The fire has burned down to a disciplined ring of coals by the time Aldo speaks again. The night has settled into its colder register, the kind that creeps under armor seams and makes breath audible even when men try to keep quiet. Above them, the moon hangs low and round, bleaching the snowfields and rock faces into pale gradients, the stars erased as if the sky itself has chosen restraint.
Aldo stands slightly apart from the cluster of soldiers, one gloved hand resting on the stock of his musket, the other loose at his side. He feels the weight of attention settle onto him—not heavy, not oppressive, but expectant. This is the hour before movement, when words matter more than noise.
"This wolf pack has up to one hundred and thirty wolves," Aldo says. His voice is level, unhurried. "A Super Pack. An anomaly, as I was informed a day earlier." He pauses, eyes shifting briefly toward the dark slope where the scouts vanished. "Though I'll need an updated count."
Bojing hums softly, arms crossed, eyes reflecting moonlight. "So that's why we're wiping them out," he says, casual but thoughtful. "Their sweep range and they collapse ecosystems if left alone."
Aldo nods once. "That's my assessment from the given data."
The lower-ranked soldiers lean in without realizing it. Some squat. Some rest elbows on knees. A few glance instinctively toward the mountain, as if the wolves might already be watching.
Aldo continues, his tone sharpening just enough to signal intent. " So we don't fight them head-on…" His fingers tighten slightly on the musket. " But a surgical strike. Bullets into dens while they're asleep."
A ripple of approval moves through the group, quiet, professional. But it doesn't last.
The twelfth soldier speaks up. He's older than most, face lean, eyes sharp with the kind of focus that never fully relaxes. "Sir. They've got night vision. Stronger than ours. Smell, too. Hearing."
Aldo meets his gaze without challenge. "I know." He lets a breath out through his nose. "That's why we don't need all one hundred."
He straightens slightly, posture firming as his mind shifts from recollection to instruction. The moonlight slides across the metal edges of his armor, turning them pale blue.
"We stay upwind," Aldo says. "Avoid heavy sweating. No unnecessary exertion." He gestures toward the ground with two fingers. "No food smells. That means sealed rations only."
A few soldiers instinctively check their packs.
"We move on rocky ground," he continues, "and along open, wind-exposed ridges." His eyes sweep the terrain as he speaks, already tracing routes. "Wolves don't track forever. Scent degrades fast in bad conditions. Wind breaks it and stone doesn't hold it."
He shifts his weight, boots crunching softly in the frost.
"For their superior hearing ability," Aldo goes on, "slow, steady movement is perfect counter. No sudden noise. Secure metal. If it clatters, you failed." A faint, dry note enters his voice. "Use ambient sound. Wind. Snowfall. Let the mountain cover us."
Several men adjust straps and buckles immediately, movements careful, almost reverent.
"As for their vision," Aldo says, lifting his chin toward the moonlit ridge. "Break your silhouette by avoiding skylines and leaving no clean outlines." He taps the side of his helmet. "Trees. Rocks. Irregular shapes. If you look like something the mountain made, they hesitate."
The twelfth soldier nods slowly, absorbing the logic. Then his jaw tightens.
"We could flush them," he says firmly. "Noise in the brush. Pull sentries out first. Kill the Guardians, then push deeper into the caves."
A murmur ripples through the group: interest, caution, calculation.
Before Aldo can respond, footsteps crunch rapidly from the darkness.
The scouts return.
They move fast, breath fogging, eyes bright with urgency. One steps forward, salutes loosely.
"Six caves occupied," he reports. "Confirmed activity. Sir—we should act now."
The tension spikes like a drawn wire. Hands shift on weapons. Someone exhales too sharply.
Aldo raises his hand.
The motion is small. The effect is immediate.
"Calm," he says. Not loud. Certain.
The scouts still, chastened. Aldo looks past them toward the mountain again, mind racing through angles, distances, ice.
[Cold breath…] The memory presses close: frozen rations, air turning into knives. [I still don't have a clean answer.]
"They can spray cold," Aldo says aloud. "Freeze ground. Create ice." He shakes his head once, honest. "I don't have a practical counter yet. Dodging works—sometimes. For a large team?" He exhales. "Unreliable."
Bojing's eyes light up.
"What about fire?" he says suddenly. "Makeshift flamethrowers."
The reaction is instant.
Eyebrows rise. Someone snorts. Someone else laughs once, then stops when no one joins in. The entire 204th company turns to stare at Bojing.
Aldo blinks. Then raises an eyebrow, slow and deliberate.
"Explain," he says.
Before Bojing can elaborate, the twelfth soldier cuts in, voice edged with frustration. "Or…we attack from multiple directions to confuse them. No need for flamethrowers."
