The comm in Raizen's ear tore itself in half.

"Hold - do not - stay put -" Alteea, stretched thin, sirens chasing her voice. Kori hammered in on a second loop, iron over steel: "Stay - camp- That's an order. Sit tight, everything's under con -"

Raizen reached up and pinched the switch at the base of his earpiece.

Click.

Silence arrived like a door shutting on a storm.

Everyone had been braced to argue with a voice. No one was ready for no voice at all. Hikari's breath hitched. Esen's eyes jumped to Raizen's hand. Arashi's mouth opened on a joke that forgot what it wanted to be and closed again.

Raizen didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "We move."

That was the sound of a coin landing on its edge and staying there.

He turned on his heel, already dividing them as if the map were printed behind his eyes. "Lynea, Arashi - rear. Hikari covers both of you, no gap between. Hikari, you're triage if we get a survivor on the run, but don't leave their shadow."

Hikari nodded once, already slinging the med kit across her back, checking the latches by feel.

"Esen with Ichiro" Raizen went on, pointing. "Ichiro, I want spines up and walkways hard. Give him rooflines. Esen, you shockwave from above only - top-down, no ground bursts near miners. Don't get dangerous. You move when he moves. Don't show off."

Esen didn't say he never showed off. He said, "Fair" and the rings on his fingers flared and went calm again like breath.

"Feris, Obi – stay at camp." Raizen's eyes held them, not unkind. "Check for anything. If the mountain even breathes wrong, you call it. Keep Toma alive. And Obi -" he stepped in, low enough that only Obi heard the rest "- and have the bandages ready."

Obi's grin tried to arrive, then changed its mind. He squeezed Raizen's shoulder. "Always do."

"Keahi." Raizen angled his chin and she was already stepping forward. "Midline heavy support, one pace ahead of rear team, one pace behind Esen's line. If anything punches through, you're the wall that says no."

Keahi's hand brushed her hilt in acknowledgement. "Understood."

Lynea's fragments hovered near her palm, instinct answering instinct. She cocked her head, studying the shape he'd made of them all. "You… Just tore up Kori's whole structure" she said softly, not a complaint. "No teams of four. Two elastic bands and a spearpoint. You just -" she traced the air without meaning to "- balanced our coverage and made a crossfire nobody can call twice. In thirty seconds."

Raizen's mouth twitched like a man assaulted by compliments. "We're not in the manual's terrain."

"Don't lie" Lynea said, almost amused. "The manual doesn't have this."

He didn't argue. He looked north.

Toma stood there with blood drying down his sleeve and stubbornness in the turn of his jaw, trying to be older than he was because someone had to be. Hikari stopped long enough to touch his shoulder. "Stay" she said, and made the word sound like a kind thing, not an order.

"I can run" Toma said.

"You already did" she answered, which was the kindest way to win a fight.

Raizen shouldered his pack. The blades settled against his hips with the familiarity of a habit you choose on purpose. He looked across his people once, fast, the way you count a room not to own it but to keep it.

"Rules of contact" he said. "We don't chase into trees. Don't split for pride. If it looks like me and it isn't breathing in my rhythm, you don't talk to it. If you hear your name twice, the second one's a liar. Mark anything wrong with light and keep moving."

"Ok!" Keahi shouted.

"Alright" Lynea echoed.

"Copy! And if I start levitating again?" Feris asked, rope already cinched around the center pole.

"Then you keep the camp from flying away with you" Raizen said. It almost counted as humor.

Obi clapped once, too quietly to be a drum, just enough to give the moment a seam. "Bring them back" he said. "Preferably all of them. Extra points if they complain about the soup."

Arashi rolled his wrapped shoulder, tested the weight of his pistols in one hand. "I can shoot ugly" he told Raizen.

"You can shoot smart" Raizen returned. "Ugly comes free."

Ichiro pulled his coat even tighter - eyes already measuring slope and wind and how stone likes to be. "I'll put stairs under his feet" he said, chin at Esen.

Esen's smile flashed quick and fierce. "I'll ring their ears."

