The forest did not welcome me as much as it tolerated me.
Trees crowded in tight ranks, trunks thick and dark, bark ridged like old scars. The canopy blocked most of the sky, but light still filtered down in pale slices that moved when the wind decided to remember its job. Underfoot, damp soil gave way to patches of stone. Roots rose like tripwires. The air smelled of wet leaves and cold earth with a faint mineral undertone that reminded me of the chasm still existing behind me.
Animals lived here. I could hear them without seeing them; small bodies moving through undergrowth, a quick flutter of wings, the occasional call that sounded like a bird with an agenda. Somewhere deeper in the trees, something heavier moved with patience, snapping twigs without trying to hide it. Sera did not do subtle in the way Earth did. Everything here felt built to survive a world that took joy in proving you wrong.
My armor made almost no sound. That bothered me more than it should have. A body this big should make noise. The silence made me feel like a lie walking upright.
I kept moving anyway, putting distance between myself and the fissure. I needed information. I needed a map. I needed anything that counted as a plan, because improvisation had already carried me through two chapters, and the universe had started to take that personally.[1]
Then gunfire cracked through the trees.
It came from ahead and slightly left, close enough to be real, far enough that the forest swallowed the echo. The first burst made me freeze. The second burst made my brain start labeling shapes it could not yet see.
This was not hunting. It was sustained. It was organized. It had rhythm.
I moved toward it without deciding to. The decision arrived later, dressed up as logic, which is how my mind preferred to handle embarrassment.
The forest thinned as I approached. The undergrowth grew sparse. I found myself skirting a slope that dropped into broken terrain, a spread of shattered stone and half-buried foundations. Ragani, if my sense of direction and my accidental memory of maps held. A place with enough strategic value to be fought over and enough unlucky timing to be fought over repeatedly.
Shots continued; rifles, heavier weapons, and something that sounded like a mounted gun chewing through its own patience. Smoke drifted between trees in faint gray strands. I stepped to the edge of the treeline and looked out.
Below me, a squad of COG soldiers crouched behind rubble and the remnants of a low wall. Their armor looked older than what I associated with the later war. Plainer. More utilitarian. Less ceremonial. The blue was there, but it felt like paint applied to something that expected to be shot, not a symbol meant to reassure civilians.
Four armored vehicles pinned them.
They were Indie APCs, squat and mean, with angled plating and heavy guns mounted high enough to rake the cover. Their engines growled even through the distance. They advanced in short pushes, firing, pausing, firing again, as if the drivers had learned patience from long practice.
The COG squad did not break. They returned fire in controlled bursts, disciplined enough to keep ammo for the next minute, stubborn enough to keep living through this minute. One soldier leaned out to throw something; a grenade arced, bounced, and detonated against a vehicle's side with more noise than effect.
And at the center of them, directing with sharp gestures and a calm that did not waste motion, stood a man I recognized before I had any right to.
Adam Fenix.
Not because I had met him, obviously. Because my brain had cataloged him the way it cataloged fictional heroes and historical figures, with the same casual disrespect for reality. He looked younger than the Adam I had seen in later timelines, but the posture matched. The hair, the face shape, the way he held himself, like his mind operated a fraction of a second ahead of the world.
I hated that I could identify him. It made this feel less like a nightmare and more like a plot.
An APC fired a burst that chewed into a nearby multi-store apartment. The structure was already damaged, with walls cracked and the roof sagging, but the impacts pushed it past dignity. The top floor collapsed inward. Then the whole building folded like wet paper, dropping into a cloud of dust and splintered wood.
The collapse swallowed part of the squad's cover.
I watched three COG soldiers vanish beneath the falling mass. Another stumbled clear with one arm pinned, yanking himself free while someone else dragged him by the vest. The sound did not reach me clearly, but I could see mouths open in shouted orders, the frantic hand signals that tried to turn panic into procedure.
Adam did not flinch. He moved forward, lower than the others, and hauled one trapped soldier out by the shoulder plate. Then he pointed toward the left, and two soldiers shifted positions to create a new angle on the closest APC.
They hit it hard.
One of them fired a launcher; the projectile struck the APC's side and detonated with a concussive slap. The armor buckled. The vehicle lurched, then began to burn. Its gun stopped firing. The second APC tried to adjust to cover the gap, and the COG squad punished that movement immediately, focusing fire on its tires and side panels.
A second explosion, smaller, more surgical. The APC's engine compartment erupted with smoke. It rolled forward, slowed, and ground to a stop.
The remaining two APCs hesitated.
The pause was brief, but I could see it in their metallic posture. The guns swept, searching for the threat that had just proven itself. The drivers recalculated. This was not a clean ambush anymore.
