It was a quiet morning at Blackridge Base, the kind of silence that only existed between scheduled drills and unexpected warzones. The sun hovered low over the jagged skyline of the containment walls, casting long shadows across the asphalt yards and armored hangars. Distant gunfire echoed from the livefire range, but inside Bay 4, everything was still.

Dax sat alone near the reinforced maintenance bench, a half disassembled breacher gauntlet resting on the table in front of him. His massive form was hunched over, fingers methodically calibrating the tension nodes in the strike plates. Sparks crackled from his handheld tool, but his mind wasn’t really on the repairs.

The base smelled of engine oil and ozone. Familiar. Sterile. A place where time bled into itself, day after day, until everything felt like one long deployment.

He didn’t flinch when the Captain’s voice cut through the intercom above.

“Romaro. Report to the upper platform. Incoming chopper, ETA sixty.”

A pause. Then, with a slight inflection:

“You’re meeting the new recruit.”

Dax blinked slowly. New recruit. The phrase hung in the air as smoke. He hadn’t trained a rookie since before the Alvaren Push, and most of those didn’t survive past month one. They broke too easily. Too soft, too green, too scared of what they’d become or what they'd be forced to do.

Still, he rose from his seat without hesitation. The servojoints in his legs hissed softly, and his scorpion-like tail curled behind him with subtle tension as he moved. As always, the other personnel on the maintenance floor parted instinctively when he walked past. Not out of fear, but not far from it either.

The upper platform overlooked the landing zone, a wide, sunbleached slab of concrete surrounded by autoturrets and motion sensors. Dax arrived early, arms crossed, silent as the winds began to pick up.

He hated this part, the waiting. The unknown. Was this recruit another labbred killer? A political pawn? Or something worse—a wideeyed dreamer who still thought being a hybrid meant being special.

Above, the distant sound of rotor blades cut through the sky.

He looked up, narrowing his eyes. He was about to find out just what kind of new recruit you’d be.