The longboat cut across the bay like a knife through kelp, its progress smooth but with just enough resistance to piss Kade off.

  She sat near the bow, coat collar turned up against the stiffening breeze, the salt-stained leather soft from use and weather. Behind her, oars dipped in and out of the water in perfect rhythm, the low creak of the rigging and the wet slap of wood on sea forming a syncopated march. The sea was mercifully calm, almost as if sensing her mood and deciding not to test her.

  Being used was enough to spark her ire. Losing one of her crew lit it into something colder. Would having had all the information about what was happening in that warehouse have saved the Marine? Probably not. But Burrell’s lies of omission had taken away the chance to find out.

  Over her shoulder, Sergeant Myers was bantering with one of his squad, a woman with a chipped tooth and the unmistakable look of someone who’d just been through the grinder. He worked a mouthful of sunflower seeds as he talked, spitting the shells over the side of the longboat between sentences, each one a small punctuation mark in his story about a siren who supposedly had a thing for men with crooked noses.

  Kade didn’t bother turning around. She’d heard the story before, and Myers always changed the ending depending on who he thought needed cheering up.

  It seemed as if every mission they lost someone. It wasn't sustainable. They needed to get harder faster. If this is how a group of professional soldiers were dealing with the cataclysm, what was it like for the world, she wondered.

  Clouds stretched low and thick across the sky, muting the sun’s glare into a steel-gray sheen on the bay’s surface. The city across the water hunched like a rusted carcass, scaffolding clawing skyward around dry docks, cranes frozen mid-motion, their silhouettes fractured by the rippling water.

  She tried to shake off her morose as she caught a movement off the starboard side, just at the edge of perception. A long shadow drifted beneath the surface, moving with deliberate ease near the mouth of the bay. Big fish. Bigger than anything local, even before the world fell apart. It had no dorsal fin and left no wake. In this new world, you could only know for sure if it was a predator by whether it tried to bite you. It slipped away without breaking the surface, content to vanish into deeper water. Whatever it was, it had no interest in them. Not today.

  That suited her just fine. She had no interest in picking a fight with an oversized sea creature. She had bigger prey in mind, and it was waiting behind a desk with a face that deserved a broken nose.

  Kade sighed and tried to let the tension slip from her shoulders before it turned into a headache. She flicked open her interface with a thought, and the system shimmered into place across her vision.

  +1 Grenadier | That's not how you prepare crab, but sure, pull the pin, season with shrapnel, serve with a side of tactical overkill.

  +1 Leadership | Leadership isn’t about glory. It’s about being the one who decides who walks into danger and who doesn’t come back.

  +1 Light Armor | You moved fast, hit hard, and trusted the armor to take what you couldn’t dodge.

  +1 Sword Combat | Turns out swinging sharp metal at angry things is still a valid strategy. Who knew?

  The numbers should’ve felt like a win. Boosts to sword combat and light armor were always good. The Simulation continued to show its snark with the grenadier and rewarding alternate ways of thinking about combat. However, the comment about the leadership gain stung. Not because it was mean or even wrong. Rather, it was the truth and something every officer had to learn the hard way. Of course, they learned it during officer training, but they never truly understood it until they experienced the situation. It was a lesson Kade knew forward and backward. She wished the Simulation would feel the need to keep reminding her of the lesson.

  She blinked the screen to the side with a thought and pulled up her character sheet.

  Name: Sarah Kade

  Class: Corsair

  Level: 8

  Health: 340/340

  Mana: 200/200

  Stats

  Strength: 9

  Dexterity: 7

  Intelligence: 10

  Constitution: 7

  Charisma: 8 (9)

  Abilities

  Against the Tide

  Blade Whirl

  Command Presence

  Deck Fighter

  Riposte of the Kraken

  Stormwall Stance

  Skills

  Amphibious Combat: 1

  Amphibious Movement: 1

  Dirty Fighting: 11

  Grenadier: 2

  Leadership: 17 (22)

  Light Armor: 6

  Ocean Craft: 10

  Ocean Navigation: 8

  Sailing: 8

  Stealth: 1

  Sword Combat: 15

  Tactical Negotiation: 2

  Nothing life-changing since she'd checked her character sheet days earlier. Just clean stats and a tidy line of combat logs with her name stamped on more than a few kills. Her hands rested on her knees, fingers curled tight enough to press half-moons into the leather. The skill gains came at a cost. It always did. But this time, it wasn’t just the blood of enemies under her boots.

  One Marine was dead. She knew the name, the face, the service record, but none of that mattered right now. Not to the system, and not to Burrell. The rest of the squad had walked away with cuts, bruises, and worse. One of them appeared to have dislocated their shoulder. The woman Myers had been chatting with was bleeding from half a dozen scrapes, and her chipped tooth stood out like a badge of the mess they’d just crawled through.

