Main Base wasn't built for a siege. It had fences, checkpoints, a scattering of watchtowers manned by soldiers who'd trained for patrols and convoy escorts, not for holding a line against a coordinated assault. I understood that within about thirty seconds of reaching the perimeter, because the western wall was already on fire in two places and the gunfire coming from beyond it sounded less like a raid and more like a small war.
"This isn't Kane," I said, watching the chaos unfold from the relative safety of the command tent, Reyes beside me, her face carved from stone, a runner shouting grid coordinates into a radio behind us. "He wouldn't hit us like this. Too many civilians inside the wire."
"You're right," Reyes said grimly. "Intelligence just confirmed it. This is a splinter cell — Kane's people call them the Unbound. They think the Free faction's too soft, too willing to negotiate. This is them making a point."
"How many?"
"Scouts are saying forty, maybe fifty. Augmented, some of them. This isn't a raiding party, Corporal. This is meant to break something."
Alarms blared somewhere behind us, a rising, mechanical wail that set every nerve in my body on edge. Through the gap in the tent flap I could see Vanguard already moving — Ian's lightning arcing bright against the darkening sky, Dustin's silhouette braced near the breach in the wall, Alex's sword catching torchlight as he cut down anything that made it through the gap. Ralph, bandaged ribs and all, was throwing fire he had no business throwing yet, and I could see even from here that he was slowing down, running dry, each burst smaller than the last.
"They need me," I said.
"You're suspended," Reyes said, but there was something in her voice that told me she was already fighting her own instincts on this, weighing an order against a base that was actively burning. "If you go out there, Voss will use it. You know that."
"If I don't go out there, people are going to die that don't have to." I looked at her, and for the first time since I'd met her, let every ounce of the fear I was actually feeling show on my face. "Colonel. Please. I'm not asking you to look the other way for my sake. I'm asking because I've fought whatever's coordinating those zombie packs, and I know exactly how bad a coordinated assault gets when nobody with real firepower stops it early."
Reyes held my gaze for a long, terrible second, the sound of the battle outside filling the silence between us, another explosion rattling the tent's canvas walls. Then she exhaled, sharp and decisive, the decision visibly landing in her shoulders before it reached her mouth.
"Emergency battlefield authorization," she said. "Effective immediately, all suspended personnel are reinstated for the duration of this engagement, by my authority as operational commander. Get out there, Corporal. And Johnathan — whatever you do out there, make it worth the paperwork I'm about to have to file."
I didn't need to be told twice.
I hit the perimeter at a dead sprint, mana already flooding my legs, and the scene that met me was worse than I'd let myself imagine from the command tent. The Unbound weren't just armed — they were augmented, crystal-eaters same as us, moving with a speed and viciousness that told me these were people who'd stopped seeing any line between themselves and the monsters they were supposed to be fighting instead of humans they used to be. One of them tore through a soldier's rifle with bare hands like the metal was cardboard, laughing while he did it.
I drew both deagles and went to work.
The first two I dropped clean, headshots from a distance that would have been impossible three months ago and felt almost casual now, my hands steady in a way my racing heart didn't match. The third came at me with a blade wreathed in something that looked disturbingly like Alex's own darkness affinity, and I had to actually think for a half-second before I ducked under the swing and put him down with a knee to the jaw hard enough that I felt it crack through my own leg, the man's head snapping sideways with a sound I tried not to think too hard about.
"Johnathan!" Ian's voice, somewhere to my left, relief and urgency tangled together. "About time. We've got a problem near the supply depot — they're trying to burn it, and if that goes up we lose our medical stock along with everything else."
I didn't waste time asking follow-up questions. I stopped time.
Not a sliver this time — I let it run longer than I ever had in front of this many people, three full seconds of grey, silent world, the mana drain hitting my core like a physical blow the instant I committed to it. I sprinted through the frozen battlefield toward the depot, weaving between combatants caught mid-motion on both sides — a soldier's mouth open around a shout that would never finish, a raider's blade halfway through a downward swing that would never land — past a raider mid-throw with a molotov cocktail already lit and arcing toward the depot's fuel drums, flame frozen into a strange, motionless smear against the grey stillness of everything else. I caught the bottle out of the air, redirected its throw with my own momentum, sent it arcing instead into an empty stretch of dirt fifty feet clear of anything flammable, and reached the depot's main door just as my three seconds ran dry and the world snapped back into motion around me all at once, sound crashing back in like a wave.
The raider who'd thrown the molotov staggered, confused, staring at his own empty hand like it had betrayed him, head swiveling to find a target that had simply vanished and reappeared somewhere he hadn't expected. I put a round through his chest before he worked out what had happened.
