1. The Position

It was late afternoon, the sky overcast and low. Tracer scars, old smoke, and the skeletal remains of houses marked where the front line lay: a tangle of trenches, foxholes, shattered barns, and half-frozen fields.

Sergeant Aleksei Morozov crouched in a narrow dugout under a sheet of camo netting and burlap, watching nothing in particular. He’d been a contract soldier before the war, a career man. Now, at thirty-four, he felt sixty.

“Battery three checking in,” crackled a voice over the company net. “We’re in position. No eyes on movement yet.”

Morozov thumbed his own radio.

“Copy,” he said. “Stay low, no heroics. Drone teams are active on their side today.”

That last part was unnecessary. Everyone knew.

Two days ago, a sister unit had lost an entire squad when a swarm of Ukrainian FPV—first-person-view—drones found their truck convoy on an otherwise empty road and turned it into a line of burning metal. The videos had already made it to Telegram channels. Some of the men had watched them in morbid silence, recognizing faces, helmets, even license plates.

Now, each bird song in the trees sounded a little too mechanical. Each gust of wind felt like the beginning of a distant buzz.

Private Denis Babkin, the youngest in the squad, lay on his stomach behind a log, peering through chipped binoculars at the gray smear of the village ahead.

“Looks dead,” he muttered.

“Dead things bite, too,” Morozov said.

He knew the Ukrainian tactic by now: send small infantry groups to probe; wait for the Russians to respond with vehicles or visible movement; then unleash drones.

He’d learned to assume he was being watched.

What he didn’t know was that, at that very moment, he was right.

 

 

2. The Pilot

Twenty-eight kilometers behind Ukrainian lines, in an anonymous farmhouse that had once sheltered pigs and now sheltered electronics, a man named Andriy “Skif” Skiba hunched over a set of goggles.

The room hummed with generators and quiet tension. Screens glowed on folding tables. Antennas sprouted from every window. Outside, the yard was a mess of tire tracks, empty ammunition crates, and carefully coiled wires.

FPV drones—modified racing quadcopters with explosive payloads—hung from a wooden rack on the wall, each with a small strip of colored tape indicating its frequency and assigned pilot.

Skif’s fingers rested lightly on a controller, thumbs poised over the sticks.

He’d been a hobbyist before the war, flying drones through makeshift obstacle courses in abandoned warehouses, streaming his flights online for a few hundred subscribers. Now he flew into trenches and through broken windows, and his audience numbered in the thousands: brigade commanders, artillery officers, sometimes even foreign volunteers watching recorded strikes.

He preferred not to think too much about that.

In his goggles, the world was a low-resolution tunnel of motion: a shaky, fisheye view from the nose of a drone currently cruising three hundred meters above the no-man’s-land between two broken villages.

He dipped the right stick slightly, bringing the horizon line into view. Patches of forest. Shell craters. A rusting tank carcass baking in the cold.

“Anything?” asked Oksana, the unit’s coordinator, leaning over his shoulder.

“Just the usual,” Skif said. “No armor. No trucks. Wait…”

He adjusted the camera angle.

Near the tree line on the Russian side, something caught his eye.

A patch of ground that looked just a shade too regular. A line of branches that broke pattern. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer where air met fabric.

“Trench position,” he murmured. “They’ve camouflaged it, but badly. See the net?”

Oksana squinted at the secondary monitor displaying his feed.

“I see it,” she said. “Zoom in.”

Skif didn’t need to zoom.

He dipped the drone lower, trading wide situational awareness for detail.

The trees grew larger. The ground surged upward. His heartbeat synced with the drone’s tilt.

Suddenly, heads came into view—tiny, pixelated shapes under a mesh of netting and branches. Helmets. Shoulders. A glint of metal: maybe a rifle, maybe a scope.

“Got them,” Skif said.

Oksana’s voice rose, firm.

“Calling Fire Control,” she said into her headset. “We have an enemy squad in partial cover at grid coordinate…” She rattled off the numbers. “Requesting HE, quick response, bracketed. And we’re spinning up FPV.”

