The embrace lingered, but to Jord, it slipped through him like a dream already fading. The scent of lilacs still clung to him. He drew a breath, and the fragrance sharpened a memory: purple petals spilling over a garden wall, their velvet clusters trembling in the spring breeze. Back then – before Paul, before the invasion – their perfume had meant joy, their splendour a quiet marvel etched into the haze of childhood. And never once since then had the memory returned. A thought rose unbidden, unasked: Lilacs belonged to a dead world.

  And yet the new world demanded concessions, same as the old. A remarkable stench arose from shallow ditches lined with wooden frames, hastily built and dug with crude tools. A branch knotted to a stone, held steady by rope braided from algae, served as their shovel, a primitive instrument, if Jord had ever seen one. He doubted it could cut through anything tougher than the shoreline terrain.

  Sanitation, he reflected, was vital to any society hoping to outlast pestilence – but survival demanded more than cleanliness. It demanded order, and one of the group's first rules had been simple, brutal in its clarity: never wander alone, for shame was preferable to death, and always bring someone armed. That last clause, he thought, was the keystone, the final stone locking the arch of their first doorway towards a new burgeoning society.

  But still, despite the warning being issued when their initial group had fewer than a dozen members, few followed it at first. As the march wore on and the forest claimed its first drifters, however, the rule became gospel, learned not through caution but through consequence.

  Yells.

  Bangs.

  A volley rang.

  Panic swept the camp.

  Should I stay? The question fired inside his head, but his hand was already curled around the rifle.

  ‘I will check what happened,’ Jord said, trying to discern the source of the commotion, a difficult task as gunshots echoed and ricocheted through the air. The cluster of people on the same elevation as him only made the task harder.

  Giuliana’s gaze snapped to his, forlornness sharpening into something fiercer. She seized his sleeve, her nails biting through fabric to skin. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered.

  Jord licked his lips. Fear and a sense of foreign duty warred in the tremor of his jaw – but beneath both thrummed that traitorous spark, the one that lit up when “impossible” became just another word to outrun. Good chemicals, Lapo called it. The ones that make idiots feel like kings.

  His heart hammered, a staccato counterpoint to the gunfire. ‘I’ll come back,’ he said, her sapphire eyes holding him like a lodestone.

  ‘Promise me.’

  Jord nodded, and she capitulated.

  Jord waded into the chaos, rifle held vertical like a standard-bearer’s pole – a trick he’d learned from Lapo. Survivors peeled back from the barrel’s cold kiss.

  He tailed behind Arvido Korvilo, a stout man in his fourth decade with pale blue eyes and a trimmed beard, who was of the same age as Jory. He had been found and trusted with a position of shared command over the camp’s perimeter, following direct recommendation from Jory, with Lapo deferring to the choice.

  Arvido, a state inspector, two ranks above both Jory and Lapo – an officer who once would have wielded authority by title alone. Jord thought. But those days were gone, never to be found again. Ranks, once backed by the state’s monopoly on violence, now meant little more than what muscle or respect a person could muster.

  Arvido a man of quick action, Jord found out, soon announced that Squads would be formed and be composed of six members: five fireteam members and one tactical officer. The leadership had endorsed the choice with a nod.

  Then, the question of who would be part of the new minted squads arose. The answer from Jory was curt: ‘Those who knew how to shoot.’ Dissident talk broke in the camp, ‘Why?’ their question in short. ‘Because we are short on ammo.’ Frowns spread on the faces of those who didn’t understand.

  Jord had been among them. ‘Six thousand rounds sounds like a damn arsenal,’ Shive had argued, until someone tossed a spent cartridge at his feet. ‘See that? No factories here. No smelters. Once they’re gone, we’re dead.’ That made short work of the whole debacle.

