The scratching came from outside the crater's rim.
Smitty and Doss both went still, the particular stillness of men who had been almost asleep and were now not, every instinct reasserting itself in the same breath. Smitty's hand found the BAR without him looking at it.
"Relax," Roger said, from his corner of the crater. He hadn't moved. "Wildlife."
"You can tell from down here?" Smitty kept his voice low.
"I can tell." Roger didn't elaborate.
Smitty pushed himself up just enough to see over the crater's rim. Several large shapes were moving through the rubble a few metres out, low to the ground, quick, entirely indifferent to the three men watching them. Scavenging with the specific boldness of animals that had spent enough time on a battlefield to understand that the humans were usually occupied with each other.
Doss looked once and looked away. His jaw was set.
"Not the Guard," Smitty confirmed, settling back down. He lowered the BAR. "Still." He looked between Roger and Doss. "We should keep a watch. I'll take first. You two sleep while the ridge holds quiet."
Roger didn't argue. The rations had done what rations do, filled the space where hunger had been with something approximately nutritious and underneath it, the day's accumulated weight was asserting itself with increasing authority. He settled into the corner of the crater, closed his eyes, and was unconscious before he'd had time to form another thought.
He didn't dream. There was nothing left to run the process.
He came back to consciousness fast, which was new.
On Earth he'd been the kind of person who required three alarms and a specific sequence of ceiling-staring before anything resembling awareness arrived. What woke him now was sound, a sharp, ragged intake of breath from Doss's side of the crater and his hand was on the Garand's grip before his eyes were open.
"Talk to me," he said.
"Nightmare." Smitty's voice, quiet, from the crater's rim where he'd been keeping watch. "He's alright."
Doss was upright, one hand pressed flat against the crater wall, breathing through something. He drained the rest of his canteen in two swallows and sat with it empty in his hands for a moment.
"Same dream?" Smitty asked.
"Different," Doss said. "Worse, I think. I saw the end of things. All of you, everyone on this ridge. And I was just standing there. Watching." A pause. "I couldn't do anything."
"Bad dreams are the price of being in this place," Smitty said, not unkindly. "They mean your brain is still working." He glanced at the BAR beside him. "A rifle helps, for the record. Something to hold onto."
"Rick." Doss's tone was patient, not defensive. He looked around at the crater's rim, at the ridge beyond it, at everything the day had made of the ground above them. "Every man out there died because someone was holding a rifle. I've spent today putting what's left of them back together. I've seen what they do."
"And you'd be among them if Roger and I hadn't been holding one," Smitty said. Blunt, but not cruel. Stating a fact.
"I know," Doss said. "I'm not judging you for it."
Smitty looked at him. "Then why not you?"
Doss was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, it was carefully, the way people speak about things they've turned over many times and still haven't found an angle that makes them simple.
"My father," he said. "When he was drinking, he was someone else. Not a bad man, he was a good man. But the drink got into the space between who he was and what he did. And one night he pulled a gun on my mother." He looked down at his hands. "I took it from him. And I pointed it at his heart."
Nobody spoke.
"I didn't fire," Doss said. "But I wanted to. I could feel it wanting to happen. And I made myself a promise right there that I wouldn't touch one again. Not because they're evil. Because of what I know I'm capable of, when I'm angry enough."
Roger had been listening without moving. He'd known the shape of this story, knew it the way he knew the arc of the whole Scenario but hearing it said plainly, in the dark, by a man who was exhausted and shaken and telling the truth anyway, it landed differently than it had from a cinema seat.
"That's not a sin," Roger said. "Wanting to protect someone you love. Whatever you felt in that moment - that's not something you need to carry."
"Roger's right," Smitty said. Quieter than usual. "And you didn't. That matters."
"In my heart I did," Doss said. "And that was enough for me to know."
A moment sat between the three of them without anyone trying to fill it.
"Well," Smitty said finally, "I'm not giving you mine regardless. You're dangerous enough without it." There was something underneath the joke that wasn't quite a joke.
Doss smiled, small and genuine. "I know. Thank you, Rick."
