Rus passed out sometime after the fires started dying down. Rus woke up under a canvas tarp with his back against a wheel well and his helmet tilted forward over his eyes like a broken sun visor.
There was something moving. A weight not heavy, but definitely there balanced on the top of his helmet.
Felt like a feathered little shit.
Cracked one eye open and saw a bird. Jet black, sleek, not quite a crow, but damn near. Eyes red like brake lights. Wings slightly spread, giving it that cartoon "ready to fly" posture.
It stared right at him.
Rus stared back.
They had a moment.
Then Gino showed up and waved it off like he was swatting a fart.
"Did it peck your eyes off?" he asked, voice muffled through his mask.
"Don't think so." Rus sat up and rubbed his face like it might do something.
Dust and sweat stuck to his skin. His whole body ached like it had gone ten rounds with a grinder. He hadn't even taken his boots off. They felt like solidified mud bricks glued to his calves.
"Anything new?"
"Nothing really," Gino replied, taking a seat beside him, creaking as he lowered himself. "Most of the bodies are ash now. Haul trucks reached Damasa about two hours ago. CP says the engineers are already spraying down the roads."
"Good for them."
He handed Rus a couple caffeine pills, which he dry-swallowed out of habit. They hit the back of his throat like chalky regret, but at least his head stopped feeling like a bag of rocks.
Dan and Foster weren't around. Probably sleeping. Or pretending to do something useful.
Rus and Gino just sat there, masks filtering the poison air, rifles across their laps. The morning wasn't much of one — just smoke-filtered daylight poking through the haze like it forgot how to be sunlight.
Gino broke the silence.
"You think we kind of lack empathy for this shit, Wilson?"
Rus tilted his head toward him. Gino sounded serious, but that didn't mean anything these days.
"Dunno," Rus muttered. "I can't really care. They aren't human."
"They looked human."
"Humanoid," Rus corrected. "A head, four limbs. Yeah. But make no mistake, they're not us. They don't think like us, don't build like us. Hell, half of 'em don't even speak in a way we can translate. Unless they're pretty or look like something we can sympathize with—some cartoon-level soft features—we don't give a shit."
Gino snorted behind his mask. "True. But, you know… if we ever ran into one of those long-eared types—like elves or whatever—they'd probably get treated a little differently."
Rus raised a brow. "You think there's a bunny mutate out there?"
"Yeah. A real bunny girl. Not cosplay. The kind with actual ears."
"You'd try to fuck it, wouldn't you?"
"In a heartbeat."
Rus stared at him. "I have to ask… is that seriously all you can think about right now?"
He shrugged, shameless. "What else is there to think about? Burned half an army of Orcs, haven't slept in two days, and our water rations taste like plastic. I'm just trying to keep the brain occupied."
"Is there even something there?"
"Back at you," he said, nudging him with his elbow. "You don't seem interested in anything much."
Rus thought what the hell he was talking about, then guessed it was about Sgt. Berta again.
"Sorry for being a romantic."
"More like gay."
Rus blinked slowly behind his mask. "If only you knew how little I gave a shit about your opinion when it comes to anything involving that."
Gino let out a dry laugh and slapped a hand against his shoulder. "Man, you need to get laid. Let Berta drain the poison outta you."
"Hard pass."
"She's not bad when she's not fucking everyone at once."
"She's always fucking at everyone from what I heard."
"That's part of the charm," he grinned.
"I'm not even going to dignify why that's part of the charm. I'll wait until we get time off. In the city. Not in the base. And definitely not with you degenerates anywhere near me. I don't fancy that kind of brotherhood, thank you very much."
"Suit yourself," he said, standing and stretching like a lazy cat. "You're gonna miss the wild times."
Rus didn't reply.
He perched his rifle on his shoulder, staring out past the camp, eyes tracing the distant smoke trails and wreckage that painted the horizon like something biblical.
Fires still burned in pockets, blackening the fields where the Orcs made their last stand. Charred heaps dotted the land like rot on a corpse. What wasn't burnt was crushed, cratered, or simply gone—bombed into a fine red mist.
And there they were, survivors with guns, caffeine pills, and a sense of humor rotten enough to make a corpse blush.
They didn't bury the dead.
They stacked them. Burned them. Watched them turn into memories.
Empathy wasn't part of the kit they were issued lately.
It wasn't a requirement.
It was a liability.
They weren't here to understand them.
They were here to end them.
Humanity wasn't the type to share.
***
Rus found himself staring at the ground, well, what was left of it.
Ash, caked and fine, spread like gray snow in all directions. It swirled when the wind picked up, coating boots, weapons, and gear in a soft powder that felt wrong no matter how many times they brushed it off. No smell, not anymore. Just the idea of it lingering in the back of their throat.
One of the newer units had rolled in that morning. Fresh from training, staging, maybe a week out of Damasa. They weren't exactly green, but they still moved like they hadn't settled into the rot of it yet. Optimistic. Still under the impression that orders made sense.
They were shoveling ash into sacks. Methodical, slow work. Ash shoveled, bag loaded, tied off, stacked. Repeat.
Fertilizer, they said.
Apparently, Orc and Gobber ash had some kind of property that helped enrich the soil. Not like human cremains, which were trash for plants, too much salt, too high on the pH scale. Burn a human and you have a chemical mess. Burn an Orc, and suddenly the eggheads in AgriTech were all giddy, saying it did wonders for the harvest.
One of the blokes from the new squad tried to explain it to Rus.
Said something about calcium silicates, trace metals, bio-char ratios. Spoke with that academic tone, like he'd taken a crash course in "Justifying Horrible Shit 101."
Rus nodded along, not because he cared, but because he didn't want to start a debate over moral ambiguity with a guy shoveling corpse dust for a living.
