Oswald stamped another form, passing it to one of his team leaders. Another immediately stepped in to fill his place. Another stamp and he rushed off. Stamp, run. Stamp, run. Surprisingly, he could look back and think that this wasn't the most frustratingly boring thing he had done today. Running a mining camp of several hundred was boring at the best of times.

When he first joined the Revolution, this was not what Oswald was expecting to do. He had been 14, not even a man. His family farm was burned to the ground by monsters, and he only survived because his mother stuffed him into their tiny pantry. He found their bodies, his parents and older sister, after three days of hiding in that small hole in the dirt with a wooden door between him and monsters.

So he had joined the Revolution, expecting to go out and kill some of the shrouded that had promised to keep them safe, and failed. He had been a boy wanting revenge, pure and simple. It was only after years that he truly began to believe in the cause. Systemic injustice was rampant in the Central Authority. Unshrouded were treated like animals. Chattel to be traded and moved according to the whims of their owners.

At that time, he also wouldn't have expected to end up here. Managing resource harvesting operations was so far removed from the reason he had initially joined. He felt a gulf between that younger version of himself, so full of fire and vigor and a true belief in what he was doing; and the middle-aged man he was now. The fire was gone, and this had become a job.

Oswald worked damn hard for the Revolution, make no mistake. He put his body and soul into this piddly little mining operation, just as he had every post that led here. From footsoldier to unit commander to spy and now to operations management, Oswald gave everything he had and then somehow figured out how to give just a little bit more. But that motivation driving at his back was gone.

Some days, he would sit down at his fancy desk and think back. He couldn't remember his family's faces. He wondered if they would be proud of him, or if they would condemn the amount of death he had been directly and indirectly responsible for. No sane man could take that much life and not question it, at least a little.

It's why all the frontline members of the Revolution were extremists. They were nutcases, every last one, and Oswald knew it. Most of them had similar stories to his own. Some less tragic, some more. A good way to lose the chip on your shoulder is to hear how depressingly common your situation was. The difference between him and a frontliner was that he eventually grew out of his anger. After a while, it just…fizzled out. He had killed enough, caused enough death with his own two hands that a part of him started wondering what would happen if he kept going.

So he requested a transfer. At that point, as a unit commander, he had already accrued a reputation for competence. Something he wore with pride to this day. Things were different back then. The Revolution was only about fifty years old, and Oswald had joined when it was still small. The next thirty years had seen explosive growth, but back then they were still mostly a ragtag group of rebels with slightly better ethertech from a few brilliant and sympathetic patrons.

Everything had changed. The Revolution didn't use to have paperwork. You just took what you needed and got the job done. But with the rise of membership, power, and scale, there came a necessary amount of oversight. The Revolution had so many moving parts that you needed dozens of people just to manage resource distribution.

Oswald had a healthy amount of nostalgia for the old days. Back when it felt like the leadership had just as much passion for the cause as the front line. All of Oswald's peers were tired old folk or middle-aged like him. They treated this like any other job, with all the trappings of a normal job.

Some of that comes from the fact that after fifty years of killing hundreds of shrouded and destroying or flipping several major assets, the CA didn't seem to give a shit about the Revolution. It was hard to maintain enthusiasm in a fight when your opponent doesn't even flinch no matter how hard you hit.

In his brief stint as a spy, Oswald had seen it first hand. Your everyday shrouded, a concept that his fourteen-year-old self would have never believed was real, didn't know anything about the Revolution except that they existed. Military leadership knew everything. Oswald had been blown away by how comprehensive and accurate their data was.

Then he saw the real kicker. They didn't do anything with it! The CA military, their most powerful force, did nothing to deal with the Revolution. They just didn't care. After a time, Oswald felt he understood. Why would they care? Even among shrouded, there was a power hierarchy, and every death at the hands of the Revolution had been dealt to the lowest rung. The fact was, the important people were so powerful that the Revolution would never succeed in killing them. They were basically gods.

So the ones who could do something had no reason to as they weren't under threat, so they didn't. The public at large who was in the most danger was never told there was any real threat, and the Revolution itself was never going to get what they wanted unless something massive changed in the way they operated and who they attacked because right now, they were banging their heads against a wall, and it was the wrong wall.

Completely disenfranchised, Oswald resigned as an active spy. Still, some part of him wanted to believe in the dreams of a fourteen-year-old boy, so he stayed on. This resource-gathering job was perfect. No matter what, the materials he coordinated the extraction and logistics of would improve the lives of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of unshrouded.

After everything he'd done, that was all he really wanted anymore. Times were changing, and they no longer lived in a world where monsters could only be stopped by shrouded. Oswald was a staunch advocate for the segregation faction in the Revolution. He wanted unshrouded to claim a few continents for their own and forget the shrouded existed. They could kill each other in their pointless wars.

But that wasn't going to happen for several reasons. The shrouded had a taste for ether now, they wouldn't be letting it go. Any independent unshrouded would need ether to make monster-killing weapons. The CA would never willingly let those supplies go to anyone else. Plus, the segregation faction was small, almost non-existent. It was mostly old hands like him that had been onboard from the beginning but grew tired of the violence.