On the other side of the line, in the tree line, something changed.

One of the men below lifted his head, eyes scanning upward.

Skif saw it through the camera: the sudden, animal twist of a neck, the flinch.

“Shit,” he said. “They see us.”

3. Realization

Denis Babkin didn’t know why he looked up.

Later, he would tell himself it was instinct, or maybe some change in the wind. But the truth was simpler: he was twenty-one, afraid, and his mind was inventing threats in every direction. So he scanned the sky as often as he scanned the ground.

This time, the sky stared back.

At first, it was just a black dot against the pale clouds, hovering where no bird hovered.

Not big, not close.

But wrong.

“Sergeant,” Denis hissed. “Look.”

Morozov followed his gaze.

He saw the dot, too. One, then, after a second, a second dot, a little to the left. They hung there, vibrating faintly.

Every briefing, every rumor, every video he’d seen smashed together in his head.

“FPV,” he said. His throat felt dry. “We’ve been spotted.”

The nearest men jerked up.

“Where?” “How close?” “Artillery?” Questions spilled over the radio, overlapping, panicked.

“Shut up,” Morozov snapped into the mic. “All units, listen. UAV at high altitude, possible FPV strikes inbound. No smoking, no movement. Thermal is your enemy. Find overhead cover. Blankets, dirt, anything. NOW.”

He turned to Denis.

“Binoculars, give me.”

Denis handed them over.

Morozov raised the battered optics, but it barely helped. The drones were too small, too far. But they weren’t going away.

They were watching.

He keyed the company net.

“Command, this is third squad,” he said, forcing calm into his voice. “We have visual on enemy drone above our sector. Requesting counter-UAV—jamming, anything.”

The reply was slow by seconds that felt like years.

“Third squad, this is command,” came the crackling voice. “We have multiple reports. EW team is repositioning. Stay put, do not redeploy. You move, they see you.”

“We’re already seen,” Morozov muttered.

Above, the dot drifted sideways, almost lazily.

It reminded him of a hawk deciding which rabbit to kill first.

4. The Math of Seconds

In the farmhouse, Skif cursed under his breath as the drone feed flickered—some minor interference, quickly corrected.

“They’re trying to jam,” he muttered. “Too late.”

On a side table, another drone was being armed by a lanky soldier everyone called “Biker.” He set a modified RPG warhead into a 3D-printed cradle under the quadcopter’s frame, checked the wires, and taped everything down with quick, practiced motions.

“Two birds ready,” Biker said. “Blue and Yellow frequencies. Which you want first?”

“Blue,” Skif said, eyes never leaving his feed. “Send me the coordinates.”

He watched the Russian squad without zooming in too much—no need to see faces if he could avoid it. Just shapes and patterns. Men tightening straps. One guy lifting a blanket over his head. Another fumbling with a cigarette, then shoving it back into his pocket.

“Idiots,” Biker said, watching the screen. “They should be running.”

“Where to?” Oksana said. “Open field? No.”

Skif exhaled.

He didn’t hate the men down there. Hating them would have made this easier. Instead, he felt something like pity, twisted with resolve.

He keyed into the fire control channel.

“Spotter One here,” he said. “Target confirmed. Recommend shift of battery three, consider dropping two HE rounds as distraction and suppression while FPV approaches. Provide sound cover.”

“Copy, Spotter One,” came the reply. “Guns adjusting. Thirty seconds.”

Thirty seconds.

Skif glanced at the analog clock nailed to the wall out of habit, not need.

Thirty seconds was a long time in the life of a drone.

He pushed his altitude drone higher, widening his perspective, keeping the Russian squad in the lower third of his frame. He didn’t want to lose them if they moved.

“Blue is on,” said Biker.

He handed Skif a second controller, linked to the FPV drone now buzzing on the rack. In Skif’s headset, the whine of spinning props joined the distant rumble of artillery.

