Chapel: In the Red Zone

🝄 Filed under: Tactical Fables / Proverbs Protocol / Anti-Technicracy Files

They called him Axel, though that wasn’t his name. He carried the rank sigil of a Field-5—the kind of man whose orders you didn’t second-guess, not unless you’d already laid your will in a burial locker. He spoke loud when he should’ve whispered. He whistled through tight canyons. He scoffed at protocols like they were embroidery. And I followed him anyway, because we had a hostile on the ridge and because I don’t argue with fire when I’m walking through dry brush.

We were five klicks deep into the Red Zone trenchline, shadowing the outer rim of a collapsed solar array—the kind the Technocults used for planetary scans and soul-fracking. No birds, no hum. Just the hiss of old cables sighing in the dust. Our uplink was dead and my jaw clicked every time I chewed from the tension of holding back what needed to be said.

Axel had one thing going for him: he had done this before. And done it well. If the world hadn’t inverted under the gravity of New Babel’s machine god, he would’ve made a decent general. He still might. But he talked too much. Every movement, every sweep of the terrain, every quiet moment that begged for the breath of listening—he filled it. Not with foolishness, exactly, but with something worse: contempt-laced bravado, shaped like courage but hollow as a broken command key.

He was crouched now beside the relay husk, muttering about how “these smurphs probably pray to USB sticks and tinfoil.”

I watched the shimmer just beyond the wreckage, the kind of shimmer that doesn’t belong to heat. My trigger finger felt the pull of electricity. I saw the dart—green-blue edge, Technicratic signature. He didn’t see it. Not yet.

Stillness.

So I didn’t warn him. I just moved. Fast, low, clean.

One dart intercepted mid-air. One shot returned, not at the shimmer—but beside it.

Shadow peeled off the rock, convulsed, dropped. Axel looked at me like I was a ghost, and for once, said nothing. We cleared the ridge in a different silence.

He didn’t thank me.

I didn’t need it.