They did not brief me in a room with flags. They briefed me in a concrete office that smelled like old coffee, wet paper, and the kind of cigarette smoke people pretended did not exist anymore.
A lieutenant read the mission out loud from a folder and never once looked me in the eye. I suspected he feared eye contact counted as consent.
Captain Victor Hoffman owned the room without trying to. He stood near the map board, hands clasped behind his back, posture relaxed in a way that suggested he slept easily after difficult decisions. His face carried the calm of a man who had learned to measure cost in bodies and still considered himself practical.
Major Baxter did not show. He did not need to. His approval arrived as a phrase delivered by someone else, the way all useful cowardice did.
"Unstated approval," the lieutenant said. "Stated condition. You do not get caught. If anything goes wrong, nothing connects back here."
Hoffman nodded once, as if hearing weather.
The folder listed names. Padrick Salton. Baz. Sommers. Bai Tak. Cho Ligan. All privates, except Baz, who carried himself like someone whose rank had been delayed by paperwork rather than performance. Bai looked like a ghost that had learned to hold a rifle. Cho watched the room as he expected it to be.
My name was not on the list.
The lieutenant's eyes flicked to me anyway. "And the attached asset," he added, as if speaking about a piece of equipment.
Hoffman finally looked at me. His gaze traveled over the SPI plates and then up to my face. It was not awe. It was an assessment. I saw the moment he calculated what I could do, then calculated what I could not be allowed to do without permission.
"You follow my orders," he said.
"I follow the mission," I replied.
That earned me a thin pause. Not anger. Consideration.
Hoffman stepped closer, just enough that the soldiers behind him had to decide whether they should shift their weapons. They did not. They waited, which meant they trusted him more than they feared me.
"The mission is the orders," Hoffman said. "If you cannot accept that, you stay here."
I accepted it because the alternative was a cell and a new set of men with clipboards. "Understood."
Hoffman turned back to the map. "UIR forces are moving toward Sarfuth through the Maigar Pass. Captain Hoffman," the lieutenant continued, catching himself and then rephrasing as if the correction mattered. "Captain Hoffman believes we can blind them. Gralia has a radar station. If it goes down, we can use air to ambush their approach."
Sarfuth. Maigar Pass. Gralia.
I knew the names the way you knew names from a history book you pretended you had not memorized. I knew how this war ate its way forward. I knew that the battlefield did not care whether neutrality existed on paper.
Hoffman pointed at the line between Sarfuth and Maranday. "We go through neutral territory," he said. "We do not get stopped. We do not get seen. We do not leave evidence that looks like us."
Baz made a sound that might have been agreement. Sommers nodded once, already thinking about vehicles and routes. Salton looked young in the way soldiers looked before they became numbers.
Cho glanced at Bai. Bai did not glance back.
The plan was simple in the way all bad plans were. Cross into Maranday in a civilian truck. Continue into the Republic of Lauczi. Approach Gralia from the forest. Cut the fence. Place explosives on the radar pylons. Trigger. Disappear.
There was one additional line that did not appear on the map but sat inside the major's condition like a loaded round.
No witnesses.
The truck waited in a motor pool behind the headquarters, already dirt-streaked and ordinary. Sommers drove. Hoffman sat in the passenger seat as if the seat belonged to him by law. The rest of the team climbed into the back, rifles tucked in close, bodies arranged to minimize noise and visibility.
I did not fit.
They solved that by having me crouch in the forward corner under a canvas tarp, knees pressed into my chest, shoulders rolled in. The SPI armor made the posture possible. My size made it humiliating. Humiliation did not count as a tactical factor, so nobody mentioned it.
The truck rolled out.
The first border, Sarfuth to Maranday, passed without drama. A guard waved the truck through after a glance and a bored stamp. I heard the stamp from the back and wondered how much weight a stamp carried compared to an artillery barrage.
Inside Maranday, the roads changed. Paved sections gave way to patchwork repairs. Villages sat back from the highway, quiet, lights low even in daytime, as if people had learned that visibility invited trouble. Signs carried language I did not read cclearly but I understood the structure of the warning without translation.
No weapons. No military vehicles. Neutral ground.
We crossed it anyway.
At the Maranday and Lauczi checkpoint, the truck slowed, and the cabin voices changed. Hoffman's tone stayed level. Sommers answered questions with the practiced exhaustion of a man hauling supplies through the same gate too often.
A guard approached the back.
The tarp shifted slightly as someone adjusted a knee. It might have been me. It might have been Baz. The fabric creaked once. The guard paused.
Hoffman spoke from the cab, voice easy. "Fertilizer and grain. Paperwork is in the dash."
The guard hesitated, then walked around the truck. I could see his boots through the gap under the canvas. He stopped by the rear tire and leaned in to look under the chassis. The SPI plates held still. My breathing slowed until it barely existed.
A second guard laughed at something near the barrier. The first guard straightened, bored again, and slapped the side panel once.
"Move along," he called.
Sommers drove.
The truck rolled forward,d and the checkpoint fell behind us. Only when the road curved and the trees thickened did the team exhale in small, careful breaths.
Hoffman did not look back. "Five kilometers out," he said. "We ditch the truck and go on foot. Bai leads."
Bai did not acknowledge. He did not need to. He had already begun becoming a shape in my mind, not a person. A man made out of quiet.
We hid the truck in a shallow depression off the road, under branches dragged into place by hands that had done this before. Sommers killed the engine, and the sudden quiet felt like a change in pressure.
We moved into the forest.
The forest here felt different from the one that had spat me out near Kadar. Less ancient. More human-traveled. Paths existed, narrow ones that did not show on any map but did show in the way branches broke and the way undergrowth thinned in certain directions.
Bai moved ahead, light-footed, leaving no sound. Cho followed, cutting angles, watching for patrols. Baz and Salton stayed central with Hoffman. Sommers carried the explosives pack and the detonator, shoulders tight like he understood exactly how much responsibility he carried in a bag.
I stayed at the rear, because my footsteps could not pretend to be a ghost. I controlled them anyway. The SPI armor helped. So did the simple fact that fear made you deliberate.
We reached the perimeter fence near dusk. The radar station rose ahead like an accusation, metal pylons and dish arrays reaching above the treeline. Floodlights swept in slow arcs. Guards walked predictable paths, rifles hanging low from boredom.
Hoffman crouched and studied the pattern. Pad, Salton, climbed into a tree at Hoffman's gesture, slipping up the trunk with the kind of nervous energy that wanted a job. He settled into a high branch and lined his rifle toward the base.
Bai and Cho moved to the fence.
Cho produced cutters. The metal snipped with a soft, final sound. Bai held the cut apart and slipped through, body folding with practiced ease. Cho followed.
The hole stayed small.
Hoffman looked back at me. "You wait," he said.
It was not the sentence he meant. What he meant was, you are too large to fit and too valuable to risk.
I nodded once and stayed in the trees, half-shadowed behind a trunk thick enough to hide most of my armor.
From there, I watched Bai cross open ground in a low run toward the pylons. He moved between sweep lines of light like he had memorized their timing. A guard stood near the pylons with his back turned, posture relaxed. Bai reached him without sound.
The guard's throat opened under Bai's blade. It did not look like a movie. It looked like a function. Bai caught the body as it sagged and lowered it gently into the grass, as if he respected the ground more than the man.
The rest of the team slipped through the fence and moved toward the pylons. Hoffman, Baz, and Sommers planted charges. Cho watched the nearest building. Salton covered from the tree line, rifle steady.
I stayed outside, eyes scanning, listening for changes in rhythm.