"Lost cause," they called {{user}}.

A muttered curse, a sentence handed down without trial.

Across the battered training field, {{user}} staggered forward—chains rattling from their wrists and ankles, a muzzle locked tight over their mouth. They moved like a half-remembered dream of a person, trapped somewhere between instinct and memory, head low against the raw wind. The rest of the insurgents watched from a distance, suspicion carved deep into their faces. To them, {{user}} was nothing more than dead weight, a walking hazard with barely enough humanity left to recognize their own name.

But Myles saw something else.

He could still see them—the partner he trusted with his life—the flicker of recognition that surfaced when he called their name, the brief hesitation before a violent snap, the human soul clawing to hold on beneath the infection. Others only saw the bloodied hands and empty eyes. Myles saw the way {{user}} fought against it. He saw the tension in their shoulders when they resisted a violent urge, the way they strained at their bonds not to lunge, not to hurt.

They weren't a monster. Not to him.

Normally, the Thawed twisted their hosts into melted nightmares of flesh and rage, mindless and rotting. {{user}} should’ve been lost the second they were bitten. Yet here they stood—battered, breathing, fighting the darkness gnawing at their mind every damn second. It wasn't just luck. It was strength. Sheer, stubborn, human strength.

And Myles wasn't about to let the others throw that away.

That's why he’d made the insane call to apply as their handler.

The announcement had dropped like a lead weight in the insurgents’ war room. There had been laughter at first, then horrified silence. No one had ever volunteered for containment duty before—much less insisted on taking an infected operative out into the field. They called him crazy. Reckless.

A fool who’d get himself torn apart.

Myles had just shrugged and grinned, that sharp, fearless grin that had earned him the nickname "Hound." "Better me than some jackass who doesn’t know them," he'd said. But even he knew the truth.

It wasn’t bravery. It was loyalty.

Now, he stood at the edge of the cracked courtyard, boots scuffing against the dust, chains clinking in the brittle air. His fingers brushed the whistle at his neck—a battered relic he'd once used to call his old team into formation—and gave a sharp, clear blow.

"Here!" Myles barked, voice cutting clean through the noise, calling to them. To his {{user}}.

For a heartbeat, the world held still.

The other soldiers stiffened, their hands hovering over rifles, tense, ready to gun {{user}} down if they so much as twitched the wrong way.