“Feldwebel, is the ‘Old China’ operational?” a message flashed across on Alina’s wrist-panel, from Flora, “He has been outside for sixty-three minutes. This exceeds his standard strategic brooding duration by twenty-seven minutes.”

  “He is within acceptable parameters.” Alina taps the screen, sipping from the aluminum soda can, “Let us just say it is a cultural deviation from the Republic norm. It has not yet to be classified as detrimental to revolutionary efficiency. Let him be.”

  “Objection: He is not in battlesuit compliance. His unsanctioned surface exposure presents a measurable risk to our stealth status. A passing Syndicate satellite or drone would compromise our position.”

  “The risk is calculated.” Alina taps the screen again, “And I believe he is conducting unsanctioned field work, just didn’t tell me what it was. I think we should just let him do his work.”

  The ‘Red Vulture’s’ Central Intelligence Terminal (CIT) suddenly blared to life with a warning.

  “… Alina.” It is Warrant Officer Flora, now speaking through the internal comm, “We have company. A flying recon/strike asset, bearing 239 at 170 knots, Northeast. Altitude 8,300, range 41 kilometers and closing. Presumed unmanned aircraft. It is not one of ours.”

  “Log in combat records and activate Blackbox,” Alina replied, tossing the can aside. “Old man? Old man!”

  Chen Feng hopped into the tactical station, shutting the hatch behind him tight, “Heard you. I just got ‘that’ done, what is happening?”

  “Have you finished reminiscing about the past? Or were you brooding over your sex deviation from the Republic norm?” Alina Ludwig jokes.

  “…Positively hilarious,” Chen Feng rebutted, “Fact check: Citizen-Obergefreiter Chen Feng, or this unit, isn’t responsible for the apocalyptic gender imbalance in our glorious People’s Republic. Do you have anything else to say, Citizen-Feldwebel?”

  The words were sharp and precise.

  Alina Ludwig’s smug grin vanished.

  “That was a very awful thing to say, ‘Old China’. You could frame that fact less painfully.”

  Chen Feng simply glared at her.

  “You can make me ‘less painful’ by stop using that nickname.”

  “Okay, I get your point,” Alina said, sincere this time, “Alright. Your name is… Chao Fang?”

  “Chen. Feng.”

  “Chou? Chon? Why is this so hard?” Alina, struggling at reading the holographic name tag on Chen’s chestplate, “Damn, why did people invent so many languages back then? I don’t want to learn my fourth foreign language, you know.”

  “In accordance with the principles outlined in the , Chapter IV, Article II, the emergence of a multi-cultural future Republic shall be fundamental to our revolutionary progress. Comrade, you are failing at helping it to this goal.”

  , Alina thought, but did not say it aloud.

  “Okay! Both of you, cease this foolishness!” Flora yelled from the comm speaker, “There is a capitalist drone above the horizon, people. What part of it don’t you understand?”

  Alina, frowns under her helmet: “Very good. Obergefreiter, what did you do?”

  “I

  explain later.” Chen began disengaging his armor, shedding shoulder pads and plates before crawling into a sleeping compartment and lying down. “Power down all active systems. Electronic warfare, thermal, radar, lidar. Go to passive sensors only and maintain radio silence.”

  Alina: “Of course! Flora, you heard him—wait, what the fuck?”

  “There is no time to joke, Chen!” Flora's voice was frantic. “You are getting us all killed! Without the signal-scatterers they will detect us in seconds!”

  Chen Feng flipped over, facing the bulkhead wall of his rack, and pulled the blanket over himself. Did not reply.

  Alina stared at him, her helmeted gaze promising a slow, painful disassembly. She finally relented, the words a furious hiss. “If this gets us killed… Flora, comply! Do what he said!”

  The cockpit dropped to complete darkness, with only a shallow-green screen glowing. A small light point was moving toward the center of the screen.

  "Pattern identified…" Flora’s voice was a tense whisper over the internal comm. "‘Rāva?a’ class unmanned tactical bomber. Payload capacity: 2,800 kilograms, plus two cruise missiles. It possesses sufficient yield to scatter our constituent atoms into a stable orbit. There would be no mass left for a proper Republican burial.”

  Alina glared at Chen Feng’s back through her helmet. “Chen. If this is a miscalculation, I will personally file the report recommending your posthumous demotion to ‘Compost for the Collective.’ Did you hear that? Acknowledge."

  Chen Feng gave a dismissive wave without turning: "Just don't start flipping that thing off."

