Rus had smelled a lot of things in his life lately, like burned swamp water, Gobber bile, two-week-old socks inside an unwashed mech cockpit, but the stench rolling off the basin that afternoon was something else entirely. It wasn't just gore. It wasn't just cordite. It was a chemical marriage of both, thick enough to taste and mean enough to make even veterans squint their eyes like they'd been slapped.
He walked past a row of medics hosing boots, stepping around puddles that hissed from the heat still radiating through the ground. The air shimmered with the tang of cordite, burnt collagen, and whatever biological glue held orcs together.
Rus grimaced. "Smells like someone set off a barbecue in a septic tank."
Foster gagged behind him. "Boss, please don't describe it."
Gino coughed. "I think the smell's sticking to my soul man."
Dan wandered through the haze like a man rethinking life choices. "I didn't sign up for this. I signed up for shooting. Not bathing in chowder."
"Bullshit. You signed up to get into the city. Shut up," Rus muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. The QTE flickers didn't help, they kept highlighting debris, corpses, and structural hazards like glowing icons. He blinked them away. "Just get through the damn line. Prefab HQ's ahead."
He trudged into the nearest corridor of prefabs where the air, while stale, didn't feel like a refinery leaking out of a graveyard. He stepped inside one marked COMMAND, nodded to the guards, and pushed through the makeshift curtain door.
Colonel Vance Halberg stood hunched over a holographic projection. Sweat plastered his hair back. He smelled of gun oil and fatigue. Not gore, thankfully.
Halberg didn't look up immediately. His finger tapped the holographic display, zooming in on the ridge they'd just blown to hell. Red markers pulsed like open wounds, blinking intermittently as drones fed new data.
Rus cleared his throat. "You called for me, sir."
Halberg looked up. His usual half-smirk was gone, replaced with something tighter, grim, but not panicked.
"Lieutenant," he greeted. "You look like hell."
Rus deadpanned, "You should smell the outside, Sir."
Halberg snorted. "Fair. Sit."
Rus didn't. He preferred standing, since it was easier to leave that way. Halberg didn't insist.
Instead, the colonel exhaled slowly and tapped another panel. The hologram shifted. The red markers reorganized into colored clusters of green, blue, yellow, dirty orange.
"Sitrep?" Rus asked.
Halberg shook his head. "This isn't a sitrep. This is a new phase. And you're not going to like it."
Rus crossed his arms. "I rarely like anything you tell me."
"Good," Halberg said. "Because this will fit nicely on your list."
He zoomed into one of the colored clusters, literally hundreds of markers surrounded by a few towering signatures. One marked BLACK stood a head taller than any of the others.
Halberg began pacing.
"Here's the thing," he said. "Orcs aren't as stupid as we know. And what we saw today wasn't just a warband. It was a structured force. That means leadership. And leadership means we can break their spine if we take the right heads."
Rus waited.
He felt the familiar hum of a QTE-ready prompt flicker in the edge of his vision—like his instincts were preparing for something violent, inevitable.
Halberg stabbed a finger at the holo. "These tall bastards—see them? Bigger than the others. Wearing multiple colors instead of one."
Rus leaned in. The highlighted leader had layered strips of dyed hides crisscrossed over his chest from red, green, black, bone-white.
"What are the colors?" Rus asked. "Rank?"
"Not exactly." Halberg's voice flattened. "Analysts think it's allegiance. Multiple clans wearing the same marks. One leader wearing all their colors. Means they're unified."
Rus didn't say anything.
Halberg continued. "And unified orcs are dangerous. Not individually, they're just oversized meat sacks. But when they march like this? When they follow someone without fighting among themselves? That's when you get full-scale campaigns."
Rus nodded once. "And you want us to solve that."
Halberg pointed directly at him. "Your team, yes. You Counters were built for surgical kills, high-risk insertion, decapitation strikes. You're not infantry. You're our scalpels."
Berta would like this, Rus thought dryly. She'd probably sharpen her axe already.