"Don't thank me. Sleep. Both of you."
"My watch," Roger said, already moving. He rolled his shoulders, felt everything object to being asked to function again, and ignored the objections. He climbed to the crater's rim and settled in.
"Wake me in two," Smitty said, and was asleep in approximately ninety seconds. Roger had timed more impressive things today and this still made the list.
The ridge at the small hours was its own environment.
The Imperial Guard was underground. The Federation line was dug in. Nothing was moving that wasn't supposed to be moving, and Roger's Night Vision confirmed this in the particular flat, colourless clarity that had become normal to him in the last few hours. A hundred metres in every direction: rubble, smoke residue, the dark shapes of things he'd decided not to look at directly, and the ridge's other current inhabitants going about their business.
The rats had returned.
They moved through the wreckage without particular concern, working the spaces between the fallen gear and the abandoned positions with the systematic focus of creatures that had identified a resource and intended to use it. Roger watched them with the detached interest of someone who had run out of urgent things to think about and found the nearest available alternative.
One of them had stationed itself on a rock three metres out and was looking at him.
It was large, by rat standards. Its fur was dark and its eyes caught the available light in that specific way that made them appear to be generating their own. It looked at Roger with the unimpressed steadiness of something that had assessed him and arrived at a verdict that was not particularly flattering.
You remind me of something, Roger thought. I haven't decided what yet.
He picked up a spent .30-06 shell casing from the dirt beside him, there were dozens, the ridge was practically paved with them and turned it between his fingers. The rat didn't move. It watched him with the patience of a creature that had concluded he was not an immediate threat and was willing to revise this assessment if presented with evidence.
Roger snapped the casing toward it.
Smack.
It caught the rat cleanly on the side of the head. The creature made a short, indignant sound and took two steps sideways, then turned back and resumed looking at him.
Roger picked up another casing.
Smack. Hit.
The rat moved two steps in the other direction. Looked at him again. It had the energy of something that had decided this was now a situation it was involved in and intended to see through.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
Roger settled into a rhythm. Reach, aim, throw. The motion was simple enough that he could feel the small calibrations happening automatically — the adjustment for the casing's weight distribution, the instinctive correction for the wind off the sea, the subtle shift in wrist angle that increased consistency. His arm learned the problem the way arms learn things, through repetition and small refinements, getting better at something without being formally instructed to.
Then - quietly, in the back of his mind, the way all the best notifications had arrived today, something registered.
[NOTIFICATION: REPETITIVE COORDINATION DETECTED]
Skill Acquired — THROWING (LV1)High-precision delivery of handheld objects within 30 metres.5% accuracy deviation per meter beyond threshold.Applicable objects: stones, casings, tools, grenades, any throwable.
Roger looked at the notification. Looked at the rat, which was still looking at him. Looked at the pile of spent casings beside him.
He picked up another one.
Smack.
The rat moved sideways. Came back. It had accepted, apparently, that this was going to continue.
Here was a thing Roger had understood since approximately the age of twelve, when he'd first discovered that games rewarded repetition: grinding worked. It was unglamorous and it required patience and it was, beneath all the strategy and the skill expression and the tactical complexity, mostly just doing the same thing repeatedly until the thing got easier. The ridge was covered in raw materials. The rats were an infinite supply of moving targets. He had several hours of watch to fill.
He picked up another casing.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
The night ticked over. The rat - the original one, he was fairly sure, though they were difficult to distinguish at this point, appeared to have accepted the situation as one of the fixed conditions of its existence in this location. It moved when hit, returned, and waited for the next one with the weary resignation of something that had run the math and determined that leaving would cost more energy than staying.
Roger felt a certain kinship with this perspective.
By the time the sky to the east began its transition from black to the specific grey-blue that preceded actual light, he'd found a rhythm with the casings that had stopped feeling like effort. The motion was automatic. The calibration was constant.
[SKILL UPGRADE: THROWING → LV2]Range extended to 40 metres.Accuracy deviation: 5% per 2 metres beyond threshold.
