Roger didn't wait to see the grenades land.
He was already moving - back turned, legs working, navigating the tunnel from memory because looking back would cost him the half-second he didn't have. Behind him, the detonations came in sequence: one, two, three, four, the sound compressing in the confined space into something that felt less like explosions and more like the tunnel itself objecting to its continued existence.
The pressure wave hit him between the shoulder blades like a shove and nearly took him off his feet. He caught the wall with his left hand, bounced off it, kept moving.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Command element neutralised - Senior officer eliminated.Scenario Completion Data: +500
[SYSTEM ALERT]Milestone objective completed.Skill unlock triggered.
[SKILL ACQUIRED — DRAW STRIKE (LV1)]Melee passive. Optimises the draw-fire-recover sequence for sidearms and bladed weapons.Effect: +15% chance of decisive strike on first shot from holster. +20% chance of disabling hit on rapid follow-up strikes.Note: Effect applies to the opening movement of any engagement - the moment before the opponent has fully registered your intent.
[SKILL PROGRESSION]Ballistic Proficiency: threshold reached.Ballistic Proficiency → LV4100% accuracy within 100 metres. -5% per 20 metres thereafter.All standard infantry weapons - Federation and equivalent — now included.Passive: 10% chance to trigger vital strike on any hit.
[SYSTEM ALERT]User Level: 4 → 5Skill Point awarded: 1
Roger processed the notifications the way he processed most things under fire: quickly, in order of tactical relevance, filed and acted on.
Ballistic Proficiency at LV4. Effective range now a hundred metres, all standard infantry hardware included. Vital strike chance. He'd think about the implications when he wasn't running.
Draw Strike was interesting, a melee-adjacent passive built around the opening moment of an engagement. He filed it under useful, situational, will matter later and kept moving.
The tunnel behind him had woken up fully.
He'd known it would. The grenades and the gunfire had done what they were designed to do, which was create chaos, and chaos in a confined space was bidirectional, it bought him time and it also guaranteed that everything in the network with a weapon was now oriented toward him. He could hear it through Sound Localization: boots, many of them, converging from the outer passages, funnelling toward the main corridor he was currently running through.
They weren't panicked. That was the thing about the Imperial Guard's garrison that he'd learned over the past hour: they were well-drilled even in bad situations. The command element was gone, but the unit below command level still functioned. Someone had taken charge. They were running search patterns, cutting off exit routes, moving to put him between two groups.
He needed to be somewhere else before they finished the geometry.
He took the first branching junction right, away from the direction the largest group was converging from and pushed into a narrower passage that his tunnel map said angled back toward the surface.
[COMBAT FOCUS — READY]
He didn't use it yet. The cooldown had reset sometime in the last twenty minutes, he didn't know exactly when and he was keeping it for the moment he couldn't solve without it.
Three operatives came out of a side passage ahead of him, close, all of them adjusting to the sight of him at the same moment he was adjusting to the sight of them.
He raised the M1911 and fired before they'd finished raising their rifles.
Draw Strike activated on the first shot, he felt it as a slight sharpening, the sidearm coming up with a precision that felt borrowed from something more refined than his current training level. Two rounds, first target. The vital strike passive from Ballistic Proficiency triggered on the second shot of the pair. The operative dropped cleanly.
Bang. Bang.
The remaining two. He was already moving past them before the sound finished echoing.
He reloaded on the run, the Rapid Reload skill trimming the process down to muscle memory. He was counting magazines automatically now - a habit the last forty-eight hours had installed with the thoroughness of long experience. He had the M1911 in his chest holster and the second in his right-side holster and a Garand across his back. He was burning through the M1911's reserves faster than he'd like.
He took the next junction straight and found himself in a passage that was partially collapsed, a previous artillery strike had brought part of the ceiling down and compressed the walkable width to something that required turning sideways to pass through.
He passed through it sideways. Tight. The timber shoring on the other side had shifted under the load and was making the specific sounds that timber makes when it's no longer fully performing its structural function.
He didn't stop to assess it. He moved.
Twenty metres further, the passage opened into a wider section - a supply cache, from the look of it, stacked timber and canvas cases and the remains of a cooking arrangement that hadn't been used recently. Two operatives were positioned at the far end, guarding an exit passage. They weren't searching. They were waiting, which meant someone had placed them there specifically, which meant someone was thinking about the exits.
He had maybe two seconds before one of them looked in his direction.
He used both of them.
Draw Strike on the first shot, the opening movement, the moment before they'd registered his presence and then the follow-through on the second while the first was still dropping. Both shots found their marks within the same breath.
He crossed the room and went through the exit passage before checking what he'd just used.
M1911 magazine: three rounds remaining.
He switched to the second M1911.
The passage rose. The smell of the tunnel - accumulated, underground, old, was beginning to give way to something that had more air in it. He was getting closer to the surface.
