Leave ended the way leave always did — too fast, and with a summons waiting the moment we returned to Main Base. Colonel Reyes had us in the briefing room within an hour of our transport landing, the whole of Vanguard assembled, fresh off three days that had almost let us forget, briefly, what world we actually lived in. I noticed, walking in, that someone had already patched the last visible scorch mark from the Unbound attack, painted over clean enough that a stranger wouldn't have known anything happened there at all. The base moved on fast. It had to. There wasn't room, in a world like this one, for wreckage to sit around reminding everyone how close things had come to falling apart.
"Welcome back," she said, without much preamble, spreading a fresh intelligence packet across the table. "I wish I had something gentler to ease you back into duty with, but the forest situation hasn't improved while you were gone. Scout reports now put the coordinated warband territory at nearly triple what it was a month ago. Command's officially designating it a Dominion-classification threat as of this morning."
"Dominion," Ralph repeated. "Like an actual government."
"Like an actual government," Reyes confirmed grimly. "Two commanders confirmed, likely more we haven't encountered yet, an organized training structure, expanding territory. We're not looking at pest control anymore. We're looking at a rival power establishing itself on our doorstep."
"What's the classification actually mean, practically?" Dustin asked. "Beyond the label."
"It means command treats it the way they'd treat a hostile nation-state, not a wildlife problem," Reyes said. "Resource allocation shifts. Intelligence gathering becomes a standing priority instead of an occasional sweep. And it means the political calculus around engaging it changes — command's going to want diplomatic options explored before full military ones, the same as they would with the Hero or Free factions, however strange that sounds applied to something that used to be a zombie horde."
"Diplomatic options," Alex repeated, deadpan. "With something that opened a conversation by rearranging a dead patrol into a message."
"I didn't say I agreed with the approach," Reyes said. "I said that's the direction command's leaning. For now, our job doesn't change much — containment, response, intelligence gathering. The politics happen well above our pay grade."
I thought about the grey-black commander's voice, cold and patient, telling me it wondered what had taught me restraint. I thought about the purple one retreating the moment things turned, testing rather than committing. Something about both of them had felt less like animal cunning and more like strategy, the kind that came from somewhere with actual foresight behind it — the kind of patience Voss also seemed to specialize in, though I doubted the two had anything to do with each other beyond making my life simultaneously more complicated.
"What's command's plan?" Ian asked.
"For now, containment. Reinforced patrols along the perimeter, increased surveillance on the forest territory, and Vanguard on standby as our primary rapid response if the Dominion makes another move." Reyes's eyes moved across all five of us, lingering half a second longer on me than the others. "You've all more than earned a reputation this past month. I need that reputation to keep holding, because I don't think what's coming next is going to get easier."
"Define 'not easier,'" Ralph said.
"I'd rather not," Reyes said, and there was no humor in it at all, which somehow landed harder than if she'd tried to soften it. She glanced briefly at me, something unspoken passing behind her eyes before she continued. "Corporal, for what it's worth — I read the hearing transcript this morning. Clean outcome. I'm glad it landed the way it did."
"Thank you, Colonel."
"Don't thank me. I just relayed what I saw with my own eyes." She straightened a stack of papers on the table, businesslike again. "Voss's own review is scheduled for next month. I wouldn't expect him to go quietly into that one either, so keep your guard up in the meantime. Men like that don't spend a setback sitting still."
"Understood."
"Get settled back in. Full briefing on the training-ground intel tomorrow morning, 0700. I want everyone rested before then."
The meeting broke not long after, the squad filtering out in twos and threes, already trading theories about what "Dominion-classification" actually meant for their day-to-day rotations, and I found myself lingering in the briefing room after the others filed out, staring at the map still spread across the table — Main Base, the forest territory marked in a red that had grown noticeably since the last time I'd looked at this exact map, the wider region beyond it dotted with Hero faction holdings, Free faction territory, unclaimed zones nobody had fully mapped since the world ended.
Somewhere out there, past the edge of a map that only showed what command cared enough to track, was a line in an intelligence report about a teenage boy with a spatial affinity, and a base full of people who trusted me with almost everything except the two secrets that mattered most — what I really was, and who I was still hoping, against every rational instinct I had left, to find.
"You've been staring at that map a long time," Dustin said, appearing at my shoulder with the quiet way he had of showing up without announcing himself.
"Lot to think about."
"The Dominion, or something else?"
I looked at him, and for a second I considered telling him — telling someone, finally, about the report, about Antonio, about the weight I'd been carrying alone since that clerk's office three days ago. Dustin, of everyone in Vanguard, felt like the one who might actually understand carrying something like that without turning it into a whole conversation I wasn't ready to have. He'd told me himself, once, about the gravity affinity passed down from a brother he'd lost. He knew what it was to carry a piece of someone who wasn't there anymore.
