The helicopter rose higher into the grey sky, its spinning blades cutting through the thick air with a heavy, steady rhythm that echoed across the broken land below, and for a long moment none of them spoke because they were still trying to process what had just happened, the escape, the chaos, the dead, the blood, the loss, and the impossible miracle of a machine appearing out of nowhere when there was absolutely no hope left for any of them.
The officers were the first ones to truly react, their eyes moving slowly from the control panel to the seats, then to Ethan, then back to the open air beneath them, as if they were trying to confirm that what they were experiencing was not some kind of shock-induced illusion, because there was simply no logical explanation for how a helicopter could appear in the middle of a doomed battlefield with no signal, no backup, no base, no call for extraction, and no visible source.