Halberg moved on. "The artillery did the first job, softened them. But that won't stop them regrouping. These figureheads? They're the glue. You cut them out and the whole mass collapses into infighting."
Rus raised an eyebrow. "You want us to ambush them."
"Ambush. Isolate. Kill." Halberg corrected. "We've identified at least eight potential leaders. Tall bastards. Armor thicker than the rest. Mutated frames. They command with gestures. They coordinate movement. They're the brains, such as they have."
Rus looked back at the holo. Colored icons pulsed like ulcer spots.
"Why now?" he asked.
Halberg paused mid-step. "Because they'll recover. Today's bombardment took out a chunk of their meat, but not their direction. The leadership was smart enough to stay out of the basin. They didn't walk into our fire. They let the fodder die first."
Rus exhaled through his nose. "Cowards."
"No," Halberg said. "Strategists. And that's a big problem. We won't want a guerilla war on our hands. We'd rather burn the place."
He tapped the holo again. The map zoomed into a ravine—a shaded valley east of the ridge. Multiple tall signatures glowed within it.
"Here's the plan," Halberg said. "Scouts have located their command post. Not permanent, but stable enough for them to organize. You're going to hit it."
"Hit it how?"
"With everything you've got."
Rus stared. "So Cyma Squad moves out as soon as…?"
Halberg nodded. "As soon as we finalize the approach vectors. Likely dawn tomorrow. We want you to go in cold and quiet. Elite entry. No loud artillery to warn them. Kill the figureheads, pull out, and let them eat each other."
Rus sighed, rubbing his eyes. "And here I thought today was already bad."
Halberg chuckled without humor. "Trust me. Tomorrow's worse."
Rus stared at the holo, at the blinking icons representing mutated giants who could rally thousands by screaming loud enough. Killing them wasn't the issue. The issue was getting close before they sensed anything.
"Any intel on their behavior?" Rus asked.
Halberg nodded sharply. "From the reports, these ones don't rush. They think. They analyze terrain. They direct troops in patterns. They wear colors because it shows clan loyalty. They carry trophies. Their armor is hide, bone, maybe steel scraps. They fight with massive weapons, poleblades, clubs, crude hammers. They hit like trucks. They can break a mech's knee joint if they catch it right."
He paused. "They're also smart enough to pull back from shelling. That's new."
Rus felt the QTE flicker again—little arcs indicating angles of approach, simulated paths, potential threats, predicted reactions. His mutation worked overtime, mapping out possibilities before he consciously thought them.
Halberg didn't notice the shift in Rus's eyes. "Your job," he continued, "is to cripple them. I don't care how. Just break the command. Take the colors off their corpses. Make sure they can't get up."
Rus nodded. "Understood."
Halberg sighed and finally sat down, shoulders slumped. "This isn't just another op, Lieutenant. This right here decides whether we hold Galves or lose three counties worth of progress."
Rus blinked slowly. "So no pressure."
Halberg pointed at him with a half-smile. "Pressure's for infantry. You Counters? You're pressure valves."
Rus snorted softly. "Sure."
Halberg rubbed his temples. "I'll send the full intel packet to your console. Prep your gear. Sharpen your blade. You'll be in the ravine by dawn."
Rus turned to leave.
"Lieutenant," Halberg called after him. Rus stopped.
Halberg's expression softened just a bit, not warmth, not sympathy, but the acknowledgment of someone who knew exactly how much weight he was placing on one man.
"Cut the head," Halberg said. "And the body dies."
Rus nodded once.
* * *
The forest closed around them like a fist. Moss muffled bootsteps. Branches caught at straps and webbing. Even the air seemed to hold its breath a wet, green silence that made the world feel narrow and urgent.
Rus moved at the front, Cyma Squadron's outline a darker slab a dozen paces behind him. The ravine funneled them north, following a creek bed that had been carved by seasons no one counted anymore. The trees here were older, trunks like columns, underbrush burned into neat channels by animals and the paths of those who wanted to keep to shadow. The light through the leaves came in thin green knives.