  The op hadn’t gone sideways. It had gone exactly as planned. That was the problem. They’d cleared the warehouse like they were supposed to, and in doing so, handed the Tidebound Front a piece they needed to lock down control of the safe zone. It was never about neutralizing a threat. It was about taking ground. She just hadn’t seen it until it was too late.

  The Talon hadn’t been sent in blind, but they had been used. And she had let it happen.

  The oars slowed as the docks came into view. Despite years of brine and neglect, the dock timbers still held, though warped. The Talon’s silhouette loomed just beyond the pier, its hull riding low and scarred from the last fight. Even from here, she could hear the shouting. Crewmembers barked orders to ready the tow lines, boots pounded across the deck, and metal clattered against metal as someone checked the rigging.

  They were prepping to move her into drydock. Looked like Burrell was going to honor his part of the deal for clearing out Warehouse Seventeen, just like he’d promised. His engineers were set to handle the repairs, and after Block Island Station and the fight with Naomi Darkmoor, the Talon needed every bit.

  On the dock, Petty Officer Stone stood at the ready in her Navy-issue fatigues, sleeves rolled high and gloves already stained. She looked like she hadn’t stopped treating the wounded since they docked. Kade hadn’t brought a healer on the op. She'd thought it was too risky to put one of their three clerics in the field. Better to keep them out of combat. That logic had felt solid at the time. Given how everything turned out, she wasn't so sure of that logic now.

  The longboat thudded against the dock with a dull, final sound. Kade stood and stepped off without waiting for orders, her boots hitting the worn planks with a solid weight that came from exhaustion, anger, and purpose. She didn’t look back. Myers and Stone were already moving, guiding the injured toward the waiting corpsmen and helping lift the body bag onto a stretcher. That part didn’t need her.

  Ahead, two figures descended the Talon’s gangplank. She saw Lawson first, stiff-backed, eyes locked on the longboat like he was already accounting for the losses. Behind him, Captain Voss walked with arms folded and jaw clenched, his face unreadable. Since the Cataclysm, he had always looked like someone had stolen his favorite knife. Today, it looked like he planned to find whoever did it.

  Kade stopped just shy of the end of the dock. Voss stepped in first. He gave her a curt nod, eyes flicking briefly to the wounded being carried past.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “Looks like you’ve been through it.”

  Kade didn’t bother with pleasantries. "I'm sure you know things weren't as advertised if you saw the Simulation notification."

  Voss exhaled, not with frustration but with the breath that came from carrying a weight that never got lighter.

  “I saw it,” he said. “And no, I’m not happy with our friend Mr. Burrell.”

  Kade said nothing. She didn’t trust her voice not to come out sharp enough to cut.

  “I’d like you to express that feeling to him,” Voss added. “Lawson’s your shadow for the rest of the day.”

  At that, Lawson stepped forward, offering a mock salute. Four Marines fell in behind him without a word, spreading into a loose escort formation as if they’d been briefed an hour ago. They were clean, alert, and not looking to be friends. Kade didn’t need them to be.

  She gave Voss a quick head jerk in return, then turned and started walking. The admin building sat at the far end of the yard, all sandbags, rusted scaffolding, and too many eyes watching from behind boarded windows. As they cast off the lines and secured the tow ropes, the Talon’s hull groaned behind her. The dock crew moved with quiet urgency, prepping the ship for drydock before anything else went wrong in this powder keg of a fortification.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Kade didn’t look back.

  She had a meeting to attend, and someone to remind that the Horizon Talon wasn’t a pawn.

  One crisis down. Now for the knife fight dressed in paperwork.

  Soldiers did not line the warpath she carved through the Tidebound Front's sprawl. It was lined with people pretending to be them. Dockhands in mismatched armor stood at checkpoints, trying to look sharp. Civilians with makeshift weapons watched from scaffold towers, wearing the nervous focus of those who had trained on instinct rather than doctrine.

  They moved as if they thought the war was over. Head high, strides confident, backs just a little too relaxed. The Simulation had already spread the word. The warehouse was cleared, the zone locked down, and the Tidebound Front had officially claimed another chunk of contested ground. It seemed that no one noticed they had four other locations left to capture.

  Kade kept her eyes forward. Lawson moved beside her without a word, their Marine escort a silent buffer behind them. She didn’t need to see the looks they were getting to feel them. Judgement, maybe. Gratitude, possibly. But more than anything, distrust. The kind that came from watching someone else do the bleeding for your flag but still being an outsider.

  Not one of them had shed blood for it.

  They passed an old parking structure, which someone had converted into a makeshift watchtower. Ahead, above the heads of a few scattered civilians moving along the street, a small Restoration Council flag bobbed into view. Blue field, gold circle, and that ornate little shield inside it, one half marked with chevrons, the other with a stylized municipal building.

