--- Some time ago, The Lighthouse ---

Glass walls. A ring of tall monitors. Cold light across polished floors. Alteea stood in the center with a mug slowly going cold and three lines of data that behaved.

First, the miner feed. Alteea decided to monitor them, with all of the recent anomalies. They were green dots like small ants, climbing the north slope.

Then a red blink.

TERMINATED.

Another. And another. The pulse bars next to their IDs went flat. She frowned, tapped the filter, told herself it was a sync delay, a packet drop or a stupid cable.

The alarm line woke.

Short chirps at first. "Minor anomaly" She silenced it without looking away.

Something else lit up – a trace she didn't know. Not a drone. Not something she recognized. A smear near the peak. Too clean for noise, too messy for a signature.

"Why the peak?" she said out loud, but to herself.

She stood there, thinking. Then it hit her. If you want to be seen, you stand higher. If you want to cast farther, you stand higher. She didn't like either answer.

The trace steadied. The alert escalated: UNKNOWN ENTITY - UNKNOWN ORIGIN.

Her mouth went dry. "On the mountain?"

She zoomed in. The shape tried to be a shape and failed.

PATTERN - UNRECOGNIZABLE

The miner board coughed up another red square. TERMINATED. This time the audio hitch came with it - half a second of someone's breath, then silence.

The new trace pulsed.

Her scale ran from Fortitude 1 to 10. The line rose like a tide with somewhere to be. Six. Seven. Eight.

She told herself to breathe.

Nine.

Something crackled in the floor. A faint pop, like a bad bulb dying far away.

Ten.

The line didn't stop.

It kept climbing. The number field glitched. The Lighthouse dimmed. Every monitor tried to draw something that didn't want to be drawn.

The room went bright.

A flat, painful flash as half the wall of screens strobed, blanked, then exploded.

The Lighthouse sneezed glass shards.

Shouts. The deeper bang of a something giving up. A panel near her head burst, a sheet of safety glass slid down in glittering shards. Alteea was hit by it, felt a dozen cuts announce themselves on her forearm and jaw, and didn't stop moving.

"Set power two to auxiliary" she snapped, already at the manual rack. "Cut non-critical. Seal the upper ring."

No answer. The tech who should have answered was on the floor, blinking at her hand like it was a stranger. Blood ran over white tile and pretended to be art.

"Med team to Command" she said softer, to everyone. "Now."

She hauled the main breaker down herself. Half the room went dark, the other half fell to a mean red glow. She kicked a frame out of the way and reached the old board - the ugly one with toggle caps and laminated checklists you could run with two fingers and a pulse.

It still worked.

"Comms - low power. Give me anything" she said, and jammed a thumb on the transmit.

Static. And under it, sirens. Somewhere between the hiss she heard her own voice reflected - no, the tower's echo. She turned the gain down, hard.

"Division Two, status."

"Spinning!" came back, thin and over-compressed. "Rotor diagnostics - good. Lift in… Uh… A minute."

"Division Five - Rune airborne" another voice chopped. "Wingsuit clear. Drop vector requesting."

"Approved" she said. "North slope - ridge three. Wind twenty-two west. Hard gusts."]

"I can't hear y-"

A tech staggered up with glass glittering in the hair. "Windows are shattered. All of them." they said before they saw the blood on their sleeve. Alteea, pushed them toward the command room exit with more care than her tone allowed.

"Down. Clinic. Go" she said. "I've got it."

She thought to herself: What the hell even was that… An EMP? A shock…?

She looked back at the board. The Unknown trace had flattened into nonsense. The system kept trying to label it, failed, and flagged: Error_129B: Data Overwrite. Below that, a line she hated: Auto-Scale Range Exceeded.

"How high did you even go?" she whispered to the empty peak on the screen. "What are you?"

The Lighthouse creaked around her. Below, someone dragged a wounded colleague and left a thin strip of red on the stairs.

No time.

She punched through to every open squad channel. "North ridge - multiple fatalities" she said, making the words colder so they would land. "Division Two is inbound. Hold positions as able."

Static bit her answer.

"Team Three - report." She couldn't help using their call sign first. Habit. Worry.

A reply came back ragged, buried in snow. Hikari's timbre? Hard to tell. "- clear - outside – are- alright?" Then the new alarms drowned it.

Another voice broke in, younger, loud. "- do not - stay put-"

It was Kori, iron behind the overload. Alteea wanted to tell her a ton.

The glass under her boots popped again. A crack ran across the floor like a slow river and stopped a foot shy of the old board's leg.

She killed the thought. She went back to checklists.

Petal walls: she had them. She brought them to amber, not red. Red was for cities under assault. Red would pull attention she couldn't feed. Amber would posture and maybe buy an inch.

Drones: she launched what was left. Their small rotors whined up from the pad like bees with good ideas. If she could get one above the ridge, she could see. If the ridge didn't spit it out of the sky.

Air lanes: she cleared them; painted two approach vectors for quadcopters and one higher for Rune. The tower's wind readouts were still honest. She took the numbers and handed them to a man about to jump into weather with nothing but a fabric suit and faith.

Her forearm burned. She finally looked - thin red lines, glass dust stuck in sweat. Later.

She tried the peak again.

Nothing.

No signature. No smear. The map was clean, falsely clean - like a table wiped after a bad conversation.

It had been there.

Now it wasn't.

"Are you moving…?" she asked the quiet, "or are you done?"

Below the peak, the pulse board kept flashing red. TERMINATED. TERMINATED. Between the death notes, some yellow blinked: Some were still alive. Barely, but alive

She opened for them only. "Hold" she said - aware of how little that word could do.

"Reinforcements inbound. Five minutes. Do not chase. Do not break."

Static scraped at her teeth.

"-divis – copy – more incom-"

Raizen? It sounded like a tired voice.

She wanted to ask a name. She didn't. "Coordinates. Give me your -"

The channel tore. Her monitors tried to come back and failed into white, some into black. The old board stayed steady in her palm.

"Division Two - ETA?" she demanded, and a rotor wash answered her, loud even through walls. A quadcopter slid across the cut glass of sky outside the wound where a window used to be. Another shadow behind it. Another, higher - the angle that meant wingsuit.

"Thirty seconds. Touchdown staggered" the pilot said, calm. Blessedly normal.

"Rune?" she asked.

"On the wind" someone else answered, a little grin tucked in the phrase. "He's smiling. Too much."

"Good" she said. She didn't add don't. She didn't add stop being an idiot. She knew which kids listened and which didn't until you made them.

She pressed the general. "Vanguards on site" she said. The words tasted real as soon as she spoke them. "Hold your line."

The tower had stopped shaking. The wind had its voice again. The smell of burned circuits filled the air everywhere

She set her jaw. She put her bleeding hand back on the board. And, with half a room and a dozen cuts, began to steer a war from an ugly, faithful panel that had never lied to her once.

Inside, Alteea watched the clean map where a monster had been and understood the worst part:

It wasn't waiting.

It was gone.

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