Bojing grins, undeterred. "Why not both? Multiple directions and fire."
Aldo lifts a hand.
"How," he asks calmly, "do you propose making a flamethrower?"
Bojing straightens, almost proud. "Fire scrooolllll…" he says. "I got it from a local female shaman." He smirks. "After some flirting, of course."
A few soldiers chuckle despite themselves.
Aldo tilts his head. "Can it be torn into pieces?" he asks. "Used as fuel? Loaded into a musket?"
Bojing shakes his head. "No."
Aldo nods once, decision already formed. "Then test it on your own time." He gestures toward the twelfth soldier. "We'll go with his plan."
Bojing pouts, shoulders slumping. But he doesn't argue.
The decision settles the group. The tension transforms into motion.
Orders are murmured. Lines form. Boots begin to move, crunching softly as the Active Team follows the scouts' indicated route toward the mountain's shadowed face.
Aldo takes the lead position, senses stretched thin, every sound catalogued. The moon follows them like a pale coin pinned to the sky, its light cold but steady.
Behind them, unnoticed, a small shape slips from the village edge.
A local girl: tall for her age, pale, runes faintly glowing against her skin—keeps low, moving from bush to bush with practiced ease. Her eyes are fixed on the soldiers' backs, intent and bright with something unreadable.
She follows.
The decision about the trees dies quickly.
Bojing looks up once more, squinting into the dark canopy. "If we jump from branch to branch—"
Aldo stops walking.
He turns, lifts his hand, and taps the nearest trunk with his knuckles. The sound is dull. Hollow with cold.
"No," he says evenly. "The branches here are thin.Brittle. They'll snap under our weight." His eyes move upward, measuring thickness, distance, snow load. "We'd break silhouettes, make noise or fall."
The twelfth soldier nods immediately. The idea is abandoned without debate.
Under the dim, ethereal moonlight, the forty-man Active Team resumes its movement along the mountain trail the scouts marked earlier. The path is narrow, packed snow over stone, wind-swept enough to erase tracks within minutes. The moon casts a faint blue sheen over everything, softening edges, flattening contrast. Shadows are shallow here.
Aldo moves at the front, pace measured, boots placed with deliberate care. Every few steps he pauses, listens. Wind over rock. Snow whispering down slope. The distant creak of frozen trees. Nothing else.
Behind him, thirty-nine men mirror his rhythm. No one speaks.
They are all worried.
Not loudly. Not even consciously. The worry exists in the tension of shoulders, in how fingers rest closer to triggers than doctrine strictly requires. Wolves? Darkness? Blood? No one names it. Aldo doesn't either.
He keeps walking.
The first cave emerges from the rock face like a split wound—low entrance, partially drifted over, breath of warmer air leaking faintly into the cold. Two younger soldiers start forward instinctively.
Aldo lifts his fist.
They freeze.
The twelfth soldier steps in beside him, voice low. "Guardians," he murmurs. "They may leave sentries."
The formation shifts immediately.
Men spread out into a loose sphere, muzzles angling outward and inward, covering every possible approach. Inside the cave. Behind them. Above the ridge. Snow crunches softly under boots, but no one rushes now.
Aldo raises two fingers, then three.
"Three ranks," he says. "Staggered. Fire by rotation."
The muskets come up as one.
"Advance while firing. Scouts forward. Watch flanks."
The first volley cracks through the cave, the sound compressed and swallowed by stone. Smoke blooms briefly, then thins in the cold air. The second row fires. Then the third. The rhythm is controlled, mechanical.
They move forward step by step, muzzles flashing, boots steady. Shapes collapse deeper in the cave: white forms jerking, then stilling. No howls. No charge.
At the far end, the cave narrows into darkness and silence.
Aldo waits outside, breath slow, listening.
The soldiers return carrying bodies—several dozen, limp and heavy, fur already stiffening. Faces are flushed, eyes bright.
"Good haul," one of them says, unable to keep the grin from his voice. "This'll sell well."
Aldo nods once. No comment.
He signals the Reserve Team. "Extract those carcasses. Move them back."
They obey, efficient and quiet.
The operation resumes.
Second cave. Same approach. Same formation. Same result.
Third.
Fourth.
Fifth.
Each time, doctrine holds. Fire discipline remains clean. No counterattack. No ambush. Wolves die in their sleep or stagger briefly before collapsing under concentrated volleys.
It becomes… boring.
Strangely so.
The repetition dulls the edge of awareness. The success feels tedious, procedural. Men begin to exchange glances between movements. Someone mutters about prices again. Bojing lags half a step behind at one point, jaw tight, eyes narrowed with faint irritation.
He pouts, clearly annoyed by the lack of challenge.
Aldo notices.
