They found him by the cave entrance.
He hadn't made it far - thirty metres from the collapsed exit, sitting against the ridge slope with his back to the rock and the Garand across his knees, watching the dark. His right calf had made its opinion on further movement known with increasing authority, and he'd decided that the ridge's outer slope, in the dark, with Night Vision active, was a defensible enough position to wait in.
"Roger." Doss's voice, low, from the dark to his left.
"Here." He kept his eyes forward and his hands on the rifle until they were close enough to confirm. Then he lowered it.
Smitty came in from the right, M1 Carbine in hand - he'd acquired it somewhere in the last hour, which Roger didn't ask about because there were exactly enough hours in a night for questions that mattered and that one didn't. Doss was already kneeling beside him, medic bag open, hands going to the wounds without preamble.
"Shoulder," Roger said. "And the right calf. Calf is worse."
"I'll be the judge of that," Doss said, which was as close to don't tell me my job as Doss ever got.
"Smitty looked for you," Doss added, without looking up from the bandaging. "We both did. When we heard the explosions from the cave-"
"I know," Roger said. "Thank you."
Smitty made a sound that was not quite an acknowledgment and not quite a dismissal. He was scanning the dark with the Carbine at low ready, which was more useful than anything he might have said.
"We're even again," Roger told him.
"We're going to lose count," Smitty replied.
Doss finished the shoulder - competent, fast, tighter than Roger expected and moved to the calf. "Nothing's broken. The calf will hurt for a while. The shoulder is a graze, you'll have full use of the arm." He sat back. "You were lucky."
"I was also stupid," Roger said. "Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Doss looked at him. It was a specific look, the one that said I'm glad you know that. He didn't add anything to it.
From deeper in the ridge, gunfire. Disorganised, frantic, sweeping - the Imperial Guard's garrison running search patterns in the dark, trying to find three people who were deliberately not being found. The night, the smoke, and the fact that lighting a flare would paint their position for the Federation's naval guns all worked against them.
"We should move," Doss said quietly.
"One minute," Roger said. He closed his eyes.
He had two skill points. He'd been carrying one since Chapter 10 and earned the second from the level-up during the tunnel sequence. Two points, and he needed to choose correctly because he didn't know when the next ones were coming.
He ran through the available nodes with the focus of someone doing math under time pressure.
The ranged branch had been waiting - Eagle Eye, Steady Aim, both of them excellent in open terrain. The ridge's next phase was going to be surface combat again, which meant those investments would pay immediately.
But his right shoulder was bandaged and his right arm was going to be operating at reduced capacity for at least the next several hours. He'd compensated already, right hand on the stock, left hand on the trigger, buttstock against the left shoulder and it had worked because the System had given him enough base competency to make the awkward work. What he needed wasn't better accuracy from his dominant hand. He needed his non-dominant hand to be genuinely reliable.
And there was the sniper problem.
He'd taken two wounds in the tunnel. Both from directions he hadn't been watching. The Sound Localization had given him warning - partial, imperfect, operating through interference but it hadn't saved him from either shot. What would have saved him from the second one was something faster than conscious response. Something that didn't require him to process the threat before reacting to it.
He spent both points.
[SKILL ACTIVATED - DUAL WIELD (LV1)]Both hands now operate with equal weapon-handling competency.Effect: +30% attack speed when operating two weapons simultaneously.+20% critical strike chance in active combat.Note: Ambidexterity is permanent. Both hands retain full dexterity regardless of weapon type.
[SKILL ACTIVATED - EVASION (LV1)]Passive threat response system. When facing imminent fatal or critical damage, instinctive avoidance response activates.Effect: 25% chance to avoid lethal hits. Reduction scales with threat proximity and angle.
Note: The response is pre-conscious - it does not require the user to perceive the threat before activating.
Roger opened his eyes.
He reached across his body with his left hand and drew the M1911 from the chest holster. Smoothly. The motion that had required conscious effort and deliberate compensation an hour ago was simply - easy. His left hand closed around the grip with the same natural authority his right hand had always had. He disengaged the safety with his thumb, finger indexed along the frame, ready.
He looked at his left hand for a moment. Then he re-holstered.
"Alright," he said. "Now we move."
The next two hours were a different kind of work.
Doss and Smitty resumed their search of the ridge's outer slope, wounded Federation soldiers who'd been left in the withdrawal, men who'd crawled into craters and gone still and been left behind in the chaos. Roger covered them, moving carefully on the damaged leg, using Night Vision to clear the path ahead and Sound Localization to track the Imperial Guard's search teams at a distance.
