Lot of glossary terms in this one.
SOCOM - Special Operations Command
JSOC - Joint Special Operations Command (subservice within SOCOM)
AWG - Asymmetric Warfare Group - An Army organization tasked with identifying new adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures and identifying shortfalls in readiness
MARSOC - Marine Special Operations Command
Group - Shorthand for members of Army special operations teams, such as the 10th Special Forces Group. Saying someone i...
2026-01-23 16:30:15 +0000 UTC
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Glossary terms: S2 Shop - An Army term for an intelligence center typically tasked with collecting and compiling raw information into actionable intelligence.
Chapter 108 – Anomylous Properties
The rifle barked in his hands. At the other end of the range, a chunk of one of the concrete targets tore away. A small puff of smoke and brass shavings vented out the right side of his gun. Well, at least it shot. What was more, the gun sent another ping of satisfaction into his mind....
2026-01-22 18:45:32 +0000 UTC
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About time Cole got an upgrade. While the patient hunter rifle was fun, Curahee armaments are starting to be ineffective against some of the bigger threats.
Chapter 107 – Cthulhu Calibers
“Airborne, a word,” said Hard Tone as Cole pushed himself up from his chair. The rest of the team looked at him.
“Go ahead without me,” he said. “I got nothing planned for us today, so if you don’t got shit to do, go home. Tomorrow we’re picking our next assignment.”
...
2026-01-21 18:02:15 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 106 – Babel Debrief
“I’m just saying, it’s wild,” said Howie. The elevator doors closed and Cole leaned against the wall as his team rode up towards the third floor. Hard Tone was conducting individual team debriefs, and theirs was the last of the day. Howie continued. “Like, four scientists and two soldiers dead, more people injured from an experiment at a government laboratory. Not a peep. Any other organization this would be a national disaster.”
“This...
2026-01-16 21:27:44 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 105 – Reunion
Cole gave his account to Bricker, who nodded along and occasionally asked the unremarkable clarifying question. But it wasn’t until the end of the debrief that Bricker asked Howie to leave the room to speak to Cole alone.
The director stood up, pacing to the back of the office and running his fingers across the case that held his arquebus and sword from Curahee. “Cole, I have no intention to stop pulling at the thread of this world—the March
2026-01-15 17:26:36 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 104 – Unknown Depths
“Hey Cole, security detail brought up a present for you,” said Howie. He held up what looked like an otherworld assault rifle, grinning ear to ear. “The lab got trashed, but at least those guys dropped loot. I don’t know what it does. But those things were tough as nails, so I bet it’s pretty good.”
Back in the trace lab, Cole held out his hands and caught the rifle as Howie pitched it over. It was certainly the strangest-looking otherw...
2026-01-14 18:13:24 +0000 UTC
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War Horses Book 6: Sunstone Imperative is live on Amazon in ebook, Kindle Unlimited, and print. You can grab a copy, here: https://www.amazon.com/War-Horses-Book-Sunstone-Imperative-ebook/dp/B0G6GYNQ65
Also, until tomorrow, many of my back catalogue books are free or heavily discounted, including:
War Horses 1-3
The Dragon's Banker
Oathbreakers Anonymo...
2026-01-11 17:26:29 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 103 – Ballistic Realignment
“You gotta be kidding me,” Cole muttered. He held it up to his eye and switched it round the first way again, just in case. Maybe it was like one of those thumb drives that were always wrong until you actually looked at the fuckin’ thing. But no such luck. His chest started to feel tighter. Holding his breath, he wrapped his fingers around the padlock, braced against the valve, and pulled. The lock scraped across the valve,...
2026-01-10 04:11:42 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 102 – Flush Them Out
Rodriguez stared at Cole like he’d just walked on water, but the senior engineer managed to stay on task.
“Colton, right? Tony said you were coming.” He looked over his shoulder to a woman with a phone pressed to her ear. “Tina, tell Tony help just got here. Though,” he glanced out the window at the darkened generator room. “Not sure how much longer here is gonna last.”
“George, yeah?” asked Cole. The middle-aged en...
2026-01-09 01:00:23 +0000 UTC
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Hey all! Had an amazing trip seeing friends I haven't seen in 5-10 years and a couple that I hadn't yet met in person. Thanks for your patience in getting the chapters up this week.
The update schedule is also changing for now, to Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
Chapter 101 – Generating Solutions
“This shit is wild,” said Rodriguez beside him. “There hasn’t been real a casualty since I got stationed here. I thought the guys I replaced were making it up.”
