By morning, the storm had fuck off. The skies were still dark, heavy with leftover clouds and a sickly gray hue, but the lightning was gone. The thunder had retired, probably off somewhere nursing a hangover. Rain still fell, lightly now, more of a drizzle than a downpour. The air smelled like burnt ozone and wet concrete.
Berta was still asleep, snoring lightly like a smug chainsaw with a superiority complex. Rus left her there, grabbed his gear, and headed down the stairs.
Dan, Foster, and Gino were in the lower floor already up, miserably huddled around a small, half-functional heater unit they'd scrounged from somewhere. They looked like wet dogs trying to convince themselves it was summer.
"Took you long enough," Dan muttered. "You miss the part where the entire roof nearly got blown off last night?"
"No. I just ignored it better than you," Rus said, shouldering his rifle.
Gino passed Rus a cup of instant sludge. "We saved you some coffee."
Rus stared into the mug. It was more grease than coffee. "This looks like something that'd strip paint off a tank."
"Exactly. It's strong."
"Strong doesn't mean drinkable, Gino. It means lethal."
Foster was chewing on something unidentifiable. Probably an MRE that had outlived the war that created it. "Reed's calling us in for a briefing at ten. Said something about shifting east again. Another stretch of land is secured."
"Brilliant," Rus said, deadpan. "More walking. More shooting. More philosophical debates about whether killing orcs makes us morally bankrupt or emotionally constipated."
Dan looked up. "Definitely the second one."
"Agreed," Gino added.
Ten minutes later, they were all assembled in the outpost's main hall, most of Cyma Unit present, including Berta who finally rolled in, hair a mess, but still somehow managing to walk like she owned the building.
Commander Reed stood in front of the outdated projector, flicking through satellite scans and deployment maps.
"Sector 13," he started, voice rough. "Looks like it might've been a logistics hub before the Collapse. Lots of ruins, old highway systems, underground silos. And a hell of a lot of movement. Orcs, gobbers, and something new."
That got everyone's attention.
"What do you mean 'new'?" Dan asked, squinting.
Reed didn't blink. "Scouts picked up visuals. Bipedal. Taller than orcs. Black skin, chitin-like armor, but not tech. Biologically grown. Fast. Organized."
"Mutates?" Gino guessed.
"No idea. TRU wants samples. You're going in to get them."
Of course they were.
Berta leaned in next to Rus, whispering, "See? Told you we'd have fun today."
"If your definition of fun includes being mauled by nightmarish freaks in a collapsed sewer tunnel, then yes. Loads of fun."
She grinned. "C'mon, Wilson. Where's your spirit of adventure?"
"I left it back in the city, right next to my will to live."
Reed continued, outlining the op. Standard recon, sweep-and-clear, full combat gear. Drone support overhead, but comms were expected to be spotty. The ruins had thick underground levels, meaning they'd probably lose contact halfway in.
The plan was simple. Go in. Kill anything hostile. Drag back a few corpses for science. Try not to die.
They geared up in silence. Routine now. Armor plates clicked into place, rifles checked, bayonet blades sharpened. Foster muttered something about needing new socks. Gino stuffed a pack of caffeine gum into his chest pouch. Dan sighed like a man sentenced to another day of idiocy and bloodshed. Which, to be fair, he was.
Berta approached Rus just as they loaded into the Humvee.
"You gonna babysit me again, Wilson?"
"I'd rather babysit a live grenade."
She chuckled. "That's what I love about you, Wilson. So warm. So loving."
"Don't confuse exhaustion for affection."
"Oh no," she said, climbing into their Humvee's gunner's seat, "I'm just waiting for the day you finally crack and confess you like me."
"If that happens, shoot me."
"Gladly."
The Humvees rolled out, the rest of the convoy behind them. The land outside was soaked, flooded in places, and covered in the kind of mud that made one question why God gave dirt ambition. The ruins of Sector 13 loomed in the distance, tall, crooked silhouettes of a world that once had purpose that were now just bones.
They didn't talk much on the way in. Everyone had their game face on as if it were a calm before the storm.
As they reached the perimeter of the ruins, the drone pinged movement ahead. Red dots on his internal compass. A lot of them.
Berta adjusted her grip on the LMG.
Dan muttered, "Showtime."
Rus checked the chamber on his rifle and gave the signal to engaged the strays.
***
The Humvee came to a slow halt, tires squelching in mud as the cracked road turned to debris. The edges of Sector 13 looked like every bad memory stitched together into a crumbling cityscape, collapsed bridges, sunken streets, skeletal towers half-swallowed by moss and time. The kind of place that made them feel like they were walking through someone else's grave.
