“Ah—Supreme Commander. Good to see you here.”

  The man who’d knocked stepped inside like he expected the air to bite him. He was young—late twenties maybe—with a crisp uniform and a face that had learned to hide its emotions by holding them very still. His eyes flicked to Mavis, then away.

  Mavis sat up straighter in the chair at the head of the table. Francis remained to her left, his presence a quiet anchor.

  “You can call me Mavis,” she said.

  The officer blinked, as if he hadn’t considered that the thing everyone called ‘her’ might have preferences.

  “Yes. Of course. Mavis.” He swallowed. “Lieutenant Harris. I—uh—I’ve been asked to set up the room and… and make sure you had everything you needed.”

  Mavis glanced around. The table. The map. The chairs. She didn’t know what “everything” meant in this context, but she nodded anyway.

  “I’m fine,” she said, then hesitated. “Do I… do something? Or do I just sit?”

  Harris looked to Francis like a man searching for a script.

  Francis gave him a small, reassuring nod. “She’ll sit.”

  Harris exhaled, relief leaking out of him in a way he probably didn’t even notice. “They’ll be here shortly,” he said. “The—uh—the generals.”

  He backed toward the door like he wanted to escape, then stopped himself, remembering manners. “It’s… an honour,” he added, and left.

  When the door closed, the silence returned, thicker than before.

  Mavis stared at the map on the wall, at the lines and arrows and blocks of colour that meant something to everyone here except her. “So,” she said quietly, “this is really… a war.”

  Francis didn’t answer right away. “Yes.”

  Before Mavis could ask more, the hallway outside filled with footsteps—measured, deliberate, too many to be casual. The door opened again and this time it didn’t feel like one person entering a room. It felt like a whole structure shifting its weight.

  General Arnold came in first—broad-shouldered, greying, his eyes sharp with sleeplessness. Agent Palmer followed, and behind them two other senior officers Mavis didn’t recognise: a woman with cropped hair and a rigid jaw, and a thin man with a folder clutched to his chest like a shield. More filed in after them, taking seats as if they’d rehearsed where their bodies belonged.

  Every conversation died the moment they saw her.

  One by one, they bowed.

  Some bent at the waist. Some lowered their heads only slightly, as if their pride fought the motion. But they all did it.

  General Arnold spoke, voice careful. “Supreme Commander.”

  “Mavis,” she corrected again, a little firmer this time.

  A ripple of uncertainty—then acceptance.

  “Mavis,” Arnold repeated. “We are here to serve you to the fullest extent possible. Anything you require—food, quarters, clothing, security, information—will be provided. If there is any desire you have, any request, we will endeavour to fulfil it.”

  The words sounded practiced. Like a vow. Like fear dressed up as loyalty.

  Mavis nodded, unsure what to do with that. She looked at Francis, but he only gave her the slightest encouraging tilt of his head, as if to say: Let them talk. Learn.

  Agent Palmer’s gaze flicked to his son for a fraction of a second—pride, worry, command—then back to Mavis. “If it pleases you,” he said, “we will brief you on the current situation.”

  Mavis realised, suddenly, that she truly didn’t know what the world looked like beyond her own hunger and movement. She’d been drifting through ruins. Killing when she was angry. Eating when she could. Sleeping where she dropped.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me.”

  The thin man with the folder stood. “Our civil theatre is divided into three primary blocs. The Western Coalition”—he pointed to a section on the map—“is us. The Eastern Compact is fractured but hostile. The Southern Alliance is opportunistic; they trade support to whoever bleeds least at the moment.”

  Mavis stared at the coloured zones. “Why are they fighting you?”

  A pause.

  General Arnold answered, blunt. “Because we chose you.”

  That landed in her chest like a stone. Chosen. Not feared. Not hunted. Chosen.

  The woman with cropped hair spoke next, brisk. “We’ve been losing ground for months. Supply lines are strained. Our forward regiments are holding, but barely. The enemy has armour we can’t match and aircraft we can’t contest. They’ve begun probing our perimeter daily.”

  They spoke in acronyms and coordinates, in casualty percentages and fuel rationing and contaminated zones. Mavis listened, but the words slid off her like rain. What she heard beneath it was the same thing, repeated in different forms:

  We are cornered.

  Then, gradually, the tone shifted. The map became more than a map. It became a problem to solve.

  General Arnold leaned over the table. “If we can reinforce Red Ridge and push back here—”

  “No,” the cropped-hair woman snapped. “We don’t have the men for a push. We need to pull them back to the secondary line and—”

  “And abandon the ridge?” another officer protested. “That’s suicide. They’ll flank us within a week.”

  They began to argue—controlled, but urgent. They circled a point on the map, voices overlapping, hands stabbing at paper.