[Routine is dangerous,] he thinks, the thought passing through him like a chill that has nothing to do with the cold. His jaw tightens slightly, then relaxes. He keeps moving.
They exit the fifth cave with the same efficiency.
Then something changes.
Several tall soldiers emerge from the cave mouth carrying a body between them.
At first glance, Aldo thinks it's another wounded man—same height, same build. Then the moonlight shifts.
The proportions are wrong.
The body is thrown down onto the snow at Aldo's feet.
He looks down calmly.
Long limbs. Broad shoulders. White fur matted with blood where bullets tore through muscle. A face that is almost human, stretched and wrong, muzzle shortened but still unmistakably lupine. Red eyes, half-lidded, glassy. Especially…the "additional ears".
Aldo exhales once.
"Canus Lupusian," he says.
A soldier blinks. "That's a wolfman," he says, confused. "Why are you using—"
Aldo chuckles softly, brief and dry. "A term I made up," he replies. " to be less colloquial."
"Colloquial ?"
"You can understand it as casual"
The moment passes without ceremony.
He crouches slightly, studying the body. The fur. The hands. The musculature.
A tall soldier restraining the corpse speaks quickly, tension leaking through his voice. "Sir—he attacked while we were eliminating Red-Eyes. Came out of nowhere. Squad leader reacted fast."
Aldo nods. No reprimand. No praise.
Then—
Movement.
The girl bursts from the shadows.
She is tall, pale, rune-tattoos faintly glowing as she throws herself forward. She grabs the Wolfman's torso, arms wrapping around him, shielding his body with hers.
"No!" she cries, voice sharp and raw in the night. The word carries a strange accent, ancient and clipped, like ice breaking.
Muzzles snap up instantly.
Everything happens at once.
Gunfire erupts—not from the cave. Not from the formation. From somewhere unseen.
The sound shreds the air.
The twelfth soldier slams into Aldo, dragging him down behind a rock as bullets punch into stone above them. "Down!" he shouts.
Snow explodes in sprays. Soldiers scatter, some diving for cover, others stumbling in confusion. Orders overlap. Someone screams for a medic.
Aldo's heart hammers, breath sharp. He forces himself upright into a crouch, eyes scanning, mind racing to reassert structure.
"Reserve Team—scout!" he shouts. "Find the shooters!"
More gunfire. No clear direction.
Men begin to run.
Panic ripples through the formation, fast and ugly. Discipline frays at the edges.
Aldo raises his voice, cutting through the noise. "Active Team—fall back by squads! Cover each other!"
He moves as he speaks, pointing, pulling one man back into line, shoving another behind cover.
[This isn't wolves,] his mind registers coldly. [This is something else.]
The girl still shields the Wolfman, screaming something he doesn't understand. Shadows move on the ridge. The night fractures into chaos.
Aldo keeps issuing orders.
Trying to hold what's left together.
Trying to retreat—cleanly, if possible.
The mountain answers with silence and gunfire.
The whole team starts running before anyone gives the order.
Boots skid on frost-hardened soil. Breath turns into white bursts that tear out of lungs too fast. Someone shouts—too high, too thin—and the sound fractures against the trees. Aldo runs with them, not leading, not lagging, pulled by momentum like a body in a current. The forest narrows. Snow-laced branches scrape armor and cloth. The world reduces to the pounding of blood in his ears and the snap-crack of distant gunfire breaking rhythm somewhere ahead.
Then—voices.
Russian. Rough consonants, clipped vowels, rising and falling in a cadence he knows too well.
The sound reaches him sideways, through the trees, through the gunfire, through time.
His stride stutters. Not a stop—never a stop—but a hitch, like a gear grinding before catching again. The worst thing Aldo has ever seen has happened. Not a possibility. Not a scenario. A fact. A rebel ambush.
The second time.
Never successfully repelled it.
His heart slams against his ribs with no coordination left in it. His eyes widen, pupils swallowing light. The cold, which had been background noise moments ago, snaps into clarity—sharp, invasive, crawling under his clothes and into his bones. Each breath burns on the way in and out, too shallow, too fast.
This is wrong, someone says behind him, a voice cracking into panic.
Aldo doesn't answer. Words are suddenly heavy things, and he cannot afford the weight. Memory flashes without permission: muzzle flashes in trees that shouldn't hold enemies, screams cut short, orders lost under overlapping fire. He does not think in sentences. He does not think at all.
This is the second time he is closest to Death.
But this time, his instincts move before doctrine can assemble.
The team breaks into a clearing slashed by uneven terrain, the hillside falling away to a ravine choked with brush and shadow. Gunfire erupts from both sides at once. Bullets rip through bark, spit dirt, snap branches overhead. Someone goes down—not dead, not yet—dragged back by two others who trip and nearly fall with him.
Aldo's hand is already up.
