Rain didn't fall. It poured. Hammered. Came down like the sky was trying to wash its hands of the world.
It had been two and a half years since he signed up. And after swamps, rift zones, and monsters that looked like someone's failed taxidermy experiment of a myth, Rus still wasn't ready for what came next… the monsoon season in Damasa.
There were no enemies. No engagements. No warning. Just a wall of weather that rolled in from the western basin and decided it hated everything they'd built.
The first day was fine. Some drizzle. A little mud. You think, alright, some rain, big deal.
By the third day, it became clear that Damasa was not prepared.
The grunts, poor bastards, had been pulling extended shifts, planting every sensor, water-level monitor, and terrain deformation detector they had into the ground like it was some kind of religious rite. Soil stability anchors, thermal markers, chemical readers, wind vanes. You name it, they jammed it into the dirt and called it "preventive defense." As if a tide of water could be shot at or interrogated.
Every outer gate had new retractable flood barriers installed, thick slabs of pressure-sealed duraplast bolted into rails that could raise six feet in under a minute. They tested fine under drills. Under real rain, they groaned like a dying cow.
Pumps, the big ones, were hauled in and dropped around the perimeter, rigged to siphon water off the lowlands. But that only worked if there was somewhere to pump to. Unfortunately, their glorious city-node had a sewer system about as useful as a chocolate rifle. Half-built. Half-clogged and half-forgotten. The plans said it would be finished next quarter.
The rain didn't get that memo.
Powered labor teams were deployed. Guys in mech-assist suits, thick plates covering every joint, hydraulics whirring like mechanical lungs as they waded chest-deep through the rising brown floodwater. Their job was to clear the pipes. Dive into flooded trenches. Unclog the arteries of the city before the place drowned in its own runoff and rot.
The big issue was that armor doesn't swim. So if you fall, you sink like a rock tied to a sad dream. Two workers already went missing on day five. They probably got sucked into a collapsed storm drain and churned into paste. Even with thick armor, the water would still break them.
TRU was more concerned about whether the bodies would block flow capacity.
To help the system cope, they installed temporary overflow canals: long, carved channels dug by construction Knights and reinforced with steel-rebar plates to hold up against the water pressure. Portable dams were dropped in at key junctions, sealed with foam and sandbags, directing floodwaters into controlled spill zones that were barely better than bogs.
Drones buzzed overhead constantly. The quad-rotors with floodlights and thermal cams. They scanned the water levels and heat signatures to make sure no one drowned where the cameras didn't reach. Still, the mud ran thick, and with every day the rain didn't stop, the more Damasa looked less like a forward operating base and more like a military-themed waterpark.
The sewer was its own kind of hell.
Rus saw it once.
A six-man team had to go down and remove a clog in Drain Route Beta-3. Four men went down in heavy suits. One returned. The survivor didn't speak for two days and had to be sedated because he kept screaming about "things swimming in the dark."
Probably rats. Maybe not.
The shit down there was old—pre-Rift era in some cases. You'd think nothing survived, but Damasa had its own ecosystem beneath the surface. Sludge monsters weren't a myth, they just weren't technically classified as sentient. That didn't stop them from trying to chew through armored gloves.
Even UH's cutting-edge tech had limits. You could have railguns and orbital defense arrays, but when water came pouring in faster than you could push it out, all you could do was hold the line and hope you didn't float away.
And for Rus?
Thanks to his shiny little rank and his history of not dying gloriously, he got a front-row seat to all of it from behind a reinforced admin window.
He watched. He signed forms. He answered questions about logistics reallocation, potential evacuation contingencies, and maintenance status of the bunkhouses in case of partial submersion.
He also drank a hell of a lot of coffee and tried not to feel too smug about not being knee-deep in rancid sewer stew.
Muriel passed by once, soaked to the bone in her coat, scowling hard enough to shatter the fabric of reality. "Enjoying your air conditioning, Lieutenant?"
"I'd offer a towel," rus said. "But I'd have to stand up for that."
She flipped him off and kept walking.
Kate was less hostile about it. She barged into his office with a data slate and a waterproofed poncho, dropped both on his desk, and stared.
"You get to be the one who files this," she said.
Rus looked at the slate. "What is it?"
"Water ingress data from every bunker and storage depot east of the motor pool."
"All of it?"
She gave Rus a smile that could melt steel beams. "Every. Last. Dripping. Number."
