Roger found a shadow and used it.
Not far - twenty metres from where Doss and Smitty were working the perimeter's near side, close enough to hear if something went wrong. He put his back against a jagged rock, let the darkness close around him, and turned his attention inward.
The Omni-System was waiting.
He'd caught glimpses of the full interface during the activation, the way you catch a glimpse of a large room when someone opens a door briefly and then closes it again. Now he held it open properly and looked.
The skill tree was vast in a way that the word vast didn't really cover. It didn't have edges he could find. It extended in every direction he tried to look at it, branching and re-branching into nodes that were mostly dark - locked, inert, requiring things he hadn't done yet and levels he hadn't reached. The architecture of it reminded him of something between a circuit board and a root system: dense at the centre, increasingly speculative toward the edges.
At the base, lit and accessible: what he'd built today.
Ballistic Proficiency (LV3). Glowing steady blue. CQC Fundamentals (LV1). Dimmer - present but underused. Climbing (LV1). Throwing (LV1). Both quietly pulsing. And separate from the others, in a colour that sat closer to red than anything else in the interface: Combat Focus. Innate. Different in kind from the rest. He wasn't sure what that distinction meant yet, but it was there.
He spent a moment looking at the locked sections, the ones shrouded in black, not even showing names, requiring conditions he didn't know yet. Most of the tree was this.
Hello? he thought, experimentally. Anyone in there? Is there a tutorial section?
Three seconds. Five. The interface didn't respond. No voice, no prompt, no blinking cursor.
Roger let out a slow breath that functioned as a laugh.
Good. He'd half-expected some kind of entity, the System-as-companion that featured in roughly every second piece of genre fiction he'd ever read. A guide, an AI, a disembodied narrator with opinions about his choices. The silence was a relief. He was not in the market for a co-pilot. He was in the market for tools, and tools didn't need to talk.
He'd played enough games with bad UI that he could navigate an interface through pure trial and error. This one was better than most.
He focused on the available nodes, grey-white, flickering with faint light when his attention settled on them. Four branches. He catalogued them quickly.
Melee: Evasion, Fortification, Dash. Ranged: Eagle Eye, Steady Aim, Dual Wield, Rapid Cycle. Support: Mostly locked, one blurred node requiring conditions unmet. Utility: Two nodes available and clear.
He read each available skill's description carefully, loading the details the way you read patch notes before committing a build, looking for the ceiling, the cost, the thing that sounds good until you actually try to use it in a bad situation.
The ranged branch was tempting. Steady Aim would push his accuracy threshold further; Rapid Cycle would close the gap in the Garand's rate of fire. Eagle Eye offered extended range. Dual Wield he dismissed immediately, two rifles was not a solution to any problem he currently had.
Evasion made his instincts say yes. A passive chance to dodge incoming fire. On a ridge where sniper positions were essentially permanent furniture, anything that reduced the probability of a round finding him was worth serious consideration.
But then he looked up at the sky.
The Southern Archipelago at night was a different problem than it had been twelve hours ago. The smoke was the same. The Imperial Guard's positions were the same. What had changed was the darkness - total, deliberate, the specific advantage that the Imperial Guard's tunnel network was designed to exploit. Their ghost squads operated after dark the way they operated in tunnels: by memory, by touch, by the patient certainty of men who had prepared this ground for exactly this moment.
Evasion was reactive. It helped after someone had found him.
He needed to find them first.
He moved his focus to the Utility branch.
Low-Light Night Vision (LV1).
One skill point. He spent it without further deliberation.
[SKILL ACTIVATED]LOW-LIGHT NIGHT VISION (LV1)Vision clarity: 100% within 100 metres regardless of darkness, fog, smoke, or precipitation.Beyond threshold: 5% restriction per 10 metres.Rendering: high-contrast monochrome.
The world changed.
Not slowly - immediately, completely, the way a lamp comes on rather than the way the sun rises. The ink-black shadows that had been pressing in from every direction simply stopped being opaque. The ridge resolved itself into a crisp, high-contrast landscape, every crater rim defined, every piece of rubble distinct, the smoke reduced to a grey haze he could see through rather than being stopped by.
He could read the wear marks on the helmet of a Federation soldier sleeping thirty metres away. He could see the texture of the rock face at his back.
He could see, a hundred metres out to his right, a shape among the corpses that was not lying the way corpses lie.
It had the subtle, too-controlled stillness of a man managing his breathing deliberately. The specific discipline of someone trained to play dead and wait for darkness to give them room. The Imperial Guard's ghost tactics weren't supernatural. They were patience and practice, and in full darkness they were devastatingly effective.
In what Roger could now see clearly, they were just a position.
He raised the Garand.
Bang. Bang.
Two rounds. The controlled stillness became something else.
The shots cracked across the ridge like snapping wood. Immediately, the reflex of men who'd been sleeping with their fingers near their triggers voices surfaced from the dark.
"Who fired? What's out there?"
"Caught one playing dead," Roger said, lowering the rifle. "He was starting to move."