  Mavis sat there, watching them forget she existed.

  Not out of disrespect—out of avoidance. As if asking her was stepping too close to a cliff edge.

  Francis shifted beside her, jaw tight. He could see it too.

  Mavis’s fingers curled on the table. She thought of the regiment she’d killed by mistake. Of Francis telling her it would be okay. Of the room they’d given her. The shower. The clean sheets. These scant resources - she knew how valuable they were. Surely that was another reason why this war was ongoing. She knew people would kill for them. When she was out there, she had done the same.

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  Their hospitality hadn’t been free. Nothing here was free. But she wanted it to be worth something. She wanted to contribute, to give something back.

  Mavis leaned forward. “Where is it?” she asked.

  The room fell silent so fast it was like someone had cut the power.

  General Arnold blinked. “Where is… what?”

  “The fight,” Mavis said, impatient now. “The place you’re talking about. Red Ridge. The regiment you’re about to abandon or sacrifice or whatever you’re doing.”

  No one spoke. The thin man with the folder looked like he might faint.

  Agent Palmer cleared his throat. “It’s a forward trench line. Heavy contact. If you—”

  “If I what?” Mavis’s eyes narrowed. “Help?”

  Arnold’s face tightened, and for a moment Mavis saw the calculation behind his fear. Then he bowed his head slightly, not in submission this time, but in something that looked dangerously close to relief.

  “Yes,” he said. “If you helped, it would change everything.”

  Mavis’s mouth pulled into a smile that was too sharp to be called kind. “Good. Tell me where.”

  Coordinates were given. A route. A description of the terrain. A warning about friendly positions.

  Mavis stood before anyone could finish. The chair scraped back.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, and then she was gone—so fast the air in the room seemed to snap in her wake.

  Francis lurched to his feet instinctively. “Mavis—wait—”

  But the only answer was the fading tremor in the walls, like the bunker itself had exhaled.

  For a few seconds no one moved.

  Then Monica—who’d slipped into the room quietly during the briefing and now sat near the middle—let out a breath and whispered, “Holy shit.”

  General Arnold turned to Agent Palmer, voice low. “If she does this… we owe you.”

  Palmer didn’t look pleased. He looked terrified.

  “We already owe her,” he said.

  ??????

  Mavis sped through the hallways which were mostly empty. The excitement had caused her to react a bit too hastily perhaps. Luckily, this seemed to be a part of the facility not many people visited. Perhaps it was a secure area? She came to a stop, realising she didn't really know where she was going or where to go to get out of here. It was indeed a maze of tunnels.

  She looked at an unmarked door in the side of the hallway, right next to her current position. It seemed to call out to her, as if there was a kind of... energy... permeating from within. Curiously, she went up to it and put her hand on the door. Yes, there was definitely something inside there, something strange. The door was probably locked but she could break in if she wanted to.

  No. She dismissed the thought as soon as it crossed her mind, refusing to even try the handle in case she damaged it. She turned away. She wasn't going to do that, she would just ask Francis about it later. They could come here together tomorrow or another day. For now, she had a job to do, she had promised them she was going to help out in the battle. And before she could do that, she needed to find a way out of here that didn't involve tearing a hole straight up through the ceiling. So she went back to go and ask for their help.

  ??????

  The front was a wound cut into the earth.

  Trenches zig-zagged through ash-covered ground. The sky above was a bruised grey, snow drifting down in lazy spirals that didn’t feel peaceful in the slightest. Men and women huddled behind sandbags and rusted plating, their faces smeared with soot and exhaustion. The air smelled of cold metal and old smoke.

  A soldier peeked over the trench lip, rifle raised, and immediately ducked as rounds snapped overhead.

  “Hold!” the captain barked. “Hold the line!”

  Then the world changed.

  A pressure swept through the air—not an explosion, not a shockwave, but something like reality tightening. Soldiers froze, looking around, confused, as if they could feel a presence before they could see it.

  Above the battlefield, a figure hovered - olive green uniform, blonde hair moving in a wind that didn’t touch the ground.

  Mavis.

  On the enemy ridge, men shouted. A tank turret jerked upward. A rocket team scrambled.

  They fired.

  The projectiles didn’t reach her. They came apart in the air, reduced to glittering dust that fell harmlessly like dirty snow.

  Mavis’s gaze tracked the enemy lines with unsettling calm. Then the ridge itself began to unravel. It wasn’t a blast. It was subtraction.

  Concrete bunkers crumbled as if they’d been built from dry bread. Tanks sagged into the earth, metal flowing and folding, their barrels twisting like soft wire. Men tried to run, but the ground under them turned granular, swallowing boots, then legs, then their bodies became one with it, their flesh becoming liquid and then dust, whisked into the earth.

