I wasn't allowed on the mission, but nobody had said anything about the communications room, and Bruce — who apparently had more clearance than I'd realized, or simply didn't ask — let me sit in a corner of it with a headset while Vanguard's channel crackled to life at dawn.
The comms room was smaller than I expected, wedged into a converted supply closet with three desks crammed shoulder to shoulder and a wall of pinned maps that had clearly outgrown the space years ago. A young comms officer — Private Nkemelu, according to the name stitched above her breast pocket — glanced up when Bruce led me in, took one look at my face, and apparently decided not to ask any questions she didn't strictly need answered.
"Corporal," she said instead, sliding a spare headset across the desk without being asked. "Channel three. Try not to talk over anyone, it messes with my logs."
"Copy that."
"Bravo team, radio check," Ian's voice came through, steady as always.
"Copy, Vanguard One. We hear you." That was the standard squad supporting them, four regulars assigned as backup muscle for anything beyond a straightforward sweep.
I sat with my hands folded tight in my lap, listening to the mundane chatter of a squad moving into position, and felt every second of it in a place low in my chest that had nothing to do with mana.
"You don't have to sit through the whole thing," Bruce said quietly, settling into the chair beside mine with two cups of something that was trying and failing to be coffee. "I can flag you if anything happens."
"I know."
"You're going to sit through the whole thing anyway."
"Yeah."
He didn't argue, just handed me one of the cups and settled in like he'd expected exactly that answer. The forest sweep started clean. Ralph's voice came through periodically with updates — no contact, no unusual density, terrain notes for whoever compiled the after-action report. For nearly two hours it sounded almost boring, and some small, guilty part of me was disappointed, because boring meant I'd been benched for nothing.
"They're moving through the northern approach first," Bruce said, tracing a finger along a map pinned to the wall beside the comms desk, mirroring the coordinates the comms officer was tracking on her own display. "Same route as the last sweep, more or less. Command wants a controlled comparison — see if the density's actually changed or if it was a bad day for whoever reported it."
"It's changed," I said. "I could feel it change just standing in that clearing."
"I believe you. Command wants numbers, not feelings."
Then Dustin's voice cut through, tight and fast. "Contact. Multiple. They're not scattering — same formation as before."
"How many?" Ian, already sharper.
"Fifteen, maybe twenty. Tier three, tier four mixed." A pause, and I could hear gunfire starting to crackle in the background of the transmission, sharp and constant. "They're flanking us. This isn't random, Ian, this is the same thing from before."
I gripped the edge of the desk hard enough that my knuckles went pale. Twenty, mixed tiers, coordinated — that was a fight that had needed all five of us the last time, and now it was four, plus a support squad that had never fought anything like this.
"Ralph, left side, don't let them pin us against the ravine," Ian ordered. "Alex, watch our six, they might be trying to loop around."
The next several minutes crawled by in bursts of static and half-heard shouting. I caught fragments — Ralph calling out a burn, Alex swearing in a way that suggested his sword had connected with something it shouldn't have, Dustin's voice going flat and clipped the way it did when he was spending more mana than he wanted to admit.
"Left side's collapsing!" Ralph's voice again, breathless. "There's more of them than the last count, they must've been holding some back — "
"Hold the line, Ralph, I'm coming to you," Ian said, and I could hear the strain in his voice even through the static, the particular tightness of someone running full-out while trying to keep his words steady.
Then a sound I recognized instantly and hated myself for recognizing — a scream, cut short, one of the support squad members.
"Man down!" Ian's voice, no longer steady at all. "Ralph, cover him, get him back — "
"I'm hit!" Ralph's own voice this time, breathless, pained. "Claw got through, I'm — I'm fine, keep going — "
I stood up out of my chair before I even realized I'd moved, headset cord yanking taut against the desk. Bruce grabbed my arm.
"You can't," he said, low and urgent. "You're suspended. If you show up on that field without orders, you hand Voss everything he needs."
"They're dying out there."
"They're fighting," Bruce said. "There's a difference, and you know it better than anyone. Let them fight it."
"That's easy to say from a chair."
"I know." Something in his grip on my arm didn't loosen, but his voice softened, just slightly. "I sat in a chair once while people I loved fought for their lives without me too, Johnathan. It's the worst feeling in the world, and there's still nothing you can do about it from here except make things worse for everyone if you walk out that door."
I stood there, torn in half, listening to my squad — my squad, the word settled into place somewhere I hadn't expected it to — claw their way through a fight I should have been standing in the middle of. It took another eleven minutes, by the clock on the wall, though it felt like an hour, the comms officer beside me relaying grid coordinates to a medevac crew on standby, before Ian's voice finally came back through, ragged but alive.
"Contact neutralized. We've got two wounded — Ralph took a claw across the ribs, and one of the support guys is in bad shape, needs immediate extraction."