"Something else," I admitted. "Family stuff. Complicated."
"Everything's complicated now." He echoed his own line from weeks ago, and something about the repetition made me almost smile despite everything. "You don't have to tell me. Just — for what it's worth, whatever it is. You're not carrying it alone unless you decide to be."
"You keep saying things like that."
"Someone has to." A small, dry almost-smile. "Ian handles the pep talks. Alex handles the jokes. I apparently handle the uncomfortably direct observations nobody asked for. We all specialize."
"Since you're apparently the resident expert on gravity cores and mana theory," I said, seizing the opening before I could talk myself out of it, "you want to actually look at that wyvern crystal with me? It's been sitting in my footlocker for weeks. I keep meaning to get it properly examined and keep not finding the time."
Something sparked behind Dustin's usually flat expression — genuine interest, rare enough on him that it was almost startling to see. "I've been wondering when you'd ask. Yeah. Let's look at it now, actually, before something else catches fire and eats the rest of the evening."
We walked back to my room together, and I dug the crystal out from under a stack of spare uniforms, setting it on the small table between us where the low lamplight caught its strange, double-shaded glow — the amber warmth I recognized as close kin to my own core, threaded through with something darker underneath, almost violet in the right light.
Dustin turned it slowly in his fingers, studying it with the same careful attention he brought to reading a battlefield. "This isn't a single-stage core. Most crystals we pull off a kill are one color, one purity level, however strong or weak. This has two distinct signatures fighting for space inside the same structure. I've read about this in passing — training material, mostly theoretical. It happens sometimes when a creature's evolving faster than its own core can stabilize. Like it molted between stages mid-transformation and both layers got fused together instead of one fully replacing the other."
"Is that dangerous? Useful? Both?"
"Could be either. Cores like this are rare enough that most of what's written about them is guesswork." He held it up to the lamp, watching the two colors shift against each other. "If I had to guess, I'd say whatever's out there evolving the wildlife is doing it faster than anything I've read about actually accounts for. This wyvern didn't have months to stabilize into whatever it was becoming. It got pushed there in what sounds like weeks, based on the outpost captain's timeline."
"That tracks with what you said in the forest. Something's accelerating all of it — the zombies, the wildlife, maybe even those two commanders."
"Maybe." Dustin set the crystal back down carefully, like it might still be listening. "I'd want a proper lab to actually confirm any of this. But for what it's worth — I don't think this crystal's dangerous to hold onto. I think it's evidence. Command's evolution researchers would probably kill to get their hands on a specimen this unstable."
"I'm not handing it over. Not with Voss still circling and every piece of unexplained evidence in this base apparently routing through channels he can access."
"Didn't say you should," Dustin said. "Just said it's worth knowing what you're sitting on. For your own use, if nothing else — a core like this, properly understood, might tell you something about how fast the threats around here are actually escalating. Better to know that before it shows up as a surprise in the field."
I turned the crystal over once more before tucking it back into the footlocker, filing away everything he'd said next to the rest of the questions I didn't have answers to yet. It was one more thread in a growing tangle, but at least now it was a thread I understood a little better than I had that morning.
"Thanks," I said. "For actually looking at it instead of just telling me to hand it to command like everyone else would've suggested."
"You don't hand a mystery to people who've already decided what they want it to mean," Dustin said, heading for the door. "You figure it out yourself first. Then you decide who gets to know. Same rule applies to whatever's actually bothering you tonight, for what it's worth."
He left, heading off toward the mess hall, and I sat alone in my room a while longer, the crystal safely back in the footlocker but the shape of everything Dustin had said still turning over in my head — thinking about coordinated zombie commanders, about a major who wasn't done with me yet, about a brother who might be alive and fighting on the wrong side of a war I hadn't even known had two sides worth choosing between.
Somewhere in all of this — the Dominion, Voss, Antonio, a crystal that apparently proved something out there was accelerating faster than command's own researchers understood — there had to be a version of my life that didn't feel like juggling five different fires with the same two hands. I hadn't found it yet. I wasn't sure it existed.
Whatever quiet I'd had, it was well and truly over. I checked my deagles one more time, felt the familiar weight of them settle against my hips, and went to find the rest of my squad. Whatever came next, I intended to face it with them at my back — the Dominion's patient generals, Voss's unfinished business, and whatever answer waited for me at the end of a single unconfirmed line in a low-priority intelligence report, however long it took me to finally chase it down. One thing at a time. That was the only way any of it had ever gotten manageable in the first place, and it would have to be enough to carry me into whatever tomorrow's 0700 briefing decided to throw at all of us next.