The jungle was silent, save for the crackle of Sukhoy's molten remains.
The twelve men of Task Force Avenger—what was left of them—were frozen. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, cooked meat, and a new, impossible reality. Their training, their weapons, their entire 21st-century worldview had been rendered meaningless by a girl with a stick.
"Jin, did you... did you see that?" Captain Thorne's voice was a strained whisper over the comms, his M4A1 still aimed at the smoking pile.
"Deadeye" Jin, the American sniper, was breathing hard. "I see it, Captain, but I... I don't..."
"Laska," the Russian Captain, Voron, barked. "Report. Status."
"Laska," the Russian sniper, replied, his voice utterly calm, a cold counterpoint to the American's panic. "Vizhu tsel'. Mage." (I see the target. Mage.)
Through his 1P69 high-powered scope, Laska saw the "princess." She was smiling, her face serene, her wand held casually by her side. She was already scanning the trees, her eyes glowing with that same cold, blue light, searching for her next victim.
Jin, on the American side, was still trying to process what he'd seen. "Control, this is Avenger-4. Be advised, the hostile has... magic. I say again, we are engaged with a... a magic-user..."
Laska gave zero fucks.
He had his orders. Neutralize hostiles. That girl was the single greatest threat on the field.
He didn't care about magic. He cared about ballistics.
His finger, steady and practiced, took up the slack on the trigger of his SV-98 sniper rifle.
He calculated the drop. 300 meters. A light crosswind.
He put the crosshairs on her forehead.
"Prostishchay, suka." (Goodbye, bitch.)
CRACK.
The 7.62x54mmR round, traveling at 820 meters per second, was a physical law. It did not care about wands, or magic, or princesses.
The girl's smile was still on her face as the round hit. There was no shield. There was no warning. Her head disintegrated in a pink mist, the .30-caliber bullet's hydrostatic shock turning her skull into a pressurized bomb.
Her body stood for a single, shocking second, a fountain of red erupting from its neck, before it crumpled, boneless, to the ground.
The wand clattered uselessly onto the moss.
"TARGET DOWN!" Laska yelled, already racking the bolt for his next shot. "Mage neutralized!"
"Holy... Jin, did he just...?" Diaz started.
"Good shot," Voron, the Russian Captain, grunted.
But the medieval soldiers... they weren't surrendering. They weren't breaking.
They had all stopped, their swords lowered, and were staring at the body of their fallen "princess."
A low... growl... started, rumbling from inside their closed helmets.
Then, they looked up. All twenty of them. They looked directly at the snipers' ridge.
And they roared.
It was not a human sound. It was the sound of a thousand predators, a sound of pure, unrestrained, bestial rage.
"What the hell is...?" Miller started.
CRACK. SNAP. POP.
The sounds of their bones were audible even from 300 meters.
"Captain!" Harris yelled, his binoculars shaking in his hands. "Their... their armor! It's... it's breaking!"
He watched, in heart-stopping, high-definition horror, as the medieval soldiers transformed.
Their helmets were ripped off as muzzles, black and wet, burst from their faces. Their gauntlets exploded as hands became claws. Their armor burst at the seams as their bodies swelled with unnatural, twitching muscle. Fur—thick, black, and matted—sprouted from their skin. Tails, thick and lupine, ripped through their breeches.
In ten seconds, the twenty-man platoon of "medievals" was gone.
In their place stood twenty monsters.
They were eight-foot-tall, bipedal... wolves. Werewolves. Beast-men.
They had the heads of demonic lupines, their eyes burning with the same blue, magical light that had been in the princess's.
"THEY'RE... THEY'RE FUCKING WEREWOLVES!" Diaz screamed, his voice a high-pitched shriek of pure, undiluted terror.
"FIRE! FIRE! LIGHT THEM UP!" Thorne and Voron screamed in unison.
The two machine gunners, Miller and Dimitri "Medved" Orlov, who had been waiting for the order, opened up.
BRRRRRRRRRRT!
CHUG-CHUG-CHUG-CHUG!
