"They're not choosing which dies," Natasha said, voice tight. "They're shaping the fight so the sacrifice, if it comes, has meaning."
On the field, the squads moved like a single instrument. Unit A peeled off in tight columns, rifles braced, moving low and fast toward the convoy. Unit D and E surged forward in a synchronized push—smoke grenades popped, suppressive fire hammered gaps, and the metal hounds that had tried to pin the platoon were met with a counter-assault so clean it looked rehearsed for months.
Unit C looped wide, a short wing intended to intercept and delay any reinforcements the Trial might throw at the convoy. Unit F—less flashy, more pivotal—angled to the midpoint and dug in. They erected a moving defense: sandbags in a heartbeat, shields locked, medics set up triage while engineers prepped an improvised extraction lane.
The convoy sat in the open: civilians, collapsed vehicles, scores of unarmed people huddled among crates and overturned tarps. The platoon, a hundred meters further, was a hard point—trenches, smoke, a few wounded bleeding into the sand. The Trial's clock ticked like a metronome.
From the observation room, Dave watched without saying a word. Tony leaned forward, mug forgotten. Steve's eyes narrowed. Natasha's eyes were flinty, ready to object to any needless risk. Aizen's slight smile looked almost amused.
"Watch the vectors," said a quiet voice in comms from the field commander. "We compress the enemy's decision space. If they try to split, they'll thin themselves. If they commit, they'll hit our trap."
The Trial responded, as it always did, by escalating. A new pack of constructs erupted from a dune ridge to the convoy's flank—faster, sleeker, coordinated to drive civilians into the open. Simultaneously, heavier, armoured constructs slammed into the platoon's left, pushing hard to force the defenders to bleed.
Unit A hit the convoy like a hammer. They moved in pairs, clearing pockets, dragging civilians low, loading them onto makeshift litters. Unit C took the long flank, drawing two packs away by using noise and collapse charges—sacrifices of cover and time to buy the convoy a corridor. Unit F's fallback net held in place, taking the brunt of a temporary probe while medics triaged. Unit D and E, meanwhile, took the fight to the platoon's assailants—bayonets and sledgehammers in the dust, close, brutal, precise.
Materials, stamina, timing: everything was economy. Every second someone spent reviving a civilian cost the platoon a fraction of stability. Every second the platoon held reduced the number of beasts that could be reallocated to the convoy. Their strategy had created a coupling—one effort bolstered the other.
The Trial reacted unpredictably: it sent a heavy, jackhammering construct that aimed to split the midpoint, forcing Unit F to expose itself. The midpoint buckled under pressure; a line man went down with a leg smashed by hydraulic limbs. For a breath, a gap opened.
A medic crawled into the breach anyway, dragging the wounded back behind the line. Another soldier filled the hole, replacing him without hesitation. The formation adapted.
From Unity Tower, Tony let out a low, awed whistle. "They're trading risk and reward the way seasoned commanders do. That was a bad move by the Trial—this isn't a binary puzzle anymore."
Shuri tapped at the console, watching movement vectors overlay in real time. "They're folding time—compressing the decision loops so the Trial can't surgically excise one target without bleeding its own forces."
The clock pressed down. Civilians were being loaded onto litters; wounded were patched; a few of the evac vehicles were restarted with quick jury-rigging. At the platoon, the defenders found a second wind as reinforcements broke the would-be encirclement. The assailant construct that had focused the platoon was torn apart in a coordinated charge led by Unit D's shock team.
Then the Trial tried a final, cruel trick: it flooded the comms with a single, piercing transmission—apparently from Command—ordering a full redeploy to the convoy. The feed's metadata flagged it as a Trial-inserted false order, but the comms latency and the storm's distortion made it dangerous to assume authenticity.
The commander who'd been holding everything together glanced at his squad, then at the convoy corridor, then simply tapped his helmet twice—the standard reject. No one obeyed the false order. They tightened, and their decision held.
Seconds before the trials timer would have declared a forced degradation, Unit A shoved the last civilian onto the extraction strip. A helicopter-illusion—part of the Trial—rotated into view: a safe extract for the convoy, minutes ahead of schedule only because Unit C's flank had pinned the nearest counter-pack long enough.
At the platoon, Unit D and E's assault collapsed the last major threat; their wounded were few, their cohesion intact. The Trial's siren flickered. The HUD flashed:
[PHASE 4 — JUDGMENT SHIFT: RESOLVED]
[Outcome: Adaptive Command Doctrine — SUCCESS]
[Civilians Evacuated: 92%]
[Platoon Survival: 87%]
[Casualties: Moderate — Accounted & Stabilized]
On the field, soldiers exhaled but did not cheer. They did what they were trained to do: minimize loss, maximize mission value. A medic finished stitching a leg, a commander adjusted his map, and the formation re-composed, ready for whatever the Trial sent next.
In the control room, silence broke into a mix of measured relief and sober curiosity.
Tony clapped once. "Hell of a plan."
Natasha's hand didn't leave the edge of the console. "They earned it. But note the cost. This Trial doesn't forgive mistakes."
Aizen's gaze lingered on the field, thoughtful. "They created a third option by constraining the battlefield. That's the kind of thinking that wins wars."
Dave, still quiet, finally spoke. "They worked together. No heroics, no gambling. That's what I wanted to see."
The Trial's feed pulsed, recalibrated, and with clinical impartiality, opened the next bracket. The desert did not rest. The participants did not either.
But whatever the Trial had been designed to break in them—pride, panic, ego—it had failed. They had become the kind of force that turned impossible choices into structured outcomes. They had learned, in motion, how to carry the weight of other people's lives and make it matter.
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