Then the ambush.
Not a formal one, more like the inevitable result of a tunnel network with multiple exits and operatives moving through all of them simultaneously. He came around a bend and walked directly into a group of eight who'd been moving in the opposite direction with the same urgency he had.
Nobody had a clean angle. The tunnel was too narrow, everyone too close, the rifles on the Guard's side completely useless at this range.
Roger triggered Combat Focus.
The world decelerated. Every face in front of him resolved into individual detail, he could see the specific moment of recognition in each of them, the adjustment of weight, the beginning of a movement that was going to take several of his subjective seconds to complete. He had the full five.
He used three and a half of them.
He moved laterally into the wall, putting stone at his back, and worked the M1911 from left to right, two rounds per target, the vital strike passive firing twice in the sequence, the Draw Strike's opening-movement bonus applying to the first shot in a way that felt like the skill was interpreting the reset of a new threat as a fresh opening. He filed that for later. Right now it was useful.
The five seconds expired.
Eight people had been occupying this section of tunnel.
Now one was.
He reloaded the M1911. Six rounds left in the magazine. He checked the second one: empty, already spent without him fully tracking when. He holstered it and left the empty.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Active threats neutralised - Passage secured.
Scenario Completion Data: +80
He kept moving.
The tunnel was rising more steeply now, the packed earth underfoot giving way to rock, the timber shoring sparser. He was near the edge of the constructed network, approaching the natural cave system at the ridge's base.
That was when the bullet found him.
He heard it before he felt it, the specific crack of a Type 38 from somewhere behind and above, a concealed position he hadn't mapped because he hadn't been looking for it, because he'd been looking forward and the shot came from behind.
The round caught his right calf - not clean, not through-and-through, more of a tearing graze along the muscle's outer edge that felt, for the first half-second, like nothing at all.
Then it felt like quite a lot.
He hit the wall with his shoulder and caught himself. Looked down. Blood, yes. Moving? Yes. Bone? He tested weight on it carefully, and the leg held, which meant the bone was intact, which meant this was a wound he could work with.
He filed the pain in the same place he filed everything else that wasn't immediately actionable and pushed off the wall.
Behind him, he heard the bolt cycle.
He raised the Garand, the first time he'd used it since entering the tunnels, the rifle feeling enormous in the close space and fired once at the muzzle flash's location in the wall above him.
A shape dropped from a natural ledge he hadn't seen.
He kept moving. Faster now, because the leg was going to stiffen if he let it, and because whoever had heard that Type 38 discharge was going to be moving toward it.
The wound changed something.
Not his pace, he maintained that through the pure mechanical insistence of someone who understood that stopping was worse than hurting. But it changed his thinking. He'd been operating at the edge of what his skill set could sustain, using Combat Focus twice in twenty minutes, burning ammunition at a rate that was approaching a genuine supply problem, taking risks that had paid off until one of them hadn't.
He was not invulnerable. He'd known this intellectually since arriving in this world. He knew it differently now, with his right leg leaving a trail he was going to have to explain to Doss.
Be smarter, he told himself. Skills are an edge. They're not a ceiling.
He saw light ahead - not the lamplight of the garrison's interior, but the cold grey pre-dawn filtering down through a natural crack in the rock that had been widened into a rough exit. A canvas tarp hung across it, dark, concealing.
He heard boots behind him. Close. A group, not a pair.
He had the last grenade, one MK2, (which he'd been rationing since Chapter 11) and approximately a second of decision-making time.
He pulled the pin, held it for a two-count, and threw it back into the passage without looking.
He hit the canvas tarp with his shoulder and burst through it into the open air.
The explosion came from behind him and slightly below, the grenade had bounced once off the tunnel floor before detonating, which put the blast radius exactly where the pursuing group had been. The pressure wave emerged from the cave entrance and hit Roger in the back, lifting him forward off his feet.
He hit the ground outside and rolled - controlled, mostly, the Climbing skill's fall-resistance passive doing what it was designed to do even on horizontal surface and came to a stop with his face in the dirt of the ridge's outer slope.
He lay there for a moment.
The sky above him was the particular shade of dark blue that preceded actual dawn by about thirty minutes. The stars were still visible, which seemed incongruous. Stars had no business being that calm above all of this.
He could hear the cave entrance behind him settling - rock and timber, shifting under the blast damage, the structure's integrity making a series of opinions known. He wasn't going back in there. Nothing that had been in there was coming out.
He pulled himself upright, tested the leg, accepted what it reported, and started moving toward the Federation line.
Slowly. Carefully.
With his right calf making its position on the matter very clear.
He'd survived stupider things in the past forty-eight hours, and he'd been smarter about most of them. The lesson was acknowledged. He'd process it properly when he'd slept.
For now: uphill, toward the sound of Federation voices, away from the smoke.
One step at a time.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones