All Chapters of REBORN IN THE CATACLYSM: I DUMP MY LEECH HUSBAND FIRST: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

They moved before the light fully settled into the trees.Howard had felt the change in my posture during the final watch and asked no questions. The column simply rose, packed, and started north under the last of the dark. Lia took point again without being told. The fighters adjusted spacing to keep her bracketed. Rios managed the early kilometers on the crutch and transferred to the litter only when the ground grew uneven.Sarah walked when the footing allowed. The permanent link carried a careful, deliberate calm that she was maintaining by force of will. Every time a branch snapped or a bird called she flinched once, then forced the reaction down. The effort was visible in the set of her shoulders.I stopped her gently after the third flinch.“You don’t have to hold it that hard,” I said quietly. “The quiet kind of scared is harder for them to use than the loud kind. Just stay next to me.”She looked up, searching my face for the rule underneath the words. Then she nodded and let

The drone’s thin engine note climbed from the edge of hearing into something immediate.Howard did not look up. He simply drove the column harder along the floor of the cut, boots tearing at the loose stone. The walls rose again after the shallow stretch, giving partial concealment, but the channel was still open to the sky in a long, straight line. A targeting package would not need perfect cover to finish the job.“Break left at the next bend,” I said. “Out of the cut. Into the brush on the shoulder. Scatter the thermal.”The fighters adjusted without breaking stride. Rios was lifted from the litter and half-carried; the time for measured rotation had ended. Sarah’s arms locked around my neck hard enough to hurt. The permanent link carried raw fear now, no longer contained. There was nothing left to damp. The window was already closed.They scrambled up the side of the cut at a place where the wall had collapsed into a steep, sandy slope. Loose earth gave under every step. Behind th

The brushy corridor ran north longer than it had any right to.Low walls of tangled scrub and second-growth pine kept the sky fractured. The ground underfoot was soft and uneven, forcing the column into a careful, almost shuffling rhythm that protected Rios’s reopened wound at the cost of every minute they could not afford. Two fighters supported him between them. The litter had been abandoned in the rockfall; there was no time to rebuild it.Sarah stayed in the carrier. She had stopped trying to walk. The permanent link carried a continuous low tremor of exhaustion layered over the deliberate quiet she forced on herself. Every few minutes the Continuity tone returned—short, probing, almost polite. Each time she stiffened, held, and then slowly unclenched. The operators were patient. They did not need a large spike. They only needed enough small ones to keep the window from widening again.Lia spoke without looking back. “They’re herding. The drones will keep the flanks warm while the

The patient tone returned four more times before the midpoint of the night.Each instance lasted longer than the last. It never pushed hard enough to tear a spike loose. It simply rested against the permanent link and waited, a steady pressure that made silence itself feel like work. Sarah woke at every one. She did not cry. She only pressed closer and held the reaction down until the tone faded. The cost accumulated in the fine tremor that never fully left the bond.Howard rotated the watches in short intervals. No one slept more than forty minutes at a stretch. Rios drifted in and out, the reopened wound and the day’s exertion pulling him under despite the discomfort. Lia remained awake through the first half of the night, seated near the cut’s entrance with her arms around her knees, eyes on the dark slope above.At the fifth tone Sarah’s control slipped for less than a second. A thin, bright thread of fear escaped before she crushed it. Somewhere on a Continuity board the operator

The third pulse struck as they reached the final twenty meters.It hit short and to the right, close enough that the heat washed across the column in a single hard wave. One fighter went down hard, shoulder and side seared. Two others dragged him without breaking stride. The smell of burnt cloth and skin followed them the rest of the way.They dropped over the edge of the saddle into the secondary drainage in a controlled fall of bodies and packs. The cut was deeper than it had looked from above—steep walls of packed earth and stone that closed overhead in places where old roots and collapsed soil formed a partial roof. The drone’s engine note swept across the open ground they had just left, searching for the thermal bloom of people who were no longer there.Howard counted heads in the dark. Eight adults. One child. The burned fighter was conscious and biting down on a folded strap to keep from making noise. Rios was pale and silent, the reopened wound bleeding through the latest dres