They went slow. No chatter. Only the soft click of a strap, the occasional cough swallowed into a sleeve. Berta walked beside Rus, axe down across her shoulders like a casual threat. Dan and Gino flanked the pair, rifles raised but not pointing. Foster had the spare mags and the grapnel. Stacy and Kate watched the canopy, eyes moving like seasoned predators. Amiel was as still as a cut gem at the back, drone hovering near her shoulder, scope warm in her hands. Cyma's servos whispered as it tracked thermal pockets ahead.
The plan was simple. Get in, find the command post, take the heads, get out. No fireworks until the last throat was slit. The TRU's plan for sterilizing numbers didn't matter here. This was scalp work.
Rus's HUD flickered, faint arcs and arrows ghosting at the edge of his sight like a second skin. The QTE prompts were easier now, the more he used them, the smoother they ran. It was less magic and more habit a set of tools etched into his reflexes. The overlay pulsed as they turned along a narrow goat path that opened into a shallow bowl.
He raised a hand and the squad froze like someone had put the world on hold.
"Camp," he breathed.
They came over the lip and saw it, a ring of crude shelters, fires guttered low, banners stitched into poles, and a scarred clearing where bigger beasts had been butchered and hung. Orc men moved deliberately between shelters. Nothing chaotic. Quiet discipline. Sentinels walked the perimeter, shields slung, poleblades resting like extensions of their arms. The leader they'd marked on the holo was unmistakable even from a distance. Being taller than the others, draped in layered colors, an obsidian-dark hide that glinted faintly in the dappled sun. He had a way of standing that made other orcs clear a space. The banners at his post had three colors stacked together, bone, green, black the same pattern the analysts had highlighted, the alliances worn like armor.
Rus's overlay tightened. Attack vectors, egress routes, turret arcs that might not exist yet. The QTE pulsed a single instruction: PRIORITY TARGET, HEAD.
Silence. The squad exhaled slowly, the movement swallowed.
Amiel's rifle was already up.. The drone stilled, eyes locked, its quiet motor a metronome in Rus's skull. He watched her shoulders as she balanced the weight.
She raised the scope, closed the eye, and the world narrowed. Rus saw the target arc in his vision , the leader's shoulder, the angle of the skull, the margin for error. He could see Amiel's light of sight , a pale arrow that slid gently into the kill zone.
The first shot punched cleanly through the air.
The leader staggered, more from shock than pain, a hand reaching up to feel a hollow where instinct told him something vital had been taken. He didn't drop. He blinked, baffled, trying to understand why the world had turned wrong. The sentries shouted, a jarringly human sound, and the camp snapped awake.
Amiel's second shot cracked. The leader's legs buckled and he went down, a great weight crumpling into the dirt. For a heartbeat, the forest held, waiting for the fall to mean something definitive.
The third shot came in quick and cold, and the leader lay still. The body slumped, silent.
There was no gore on display. The shots were aimed to stop, to end command and the result was obvious, a body that no longer commanded. The camp froze, only now its lines of order shredded like cut rope.
The silence shattered then into snarls. Alarm spread in a dozen directions. Sentinels ran, the smaller orcs moving with frantic hunger toward the sound. The field became a machine grinding to life.
Rus barked the order. "Engage. Fall back lane Alpha. Make them think it's a rout. Keep cover. Draw them into the funnel."
Berta's grin went sharp. "About time," she said, before snapping to the rhythm of it, metal in her hands, eyes bright. Amiel already vanished into shadow, rifle slung as the drone flicked forward with a thin whine.
Rus drew Salvo. The HF blade sang up, a low vibration along his arm, the edge catching light like a living thing. The QTE overlay bloomed, attack arcs painting the clearing in blue and red. Thrusts to commit, arcs to evade, counters to break momentum. It was a puzzle of movement that his body recognized before his brain had to choose.
