From his prefab office, Rus watched the others fool around across the Bay of Gorda.
The squad was scattered with Berta shouting at recruits again, Stacy and Kate trying to look busy near the armory, Amiel sitting alone under the awning with her rifle stripped open on her lap. Even Cyma was there, the machine's matte plating gleaming in the morning sun as it stood in silent guard over the chaos.
The bay had become a hive of soldiers, counters, and logistics crews constantly moving in and out, shuttled by VTOLs that never stopped screaming overhead. Every hour, new boots arrived and old ones left, an endless tide of steel and uniforms.
Watching it, Rus couldn't shake the thought that at this rate, he might never need to fight again.
With how many Counters and Libertalia soldiers had poured in, it was getting hard to find room to breathe, let alone a reason to draw his weapon.
He honestly had half-forgotten why they were even here anymore.
The reports trickling in didn't help much, fragmented updates, shifting orders, redirections. But piecing them together gave him a vague picture that the push northeast was still on. The next objective was breaching Galveson, then advancing toward Savine, where another encampment would form.
The whole thing looked good on paper. A neat little chain of progress.
But from down here, it felt like a strategy written by ghosts.
Trying to understand what those bastards in Libertalia Command were doing was like reading smoke. The big picture was always moving, always mutating. Every time Rus thought he understood the logic, another change of orders swept in and erased it.
It wasn't that he couldn't keep up. He was fast, faster than most. It just felt like there was a second layer to it all. A hidden rhythm only the higher-ups could hear. Like everyone was dancing to a beat that he wasn't built to follow.
He'd stopped trying to make sense of it weeks ago.
All he really knew was that his role had shrunk. Months ago, Cyma Unit had been first in, last out, battering through nests, cracking open Rift zones, burning the ground clean. Now, they were background muscle. A reliable standby.
Part of him was grateful. Another part wasn't sure what to do with the quiet.
"If Libertalia stopped being a bunch of damned cunts," he muttered to himself, "maybe I could finally get out."
He leaned back in his chair, staring through the slit window at the sprawl of the base.
That was the thing that bothered him the most. The longer he served, the more he started remembering why he'd come here in the first place, why he'd fought, survived, adapted.
When he'd first arrived in this world, all he'd wanted was something simple. A place to live. A job. Maybe someone decent to share it with.
That was it.
Now he was knee-deep in bureaucratic warfare, pretending to understand maps drawn by men who would never step onto the soil they planned to conquer.
He rubbed at his eyes, glancing at a stack of papers on his desk. Logistics manifests. Deployment schedules. Boring, necessary things.
His mind drifted, as it often did, to Berta.
He liked her, there was no denying that. She was fire and chaos and laughter wrapped in armor. A friend, sure. But the first impression she'd made had burned too deep for anything else.
That first meeting had set the tone. Maybe that was why he kept his distance.
Because he knew if he ever crossed that line, something in the balance would break.
And Rus didn't like change.
Call it cowardice, call it caution, didn't matter. Change had a habit of wrecking everything it touched.
Instead, he buried himself in study when he could. Reports. Notes. Theories.
He'd been digging into mutations lately, trying to understand what made each of them different. The powers weren't equal, that much was obvious. Some were subtle, others catastrophic. Some barely changed a person; others rewrote them.
He'd spoken, well, argued, really with some researcher once, name already forget. The man had claimed every mutation was a reflection of something internal. A personal reality.
"Each of us lives in a world shaped by our thoughts," the man had said. "Our powers just make it visible."
It sounded like philosophy wrapped in science, but Rus couldn't entirely dismiss it.
If it was true, it meant every ability. every trick, every burst of strength, every slowed moment wasn't random. It was their personal personality carved into physics.
He was glad there were limits.
Because if someone out there truly had the power to reshape the world around them to fit their personal reality, then they were all living on borrowed time.
He hoped no one like that existed.
Or if they did, he hoped they were content to stay invisible.
The day wore on in that dull, restless rhythm. Distant gunfire from a training range. Engines roaring. The drone of officers shouting at recruits.
No emergencies. No alarms. Just order.
Too much order.
Rus found himself glancing out the window again, almost expecting to see something, an explosion, a Rift flare, even a skirmish. Anything to break the monotony.
Nothing.
Only the sight of his squad still lingering in the sun. Berta was laughing again, probably bullying some rookie into sparring. Kate and Stacy leaned against a wall, trading sarcastic remarks. Amiel stood apart, calm and silent as always, her eyes on the horizon.
Cyma loomed beside them, motionless.
"Maybe I'm getting soft," Rus muttered. "Missing the noise."
He considered it.
Then he looked around the office, the hum of the AC, the half-empty cup of coffee, the tin of peanuts, the neatly stacked files and decided no.
