Chapter 7 - The Silent Savior

  Vadim crouched in the dark corner of the shop, his body pressed tight against the underside of a desk. His eyes were fixed on the shattered doorway, unblinking. In this war, an enemy soldier was a mercy; if you were caught, you could at least surrender. But the drones? They were different. A drone didn't take prisoners. It only delivered death. He tightened his grip on the portable jammer until his knuckles turned white.

  he told himself. He repeated the words like a mantra, forcing the suffocating coil of anxiety in his chest to loosen, if only by a fraction.

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  The image of his mother’s face flickered in his mind. Then came Natasha. And then, strangely, the silhouette of an excavator standing lonely in the center of an open-pit mine flashed across his vision.

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  Vadim was a son of Western Siberia, born in a city that felt smaller than the sky above it. His father had been a soldier—a man who met his mother, fathered a child, and promptly vanished to another city. Whether it was a tactical retreat or a cold-blooded choice, Vadim never knew. He was simply left behind with his mother.

  Surrounding his hometown were three massive open-pit mines. Their scale was beyond comprehension, colossal craters over ten kilometers long, spiraling down into the earth like the fingerprints of a god. They were jagged bowls carved out in search of asbestos, plunging three hundred meters deep. Standing on the edge, looking down into that maw, Vadim hadn't felt fear. He had felt a strange, intoxicating sense of wonder.

  As a boy, Vadim loved the mines. On weekends when the workers were away, he would sit on a ridge overlooking the site for hours. A sense of groundless euphoria would swell in his chest just by looking at the vastness.

  But the feeling changed the moment he graduated high school. Without the grades or the money for university, the mines were his only destination. When he finally descended into the pit as a worker, the wonder vanished.

  The deeper he went into that circular void, the more it felt like sinking into the midnight zone of an ocean. The light faded. He felt swallowed by an abyss that had no bottom. The mine viewed from a distance and the mine experienced from within were two entirely different beasts.

  In that small city, the mines were the only way to survive. But as time passed, the work began to dry up. They were digging for asbestos,a mineral the world had branded a silent killer. International condemnation grew, and country after country banned its use.

  Vadim couldn't wrap his head around it. To him, it was just the same grey stone he had seen since childhood. How could something so familiar be so deadly?

  But the politics didn't matter; the reality did. Jobs were vanishing. His mother had already been laid off.

  The mines had no future, yet he had no way out. He lacked the skills to flee and the heart to leave his mother behind.,

  At twenty, Vadim found himself aching with envy for Natasha. She had made it out, moving to a big city for university to study journalism. It was through her that he discovered the poetry of Blok—the only thing in his bleak existence that made his heart feel full.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

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  One day, on his way home from the mines, a recruitment flier caught his eye. It spoke of a war that needed bodies. In truth, his conscription was already overdue; he had only managed to delay it time and again due to his family circumstances.

  The salary printed on the flier burned into his retina. Among the various clauses and conditions, one sentence stood out with haunting clarity:

  He whispered to himself, the words tasting like ash.

  "Ah… there’s nowhere left to run."

  If he stayed here, he knew his life would end in the same way it began—destitute and hollow.

  Vadim walked into the birch forest. The sun was dipping low, its light fracturing into pale shards as it pierced through the white trunks. There, in the silence, he forged a conviction for himself. To kill, a man needed a cause.

  "We started this war, but God is the one guiding it," he muttered, trying to believe his own lie. "And because He guides it, this is right."

  Vadim stuffed the flier into his pocket and stepped out of the woods. He went home to convince his mother.

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  Inside the shop, the silence was absolute. Not a sound stirred the stagnant air.

  After a few agonizing moments, Vadim momentarily set the jammer down. He tore a strip of fabric from the top of his trousers, gritted his teeth, and gripped the jagged shard of metal embedded in his thigh. With a sharp grunt, he yanked it out. He quickly bound the wound with a discarded towel he found on the floor.

  Fortunately, there were no other deep lacerations.He lowered his head, letting out a long, shaky breath.

  "Whew..."

  In that split second, everything changed.

  He looked up to find a drone. It had drifted through the shattered doorway without a sound, hovering near the ceiling. Its crimson lens stared back at him, locked on.

  "Ah..."

  Vadim’s reflexes kicked in; he lunged for the jammer. But even as he moved, a cold realization washed over him:

  With a mechanical whine, the drone lunged toward him at a terrifying speed.

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  Then, barely a meter into its flight, the machine suddenly lost all power and slammed into the floor. Vadim hadn't even pulled the trigger on his jammer. It wasn't his doing.

  "What...?"

  As he stared in confusion, a soldier stepped through the doorway.

  He wasn't one of Vadim’s own, nor was he the enemy.

  They were soldiers from an allied nation, conducting joint operations with Vadim's unit. Their operational zones rarely overlapped, so he hadn't seen them often, but he’d heard the stories of men who put their lives on the line for a war that wasn't their own.

  Vadim felt a surge of gratitude. He admired them for fighting to the end in a foreign land. Seeing them from a distance, he had sometimes wondered if they were paid as well as he was. But Maxim was different. Maxim mocked the allies, calling them "dogs or pigs" that only had value if they were well-trained. Vadim loathed that side of Maxim. Whether friend or foe, he hated treating people like cattle.

  Vadim fought to win the war, not to cultivate hate.

  The NK soldier’s uniform was nearly identical, but his physique and gait were subtly different. Vadim recognized it instinctively. A wave of relief, even thankfulness, washed over him.

  The soldier tilted his combat helmet back with his left hand, locking eyes with Vadim.

  "Pencil."

  "Sky," Vadim croaked.

  The countersign,the proof they weren't enemies.

  The soldier approached, glancing down at Vadim’s mangled thigh. He knelt and began to undo the blood-soaked towel.

  "Stay still. I’m going to treat you."

  Vadim thought, but the words stayed in his throat.

  In that moment, the soldier pulled a silver steel ball from his pocket. He tossed it lightly into the air, and to Vadim's shock, it stopped mid-flight, suspended by nothing.

  The sphere split in two. From one half, a needle-like structure emerged; the other revealed a perfectly flat surface. Defying gravity, the two pieces hovered in the air.

  A second later, both objects flew toward his thigh.

  A laser-like light erupted from the needle, while the flat component snapped onto the wound. The sphere halves began to rotate around his leg, performing some unseen task. Vadim was too stunned to speak. Surprisingly, there was no pain. His leg went completely numb, as if it had been hit with a powerful anesthetic.

  "Don't move," the soldier said, his voice low and calm, resonating with a weight that seemed to steady Vadim’s racing heart. "I’ll explain later."

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