When Miller opened his eyes again, he was back in the loading bay. His helmet HUD was clean. The sun cast proper shadows. Vance was slapping his cheek.

“Sir, my optics are fried,” he said, turning toward Sergeant Vance.

It was a Windows error chime. Ding.

And then: “BIOS updated. Please restart to apply changes.”

He fired. The bullet didn’t glitch. It hit Park square in the chest.

“Yeah,” he said, not looking at the distant hills. “Just… shaders needed a reboot.”

“What the hell?” Private Miller tapped his helmet. The HUD was gone. The ammo counter, the compass, the friendly markers—all of it swallowed by a single, pulsing line of red text crawling across his retinal display:

“Miller! You froze for six seconds. You good?”

They turned to Rossi. His cheeks didn’t curve. They were jagged polygons. His eyes were two flat, glossy decals. When he blinked, the skin around them didn’t move. He looked like a puppet.

But he never played the Opfor hunting mission again. And he never, ever looked at the skybox.

Miller closed his eyes. The last thing he heard wasn’t gunfire or an explosion.