The carriage smelled of paper and gun oil.No one spoke during the ride. The driver wore the insignia of Central Command, but didn't look back once. Aren sat with his hands folded in his lap, eyes on the window as the forests thinned into cracked roads and silent checkpoints.
He was expected. That was the first warning.
No station ever expected a transfer from the fens — not unless the recipient had requested it.
When they stopped, a clerk took his name without looking up. "You're to report to Directive Officer Ren," she said. "Briefing begins in thirty minutes."
Aren nodded. His boots were clean. That felt wrong.
The planning station looked nothing like the outposts he'd known.
There were no tents. No rust. Just concrete, glass, and walls that didn't lean. The air tasted filtered. Even the silence here was efficient — no shouted orders, no field complaints. Just the turning of pages, the hiss of steam pipes, the muted flicker of light off map-glass.
Aren stood in the center of the briefing hall. No one greeted him. They didn't need to.
On the far wall, eight casualty charts blinked in sequence. Numbers rising. Lines dropping. One screen showed a region he'd never seen — sector numbers he didn't recognize, enemy movement arcing in red.
He watched it curve, like a hand closing.
Behind him, a voice spoke:
"You're the anomaly."
Aren turned. The woman who entered wore no insignia except a single silver strip across her collar. Her face was unreadable.
"I'm Officer Ren," she said. "I've reviewed the logs. You have survived sixteen operations with zero critical injuries, seven commendations, and a 48% higher-than-average local casualty ratio among unaffiliated units."
She said it the way someone might describe rainfall.
"We're testing a hypothesis," she added. "If you're willing."
Aren didn't nod. But he didn't leave.
Ren smiled without warmth. "You'll be working with Analyst Drev. For now, observe only."
She walked away before he could ask what the hypothesis was.
Analyst Drev was younger than Aren expected — lean, pale, too many ink-stains on his sleeves. His voice carried the smooth rhythm of someone used to being right.
He didn't shake Aren's hand. Just motioned toward a set of observation terminals lined against the far wall.
"Directive Officer says you learn fast," he said. "Let's test that."
The console displayed terrain models — elevation, water retention, known demon drift routes. Over it all, a translucent grid pulsed faintly, marking prediction zones.
"These are updated hourly," Drev continued. "You'll sit in on briefing calibrations and assess anomaly curves. If anything looks wrong, you say so."
Aren studied the shifting lines. "How do I know what's wrong?"
Drev snorted softly. "You'll know. That's the point, isn't it?"
He wasn't unkind. Just curious. Like a scientist holding a match over an open bottle to see which gas escaped.
For the next few days, Aren worked in silence. He watched simulations, marked trajectories, adjusted operation timing with suggestions that felt... obvious.
But the results weren't. His notes delayed one deployment by six minutes. That same delay let a trap formation collapse just after a demon surge passed — reducing losses by seventy percent.
No one questioned it.They wrote it down, charted it, folded it into a summary report.
Aren didn't feel clever. He felt cold. Every success arrived too easily — like the world was folding to meet him.
One evening, Drev leaned over the maps.
"You ever notice," he said, "how every time you shift something… something breaks somewhere else?"
Aren looked at him.
Drev smiled, but there was no humor in it. "I've started tracking it. It's probably nothing. But I'm good with numbers. And something about your timing feels like… trading."
He didn't finish the sentence. Just walked away, humming a tune Aren had never heard before.
The deployment map pulsed amber across the briefing table.
Four squads arranged in a crescent arc. One chokepoint, two fallback trenches. A hill to the north that shouldn't have mattered — until Aren stared at it for five minutes and said, "Shift Delta Three to the incline."
Ren raised an eyebrow. "Justify?"
Aren hesitated. "They'll break pattern. Come through early."
The room fell still. One of the lieutenants frowned. "There's no precedent for that flank."
Aren didn't argue. He just circled the incline again on the glass, slowly.
Ren said, "Do it."
The skirmish lasted thirteen minutes.
When it was over, enemy units had poured from the north slope — just as Aren had said — and were met with suppressive fire that cut their ranks in half before the second wave rose.
It was a slaughter. Not clean. Not elegant. Just efficient.
Later, the reports called it a "preemptive tactical counterstroke." Ren simply called it acceptable.
Aren stayed silent through the debrief.
Three hours later, Drev brought him the casualty logs.
"There's a pattern," he said, dropping the folder on the cot beside Aren's bunk. "Not just today. Last five simulations too."
Aren opened the folder. Each operation with Aren's signature showed a common thread: reduced losses at target site. Spiked fatalities in the adjacent periphery.
Today, it had been the support squads.
"They never made it to position," Drev said. "Mudslide. Two didn't even leave base before a flare malfunction burned half their fuel stock."
He waited. "You predicted the enemy shift. Did you also predict the fallback routes failing?"
Aren looked at the folder. "No."
"Do you care?"
That question stayed in the air like smoke.Aren didn't answer.
He didn't look up when Drev left.
The lights in the barracks flickered at night, even though the lines were new.
Aren sat cross-legged on the floor with a stub of charcoal and one of the blank requisition slips he hadn't turned in. The room was silent except for the wind pressing against the shutters — steady, soft, like something breathing slowly through its teeth.
He didn't draw the maps. Not exactly.
Instead, he marked moments.
Not battles — outcomes.He placed small circles at the center of each. No names. No coordinates. Just a dot for every time he'd been there. Or close.
Around each dot, he drew others. Places where others had fallen. Squads delayed. Officers lost to coincidence or terrain or malfunction. Always at the edges.
He filled the sheet.
Twelve rings. Then another.He stared at the shapes. Then drew one more at the center, darker than the rest.
The charcoal snapped in his fingers. He didn't reach for another.
On his way to the mess the next morning, someone nodded at him.
"You're the lucky one, right?" they said.
Aren didn't answer.The nodder didn't wait for one.
Drev was gone when Aren entered the data room.
The consoles were off. Light from the eastern window fell over the stacked folders like dried leaves. Most were sealed. One wasn't.
Aren didn't mean to look. He told himself that, even as his fingers opened the thin red folder and spread the contents across the desk.
Casualty reports. Maps. Internal assessments. Each labeled with dates and coordinates Aren recognized. Every engagement he'd touched. Every deployment where things had gone "too well."
In the margins, someone had circled a word:Anomaly.Then again:Statistical outlier.Then finally:Field variable: Aren Valen.
One sheet had only a list — brief operations, dates, results. On every line, his name appeared as either advisor or participant.
Beneath it, written in a different pen, someone had added a single line:
"Pattern doesn't prove cause.Unless the pattern stays."
Aren read it twice. Then folded the paper once, then again, and slipped it into the lining of his coat.
He left the folder as it was. No additions.He didn't speak of it again.