The FPV drone’s camera feed popped into the corner of his goggles: a side-by-side view he’d practiced dozens of times. Left eye: high-altitude, calm, wide. Right eye: ground-level, chaotic, fast.

“Launching,” Skif said.

He nudged the stick.

The FPV drone leapt off the rack and shot toward a gap in the barn wall, daylight exploding across the screen for a split second before the landscape outside rushed up to meet it.

From takeoff to target would be about 40 seconds at this distance.

Less, if he flew aggressively.

He felt his breathing slow.

5. The Wait

In the tree line, silence settled over the Russian squad like an added layer of weight.

No one talked.

They listened.

Morozov pressed himself against the forward wall of the trench, feeling the damp of the earth soak into his uniform. Denis lay flat beside him, helmet tilted, eyes wide.

“You know what to listen for?” Morozov whispered.

Denis nodded, swallowed.

“The buzzing,” he said. “Like a… like a big wasp.”

“It will come with the artillery,” Morozov said. “They’re not stupid. They’ll mask the sound if they can.”

“How do we—”

A distant boom cut him off.

Then another.

Morozov didn’t feel the impacts yet, but he heard them: the long, low rumble of heavy shells leaving Ukrainian barrels.

He did quick math in his head.

“Brace,” he said.

Five seconds later, the first round landed two hundred meters behind them, in the forest. The ground jumped. Leaves rained down. Someone cursed.

A second round hit closer, a deafening crash that punched the air out of Denis’s lungs and showered the trench with dirt and splinters.

The man on the left, Anton, raised his head to shout something.

Morozov grabbed his helmet and shoved it back down.

“This is bracketing,” he yelled over the ringing in his ears. “They’re finding the range. Next ones might be on us. STAY DOWN.”

He didn’t say the other part: that somewhere inside that storm of sound, a quiet, targeted death could be riding the air.

Denis strained to listen.

At first, all he heard was his own heartbeat, the ringing, the whisper of dirt settling.

Then, faint, like a mosquito at the edge of perception:

Bzzzzzz.

“Sergeant,” he breathed. “I hear it.”

Morozov heard it, too.

A high, insistent whine, rising and falling with the pitch of a small engine under strain. Getting closer.

He clenched his jaw.

“Here we go,” he said.

6. The Run

In his right eye, Skif’s FPV feed showed the ground blurring beneath him: fields, broken tree trunks, burned-out cars. He kept the drone low, just a few meters above the terrain, using bushes and dips as cover from any opportunistic small arms fire.

In his left eye, the high-altitude drone showed the target area.

He synced them like two maps.

“Twenty seconds,” Oksana murmured, more to herself than to him.

Another artillery shell landed, its blast wave rippling through both video feeds as a brief, jittery tremor.

Skif adjusted the yaw slightly, aligning the drone with the gap in the trees where he knew the Russian position lay.

He could almost feel the air down there—cold, electric.

“There,” he said.

The tree line appeared in the FPV feed, growing, filling the screen. The resolution wasn’t great, but he didn’t need sharpness. He needed shapes, shadows, the hint of a trench lip where the ground broke unnaturally straight.

He dipped lower.

Branches whipped past, a blur of brown and green. For a moment, his stomach lurched as the drone clipped a twig and wobbled.

“Easy,” Biker muttered.

Skif recovered.

Then he saw it.

The edge of the dugout. The sagging net. The dark rectangle of a firing slit.

Inside, movement.

A helmet. Part of a shoulder. A glimpse of pale skin between glove and sleeve.

He was close enough now that the buzzing would be unmistakable.

The Russians would be hearing their death approach.

He cut throttle slightly, dropping the drone to chest height. At this angle, it would plunge into the trench like a thrown knife.

He breathed out, long and slow, and pushed the stick forward.

7. Impact

The sound inside the trench turned from a whine to a roar in an instant.

Denis felt it more than he heard it—a vibration in his teeth, a pressure in his chest. He looked up without meaning to.

