After we swatted the flying bastards out of the sky and scorched their nests into greasy vapor, Commander Kilgore made the city of Victoria the new Forward Operating Base.
Charming.
Well, "city" was generous. It was a skeleton. What was once a seaside hub now looked like someone had paused time and let rot do the rest. Buildings stood like tired men, leaning just enough to make you wonder if they'd fall when you weren't looking. Still, it was better than a tent in the mud.
The next target was the County of Acson. 2,220 square kilometers of unspoiled wilderness or what passed for it these days. The aerial scans showed terrain that looked like it was plucked straight out of a pre-rift propaganda brochure for "Return to the Old World." Rolling hills, cliffside woods, rivers winding like veins across deep green valleys. Breathtaking, if you could forget this planet was actively trying to vomit monsters out of every rift like an allergic reaction.
Cyma Unit was first to enter.
"First boots, first targets," Rus muttered.
They moved light. Recon kit only, rifles oiled, armor trimmed down to breathable levels. The ride in was quiet, just the rhythmic hum of tires and the distant thump of artillery echoing from the direction we'd come.
The fort was the reason Kilgore wanted this zone locked down. An old one. Pre-Rift, obviously. You could tell by how it wasn't shaped like a metal dick or built around sensor pylons. It was carved stone and high walls, overlooking a flat basin of land that seemed naturally gifted for fortification. A place someone could defend without needing orbital drones or counter-artillery.
Rus stood at the top of the eastern rampart, hands resting on his rifle, visor lifted. Wind carried the sharp bite of pine and ash. From up here, the county stretched wide—fields of green, water running silver, and the broken skeleton of a distant town along the ridge line.
It was quiet.
Unnervingly so.
Kilgore said the plan was to secure this old fort and repurpose it into a long-term outpost. The flat terrain was ideal for a drone relay hub and artillery nests. The idea was to lock down Acson and push east, but to do that we needed a fortress that wouldn't blow away in the next Riftquake.
Rus leaned on the crumbling stone ledge, flipping through the field tablet the TRU gave him. A compiled history file. Local records. Mil-structure layouts. Probably fabricated by AI, but well-sourced enough for his taste.
Apparently, this place had been held during the so-called First Battle of the Estuaries. A civil conflict from a few decades ago before the Post-Rift Era. One of those power struggles you find in every history book with idealists, loyalists, fools, and corpses. But it wasn't the bloodshed that caught his attention. It was the man who held the fort.
General Arlan Merivault. Nicknamed Ironwall.
Renowned for tactical brilliance, so the file claimed. Unshakable resolve. Made a name here during that first battle, when his brigade held off a rebel force three times their number. They dug in, fortified the walls, turned the natural shape of the land into a goddamn deathtrap.
And they won.
He read the rest aloud as he paced the ramparts, mostly because no one else in Cyma had the patience for it and he needed something to keep his mind sharp.
"He earned the nickname Ironwall for holding the line for sixteen days straight with dwindling ammo, short rations, and constant enemy shelling. His men never retreated. He never left the wall. When the smoke cleared, he walked down the slope and offered a truce to the surviving rebels."
Berta climbed up behind him and listened with one eyebrow arched, sweat plastered to her temple.
"Damn," she said. "Sounds like your kind of guy. Real charming."
"Man knew how to hold a position," Rus muttered, still scrolling. "Wish we had one of him every time we walked into a swamp full of piss-goblins and suicidal lizards."
She smirked. "Sure you don't want to grow out a beard and go full warlord? 'Ironwall Rus' has a ring to it."
"Only if I can chain you to the wall and charge entry."
She snorted. "Kinky."
"Not a compliment."
Rus tapped the file shut and stared out over the fort again. It was a good spot. That's what worried him.
Cyma settled in quickly. The engineers began offloading supplies, drones buzzed overhead mapping every inch of terrain, and the Knights stomped in like bored giants, scanning for hostiles. The outer fields were mostly clear. No movement. No tracks.
