The Anchor Point was dead.Marcus Vail could tell before he even reached it. The stone pillar at the center of the clearing had gone gray and cracked, its glow long since burned out. Six months ago, this place would have hummed with power. Now it was just rubble, picked clean by everyone who got here before him.He crouched at the edge of the clearing anyway. Dead points still dropped scraps sometimes. Scraps kept a man alive.A soft chime rang inside his head.[System Notification]Class: UnrankedLevel: 1Nearby Threat: None DetectedHe almost laughed. Level 1. Six months ago the System hadn't even bothered to rank him — he'd been past its normal scale. Now it treated him like a stranger, and that was exactly how he needed it.Marcus moved into the clearing, boots quiet on broken stone. He kept his shoulders low, his steps small, the way a real Level 1 would move — nervous, careful, slow. It wasn't hard to fake. Most of these habits, he'd trained into other men once. Now he wore the

Marcus didn't sleep that night.He found a shelter half a mile from the ridge — an old maintenance shed, rusted through, forgotten by everyone except scavengers who knew exactly where to look. He sat with his back against the cold metal wall and closed his eyes, and that was when the memory came for him, the way it always did when he let his guard down.It didn't come as pictures first. It came as sound.Alarms.Six months earlier.The command tent at Anchor Point Prime shook with noise — System alerts screaming across every display at once, red text stacking faster than anyone could read it.[SYSTEM-WIDE EVENT: ACTIVATION SEQUENCE INITIATED][GLOBAL RANK RESET IMMINENT][ALL PERSONNEL: HOLD POSITION]Strategos Ryker Alden stood at the center of it, watching numbers he'd never seen before scroll across a screen built to show him everything. Beside him, three of his senior officers argued over each other, voices climbing toward panic none of them would admit to."This isn't scheduled,"

Dawn drills ran longer than Marcus expected. By the time Elena called the unit together for a briefing, the sun was fully up and half the recruits were already dragging."Change of plans," Elena said, standing in front of a rough map pinned to a wooden board. "Zero-Nine's showing incursion activity. Command wants a response team out there before it spreads."A murmur went through the group. Marcus stayed quiet, studying the map over someone's shoulder. Anchor Point Zero-Nine sat close to the settlement's northern border — close enough that an incursion there wasn't just a nuisance, it was a threat to the whole territory."Team's six," Elena continued. "Devrin, Renna, Kolt, Sable." She paused, eyes moving to Marcus. "Vail. You're with us."Marcus nodded, keeping his expression flat. Part of him — the old part, the part he kept buried — was already running the terrain in his head, already building a response plan before Elena finished briefing anyone else."We move in twenty," Elena sai

Marcus couldn't sleep.He lay on the narrow bunk in the recruit barracks, staring at the ceiling, running the war council meeting over and over in his mind. Two hundred soldiers on the northern ridge. An unstable Anchor Point nobody would waste real strength fighting over. A supply route sitting quiet and undefended to the east, exactly the kind of target a smart commander would choose.He'd built plans like this before. Written the doctrine himself, back when Sovereign Command still called him Strategos instead of nothing at all.Around midnight, he gave up on sleep and slipped out of the barracks, walking the quiet paths between buildings until he reached the settlement's eastern wall. A single guard stood watch at the gate, half-asleep on his feet, the kind of thin coverage that told Marcus exactly how little anyone here understood what was coming.He climbed a maintenance ladder to the top of the wall, ignoring the guard's tired nod, and looked out over the dark terrain stretching

The supply route ran through a narrow stretch of forest, trees thick enough to slow wagons but open enough for a small team to watch both sides of the path. Elena's unit took position there just after midday, spread out along the tree line the way Marcus had suggested without quite admitting it was a suggestion."Two days, maybe three," Elena said, crouched beside a fallen log, scanning the empty road ahead. "That's how long Reyes gave us before he pulls the team back and calls it wasted effort.""It won't take that long," Marcus said.She glanced at him but didn't ask how he knew. Some silences had become easier between them since the war council.The forest stayed quiet through the afternoon. Devrin and Kolt took the north side of the road, Sable and Renna the south, Elena and Marcus holding the center where the path narrowed between two ridges. Nothing moved except wind through the branches and the occasional distant call of something living in the deeper woods.[System Notificatio