“...
2026-01-08 02:27:51 +0000 UTC
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Show of hands, who thought this was going to be a between-missions downtime arc?
Surprise early chapter! I'll be traveling this weekend, so tomorrow's chapter is getting posted today and Monday's chapter will probably be a bit later in the week. Enjoy, happy New Year, and have a great weekend!
Chapter 100 – Hello From the Other Side
A few feet away, Howie froze. Not in the sense that he locked up out of surprise or fear, but in that a layer of ice raced across his skin, ...
2026-01-01 18:44:35 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 99 - Resonance
“Potentially?” scoffed Tony. “With elasticity response this strong, It’s a good bet they already know we’re here.”
“While that’s statistically likely, I prefer not to jump to conclusions,” said Dr. Sukesh. “Do you have the data you need for the extrapolator?”
“It’ll take a lot of compute time to crunch it, but yeah,” said Tony. He tapped his thumb on the desk. “We can run the sympathetic resonance test now.”
“W...
2026-01-01 06:11:19 +0000 UTC
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The wife got me a new drawing tablet for Christmas, so please enjoy this (very) rough sketch of Tribe Apollo.
(I forgot Rufus)
2025-12-31 06:46:23 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 98 - Locksmiths
Cole wasn’t sure what to expect from the lab. Big tanks of freaky mutants or velociraptors, maybe. Banks of switches and dials and arcane sigils in the floor. Maybe even a tiny star held in captivity, like the ones he saw when he walked the path in his mind to evolve his class.
The reality turned out to be somehow both more mundane and more fantastic. No specimen tanks or archaic control panels. Instead, the concrete room was a series of manned computer...
2025-12-30 01:17:59 +0000 UTC
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Did it again, got the chapter set up and forgot to hit Publish. Sorry for the late chapter, everyone.
Chapter 97 – The Good Doctor
“Are you kidding me?” muttered Howie. “The next trailer over?”
Cole had to keep himself from laughing at Howie’s consternation. Dr. Sukesh had been less than ten meters away while the receptionist tried to stonewall them.
“You know,” said Cole, “You work with people like Sophie, Bricker, and Jeff...
2025-12-27 18:39:34 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 96 – Beyond the Compound
The full Babel debrief wouldn’t be until after the rest of the climbing teams and the hornet teams made it back to Earth—only about half of which had returned so far. Babel excursions could consume weeks of active otherworld deployment time, and it was only their immediate urgency and external threat that shoved Cole and his team through two floors in less than a week. With the otherworld dagger in tow, Cole had Sophie book tickets for he and How...
2025-12-23 04:41:52 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone! Just a quick note, next week will be updates Monday and Wednesday, so have a nice weekend and enjoy your Christmas!
Chapter 95 – All’s Well
Eighteen hours down post off-world mission. That was the Kicker Convention, spelled out in the SOP in no uncertain terms. Yet, after checking in his gear at the armory, Cole went straight up to Lewis Hall, still in his dusty, charred uniform. The otherworld dagger he’d taken off Artian’s retainer was burning a hole in h...
2025-12-20 00:16:32 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 94 – Unwelcome Guests
Even the winged creatures that infested the city attacked the airborne mage. As though affronted that anyone would dare assume the right of entering their skies, leathery bat-like creatures with fangs and claws swarmed in a vortex above the Beast Cult mage. The spellcaster fended off bullets from below as well as diving swipes from above. Ammunition was dwindling fast, and they could hardly stop to unpack spare magazines from their kit. Not only that, b...
2025-12-18 23:53:59 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 93 – Bring the House Down
Cole got a clear view of the battlefield as he climbed above it—including the wolf-like knight, bounding from façade to façade directly below him like gravity didn’t apply. Each leap carried it closer to the party in the plaza pushing desperately toward the Arena. The top half of the knight’s armor was drenched in multi-colored monster blood and steam billowed from the cracks in his armor. His claws dug into hard volcanic stone as if it were...
2025-12-18 04:52:00 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 92 – A Beastly Enemy
“Howie, eyes on three BC pacs, two robes one helmet, north corner rooftop of five-story structure four-hundred meters east of your position, caved in west corner. Confirm you have structure in sight.”
“That’s more than one structure from my station. NODs are on, lasso it for me.”
Cole swapped back to his patient hunter rifle for a moment, using the pressure pad on the handguard to sweep an infrared laser in a tight circle o...
