The rain turned the battlefield into a slow, sucking grave. By dawn, the surviving enemy had pulled back. The crossroads was theirs. A runner arrived at noon with word that a real relief column was two hours out.

She reached the berm. Peeked. The carrier was seventy meters out, churning dark soil, its tracks throwing fans of filth. The driver’s slit was a narrow horizontal line, barely visible. She raised her rifle, exhaled, and fired.

They never called it Sector Seven after that. The maps got redrawn, the battle renamed by some clerk in a dry office. But the soldiers who survived—the ones who crawled through the ditch, who watched the yellow flare hang like a false sun, who heard the wrong gun fire at the right time—they called it something else.

Private Dina Rostova caught on first. Her eyes widened. “You want to fake a friendly unit arriving.”

Back at the barn, Hari helped her crawl inside. Fallon was staring at her with something between awe and horror. “You made them shoot their own.”

“For me to do something stupid.”

The plan unspooled like frayed wire. Voss would crawl out the back of the barn, using a drainage ditch that ran parallel to the crossroads. The ditch was half-collapsed, filled with black water and worse things, but it led to a low berm thirty meters from the enemy’s expected advance. From there, she could see the carrier’s driver hatch. One well-placed shot from her rifle wouldn’t kill the vehicle, but it would spider-web the viewport. Blind, the driver would stop. Confused, the commander would hesitate.

“I want to make them hesitate,” Voss said. “Hesitation in mud is worth a thousand rounds. Their carrier can’t maneuver in this sludge if they panic and reverse. Their infantry will go to ground. That buys us time.”

“Time for what?” asked Fallon, his voice thin.

Corporal Lena Voss wiped a sleeve across her forehead, leaving a brown smear. Behind her, the rest of Fireteam Dagger huddled inside a collapsed barn whose roof now served as a sort of angled helmet. Their objective was simple on paper: hold the crossroads at the Spoon’s southern tip until reinforcements arrived. That was twelve hours ago. Reinforcements had been chewed up by artillery two klicks back. The radio only spat static and the occasional garbled prayer.

The second carrier fired. Not a machine gun. A cannon. The round struck the first carrier’s side armor, which was never meant to withstand a direct hit from its own kind. The explosion was a wet, muffled thump, followed by a geyser of black smoke and shredded metal. The enemy infantry in the open were caught in the blast wave, thrown into the mud like rag dolls.

She didn’t need binoculars. The figures emerged like mud given form—enemy infantry, their grey coats so soaked with filth they looked black. Twelve, maybe fifteen of them, fanning out in a loose skirmish line. Behind them, the low growl of an engine: an armored personnel carrier, its hull plastered with dried muck for camouflage.

Not because the road was clear. But because fear, once unblocked, flows faster than any bullet.

The shot was true. The slit fractured into a milky starburst. The carrier lurched, then stopped, engine whining as the driver slammed the brakes. Shouts in a language she didn’t need to translate. Confusion.

Now, Hari.