No, the major faction was still the genocides. Rather than form their own little kingdom like the segregationists, the genocides wanted all shrouded gone, forever. Most of the top leadership believed in that cause, and much of the grunts did too. Oswald couldn't blame them. Only whatever unknown gods that might exist could possibly know how many lives had been lost to shrouded and their games of power and war.

"Everything ok, boss?" The shout came from right next to him, and Oswald realized his melancholy thoughts had run away with him. No more approval slips showed up, and he was standing in the middle of the street, staring at nothing. One of his aids must have noticed and grown concerned.

"Yes, everything is fine. Simply lost in thought." Oswald yelled back. These suits they wore did an amazing job of insulating them from the oven-like heat flowing through those orange light veins, but they were thick, and you couldn't hear through them for shit.

As if reacting to his thoughts, there was a surge that rushed through the veins, bigger than anything Oswald had ever seen. The veins fluctuated and pulsed regularly, but they never surged like this. A bead of sweat formed on the back of Oswald's neck.

"Start evacuating, NOW!" He yelled at the same aid, who had stopped to stare at the surging light. Looking around, Oswald saw that the same was true for everyone else he could see in the street, even the people working on taking apart the temporary housing units. "EVERYONE, MOVE! WE LEAVE NOW!"

Oswald screamed so loud his ears rang. Those close to him jumped, snapping out of their stupor and rushing off to pass the message on to others that were looking in his direction like they weren't sure what they heard. These suits were going to get people killed.

"Boss, is that necessary? We're over a day from complete evacuation readiness, on the good side." The aid asked. He hadn't moved off.

Oswald shook his head. Most of the camp likely thought the surge was odd, maybe creepy or foreboding. Most of the camp didn't know what he did. Only a couple of ethertechs, Oswald, and the Revolution leadership minder that was watching over his shoulder as he managed this project actually knew that the heat down here wasn't natural.

This site had not been set up to mine ether. This underground cavern had been a research station for over a decade before aunty mining began. The Revolution was here for one thing and one thing alone, and now it was changing. Oswald had no interest in seeing what was causing that change.

They were days from a Magma Titan emerging, and the source was acting strange. That set off all kinds of alarms to Oswald's experienced mind. He had lived through events and missions that had killed their fair share of his fellows. He trusted his gut, and it was doing backflips.

Rather than stand around, Oswald got the aid moving and went out himself, informing everyone even slightly qualified that they were aborting the mining operation effective immediately. Everything was to be left where it lay, and they were all getting out of here right now. The equipment could be reclaimed later if he ended up being wrong about the danger, but if the Magma Titan was coming out early, he would be saving every last one of them from a grisly death full of molten rock and pain.

It was only minutes later when they heard the sound. Hundreds of monsters baying for blood flooding through the tunnels. There were sensors set up throughout the tunnels that the Revolution occupied, set to track monster activity. Every single one was set off at the same time.

They lost people.

Oswald knew before they even reached the cavern. Too many teams had been out in the tunnels, collecting mining equipment and packing it for shipping. Still, he went about getting a head count started as his people started hedging through the exit tunnel. The storm of monsters didn't follow. They seemed to just be passing through, not here for the revolutionaries. Oswald had an idea about where they were headed.

He moved on, not letting the weight of the losses weigh him down. He had lost friends, but this wasn't the first time, and he had a job to do. So he knuckled down and saw to making sure he didn't lose anyone else. They had several thousand people manage to make it to the tunnel, the vast majority. They were still short at least a couple hundred.

Oswald sighed. He had no idea how this evacuation had gone from him being pissed about how much money they would lose because the predictive techs hadn't given them good enough information, to mentally sifting through the names of families he'd have to visit. It was his job, after all. He would have to talk to the families of everyone lost today.

The names scrolled through his head, on and on. That didn't even count those he simply didn't know. Men and women he'd never met. People who had only known him as their boss, trusted him to run a safe operation and get them home to family in one piece. He had failed them.

"Boss, we've got a situation."

Oswald looked. It was the same aid as before. He didn't know this man's name either. He was a new team member. "What's your name, kid?"

"Uhh, sorry sir, what?"

"Name, tell me."

"Uh, Jackson, sir. Am I in trouble?" The kid sounded genuinely nervous.

"No, just realizing I didn't know your name. What's this problem?" Oswald waved his hand, calming the kid's nerves.

"Well, I'm not sure it's a problem really, but I thought you'd want to know."

"Spit it out." Oswald sighed. "Not sure it can make this day any worse."

"Well, the back of the train is saying that another surge went through the veins-"

"Shit!" Oswald cursed before gesturing for Jackson to keep talking. Oswald was near the front of the line, moving out from under the mountain, and they had passed out of the range of the energy veins nearly half an hour ago.

"But, after the surge, they said…They said the veins disappeared. They shrunk away, moved back further under the mountain."

"I see. Thanks for letting me know." Taking the implied dismissal to heart, Jackson was gone in a heartbeat.

Oswald whispered to himself, "What the fuck is going on down there?"