  Sharpshooters selected and weapons confined, Jord kept his own only thanks to Lapo’s decree – a decision that drew scowls from the officers and simple rank alike. ‘He’s a rookie,’ they’d grumbled. Lapo’s reply had been short: ‘He hasn’t let me down insofar.’ And so Jord became Lapo’s watchman, a man not beholden to any of the new eight squads formed but to Lapo’s decision alone.

  He reached the frontline – or what passed for one, as there were no trenches, no barricades, just a grim consensus of how far they could stray before one of the sprouters could claw at them. The camp’s hearth lay three hundred paces behind him, its smoke a smudge against the sky. A beacon that once lit had steered pockets of survivors towards the camp.

  Ahead, a titan tree loomed two hundred paces distant, its roots clawing at the soil like arthritic hands. A meagre buffer, but enough to spot movement. For now. Work was being done to create a perimeter of little fires that could illuminate the immediate surroundings when the inevitable night would swallow them all.

  His gaze drifted to the far end of camp, where figures toiled in silence, carving shallow graves into the earth. No one had died since leaving the tree line. But the orders were clear. The holes had to be ready.

  The last attack, Jord ruminated, had come three hours ago – an hour after they’d stumbled upon this godforsaken shoreline. At first, the coast had smelt of safety and brine. Now, every shadow that twisted in the woods or rippled beneath the algae-slick waves pulsed with the promise of death.

  His gaze swept the treeline, tracing the movement of the sprouters – and something else. At first, he thought it was another of those cancerous beings hidden by the tree. But then it moved, not with the stumbly gait of the cancerous fiends, but with intent, like something that knew it was being watched. Jord’s breath caught. He found himself quietly thanking the seven gods they had not encountered this abomination back in the forest. Had they done so, the entire group might have frozen on the spot, ready for the picking.

  His eyes were drawn like a curse to a head, borne aloft by eight spindled limbs, each ending in hands that each held seven clawed fingers. Its grin split the face from mangled ear to ripped ear, teeth jagged as broken glass. Milky eyes, unblinking. Hair like sodden rope. A perpetual frown stood accusatory, as if humanity itself were a personal affront.

  It made no sound. No howls, no shrieks, no slaps of limbs on cluttered ground. Just stillness. Calculating. As if it were studying them. Perhaps it had come alone. Perhaps it followed the scent of smoke. Or perhaps it followed the rhythm of voices. Jord couldn't say, but the reason hardly mattered. What mattered was that it was here, and it was watching.

  Jord felt a cold creep slowly crawl up his spine. He stifled his trembling hand. They could endure individual sprouters, but waves of them directed by this perversion of a human face?

  Branches snapped on his left. More on the right, small sticks that fell when ventures returned with fuel for the main flare. Two squads were closing in, rifles lifted, faces pale. No orders shouted, for there was no need. Jory had crafted a plan to deal with such events, but stratagems seldom held when faced with reality.

  Arvido watched the macabre spectacle unfold, his face taut with something unreadable, like a man waiting for the other shoe to fall. Then – gunshots rang out from further ahead, sharp and definite, for each bullet spent a new limb sprouted. The moment held its breath. But no fresh wave of abominations followed.

  Jord saw Arvido’s shoulders lift with a slow inhale. His spine straightened. The stillness settled, uneasy and partial.

  And so, Hingur, tall and stone-faced, blinked hard as if waking from a daze. Around him, the others still stared at the thing in the treeline; some had their mouths half open, a question hanging from their lips, but their voices had been stolen by the grotesque fiend.

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  Hingur wasn’t immune, far from it – but mental clarity kicked in before fear could settle and take root. He turned to Arvido.

  ‘Sir… do we engage?’

  The question snapped through the group like a whip. Heads turned. Breath caught. The stupor broke, and the remaining stillness evaporated like dew at dawn.

  Arvido didn’t turn. His eyes stayed fixed on the battlefield. ‘No. Second and Third Watch seem to have it under control. Form a line at their backs in case they need to fall back.’ A pause. His voice thickened with revulsion. ‘And if you’ve got a clear shot of that thing... take it.’