The L-shaped crossfire from the M249 SAW and the PKP Pecheneg was a wall of lead. The 5.56mm and 7.62x54mm rounds tore into the charging pack.
Flesh ripped. Blood sprayed. The beasts stumbled.
But they did not stop.
"THEY'RE TANKING IT!" Miller screamed over the roar of his own gun. "THEY'RE NOT GOING DOWN!"
A beast, its chest a "red mist" from a dozen 5.56mm hits, just snarled and accelerated.
They were impossibly fast. They crossed the 300-meter killing field in under twenty seconds.
They hit the line.
It was not a battle. It was a slaughter.
A beast the size of a small car, its armor hanging in shreds, slammed into Dimitri "Medved" Orlov. The big Russian, built like a bear himself, roared and emptied his AK-12 into its gut, but the monster just swiped.
Its claws, like obsidian knives, ripped Dimitri's chest open, from shoulder to hip.
The big Russian gurgled, blood pouring from his mouth. He looked at Harris, his eyes wide with shock. The laminated photo of his wife and his daughter, Katya, fluttered from his shattered armor and landed in the mud.
Another beast tore his head from his shoulders.
"MILLER! DIAZ! ON ME!" Harris screamed, firing his M4A1 on full-auto, the 5.56mm rounds feeling like pebbles.
"GRENADE!" Diaz yelled, fumbling with his M203 launcher. He never got the shot off. A beast seized him, lifted him, and bit his torso in half. His legs fell one way, his upper body another.
"FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" Miller was screaming, his SAW empty. He dropped it and pulled his M9 Beretta, firing pop-pop-pop into the face of a wolf-thing. The beast howled, laughed, and a massive, axe-like claw came down.
It severed Miller's arm at the shoulder.
He stared at the stump, his face white. "Harris... it..."
The beast's jaws clamped on his head. CRUNCH.
"JIN! LASKA! FIRE ON OUR POSITION! DANGER CLOSE!" Thorne was screaming, back-to-back with Voron, the two captains firing their rifles in controlled bursts.
"NO GOOD, CAPTAIN! THEY'RE ON US!" Jin's voice shrieked over the comms. "THEY'RE... AAGH...!"
The comm went to static.
Thorne and Voron were the last of the main line. A beast lunged. Voron met it, roaring, jamming the barrel of his AK-12 into its eye and pulling the trigger. The back of its head exploded.
But two more were on him, one from the side. A clawed hand, as big as a dinner plate, punched through his chest, severing his spine.
The Russian Captain stared down at the claws, his eyes wide, before he was thrown aside.
"NO!" Captain Thorne roared, emptying his magazine into the beast that killed Voron. It stumbled, but a second one hit him from the blind side, taking him to the ground. Harris saw his Captain, his CO, a man he respected, get torn limb from limb by three of the monsters.
Harris was alone.
He was the only one standing.
His rifle clicked empty.
He was surrounded. Ten... fifteen of the beasts, their muzzles dripping with the blood of his friends.
He was going to die.
He dropped his rifle and fumbled for a new mag, but his hands were shaking. He saw Miller's body. He saw Diaz's. He saw Dimitri, and the muddy picture of Katya.
He was frozen.
And then... he saw it.
Miller's severed head, lying on the moss... spoke.
Its mouth moved.
Its dead eyes stared into his.
"Harris... Revenge... Avenge us..."
He spun. Diaz's upper torso, ten feet away. Its mouth was moving.
"Kill them... Kill them all, Harris... Take... revenge..."
He looked at Thorne's remains. At Dimitri. At Voron. Their dead, bloody mouths were all moving. All saying the same words.
"Revenge. Avenge us. Kill them."
The voices. The voices. They were screaming in his head.
The rage, the terror, the grief, the sheer, impossible wrongness of it all... it hit him like a physical blow.
It broke him.
Harris Brown... snapped.
He started to chuckle.
A low, breathy, wet sound.
The beasts, confused by this strange, un-prey-like behavior, paused.
The chuckle grew. It became a giggle.