  Alina, though now calm-faced, still dragged a periscope—an extremely rudimentary tool—to her commander’s hatch and peered out with it.

  A faint light column passed through the dark sky without stopping in this area.

  "The Rāva?a is gone," Flora exhaled sharply.

  Alnia chuckled nervously, grabbed the previously aluminum can, and started chugging soda again.

  “B-but how did he pull that off?” Flora's tone shifted, the most "ecstatic" expression she could muster—which for her was a slight, perceptible brightening of her otherwise analytical delivery “I never see a ‘Rāva?a’ just wander off like a blind person——Chen, just how? They were just prefabs!”

  If someone sees the “Red Vulture” from its outside, the IFV, is indeed, covered in prefabs and building debris.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  The sky bled from deep black to a leaden grey, offering just enough light to see by. In the hours to come, this dull glow would strengthen to the level of a stormy overcast day—the maximum illumination this poisoned continent had known for centuries.

  An "Indra"-pattern MBT ground its way down the muddy track. Standing in the command hatch, his gold-trimmed and ornate armor a stark contrast to the grime of his surroundings, the distinct Delhi Syndicate Security Arm badge reads Corp-Major. His mood was as darkened as the sky above, a thunderhead starkly contrasting with the cowed faces of his subordinates.

  A report flashed on his tactical screen.

  "Sir," a voice crackled over the comms, "we've reconstructed their camp. They were definitely here—until early morning at the latest."

  “A tracked vehicle,” another analyst reported. “Signature matches a Sp-16i ‘Juno’ IFV. Standard PRNT reconnaissance squad complement.”

  The Corp-Major’s response was icy. "It fits their profile. That special hybrid battalion, a coordinated effort to spontaneously disband and infiltrate. One of the typical communist tactics."

  One of the patrol lieutenants interjected, his brow furrowed. "Our 'Rava?a' UAVs were deployed last night. They're equipped with passive signal detection from up to 30 kilometers and AI-driven visual recognition detection trained specifically on PRNT vehicle profiles. If the opposing side had foreknowledge, they could have avoided detection..."

  "Impossible," the Corp-Major snapped, cutting him off. "Their IFV model can only sustain optical scatterer for ten minutes before power depletion. The models that are capable of overnight stealth are mounted on SPGs and larger vehicles, not infantry carriers. Their active EW takes to spool up from a cold start, once turned off." His voice rose, laced with controlled fury. "We have five classes of air assets flying around all-night at random-assigned patrol routes, yet they evaded the specifically. Their method can only evade the , not anything else! How? Do you believe the Company doesn't have a single informant among our ranks?"

  He scanned the silent, helmeted faces around him. "And don't tell me those wretched communists have suddenly mastered natural camouflage! Their planet is a frozen rock. They don't have ."

  A heavy silence fell, broken only by the hum of electronics and the drip of acidic water.

  "Continue tracking," the Corp-Major finally ordered, the words a low growl.

  "But, Sir,” the lieutenant ventured again, his voice hesitant. “They’re a single, isolated squad. If they’re heading for the East-Delhi engagement zone, other assets will neutralize them. This deployment is… inefficient.”

  The Corp-Major 's expression hardened into something absolute. "Because we are 'Kalki's Wrath.' We are the only mobile unit without a current assignment. Our karma is built on proactively purging the Company's enemies, even without being asked to!" He leaned forward, his voice rising to a declaration that cut through the growl of restarting engines. "I, Vikas Rajan, so declare it! We will exterminate this 'special hybrid battalion,' starting with this pathetic squad! Let it be known—our mission is total depletion. No one reaches the fifth zone!"

  Under the cold calculus of corporate warfare, this order was excessive—a sledgehammer to crush a gnat. But the invasion of the Pan-Delhi Economic Zone had taught the Delhi Syndicate a brutal lesson: the People's Republic of New Terra was not just a competitor corporation. They were an entirely new kind of enemy, and they bred a corresponding new kind of hate.

  “‘Visual camouflage’? That was what you did?” Feldwebel Alina Ludwig is exasperated, “That’s the grand secret? It’s simple? Why didn’t our doctrinal algorithms account for this?”

  The Sp-16ia with the name “Red Vulture” roll through a narrow passage between a jungle of mutated, radiated floras of what-used-to-be the Indian rainforest. According to the historical records, this area was once an epicenter of a thermonuclear blast during one of the so-called corporate wars. The radiation aside, Chen’s opinion is that this land has a twisted form of beauty in it: the natural lives of Mother Earth somehow shrugged off the folly of civilization and moved on with their lives.