The improvement was immediately perceptible, the same way the Ballistic Proficiency upgrade had been perceptible, not as a surge but as a settling, like something clicking into a position it had been approaching for a while. He picked up a casing and threw it at a piece of rubble forty metres out. It hit where he'd aimed.
He tried forty-five. Hit, with a slight leftward drift he'd need to account for.
Good enough, he thought. More than good enough.
Doss stirred behind him, sat up, blinked at the early grey light with the expression of a man reassessing his situation from scratch. He looked at Roger.
"Get some rest," Doss said. "I've got it."
"I'm wired." Roger was already moving. He climbed out of the crater on all fours, staying below silhouette height. The snipers would be back with the daylight.
"Where-"
"Scavenging. Stay in the hole."
He moved through the rubble on his hands and knees, working parallel to the Federation line, collecting what the previous day's assault had left behind. Captain Glover had ordered a formal recovery but the ground between the positions was complicated enough that plenty had been missed. M1 clips, mostly - he found eleven before he'd covered fifty metres and MK2 fragmentation grenades, which he tucked carefully and counted as he went.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The Imperial Guard's fallen he left alone. Not out of sentiment, out of pragmatism. Their gear was built for their own doctrine and their own weapons, and the risk of a concealed trap outweighed any potential gain. He'd learned this the way he'd learned most things today: by watching what happened to people who hadn't.
He was filling his Tactical Storage with the fourth grenade, feeling the weight of his pockets redistribute in that slightly unreal way the skill produced, when he heard it.
Not with his ears first. With the part of his attention that had been running background assessments all day without being formally asked to the part that had gotten very good at distinguishing sounds that belonged here from sounds that didn't.
The sound that didn't belong: the sharp, rhythmic slap of boot soles on rock. Close. Moving fast.
He looked up.
Ten metres. A trapdoor in the ground, flush with the rubble, invisible unless you knew exactly what you were looking at, had swung open, and from it came men, in khaki, with bayonets already fixed. Eight of them, clearing the hatch in quick succession and immediately orienting toward the one Federation soldier in their immediate vicinity who was on his hands and knees with nowhere to go.
He had roughly two seconds.
The Garand was across his back. Reaching it, getting it off his shoulder, acquiring a target, at this range, against eight people already in motion, that sequence didn't fit in two seconds.
His hands were already in his pockets.
He pulled the pins on two MK2 grenades simultaneously, one in each hand, the way he'd seen it done in a dozen films and had never entirely believed until the mechanism was physically under his thumbs. The pins came free. The spoons stayed in his grip.
He didn't throw at the lead men. That was the wrong target. He threw at the middle of the group, the geometric centre of the mass, the point that the grenade's fragmentation radius would cover most efficiently and he threw both at once, one slightly further left than the other to account for the gap in the formation.
The physics of the LV2 skill were reliable. The arc was clean. The grenades crossed the distance and landed where he'd put them.
The lead men had covered half the gap when the detonations came.
BOOM.
The twin blasts hit close enough together that the sound merged into one extended event. The pressure wave crossed Roger's position and he turned his face away from it instinctively, one arm up. Debris came down - dirt, gravel, smaller things he didn't examine.
He looked up through the settling dust.
The trapdoor was still open. The space around it was not as occupied as it had been.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Active threat neutralised - Ambush disrupted.
Scenario Completion Data: +40
[SKILL PROGRESSION]Throwing: +1
Roger got to his feet, keeping low, sweeping the area. The morning mist was thickening as the temperature shifted and he could feel the day assembling itself around him, the light coming, the ridge waking up, the particular quality of air that preceded a day that was going to be as bad as the last one.
He looked at the open trapdoor. Then at the position of the Federation line. Then at the ridge above him, where the Imperial Guard was redistributing itself in the tunnels for the morning's assault.
He added a fifth grenade to his pocket from the ground nearby. A sixth.
Then he worked his way back toward the Federation line, staying low, and began thinking about what the next twelve hours were going to require.
The answer was most of what he had. Probably all of it.
He started making a list.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.