The bay erupted more openly this time.

“There,” Briggs said, his voice dropping into something meaner, more private, though he still wanted everyone to hear it. “Hands like that? You don’t deserve gear.”

Mason’s bare fingers hovered over the next round.

For the first time, he paused.

It was tiny. Barely a second. But it was enough.

His right wrist turned as he reached down, and the fluorescent light caught skin that had been hidden beneath the gloves and cuff. There was a scar there, long and pale, cutting diagonally across the inside of his wrist like an old blade mark. Just above it sat a dark, clean-lined symbol—small, precise, not the kind of tattoo soldiers got on drunken weekends. It looked official. Intentional. Unit-specific.

Specialist Aaron Velez, standing three feet away with a clipboard tucked under one arm, noticed it first.

His face changed instantly.

Not much. Just enough to matter.

His smirk vanished. His eyes narrowed. He shifted his weight as if something cold had moved through him. He looked from the mark to Mason’s face, then to Briggs, then back down again. His mouth parted like he was about to say something.

He didn’t.

Briggs either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Mason picked up another round. His voice, when it came, was quiet enough that only the closest men heard it.

“Copy that.”

There was no edge in it. No resentment. No sarcasm.

That somehow made it worse.

Briggs stood and turned, basking in the moment. “This is what happens when people forget their place,” he announced, as if he were teaching leadership instead of enjoying cruelty. “You get sloppy. You get corrected.”

A corporal near the cage door gave a short nod like he thought that sounded wise. Someone else muttered, “Damn right.”

Mason kept working.

He was halfway through the scattered rounds now, moving through them with the same steady rhythm. A line of dust had transferred onto one knee of his uniform. The skin of his fingers was already reddening from the concrete. Every time brass clicked into the crate, the sound seemed sharper in the growing hush.

Velez’s discomfort spread without explanation. The men nearest him sensed it first. They didn’t know what he had seen, only that something in his posture had changed from entertainment to unease. He kept glancing toward the warehouse entrance. Toward Mason. Toward the scar. Toward Briggs.

Briggs noticed that.

“What?” he snapped. “You got something to say?”

Velez straightened. “No, Sergeant.”

“Then get back to work.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

But no one really got back to work. Not fully. The room remained tilted toward Mason on the floor. The scene had momentum now, and moments like that were hard to leave. Humiliation had gravity.

Outside the bay doors, footsteps pounded against the concrete corridor.

Fast. Focused. Coming hard.

At first no one reacted. Fort Cormorant was always noisy—boots, engines, shouted orders, metal doors slamming. But then the footsteps got louder, closer, urgent in a way that cut through the warehouse rhythm.

A figure appeared in the doorway at a near run.

Captain Elena Mercer came in like a storm front.

She was still in her patrol blouse, sleeves down, chest rising fast from the sprint across the motor pool. Her gaze moved once across the bay and took in the whole picture at once: the spilled rounds, the crate on the floor, the ring of silent soldiers, Sergeant Briggs standing over a kneeling man.

Then her eyes hit Mason.

She stopped dead.

The air in the room seemed to collapse inward.

Briggs turned, annoyed at the interruption before he understood who had interrupted him. “Captain,” he said, with the brittle confidence of a man who still believed he controlled the scene.

Mercer didn’t answer him right away.

She stared at Mason for one long second, then at the gloves on the floor, then at the bloodless calm in his face. Her expression hardened so quickly it felt like a door slamming shut.