The APCs began retreating, backing away in tandem, still firing as they withdrew, then turning and accelerating down a broken highway that ran between ruins.
The COG squad held fire until the vehicles cleared the line of sight. Then the soldiers collapsed behind cover, not from fear, but from the sudden lack of immediate necessity. One soldier crawled toward the collapsed house and started digging through the debris with bare hands. Another kept watch. Adam stood, scanned the area, and motioned his people into a tighter defensive arrangement.
I stayed in the treeline.
I stayed far enough away that the battlefield felt like a diorama. Nearly eight kilometers, if my sense of scale remained honest. The part of me that still thought in civilian terms could not accept what my eyes just did. I could see expressions. I could see an insignia. I could see the way Adam's left hand trembled once when he thought nobody was watching.
My vision had no right to be this precise.
I blinked several times. Nothing changed. I shifted my focus from the squad to the horizon and back again; the world snapped into detail wherever I pointed my attention, like my eyes carried their own optics.
So this body came with a built-in scope. Lovely. Another feature I never asked for and could not responsibly return.
Minutes stretched. The forest behind me remained quiet. The battlefield below stayed tense. The COG soldiers pulled survivors from the rubble. They dragged the wounded into the shadow of a broken wall. One man sat with his back against stone, helmet off, staring at his hands as if they had failed him. Another soldier crouched near Adam and spoke quickly, pointing in the direction the APCs retreated. Adam listened, nodded once, then turned and began organizing positions.
Hours passed in a way that made time feel cheap.
Cloud cover shifted. Light changed angles. The air cooled. I did not move much. I watched. I tried to convince myself that I observed for tactical reasons, not because I felt fear or anxiety due to the men and women below.
Eventually, the second attack came.
I heard the engines before I saw them, a low thunder that vibrated through the ruins. Then the vehicles rolled into view: not four this time, but a column. Twenty, maybe more, spread out in a staggered line. Their guns flashed in coordinated bursts. Infantry moved alongside them, small figures using the vehicles as mobile cover.
At the front, heavier than the rest, a Pari tank.
It looked like a beast built out of metal and impatience, tracks wide, turret bulky, armor layered. It pushed aside rubble like it was brushing lint off a coat. Its main gun fired once; the shell struck the COG position and threw up a burst of debris and dust that swallowed a section of the line.
The COG squad returned fire, but they were outmatched. Their shots sparked off armor. Their explosives slowed vehicles but did not stop the advance. The enemy learned quickly, adapting angles, pressing the edges, cutting off retreat lines.
The defense began to buckle.
I watched a soldier go down and not get back up. I watched another drag him by the straps and then drop him when a burst forced both of them into cover. I watched Adam move between positions like he could hold the line together through willpower alone.
He could not. Not against that much steel.
I started moving closer.
I did not sprint at first. I paced through the trees, choosing a path that kept me concealed. The SPI armor did not make me invisible, but it did make my outline less obvious against shadow. More importantly, the forest still obeyed its old rules. Humans looked at noise and motion; I provided neither.
As I closed the distance, the sounds sharpened. Individual gunshots are separated into distinct weapons. I heard shouted commands. I heard the harsh clank of metal on stone. I smelled smoke, dust, and hot oil.
Then I saw a flicker of orange.
A Molotov.
It arced through the air from the COG line and struck near the Pari tank's intake area. Flames blossomed, licking along the rear section. The tank did not stop. It kept advancing, and for a moment, the fire looked less like a weapon and more like an ornament.
Two men stood near Adam. One was taller, shoulders set, moving with a soldier's economy. The other, close enough to be recognized by my brain's unhelpful database, had to be Collins. His helmet sat slightly askew. He gestured urgently, pointing toward the tank, then toward the dwindling COG position.
They needed a miracle.
I felt the system sit quietly inside my skull, not speaking, not offering prompts, just existing like a loaded device. I did not need it to tell me what to do. I only needed my own threshold to break.
It broke when the tank fired again.
The shell struck the collapsed house area, and the remaining cover there disintegrated. Dust swallowed half the defense. When it cleared, more bodies lay still. The COG line thinned in a way that could not be fixed with half-given courage.
I stepped out of the treeline.
No careful approach now. No stealth. I moved into open ground with the casual inevitability of a disaster.
The Pari tank's turret began to swing toward me, either because someone saw me or because the gunner could not imagine anything else worth shooting. The vehicle's secondary guns chattered, spraying rounds that stitched the ground.
The rounds hit me.
They sparked off armor and stung like thrown gravel. The impacts pushed me a fraction of an inch, then stopped mattering.
So that was new information.
I ran.