He didn't miss the fight.
Not at all.
***
Evening bled slow across the Bay of Gorda.
The light turned gold first, then gray, and finally that washed-out violet that made everything look frozen in time. The hum of machinery softened. The voices carried differently—lower, calmer, tired.
Rus stepped out of his prefab office, coffee in hand, and stood on the metal steps overlooking the sprawl. The air smelled of oil and salt, the two constants of military life. He could see the entire compound from here, the prefab rows, the landing pads, the cranes still moving crates even after dusk. It all looked busy enough to fool someone into thinking there was purpose in it.
The squad was scattered but visible, orbiting each other in their usual patterns.
Kate sat on a crate with a cleaning kit laid out, disassembling her rifle piece by piece with surgeon precision. Stacy leaned nearby, smoking a thin roll, pretending to keep her company but mostly just watching the horizon.
Berta had set up near the outer fence, axe across her lap, talking too loud at a group of rookies who were smart enough to laugh at her jokes.
Amiel, predictably, was perched on the wing of a grounded VTOL, scope half-assembled, staring through it at nothing.
Rus sipped his coffee and let them be.
This was what "quiet" looked like in their world, everyone keeping their hands busy so their minds didn't wander. No one trusted silence here. Silence meant time to think, and thinking never helped.
He wandered down the steps, crossing the dirt path toward the storage yard. A few soldiers nodded as he passed, half-salutes more habit than respect. Someone was playing music from a portable speaker that was maybe pre-Rift. It didn't matter. It was sound, and sound meant life.
"Boss," Berta called out when she spotted him, waving a canteen. "Are you finally leaving the desk? Miracles do happen."
"Paperwork's finished," he said.
"See? You can be tamed." She grinned, wide and shameless. "Want a drink?"
"No," he said automatically.
"Suit yourself." She took a long pull and grimaced. "Water. Disgusting."
Rus smirked, faintly. "Try staying hydrated for once."
"Hydration's for people who don't live violently," she shot back, but the edge was playful. The rookies around her laughed, relieved to have a reason to.
He left her to it.
Further down, he found Stacy and Kate watching the last transport of the day lift off from the dock, engines burning orange against the dusk.
"Looks like the carrier's running night ops," Stacy said. "More supply runs."
Kate nodded. "Or evac for the wounded from the northeast front."
Neither sounded particularly interested in the answer.
Rus stood beside them for a while, hands in his pockets. The bay looked calm from here. Too calm. The kind of calm that felt fake, like something was holding its breath. The surface of the water shimmered in the dying light, reflecting the scattered glow of floodlights along the shoreline.
"You think it ever ends?" Kate asked suddenly.
"What?" Rus said.
"This. All of it. The fighting, the clearing, the rebuilding. Feels like we're just looping."
Stacy flicked ash off her smoke. "There's always another hole to fill."
Rus took a moment before replying. "It ends when people stop finding ways to break the world."
Kate gave a short laugh. "So never. How many times have I asked this, Boss?"
"Dunno."
When the conversation drifted off, he moved on again. It wasn't that he couldn't stand still, it was that standing still made him restless. Made him remember too much.
Cyma was where he expected, standing near the motor pool, silent and unmoving, eyes dimmed to standby. Rus paused beside it, looking up at the smooth armor plating.
"You get bored?" he asked it quietly.
The machine didn't answer. It never did. But he sometimes liked to imagine it understood.
He lingered there longer than he meant to, the hum of generators filling the spaces between thoughts. There was something grounding about being near the machine, something steady. Cyma didn't question orders. Didn't flinch. Didn't lose sleep. In a world that ran on half-truths and shifting plans, the bot was the only constant.
By the time he turned back, the bay was fully dark. Floodlights flicked on one by one. The soldiers settled into their routines—cleaning, talking, pretending tomorrow wouldn't look exactly like today.
Rus headed back toward the prefab cluster. He passed Berta again, still holding court, now trying to arm-wrestle one of the rookies on a barrel.
Amiel had moved from the VTOL wing to the ground, still working on her scope, the faint glow of her drone hovering nearby like a loyal firefly.
Kate and Stacy were finishing up their gear check, trading quiet jokes.
For a fleeting moment, the scene looked… normal. Almost peaceful.
And that, more than anything, made Rus uneasy.
War didn't give you peace without a reason.
He paused at the threshold of his office, looking once more at the bay, the walls, the lights. Everything held together by order, by habit, by noise. All of it temporary.
He thought of Damasa again, of the swamp waiting for them, of the next corridor on the map that would soon drag them forward. He didn't know when it would come, only that it would.
For now, though, the night stayed still.
He went inside, poured the last of the coffee, and sat back at his desk.