"Bojing," he says, the name tearing out of him, raw. "Use it."
Bojing turns, eyes wide, then brighter than they should be in this moment. For a heartbeat, joy crosses his face, unfiltered, almost wrong, and then discipline clamps down. He nods once, sharp. He reaches for the scroll like a lifeline.
[Why now. Why this. This isn't how it's done. This isn't clean. This isn't—]
The scroll unfurls with a hiss, parchment edges crackling as if alive. Bojing chants but not learning, not shaping, only activating what has already been decided by someone else, somewhere else. The words scrape the air, old and heavy. As he chants, bullets stitch the ground between them. One tears through a sleeve. Another sparks off armor. The sound is everywhere, overlapping, directionless.
Then the fire answers.
A column of flame erupts forward, violent and crude, a roaring spear that tears through the treeline and into the hillside. It is not precise. It is not contained. It does not discriminate. Heat slams outward, then—wrongly—cold follows, an unnatural inversion that claws at exposed skin. Aldo flinches as the temperature drops hard enough to sting. Around him, soldiers cry out, hands burned by backlash, palms blistering despite gloves.
This is not triumph.
This is survival purchased with damage.
The fire spreads, racing along dry undergrowth and resin-rich bark, devouring a wide swathe of the slope. Smoke boils upward, thick and choking, dragging sparks with it. Shapes burst from the inferno—Red-eye Winter Wolves, massive and pale, eyes glowing like coals in the smoke. They flee in all directions, driven mad by heat and terror.
Shots ring out again, more frantic now. Soldiers fire to eliminate the danger, reflex overriding hesitation. Wolves fall, some skidding across snow, others collapsing mid-stride. The sound is relentless, a percussion of cracks and thuds and screams—animal, human, indistinguishable in the chaos.
Aldo's vision tunnels. He tracks movement without thought, counts without counting, steps where he must to avoid being trampled or shot. His hands shake. He clamps them into fists, nails biting into skin through fabric.
Through the fire and smoke, figures move that are not wolves. Soldier Number 12 sees them first.
For him, the world slows in strange ways. He registers silhouettes retreating in the sea of fire—human shapes, stumbling, turning back once as if to count who is missing. Two figures slip at the ravine's edge. There is a brief, sickening pause as gravity decides, and then they are gone, swallowed by shadow and distance.
A terrible tragedy. No cheers follow. No one claims it. In this desperate confrontation, only by surviving could they empathize. Moral calculus compresses into a single variable: still breathing.
On the far side of the clearing, the village girl runs, teeth clenched, face streaked with soot and tears. She carries the werewolf boy in her arms, his body limp with exhaustion and fear. She does not look back. She does not need to.
When the fire finally gutters and the gunfire thins, the silence that follows is not peace. It is absence. A ringing void that presses against ears and skulls.
Soldier Number 12 moves because someone has to. His voice is hoarse but steady as he instructs the others to carcass all the Red-eye Winter Wolves they have hunted. The work is grim and methodical. Numbers anchor him. Around one hundred. Precisely one hundred and four accounted for. Twenty-six missing.
No one says what missing means.
Night bleeds into a gray, ash-scented morning.
Soldier Number 12 returns to the forest at first light, moving carefully through blackened ground. The fire is out, but he pours water anyway, watching steam rise in weak, ghostly curls. He covers his mouth and nose with a damp cloth and steps into the burned area. The smell is thick, clinging, a mix of char and wet earth.
Animals lie where they fell. Small ones, larger ones. The remaining twenty-six wolves are there too: burned, not fought, their massive forms reduced to dark shapes against the snow. He confirms each, records it with a shaking hand. This is not reflection. This is documentation. He will send it to Aldo later.
In the village, Aldo does not know any of this yet.
He lies on his bed, winter pressing cold through the walls, grooming an animal's fur between his fingers. The texture is coarse and unfamiliar. He does not recognize the species. That bothers him dimly, like a splinter under skin he is too tired to remove.
His head aches with a deep, spreading pressure. Fatigue drags at his limbs until even breathing feels like effort. His eyes burn when he opens them; his mouth is dry, tongue sticking to the roof. Each breath comes with a faint hitch, a reminder that his body has not caught up with the fact that he is alive.
[Still here. Still—why won't this stop. Why is it cold. Why can't I—]
He turns onto his side, clutching the fur without meaning to. Outside his room, voices rise from the village hall. Another conflict is unfolding—arguments, accusations, plans forming without him. Normally, he would be there already, parsing, deciding, controlling the flow.
He does not move.
The voices blur into noise, then into nothing at all. Sleep takes him not as rest, but as shutdown. An anesthetic against a world that kept moving when he needed it to stop.
The fire has gone out.
The aftermath remains.
…