Hikari checked the clasps on her gloves, looked up at Raizen, and decided not to say what she wanted to say. She said, "Don't be late" which was fairer to both of them.

"Let's go." Raizen said.

They moved.

The camp's gold circle fell behind them, polite as a house closing its door. Snow met boot. Breath met air. The world reduced itself to what it had to be: white, gray, the dark thread of the north trail and the ridge wearing a shawl of cloud like it had earned it. The quiet wasn't absence - it was concentration. The kind the body uses seconds before it decides to run or fight.

Esen and Ichiro peeled right, keeping a low line along a spine of rock. Ichiro's palm rode the stone. Scaffolds of ice and packed snow shivered up in neat steps where there had been none, giving Esen a ladder the mountain hadn't agreed to but accepted anyway. Esen bounced, took altitude, let a ring wake around his hand and fall asleep again with a tiny sound like a coin on glass.

Keahi took the center axis and made it look like a decision the world had been hoping someone would make. The sword at her back was a line the day didn't argue with.

Lynea fell to rear-left, Arashi rear-right, their triangle keeping Hikari inside like a secret everyone had agreed to keep. Lynea's shards traced small, obedient circles around her. Arashi's breath misted steady, carefully unheroic, his arm still stiff from the wound earlier. But he didn't care.

Raizen set the pace. The speed you choose when your body knows the distance and lies to your head about how long it can keep it.

The ridge rose, a slow, unkind promise. No birds. No hum. The air felt scrubbed in a way that would have been pleasant if you hadn't already learned what came after clean.

"Raizen" Hikari said, falling into step beside him. She didn't crowd. She didn't lag. She matched him like it was a song she'd practiced in private. "You split them into groups. Coverage, backups... You accounted for failure points, even mine." She didn't make it an accusation. "But where are you in that plan?"

He glanced at her, just enough to show he'd heard the question before she asked it. "I'll call targets" he said. "You just don't break formation. Or at least try to."

"That's not where" she said, soft.

He looked forward again. The wind pulled a thin veil across the slope and let it go. "I'll be in the front" he said.

She knew the answer and still wanted to ask the rest. "Alone?"

"That's where I do the most."

It wasn't pride. It wasn't martyrdom. It was a man saying water is wet because he's been drowned in it and learned how to swim.

Hikari breathed in to argue and breathed out something else. "Then don't make me fix the part where you tear" she said, which was the only blessing he would accept.

"Deal" he said, letting out a small smile. First of today.

Esen's voice came thin over the local channel, cheerful because he chose to make it so. "Got us a roofline. I'm high. Ichiro's building me a conscience."

"Don't give it back" Ichiro said.

They cut a clean path through a drift where the snow had forgotten to be powder and decided to be glass. The sound of their steps traveled too far and then remembered to behave and folded back in.

"Lighthouse?" Hikari tried, not because she expected an answer but because hope is a habit. Static gave her the cold shoulder.

Raizen didn't touch his comm. The last thing he'd heard from Alteea before the click lived in his bones anyway. Do not move. Stay put. Vanguards on their way. Sirens behind a voice that didn't panic for anyone. He walked faster.

Toma's directions had been simple and cruel. North ridge. Past the bent spruce that looks like a broken shoulder. Over the shallow dip where the wind collects. He followed them like a recipe he hated: one step, then the next, add breath, fold in fear, do not overmix.

"Raizen" Lynea said after a time. "When this is over, Kori will invent a new punishment."

"Not new" Arashi said. "She's been saving it. I can tell."

"Let her" Raizen said, not unkind. "We're trying to save lives now. That's all that matters. Punishment can come later. Then, he lifted a hand and the line compressed behind him without crunch or complaint. He studied the drift edges for the signature cuts of panic feet. He listened for the kind of silence that hides knives. He watched the tree line like it was a story that might decide to be true.

He took one more breath like it was an oath and tasted cold and iron and the echo of sirens that weren't there anymore.

"All right" he said to the slope, to the sky, to whatever watched. His breath fogged and was taken by wind that remembered its job. He stepped forward, just a hair, enough to make it official.

"Let's do this."

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