Page 26 of Accidentally Fearless

All units reported. I stood beside the platform in full battle armor, watching my warriors arrange themselves in formations that existed in no Velkorin textbook—asymmetric, fluid, designed to shift and adapt in real time. Three hundred soldiers, each one trained in the past two weeks to operate within Rory's framework. They moved differently than they had a month ago. Faster and more adaptive. They communicated with hand signals she had taught them, positioned themselves using terrain-reading techniques she had drilled into them, and fought with the confidence of warriors who had been winning and expected to keep winning.

"Remember what we practiced," she said. "Phase one—let them come. I want Krenix's center committed to the basin before we engage. Phase two—funnel. Same as Zone Three, but bigger. Phase three—I'll call it live. Trust the process."

A warrior from the second squad—young and barely past training, his bronze scales still bright with adolescent sheen—looked up at the command platform and shouted, "For the human!"

The cry was taken up. Three hundred voices shaking the basin, a war chant that had not existed three weeks ago, that would be remembered for generations.

Rory's expression went blank with shock. Then she grinned, wide and unguarded. It was the smile of a woman who had spent years being invisible, and now she was standing in front of three hundred warriors who had just made her their battle cry.

"Yeah, okay. For the human works," she said into the comm. "Now get out there and win my war."

My war. Her words landed in my chest.

The battle horn sounded.

Phase one was textbook—Rory's textbook. Krenix's heavy infantry advanced in traditional formation, their emerald-scaled ranks filling the basin with discipline. Our forces held the perimeter, giving ground in controlled increments, drawing Krenix's center deeper into the basin while his flanking units spread to cover the widening front.

"He's overextending," Rory called. "Exactly like we wanted. West flank, hold your line—don't take the bait. He's probing your gap to draw you out. Let him see the gap. Let him think it's a weakness."

Seven minutes. Krenix's center was fully committed. His flanking units were spread across the basin's width, their formation thin, their reserves committed to maintaining a line that had grown wider than their force could comfortably cover.

"Phase two. Funnel, now. West flank, close. East flank, close. Pinch him."

The flanks moved. Our forces swung inward from both sides, compressing Krenix's overextended line into a narrowing corridor. Natural stone formations that Rory had pre-positioned—the honor code said nothing about rearranging rocks—channeled the compression. Krenix's forces, suddenly squeezed on three sides, began to lose formation integrity.

The fighting was intense. Close-quarters blade combat mixed with energy weapon exchanges, and the sounds of impact and discharge echoed off the basin walls. Dust rose in clouds. Bioluminescence flared across both armies—amber for focus, red for pain, the harsh white of maximum exertion.

Twelve minutes. We were winning. The funnel was working. Krenix's command flag was visible in his rear echelon, and his signal officers were transmitting increasingly frantic commands.

And then the comms died.

The silence in my earpiece was absolute. Not static, not interference—total silence. The kind of silence that meant the system hadn't degraded. It had been shut down.

Around me, squad leaders reached for their communicators and found nothing. The coordinated movement of our forces—the real-time adjustments that were the backbone of Rory's entire tactical framework—stuttered and stopped. Units that had been moving, synchronized, began to drift, their leaders looking toward the command platform for guidance that was no longer coming.

"Comms are down." Zenir said beside me, her own communicator dead. She checked the diagnostic display on her wrist unit. Her expression hardened into something I had rarely seen from her. Genuine anger. "Internal override. Someone used officer-level access codes to shut down the entire array."

Therak.

No enemy could have accessed our internal communications architecture. No malfunction would have affected every frequency simultaneously. Someone with officer-level clearance had deliberately destroyed our ability to coordinate—in the middle of the largest engagement of the war.

On the command platform, Rory's displays went dark. I watched her stare at the dead screens for three seconds. Three seconds of absolute stillness, her hands flat on the console, processing the catastrophe.

Then she pulled off her headset, threw it onto the platform deck, and climbed down the ladder.

Toward the battle.

"Rory!" I started moving, but she was already through our rear line, pushing between armored warriors, heading for the front. A five-foot-four human woman in tactical clothing, unarmed, walking into a Grand Melee.

She reached the forward line. Warriors twice her size surged around her, locked in combat. She was in the middle of it—directing, not fighting. Her hands went up in the signal configurations she had drilled into every squad leader. Shift left, hold position, close the gap, advance on visual mark.

"Formation leaders!" Her voice cut through the chaos with a clarity that shouldn't have been possible. "New protocol! Visual signals! Watch me!"

A blade came within a meter of her. Korvis—the silver-scaled veteran who had been the first to say "show us again" in her training sessions—threw himself sideways to deflect it, taking the impact on his armored shoulder. He positioned himself between Rory and the enemy line without being ordered to, and two other soldiers from his squad closed ranks around her. Rory didn't flinch. She was already signaling the next formation, her eyes reading the battle, finding the patterns beneath the chaos.

Her soldiers saw her. And something happened that I had studied in military history but never witnessed. A leader's physical presence on the battlefield transformed the morale of an entire army.

Warriors who had been faltering surged. The formation—broken by the loss of comms—reformed around her like water flowing around a stone, soldiers placing themselves between her and danger without orders, fighting harder because she was there.