The transition from the sterile, concrete safety of the AIC nerve center back to the active theater of war was immediate and unceremonious. Major Vance was a man of cold, blinding speed when a strategic variable shifted. Within forty-eight hours of the Autumn Offensive's successful opening synchronization, Captain Bartholomew was stripped of his comfortable laboratory quarters and handed a set of sealed, crimson-stamped deployment orders.
He was being sent to Sector Blackwood, a jagged, high-casualty valley on the outermost edge of the southern push. It was a sector notoriously ignored by the grand strategists—a meat grinder where the terrain itself seemed to swallow Aetheric signatures whole.
"You have stabilized the brain of the army, Captain," Vance had told him coolly as the transport vehicle idled outside the hub. "Now you must face its rot. The laboratory can no longer afford you the friction required to break the B-Rank threshold. You are adapting to the memories too quickly. You need an environment where the stakes are unscripted."
Bartholomew sat in the back of the armored transport, the deep sapphire C-Rank Aether Gem humming against his uniform harness. His stats remained fixed, a testament to his current plateau:
[RANK: C-RANK (ELITE MAGE) — PROGRESSION TO B-RANK: 53%]
[Endurance: 135]
[Magic Power: 155]
He was undeniably powerful—far stronger than any standard front-line officer—but as the vehicle bounced over the shell-cratered roads, he felt an icy knot of dread tightening in his stomach. Vance wasn't just sending him to fight; Vance was actively hunting for a tragedy that would break him.
The Valley of Shards
Sector Blackwood was a miserable, mist-choked canyon littered with the crystalline debris of shattered Aetheric barriers. The mud here wasn't dark clay; it was an unnatural, shimmering gray, contaminated by decades of low-grade magical runoff from old border skirmishes.
Bartholomew arrived at the forward command post—a reinforced log bunker dug into the side of a sheer cliff face—to find a garrison that looked entirely dead on its feet. The local commander, a hollow-eyed Major named Sterling, didn't bother to salute when Bartholomew stepped inside.
"An AIC Captain," Sterling muttered, his voice dry as gravel as he squinted at Bartholomew's crisp uniform and the gleaming blue Gem on his chest. "They sent me a bureaucrat with a fancy crystal. What's the matter, did the grand offensive run out of paper to stamp?"
"I'm here to audit your defensive stabilization arrays, Major," Bartholomew replied, keeping his tone flat and professional. "Logistics Command reports an unacceptable 40% failure rate in your forward trenches' deflection runes."
Sterling let out a harsh, barking laugh. "An audit. Beautiful. Let me tell you about our logistics, Captain. The enemy isn't using standard artillery. They've deployed Resonance Mortars—experimental scrap-weapons that don't shatter the shields, but match their frequency until the runes turn inside out. My mages aren't failing; their equipment is committing suicide. We're losing a platoon every three days to internal shield implosions."
Bartholomew's eyes narrowed. He stepped up to the tactical table, running his passive Logistik scan over the crude, charcoal-drawn map of the valley.
[DETECTION: SUBTERRANEAN FREQUENCY DRIFT ACTIVE. ALLIED DEFLECTION MATRICES OPERATING AT 42% EFFICIENCY. CRITICAL FAILURE IMMINENT IN DEFENSIVE LINE DELTA.]
The numbers were staggering, but what chilled Bartholomew to the bone was the sudden, subtle shift in his peripheral vision. The gray mist outside the bunker window seemed to thicken, transforming in his mind's eye into the suffocating, ash-choked air of The Siege of the Iron Spires (1924)—a brutal defensive action from his past life where entire regiments had been vaporized when their experimental shield arrays harmonic-snapped.
The sound of singing metal, his memory whispered. When the mortars fire, the air doesn't boom. It sings.
The Audit under Fire
Bartholomew didn't stay in the bunker. Backed by his elevated Endurance (135), he ignored Sterling's protests and marched straight down into the communication trenches of Line Delta.
The conditions were appalling. Enlisted men, caked in gray mud, lay huddled under crude timber overhangs. At every forty-yard interval, a D-Rank deflection plate was bolted to the trench wall, its surface flickering with a weak, sickly blue luminescence.
Bartholomew knelt before one of the plates, drawing a silver tracing tool from his pocket. He pushed a fraction of his MP into the metal, analyzing the lattice structure.
"Sir," a young corporal muttered, leaning against the sandbags with a heavily bandaged arm. "Don't touch it too long. When the wind changes, those things get hot enough to melt your skin off."