He groaned. "You know, there are war crimes against this kind of treatment."
She turned to leave. "Then file it before the office reopens."
By week two, things began to stabilize. Mostly. The rain hadn't stopped, but the pumps were keeping up. The sewer network wasn't clear, but it was passable enough for crews to keep the worst from backing up into the mess hall.
Casualties remained low. TRU said the flooding hadn't breached any critical storage zones. The ammo was dry. The comm towers held. The drones were all accounted for.
And the Ridge was still sealed and still quiet.
The only Rift now was the one forming between every grunt and their patience.
Foster got a trench foot and refused to stop whining about it. Dan made him a medal out of tin foil and named it the "Order of the Mushy Sock." Gino painted a smiley face on a sandbag and talked to it like it was his emotional support therapist.
Berta helped by throwing the sandbag into a drainage canal and telling him to grow a pair.
Amiel, of course, remained the only normal one. She dried and oiled her rifle every day with almost monastic focus. Rain or not. Flood or not. She sat under the barracks canopy and worked like the world hadn't just tried to flush them down a planetary toilet.
In some ways, he respected the rain more than anything else they'd fought. It didn't care. It wasn't angry. It didn't scream or charge or bleed. It just was. Endlessly, indifferently present.
And they fought it with sandbags.
Mother Nature always wins, eventually. But for now, they were holding.
Not perfectly. Not gracefully. But they were still standing.
That had to count for something.
Even if his boots squeaked every damn time he walked through the hallway.
* * *
The TRU briefing was the kind of soul-sapping, chair-squeaking ordeal that started with a promise of information and ended with a migraine and three pages of acronyms no one would use outside of requisition forms.
The core message, stripped of jargon and bureaucratic vomit, was simple.
The land's fucked.
Specifically, the land they'd been clearing sector by sector since Damasa became the forward operating heart of UH's regional reclamation campaign of this continent.
Apparently, the Rift hadn't just vomited monsters and madness into the world, it had taken massive bites out of it, too. Pre-Rift zones, as they called them now, had been "nibbled" by space-time distortions and gnawed at until they resembled a post-apocalyptic patchwork of failed geometry and unstable weather patterns.
It wasn't just bad terrain. It was broken terrain.
"Localized temporal frays," Garn called them.
Rus called it a weather pattern designed by a sadistic god with a grudge against umbrellas.
One minute you had a dry hillside. The next, the wind screamed like a banshee, and your boots were stuck in what used to be solid rock but now decided to behave like molasses mixed with battery acid. And heaven forbid lightning came. The sky had been known to spark without clouds. Electricity danced between rocks. One poor bastard in 3rd Company was flash-fried while taking a piss near a power relay.
Unfortunate was the word the report used.
"Spontaneous atmospheric variance," TRU called it.
He called it Bullshit Weather, Apocalypse Edition.
Six regional zones.
Each was bigger than some countries. Each with their own weather tantrums and terrain instability.
Coastal Plains. Northern Flats. Great Basin. Ridgefront. Southern Stretch. Highlands.
That's what they were calling them now.
All riddled with Rift-bite. All crawling with unknowns.
UH couldn't terraform the land. That was above their tech level—even with all their shiny toys, drones, Knights, ADR bombs, and orbital sweepers.
So, the big brain solution was to catalog it.
Each sector. Every zone. Piece by piece.
"We identify what's stable, what's salvageable, and what's just a deathtrap in disguise," Garn said, smugly, like he came up with the concept of not walking into landmines.
He clicked his pointer at the 3D terrain map. "You see these fault lines? These are metaphysical scars. Weather doesn't behave normally in these places. Time dilates. Temperature spikes. We've seen plants grow and die in under twelve hours."
Great.
So not only did they have to worry about gobbers with spears and possible Rift creatures trying to suck their brains out through their eyes, they had to worry about the evil climate.
"Which is why," Reed finally cut in, face like carved concrete, "we're assigning advanced recon fireteams to begin stabilization assessments."
Translation of that was for Cyma, pack your bags.
Of course, they didn't say it outright. But the moment Reed looked at Rus across the table, he knew they were about to be sent out again.
Back at the barracks, Dan, Gino, and Foster were trying to dry their gear. It looked like someone had dumped their kits into a blender and hit "liquefy."
