The Ninth by Benjamin Schramm

hunting!”
    Brent looked above and found the clouds moving at an impossible rate, the ambient lighting changed from bright noon sun to the dull amber of dusk.  In about thirty seconds, the environment had shifted from noon to midnight.  Brent noticed several nearby recruits closing in on him.
    “Looks like there are eight of us with the last four sneaking widely around the center to join us, sir,” reported Dante
    “That’s wonderful,” Owen whispered.  “Got our own little squad, but does anyone have a plan?”
    “I’ve got one,” Brent said, matching Owen’s whisper.
    “Of course you do.”  Hiroko added, as the last recruits joined them.  “I expected nothing less!”
    “The instructor can’t see us out here, but who knows if he has listening devices, so everyone be quiet from this point on,” Brent said when all the recruits were close enough to hear his whispering.  “Dante come with me.  Everyone else stay here until you get the idea, then repeat.”
    “Understood, sir,” Dante responded in a low voice that spoke for everyone.
    Brent and Dante slowly advanced toward a nearby tree.  Brent grabbed it and started gently shaking it.  When most of the leaves had silently fallen to the ground, he motioned for Dante to face away from him.  With Dante’s back turned, he started imbedding leaves in his uniform.  After a few moments, the back of Dante’s uniform looked like the surrounding ground brush.  He then gestured for Dante to do the same to his uniform.  Having gotten the idea, the rest of the six paired up and headed toward nearby trees.  A few minutes later, Brent’s haphazard squad was done and ready to move out.
    “We will split into two groups so that if this doesn’t work we won’t all get caught,” Brent whispered.  “I’ll lead the first group and Owen will take the second.”
    Brent searched the ground cover until he found a branch.
    “Owen and I will take a handful of these branches, and when the ground cover gets sparse along our path we will throw them against a tree to provide more leaves to add to our cover,” he explained as quietly as he could.  “To keep the instructor from figuring out our plan, the rest of the group will also bring some branches and throw them against other trees randomly.  If this works we should make the clearing before the instructor figures out where we are.”
    Everyone nodded and started searching for branches.  When everyone had a handful or two, Brent pointed in the direction Owen was to take and started on his path.  Once the two groups had separated enough, Brent hit the ground and started crawling slowly and silently toward the clearing in the center.
    “He can’t be serious!  He wants us to crawl ?” Hiroko whined.
    “Shush, you want to pass this exam right?” Owen asked, dragging Hiroko to the ground with him.  “Can’t let Erin get the last laugh now, can we?”
    Out of the corner of his eye Brent saw the rest of Owen’s group do the same.  Once on the ground he lost track of them.  This trick of his might work better than he expected.  At the rate Brent and his group were crawling, it would take at least three times as long to get back to the center as it had taken to get to their beacons.  On the plus side, in the seeming eternity of slow progress the recruits improved their crawling until they were almost silent.
    After a long period he could once again make out the structure ahead.  The instructor was still in his chair, but now four searchlights, one on each side of the fortress, scanned the near woods.  Brent assigned them arbitrary directions in his mind, calling the one patrolling his area the south light.  He could make out a display on the arm of the instructor’s chair; the green gray light it emitted hinted at some sort of night vision.  He came to a complete stop.  This was a new development he hadn’t counted on.
    “Dante, throw a branch to your right at a tree halfway between us and where