Chapter 14: Grezheim

SPECIAL BASE #44

UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES

DEFENSE BUNKER [CALIFORNIA]

Sweat beaded on my forehead.

I wiped it with the back of my hand, forcing my expression into something neutral. My eyes stayed fixed on those block letters before I made myself look away.

Don’t react. Don’t let it show.

I tugged the mule’s rope and stepped through the threshold.

The wind hit me first. Dry and warm. Carrying the faint scent of sun-baked earth.

I stopped walking for a moment.

The mule bumped into my back again, snorting its displeasure, but I didn’t care.

I was outside.

The landscape unfolded before me in a vast, rolling expanse that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The ground was dry and golden-brown, cracked earth and pale dust, but stubborn life pushed through everywhere. Low scrub brush clung to the terrain in dense patches. Trees dotted the distance, twisted things with thick trunks and sparse canopies.

We stood at the base of a low plateau. The cave opened behind me, the massive metal doors framing it on either side. Ahead, the land sloped gently downward into a broad plain that seemed to go on forever.

I tilted my head back and breathed.

My lungs filled with air that didn’t taste like stone or smoke.

Behind me, the column continued to pour from the cavern. Students stumbled into the light, blinking and shielding their eyes. Soldiers emerged with more composure but the same involuntary squint. The transition from underground darkness to open sky hit everyone the same way.

Soon a cheering started.

It began somewhere near the front of the column, a single voice raised in relief, and spread backward like wildfire. Students threw their arms up. Some embraced each other. A boy near me dropped to his knees and pressed his palms flat against the earth as if he needed to confirm it was real.

Laughter mixed with the cheering. A few students were crying, wiping their faces with dirty sleeves, pretending they weren’t.

An officer climbed onto a flat-topped boulder near the cavern entrance and raised his hand for silence. It took a while to come.

“The expedition has concluded,” he announced, his voice carrying across the assembled crowd. “All objectives regarding artifact recovery have been met. You have performed your duties admirably.”

A brief, measured pause.

“However.” The word cut through the celebration.

“Don’t lower your guard. We are deep in the southern territories, far from the major cities. The journey back to central Silberwald begins immediately. Our priority is the safe return of all personnel and recovered materials. Stay with your assigned units. Follow orders without delay.”

The cheering didn’t resume with the same energy after that. It sputtered and faded into murmured conversations, nervous glances toward the empty horizon.

I stood apart from it all, one hand on the mule’s rope, the other hanging at my side.

Silberwald.

The name rolled through my mind again, and this time it collided with everything else.

California.

The word stamped on those doors. A piece of geography that belonged to a world that had apparently ceased to exist so thoroughly that its language was now called “Ancient” and its military bunkers were mistaken for the ruins of a lost civilization.

The wyvern’s voice echoed in my memory.

For seven hundred years you’ve had access to magic.

Seven hundred years.

My jaw tightened.

This never happened while I was alive. There was no magic. No mana. Not in my world.

But the bunker doors are real. The English is real.

It can’t be the past. Am I in the future?

But how far into the future? And why am I here?

I had no answers. Only the questions, stacking up.

My gaze drifted sideways.

Iris stood thirty paces away, helmet off now, running her fingers through sweat-damp hair while she spoke with her two companions.

In other loops, I had told her about my memory loss. She had been receptive. More than receptive, she had helped me. Read my journal. Explained the world.

Yet those loops had a safety net.

In those loops, I knew her memory would be erased. I knew the day would reset. I knew that whatever I revealed, whatever vulnerability I showed, it would vanish with the next death. The slate wiped clean. No consequences.

Stolen novel; please report.

This time was different.

This time, tomorrow was actually tomorrow.

If I tell her about my memory or the language, she might tell others. If others find out that I can read the Ancient Language, that I recognize it, that I know what those words mean…

The implications branched outward like cracks in ice.

Questions would follow. Questions I couldn’t answer without revealing things that would make me sound insane.

They’d lock me up again. Or worse.

I looked away from Iris and fixed my eyes on the horizon.

Keep it to yourself. For now.

“Set up camp! I want tents raised before we lose the light!”

The order cracked across the plain as the sun began its descent. The column had marched for perhaps an hour from the cavern mouth before the officers called a halt on a broad, flat stretch of ground that offered clear sightlines in every direction.

If I squinted against the fading light and looked to the northeast, I could make out a shape on the horizon. Something that interrupted the flat line of earth and sky.

A town. Perhaps a few hours’ march away. Perhaps less.

I filed it away and turned to the more immediate problem.

The mule.

I led the beast to a row of iron stakes that had been driven into the hard-packed earth. The mule resisted the final three steps on principle, planting its hooves and staring at me with the flat, unblinking malice.

I looped the rope around the stake, knotted it twice, and gave the mule a look that said Fight me if you can. The mule flicked its tail.

I turned away and began unpacking my tent.

My hands moved with a competence that surprised even me. Not because of this world’s training. Because of the other life.

Firefighters didn’t just fight fires. They trained for everything. Wilderness survival. Emergency shelter construction. Field camps during wildfire deployments where you slept in whatever you could raise between shifts, knowing you’d tear it down at dawn and do it again somewhere else.

My fingers found the rhythm without conscious thought.

Around me, other students struggled with theirs. Poles collapsed. Canvas billowed and escaped grasping hands. Two boys argued over which end was the front. A girl sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at a tangle of rope with the expression of someone contemplating surrender.

My tent was among the first to stand in the student sector.

I ducked inside, dropped my pack, and sat for a moment in the interior, listening to the camp settle around me.

When the last light drained from the sky, a whistle blew.

I followed the sound to the distribution point, where a line of students had already formed. Each person received their ration from a bored-looking quartermaster who ladled soup from a massive iron pot and handed out chunks of bread that could have doubled as building materials.

The soup was thin. Vegetables floated in a broth that tasted mostly of salt and the metallic tang of the pot itself.