  And the penny drops, Kade thought to herself. Figures.

  The cart came into view a moment later. Hand-built reinforced wheels, wooden frame reinforced with bolted aluminum ribs. Probably scavenged from a lawn trailer or industrial dolly, then upgraded by someone who liked the idea of ceremony more than utility. Two poor bastards pulled it, and both were already sweating through heavy-duty rescue jackets with postures tight from frustration. The man seated inside didn’t seem to notice.

  He looked like a government press conference brought to life. Double-breasted coat, high collar, cuffs trimmed in gold thread that probably used to mean something before the world collapsed. His expression didn’t carry the grim satisfaction of victory. It carried the hunger of someone who saw a power vacuum and was already deciding how best to fill it.

  Kade didn’t stop walking, but her eyes lingered just long enough to mark his face and the way he carried himself like he expected the world to give him right-of-way. A bureaucrat with a title and a target.

  Lawson glanced at the cart, then muttered just loud enough for her to hear.

  “Bet we don’t get to avoid that one.”

  "Maybe if we walk faster, he'll vanish," she replied.

  "I've tried that with exes. Doesn't work."

  Burrell had thrown the Talon into the fire to secure a political foothold. The mission had succeeded, but the cost wasn’t just one dead Marine and several wounded. It was a battered team and a time bomb dropped into the middle of an already unstable political situation. Kade wasn’t ready to call that a strategic win, let alone the foundation of a beneficial alliance.

  Kade kept moving, pace unbroken.

  The admin building stood a short walk ahead, its double doors propped open with a concrete block and a stack of bundled cables. Kade crossed the street without waiting for traffic, not that there was any. She didn’t need to check her pace. Lawson and the Marines kept up easily.

  At the threshold, she glanced over her shoulder. The Restoration Council cart was still making its slow, deliberate crawl through the streets several blocks behind them. The councilor sat upright inside it, gaze locked ahead like he expected the world to part in front of him.

  Kade stepped into the building without breaking stride. Her boots hit the tile with practiced weight, coat catching the air behind her.

  Inside, the lobby was quiet, the air thick with the scent of paper, sweat, and damp plaster. A woman at the reception desk started to rise, but Kade was already past her. Two armed guards at the hallway entrance shifted uncertainly, their hands twitching toward weapons they clearly weren’t confident using. Kade didn’t slow down.

  Behind her, Lawson’s voice cut in with polite steel.

  “Let’s give the lieutenant and Mr. Burrell some alone time to talk.”

  It wasn’t a suggestion. The secretary froze mid-step, her breath caught halfway to protest. Hesitantly, the guards retreated toward the wall, silent. The four Marines who had been shadowing Kade and Lawson repositioned cleanly, two near the door, two watching the hall.

  Kade didn’t look back.

  She reached the office door and pushed it open without knocking.

  Inside, Burrell Haskett stood behind his table covered in topographic maps and hard copy deployment logs. Red and black marks scattered across the surface. A yellow grease pencil sat uncapped near his hand. He didn’t look surprised to see her.

  “Lieutenant Kade,” he said. “I was expecting you.”

  Kade stepped into the room and shut the door behind her with enough force to shake the wall. Her voice came out hard and steady.

  “You sent me in knowing you were using us for your political games.”

  Burrell didn’t flinch. He set the pencil down and folded his hands behind his back, eyes fixed on her with the calm patience of someone who’d already built his defense.

  “I sent someone who could clear the warehouse and needed a favor from me. Don’t act like you’re not getting what you wanted out of the deal. I’m keeping my end. Your ship is already on its way to dry dock.”

  “You used us to tip the balance of power.”

  “I used you to take a step toward securing a safe zone for everyone. That’s not a game. That’s survival.”

  The words landed with the weight of hard pragmatism. And it wasn’t a lie. That was what made it worse.

  Kade stood silent for a beat, fists clenched at her sides. The anger was still there, simmering hot in her chest, but now it had something colder wrapped around it. Understanding. She saw exactly what kind of man Burrell was. He wasn’t a coward or a schemer. He was a builder, and he was more than willing to use blood as mortar.

  The shout wanted out. She bit it back and swallowed something colder.

  “I want to know what you think I would’ve said if you’d told me the truth before we deployed,” she said.

  Burrell’s expression didn’t change.

  “So do I.”

  Kade gave a quick breath through her nose, not quite a laugh, not quite anything close to humor.

  “Now we’ll never know.”

  Burrell didn’t move. He stood on the far side of the table, fingers resting lightly on a spread of marked-up maps, the yellow grease pencil forgotten by his hand. Kade didn’t sit. She hadn’t been invited, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have taken the offer. The silence between them as each one was waiting for the other to make the next move. A move that would determine the direction of the Tidebound Front and Horizon Talon relationship.