A dark shape, the size of a shoebox, flashed into view over the lip of the trench.

“Down!” Morozov shouted, throwing himself sideways, dragging Denis by the collar.

For a frozen second, Denis saw the front of the drone.

A small camera lens. A snarl of wires. Something metallic and ugly strapped beneath it.

The drone dipped, angling itself like a striking bird toward the center of the trench, where three men were still scrambling for cover.

Time fractured.

Denis hit the bottom of the trench face-first.

Morozov’s weight crashed on top of him.

Someone screamed.

There was a white flash.

Then sound.

Not the boom of artillery, which rolled and echoed.

A sharper, cracking concussion, like being inside a slammed door.

Heat washed over Denis’s back. Debris—dirt, wood, something wet—hammered his helmet.

His ears went out completely.

He tasted iron and mud.

For a moment, the world was just black.

He thought, distantly: So this is it.

Then the black receded.

He found himself in a narrow tunnel of vision, looking at his own hands, fingers digging into the earth.

Morozov rolled off him with a grunt.

“You alive?” the sergeant’s voice came faintly, as if from underwater.

Denis tried to answer.

Coughed instead.

The trench was chaos.

The place where three men had been seconds ago was now a churned mess of earth and torn fabric. One man lay twisted, motionless. Another writhed, clutching his leg, which ended abruptly at the ankle. The third—Denis didn’t see the third.

His stomach heaved.

He turned his head and vomited bile.

“Medic!” someone shouted, though there was no medic. Just a lanky corporal with a trauma kit and too little training, already scrambling toward the wounded.

Above, the buzzing came again.

Higher this time, moving past them.

They’d only sent one drone into this trench—for now.

The others would be hunting nearby positions, vehicles, anyone who moved.

Morozov’s eyes went to the lip of the trench, where the camo net had been blasted aside.

In that instant, he made a decision.

“Out,” he snapped. “We can’t stay. They know they hit. Next will be artillery, or more drones. Move! Tree line, fifty meters back, deeper into the forest. Use the smoke.”

“Command said—” Denis began.

“Command is not here,” Morozov snarled. “Shut up and run.”

He grabbed Denis by the back of his vest and shoved him toward the splintered log that served as a step.

The squad, what remained of it, moved.

Some crawled. Some stumbled. One had to be half-carried.

They scrambled up the side of the trench into a world that felt suddenly too bright, too exposed.

The sky was an ugly gray lid.

The buzzing had faded, replaced by the distant roar of other impacts, other battles.

Denis ran.

Branches whipped his face. Roots tried to trip him. He clutched his rifle like a child’s toy, useless against enemies that came from the sky.

Behind them, seconds after they cleared the trench, an artillery shell landed almost directly on their former position.

The blast punched Denis in the back, throwing him forward.

He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up gasping, ears ringing anew.

He turned.

The trench was gone.

In its place was a smoking crater, dirt and wood and pieces of equipment flung outward like petals of a dark flower.

“And that,” Morozov panted beside him, “is what happens after they realize you survived the first one.”

8. The Feed

In the farmhouse, Skif’s FPV feed cut to static a fraction of a second before the explosion.

That was normal.

He pulled off his goggles, blinking as the dim room replaced the kaleidoscope of motion.

“Hit,” Biker said, watching the high-altitude feed on the monitor. “Look at that.”

On the screen, from the calm distance of three hundred meters up, a puff of dark smoke blossomed among the trees. Tiny figures scrambled away like ants from a disturbed nest.

“Three, maybe four down,” Oksana said, her voice flat, professional. “The rest are retreating deeper. Artillery’s finishing the job.”

Her tone was deliberately clinical, as if they were discussing tank silhouettes on a training range instead of human lives.

Skif sat back, wiping his palms on his pants.

“Good flying,” Biker said, clapping his shoulder.

“Thanks,” Skif said automatically.

He looked at the paused frame on the high-altitude screen.

If he squinted, he could see one figure turning back toward the crater, as if wanting to go back for someone and being dragged away.