"Copy, Vanguard One," the comms officer beside me responded, already relaying the medevac order. "Extraction inbound, ETA fifteen minutes."
I sat back down slowly, the adrenaline that had spiked through me with nowhere to go leaving my hands shaking slightly against my knees.
"They made it," Bruce said quietly.
"Barely."
"Barely's still made it."
We waited through the extraction, through the confirmation that Ralph's wound, while ugly, wasn't life-threatening, through the grimmer confirmation that the support squad member wasn't going to be as lucky — alive, but he'd lost enough blood that the medics were talking about whether he'd walk the same again. I listened to that part of the transmission with my jaw clenched so tight it ached afterward, one more name added to a list I already carried too many of.
By the time Vanguard made it back to base that evening, I was waiting at the landing pad despite every instinct telling me it was a bad idea to be seen there. Ralph came off the transport first, one arm strapped tight across bandages that had already soaked through once, but upright, walking on his own power, which I chose to take as a good sign.
"You look like hell," I said.
"You should see the other guy," Ralph rasped, echoing my own line back at me from weeks ago, and managed something that was almost a grin. "Wasn't the same without you out there. Not gonna lie."
"I heard."
Ian came down the ramp behind him, exhaustion etched into every line of his face, but his eyes found mine and held them with something like relief. "You heard, huh. From where, exactly? Because I'm pretty sure your access got cut."
"Comms room. Bruce has connections."
"Of course he does." Ian shook his head, half a laugh escaping despite everything. "Twenty of them, coordinated like before. Whatever's directing these packs, it's not slowing down while you're stuck at a desk."
"I noticed."
Dustin came last, quieter than usual even for him, a fresh scrape along one cheekbone he hadn't bothered to clean up yet. He stopped in front of me, studying my face for a long moment.
"It felt different today," he said. "Fighting without you. Not worse, exactly. Just — like we were missing a piece we didn't know how load-bearing it was until it was gone."
"We need you back," Alex said, coming down last, sword still on his hip, jaw set in a way I hadn't seen on him before — none of his usual theater in it at all. "Not because we can't handle ourselves. Because the next time it's twenty coordinated tier fours, it might not be a claw across someone's ribs. It might be someone in a bag."
I didn't have an answer for that, because he was right, and because there wasn't anything I could say from where I currently stood, suspended and under investigation, that would actually fix the problem.
"I'm working on it," I said instead, and hated how thin the words sounded even as I said them.
Bruce found me an hour later, after the squad had scattered toward the infirmary and their own bunks, still standing at the edge of the landing pad watching the last of the transport's running lights fade into the dark.
"The support squad member," he said, without preamble, because he'd clearly learned by now that I didn't need the news softened, only delivered honestly. "Corporal Whitfield. He's stable. Going to need weeks of recovery, maybe longer before he's back on active rotation, if he ever fully gets there. Nerve damage in the leg, from what the surgeon's saying."
"Because I wasn't there."
"Because a coordinated tier-four warband ambushed a nine-person patrol in unfamiliar terrain," Bruce said, sharper than I expected from him. "That's not the same sentence, Johnathan, and I need you to actually hear the difference, because I've watched you do this before — take every bad outcome and file it under things you personally failed at. You didn't put that claw through his leg. Something out in that forest did, something command still doesn't have a name or a classification for."
"It still would've gone differently with five of us instead of four."
"Maybe. Probably, even." He didn't pretend otherwise, which I appreciated more than a comforting lie would have. "But you're benched because of a decision you made three months ago, and Whitfield got hurt because of a decision some corrupted intelligence made this afternoon. Those are two different chains of cause, even if they both land on you feeling guilty about the same soldier."
I didn't have anything to say to that, not right away, so I just stood there a while longer, the cold finally starting to seep through my jacket, watching the perimeter lights flicker on one by one along the fence line.
"Command's going to push a tier classification through for that warband soon," Bruce said eventually, softer, filling the silence rather than pressing it. "Ian's report used the word 'organized' four separate times. That's going to get someone's attention above Reyes's pay grade, inquiry or no inquiry."
"Good. Maybe it'll matter more than whatever Voss thinks he's found in a warehouse."
"Maybe." Bruce clapped a hand on my shoulder, the same easy warmth he'd always had, undimmed by three months of promotions and transfers and a new set of stripes. "Get some sleep, Corporal. Whatever's coming tomorrow, you'll want to be standing for it."
I watched him go, then looked back out at the dark treeline past the fence, somewhere past the perimeter, where a forest that had already claimed part of one soldier's future today was still out there, patient, watching, and completely unbothered by an inquiry that had nothing to do with it at all. Whatever it was building out there, it wasn't going to wait for Voss to finish deciding what to do with me, and it certainly wasn't going to wait for a hearing board to decide whether I was allowed back on the roster to help stop it.