The command tent smelled of ink, blood, and burnt parchment. Reyes cleared a long table with one sweep of his arm, scattering ration tins to the dirt floor, and unrolled a thick stack of reports that looked like they'd been handled too many times by too many shaking hands.
"Most of this is fragments," Reyes said, spreading the papers out. "Scout accounts from the perimeter, a handful of recovered journal pages from the bodies we did get back, and one survivor — barely. She made it out three hours after her team went silent. Hasn't said much since."
"I want to talk to her," Aryan said.
"She's in the infirmary tent. I'll take you after this." Reyes tapped the topmost report, a hastily scrawled account in handwriting that grew progressively less steady toward the bottom of the page. "What we've pieced together: the other side of that Gate isn't a single dungeon. It's a layered zone — at least three distinct tiers our scouts have mapped from a distance, each one worse than the last. The outer tier is mostly low-tier corrupted beasts, the kind your reports already described from the perimeter breaches. Survivable, in numbers, with proper coordination."
"And the deeper tiers?"
"That's where both A-Rank teams stopped sending updates." Reyes pulled out a second page, this one stained dark along one edge in a way Aryan chose not to examine too closely. "One scout, watching from extreme range with a long-sight crystal, reported something she called 'the Choir' — multiple voices speaking in unison from deep within the second tier, in a language her translation ward couldn't parse. She pulled out immediately after. Smart woman. Probably the only reason she's still breathing."
Aryan absorbed that in silence, turning the implications over. Not just stronger monsters. Something coordinated. Something that spoke, even if nobody could understand what it was saying.
"What's the third tier?"
"Unknown," Reyes admitted. "Nobody's gotten close enough to describe it and come back. The working theory among the mages is that it's the source — wherever the corrupted mana is actually originating from, the thing the Gate itself is feeding. Close that, theoretically, and the Gate destabilizes." He shrugged, a tired, hollow gesture. "Theoretically. Nobody's tested it, because nobody's made it that far."
A young medic ducked into the tent, hesitating at the sight of Aryan before addressing Reyes directly. "Commander, the survivor's awake. She's asking for water again, but she's lucid for now, if you wanted—"
"We're coming," Reyes said, already moving.
The infirmary tent was quieter than the command tent, lit by dim mana-lanterns, rows of cots holding soldiers in various states of repair. The survivor sat propped against a folded blanket near the back, her armor stripped down to a simple wrap of bandages across one shoulder, her eyes distant in the particular way of someone who'd seen something her mind hadn't finished processing yet.
"Sera," Reyes said gently. "This is Aryan. He's going in after the others. I need you to tell him what you told me, if you can."
Sera's eyes moved slowly to Aryan, taking in his youth, his plain clothes, the absence of any visible rank insignia, with the flat exhaustion of someone too depleted to feel surprised by anything anymore.
"You're not ready," she said. It wasn't an insult. It came out more like an apology.
"Probably not," Aryan agreed. "Tell me anyway."
Something in his answer seemed to settle her slightly — not comfort exactly, but the recognition of someone who wasn't pretending otherwise. She took a slow breath and began.
"We cleared the outer tier in under an hour. Coordinated, clean, textbook. The second tier is where it changed." Her hands, resting in her lap, had curled slightly without her seeming to notice. "The corrupted beasts there don't attack randomly. They herd. They drove us into a narrow valley of black rock, and that's when we heard it — the Choir. Voices, dozens of them, all speaking together, perfectly in time, like a single throat split into many mouths." She paused. "Our translation wards couldn't process it. Not because the language was unknown. Because the ward kept registering it as more than one language at once, layered on top of itself."
"What happened after that?" Aryan asked quietly.
"I don't fully know," Sera admitted. "Something in the sound itself made three of my squad simply... stop. Mid-fight. Standing still, eyes open, like they'd forgotten what they were doing. The beasts didn't even need to attack them after that. They just walked over and—" She stopped, swallowing hard, and didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
"How did you get out?"
"I ran," Sera said, and there was no shame in her voice at all, only flat, exhausted honesty. "The Choir's effect seemed tied to proximity and duration. I'd been at the edge of the group, not the center. I had maybe four seconds before whatever it was finished taking hold completely. I used them running instead of standing still trying to understand it." Her eyes finally focused fully on Aryan, sharp despite everything. "Don't try to understand it. Whatever you do down there. The understanding is the trap."
Aryan held that warning carefully, turning it over alongside everything Reyes had already given him. Not raw strength, then — or not only raw strength. Whatever waited in the second tier hunted attention, comprehension, the very human instinct to listen and make sense of things.
"Thank you," Aryan said. "Truly. I know this isn't easy to talk about."
Sera studied him a moment longer, then said something that lodged itself in Aryan's chest more firmly than any of the tactical details had. "The two who didn't make it back — Daven and Yuki. If you find anything left of them in there… I'd rather know the truth than keep wondering. Whatever that truth turns out to be."
It was the same request, almost word for word, that Aryan had made to Marcus barely a day earlier. No dressing it up. Just the truth, whatever it is.
"I'll remember that," Aryan said, and meant it completely.
Outside the infirmary tent, the artillery continued its slow, relentless rhythm against the Gate, and the sky above the Northern Wastes held its long, bruised wound open, patient as ever, waiting for whatever came through it next — in either direction.