  Playfully, Mavis watched the soldiers scrambling, a malevolent smirk forming on her lips. She was enjoying this. Wherever she looked, destruction and chaos ensued. A machine-gun nest vanished in a blink—where it had been was only a shallow depression, steaming faintly.

  The enemy’s return fire became frantic, then sparse, then stopped entirely.

  In the trench, a young soldier—barely more than a boy—rose too high in stunned disbelief, and a single enemy rifleman, somehow still alive, aimed at him from behind a half-collapsed wall.

  The shot cracked.

  Mavis’s head snapped toward the sound.

  The bullet turned to dust inches from the boy’s face.

  He stared at the drifting particles like he’d just watched his own death evaporate.

  Mavis’s eyes narrowed with renewed focus.

  The rifleman and the wall behind him ceased to exist.

  Silence rolled across the field like a blanket.

  Then Mavis dropped to the ground, boots touching ash.

  No one moved at first. Not because they couldn’t. Because they didn’t know what kind of movement might get them killed.

  The captain climbed out of the trench slowly, hands raised, then sank to one knee.

  “Supreme Commander,” he said, voice thick.

  The kneeling spread like contagion. Soldiers bowed their heads. Even the wounded tried to shift into some posture of submission.

  Mavis looked at them, and for a moment she felt something bright and fierce in her chest.

  They need me.

  “Get up,” she said, though her tone wasn’t gentle. “I’m not here to watch you grovel.”

  Some obeyed. Some stayed down, too afraid to believe her.

  The captain stood, swallowing hard. “You… you saved us. We were ten minutes from being overrun.”

  Mavis shrugged, as if she hadn’t just rewritten the landscape. “Then don’t be overrun,” she said, and turned away before she could see their expressions.

  They stared after her like she was a miracle with teeth.

  ??????

  They had dinner in a reinforced dugout—more bunker than trench now, lit by harsh lamps that made everyone’s skin look sallow. Tin trays. Hot stew. Bread that tasted like rationing and relief.

  Mavis sat alone at a small table pushed against the wall. No one dared sit with her. They ate in clusters, speaking too loudly about nothing, laughing too hard at jokes that weren’t funny—morale trying to convince itself it was real.

  Mavis stared at her food, appetite dulled by the strange emptiness that followed violence. She’d done what they wanted. She’d saved them.

  So why did it still feel like being alone in a room full of people?

  A chair scraped.

  Mavis looked up sharply.

  A soldier stood there, tray in his hands, face pale. The same boy she’d saved—early twenties at most, freckles under grime, eyes too wide.

  He didn’t sit yet. He looked like he might bolt.

  “Supreme Commander,” he began.

  “Mavis,” she corrected automatically.

  He swallowed. “Mavis. I—uh—I just wanted to… thank you.” His voice shook. “That bullet— I would’ve been—”

  “Dead,” Mavis finished, flat.

  His throat bobbed. “Yes.”

  He hovered, still not sitting, as if asking permission with his whole body.

  Mavis gestured at the chair opposite her. “Sit.”

  He sat so stiffly it looked painful.

  Up close, Mavis could see his fear sweating through him. His hands trembled around his spoon. He tried to hide it by gripping harder, making the metal clink softly against the tray.

  “You’re scared,” Mavis said.

  He laughed once, a short, broken sound. “No, I’m— I mean—”

  “You are,” she insisted, and there was no anger in it. Only something raw. “Why?”

  He stared at her like the question itself was dangerous. “Because… because you’re you,” he whispered.

  Mavis’s jaw tightened. “I saved you.”

  “Yes,” he said quickly. “And I’m grateful. I’m— I’m honoured. I just—” His eyes flicked to her hands, as if imagining what they could do to him. “I don’t know what you’ll do next.”

  Mavis felt heat rise behind her eyes, not tears this time—something sharper. “So even when I help, you still look at me like I’m a monster.”

  He went white. “No— I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes you did.” Mavis pushed her tray away. The stew sloshed. “You all do.”

  The soldier’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

  Mavis stood so suddenly the chair tipped back and hit the wall. The sound made nearby conversations die again, heads turning.

  She looked down at the soldier one last time. He was frozen, certain he’d made the wrong choice walking over here.

  Mavis’s voice dropped. “Don’t sit with me again if you’re going to shake like that.”

  Then she walked out.

  No one stopped her. No one followed.

  Outside, the cold hit her like punishment. She lifted into the air, rising above the trench line, above the tiny lights and tiny people and their tiny gratitude that still came with fear attached.

  She flew back toward the main complex, toward the only faces that had ever looked at her like she wasn’t a walking apocalypse.

  Toward Francis. Monica. Sam.

  Toward the fragile idea that maybe, somewhere there underground, she could find something that didn’t flinch when it saw her.