Someone screamed my name from behind — not in warning, in confusion, and I turned just in time to see one of the regular soldiers staring at me with wide, disbelieving eyes, clearly having caught some fragment of what I'd just done even through the chaos, his mouth working around a question he didn't have words for yet.
I didn't have time to worry about it. The fight was still raging, and worrying about one confused witness felt like a luxury I couldn't afford with the depot's fuel drums still sitting twenty feet from an active battle.
"Depot's secure!" I shouted into my comm, already moving back toward the main fighting, deagles reloaded on the run. "Where do you need me?"
"Breach point, west wall," Ian's voice crackled back, strained. "Dustin's holding but he's running thin, and we've got a second group trying to widen the gap."
I got there in under a minute, and the sight that met me was Dustin standing almost alone against a knot of six Unbound fighters, gravity fields the only thing keeping them from simply overrunning him, sweat streaming down his face with the effort of holding that many localized pulls at once.
"Little help," he said, through gritted teeth, not looking away from his targets.
I stopped time for a half-second — a fraction, barely worth the cost, but enough — and repositioned myself directly behind the nearest attacker. When time resumed, I put a round through the back of his skull before he ever registered I'd moved, and the rest of the group, suddenly down a man with no warning at all, hesitated just long enough for Dustin's gravity field to finish the job, crushing two more to the ground hard enough that they didn't get back up.
"Thanks," Dustin gasped, dropping the field on the remaining three so he could actually fight them conventionally, exhaustion written across every line of his face.
"Don't thank me yet. There's more coming."
There were. The rest of the engagement blurred together the way real fights always did — Ralph collapsing his fire output down to precise, economical bursts once his mana started running thin, conserving what little he had left for the moments that actually mattered, Dustin holding the breach in the wall almost single-handedly with gravity fields that turned charging raiders into stumbling, easy targets, Alex fighting with a grim efficiency that had none of his usual flair left in it, blade moving in short, brutal arcs instead of the theatrical flourishes he usually couldn't resist. I moved between all of them, plugging gaps, using my ability in careful, deniable pieces even as the temptation to just end it grew with every scream I heard, every soldier I watched go down within reach and out of it in the same breath.
At one point I found myself back to back with Ian, both of us surrounded by a loose ring of Unbound fighters who'd apparently decided we were worth focusing fire on.
"Any bright ideas?" Ian shouted, lightning arcing between his hands in a constant, crackling hum.
"Working on it."
"Work faster."
I dropped two with clean shots, felt Ian's lightning chain between three more behind me close enough that the hair on my arms stood up from the discharge, and between the two of us the ring broke inside of twenty seconds, bodies scattered across the churned dirt around us.
"That's a bright idea," Ian said, breathing hard, a fierce grin breaking through the exhaustion. "More of those, please."
It took the better part of an hour before the Unbound broke and retreated into the treeline, leaving nearly thirty of their own dead behind on our side of the wall. We'd lost four soldiers. Ralph was down again, this time badly enough that Bruce had to half-carry him to the infirmary himself, blood soaking through a fresh wound layered over his already-healing ribs. Ash, I learned later, had spent the entire battle in a supply closet with Emma standing guard outside it, ice-formed blade in hand, ready to make sure nothing got close enough to matter.
I stood at the breached wall as the adrenaline finally started to fade, blood — some mine, most not — drying stiff on my jacket, and thought about the soldier who'd stared at me during the depot fire, and the seed of doubt I'd just planted in at least one person's head about exactly what "short-range teleportation" actually looked like when nobody expected you to be watching closely.
It had been worth it. I told myself that, over and over, as Reyes found me at the wall and looked at the carnage with an exhausted, grim satisfaction, her uniform torn at one shoulder, a shallow cut along her jaw she hadn't stopped to treat yet.
"You saved this base tonight," she said quietly.
"Voss isn't going to see it that way."
"No," Reyes admitted, looking out at the smoking wreckage of the breach, the bodies still being counted somewhere behind us. "He probably isn't. But I meant what I said out there, Corporal. Whatever this costs you politically — it was worth it tonight. I need you to hold onto that, whatever happens next."
I nodded, not quite trusting my voice, and looked out past her at the dark treeline where the Unbound had disappeared, wondering how many more nights like this one were still waiting for us before whatever was coming finally showed its whole hand.
Behind us, soldiers were already dragging debris away from the breach, torches and portable floodlights turning the wall into a chaos of long, shifting shadows. Somewhere in that light, I knew, was the soldier who'd seen me disappear and reappear near the depot — one more person who now had a question about me that I couldn't afford to let anyone answer honestly. I didn't know his name yet. I had the sinking feeling I was going to learn it soon, one way or another, and that whatever came of it wouldn't be simple.