He told himself not to.

Not to imagine faces.

Not to remember that the enemy had mothers, wives, kids, inside jokes.

He focused on why he was here.

Last year, a Russian artillery strike had taken his younger brother’s legs while he was delivering supplies to a civilian shelter. There was no footage of that. No toggles. No static. Just a phone call in the middle of the night and a hospital hallway smell that still haunted Skif’s dreams.

He adjusted his headset.

“Ready for Yellow,” he said. “What’s the next target?”

9. The Space Between

Night fell crooked over the front.

On the Russian side, Morozov’s reduced squad huddled deeper in the forest, having dug a makeshift scrape and stretched a canvas over it. Their old position, now a smoking memory, was somewhere behind them, littered with debris that had once been their lives.

Denis’s hands shook as he lit a small solid-fuel tablet for tea.

“Stop that,” Morozov said quietly.

“Stop what?” Denis asked.

“Watching the sky every three seconds,” Morozov said. “If they come now, at night, it’ll be different. Quieter. Harder to see. You’ll break your neck with that.”

Denis managed a weak laugh.

“I liked it better when we worried about tanks,” he said. “At least you could hear them.”

Morozov stared into the dark between the trees.

“You can hear these, too,” he said. “If you listen. If you accept that you’re not the biggest predator anymore.”

“What do we do?” Denis asked. “If they keep getting better… faster… cheaper…”

Morozov shrugged, a small, tired motion.

“Adapt,” he said. “Dig deeper. Spread out. Beg for our own drones. Pray the jammers work. And hope that somewhere, in some farmhouse behind their lines, their pilots get as tired and as afraid as we are.”

“You think they’re afraid?” Denis asked, incredulous.

“They’re human,” Morozov said. “Humans fly those things. Not robots. Not yet. There’s always fear. On their side. On ours.”

He didn’t say it aloud, but he thought: The problem isn’t fear. It’s when fear becomes routine.

On the Ukrainian side, in the farmhouse, Skif sat on an upturned crate outside, smoking a cigarette he didn’t really want.

Oksana joined him, wrapping her jacket tighter.

“You flew well today,” she said.

“Tell that to the guys over there,” he said, exhaling smoke. “If any are left.”

“If you didn’t,” she said, “their artillery would be hitting our guys in the village. Or their infantry would be pushing. Cause and effect. You know this.”

“I know,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

He stared at the night horizon, where distant flashes still came and went.

“You ever think about what this looks like from above?” he asked. “Not drone height. Satellite. Higher. Two countries, scribbling fire on each other. Little insects running, hiding, burning.”

“I try not to think at all,” she said wryly. “Thinking is for after the war.”

“If there is an after,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

10. Then THIS Happened…

Two days later, a clip began circulating on Russian and Ukrainian social media.

It was a composite: someone had spliced together the Ukrainian FPV footage from Skif’s drone—captured from a recorder that quietly logged his flights—with another angle, possibly from a helmet cam someone on the ground had been foolish enough to activate.

The first part of the video showed what viewers were used to by now: the dizzying FPV approach, the plunge, the hit. Comment sections filled with the usual mix of triumph, rage, dark humor, grief.

But the second part was different.

It started after the blast, in the woods behind the line, shaky and breathless. The camera pointed at the ground most of the time—boots stumbling over roots—but caught fragmentary glimpses: a bloodied sleeve, a man with his arm around another’s waist, half-carrying him; the glow of a small fire in a newly dug scrape; hands handing around a single cigarette, each man taking a drag in silence.

At one point, whoever held the camera panned up, just for a second, to look at the sky.

It was dusk.

A small drone buzzed far overhead, too high to see detail. Just a tiny, dark cross against the clouds.

The man behind the camera extended his middle finger upward and laughed hoarsely.

“Keep watching,” he said in Russian. “We’re still here.”

The clip cut there.

No dramatic music. No text overlay.

Just that.