Still, something itched in the back of his skull.
The land was too good and too untouched.
Like something was letting them move in.
Gino and Dan were setting up a perimeter to the west. Kate was coordinating with logistics, trying not to strangle the comms operator who kept calling her "sir" despite the two very obvious things on her chest that said otherwise. Stacy and Amiel were already up on the southern ridge, eyes in their scopes, completely silent.
Berta stood beside Rus a little too long. He noticed her hand kept drifting toward her axe.
"You feel it too?" Rus asked.
"Yeah," she said. "This place ain't empty."
"Not yet."
They held the fort by nightfall. The walls were lit by temporary halogens, casting long shadows on the ancient stone. It looked surreal—modern war tech clinging to relics of a different age.
And still, nothing came.
Commander Kilgore called it in.
"Victoria has been secured. Acson Fort is now FOB Ironwall. You will hold and prepare for second wave construction units."
No threats. No contact. Just orders to hold.
It should've felt like victory.
But it didn't.
Rus sat alone by the northern wall that night, cleaning Salvo. The hum of its high-frequency edge was gone for now, no need to burn power when the blade wasn't singing.
He couldn't help but think about Ironwall. The man. The myth. Whatever version of him still lingered in this stone.
Did he know the calm before the first siege?
Did he feel it too? That wrongness in the silence?
The ground here was too firm. The walls were too intact. The river was too clean.
A place untouched in a world like this?
Either cursed or waiting.
Footsteps echoed behind him.
Amiel.
She sat down beside me without a word.
They watched the valley in silence.
Then she said, "Feels wrong."
"Yeah."
"Something's here."
"Or something was."
She tapped her fingers against her rifle, slow, rhythmic.
"We're staying?" she asked.
"For now."
"Good."
Another silence passed.
Then she added, "Don't like running."
Rus nodded.
Neither did Ironwall.
By morning, they were issued new objectives. More recon. Patrol the hills. Clear nearby ruins. Keep building.
Business as usual.
But as he walked the wall again, He couldn't help but feel like he was part of something older. Something that had already played out once and was waiting to happen again.
* * *
For the next seventy-two hours, the County of Acson stayed peaceful. The only thing attacking them was boredom and the occasional case of trench foot from the local humidity. No mass ambush. No Rift opening like a hellflower. No winged bastards blotting the sky. Even if there were, the beehives were waiting for the fuckers.
Just a few scattered Gobbers who looked as surprised to see them as they were tired of seeing them. Berta took one down with her axe before finishing a sentence, and Gino tagged the other two before they could even scream. Quick, clean, uneventful.
"Are we cursed or blessed?" Rus muttered as he logged the incident. "And which one do I shoot first if it changes its mind?"
Cyma rotated shifts, established observation posts, and dug in.
Then, on day four, something changed.
It started with Amiel. Of course it did. She radioed in from her position along the western riverbed, dead calm as always.
"Movement. River. Unusual," was all she said.
Rus was expecting another Gobber patrol or some half-mutated deer. What he got when he arrived was… not that.
He crouched beside Amiel at the edge of the slope overlooking the river that cut through the valley floor. It was shallow, maybe waist-deep at most, slow-moving, with reed beds along the edge and algae coating the banks like green blood.
But there were shapes in the water.
Ten or so of them. The size of cars. Wading, half-submerged.
They moved slowly, deliberately, with that casual grace that says "I'm not worried, and neither should you be."
"...The fuck are those?" Rys asked.
"Not aggressive," Amiel said. "Not Gobbers."
She was right.
They were unlike anything they'd catalogued in the database. Elephant-shaped but wrong in all the places that mattered. Their skin was scaled like a crocodile, mottled in earthy greens and blacks. One of them had a massive, armor-plated horn extending from the middle of its forehead, curving slightly upward like a broken sword. Instead of hooves or feet, they had webbed, wide paws designed for slow, deep wading. And along their ribs were gills.