Bartholomew didn't answer. His scan was returning terrifying data.
[STRUCTURE: FLUID COHERENCE MATRIX. SPECIFICATION: 1912 STANDARD. WARNING: UNABLE TO REPEL PERIODIC RESONANCE HARMONICS. CASUALTY RATE PREDICTION: HIGH.]
"They're using the old fluid matrices," Bartholomew muttered to himself, his teeth grinding. "Vance knew this. He sent these men out with obsolete shielding models just to see how long it would take for the resonance to crack them."
Before he could process the fury blooming in his chest, the air changed.
It wasn't a rumble or a thud. It was a high, vibrating whistle that set Bartholomew's teeth on edge. The gray mud in the bottom of the trench began to dance, vibrating in tiny, geometric ripples.
"Mortars!" the corporal shrieked, throwing himself into the dirt. "They're singing!"
The resonance shells struck the hillside above Line Delta. There were no massive explosions of dirt—only blinding, violet flashes of pure, discordant Aetheric energy. The moment the sound waves hit the trench line, the deflection plates didn't block the force; they absorbed it, their blue runes instantly shifting into a violent, screaming purple.
The Weight of the Unsaved
Bartholomew reacted on pure instinct. He sprinted down the twisting trench, his C-Rank Gem erupting into a furious sapphire glare as he slammed his hands onto the nearest screaming deflection plate.
"Miller! Davies!" he shouted, calling out for his AIC Lieutenants before remembering he was alone in the mud. He had no analysts here. No laboratory filters.
He drew deeply from his MP (155), attempting to force the familiar Inverted Temporal Rune into the plate to delay the feedback loop. But the matrix was too primitive; the old 1912 fluid metal couldn't handle the complex future geometry. The rune fractured under his fingers, spitting white-hot sparks that scorched his forearms.
[MATRIX INCOMPATIBLE. TEMPORAL COMPENSATOR RUN-TIME FAILURE. SHIELD IMPLOSION IN 4 SECONDS.]
"Get back!" Bartholomew screamed to the soldiers huddled in the bay.
He couldn't fix it. The realization hit him like an icy fist. His future knowledge was a map of advanced systems, but he was currently dealing with ancient, volatile scrap-metal that lacked the technical infrastructure to accept a modern cure.
He threw himself backward, using his massive Endurance to shield his vital organs just as the deflection plate imploded.
The blast was blinding. A localized shockwave of inverted force tore through the trench bay, shattering the timber supports and collapsing thirty feet of earth in a fraction of a second. Bartholomew was thrown violently through the air, crashing into the muddy trench floor as tons of gray clay poured down around him.
The Horizon of the Unprepared
He didn't lose consciousness. His elevated physical stats saved his life, but his ears were ringing with a deafening, high-pitched whine. He slowly pushed himself up through the heavy gray mud, coughing violently, his uniform torn and caked in filth.
The trench bay was gone. In its place was a horrific mass of collapsed earth and shattered timber. Through the settling dust, Bartholomew could see the boots of the young corporal he had been speaking to just moments before, pinned beneath a two-ton timber beam. There was no movement.
The WLS interface flickered weakly in his vision:
[TACTICAL OVERRIDE: LINE DELTA DEFLECTION FAILURE. CASUALTIES REGISTERED: 14.]
[EXP GAINED: +40 (TACTICAL DATA CORRELATION)]
[EXP: 840/1500]
Bartholomew stared at the numbers. Only forty EXP. The system didn't reward him for surviving a failure he couldn't fix; it only rewarded him for overcoming one. The fourteen men who had just died next to him were merely "data points" to the cold entity governing his soul.
He looked down at his smoking, blistered hands. For the first time since his awakening in 1914, a profound, unadulterated rage began to eclipse his fear. He wasn't just a victim of his memories anymore; he was a pawn in a larger, systemic slaughter orchestrated by men like Vance who viewed human lives as fuel for optimization.
He looked up at the jagged ridges of Sector Blackwood. The resonance mortars were beginning to whistle again in the distance, their terrible, singing notes echoing through the valley.
He couldn't use the advanced future runes here—the current technology was too primitive to hold them. If he wanted to survive this valley and reach the B-Rank power required to pull himself out of Vance's grip, he couldn't rely on elegant, modern solutions. He was going to have to invent something crude, violent, and entirely un-academic. He had to learn how to fight with the broken tools of the present.