They retreated in two deliberate lines. Dan, Gino, and Foster fired controlled bursts behind them, not to kill so much as to keep heads down, keep the orcs' attention off the real blade. The greenhorns' bullets punched into ground and bark. The orc warband surged, a dark tide, their war cries replaced by the sound of heavy boots and metal on wood.
The first orc to close looked like a tree with hands. His poleblade swung in a terrible arc intended to cleave. Rus stepped aside, pressing within the reach of the shaft. The QTE blinked: PARRY—TURN—KNEE. He moved on cue. Salvo caught the poleblade near its haft, the vibration through the handle telling him the metal's temper. He twisted, using the pole's momentum to lift and redirect. The orc's swing overreached; Rus drove his knee to the inside of the beast's thigh, folding the big creature to a knee, and then spun, planting the butt of the blade into the base of the throat. The orc went down with a breathless roar.
Berta met another charging pair and smiled like she'd found a puzzle she could break. She swung her axe low and fast. The first blow caught a shoulder, leather parting with sound like an animal yelp. The second blow came in an upward arc that broke a shield strap. The third was a savage, practiced chop that put the orc off balance, and Berta finished with a savage knot work of ax handle and footwork that left the creature lying in a heap. She didn't celebrate, she simply moved on, efficiency in motion.
Amiel reappeared three paces to Rus's right, silent as a shadow, knife in hand for the close work. A hulking orc came down on her with a clean, brutal swing meant to crush. She sidestepped on the ball of her foot, stepped in under the blow, and drove her clawed knife into the soft space below the armpit. The orc staggered, the motion halted as if someone had cut a cable. Amiel twisted, using his stagger to wrench him off balance, and then planted a precise strike to the throat that was a simple, final movement. No flourish. No noise beyond the orc's collapse.
Rus felt the QTE arrows updating, predicting the next moves of the ranks. The overlay whispered angles to him where a poleblade would overreach, where a shield would leave a flank exposed, where a thigh could give way if hit just so. He followed the instructions like a man following a map laid out in motion: block, spin, rip, drive. It was not a spectacle. It was work, brutal and methodical.
An orc with a two-handed hammer pivoted toward them, swinging low to crush. Rus parried, felt the shock up his arms as the HF blade absorbed impact. He turned the hammer's arc into space, pushed beyond the strike, and sallied in with a short, brutal slash to the side that sent the big creature stumbling. Berta met that stumble with a downward axe strike that cracked the orc's knee. The two of them worked like gears, he made the opening, she finished the motion.
The camp dissolved into a maelstrom. Orcs surged from every shelter not random beasts but trained fighters, their actions coordinated even without the leader's voice. Rus's muscles moved with a terrible calm. He blocked, jabbed, and stepped. Salvo sang. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't theatrical. It was efficient and ugly and precise.
At one point a poleblade came in so fast it blurred. Rus's overlay marked a narrow window: KICK—SLIDE—UPRUSH. He followed it. A heel to the knee, a slide under the swing, an uprush that caught the orc below the jaw with a glancing strike that left the big beast reeling. Berta cleaved through the opening like a reaper finishing a harvest. Flesh didn't bloom; bodies fell. The forest floor took them.
They moved as a unit, a serrated arc of steel and shadow pulling the warband into a tighter knot, through the ravine's funnel, toward pre-cleared kill zones where mortars could still reach and where fellow units waited with bayonets and traps. Rus kept an eye on egress, finding bottles of space for retreat, making sure the flow didn't bunch and trap them. He called for a break and pulled at the first sign of a flank closing.
The QTE kept updating with micro-commands: BLOCK—TURN—THRUST; CUT—DROP—PIVOT; BACKSTEP—RELOAD—SUPPRESS. The HUD's arrows were not flashy; they were practical. He could have fought without them, but they made the difference between hitting and slipping, between controlling blood and becoming someone else's corpse.
Amiel was quiet but deadly. She moved through the melee like a patient knife seeking seams. Where a poleblade opened, she was there. Where a shield dropped, she was there. She didn't celebrate. She didn't even breathe hard. She just kept moving, keeping the kill windows tight.
