Field Report: K9 Unit

*Field report. Filed the only way this unit files anything.*

Smell the Office before I see it. Always do.

Sneak. Click. Tag goes on, the kind you don't feel, the kind that means something now. Nobody explains it twice. Don't need it twice.

K9 unit. That's the whole job title. Two words, no negotiation in either of them.

Stand near the flag. Not on it — near it. Someone else's job to stand on it. Mine is simpler and older than flags: something comes for what's ours, I know before the humans do, every time, because that's not a feature anyone built, that's just what a nose is for.

Diminishing returns, they say. Meaning: one of me slows a taker down. A second one of me slows them down more, but not twice as much, because a Contest Window doesn't care how many good dogs are standing in it, it cares whether the taking got harder — and it did, and that's the only number that was ever going to matter to me.

Watched a Window get flipped once before any of this existed. No K9, no tag, no diminishing anything. Just an Office that changed hands because nothing four-legged was standing near it when it mattered. Didn't like that. Still don't. Won't happen twice, not on my watch, not on the patch of ground I've decided is mine to smell first.

They gave me a role before they gave me a story. Fine by me. Never needed the story. Needed the Office held. Got both eventually — the story's this report, the Office is still ours, check the map if you don't believe the second part.

Good boy. Filed and confirmed.