound of drones patrolling overhead was muted.
Rus thought about the Ridge. About the Rift. About Salvo's hum in his hand and the weight of responsibility he hadn't asked for but now wore like a second spine.
Being Tier Three wasn't a gift. It was a promise.
The kind you bleed to keep.
"Wilson," Kate called behind him.
Rus turned.
"You coming to the mess for one last meal before the slog?"
Rus shook his head. "I'll eat in the Humvee. Less chance of some idiot trying to get me drunk."
She rolled her eyes and left without another word.
***
It was a painful ride for the next days.
Not dramatic, not action-packed, just painful. Four days of being stuck in the Humvee convoy, rolling over pitted earth, cracked concrete, and the occasional rotted-over skeleton of some long-dead farm town. It was a full battalion on the move. Armored personnel carriers, logistics crawlers, air-defense mechs hitching rides on flatbeds. Enough firepower to flatten a mountain and enough bureaucracy to rebuild it again in triplicate.
Commander Kilgore was in charge.
A man with the voice of a sermon and the leadership style of a steamroller. If he wasn't shouting over the comms, he was growling about delays and issuing orders like they were a pack of unruly dogs instead of a seasoned Counter Unit. He had that kind of career tone. The type of guy who had medals for breathing and gave inspirational speeches that made them want to eat a bullet.
Cyma, for reasons still unknown to man or God, was picked to lead point.
Berta was thrilled, of course. "Finally," she said, leaning out of the Humvee window, hair tied up and bandana tight. "All those years of playing sidekick to this country's trauma dump finally paid off."
"You mean me?" Rus asked.
"No, I meant Dan. Obviously you, jackass."
Four days of that. Four days of swampy heat, unfiltered sunlight, the smell of oil, piss, and MREs. Four days of clearing the road ahead, checking every ruined structure for hostiles, wild growth, or structural collapse. Every two clicks, they stopped to mark safe zones and clear the worst debris, setting up rudimentary comm towers and storage caches.
The first day they lost two logistics grunts to a collapsed viaduct. The second day, a drone spotted movement on the hillside and they spent five hours crawling through brush just to find a pair of wild dogs tearing apart an old mech suit. On day three, the rain came, and the route turned to mud thick enough to trap even the Knights for a while.
They called it Baptism by Boredom.
"Boss," Foster said at one point, leaning back in the rear seat, boot tapping the side of the Humvee, "you ever get the feeling we're the janitors of an apocalypse no one's watching?"
"I did," Rus replied. "Then I got promoted. Now I'm middle management."
"Tragic."
"Truly."
The only good thing about the whole affair was that no one died.
At least, not from anything violent.
There were some near-misses. Gino almost stepped on a buried sensor mine that hadn't seen daylight in years. Dan fell into a collapsed storefront and nearly got impaled on a metal beam. But no actual firefights. No Riftlings. No Gobbers. No mutated swamp serpents rising out of the road screaming their birth curses.
Just miles and miles of terrain, heat, exhaustion, and Kilgore's voice reminding us how little sleep we were getting.
It was only later that they set up an outpost near the remnants of a coastal watch station.
It was barely standing, concrete walls eroded by salt, a radar dish half-buried in vines, but the structure was sound enough to house a temporary FOB.
They called it Point Dagger. Because of course they did.
"Why Dagger?" Gino asked, half-dozing against a crate.
"Because 'Point Existential Dread' didn't pass UH naming conventions," Rus muttered.
The base was functional within twelve hours. Drones scanned the perimeter, the Knights positioned their cannons to face the coastline, and they ran the first proper diagnostics on the airspace ahead.
Nothing good.
The birds were gone. The clouds were wrong. And the signal interference meant that every other scan came back with static ghosts.
Reed wasn't on-site, but he called in twice a day. Once for updates, once for pressure. He had a knack for asking about problems five minutes before they happened.
"You'll push through Lavie tomorrow," he said in the evening brief.
"Town's ruins," Rus told him. "Scanners show possible movement."
"Probable?"
"Unknown."
"Then find out."
As always, helpful.
Berta crashed on a cot near the comms tent that night, muttering about how her back would sue her for war crimes.
Rus sat outside, back against the side of the Humvee, helmet off, rifle across his lap.
Amiel passed him once. Didn't say anything. Just a nod. Her way of checking if he was alive.
Kate joined him minutes later, holding two coffee pouches.
"Congratulations, Lieutenant," she said, tossing one to him. "You've officially earned a week of leading grunts through swampland hell and into the jaws of flying nightmares."
"Feels like I just won a free stay at a luxury resort."
"Do we at least get those little mint chocolates on the pillow?"
"No. We get the privilege of not dying."
"Not quite as sweet."
They sipped quietly for a while. The night was cool. The wind smelled like brine and algae. The ocean wasn't far. Rus could hear the waves sometimes, when the wind cut just right.
Then the scanner beeped once.
Not urgent. Just a ping. A low-level anomaly.
Kate stood and went to check. "False positive. Just movement lag."
That was becoming more common.
Later, they reached the edge of Lavie.
It was less a town and more a graveyard. The buildings were half-eaten by time and overgrowth. The roads had collapsed into pits of black water. Whatever had lived here before the Rifts had long since fled or died.
Cyma spread out.
"Same drill," Rus ordered. "Gino, Dan, Foster, north block. Kate, Amiel, set up drone feeds. Berta, with me. We sweep the central plaza. Stay sharp."
"Sharp as your jawline, boss," Berta said with a grin.
"If I die, you're not allowed to flirt at my funeral."
"I'll flirt with your corpse. Don't tempt me."
They moved slow.
Every building we cleared felt like it had secrets. But they found nothing. No creatures. No traps. No bones. Just… emptiness. That eerie, post-Rift emptiness that lingered like a memory no one wanted to admit they had.
Foster radioed in. "Boss. We found something."
"Define something."
"Looks like… nests."
"Nests?"
"Yeah. Organic matter. Dried. Like something roosted here. Big."
That was the first real sign they were dealing with those flying things.
"Samples?"
"Bagged. Sending drone shots."
The images came in minutes later. Veined cocoons. Shed skin. Talon marks on walls. Whatever had been here, it had wings. And claws.
Kilgore then ordered them to establish a fallback point. They secured the upper floors of Lavie's old town hall, reinforced it, and laid out enough sensors to light up the whole valley.
Still no movement.
And that made it worse.
By the time they were ready to push to Victoria, Cyma was tired and then the birds appeared, trying to gang up on a Knight trying to clear a nest.