The inquiry did not begin with him.
It began with numbers.
Routes marked late. Stores logged twice. Requests duplicated and then corrected. Minor inconsistencies that meant nothing on their own and irritation in bulk.
A junior quartermaster noticed first.
He had been assigned to reconcile depot reports after the river delay. It was dull work, meant to fill time until someone senior took interest.
No one did.
He spread the ledgers across his desk and frowned.
"Why is this depot flagged twice?" he muttered.
The mark was light, nearly erased. A clerk's habit, not an order. Still, it appeared again on the next page. And the one after that.
He traced the dates backward.
The delays did not align with weather.They did not match troop movement.They did not follow supply strain.
They clustered.
By the third evening, the quartermaster had drawn a map.
Not precise. Not official. Just a working sketch pinned to his board. Crossroads circled. Depots marked. Margins annotated with times and brief notes.
Ground failures.Structural settling.Unexpected rot.
He stared at it until his eyes ached.
"This isn't coincidence," he said aloud.
He took the map down and folded it carefully.
The officer he brought it to was polite.
Busy, but polite.
"You're saying the infrastructure is failing along movement routes," the officer said, scanning the notes. "That happens during war."
"Yes, sir," the quartermaster said. "But not like this. Not without pressure."
The officer set the papers aside. "Pressure is everywhere."
"Yes, sir. But this—this follows people."
The officer paused.
"That's a serious claim."
"I know."
The officer considered him for a moment longer, then nodded once. "Leave this with me."
The quartermaster did.
He left feeling lighter.
The officer did not send the report upward.
He sent it sideways.
To engineering.
By the end of the week, a new explanation circulated quietly.
Not spoken aloud. Written in margins. Shared between men who preferred causes that could be measured.
Overuse.
That was the word.
Roads strained by repeated passage. Stone weakened by vibration. Ground softened by numbers, not miracles.
It fit doctrine.It fit precedent.It fit comfort.
New restrictions followed.
Routes were limited. Weight reduced. Movement schedules staggered. Efficiency dropped, but predictability returned.
Mostly.
He felt the change immediately.
Not as ache.
As absence.
Where the pressure had come and gone before, now nothing answered at all. No correction. No resistance.
He stood where told. Walked where ordered. Carried records between buildings whose foundations were being reinforced too late.
The ground held.
For now.
That night, as he passed beneath a scaffold newly raised against the warehouse wall, a stone loosened above him.
It did not fall.
It waited.
A cart rolled past first. The vibration was enough.
The stone came down and shattered at the edge of the road.
No one was hurt.
The foreman swore and ordered the scaffold checked again.
"Overuse," someone muttered.
He did not look up.
The pattern had been named.
Incorrectly.
And because of that, it would grow.