Chapter 13: The Sergeant’s Rules

Chapter 13: Chapter 13: The Sergeant’s Rules

The firing range appeared while Marcus was still taking off his helmet.

It came the way Aveline’s courtyard had: a ripple through the grey slate, spreading outward from the spot where the new summon first stood in the Sanctum. This time, the stone didn’t turn to cobbles. It turned to hard-packed dirt and gravel. Sandbag walls rose along one side, and a long wooden firing line stretched out from the courtyard’s east wall. Beyond it, at twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred meters, paper targets stood on steel frames, faded and peppered with old holes.

A corrugated tin shed. A rack of empty ammo crates. An easel holding a target board painted flat black, with a stub of chalk in its tray.

[Fragment manifested: Range Four, FOB Halvard.]

Marcus stood very still in the middle of it, his helmet in one hand.

Aveline rose from the rim of the cracked fountain and came to stand beside him. She didn’t say anything. She’d been through this once already, and she knew.

"Range Four," Marcus said after a long moment. "I qualified half my platoon here. Kowalski couldn’t hit the fifty-meter target for a month." He walked to the firing line and ran his hand along the wood, worn smooth by a thousand elbows. "Reyes carved her initials into the post at the end. Command made her sand them off."

He walked to the end of the line and crouched. Then he laughed, short and rough.

"She carved them back."

Elias came close enough to see: two letters in the post, R.R., sanded faint and then cut deep again.

Marcus stood and set his helmet on the post, carefully, right over the letters. When he turned around, his face had settled back into the same flat calm it had worn on the rooftop.

"Right," he said. "Sit down, Pierce. Let’s see what I’m working with."

Elias sat on an ammo crate. Marcus pulled up another one across from him, close, elbows on his knees. Aveline leaned against the sandbags with her arms folded, and Elias had the distinct impression she was enjoying this.

"Fights," Marcus said. "Every one since you got this. Start at the beginning."

So Elias told him: the Drowned Cathedral, the King, the censer, walking into the swing. Three nights of rats in the Warrens. Thornback Gully, the shaman, and the firebolt he’d eaten on purpose.

Marcus listened without interrupting. When Elias got to the firebolt, his eyebrows rose a quarter inch.

"You broke position."

"She had a blind side."

"He did," Aveline said. "I’ve told him not to make a habit of it."

"Good." Marcus looked at Elias. "Breaking position to cover a blind side is right. Breaking it because you got excited is how people die. Learn the difference. Next. Status."

Elias opened it and turned it so they could both see.

[ STATUS ]

Name: Elias Pierce

Rank: D

Level: 5 | EXP: 40 / 600

Class: Assassin [E-Rank] | Threshold Summoner [HIDDEN]

HP: 190 / 190 | MP: 104 / 104 | STA: 170 / 170

STR: 10 | AGI: 16 | VIT: 12

INT: 24 | PER: 24 | WIL: 26

Marcus read it the way he’d read a casualty report, slowly and twice.

"Strength ten. You know that’s low."

"I know."

"Willpower twenty-six. Perception twenty-four." He nodded. "You’re not a fighter, Pierce. You’re a spotter nobody’s taught to shoot. That’s fine. I can work with a spotter." He tapped the window. "How many of us can you call?"

"A new slot every five levels." Elias expanded the skill. At the bottom sat a line he’d skimmed past before. "And a limit. Bound summons: twelve."

"Twelve," Aveline repeated softly.

Marcus didn’t say anything. He just filed it away, and Elias recognized the look. He’d seen it in the mirror.

"Money," Marcus said.

Elias hesitated, then laid it out. Mira’s stabilizer, fourteen hundred a month. The overdue bill he’d paid with a coin from Ozzie’s. Garrick’s envelope, sitting in a shoebox under his bed, enough for three months if he touched it for nothing else. And what an E-rank solo clear brought in at the Association exchange: groceries, if you didn’t eat much.

"And your sister," Marcus said, quieter now.

"Mira. Sixteen." Elias looked down at his hands. "Gate sickness, from the Crimson Break. It’s getting worse slowly. The doctors keep mentioning a better treatment in careful voices, which means I can’t afford it." He swallowed. "And Garrick Holt knows which floor she’s on."

Marcus was quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," he said. He stood up and went to the board.

He picked up the chalk and wrote across the top in block capitals: THE PLAN.

"Rule one." GATES EVERY NIGHT. "Hospital in the day, gates at night, six hours of sleep minimum. You don’t get to skip sleep. Tired spotters miss things."

"Rule two." ONE RANK AT A TIME. "You clear what your status says you can clear. When it goes up, we go up. Not before." He looked at Elias. "You don’t get to walk into another cathedral. Nobody gets lucky twice."

"Rule three." TWO BUYERS. He drew two boxes side by side. "The Association exchange gets the boring stuff, enough to look like a hardworking E-rank assassin scraping by, and nothing more. Your friend Ozzie gets everything else, in small batches, never on the same day. Nobody looks at one place and sees the whole picture."

Elias stared at the board. It was so simple. He’d been doing a clumsy version of it already without ever putting it into words.

"Rule four." NOBODY KNOWS. "Mask on outside sanctioned clears. Nobody with a badge ever sees us. If someone does, we’re gone before they finish looking."

"Rule five." SANCTUM EVERY DAY. He pointed the chalk at Aveline. "She makes you hard to kill. I teach you to read a field. Skills in here, levels out there."

He stepped back and looked at the board. Then he stepped forward again and wrote one more line at the bottom, smaller than the rest.

EVERYBODY COMES HOME.

He didn’t explain it. He didn’t have to. Elias thought of the red warning in his status window, and of the initials carved twice into the post.

Marcus set the chalk back in the tray and turned around.

"You want twelve of us?" he said. "Then you level like it’s your job."