72 HOURS TO DIE

The Krovik Pass was never meant to be held in December.

Captain Lukas Varda knew this the moment his battalion commander issued the order, speaking not with the conviction of a strategist but with the flat tone of a man reading a telegram he already knew was bad news. "Hold for seventy-two hours," the command had said. "Allow the 3rd Division to regroup at the railhead." Seventy-two hours. In this weather, against a enemy that knew these slopes the way a shepherd knows the limp of his favorite goat, seventy-two hours was a death sentence dressed up in operational necessity.

Now, on the third morning, with a wind screaming down from the heights that could freeze a man's breath into a mask of ice before it left his lips, Lukas understood that the sentence had come due.

He lay prone in the snow, pressed behind a granite outcropping that offered the only cover on this exposed ridgeline. The cold had long ago ceased to be pain and had become something else—a dull, distant hum in his bones, like the memory of warmth. His rifle, a bolt-action Model 41 with a stock scarred from three campaigns, felt less like a weapon and more like an extension of his frozen body. Through the drifting snow, he watched the tree line across the valley.

They were out there. He could feel them.

"Sir." The whisper came from his left, where Corporal Marten Pavic had burrowed into the snow like a marmot seeking hibernation. Marten was nineteen, from a fishing village on the southern coast, a place where the biggest worry had been whether the autumn catch would pay the winter debts. Now his face was the color of old cheese, and his hands shook around his rifle not from fear but from the cold that gnawed at them all. "Sir, I can't feel my trigger finger."

Lukas didn't look at him. "Then use your middle one, Corporal. The enemy won't wait for your hand to thaw."

Behind them, spread along the ridgeline in hastily dug fighting positions, the rest of 2nd Platoon waited in similar misery. Twenty-seven men, reduced from forty-two after the first two days. They had names and faces and families, but Lukas forced himself not to think about that. In command, thinking of them as men made you hesitate. And hesitation on a frozen mountain got everyone killed.

The morning was silent except for the wind. No birds sang at this altitude in winter. No animals moved. The world had become a study in white and grey, beautiful in the way a corpse is beautiful—still, perfect, and utterly devoid of life.

"They're not coming," Marten whispered hopefully. "Maybe they pulled back. Maybe—"

The first mortar round landed fifty meters to their right

The sound was not the sharp crack of artillery but a deep, muffled crump, the snow absorbing the explosion even as it flung geysers of frozen earth and shrapnel into the air. Before Lukas could shout, before his body could even react, the world dissolved into noise and chaos.

"Contact! Contact left!"

"Where? I don't see—"

More rounds fell, a creeping barrage walking its way up the ridgeline with terrible precision. Lukas scrambled to his knees, the cold forgotten, adrenaline burning through his veins like distilled fire. He spotted them then—grey shapes emerging from the tree line across the valley, spreading into a skirmish line, moving with the practiced ease of soldiers who had done this a hundred times before.

They were Volgan. The enemy. The Eastern Bloc. The Horde. They had many names in the Western press, in the training manuals, in the propaganda films Lukas had sat through before deployment. Subhuman, the posters called them. Barbarians. The Grey Tide. Their faces, when you could see them in newsreels, were always blank, expressionless, the faces of automatons programmed for destruction.

Lukas had learned, in three years of war, that this was a lie.

They were men. Dangerous men. Skilled men. Men who moved through the snow like it was their native element, who never wasted a bullet, who never broke formation. Men who, if you got close enough to see their eyes, looked just as tired and just as terrified as the boys of 2nd Platoon.

"Hold your fire!" Lukas roared, his voice cracking against the wind. "Wait for the range! Wait—"

The Volgans opened fire.

The crack of rifles merged into a continuous roll of thunder. Snow puffed around Lukas's position as rounds impacted inches away. Behind him, he heard a wet gasp, a gurgling cry, the sound of a man trying to scream through a throat that was no longer whole.

Lukas raised his rifle, sighted on the lead figure in the grey line—a sergeant, by the way he gestured his men forward—and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle kicked. The sergeant stumbled, fell forward into the snow, and did not rise.