The garrison operatives were methodical but working blind. They had no Night Vision equivalent. In the smoke and dark, they were relying on hearing and pattern - sweeping areas, listening for breathing, using light only when they thought they'd found something.
Roger denied them the pattern. He moved in irregular intervals, changed direction before his footsteps established a rhythm, stayed below silhouette when the ridge's natural terrain allowed it. Every time a search team came within two hundred metres of Doss's position, he redirected them, a shot fired in the wrong direction, a sound placed away from where it mattered, using the garrison's own search logic against them.
They're looking for activity, he thought. Give them activity somewhere else.
It worked until it didn't, which was approximately when a search team came around a rock formation from an angle Sound Localization hadn't given him enough warning on, the terrain interference problem, a boulder cluster between him and them absorbing the acoustic data he needed.
He heard them at the same moment they saw him.
Four of them. Ten metres. Three of them raising rifles.
He moved both hands simultaneously - right hand on the Garand, left hand drawing the M1911 in a single motion. The Draw Strike passive activated on the left hand's first shot: the opening-movement bonus applying exactly as it had in the tunnel, the M1911 coming up with a precision that felt like it was working ahead of his conscious aim.
Bang. Left hand. Bang-bang. Right hand on the Garand, hip-level, at this range it didn't need to be more precise than that.
Three down. The fourth was close enough to close the distance before he could cycle the aim, rifle swinging for a butt-strike.
He didn't dodge consciously.
He was simply somewhere slightly different when the rifle arrived.
The Evasion passive was exactly what the System's description had said: pre-conscious, faster than thought, a micro-correction in his body's position that the threat had triggered before his brain had finished processing the threat. The rifle butt missed by four inches and carried the operative's weight past him on its momentum.
He finished it with the M1911 at point-blank range.
He stood in the aftermath breathing steadily, checking the immediate area, finding nothing else moving.
Then he looked at his left hand, still holding the M1911, and thought about what had just happened.
Both hands. Pre-conscious avoidance. He'd just run that entire sequence - draw, fire, evasion, close without his dominant hand doing the primary work once.
He hadn't known it was possible until the System made it possible. That was an uncomfortable thought he didn't have time for right now but filed carefully for later.
By the time the sky began making its intentions toward dawn clear - a slow blue-grey at the eastern edge, stars fading one at a time, the Imperial Guard's search operation had wound down. Not found what it was looking for. The garrison was pulling back to the tunnel network to wait for the next Federation push.
Roger, Doss, and Smitty found a crater that met the minimum specifications and sat in it.
Nobody spoke for a while.
Smitty had a ration open and was eating without tasting it, which was how he ate most things now. Doss was checking his medical bag - inventory, restocking from what he'd salvaged during the night's work, hands moving through familiar routine.
Roger sat with the Garand across his knees and thought about the morning.
The garrison's command element was gone. The tunnel network was still intact, he hadn't brought the whole thing down, only one access point, but it was leaderless, and a leaderless garrison in a siege situation was a different problem than a commanded one. They'd still fight. They'd fight hard. But they'd fight without coordination, without the efficient tactical response that had made the Imperial Guard's defence so effective through six previous Federation assaults.
The script has changed, he thought. Not ended. Changed.
The wound in his calf was a dull, consistent complaint that he'd stopped actively noticing because noticing it didn't help. The shoulder was manageable. He'd move differently for a few days and then move normally again, and in the meantime the Dual Wield skill had removed the disadvantage from the equation.
He took out the last ration tin, opened it, and ate.
"You should sleep," Doss said.
"In a minute."
"You said that an hour ago."
"I meant it an hour ago too." Roger looked at the eastern sky. "Ridge isn't done. I want to think about the next phase before I lose consciousness."
"The next phase will still be there after you've slept."
"So will I, presumably. That's the goal."
Doss looked at him with an expression that was equal parts fond and exhausted. "Yes," he said. "That is the goal."
Roger leaned back against the crater wall, closed his eyes, and kept thinking for approximately forty-five more seconds before the accumulated weight of the past thirty hours settled the argument for him.
He was asleep before the first proper light touched the ridge.
Above the crater's rim, Doss and Smitty kept watch without discussing who would go first. They'd both had the same thought at the same moment, which was that Roger had probably earned it.
Plz Drop Powerstones