A pause. Then: "Good eyes."
Smitty's boots found him before Smitty's voice did Roger had apparently catalogued the sound without intending to, the particular weight and rhythm of them on rubble. He materialised from the dark looking between impressed and specifically suspicious about what he was impressed by.
"That's a hundred metres," Smitty said. "No light. Open sights."
"I know."
"How."
Roger had prepared for this. "Cod liver oil. My mother was extremely committed to it. Genuinely alarming levels of commitment, looking back. Turns out she was onto something."
Smitty stared at him for a long moment with the expression of a man who knew he was being handed a non-answer and was weighing the cost of pursuing it.
He let it go. There were weirder things on this ridge.
"Rick!" Doss's voice, from a crater out to the left. "Live one over here."
Smitty exhaled through his nose. He had been planning on standing still for another thirty seconds. He turned toward the sound. "Coming."
The wounded man had taken shrapnel in the abdomen - Doss had packed and stabilised it on the spot, the way Doss did everything, with a focused economy that made it look easier than it was. He needed proper care the ridge couldn't provide. The three of them got him mobile between them and carried him back to the forward aid station.
The station was controlled chaos lit by hooded lanterns. Medics moved between rows of stretched-out men with the clipped efficiency of people who had run out of time for anything other than the next task. Antiseptic and smoke and something underneath both of those.
Doss handed the man off with a precise verbal summary, wound site, treatment applied, immediate needs and stepped back. He wiped blood from his forehead with the back of his wrist, redistributed it, and looked at Roger and Smitty.
"We should stop," he said. "For a little while."
"Yes," Smitty said, with a depth of feeling that the word didn't usually carry.
They found a crater that met minimum specifications: deep enough for cover, shallow enough for a fast exit, dry enough not to immediately regret choosing it. The third condition was partially met. Smitty declared it adequate and sat down anyway.
He produced rations from his gear with the quiet triumph of a man pulling off a minor logistical miracle. Tins, hardtack, something wrapped in paper that had not survived the day intact. He opened everything with practiced efficiency and distributed without commentary.
"Compliments of Federation High Command," he said. "Their finest work. Don't read the ingredients."
Roger was past the point of having opinions about food. He took the tin of processed beef and ate it. It was aggressively bland and texturally ambiguous and it was the best thing he'd eaten in what felt like several years.
After the first few mouthfuls, he sat down. His legs accepted this decision with profound, unanimous relief.
"You eating?" Smitty asked Doss, pushing a second tin across.
"Not the meat, thank you." Doss had his Bible out, not reading it urgently, just holding it. "Take it."
Smitty collected it without ceremony and tossed the second one to Roger. "To each his own."
They ate. The ridge was quiet in the temporary way - paused, not finished. Flares went up on the eastern side occasionally, white light blooming and drifting and dying, casting moving shadows that meant nothing.
Smitty set his empty tin down and looked at Doss.
"Dorothy," he said. "She know what it's like out here?"
Doss's expression shifted into something quieter. A small, private smile aimed at something not on this ridge. "She knows I'm here. The details would worry her, and worrying her from this distance doesn't do either of us any good."
"She's solid."
"She is." The smile held a moment longer. "Don't tell her I needed her to be."
Smitty looked sideways at Roger. "Women like that wouldn't have much patience for men like us, I suspect."
Roger looked up from his tin. "Speak for yourself. The rifle and the dirt are misleading. I'm considerably more charming under normal conditions."
Doss laughed, genuinely, the kind that came out ahead of the decision to laugh. It was the right sound in the wrong place, which was perhaps exactly why it worked. "I think she'd like you both. After all this. When there's time to actually find out."
"After all this," Smitty repeated. Testing the phrase. "Plans."
"Better than none," Roger said.
"Plans are just what you believed before the world gave you its version of events."
"Still better than none."
Smitty considered this with his eyes closed, head back against the dirt wall. He arrived at no firm conclusion.
"Sometimes I'm a real jerk," he said, to no one in particular.
"Sometimes," Doss agreed, with the tone of a man being generous.
"Structurally, I'd say," Roger offered.
Smitty made a sound that might have been a laugh and didn't open his eyes. The conversation ended without a proper conclusion, the way conversations end when everyone has run out of fuel for them at the same time.
The ridge waited above the crater's rim with its usual patience. Another flare went up to the east, found nothing worth illuminating, and dropped out.
Roger watched the perimeter through his Night Vision, scanning slowly, finding nothing that moved in a way that shouldn't. His arms ached. His ears had finally stopped their post-artillery whine and replaced it with ordinary silence, which felt, by comparison, almost peaceful.
He wasn't sure what to call what he was feeling. It wasn't contentment. It wasn't relief. It was something smaller than either, the specific quality of a moment where nothing was actively going wrong and the people beside you were, against reasonable probability, still breathing.
He filed it away in the part of himself that he'd have to look at properly when there was time for it, and kept watching the dark.
For now, that was enough.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.