Truth was, he had a feeling he knew what was in those ashes. The "other things" he mentioned. Orcs and Gobbers weren't just flesh and bone. They were built differently. Literally. Their bodies had this weird fusion of organic and something else, like the metal they wore had bonded to their tissue, or maybe they processed minerals through their blood. Bio-metallurgy, some called it.
But unless he had hard evidence—samples, reports, or something he could actually point at. He didn't give a shit. As long as no one made him sprinkle "flavored" remains over a field, they could turn them into fucking potpourri for all Rus cared.
It wasn't their job to worry about it anyway.
So Rus and the squad sat in silence. Like scarecrows. Useless sentinels posted in a field of death, watching bags of ash pile up and wondering what century they'd landed in.
There was no clear point to them being there. No major contact expected. No recon orders. Just "maintain presence." Which basically meant sit tight, look scary, and don't shoot unless someone or something shoots first. Waste of fuel. Waste of people.
And above all, a waste of perfectly good drones.
They had three in our convoy. One was grounded for maintenance, the other only got clearance during daylight hours. The third—the one they called "Brenda" was supposedly tasked to patrol quadrants they weren't even near. All remote, all off-limits.
Rus asked Command once why they weren't running constant overhead scans.
They gave them some bullshit about energy conservation, sensor recalibration schedules, and satellite signal prioritization.
Which he was sure sure translates to: "Shut the fuck up, Wilson."
So he sat, in this graveyard of glassy dirt and burnt bones, armed to the teeth, doing absolutely nothing while higher-ups made abstract war moves on digital maps somewhere far away.
When the shift change rolled around, he didn't bother moving much. Gino and Dan picked up the perimeter watch. Foster was working on their Humvee's comms, tapping the screen like it owed him money. The new guys were still shoveling like they thought there'd be a promotion at the end of it.
Rus crawled under the Humvee to escape the sun, propped his helmet against the oil pan, and pulled out his PDA.
Checked comm logs. Nothing new.
Checked home messages. Still blank.
Opened his music folder. One track—some low-tempo instrumental—played in the background while he scrolled past files he'd already read three times over. Maintenance reports. Ops summaries. A half-written letter he'd started but never finished.
His eyelids went heavy fast. Between the caffeine crash and the warm metal of the Humvee's underbelly, it didn't take long before the world faded out.
It was quiet under there.
Comfortably so.
The chaos could have waited.
And if it didn't?
Well… someone would yell when it got close enough to matter.
***
Rus woke up to someone kicking his boot hard.
Didn't have to open his eyes to know it was Dan.
"Up-up fucker. My turn."
Grumbling, Rus dragged himself out from under the Humvee. The metal was still warm from yesterday's heat, mixed with the stink of engine oil and scorched rubber. He wiped the dust off his face with the inside of his sleeve, then handed over his spot without a word.
Dan didn't say thanks. Just grunted, ducked his head, and rolled under like they were changing shifts on a factory line.
No good mornings. No chit-chat. Just war stuff.
Rus climbed up onto the vehicle, checked the .50 cal mounted on top, and locked himself into the gunner's nest. The barrel was cool, but the sun was already climbing. Another hour and it'd be hot enough to cook a Gobber-bred rat.
Out past the perimeter, the artillery boys were putting on a show.
Somewhere about three klicks off, a line of shells slammed into a rise. The ground shook under his boots, faint but steady. Boom. Boom. Boom. Like distant thunder with anger issues.
Through the dust, he could see the arc of the shells painting long gray streaks across the sky. Precision-guided death, each one finding a target they never saw. Some Orc scout party probably stumbled into the wrong coordinates. Or maybe it was just a warning shot aka their version of ringing the doorbell with a sledgehammer.
Didn't really matter.
It was the kind of thing that made them feel both safe and very, very small.
The earth out there didn't resist anymore. It just accepted the fire like a beaten dog. When the shells hit, they kicked up columns of soil, shattered stone, and whatever poor bastards happened to be caught in the middle.
From where Rus sat, watching it all, it felt… distant.
Not in a dreamlike way. Just irrelevant. They weren't involved. Not directly. No orders to move. No sign of counterattack. So they just watched.
Foster joined him eventually, holding a can of something lukewarm he called "energy juice." Rus didn't ask. The guy would drink shit that glowed in the dark and swore it helped him stay sharp. Rus wouldn't be surprised if he had started drinking the fuel for the flamethrower.
He leaned on the side of the Humvee, eyes squinting at the impact zone.
"They're really going at it," he said.
"Guess they're pissed."
"Or just bored."
He had a point. Sometimes, Command just liked to flex.
Drop a couple dozen shells somewhere "just in case," or because someone upstairs was testing a new targeting algorithm. Sometimes it was a misclick. Or maybe some lieutenant got twitchy and wanted to preempt an attack that didn't exist.
Either way, the result was the same really. Lots of boom, not much clarity.
Gino showed up next, munching on something that looked like protein bars and regret.
"You see the size of those hits?" he said with his mouth full. "Bet they're using the heavies. Not the standard M-777s."
"Maybe."
"Wanna bet it's because the scouts got spooked again?"
"Or some Gobber pissed on the wrong bush."
They didn't laugh. It wasn't funny. Just the usual shit talk they threw around to fill the silence.
Because that was the thing about this place.
They couldn't stay quiet for too long. The silence had weight. Like the air carried memory, and if they didn't speak, it might crawl into their head and start whispering things they'd rather not hear.
So they talked.
Watched artillery chew through the landscape.
And waited.
That was the real job here… the waiting.
People think soldiers fight all the time. That they're constantly in motion, pulling triggers, saving lives or taking them.
Truth is, they sit. They watch. They eat shit food and wait. For orders. For something to break. For someone to die.
And sometimes, if they're lucky, they get to shoot back.