Epilogue
The dark pulled Brawler down like water, heavy and relentless.
For a moment he thought he was back in the jungle, lungs straining for air thick with heat and rot.
But when he blinked, the world shifted. Trenches clawed into the earth, mud sucking at boots, men’s faces hollow with hunger and fear.
Artillery thundered, the air sharp with cordite and screams.
Flash staggered through it, no helmet, no rifle, just his bare hands and those wild, dark eyes that had always hidden more than they revealed. He dropped to his knees in the muck, fingers digging into the earth as if he could hold the whole war together.
“Christian!” His voice tore across the chaos, raw, desperate. He lifted his head, and his eyes locked on Brawler’s. “Don’t let me go.”
The world bled again. Bombers streaked overhead, a city burning beneath them. Flash was there too, crumpled on the cobblestones of another war, chest heaving, blood on his lips. His hand reached out, trembling, reaching for Brawler as if across time itself. “Brother…”
Brawler lurched forward, arm outstretched?—
“Christian!”
His eyes snapped open to the dim light of Emily’s apartment. The hum of the city pressed through the window, taxis honking far below. Sweat slicked his chest, his breath ragged.
Emily was beside him, pale in the lamplight, eyes wide with fear. Her hands gripped his shoulders, anchoring him. “You were dreaming. God, you were thrashing. You scared me.”
He dragged in a breath, the phantom mud and fire still clinging to him. “Flash.” His voice was rough. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “He’s fighting. I saw him. Both wars, like he was…losing himself. He called for me.”
Emily brushed damp hair from his temple, her touch soft but steady. “It was just a dream.”
“No,” he rasped, lowering his hands, fixing her with storm-dark eyes. “It wasn’t. I felt him. He’s slipping.”
The room held still. Emily swallowed hard. “Then you need to go to him. Do you want me to come with you?”
Brawler cupped the back of her neck and kissed her, slow and lingering, as if he could memorize the taste of her in one last moment.
When he pulled back, his forehead pressed to hers, he whispered, “I’ll call you.
But your mission is here. Finish what you started.
Take care of your dissertation.” He rose, got dressed and ready to leave.
Her eyes glistened, but she nodded as she followed him to the door. “Come back to me.”
“Nothing will keep me from you, Emily. Ever.”
Brawler grabbed his bag, gave Emily one last look, firelit hair, fierce heart, the only home he’d ever wanted, and stepped into the waiting night. He could feel his teammates before the SUV pulled up to the curb.
Flash landed hard on wet boards slick with slime.
The air was a choking wall of stench, mud, rot, blood, shit, gas. Trenches stretched like scars carved across a ruined landscape, narrow walls dripping with slime. Artillery boomed overhead, the ground shaking as if the earth itself were trying to vomit the war back up.
His body was wrapped in scratchy wool, a steel pot helmet pressing into his forehead. A bolt-action rifle weighed down his hands. Mud sucked at his boots with every step, cold seeping bone deep.
A whistle shrilled. Men climbed ladders into hell.
He followed. Instinct drove him, not choice. He scrambled over the lip into no man’s land, mud and wire and craters swallowing men alive. Bullets shredded the air, machine guns hammering relentlessly. The man beside him jerked, blood spraying, and fell face down in the muck.
He stumbled forward, lungs searing, and then the hiss reached him. A yellow-green cloud slithered low, rolling toward the line. His chest clenched, his eyes burned, and he coughed hard enough to tear muscle.
He dropped to his knees, chest heaving, gagging on the reek of rot and gas.
Suddenly, hands were there, big, thick hands, and he looked up through his tearing eyes to see…Bondo’s craggy, stoic face behind a gas mask.
The man fumbled for the crude mask strapped to Flash’s side, tugged it on, the lenses fogging instantly. He could still taste the poison clawing down his throat, burning his lungs. Men screamed around him, clawing at their throats, drowning in open air.
Bondo’s shout stabbed his mind with a cold shard. “Endurance is not glory. It is survival in the face of meaninglessness. Stand, or Chaos will claim it all.”
There, among the smoke, the gas, the slaughter, he saw the shadows again. They were thicker this time, greedy, sliding over broken bodies, whispering into the ears of men who had already given up. Feeding on despair, on the senselessness.
He ripped the mask off, gas burning his throat raw. “I won’t play this game!” he roared, voice shredded, his mind overwhelmed from the horror of it all, slipping and sliding into madness. “This isn’t war. It’s slaughter! Pointless slaughter!”