  Before either could launch the next salvo in their verbal sparring, shouting from the lobby interrupted.

  A female voice shrieked. “You can’t just go in there!”

  Kade and Burrell both turned to watch the doorway the second the commotion started taking place.

  Another voice followed. It was Lawson. “You boys will stay out here with us. Everything going on in there will be above our pay grade.”

  A second later, the office door slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame. The councilor from the Restoration Council stormed in, red-faced and breathless, his entrance more force of ego than urgency. When Kade saw the cart on the street earlier, she’d known her time with Burrell would be short, and now it was.

  She didn’t like where things stood with Burrell, but she already knew she was going to like this man even less. A punch in the mouth or a kick in the pants. That was the choice being presented. Neither was the preferred choice, but that was rarely an option in these situations.

  He came to a hard stop just inside the room, eyes locked on Burrell, full of purpose and offense.

  Burrell didn’t say a word. Kade didn’t either.

  “You’ve overstepped. Again. That warehouse was the property of the Portland Government, and you had no authority to seize it, let alone assign military action without oversight.”

  Kade shifted her weight but didn’t speak. She didn't want to enter the fray until she knew what cards everyone was holding in the political game.

  Burrell straightened. “We secured a threat in a contested zone. If the Council wanted the credit for the warehouse then, they should have cleared it, you pompous ass!”

  “You don't get to dictate terms to the rightful government of Portland during this disaster situation.”

  “There is no rightful government of Portland. Callan, you lost that right after you all hid in your offices while everyone else was out here screaming for help and dying waiting for it to come!”

  Callan opened his mouth to argue, then spotted Kade. His tone changed as if someone had flipped a switch.

  “And you. Who authorized your deployment?”

  Kade met his stare. “Which part of it?”

  “You’re a military asset operating inside a civilian zone. You should have reported to the local government for coordinated disaster relief upon arrival, not initiate unsanctioned combat operations. Effective immediately, you’ll report to…”

  “No,” Kade said flatly.

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  “I was. You’re not in my chain of command, Councilor. I answer to federal command authority, not a local government trying to reassert itself. Until that changes, I’m not your asset.”

  Callan took a step forward. “You don’t get to kill things in Portland without our permission.”

  Kade’s eyes narrowed. “Didn’t see you volunteering to go in first.”

  Callan’s mouth worked for a half-second, searching for some response with teeth. None arrived. He turned back to Burrell instead.

  “This is reckless. All of it. Unchecked aggression, unauthorized operations, and now you're coordinating military movements outside of government authority?”

  Burrell didn’t blink. “Unchecked aggression!? Do you even hear yourself? It's the end of the world, Callan. Honest to god monsters are roaming the streets, and we need action, not studies and committees. You aren't doing anything to build a safe place for people, so I am!”

  Before Callan could fire back, a Simulation message turned the entire situation on its head.

  Greetings, players! Simulation global event incoming! The number of unsanctified remains found within the world has allowed regional Undead Generals to manifest and gather armies. Find these armies, and destroy the Generals to clear a region. Go forth and defend the realms, mighty hunter.

  Warning: While an Undead General is active in an area, each active spawn point generates 30% more undead. Rare and elite undead will appear 10% more often.

  The message vanished, leaving all three people in the room in stunned silence. Kade pulled the message back up in her log to read it again.

  Callan’s expression soured. “What the hell was that?”

  Burrell stared at the spot where the text had been. “What the hell is a global event?”

  Callan jabbed a finger at him. “This is your fault. Obviously, your little adventure escalated this who contested safe zone nonsense.”

  “Don’t you start,” Burrell snapped. “You’re the ones who contested the safe zone ownership. Your council stalled every attempt to clear the five locations needed to complete the quest.”

  “And your people ignored the elected government, Burrell. Don’t pin this on us just because…”

  Kade’s voice cut clean through the noise.

  “The real reason is in the message.”

  Both men stopped.

  She stepped forward, eyes on the space the UI had occupied, then back to them. "This had nothing to do with the safe zone. Though not having one is going to make things that much tougher now. It’s a failure to bury the dead. Globally. Take a moment and think about how many graveyards there are and how the accepted social norms for disposing of the dead have changed over twelve thousand years.”

  The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was the kind that carried weight. Burrell’s mouth pressed into a thin line. Callan didn’t speak. Neither of them had anything left to say that wouldn’t sound hollow in the face of what had just arrived.

  "Where is the closest Cemetary, Burrell?" Callan asked in the calmest voice he'd used since entering the office.

  "There's those two on the other side of the bay. Forest City and Calvary," Burrell said in just as calm a voice. "Same side of the bay as Warehouse Seventeen but about an hour west."

  Kade looked at Burrell, then at Callan. Neither met her eyes, and she knew where this was going.

  Tides of Ruin

  ten chapters are already available on Patreon.