  They nodded. They knew. Every bullet spent hammered another nail into their collective coffin – and yet, to let such a threat fester in the periphery? Unthinkable. Teams Two and Three lurked a mere hundred paces from the first roots, prone with rifles braced against rocks: better to let a sprouter close than waste a shot. Jord’s jaw tightened. In his mind, a clock’s pendulum swung. Tick. Would they ask someone to die for the rest? Tock. Would he?

  Jord moved to follow, but Arvido’s hand clamped his shoulder, pinning him in place. ‘You stay here.’

  Jord acquiesced.

  Ahead, the battle raged a hundred paces distant with reserved intensity, each shot carefully chosen, each engagement a dance between scarcity and retreat. Behind them, fifty paces back, First Watch crouched – the last line between the camp and the abyss.

  Sound carried poorly here; even shouts frayed into whispers.

  ‘I don’t know what Polazit saw in you,’ Arvido said, taking a breath. ‘Frankly, I don’t care. But what I do care about–’ His grip tightened. ‘–is order. The first stunt you pull, the first misstep that costs me? You’re out. Understood?’

  A gunshot cracked ahead.

  Jord nodded.

  ‘No. Say it. Say, “I understand”. So when you’re tempted to pull some heroics from your arse, you’ll think twice. If shit goes sideways and you’re involved? You’re the first to fall. Understood? Say it.’

  ‘I … understand.’

  Arvido released him. ‘Good. Now, we follow.’

  They advanced in lockstep, boots striking the earth with the precision of a military parade. Jord’s shoulders itched where Arvido’s gaze lingered. Arvido said nothing, and that made his presence all the more heavy to bear.

  The battlefield was a butcher’s tableau. Six teams stood ahead of a dozen sprouters. Seven abominations already lay motionless – if such a word could describe those things. Their forms defied anatomy: limbs splayed like snapped kindling, wounds weeping tar that seemed to smoke where it pooled. Jord counted them, his throat tight. Seven. A paltry number when the deadliest question hung unanswered: how do you kill what won’t stay dead? The answer was not for the squeamish. You carved them alive: hack the limbs, sever the spine. Butcher them before the tar sealed their wounds.

  And yet, fire had been their first hope. A scream of napalm, a cleansing pyre, even some fabric to ignite, but accelerants were relics of the past, commodities that now seemed impossible to reproduce. Later, when they tried burning a severed strip of sprouter flesh, the texture recoiled. It puckered and blackened, tightening like rawhide cured in flame. The result was leathery, almost inelastic, piece of hide.

  They clung to the theory: if the creature burned fast enough, maybe it couldn’t regenerate in cancerous growth. Maybe the fire would seal the demon inside its own body, trap it in the husk it grew from.

  But such hopes remained distant, fragile things, mere dreams. Reality was of other mind, for it stood savage in its inequality, for even the smallest sprouter stood a metre tall, a shambling mass of muscle, fat, and flayling protrusions. The scrawniest topped sixty kilos, their bodies dense as wet timber.

  The desperate that wished to win in close quarters soon discovered that it demanded three fighters and a plan: one to bait its lurching charge, two to spring a rope at its legs to make the thing stumble, three to pelt them with crude-made pilus. The tactic only worked if the creature balanced on two limbs – a rare gift. Most bore their weight across a chaos of legs and arms.

  Their true terror, however, came from how they heard. No ears ridged their skulls, only a nest of lidless eyes. Yet they heard. The doctors among them theorised, when they first had a moment of reprieve in the long march, that sound vibrated through some internal lattice – a parody of a nervous system and bone structure. It explained their frenzy when gunshots or voices rang in the distance. Some claimed thunder would drive them mad, that the sprouters’ tar-blood might boil like oil in a skillet. Jord fervently prayed it wouldn’t rain.

  ‘What do we do … sir?’ Jord said, not taking his eyes from the fighting. The last word, a concession.