Big ones.
Every now and then, they would dip their heads underwater, exhale loudly like bull walruses, and suck water in through their sides.
Gino and Dan came up behind them and froze.
"Okay," Dan whispered. "Okay. So. Are we… high?"
"Negative," Rus said.
"Because I'm pretty sure I had a dream about those things once and it ended with me drowning in yogurt."
"They don't care we're here," Gino muttered, tilting his head. "I mean… look at them. Just vibing."
"They're peaceful," Berta added, sliding up beside the rest with a pair of binoculars. "That one's got algae growing on its back. Means it's been sitting in that water a long-ass time."
Rus tapped his comms. "TRU, this is Cyma-One. We have visual confirmation on an unknown species. Non-hostile. Repeat, non-hostile. Requesting classification team."
It took exactly eleven minutes for the TRU mobile lab team to arrive.
By arrive, he means that they descended from the sky like caffeinated vultures.
Their VTOL kicked up a dust storm that blinded half the ridgeline, and out popped six science freaks in hazard suits, one of them already talking a mile a minute.
Garn, naturally, led the charge.
He didn't even greet Rus.
"Oh my God! That's them! That's the reading we picked up from satellite pings but couldn't trace! You're telling me they're amphibious quadrupeds? Do you have any idea what this means?!"
"Only that I'm going to get a headache," Rus said dryly.
He rushed past, scanning furiously with his multi-sensor. "Scales! Horns! Gills! That one's yawning—look! Their tongues are segmented! This isn't just a new species. This is a post-Rift stabilization model! They're adaptive. They've evolved in a Rift-influenced biome and stabilized into a passive ecological role!"
"I'm thrilled for them," Rus muttered.
Garn ignored him. He was already naming them.
"Elephas uncturis," he declared, waving his arms dramatically. "River Ghosts. That's what the locals would've called them. Gentle giants. Scaled, gilled, passive foragers. Just look at the fat reserves! They're made for long winters or environmental collapse. Oh my God, one just farted underwater, that's brilliant—"
Rus turned away before he started crying.
Cyma stood on the ridgeline, watching as Garn and his assistants began deploying drones and probes and babbled about ethical samples and long-term observation windows. One of them tried to toss a tagged drone toward the herd and got smacked by the tail of the nearest River Ghost like a kid getting disciplined by a grumpy uncle.
Berta smirked.
"Ten creds says Garn gets trampled within the hour."
"I'm not betting against physics," Rus muttered.
Dan leaned on his rifle. "You think we'll have to shoot them?"
"No," Rus said. "Not unless they mutate or someone gets cocky."
Foster, from the rear said. "So… yes."
They watched for another hour.
The River Ghosts didn't move much. They grazed on underwater plants, occasionally rumbled to one another in subsonic tones they couldn't hear without equipment, and occasionally shat impressive amounts of biological curiosity into the current.
TRU was ecstatic.
Rus was bored.
But he had to admit it was peaceful.
Almost… hopeful.
This was a world that had spent two decades vomiting monsters and chaos. Every inch of land they stepped on had either bled, screamed, or detonated in some fashion. But here life adapted.
Not violently.
Not with fire or hate or tentacles.
Just… adapted.
They didn't need to be monsters. They just needed to survive.
And survive they had.
When Garn came back up the hill, ranting about needing to construct a preservation field and whether they could fund a bio-research dome, Rus gave him a simple reply.
"If these things end up growing wings and shitting Rift spores, I'm putting an explosive round through the whole valley."
Garn beamed. "Of course! That's what makes it exciting!"
Then he tripped over a rock.
They left TRU to it. Cyma had real jobs.
Rus then watched the largest River Ghost lift its head and lock eyes with him across the water.
It blinked.
Then submerged.
And somehow, Rus felt like it was judging him.
Which, fair.
They'd done enough to be judged.