My stride ate distance. The ground blurred beneath me. One second, I stood at the edge of the ruins, the next, I closed enough to see the tank's surface details, scuffed paint, welded plates, grime baked into seams.
I jumped.
The leap carried me high, higher than any reasonable body should manage without assistance. For a heartbeat, the battlefield fell away beneath me. I saw the COG defenders as small figures in smoke. I saw Adam's face tilt upward, eyes widening. I saw Collins freeze mid-motion, Molotov hand still extended as if he could not accept the next frame.
I came down on the tank.
The impact rang through metal. The turret jolted. The tracks shuddered. Armor crumpled under my boots as if it had been a thin sheet. The hull bucked, then sagged.
The tank stopped.
Not slowly. Not after a dramatic struggle. It stopped because something too heavy and too determined had landed on it and turned the engine's intent into irrelevant noise.
I drove my fists into the turret housing. Not because I wanted to be theatrical, but because I needed to make sure it stayed down. Metal tore. Bolts snapped. The turret's angle shifted sharply, then locked at an unnatural tilt.
Smoke vented from the rear. Flames flared brighter where the Molotov had burned into the intake. The engine coughed once, then died.
The battlefield paused.
That pause did not last, but it existed. I felt it like a pressure change; every soldier, COG, and Indie alike, trying to understand what had just interrupted their plan. For the first time since I arrived on Sera, I stood in full view of humans who did not yet know what a Locust was.
They knew emulsion. They knew war. They knew rumors of strange sicknesses, underground mines, and accidents nobody explained properly.
They did not know me.
I stepped off the crushed turret and stood beside the tank's wreckage.
Smoke drifted around me in gray curtains. Behind it, the COG line held its fire, not from mercy, but from confusion. Adam and Collins stood at the front, still half-crouched, weapons raised but not aimed. Their eyes stayed fixed on me.
I looked directly at them.
Eight feet tall in unfamiliar armor, covered in dust and soot, emerging from a dead tank like the aftermath of an idea someone should have stopped earlier, I understood what they saw. They saw a threat. They saw a weapon. They saw a problem that did not belong to either side's doctrine.
I kept my hands visible. Open. Empty.
A gesture that meant, if nothing else, I have not decided to kill you yet.
Across the ruins, the remaining Indie vehicles began to pull back, not because of a moral argument, but because their lead asset had just been flattened by something that did not exist on their briefings. They reversed in jagged motions, guns sweeping wildly, firing a few bursts that hit nothing of value.
Then they retreated, engines roaring, leaving the battlefield with the kind of haste that only comes from fear disguised as strategy.
Silence followed. Not total silence, because wounded men still breathed and coughed and shifted in rubble. Still, compared to the gunfire, it felt like the world had shut its mouth.
Adam took one step forward.
He did not lower his weapon. He also did not raise it further. He held it at the ready, the way someone does when they would like to talk, but they would like to keep their options.
His mouth moved. I could not hear the words over the ringing in my ears, but I could read the shape of the question.
'Who are you?'
I swallowed. My throat felt too large for my voice.
I had no answer that would make sense to him. I had several answers that would get me shot. I had one answer that was true in a technical sense and useless in every practical sense.
My name is Varmund, I thought. Then I corrected myself. My name is a borrowed label in a stolen body.
I breathed out and finally spoke, forcing the sound to come out steady.
"I am not Indie."
It was a low bar, but it was a start.
Adam's eyes narrowed. Collins shifted his stance, weight moving to his back foot, as if preparing to run or shoot or do both. Behind them, COG soldiers began to fan out, cautious, silent, weapons trained on me from angles that suggested they had not lost discipline, only confidence.
I stood still in the smoke.
Seventeen years before Emergence Day, no Locust, no drills, no one expecting the ground to open and deliver nightmares. Just a war between humans, and then me, the wrong shape in the wrong place, holding the line by accident.
I felt the system inside my head remain quiet.
For the first time, I wished it would speak. A prompt would be easier than this. A menu would be easier than meeting a legend's eyes and realizing I had stepped into history with muddy boots.
Adam spoke again, louder. I caught a few words this time.
"Identify yourself."
So that was the price of intervention.
I glanced at the crushed tank, then back at the COG line, and decided to pay the price with something close to honesty.
"My name is Varmund," I said.
It sounded strange in my mouth. It sounded like a role I had been forced to accept.
Adam did not relax. He nodded once, as if filing the name away for later interrogation. Then his gaze flicked to the armor, assessing it, cataloging it, trying to place it within known technology.
His eyes returned to my face. His expression held a question he did not yet know how to ask.
I had the same problem.
[1] This is a joke so calm down