"Fire at will!" Lukas shouted. "Make every shot count!"

For a few desperate minutes, they held. The Volgan advance faltered as the Western marksmen found their targets. Lukas worked the bolt of his rifle with mechanical precision—aim, fire, eject, reload, aim again—his mind empty of everything except the geometry of killing. Target acquisition. Range estimation. Lead calculation. His men were dying around him, he knew, but he could not afford to know. He could only shoot.

Then the mortars found their range.

The round that landed near Lukas was close enough to lift him off the ground and slam him back down like a rag doll. The world went white, then grey, then slowly resolved into a ringing silence punctuated by distant screams. He pushed himself up, shook his head to clear the debris, and tasted blood.

"Sir!" Marten was beside him, pulling at his arm, his young face streaked with tears or meltwater or both. "Sir, we have to fall back! They're coming through on the left! Serzhant Jović is dead, everyone on the left is dead, we have to—"

Lukas looked left. Marten was right. The Volgan skirmish line had curled around their flank like a closing fist. In another few minutes, they would be surrounded. Encircled. Destroyed.

He looked right. The remnants of his platoon were still fighting, still holding, still believing in the seventy-two hours that were now thirty minutes past irrelevant.

He looked forward. The Volgans kept coming.

Lukas Varda had been a soldier for twelve years. He had enlisted at eighteen, a boy from the industrial city of Novigrad who had wanted nothing more than to escape the factories that had swallowed his father and his grandfather before him. The army had given him purpose, structure, a way to be something more than another cog in the machine. He had risen through the ranks on competence alone, had earned his commission in the bloodiest battles of the first year of the war, had learned to lead not by shouting but by example.

He knew what he had to do.

"Corporal Pavic." His voice was calm. Steady. The voice he used when everything was falling apart and someone needed to hold the pieces together. "Gather the men. All of them. Fall back to the second ridge."

Marten stared at him. "Sir, what about you?"

Lukas was already checking his ammunition. Three magazines. Twelve rounds each, if he was lucky. Plus the pistol at his hip, which would be useless at range but might buy a few seconds at the end. He pulled the pin on his last fragmentation grenade and placed it carefully in the snow beside him.

"I'll hold them here. Give you time."

"Sir, no. No, we can't—we won't leave you—"

"Corporal." Lukas turned to look at the boy, really look at him, and for a moment he allowed himself to see not a soldier but a fisherman's son with salt water in his blood and a girl waiting on a dock somewhere. "That is an order. You will gather the men. You will fall back to the second ridge. You will hold there until the 3rd Division arrives or until you run out of ammunition, whichever comes last. And you will live, Corporal. Do you understand me? You will live."

Marten's face crumpled. "Sir, please—"

"Go." Lukas made his voice hard, the voice of an officer who would not be questioned. "Now. That's an order."

For one terrible moment, he thought the boy would refuse. Then Marten nodded, scrambled backward, and began shouting at the survivors to pull back, to move, to run.

Lukas turned back to face the enemy.

He watched his men go. Watched them stumble through the snow, dragging their wounded, leaving trails of blood and desperation. Watched them disappear over the ridge into the grey-white distance.

Then he settled his rifle on its bipod, lined up his sights on the advancing Volgan line, and began to shoot.

He killed seven of them.

Maybe eight. It was hard to count when every shot had to be perfect, when every second brought them closer, when the cold and the blood loss and the concussion from the mortar were all conspiring to pull him down into darkness. He shot until his magazines were empty, then drew his pistol and shot some more. He threw the grenade and saw three men fall.

Then the pistol clicked empty, and there was no more time.

They came at him from all sides, grey shapes in the swirling snow. He reached for his knife—a foolish gesture, he knew, but some part of him refused to die with empty hands—and then something hard struck the back of his skull, and the world dissolved into a cascade of white stars against a darker white sky.

The last thing he heard, before consciousness fled, was a voice speaking in accented Western:

"This one's an officer. Captain's bars. Take him alive."