Berta laughed once, a short bark of sound, when she and Rus back-to-back cleared a path through a pack of orcs that had tried to encircle them. She swung, he parried, she drove, he followed. Three orcs fell under their combined force in a sequence so smooth it looked rehearsed. The fourth lunged, too fast for the rhythm; Rus felt his blade bite through bone and armor with a dull, denying resistance that said the orc might not stand. Berta finished the motion with her boot, pinning the creature for a dirty, efficient end.
They didn't take prisoners. The orcs they downed didn't twitch. The ones who could still run were shepherded toward the kill zones, the engineered funnels where other units were waiting like teeth.
At one point, a huge beast packed with color tried to rally the survivors. He bellowed, beating his chest, calling for a line to reform. He started to pull the scattered fighters back to order. Rus saw him, a taller, coated in the layered banners, an obvious target that hadn't mattered until he tried to remold the fight. The QTE pulsed: PRIORITY—DISRUPT—CUT.
Amiel stepped out, rifle picking him with two precise rounds that staggered his shoulders. The beast still moved, fury overriding sense. He reached them in a lunging charge, great weight thudding the ground. Rus met him with Salvo, closing the distance in three measured steps. The blade found a seam under the orc's arm, slid along leather and hide, and bit into muscle. The orc swung a massive club that missed by inches as Berta ducked and rose with a savage arc that caught him at the hip.
They roped the beast into a final dance of violence. Rus planted his foot, braced, and drove the blade in controlling strikes that slowed the big creature's motion. Berta's axe came down in a clean, practiced arc that separated the orc's forward motion from its center of balance. The beast fell against the roots of an old tree with the sound of a felled trunk.
Around them the fight thinned. The orcs that were not killed outright began to run, bodies moving through the trees with the injured, not the victorious. The remaining ranks collapsed into ragged groups, leaderless and scattered. The camp's ordered line left only the smell of smoke and leaf and the groans of those who would not stand.
Rus kept watch until the last shadow passed over the lip of the hollow. He breathed slow, the QTE dimming like a screen going back to idle. Salvo hummed at his side, damp with sweat and use. Berta leaned on her axe, breathing hard, grin carved on her face like a scar.
"Nice and tidy," she said, though the suit of her voice carried roughness. "You direct, I wreck. We make good furniture."
Rus didn't answer right away. He scanned the clearing. Scattered bodies, a few banners ripped from poles, the leader's colors slumped in the dirt. No triumph. No celebration. Just the work done and its immediate consequences, trackers to be removed, evidence to be bagged, TRU to be notified.
Amiel walked up silently. Her hands were steady. She nodded once, the faintest acknowledgement of motion.
Rus sheathed Salvo slowly, his fingers finding the lock. The QTE faded entirely. The overlay went black. The world was the world again of sounds sharper, time heavier. He felt it in his limbs, the dull burn of exertion, the small pricks where the fight had been close. He was not proud. He was not regretful. He was a man who had done a job and then had to move on to the next.
"Get the perimeter secure," he said finally. "Watch for stragglers. TRU will want the leader's colors intact and document everything. We don't touch their banners until they tell us."
Berta spat once in the dirt, as if to sign the agreement. "Fine. But next time, I have to go first."
"You get reckless first," Rus said.
She flashed him a grin that was all teeth. "Close enough."
They moved through the camp with the professional slowness of people who'd done this before, tag, bag, catalogue. The orc leader's banners went into a sealed crate. Kate photographed every angle with an emotionless care. Cyma recorded everything with motions precise and obedient.
When the last crate was locked and the last photograph taken, Rus looked at his squad — at the tired faces, the ragged clothes, the quiet breathing.
"Back to the ridge," he said. "We report. We move."
They left the ravine like a wound closing behind them, darkened earth, broken poles, where life had been rearranged by steel and choice.
The forest swallowed their tracks.