The air in the cramped safe house tasted stale – old concrete dust, sweat, gun oil, and cheap instant noodles. Outside, the unfamiliar sounds of a foreign city pressed in. Elias Crane sat apart from the others, ignoring the low murmur of conversation and the clatter of utensils as his team – Ghost squad – refueled after the day's reconnaissance. While Marcus ('Joker') expertly field-stripped and cleaned his sidearm, humming tunelessly, and Lena ('Doc') methodically repacked her medical kit, Elias was focused on the sheaf of handwritten notes spread across his knees.
The Chosen Light (Aelric the last flame). Found crammed in a hidden compartment during that messy op in the Balkans last month. Raw, incomplete, maybe missing pages, definitely illogical. He wasn't reading it anymore; he'd absorbed all the fragmented data it contained. Now, he was dissecting it. Aelric's final stand – a catastrophic tactical failure. Holding ground when a strategic withdrawal would have preserved forces and allowed for regrouping. Noble idiocy.
"Sentimentality overriding strategic necessity," Elias muttered under his breath, tracing a line in the notes describing Aelric's refusal to sacrifice a rearguard unit. "Classic command failure." He remembered Sergeant Miller... good man, died holding a position that should have been abandoned hours earlier because the Captain couldn't make the hard call. Aelric felt like that Captain. Brave, strong even, according to the notes, but fundamentally incapable of learning from repeated mistakes.
"Yo, Stone-Face," Marcus called out, snapping his weapon back together with practiced ease. "Still trying to decode that weird trash you picked up? Gonna find buried treasure?" He gestured with a half-eaten ration bar. "Need your energy for tonight's party."
Elias didn't look up. "Analyzing patterns." He wouldn't bother explaining it was some kind of flawed narrative. They wouldn't care, and it wasn't relevant to the mission.
Lena sighed quietly, overhearing. "Just don't let it distract you tonight, Elias."
"Focus is maintained," Elias replied flatly, flipping a page.
This 'System' the notes mentioned... giving the main character game-like stats and quests? Absurd. It apparently gave Aelric advantages, intel, feedback – and he still made the same tactical blunders, culminating in that final, pointless sacrifice. The inconsistency grated on Elias's tactical mind. Strength without strategy is just wasted effort.
I would've done better.
...
Hours later, the city was dark, rain slicking the narrow alleyways. Ghost squad moved like shadows, Elias at point. Hand signals, minimal comms chatter, the soft scuff of boots on wet pavement. Their objective: infiltrate a heavily guarded administrative building, locate and secure a high-value informant from an office on the third floor, and extract him silently. Stealth was paramount. Intel suggested multiple patrols, electronic surveillance, and dedicated guards near the target.
Elias scanned the building facade, noting patrol routes through thermal imaging, identifying blind spots in camera coverage. His movements were fluid, economical, decades of training and combat distilled into pure, lethal function. He led them through service tunnels, bypassing ground-level security. Inside, the air was cool, sterile. Silent signals directed Rook to disable a junction box, cutting power to specific corridor cameras. Joker expertly bypassed the electronic lock on a stairwell door, holding position while Elias and Rook ascended. They moved floor by floor, encountering two patrolling guards. Elias and Rook neutralized them swiftly, silently – non-lethal takedowns, bodies hidden in utility closets. No shots fired, no alarms raised. Joker and Lena followed, securing their path.
Reaching the target office corridor, Joker deployed a micro-jammer, disrupting local comms and sensors. Elias used a fiber optic scope under the door. One guard inside, reading. The informant sat at a desk, pretending to work, looking pale. Elias signaled: One Tango, One HVT. Silent entry. Non-lethal on HVT. Rook used a specialized tool to bypass the lock mechanism without a sound. Elias pushed the door open slowly. Before the guard could react to the slight change in airflow, Elias was across the room, one hand clamping over the man's mouth, the other applying precise pressure to a nerve cluster. The guard slumped unconscious. Simultaneously, Rook moved to the informant, who startled, eyes wide with fear. A quick, practiced nerve pinch to the neck, and the informant went limp. "Package secured, unconscious," Rook whispered, effortlessly hoisting the man over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Lena quickly checked both unconscious figures, ensuring they were stable, while Joker kept watch at the door.
"Clear," Elias stated quietly into his comms. "Exfiltrate. Rook, you have the package. Joker, point. Doc, rear guard. Move." They flowed back out, Rook carrying the dead weight of the informant without slowing the team's pace. They retraced their steps through the silent corridors and service tunnels, melting back into the rain-slicked alleys outside. Their extraction vehicle, a nondescript van driven by a local asset, idled at the designated corner, engine barely audible over the rain.
Joker scanned the street one last time before signaling the all-clear. Rook moved to the van's side door, sliding it open. Lena prepared to help guide the unconscious informant inside. Elias stood near the front passenger door, doing a final visual sweep of the surrounding rooftops and alley entrances, his hand near his weapon. The air felt charged, too still.
As Rook began maneuvering the informant's limp body into the van, Marcus muttered, perhaps just releasing tension, "Too easy, huh? Let's try again with more..."
Simultaneously, the different voice, colder, clearer, echoed inside Elias's skull:
"Let's try again…"
What the-? Before Elias could fully process the internal voice or question Marcus, a sickening thump came from the informant's body as it was halfway inside the van. It convulsed violently, impossibly. Then, detonation. Not an external device, but the body itself erupting from within. The explosion ripped through the van's interior and blasted outwards. Metal shrieked and buckled. The force slammed into Elias like a solid wall, lifting him off his feet and hurling him backwards nearly three meters, crashing hard against the wet alley pavement. Pain flared instantly through his body, the world dissolving into a maelstrom of heat, force, and the deafening roar of the explosion. But one word still echoed in his ears:
"Let's try again…"