No one knew how the footage had gotten out. Perhaps the camera had been lost, recovered by the other side. Perhaps someone uploaded it directly, against regulations. Perhaps it was staged. The internet argued.

But for once, the arguments weren’t about whether the FPV pilot had “skill” or whether the blast radius matched the warhead used.

They were about that last moment.

A man on the ground, reduced to a target in one frame, reclaiming his humanity in another by doing the most human, pointless thing: cursing his invisible enemy and laughing, because he was still breathing.

In the farmhouse, someone showed Skif the clip.

He watched in silence.

“That’s your hit,” Biker said, pointing. “Right there. Then look. They’re filming like we do. Like us, but stupid.”

Skif didn’t answer.

His eyes lingered on the finger raised toward the sky.

It didn’t look like bravado.

It looked like a question.

What do you do when the gods of your war can fit in two human hands and wear ski goggles?

He took off his headset.

“Enough for today,” he said.

Outside, the yard buzzed with other pilots, other flights, other battles. The war would not pause because one man felt suddenly, acutely tired.

On the other side, hidden deeper in the forest than before, Morozov tightened his squad’s new camouflage, layering damp branches over a sagging tarp.

“You think they’ll find us here?” Denis asked.

“Eventually,” Morozov said. “They always do.”

He patted a small, cheap device clipped to his vest: a portable jammer, recently issued, finicky and underpowered, but better than nothing.

“Until then,” he said, “we stay small. We stay quiet. And if they spot us again…”

He met Denis’s eyes.

“We make them work for every meter,” he said. “We make them remember that we’re not pixels on their screens.”

11. The New Normal

The war went on.

Both sides adapted.

The Russians distributed more jammers, more camouflage netting, more diversions. They built fake trenches and decoy vehicles, knowing drones would waste precious warheads on them.

The Ukrainians improved their FPVs—better cameras, better ranges, quieter props. They trained pilots in simulators, then threw them into real missions where mistakes meant more than lost hardware.

Telegram channels posted daily compilations: “top hits,” “insane drone skills,” “karma for invaders,” “atrocities from the sky.” Each side saw what it needed to see.

Far from the front, people scrolled with detached horror or morbid fascination, watching shaky footage of machines threading through windows to deliver death.

Few paused to imagine the sound on the ground—the rising whine in a quiet trench, the moment when a dot in the sky became a sentence.

Fewer still thought about the space between the screens.

The pilot who held his breath as his view narrowed to a target.

The soldier who looked up and realized that, for the first time in history, death did not need to see his face to find him.

The strange intimacy of a war where you could kill a man from twenty kilometers away and still see the color of the tarp over his head.

12. What Happened Next

Months later, after front lines shifted and the ruined village of K. became just another name in a long list of places where too many had died, a ceasefire—fragile, partial, probably temporary—flickered into existence.

Skif went home for the first time in two years.

Home was not the same.

Leaflets fluttered on light poles, praising “our brave pilots.” Children drew pictures of quadcopters dropping bombs on cartoon tanks. In his own apartment, his brother’s empty wheelchair sat in a corner, dust on the armrests.

Morozov, if he survived, might have gone back to some town in Russia with a different name and a similar weight of ghosts.

Maybe he’d flinch at the sound of a lawnmower, or a bee, or a neighbor’s drone toy.

Maybe he’d tell young men at a bar that when Ukrainian FPV drones spotted them, “then THIS happened,” and launch into a story that sounded too dramatic, too absurd, to be real.

And maybe they wouldn’t believe him.

Not until someone showed them a video.

A shaky, compressed clip where the buzzing grew louder, the camera dipped, and the world turned white.

The thing about this new kind of war is that it leaves evidence in every direction: in craters and in code, in scars and in shared links.

No one believes—not really—until they watch it.

By then, it’s always too late.

The drones have already flown.

The men have already run.

And somewhere, between a tree line and a farmhouse full of screens, the space between hunter and hunted has shrunk to the width of a radio signal and the time it takes to look up and recognize that the tiny black dot above you has already seen you first.