After that, Cole had them spend the rest of that day and most of the next running every variation he could justify. They rotated buildings, swapped team compositions, adjusted the ROE, ran drills with magic and without, and flipped the roles so Cole’s team held while Dunmar’s pushed through.

After enough repetitions, the specifics started blurring together, but the trends were consistent: Cole’s team won the majority even with handicaps stacked against them, and the ones they did lose were close enough to chalk up to bad luck or deliberate overrestriction.

As a dataset, it painted a pretty convincing picture heading into Ostreva.

The stealth drills came after that, once the force-on-force runs had given them everything they were going to give. The conditions were more lenient this time: Dunmar’s team ran patrol routes instead of holding fixed positions, and the objective was simply to reach the top floor without being detected.

Cole wasn’t gonna sugarcoat it: the first few runs were rough. Even with their familiarization, Istraynian buildings were still a distant cry from what they were used to working in. On top of that, he had told Dunmar to run his patrols realistically, which meant irregular timing and route variation. Naturally, the sergeant took that guidance and ran with it.

It took a few iterations before Cole’s team had the acoustics mapped well enough to move with confidence, and a few more after that before the Celdornians had the hand signals down and everyone had internalized the patrol timing. By the final stretch, though, they were stringing together clean runs consistently. Hell, they’d slipped past Dunmar’s full patrol net on almost every attempt, which was about as close to mission-ready as practice could get them.

Cole called it that evening. They’d squeezed out everything the rehearsals had to offer, and pushing further would’ve been grinding for the sake of grinding.

They headed back to quarters, had a solid meal courtesy of Commander Stroud’s kitchen, and collectively slept for what felt like: and may well have been: twelve hours straight.

After waking, it was straight to logistics. They ate, ran a full gear check, and spent the morning going through the garrison stores. Most of it was standard fare: rations, ammunition, water, medical supplies, nothing they hadn’t packed a hundred times before. The mana suppression charms were the only item that required any real thought. Cole had each team member test theirs for fit and quick removal, just to get the hang of it.

They spent most of the afternoon on loadouts and running through the insertion plan one last time. By late afternoon, they were at the pier, boarding the Ardent for the crossing.

The Ardent brought them around the isthmus and held position a few miles off the western coast. From there, they transferred to the launch: a small mana-powered craft that sat low enough in the water to pass for debris at any real distance. The propellers barely registered over the ambient chop, and the draft was shallow enough to nose into the rocky inlets that would’ve grounded anything bigger.

They put ashore on the rocky coves west of Ostreva sometime after sunset. The sky had gone dark enough that Cole could barely make out the cliff face above them, which meant the new moon was doing its job. They pulled the launch into a narrow cut between two rock formations, secured it, and made their way up.

The cliff wasn’t sheer, but it wasn’t cooperative either. The rock face rose at a steep angle through loose scree and stubborn brush, with the remnants of what had probably been a public staircase snaking up the slope.

The steps had been stone, originally, but centuries of erosion and neglect had reduced most of them to suggestions. Cole led them up along what was left of it, reshaping footholds with earth magic where the terrain had worn through entirely. After ten minutes of steady climbing, they pushed through a wall of overgrown brush onto flat ground.

Cole stepped clear of the foliage and stopped.

No amount of briefing could have prepared him for what awaited on the other side. Ostreva stretched across the entire horizon, every pane of glass in the city turned to ember by the setting sun. Miles of skyline bled red from end to end: spires and skyscrapers alike, all of it ablaze, as if the city itself were the source of the light and not the sun behind them.

It didn’t look abandoned so much as condemned, a city sealed in a perpetual state of dying light.

Intellectually, none of this should have come as a surprise. He’d seen the maps, obviously. He’d sat through the briefing, filed the city as Manhattan-scale, and simply moved on because he’d had drills to worry about. But there was a difference between knowing something was an apocalyptic ruin and actually standing in front of one.

Honestly, the word ‘ruin’ didn’t even feel right. He’d seen ruins before: the Colosseum, the Pyramids, the usual greatest hits. None of them had ever carried this kind of dread, probably because they’d happened long enough ago for the loss to feel academic. And probably also because so little had survived that the full scale of what was lost never reared its ugly head. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

There, the brain just filled in the rest from a textbook and moved on. Here, Ostreva didn’t leave that mercy.

The city was all still there: suburbs, highways, rail lines, the full residential sprawl of a functioning metropolis, just with every light off and every street empty. It was closer to those photos of bombed-out Dresden than anything in an archaeology textbook, except Dresden eventually got rebuilt. If anything, this had a finality to it that he’d only ever seen in games: the dead open worlds of Fallout, the abandoned Manhattan in The Division.

Graves was the first to say anything, his voice quieter than usual. “So this is what became of them. An age of wonders brought to nothing.”

