No one spoke.
Not after that.
The body of the rear operator was left behind in the dark.
Unchecked.
Uncovered.
The fifty-foot gap had returned.
Instantly.
Violently.
The remaining squad members—just the Leader and the heavy breacher now—walked in the deep shadow of the corridor.
Asset 04 walked ahead.
Alone.
The grating groaned beneath their boots.
The sound was hollow.
Stripped of the mechanical rhythm they had maintained just ten minutes ago.
The heavy breacher stopped.
He didn't signal.
He didn't ask for a halt.
His heavy boots simply ceased to move.
"This doesn't work."
The words cut through the dead air.
Harsh.
Desperate.
It wasn't a complaint. It was a formal rejection of the reality they were trapped in.
The Leader didn't turn around.
He kept his eyes on the boy walking ahead in the dark.
"Keep moving."
The Leader's voice lacked its usual commanding snap.
It was flat.
He didn't offer a tactical reason. He didn't offer reassurance. He just offered momentum.
The breacher didn't take a step.
"People keep dying," the breacher said.
His breathing was erratic. Loud over the comms.
"We close the gap, someone drops. We open the gap, someone drops. It doesn't matter what we do."
The Leader finally stopped.
He turned his head.
Slow.
"They die anyway," the Leader replied.
The coldness of the statement hung in the air.
The utilitarian logic of a man who had already accepted that the squad was expendable.
"It's him."
The breacher raised a thick, armored finger.
He pointed directly at Asset 04.
The boy was fifty feet away, entirely oblivious to the execution being debated behind his back.
"We shouldn't be near him," the breacher hissed. "Every time we adjust our spacing, the ledger just recalculates. He brings it with him."
"We stay close, we last longer," the Leader said.
Not we are safe.
Not we survive.
We last longer.
The Leader had already accepted the math. The boy was a shield. The shield was cracked. But a cracked shield still bought them time.
The breacher stared at the Leader.
The visor hid his eyes, but the heavy, ragged rise and fall of his chest plate betrayed the absolute collapse of his tactical conditioning.
"So we just wait?" the breacher asked.
He took a step toward the Leader.
"For whose turn?"
The question hit the rusted walls.
It echoed.
No one answered.
The math was undeniable.
Two operators left. One anomaly.
There was no one else to absorb the next correction.
The breacher's hands tightened around the grips of his rotary cannon.
The metal groaned under his armored gloves.
"Then we put him down."
The extreme limit of human fear had finally been reached.
If the anomaly required a life to balance the ledger, then they would balance the anomaly.
The physical shift was immediate.
Weapons lifted.
Not at the shadows.
Not at the rusted pipes.
Not at the corridor.
At him.
The heavy barrels of the rotary cannon spun up with a low, sickening whine, aimed squarely at Asset 04's back.
The Leader moved.
Fast.
Fluid.
He raised his own pulse rifle.
He didn't aim it at the boy.
He aimed it directly at the center mass of the breacher's chest plate.
"No."
The command was absolute.
The breacher froze.
The whine of the rotary barrels maintained their deadly pitch.
Two men.
Locked in a standoff in the dark, defending a monster that didn't know they existed.
The Leader stared down his sights.
"Not yet."
The two words changed everything.
The Leader wasn't protecting the boy.
He was protecting the utility.
The Leader had already done the calculation. He would pull the trigger himself, but only when the boy's existence became more dangerous than his absence.
The breacher stared at the barrel of the Leader's rifle.
The spin of the rotary cannon slowly died down.
The silence rushed back in.
The hierarchy evaporated.
The chain of command was gone.
They weren't a team anymore.
They were just... still alive.
The Leader slowly lowered his rifle.
He didn't turn his back to the breacher.
"Move," the Leader said.
There was no formation.
There was no tactical overwatch.
There was only forward motion.
Asset 04 continued walking.
His uneven, dragging stride echoing in the dark.
The two men followed.
They walked together.
Not by trust.
By necessity.
No one knew who would die next.
They only knew—
it wasn't random anymore.