Every Loop Costs a Friend

Chapter 3 - Seven Days

Chapter 3 · 980 words

Garran Dault did not shout.

That was the first thing Soren noticed about him. The training officer stood in the center of the yard at half past five in the morning, his voice carrying without effort to every corner of the formation. He was older than Soren had expected, fifty maybe, with gray cut close to his scalp and a body that had been powerful once and had settled into something economical. He walked with a limp on his left side that he made no attempt to hide.

"You are going into a structure that no one in this guild has seen before," Garran said. He didn't pace. He stood still and let his eyes move across the formation, pausing on each face for exactly long enough to make it personal. "Everything you know about dungeon exploration was learned from structures that already existed. This one is new. Which means your assumptions are wrong until proven otherwise."

He held up a hand. A runner brought him a sheet of paper. Garran read it, folded it, and put it in his pocket without comment.

"Rule one. You retreat when I say retreat. Not when you think you should. Not when your team leader thinks you should. When I say it. If you ignore a retreat order, I will personally ensure you never work in this guild again. Are we clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Rule two. Information is the objective. You are not there to fight. You are not there to be brave. You are there to observe, record, and return. If you die in that tower, you have failed your mission regardless of what you killed on the way down."

Soren shifted his weight. The cold was getting through his jacket. Beside him, Sabine was perfectly still, listening with the kind of attention that meant she was storing every word.

"Rule three." Garran's voice dropped half a register. "No piece of information is worth a life. If your team is compromised, you fall back. If you cannot fall back, you signal for extraction. If extraction is not available, you survive. That is your only remaining mission. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

The training ran six days. Garran drilled them on retreat formations, on signal protocols, on the specific cadence of emergency calls. He made them practice blind movement, navigating by touch and sound with their eyes closed. He made them practice falling, absorbing impact, getting up. Garran was afraid they would fail, and the fear made him relentless.

On the third day, during a break in the afternoon, Soren found Sabine sitting on the low wall at the edge of the yard, unwrapping the bandages from her hands. The other trainees were scattered around the yard, drinking water, talking in low voices. Garran was in his office, reviewing something.

Soren sat down on the wall a few feet from her. Neither of them spoke for a while.

"He keeps talking about coming back alive," Sabine said finally. She pulled a bandage loose and started on the next hand.

"He's been doing this a long time."

"He's been doing this long enough to know most people don't." She paused. Her hands stopped moving. "My brother is nine. His lungs don't work right. There's a treatment, a specialist in the upper districts, but it costs more than an Initiate makes in a year."

Soren looked at her. She was looking at her hands.

"Every contract I take, every rank point I earn, it goes to his medical fund. I'm not close. But if this expedition—" She stopped. Started wrapping the bandage again. "If this expedition goes well, the guild bonus alone would cover six months of treatment."

"You didn't have to tell me that."

"I know." She tied off the bandage and flexed her fingers. "I told you because you volunteered for the east position without thinking about it. That means you're either reckless or you don't have anything keeping you careful." She looked at him. "I needed to know which."

"Neither, really. I just—" He stopped. The honest answer was complicated and he was tired of sorting it. "I don't have anyone waiting for me. No family here. No one who needs me to come back in any particular condition. So I figured I could afford to be the one who steps forward."

Sabine was quiet for a long time. The training yard was almost empty now. Most of the trainees had gone to the common hall for the evening meal.

"That's not nothing," she said. "Stepping forward when you don't have to. That's not the same as having nothing to lose."

"I know."

She stood, brushed dirt from her trousers. "I'm going to eat. You should too. Garran will run us into the ground tomorrow."

"Sabine."

She turned.

"I'll watch your back in there."

She looked at him for a moment, really looked, the way she had on the first day, taking his measure. Then something in her face shifted, just slightly.

"I know you will," she said. And walked away.

The last two days passed in a blur of drills and equipment checks and the growing weight of the tower's shadow across the city. Garran ran them through every scenario he could construct. He was harder on them than on any other group. Soren realized at some point on the sixth day that Garran feared they would fail. The fear made him relentless.

On the evening before the expedition, Garran gathered the team leads in the briefing room. He stood at the front, his hands on the table, and looked at each of them.

"Tomorrow you go in. You observe. You record. You come back." He paused. "That is not a request."

Soren met Sabine's eyes across the room. Kael gave him a brief nod. The tower waited above the city, black and silent, and in twelve hours they would walk into it.