Vale’s jaw tightened. “An empire undone at the demons’ infernal touch. It speaks enough of what we hunt.” He turned from the skyline. “Let us make haste, then; we shall not suffer their ilk to despoil another stone.”

Cole nodded. “Yeah, Vale’s right. Let’s move.”

They moved out along the clifftop, keeping to the brush where it offered concealment. The terrain was coastal scrubland: low, dense, and overgrown enough that a crouched file could pass through without breaking the treeline. With how dead everything looked out here, Cole doubted anyone had patrolled this stretch in months, if ever: but he wasn’t gonna bet on it.

They kept to the sides, fighting vines and fantasy kudzu as they pushed forward.

About a mile in, the brush thinned and they came across a paved clearing on the cliff’s edge: benches, tables, a low stone wall along the seaward side. Looked like it used to be a public overlook, maybe a rest stop for beachgoers.

The overlook had seen better days, to put it mildly: burned-out vehicle husks near the entrance, cratered pavement, smashed tables and benches alongside stone spikes jutting from the ground and scorch marks across damn near every flat surface. Between the conventional damage and the spell burns, Cole was looking at one hell of a fight.

What he didn’t see were bodies. Given the scale of the damage, that wasn’t accidental: the demons had almost certainly cleared the dead, along with whatever technology had still been worth stripping.

Cole marked the location mentally and moved on.

They continued along the roadside after that, hugging the treeline where the foliage ran parallel to a two-lane road that wound inland from the coast. The pavement was cracked and overgrown but still largely intact: built well, originally.

After about half a mile, the road merged into a wider highway: four lanes, median strip, the works. Could’ve passed for an American freeway if not for the alien signage and the abandoned vehicles rusting in the breakdown lane.

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A faded sign stood on the right shoulder, mounted on a post that had started to lean. The script on it was unfamiliar to Cole but structurally similar to Celdornian: the same general character shapes, a few shared symbols, but with enough divergence that he couldn’t parse it himself. It was probably an ancestor of modern Celdornian, like how Latin eventually birthed English.

Graves studied it for a moment. “Checkpoint in approximately half a mile. Halt and present papers.” He turned to Cole. “How shall we proceed?”

Cole looked down the highway. The road curved gently ahead with decent visibility in both directions, and as far as he could tell, the whole stretch was as dead as the lunar surface. He wasn’t about to take that at face value, though.

“I think it’s better if we stay off the road,” he said. “Can’t be too safe. We’ll approach from the side, and once we know it’s clear, we can investigate the checkpoint.”

They approached from the treeline, keeping low until the checkpoint came into full view.

His first impression was that this was a lot of fortification for a highway checkpoint.

The wall stretched across the full width of the road and extended maybe thirty feet beyond it on either side: reinforced concrete and packed earth, about ten feet high and thick enough to stop most things short of a direct artillery hit. Gun emplacements sat atop the rampart at regular intervals, all of them wrecked beyond function.

Honestly, the whole thing looked like it had been pulled straight out of a zombie movie.

Between the emplacements, the remains of what Cole figured were defensive golems slumped in various states of ruin, stone frames cracked and overgrown with vegetation. He’d seen working golems in Celdorne: those things were no joke. Whatever had come through here had torn through a line of them like it was nothing, and that wasn’t a comfortable thought.

A handful of armored vehicles sat scattered along the approach road, some burned out, others crumpled inward as if something had grabbed them and just squeezed. Cole had seen what IEDs did to MRAPs, and the damage pattern here didn’t match anything in that category. The force required to compress an armored vehicle like a beer can was, frankly, insanely fucked.

The overlook had been a skirmish by comparison. Entire sections of the rampart had been caved in from the outside, the concrete buckled and displaced by the same kind of brute force that had crushed the vehicles. Blast craters and cracked asphalt along the line of fire suggested the defenders had put up a real fight: it just wasn’t enough.

Cole watched the site for a full minute, scanning the rampart, the road, the treeline on either side. As far as he could tell, the only things moving out here were the weeds. He rounded up his team.

“Alright. We’re gonna split from here. Garrett, Walker, keep eyes on the city side. Mack, Elina, you two watch the way we came in. Graves, Vale, you’re with me.”

They acknowledged and split. Cole led Graves and Vale through a breach in the wall and into the checkpoint interior.

“What is it we seek here, Captain?” Graves asked as they stepped over rubble.

“Anything useful,” he replied. “We call it site exploitation, which means we’ll just be looking around for intel. Since this used to be a checkpoint, there’s a good chance we might find records that tell us about the situation on the ground. Doubt Ostreva will look as clean as it did on that map back at Ashpoint.”

He paused. “And also, since this is a primary route into the city, there might also be signs of recent activity.”

Graves nodded. “Very well. I shall take the outbound lanes. Lord Vale?”

“I shall take the other side,” Vale said.