  The man studied him for a moment before returning his focus to the advancing monsters. ‘We wait.’

  They waited.

  Three minutes since the initial assault began, six before the whole ordeal, the sprouters still marched on. Bullets punched into their hides – thud, thud, thud – but the abominations did not die. They defied what normal life could endure.

  Jord tracked the grim arithmetic: fifteen rounds to down, not even kill, a sprouter barely a metre tall.

  One shot: the creature staggered.

  Three: its lurch slowed, tar seeping from puckered wounds.

  Six: a stumble, limbs flailing like snapped puppet strings.

  Ten: it sagged, yet still it crawled, fingers clawing soil as if the earth itself owed it life.

  Fifteen: The thing finally stopped, yet twitching still could be seen.

  What should have been a short affair turned into a prolonged game of cat and mouse. Each abomination had to be shepherded – slowed just enough to become manageable. The first shots were never fatal. Two rounds to the limbs to stagger them, then the rest delivered in precise succession. Jord counted the rhythm: slow it, stumble it, then put it down.

  Only one marksman was firing. Their best, Jord assumed, or perhaps someone who had yet to “unlock” the strange words.

  Words that they all saw in the same way, words that could be seen, they gathered, only by those who “downed” a hostile entity.

  And yet Jord’s mind kept turning back to the time when, in their frantic scramble for a defensible position, people had staved off sprouters with nothing but crude spears. A feat worth commendation, if not for the uncertainty of it all. One misstep, and you were dead. A single swipe from the larger ones, and you became mist.

  If your spear stuck and you didn’t let go, the abomination didn’t flinch. It simply swallowed the weapon deeper and closed the distance. Once in reach of their limbs, death came fast. The sane, the survivors, stopped treating spears as close weapons and began throwing them instead – to slow, then, if the seven gods allowed, to butcher a limb at a time.

  Slings had been tried, but few could aim them well, and they barely made the monsters falter.

  They found out that to fight a sprouter in single combat wasn’t impossible – just deeply unwise.

  And so, Jord thought, what remained were relics of another world. Powerful tools, yes, yet so dreadfully finite. The thought coiled through the minds like fingers tightening around a throat. He knew he was not alone in that spiral. Now that the frenetic motion had ended and they found a semblance of shelter, he saw many drifting in a fugue, lost between dread and quiet acceptance.

  He overheard passing words. Murmurs about what would happen when the last bullet was fired.

  And yet, no one gave in. He saw sprouting resolve rather than bleak despair. He found and felt that people were more motivated than ever, their survival etched in their every movement. It had never been clearer. The die is cast, his grandfather once told him, eyes heavy with sorrow. Jord had never understood what it meant. Not until now.

  Such grit. Such a desperate will to claw back a tether of life. He saw it, he felt it. A spite that overcame fear. A strength summoned from rage alone. Maybe this was what Lapo had meant. Jord frowned. Did the man know?

  However, as the last bullets sank into the final sprouter and the perversion of a creature skittered back into the forest, Jord felt his thoughts turning inward – drawn, as if by gravity, to his relationship with this new world. A heavy blanket seemed to settle over his being: His gaze felt lost, his shoulders slumped. His mind drifted to his family, stranded on the other side of the river, lost somewhere in this apocalypse.

  His mind wandered to a foolish plan – to cross, to look, to find. But the tyrannical truth loomed, quiet and undeniable. He could not even save himself.

  He no longer watched the lying fiends. His gaze had shifted, drawn to something more solid, more real. His comrades. They stood not triumphant, but transfixed, as if the silence that followed the fight demanded reverence.

  The moment felt sacred, yet fleeting. A win, yes – but one that bought them only a breath of time.

  They had done the math. Four hundred. That was the number of Sprouters they could kill if not a single shot was wasted, if no one missed, if nothing went wrong.

  It sounded like a lot. It wasn’t.

  And Jord didn’t believe for a second that there were only four hundred out there.