The transport hatch hissed open, and General Roric Vale stepped down onto the docking platform. His eyes were red from the lack of sleep for several days.

The fight against Ghouls had reached a crucial point. It had already reached the point where Platinum and above Crusaders joined the battle.

As one of the eighteen Diamond Crusaders of humanity, he led a team of Silver and Gold powerhouses in the battle.

Behind him, important members of his strike unit followed in loose formation. Twenty soldiers, all of them registered above Silver, all of them scarred in places that did not show under their uniforms.

The mission in the Pale Reaches was complete. The Ghoul nest had been cleared. Three of his men had been carried home in sealed cases, and Roric had written the letters to their families on the return flight with the same hand he used to sign troop deployments.

He should have been tired. He was, instead, walking faster than he had walked in years.

"General." Lieutenant Maren caught up with him at his shoulder. She was the only one who could match his stride without breaking into a jog. "The Marshal expects a debrief at the seventeenth hour. Shall I confirm the appointment?"

"Push it to nineteen."

"Sir."

"Push it to twenty if the Marshal complains."

A pause.

"Yes, sir."

Behind Maren, Sergeant Hael let out a low whistle that did not quite reach the General’s ears, though the men ahead of him pretended it had not happened.

Roric did not slow. The corridor opened onto the central artery of the barracks complex, and he turned left toward the registration wing without checking the signage. He had walked these halls for thirty years.

His grandchildren were here. Kenji and—what was the name of that girl again?

Ah, Ayla.

Sarah had sent the message through the family channel two days ago, and the message had reached him at the edge of the Pale only that morning. Both children were inside the Crusade, headed for the Spire.

"Those daring government recruiters," he cursed under his breath. As per the order of the government, those two milk babies would have been directly escorted into the Spire if not for his intervention.

What were they expecting two babies to do inside?

Although there were many Iron and Bronze Crusaders inside, General Roric absolutely hated the idea of his grandchildren risking their lives.

He had gained enough military merits to make an exemption for any of his descendants forced into service.

"Sir, your boots." Hael had come up on his other side, mud-spattered and grinning under the layer of dust on his face. "If you are going to meet family, perhaps a change of uniform."

Roric paused, then shook his head. "I don’t have time for it."

He had to reach them as soon as possible before the government played any other games.

"With respect sir, your current appearance might scare the children."

"No way they fear this handsomeness," Roric said confidently.

Maren bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. The men behind them did not bother to hide their grins. None of them had ever seen the General hurry.

None of them had ever seen the General smile in the way he was smiling now, which was barely a smile at all, just a softening at the corner of his mouth that the rest of his face had not been told about.

It made him look ten years younger and twice as approachable, and the unit was finding the change difficult to absorb.

Hael nudged Maren with his elbow. "Lieutenant. Note the date."

"Noted, Sergeant."

"For the record, this is the first verified sighting."

"Both of you," Roric said without turning his head. "If you have time to comment on my face, you have time to file the after-action report."

"Filed already, sir," Maren said.

"Filed twice, sir," Hael added.

Roric kept walking. He passed a checkpoint and the guards saluted late because they were too busy watching him pass with such a soft expression.

Both of them nearly thought they were hallucinating. Then they became curious.

"Where is the General going with such a happy face?"

The General of the Eastern Front, walking through the lower barracks at a pace that suggested he had somewhere to be that mattered more than the Marshal.

Word would be across the complex before he reached the registration wing.

Let it be. Roric didn’t care.

He thought about the boy first.

Kenji.

He had seen the boy last at the New Year gathering, almost a full year past. A serious child. Quiet.

Sarah had written, in her last paper letter, that Kenji had been training with a focus that bordered on stubborn. Roric liked stubborn. Stubborn kept a soldier alive on the battlefield when talent had already burned itself out.

His grandson. His daughter’s blood. The line continuing through the boy was the line continuing through Roric himself, and the thought of seeing him alive and registered and on his own feet inside the Crusade was a warmth Roric had not allowed himself during the campaign.

Warmth was a luxury for men who weren’t sure they would return home.

His pace did not change, but something inside him cooled by a careful degree. The other one. Ayla.

Six days. He had known of her for six days. A name in his daughter’s letter and a DNA result Sarah had underlined twice.

Sarah had written about her with the kind of joy Sarah had not put on a page in nine years, since the year the catastrophe had taken her first child, since the night a tunnel break in Old York had pulled the household apart and left Sarah hollow for almost a decade.

Roric had read his daughter’s letter on the flight back from the Pale, sitting alone in the cargo hold with the bodies of his men in their sealed cases two meters behind him, and he had felt, against his will, the corners of the letter dampen under his thumbs.

The General of the war front wept for the first time in his life.

His daughter was happy again.

That was the line that had stayed with him for three days. His daughter was happy again, after nine years, because of an illegitimate child of her husband.

Honestly, as a father, Roric wasn’t that happy. Which father would be happy to know his son-in-law had a child with another woman?

Even after knowing Sarah was finally happy after the death of Aiko, there was dissatisfaction inside him.

He was here only because of Kenji. The other child mattered nothing.

The corridor turned, and the registration wing opened ahead of him. The moment Roric saw the wing, he slowed for the first time since the transport. Something was wrong.

The corridor outside the testing chamber was not quiet. It was full. Officers in registration uniforms moved through the doors at a pace that did not match registration.

A medical team passed him at a run, going in. A pair of Bronze-ranked technicians passed him at a run, coming out, both of them already speaking into communicators with clipped urgency.

A junior officer he did not recognize hurried past, saw the rank on his shoulder, and stopped so fast that the soldier behind him nearly collided.

"General Vale, sir."

"Report."

"Sir, the testing chamber. Sir, I am not authorized to."

"Report, Lieutenant."

The junior officer swallowed. "Sir, the scanner. Sir, the General should see for himself."

Roric went past him.

The doors to the testing chamber stood open. Inside, the room was full. Senior administrators, technicians, two medical officers, and a registration colonel he had served with twenty years past.

At the center of the room was the scanner platform. Above the platform, in the air, suspended in a slow rotation that the room’s lighting could not explain, hung a hexagon.

It was vast. Larger than any core readout he had seen in thirty years of service. The aura around it was not the clean blue of a registered metal core.

It was deeper. Heavier. It was the color of a sky before a storm that no one had thought to warn the city about.

The hexagon turned slowly above the platform, and every face in the chamber was turned upward toward it.

The hexagon was Bronze. But the readout etched across its face, in the characters the system drew for the benefit of everyone present, was not.

"An Apocalypse Bronze Metal Core?"

The words came out of him before he had decided to say them. His mouth had hung open without his permission.

He had heard of Apocalypse cores in the briefing rooms of senior command, in low voices among Diamond ranks and above.

He had never seen one. No General of the Eastern Front had ever seen one in person. They were filed under rumor.

Apocalypse cores were obtained only through Apocalypse tunnels. Although humans had conquered more than fifty Apocalypse tunnels until now, only one person had ever managed to contribute enough for him to obtain an Apocalypse core.

That person was the current and only Conqueror-ranked Crusader of humanity. Even that person managed to obtain such a core when he was Ace!

His gaze dropped from the hexagon to the platform beneath it. A small figure stood on the scanner.

While this person...