Berta had kicked her boots off and was lying upside down on the bench, legs up the wall, scrolling through her PDA with one hand and scratching her abs with the other.
Amiel was doing her usual routine silently cleaning her drone like it was a pet hawk instead of a killing machine.
"Good news," Rus said, stepping inside.
Foster groaned. "That's never good news."
"We're getting sent out again."
Dan looked up. "Did we piss someone off?"
"Probably. But this time, it's not gobbers or orcs."
Gino perked up. "Finally. A vacation."
"No," Rus said. "It's weather."
They all stared at me.
"TRU wants us to identify sectors that have been Rift-nibbled and note anomalies," Rus continued. "They want boots on the ground. Real-time cataloguing. Pattern detection. Digital mapping. Sound exciting?"
Berta snorted. "So instead of being monster bait, we're now human weather vanes?"
"Pretty much."
Foster held up a soaked sock. "Can't they just throw more drones at it?"
"They tried. The drones go blind past a certain threshold. Electromagnetic interference. Plus, TRU claims our superhuman perception is vital."
"That's just a fancy way of saying we're expendable but observant," Gino muttered.
"Correct."
Berta flipped around and sat upright. "So. When do we leave?"
"Three days."
She grinned. "Enough time to ruin some new recruits' self-esteem."
The next morning, logistics dropped the newest recon equipment. It came in three crates and smelled like someone had vacuum-sealed paranoia and shiny metal.
Inside were upgraded sensors, terrain-mapping kits, atmospheric samplers, and new deployable marker pylons with miniaturized Rift-anomaly detectors. They called them "R.A.T.S." aka Rift Anomaly Tactical Surveyors.
Dan wanted to throw one at a gobber.
Amiel wanted to reprogram them for silence.
Berta wanted to see if one would fit inside her bra.
He told them all to shut up and start learning how they worked.
Day of deployment came fast.
They geared up, checked their supplies, and loaded into two APCs reconfigured for recon work with extra sensors, faster wheels, fewer guns instead of their usual Humvee. Which meant they had to be extra careful.
Sector B-6 was first. Edge of the Ridgefront region. Close enough to make extraction feasible. Far enough to be classified as grey zone due to the unconfirmed terrain behavior, and possible Rift residue.
On arrival, the land looked like normal highland scrub. Sparse trees, brittle soil, some broken road remnants. Then the wind started blowing backwards.
"It's like being kissed by an air conditioner with asthma," Gino muttered.
Rus walked ten feet in, tossed a R.A.T.S. marker, and it beeped violently.
"Confirmed Riftbite," Amiel said, flat as always. "Electrical fluctuation at 3.2 teslas. Ground temperature increased 2.1 degrees in sixty seconds."
Rus checked the scanner feed. "It's not just unstable. It's alive."
Foster asked, "Alive like organic?"
"No. Alive like... aware."
They pushed deeper. Trees grew in spirals. Soil had a shimmer to it, like oil on water. One R.A.T.S. marker started spinning in place before melting down with a fizz.
They moved fast. Tagged the zone. Documented anomalies. Avoided the shimmer pools that looked too much like Rift slop. Every five minutes they stopped to recalibrate the sensors while time was bending again. Rus's watch said it was noon. The sky said it was dusk. The terrain said it was a Thursday from five years ago.
Berta didn't joke.
That was a red flag.
Even she knew this place wasn't right.
Amiel remained calm, but he saw her grip tighten every time they hit a cold zone, those areas where everything was just too still.
"You think this sector's savable?" Dan asked.
Rus looked around.
At the dead, spiral-shaped grass. The way the sound dipped the moment you stepped off the path. The air that hummed like an old power line.
"No," Rus said.
They marked it red.
Three days later, they returned to Damasa.
The storm had passed.
But the real storm was still brewing underground.
TRU was collating their data with satellite imagery and Rift fluctuation reports. Garn stopped Rus near the mess and handed him a data slate.
"You're the first to log direct cross-sector feedback," he said. "Your team's spatial memory retention and anomaly response time is the best we've seen."
"I didn't ask for that medal."
"You might earn it anyway."
Rus left him standing there, creepily smiling.
They were going to be sent again. No doubt. Sector by sector. Zone by zone. Chipping away at whatever the Rift left behind.
And if the anomalies kept spreading Rus then thought Damasa wasn't going to be a bastion.
It was going to be a front line.