I didn't plan on escalating anything today.
My job's mostly routine. I process field reports—scout returns, civic updates, some minor resource metrics. I'm not a hero. I'm not frontline. I haven't drawn a blade in six years.
But today's paperwork didn't sit right.
It started with a delay. One of our scouts hadn't checked in on time. Standard protocol says you wait forty-eight hours before raising a flag, and this one was only at thirty-six. So I logged it, marked it for passive pingback, and moved on.
Except the last message they sent caught my eye.
"Collapsed village. Uneven ground. Signal echo from below. Might be a dead node. Investigating."
That's not unusual, in itself. Terrain shifts happen. But the phrasing stuck with me—"signal echo." That's not something a scout would write lightly. They're trained not to over-speculate. I flagged the message in their log, mostly so I wouldn't forget it, and got back to clearing out my queue.
That's when the second thread showed up.