“Alright, I’ll check the building, then. I’ll let you know if I find anything that needs translating.”

Cole started with the rampart. A narrow service corridor ran behind the wall, with small rooms branching off at intervals: guard posts, storage, what might’ve been a command station at some point. Most of them were collapsed or half-buried, but a few looked intact enough to be worth checking.

The first two gave him nothing but rubble and corroded metal. The third had been hit hard: ceiling partially caved in, furniture scattered across the floor in a blast pattern radiating from the far wall. Desiccated papers littered the debris, most of them torn or crumbled well past the point of recovery.

Cole picked one up carefully, and it disintegrated between his fingers. So much for that.

On the bright side, nothing about the debris suggested recent disturbance. The dust lay evenly across everything, and the paper fragments sat exactly where they’d landed however many years ago. Nobody had walked through this room since the place fell.

He moved to the back wall and found a metal cabinet half-buried under a collapsed shelf. The doors were jammed shut: rusted through, from the look of it. Cole grabbed a length of rebar from the debris, ran a pulse of enhancement through his arms, and pried the doors open.

Inside were ledgers: duty rosters, supply inventories, personnel lists. An archaeologist would’ve had a field day, but none of it was operationally relevant. He put them back.

The second drawer had a rolled map, though, and that was a different story.

Cole pulled it out carefully. The paper was stiff and bone-dry, and when he tried to unroll it, the edges started cracking almost immediately. He stopped before he lost anything and set it back with as much care as he possibly could.

Now, how the hell was he supposed to read the thing?

He didn’t have preservation tools. He didn’t have a humidity chamber or anything even approximating one. Under normal circumstances, a find like this would require careful lab work: controlled rehydration over hours, maybe days, handled by someone who actually knew what they were doing.

Then again, under normal circumstances, he couldn’t reshape rock with his hands.

The principle was straightforward enough. If all he needed to do was rehydrate it, then he could seal it in an air bubble and slowly infuse it with water vapor: controlled moisture without direct exposure. The question was whether he could sustain the spell consistently.

He went to find Graves.

“Hey, Graves. I found a map, but the paper’s too brittle to unroll. I’m thinking that if I seal it in an air bubble and feed in some water vapor, it should soften up in about fifteen minutes. Is there a way to set something like that up and just let it run on its own?”

Graves considered this for a moment. “Aye, readily enough. A temporary system would suffice: wind to sustain the seal, water to feed the vapor. It will not be elegant, but it need not be.”

He walked to the roadside, pulled a flat slab of stone from the rubble with a gesture, and hollowed it into a shallow trough. Then, using a fine point of earth magic, he inscribed two small glyphs into the interior surface: one for wind, one for water: and fed mana into them. The air above the trough shimmered faintly as the enchantment took hold.

The first chance Cole got, he was definitely going to study up on runes. Everything Verna had taught them so far was useful, yes, but it felt like there was a whole other world of utility they hadn’t even explored yet.

Once the glyphs were up and running, Cole handed him the map. Graves placed it inside the trough carefully, and sealed it with earth magic.

“Appreciate it,” Cole said. “So, you guys find anything while I was in there?”

Graves shook his head. “Nothing of consequence, regrettably. Spent casings, and mana crystals so cracked they are past all use. Vale found tracks, but only of bird and vermin. By his reckoning, neither man nor demon has trod this road in many months.”

That tracked with what Cole had seen inside. The whole site had been untouched for years, which meant they didn’t have to worry about running into anyone, but it also meant the odds of finding anything useful were slim.

They spent the next fifteen minutes combing the rest of the checkpoint anyway, but nothing else turned up.

When the time was up, they returned to the slab. Graves dissolved the seal, and Cole carefully lifted the map from the trough. The paper had softened considerably: still fragile, but pliable enough to unroll without cracking.

He spread it across a flat section of rubble and weighed the corners down with stones. The ink had faded but was still legible, and Graves leaned in to help with the script.

It turned out to be an evacuation map, complete with refugee centers, supply storehouses, military outposts, and a network of blockaded routes outlined in what had once been red ink. Cole pulled out his copy of Langston’s map and held them side by side. The differences were immediately apparent.

A significant portion of the city’s road network had been barricaded, particularly the routes leading to the port district. If even half of these blockades were still standing, the direct approach Langston had outlined would be considerably more complicated than the briefing had suggested. Depending on how extensive the obstruction was, they might have to route through one of the marked refugee centers just to reach the port: which meant passing through areas that had been designated as population concentration points during the crisis.

Vale came up to them, studying the map over Cole’s shoulder. “The stores sit uncomfortably near our way. If the demons hold them, our advance will not pass unseen.”

“Then we make sure they don’t get the chance to report it,” Cole said. He rolled the map carefully and stowed it. “Can’t raise an alarm if there’s nobody left to raise it.”

Vale smiled at that. “A doctrine I can abide.”