Three days of drills, sparring, and learning exactly how badly Alex cheated at cards passed faster than I expected. By the morning we shipped out, Vanguard Squad had a rhythm, even if it was a rough one — Ian led, Dustin watched everyone's flank without being told to, Ralph talked too much before a fight and went dead silent during one, and Alex apparently thought every serious moment needed a joke to cut the tension, which annoyed me right up until the third time it actually worked.
The convoy was five trucks, twelve regular soldiers, and us. We rode in the third truck, crates of ammunition digging into my spine every time the wheels found a pothole — and there were a lot of potholes. Three years since the world had gone to hell and nobody had gotten around to repaving anything.
"You've done this before," Alex said to me around the two-hour mark, nodding at how I had my legs braced, weapon across my knees instead of slung over my shoulder.
"A few times."
"How many's a few?"
I thought about it honestly. "Enough that I stopped counting the small ones."
He didn't ask what counted as small. I appreciated that.
The land outside the truck's canvas flap had gone quiet in the specific way I'd learned to distrust. No zombies shambling in the open fields, no birds either, which was worse — birds meant nothing dangerous nearby, and their absence usually meant the opposite. I caught Dustin's eye across the truck bed. He'd noticed too.
"Something's off," I said, loud enough for the truck to hear but not loud enough to carry outside it.
Ian leaned toward the front and rapped twice on the divider separating us from the driver's cab. "Report — anything on the road ahead?"
The driver's voice crackled back through the little speaker mounted near the divider. "Nothing on visual. Wait — "
The convoy jolted to a stop hard enough that I nearly ate the crate in front of me. Ralph swore. Somewhere up front, gunfire cracked, three shots, then a scream that cut off wrong.
"Out, out, out," Ian barked, and we were moving before he finished the second word.
I hit the ground already moving mana into my legs, and what I saw made my stomach drop. Not Free faction. Not yet, anyway. Zombies — a dozen of them, tier three at least, veins glowing faint blue under torn skin, and they weren't shambling. They were spread in a rough crescent around the lead truck, cutting off the road ahead and boxing us in against a ditch on either side.
Coordinated. Positioned. That wasn't tier three behavior. That was someone's tactics.
"Formation!" Ian shouted, already sparking lightning along both forearms. "Ralph, cover the left flank, Alex with me on the right, Dustin — "
"On it." Dustin didn't wait for the rest of the sentence. He raised one hand, and the air around the nearest three zombies visibly thickened, warped, their charge slowing to something closer to walking through wet cement. Gravity, dialed down and localized — I hadn't seen him use it in a real fight yet, and it was uglier and more effective than I'd expected.
I drew both deagles and felt the crystal in the barrels answer, mana flowing down my arms without me having to fight it the way I used to. One of the soldiers from the lead truck was down, a tier three straddling him with its jaw already opening too wide.
I didn't stop time. Not yet. Four people were watching, and a bullet was faster to explain than a blink.
I fired twice. Both rounds took the zombie through the side of the skull, and it dropped off the soldier in a boneless heap. The soldier scrambled backward, wide-eyed, and I was already moving to the next target.
The fight itself didn't last long. Four crystal-eaters and a dozen soldiers against a dozen tier threes wasn't close to a fair matchup anymore, not the way it would have been six months ago. Ralph's fire took two at once, a wide arc of blue flame that left the smell of burnt copper hanging in the air. Alex's sword, coated black, went through a zombie's collarbone at an angle that shouldn't have worked and somehow did. I used exactly one half-second of time stop — the smallest sliver I could manage — to close the last few feet on a zombie about to reach a soldier who'd frozen up, and put both rounds through it before time caught back up to everyone else.
Nobody noticed. Nobody was looking for it. That was the whole point of only ever using a sliver.
When the last body hit the dirt, Ian did a headcount — five Vanguard, twelve soldiers, one down but breathing, dragged clear by a medic who was already working on him.
"That wasn't random," Dustin said, crouching by one of the corpses. He turned its head with the toe of his boot. No visible wound except the one that had killed it, but there was something in its posture, even dead, that read wrong. "They held formation. Zombies don't hold formation."
"Coordinated hunting pack," Ralph said. "Someone's directing them. Or something."
I thought of the tier four in the warehouse basement, the fire arrows, the lab coat, the way it had talked before it fought like it enjoyed having an audience.
"Get it on the report," Ian said. "Command needs to know if these things are organizing." He looked at the road ahead, clear now, the convoy still intact. "But we've still got a job. Free faction isn't going to wait for us to finish philosophizing about zombie tactics."
We loaded the wounded soldier back into his truck and got moving again, twenty minutes behind schedule and a lot more awake than we'd been an hour ago.