Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 92: Forged

There are still questions I need to ask Boris. Dozens. About the tower, about the field around it, about what happened to the teams that never came back. But those questions can sit in the queue.

The urgency he just dropped on me rewrites the priority list.

The second wave of the Red Tide is coming. If we’re still stranded on this rock when it hits, Lost Ark loses its ammunition supply and we lose our shelter. Everything else—the tower, the erosion, the clock—is irrelevant if we die tonight.

Survive first. Solve later.

I look at Boris. He hasn’t moved from the rock. Axe still on the ground. Shoulders still curved.

"I’m not planning to stay here forever the way you have," I tell him. No cruelty in it. Just fact. "So I need to move. And I’d rather move with you than without."

I extend my hand.

Boris looks at it. A long exhale escapes him—the kind that carries years of compressed weight behind it. He reaches down, grabs the axe from the ground, and rises. With his free hand, he takes mine.

The grip is firm. Tired, but firm.

"Sure, kid." A ghost of the old grin touches his mouth. "If I let you get stuck here, Alden would never forgive me."

One down.

I scan the group. Rhayne and Lola are still together—Rhayne holding Lola’s hand, Lola still allowing it. Those two will manage. Rhayne is Lola’s quiet room, her weighted blanket in a world made of noise. Whatever metaphor fits a girl who needs silence and found it in someone who absorbs everything.

The real problem is Oliver.

He’s standing at the highest point of the inselberg—a jagged slab that juts out above the rest like a broken tooth. His back is to the group. His eyes are locked on the horizon, on the tower, on the twisted coral silhouette pulsing against the false sky.

I climb the rocks slowly. Deliberately. Placing each boot with the care of a man climbing stairs in a house where someone is sleeping. The stone is warm under my palms—residual heat from the desert, trapped in the rock long after the air went cold.

I reach the top and stand beside him. Don’t speak. Just look at what he’s looking at.

The tower dominates the horizon from here. Closer than I expected—visible to the naked eye now, the twisted helices of coral rising from the desert floor like something that grew out of the planet’s anger. The faint bioluminescence pulses in a rhythm that’s almost organic. Almost like breathing.

Oliver doesn’t acknowledge me. His jaw is set. His hands hang at his sides, open, his knuckles white from the fists he just unclenched. His eyes haven’t blinked since I started climbing.

I raise my hand. Point one finger at the tower. Hold it there.

Five seconds. No words.

Then I put my arm around his shoulders. Brief. Firm. Long enough to mean something. Short enough to not insult him.

Oliver turns his head. Looks at me. The lines on his face—the deep, weathered grooves of a middle-aged man who has buried more people than he’s saved—are pulled tight with something that isn’t grief anymore. It’s decision.

I nod.

He extends his forearm. I clasp it. He clasps mine. Not a handshake. The kind of grip men forge in trenches when words stop working and the only language left is pressure and bone.

I let go. Turn away. Walk down the rocks.

Something inside me whispers that it was calculated. Social engineering. Emotional architecture designed to pull a broken asset back into operational status.

Maybe. Maybe not. The line between pragmatism and the real thing has been blurring since the day I found this squad.

I crouch beside Rhayne and Lola.

The fire from the distant city pyre is gone. The only light is the false starfield above and the faint pulse of the tower on the horizon. In that dim glow, Lola looks smaller than usual. Not fragile—Lola is never fragile—but compressed. Like she’s folded herself into the smallest possible version of herself to process what happened.

"You two ready? We need to move."

Lola’s face scrunches. "I hate worms."

"We all do, little bear."

She reaches for her metal case. The latches pop. Gears turn, steam vents, and Lullaby emerges from the velvet interior—matte black, blue lines humming along the barrel, the dirty panda keychain swaying from the trigger guard.

Lola swings the weapon onto her back in one fluid motion, the straps locking across her small shoulders.

"Next time," she says, "I’m shooting."

You’d barely scratch a Rank B, little bear. But you’d damn sure make it angry.

I don’t say that. I just touch the top of her head and let a small smile through.

I look at Rhayne. She meets my eyes. I nod. She nods back. No words needed. The vocabulary between us stopped requiring sentences a long time ago.

Behind me, the sound of boots on rock.

Oliver is already climbing down from his perch, adjusting the straps on his gear with the mechanical focus of a man who has decided that stopping isn’t an option.

He’s buried people before. He’ll bury more. And he knows—because I made sure he knows—that I won’t let him be next.

Whether that’s a promise I can keep is a question I’ll answer when the time comes. Not before.

I straighten up. Look at my squad. Then at Boris and Jacob, already saddling the Ferredons.

"Listen up." My voice carries across the inselberg, flat and sharp. "We have a mission to finish, and I’m done sitting on rocks. Top off your OXI, hydrate, and eat. We move in five."

After filling my needs, I pull myself onto my Ferredon. The animal shifts under my weight, restless, reading the tension in my legs.

The desert stretches ahead of us—black, flat, and hostile. Somewhere beneath it, a Worm is digesting someone who deserved better. Somewhere beyond it, a tower is eating the souls of everyone too slow to escape its reach.

"Mount up. We ride for the thorns. And if that tower doesn’t like us getting close—"

I look at it. The twisted coral monstrosity throbbing against the fake stars, radiating the force that’s slowly devouring every Diver in Lost Ark.

"—it’s going to have to do a lot worse than push."