Rus hopped out, rifle raised. His inner compass lit up with dots, friendly green, unknown and hostile red. The drone above tracked movement from the air, but even then, visibility was shit. Between the broken buildings and overgrowth, this place was a maze.
Berta stepped beside him, sliding her helmet on, her visor flickering as it synced with her gear. "I don't like this," she muttered, unusually serious. "Feels like we're walking into something."
"Welcome to literally every op we've done," Rus replied.
"No, this one's different. I can feel it."
Dan, behind us, chuckled. "Is that your battle-horniness talking or actual instinct?"
"Shut it," she snapped, then adjusted her grip. "Everyone fan out. Standard sweep."
They moved in pairs. Dan with Gino. Berta with Kate. Rus with Foster. The drone fed them a bird's-eye view of their position, but as they we got deeper, signal degradation started eating away at the clarity. Glitches. Static. Blurry outlines instead of hard data.
"Why does it always go to shit once we enter the fun zone?" Gino radioed in, voice laced with sarcasm.
"Ask the eggheads man," Rus replied. "Fuck you asking me that for?
The first contact was subtle. A flicker. A shadow. A low hiss that echoed off the concrete like something breathing wrong.
Foster froze. "Did you hear that?"
Rus raised his fist. Everyone stopped. They scanned the area. Nothing on thermals, but that meant jack shit lately. Whatever these new mutates were, they knew how to avoid our toys.
"Movement, twelve o'clock," Berta said in the comms.
She was on a collapsed balcony above them, scanning with her LMG. Kate was beside her, holding a rifle like she was waiting for something to give her a reason to popped a head.
Then came the scream.
High-pitched. Animal. But… not just that. It sounded intelligent. Like pain and rage were married and had a child made of knives.
"Eyes up!" Rus shouted.
From the left flank, something darted out. It wasn't an Orc. Not even close. It was leaner. Taller. Skin the color of wet asphalt. Chitin-covered limbs. Eyes like glossy beetle shells. And its mouth opened sideways.
Foster screamed. Fired a burst that hit nothing. Rus raised his rifle and popped two rounds into its center mass. It didn't drop. It twitched. Like the bullets annoyed it.
Then it was gone, darting behind rubble with inhuman speed.
"Shit!" Dan shouted. "There's more!"
They came in waves. Not many, maybe five, maybe ten. But they moved like ghosts on crack. They'd see one, blink, and suddenly it was six feet closer.
They opened fire. Controlled bursts. Center mass. Headshots.
One went down from Gino's .50 cal, its upper body vaporized into a cloud of black blood and twitching limbs.
Another leapt from above, nearly landing on Berta. She rolled, came up with her axe, and cleaved, cutting through bone and armor in one swing. It didn't scream. It just… stopped.
Rus shot another as it crawled along the ceiling. Two in the head, one in the throat. It finally fell, hitting the ground with a sound like cracking cement.
They retreated almost as quickly as they appeared, melting back into the ruins.
"Everyone good?" Rus called out.
"Still intact," Dan replied.
"Same here," Berta said. "But these aren't Orcs. They're worse. Bugs. I fucking hate bugs."
No one argued.
They regrouped in a relatively intact corner of a collapsed bank. The drone feed was mostly static now. Whatever fuckery was here, it was messing with comms.
Berta sat on a half-buried desk, blood dripping from her axe. "We need to get a sample."
Rus nodded. "Dan, Gino, bag that corpse. The one Gino hit with the .50."
"Way ahead of you," Gino said, already stuffing a limb into a sack like he was grocery shopping in Hell. His .50 CAL on his back.
Foster was pacing. "This ain't right, man. These things moved like they knew how to fight us. They dodged, they flanked—"
"They hunted," Rus corrected. "This wasn't a panic rush. They were testing us."
Berta leaned back, eyes narrowed. "Smart monsters. Just what we fucking needed."
Kate chimed in. "TRU's gonna cream their pants over this."
Rus sighed, glancing up at the sky through a hole in the ceiling. The storm had cleared, but a new one was brewing. One with claws and speed and chitin-covered nightmares.
"We fall back," Rus said. "Send the sample. Let HQ make sense of it."
"And then what?" Foster asked.
"Then we wait. Reload. And pray these things don't learn faster than we can kill them."
Berta chuckled, tossing her bloodied axe over her shoulder.
"Oh, they'll learn," she said. "But we'll still be the ones writing the obituary."