He clawed at the air like he could tear the vision apart. His scream was swallowed by the boom of artillery.
Mercifully, it dissolved. The trenches, the bodies, the gas cloud, all ripped away into black.
He fell into the void again, choking on nothing, his lungs clawing for breath that wasn’t poisoned.
The silence this time felt heavier. He slumped into it, sweat dripping down his face, shaking his head violently. “Not mine,” he rasped. “Not my war. Not my lesson.”
But even as he denied it, the truth gnawed at him. The enemy wasn’t the Germans. It was the despair. The hopelessness. The way Chaos thrived in the cracks when men lost the will to stand.
He pressed his hands to his head. “Stop it. I’m not… I’m not yours.” But his voice lacked conviction now. The Veil had worn him down, piece by piece.
Then came the rumble. Low. Relentless. A world at industrial war.
Engines, tanks, aircraft overhead. The crack of rifles, the thunder of artillery on a scale even greater.
The void did not spit him into a trench or a harbor this time. It lifted him higher. Too high.
The first thing he saw was fire. Not battlefield fire, but cities in flames. Streets choked with rubble, glass glittering like frost, whole neighborhoods reduced to ash.
The Veil pulled him higher still. He saw it unfold across the globe as if maps themselves had come alive, arrows of steel sweeping east across Europe, armored columns rolling like iron serpents. Germany’s war machine devoured borders, swallowing nations whole.
Behind it, larger than any army, loomed the shadow.
Not wisps this time, not branches feeding soldiers in the dark.
This was a towering presence, massive and terrible, stretching its hands across continents.
Its head bowed toward Berlin, its voice a whisper that carried through parliaments and streets, factories and barracks.
The whisper had a face—Hitler’s, sharp and fanatic, eyes burning with borrowed fire. But it wasn’t just him. He was a mouthpiece. The shadow behind him pulsed and swelled, feeding on hatred, on hunger, on the desperation of men too afraid to stand alone.
He saw the ghettos next. Faces pressed behind barbed wire. Hollow eyes. Children herded into railcars. Smoke rising from chimneys that had nothing to do with warmth.
He staggered, chest tight, choking on horror that wasn’t his own. “Jesus Christ…”
The Veil didn’t let him look away. It showed him France collapsing in weeks. Poland broken, its people ground under boots. Italy bending. Russia bleeding.
Then, Britain.
A small island, ringed by gray seas, battered by bombs falling like rain. Cities scarred. Cathedrals gutted. But in the smoke and rubble, a lion stood. Bloody, torn, but unbroken. Its mane was fire. Its roar was defiance.
The lion morphed into Churchill, his face defiant, his words echoing like thunder. “Even lions can fall when Chaos grows too great. This war was not only steel against steel, but light against dissolution. Without guardians, the Veil would have ripped apart.”
From his vantage point, he saw the globe trembling.
Entire nations tipping on the edge of annihilation.
Shadows thickened where men gave in to cruelty, to despair.
But in pockets, French resistance fighters, and there…
Shark, planning and plotting with very few resources, but with courage, nothing left but grit.
Shark looked up right into his eyes, and he smiled.
“I see you, brother. We’ve got you.” Those tendrils cracked from him like whips, snapping and seeking him like he and Shark were one in spirit.
Flares of light pushed back shadows as those tendrils collided with him.
He cried out at the sensation, connection, shared purpose, love, and an oath that bit into his skin like fire.
Those tats lifted, and he fought the transformation.
He clenched his fists, rage burning through him. “This is too big. No one man can fight that.”
The Veil answered not in words but with a pull, a narrowing, dragging him down from the omnipotent height into one place, one body, one mission.
The beaches.
The water.
The men who would crawl under fire and break the way for others.
The Underwater Demolition Teams. His ancestors. His bloodline.
The Veil tore the sky open.
Sunlight blazed down on calm blue water, the illusion of peace so sharp it hurt. Then the scream of engines cut through the morning. Shadows of planes darkened the harbor, and in an instant the sky became teeth.
Explosions ripped through battleships. Metal shrieked as steel hulls split.
Columns of fire and smoke clawed toward the heavens.
Men staggered on decks, some leaping into the water, flames licking across their uniforms. The air itself seemed to burn, thick with cordite, with oil, with human screams.