  Occasionally, the local faunas appeared briefly between the silhouettes of trees.

  “I am surprised that it isn’t your instinct to apply it. I am even more surprised when I learned that no one had ever done that before,” Chen Feng sighed, “we are the weaker force in this equation, things like this are low-tech, cheap, common knowledge… even Taliban and Hamas know how to pull that off. Haven’t you taken lessons in asymmetric warfare before? Did your Academy not cover this? Because I learned it from a boy’s camp in Israel, back when I was a teen.”

  Alina: “I did! The Martial Academy of New Paris. But we never learned… that. I don’t think there is a course for it either and I honestly didn’t know what you were doing when you were drawing stripes and attaching prefabs and plas-canvas to my ride. What was that, a magic trick to make us invisible?”

  Flora's voice came through the comm, laced with genuine academic curiosity: "Clarification requested: What are 'Taliban' and 'Hamas'? Were they pre-Republic revolutionary cadres?"

  Chen Feng stared into the air with a horrified expression. He attempted to compose himself, so he turned to Alina: “Not making us ‘invisible.’ The point of visual camouflage is not about not getting seen, it is called 'blend into the natural background' and making the enemies can’t tell you from everything else in the battlefield. I measured the ambient signature of this land——very near to a turn-off New Terran vehicle with Adamantine fuselage and Promethium rotors. So, add camouflage would compensate for their… shape angles.”

  Flora: “So… it is about making us… background?”

  Chen: “Exactly!”

  Alina: “If you don’t mind, how does that even work? You are describing the function of optic-scatterers, but the same work was done with archaic technology. It is a forgotten art to us, Chen.”

  Chen Feng, now equally exasperated as what Alina was a few moments ago, replied: “Fine, basic principles. You stand on a piece of land that is green.”

  The “Red Vulture” rolled forward. Its autopilot A.I. guided it off-road into a swampy water. The IFV’s auxiliary anti-gravity engine turned on with a small hum as it glides across the mud. The viscous, liquid earth swallowed all their trace as the vehicle passed.

  Flora and Alina: “Yes, a green ground, and then?”

  Chen: “You want to be green so people will have slightly harder time to spot you.”

  Flora processed this, her reply methodical. "Acknowledged. But the silhouette and shadow anomalies remain. The observer can still distinguish the target through pattern and contrast analysis."

  Chen: “That is the next two steps: you want to blur the silhouettes of whatever things you wish to hide. People and visual identification AIs both have harder time spotting irregular shapes from an environment.”

  Alina: “Hence the stripes and… assorted debris attached to my vehicle.”

  Chen: “Correct.”

  Flora: “The underlying principle? It is not based on optic-scatterer technology.”

  The optic-scatterers are the method for ‘stealth action’ in this century. The core principle is blending light around a unit, breaking its optic visual features (therefore: scatterer) so to make the protected body invisible or transparent beyond a certain distance. Chen——as he was having this conversation——believed that this technology was invented sometime during the 21th or 22nd century and it was a superior and more expensive evolution from visual camouflage. But because people had been using optic-scatterers too long, too often and they forgot its parent technology existed.

  Chen: “Its technology was based on the same principle: evolutionary biology! Do you know what a tiger is? Striped. Zebra? Striped. All of them are cute stripy things of my century. They are the winners of natural selection because one simple, common feature is shared between them, and we got that inspiration to invent visual camouflage! We copied them! Do you know what they are? I learned this from an old movie I watched when I was a child, ‘Tunnel Warfare.’ That's how the Chinese guerrillas won 400 years ago—the Viets in the 70s, as well.”

  Chen Feng remembered vividly that he read them from a military magazine when he was 11, but the details elude him, and he didn’t get enough sleep last night. He suddenly finds he could not remember the fine scientific details, just that it works.

  No one answers for a long moment. And Chen Feng was slowly losing faith to this wretched, historical-illiterated world. Then, Flora broke the quiet, her tone tentative yet filled with a studious need for categorization:

  "Then, were tigers and zebras... ancient proletariat cadres? Pre-cursors to the First Republic of Terra?"

  Chen Feng stared into the air with a horrified expression.

  Alina cut in. “Let’s table the history lesson. Explain the stripe-to-outline correlation.”

  Chen: “You know what? I’m invoking ‘Operational Security: Need-to-Know Basis.’ It works. Accept it.”

  Alina: “…Acknowledged.”