fynovel Chapter 413: The Call
Chapter 413: The Call
Vane woke to the violent shake of Aldric’s hand. The time was exactly zero three twelve. Not zero four hundred. The northeast terrain had masked a natural, unmapped draw. The hostile cluster had sprinted through the blind spot at twice Fen’s projected rate while they slept.
By the time Aldric felt the heavy shift in the ambient field and shook his commander, the monsters were already inside their outer threshold.
Vane surged to his feet, his hand instinctively locking onto the Silver Fang’s activation point. It took him exactly three seconds to orient himself. He checked the glowing perimeter markers. He listened to the frantic scraping of claws against stone in the northeast. He had the complete tactical picture.
But Aldric was already gone.
The second-year student had launched himself into the dark before Vane even finished standing up. Aldric had chosen the absolute correct approach angle. He cut hard across the northeastern face, intercepting the cluster’s charge before the beasts could exploit the platform’s exposed right flank. His blade work was brutally clean. The entire skirmish lasted barely a minute and forty seconds. It was so fast that Fen and Kael only jolted awake in time to hear the final, wet sounds of the execution.
The last entity hit the gravel.
Aldric stood in the cleared approach. His breathing was elevated but tightly controlled. He looked down at the slaughtered cluster with quiet satisfaction. The outcome was flawless. He had neutralized a lethal threat that would have overrun their sleeping platform before the unit could form a proper defensive wall.
He turned around.
Vane was standing right at the edge of the stone platform.
"Venn."
Aldric knew exactly what was coming. He felt the cold reprimand waiting in the air the second he saw Vane standing passively at the perimeter instead of fighting beside him. "I know," Aldric breathed.
"You woke me up and moved at the exact same time," Vane stated.
"The cluster was already inside our threshold. I had seconds before they overran the right side."
"You had exactly ten seconds between shaking my shoulder and committing to your strike. That is the exact window when your intelligence should have come through to me. What were you reading? What were you going to do?" Vane kept his voice entirely level. There was no hot anger in his tone and no condescending lecture. It was simply the crushing weight of command pointing out a fatal structural error. "I was forced to orient myself to your sudden engagement rather than actively directing it. That means my next tactical decision had to be built on incomplete information about what my own soldier had already committed to."
Aldric swallowed hard, saying nothing for a long moment. He knew Vane was absolutely right. He also knew his own read had been flawless, his approach angle was perfect, the monsters were dead, and his team was completely unhurt. All of those conflicting truths existed simultaneously in his head.
"The threat was inside the threshold," Aldric repeated stubbornly.
"Yes it was. And you made the absolute right tactical call." Vane looked past him at the bloody gravel. "But that is completely beside the point. The point is that I am operating on whatever information my squad gives me. If you do not feed me data in the ten seconds you have available, I am blind to half of the battlefield." Vane locked his dark eyes onto the younger boy. "Tell me what you are reading before you commit. Even when you know you are right."
Aldric held the stare. He was not faking compliance to appease a superior. He was rapidly replaying the scenario in his mind. He analyzed the ten seconds between the wake-up and his forward sprint. He checked his memory to see if there had actually been time to speak. There had been time. Not a lot of time, but enough to shout a coordinate and an intention.
"Understood," Aldric said. He delivered the word with the exact same heavy sincerity he had used in the orientation room. He meant it.
Fen sat near the edge of the platform. Her notebook was already open on her lap. She had been quietly watching the tense exchange from the second she woke up. Kael sat nearby with his back pressed hard against the stone wall. His medical kit was open across his knees. The sudden violence had ripped him out of a deep sleep, and his panicked hands had reached for the bandages on pure instinct.
Neither of them spoke a word.
There was absolutely nothing to add to the moment. The reprimand had been brutally clean. A command error was named accurately, and the correction was accepted without a fragile ego getting in the way. The unit filed the lesson away and moved on.
Dawn finally broke. The morning light bled a pale, bruising grey over the jagged eastern face of the ridge. The towering cliffs looked even steeper in the daylight than they had upon their arrival yesterday afternoon.
Fen had been mapping the terrain since zero three thirty. By the time the official live-conditions update pinged their wristbands, she had already sketched a version of the coastal zone that was far more accurate than the data the Academy provided.
Vane opened the glowing update.
The eastern signature had been completely reclassified overnight. It was now designated as a mid-grade cluster with an elevated growth rate. The official projection models warned of continued, aggressive expansion throughout the day. The Academy assessment team monitoring the zone from their safe observation boat had clearly been watching the anomaly and finally pushed the new classification at zero six hundred.
Vane forwarded the data packet to the unit’s shared band.
Aldric read the glowing blue text. He looked out at the eastern ridge, visible from the edge of their platform as a dark, jagged scar against the brightening sky. He absorbed the terrifying numbers in the classification update and rapidly ran the math forward in his head.
"How much larger will this be by tonight?" Aldric asked the group.
"Large enough to be a completely different category of problem," Vane replied grimly.
Fen reached into her lap, tore a heavily inked page from her notebook, and handed it across the circle. She had already run the grim projections. The page detailed an exact density estimate based on the current feral growth rate. It included a strict timeline and the terrifying threshold at which the monsters would stop being a contained cluster and mutate into a zone-wide coordination disaster.
Aldric scanned the page. He looked back up at the eastern ridge, then looked directly at Vane. "That is a Day Three problem."
"Yes," Fen answered softly. Vane had not asked for her confirmation, but her assessment was flawless and she offered it anyway. "If their current growth rate holds steady through today, by tomorrow morning that cluster will be far beyond what a single Zenith unit can efficiently address."
She reached out, took the paper back from Aldric, and tucked it safely into her notebook’s running record.
Kael had been listening intently from his defensive position against the wall. He stared out at the distant ridge, his face pale in the morning light. He watched Fen pack her notebook away.
"Are the other units actively tracking this?" Kael asked nervously.
Vane checked the routing tags on his assessment band. The live update had been broadcast to all third-year commanders simultaneously. "Yes."
"So everyone out here knows it is coming?"
"Everyone possesses the exact same data update," Vane corrected him gently. "Whether they are actively running the same grim projections we are is an entirely different question."
Kael looked at the dark ridge one last time. He swallowed hard and snapped his medical kit shut.
Vane picked up his spear. They moved out.