Rus looked at her, and for once, didn't reply with a snark. Because she might be right. Or she might be delusional.
But either way they'd be the ones standing in the middle of it.
Again.
* * *
They got back to the outpost just before dusk, the light bleeding red across the cracked skyline. It always amazed him how something so dead could still look beautiful if he squinted hard enough. The drone feed was already transmitting back to HQ, and TRU had dispatched a recovery convoy for the specimen they bagged.
The rest of them sat around like busted war tools waiting to be sharpened.
Dan leaned against a concrete slab, helmet off, face streaked with sweat and grime.
"I'm telling you," he muttered, unwrapping an MRE like it insulted his ancestors, "we're one encounter away from finding something that actually talks and fights back hard."
Foster scoffed, kicking at a spent shell casing. "If it talks, I'm putting two in its mouth before it finishes a sentence."
"Bold of you to assume you'll get the drop," Gino added. He had a cigarette between his lips, half-lit, because he kept forgetting to finish lighting it. "Those things didn't just fight smart—they felt smart. Like they'd been watching us longer than we've been watching them."
Rus didn't like that idea. He didn't like the way it stuck in his head. But it felt true. Every movement, every dodge… it was surgical. Intentional. Calculated.
They weren't just killing beasts anymore.
They were fighting something that knew how to gauge them.
Berta finally returned from the outpost's comms hub, her shirt soaked through with sweat, dog tags clinking against her chest. She was holding a datapad.
"Reed got the footage," she said. "Says HQ wants us on hold for the next op. TRU's pulling the data, and… they're requesting we remain on-site until they figure out what exactly we stumbled into."
Rus raised a brow. "You mean they're using us as bait again?"
She grinned. "Of course. But this time we know we're the cheese."
Kate groaned from the side. "God. I just wanted one week without being classified as expendable."
Berta sat next to Rus, flicking some dirt off her boots. "Hey, Wilson. You're the mopey thinker. Got any big philosophical takes on what we just fought?"
Rus gave her a sidelong glance. "Only that if evolution had a spiteful sense of humor, those creatures were the punchline."
She laughed. "Knew you had something bleak in you."
"That wasn't bleak. That was hopeful. I was implying evolution still works. Even here."
She smirked. "You ever not talk like an angsty professor?"
"Only when I'm shooting things," Rus said. "Then I'm charming."
"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, lover boy."
She leaned a little closer, the sweat-slick curve of her arm brushing his. The others were too busy arguing over the finer points of the MRE beef substitute to notice the way her eyes lingered.
"You know," she said in a low voice, "if we are gonna die to some hyper-evolved mutant bug-freaks, there's worse ways to go than wrapped in someone's arms."
"True," Rus said dryly. "But most of those arms I imagine don't come with a punch that could realign my spine."
She snorted. "Romantic."
"I'm a realist. Romance is just another reason to dig a shallow grave."
"You really know how to sweet talk a lady."
Rus shrugged. "I try not to."
She nudged him with her shoulder. "Still. I meant what I said. Four years of this and I'm gone. Find a coast, maybe a bar to run. Get back to making people drunk instead of dead."
Rus looked at her for a moment. There was that tired smile again. The one she only wore when she thought no one was really watching.
"I hope you do," Rus said.
She blinked. Like maybe she hadn't expected that from him. This has been their ritual now. Talking about what to do. Like maybe if they keep repeating it,they'll actually do it.
"You?"
"I don't think that far ahead. Planning for the future implies optimism. I'm just trying to keep my boots out of the next puddle of mutant acid."
She chuckled softly, then leaned her head back and exhaled. "You're such a buzzkill."
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it."
The sun finally dipped past the horizon. The red sky faded to the kind of dark that made you feel like the stars were watching.
Over the comms, Reed's voice crackled through.
"Cyma Unit. Hold position. Prep for recon sweep at 0600. Potential contact west of your location."
Berta stood, stretching with a groan. "Well. Looks like we're still alive. Time to make the most of it."
Dan stood too, groaning like a grandpa. "And by that, you mean 'get shot at again.'"
"No rest for the sexually frustrated," Gino muttered, finally lighting his cigarette properly.
Rus checked his rifle, reloading with a smooth motion that had become muscle memory.
Another day. Another sweep. Another possible nightmare hidden in the ruins.
Same shit. Different warzone.
But maybe, just maybe they were getting better at it. He thinks so. Or maybe the war was just getting worse, and they were too numb or dumb to tell the difference anymore.