2025-12-17 01:47:15 +0000 UTC
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Author note: Not sure how it happened without my noticing, but we're a bit desynced from how far ahead the Patreon ought to be from the Royal Road version. There will be daily updates this week to get back to the proper amount of advance chapters.
Chapter 91 – Hunters of Hunters
“There it is,” said Cole, sighting through his rifle at a narrow gap between two massive, obsidian statues several kilometers away. Above it, the prismatic marker for the staircase wavered in the a...
2025-12-15 20:46:16 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 90 – Marching Orders
“Three friendly coming in,” Cole said into his radio before he turned the corner to the base of the spire. A few moments later, Nutmeg came running out to greet them and solicit chin scritches before leading them back to a ruined building near the spire where the rest of the team had staked out on the second floor to wait for him and the others.
Beth immediately ran over to Roxy and launched into a hug before telling her about their bad-ass esc...
2025-12-13 06:54:30 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 89 - Spoils
“That’s dark,” said Beth.
Cole glanced at the dyed-black hair and soot-smeared eyes of the teenage goth and declined to comment. At the two bodies, the ring of stone statues was spreading, slowly, inch by inch, as the genie trapped within reset its net. Another half hour, maybe, and the body of the dwarf and lizard-man would be back inside the ring and the formless horror could do whatever it wished with them. But their water and weapons now belonged to...
2025-12-11 05:31:01 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 88 – Just Desserts
There’s a certain sense of humility that comes with not being able to solve a problem by applying more firepower. In the Army, a lack of fire superiority was something that happened to other countries and support by indirect was just a radio away. A psychic monster trapping them in the jaws of their own insecurity was not something he’d been trained for.
Not since emptying his M4 into the heart-eater demon during the Kevlesh crossover had Cole fe...
2025-12-09 03:54:48 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 87 – The Greater Predator
“Stop! STOP!” shouted Nona. “Stop destroying the statues!”
Cole froze, finger squeezing his trigger all the way to the wall. Three meters ahead of him, a twenty-foot statue of a dragon towered over them, slowly descending to block the road and prevent their escape. But it was slow. He spun in a circle. There wasn’t a statue within arms reach of himself. Yet, each one loomed as though he was inches from death. Something was f...
2025-12-06 01:51:09 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 86 – Fixation
Cole shot awake, reaching for his sidearm before his eyes fixed on the members of his team. Nona slumped next to him, while Roxy and Beth leaned against each other on the opposite wall. Howie curled up in the corner, and Nutmeg was splayed across Besson’s lap, who had his head tilted back and snored softly. Something had startled him awake, and he couldn’t put his finger on what. But there was no immediate danger.
Cole relaxed for an instant before he...
2025-12-04 00:41:19 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 85 – Stone Cold
Of the sounds Cole expected when he got down into the ruins where Roxy had shot, laughter was pretty far down on the list. He ducked through a partially collapsed archway, rifle raised. But he lowered it once he got a look at the scene.
Beth laughed so hard she was clutching her sides, and Roxy standing over the remains of what looked like a stone statue with smoking barrels and a red face.
“What happened?” asked Cole.
Beth pointed at th...
2025-12-02 03:49:16 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 84 – Climbing Lead
“Sixteen on foot, two animals.”
“Beast Cult?” asked Cole.
“Negative. Challengers. Survivors from the last floor.”
Cole backtracked a few dozen yards and pulled himself up a small rise to peek at their trail. Sure enough, there was a group of about twenty people following a few hundred meters above, still making their way down the switchbacks and making no effort to disguise themselves. All of them were armed, all of them were ...
2025-11-27 04:31:44 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 83 - The Sixth Floor
The tunnel slanted, turning from a plummet to a high-speed slide down a smooth, stone chute. Other groups slid around them, some screaming, some cheering, some simply sobbing from the teammates they’d had to leave behind. Cole just tried to keep Howie from choking him.
The already hot temperature shot up even higher as they descended, feeling as though they were being taken out of a sauna and dropped into an oven. This was the hot, dry hellish heat...
2025-11-25 07:01:07 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 82 – The Black Lady
Strong hands grabbed Cole and pulled him back. He looked up to see Roxy focused on him, and not the gigantic, man-eating dragon preparing to pounce. As soon as he was back on his feet, he turned and burned the last charge of his ability to wrap his arms around Roxy and launch them both back as the dragon pounced, slamming into the pool where they’d stood less than a second before.
“Ohholyfuckshit!” shouted Roxy, completely un...
2025-11-19 19:49:55 +0000 UTC
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