"Technology builds empires. But it is the land that buries them." — Ancient Chameleari Proverb
The dust had not yet settled.
Kaelen stood in silence, the red wash of the command holomap flickering across his face. The Juggernaut Talon's Reach—gone. Wyrmspire—crippled, buried up to its cannons in the shifting basin. Five hundred soldiers. Engineers. Pilots. Gone, or screaming for extraction over jammed comms.
He breathed slowly through his nose.
"Give me status," he said.
No one answered immediately. The officers around him fumbled at controls, rerouting power, trying to isolate signals in the storm of electromagnetic interference. A lieutenant finally spoke up.
"We've lost two-thirds of the forward recon grid. Seismic data's useless. Communications bouncing off the canyon walls—feedback loops. Drones are grounding out. Stormwings aren't responding. The entire canyon's become a kill zone, sir."
Kaelen exhaled. Not in frustration—but calculation.
"They planned this."