It became a full-blown, shrieking, manic laugh.
He threw his head back and howled at the green-blue sky, his laughter echoing in the bloody clearing.
"REVENGE?!" he screamed at the corpses of his friends. "YOU WANT REVENGE?!"
He ripped an M67 fragmentation grenade from his vest.
"I'LL GIVE YOU REVENGE!"
He pulled the pin, the click loud in the sudden silence.
He looked at the monsters, his eyes wide and blazing with a new, terrifying light.
He dropped the grenade at his own feet.
And, as the beasts, finally realizing the threat, lunged for him... Harris ran.
He didn't run away. He just ran. He burst through the circle, diving into the undergrowth, his only thought to put distance between himself and the blast.
BOOM.
The M67 detonated, its 6.5-ounce payload of Composition B and its pre-fragmented steel shell doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The shrapnel, over 1,000 pieces, tore through the circle of beasts, shredding them. The shockwave threw Harris a dozen feet, slamming him into a tree.
He landed hard. His vision was black. He was... alive.
He pushed himself up, his body a symphony of pain. He couldn't hear. His ears were ringing.
He stumbled, disoriented, through the jungle. He didn't know where he was going. He was just running.
He was the sole survivor. He... he...
THWACK. THWACK-THWACK.
A pain, sharp and white-hot, exploded in his back.
He looked down. An arrow, black-fletched and cruel, was protruding from his stomach, having punched clean through his body armor.
He looked back. Another arrow was in his shoulder. Another in his thigh.
He staggered, a human pin-cushion.
THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK.
A volley. His back lit up. He felt at least five more hit him.
He saw them, at the edge of his vision. Elves. The same elves from the Odyssey feed. They'd been watching. They'd been waiting.
"No..." he gurgled, blood filling his mouth.
He took one more step.
Then a final volley, maybe three or four more, hit him in the back. The sheer kinetic force of ten arrows striking him at once pitched him forward.
He fell, his face hitting the alien mud, his world finally, blessedly, going black.
________________________________________
[UNKNOWN TIME LATER]
[CLASSIFIED GDI MEDICAL FACILITY, PETERSON SFB]
...A beep.
...A voice. "He's stabilizing. How is he even alive? The pilot said he found him... he had fourteen arrows in him."
...Another voice. "He's a Ranger, doc. They're too stubborn to die."
________________________________________
[ONE WEEK LATER]
[SECURE DORM ROOM, 'PROJECT AVENGER' WING]
Harris was locked in.
The GDI had declared him a hero. The sole survivor of Task Force Avenger. They'd covered up the massacre, of course. The official story was that the team had "succeeded in planting the beacon but was amb_ushed during extraction, fighting to the last man."
Harris was their poster boy. Their hero.
Harris was... broken.
He sat in the dark. The GDI doctors had pumped him full of so much blood and so many advanced coagulants and antibiotics that he'd survived. But his mind was still in that jungle.
The voices.
They hadn't stopped.
"Revenge, Harris..."
Miller's voice.
"Kill them for us..."
Diaz's voice.
"...Katya... Avenge... Katya..."
Dimitri's voice.
He clutched his head, rocking back and forth on the cot. "Shut up," he whimpered. "Shut up, shut up, shut up, you're dead!"
But they wouldn't shut up. They were louder, every day.
His gear bag was in the corner. The one they'd recovered with him. It still had the "evidence" from the mission.
It still had the mask.
Suddenly, a new voice.
It wasn't a scream. It wasn't a whisper from a ghost. It was... smooth. Powerful. Seductive. And it wasn't in his head. It was in the room.
"They are so loud, aren't they? Such an echo."
Harris's head snapped up. His eyes, frantic, darted around the empty room.
"Who... who's there?"
"They will never be quiet, Harris. They are a wound. And a wound cannot close if you keep picking at it."
The voice was coming... from the gear bag. From the mask.
Harris, as if mesmerized, stood up. He walked, his legs unsteady, to the bag.
He unzipped it.
The obsidian mask was inside, nestled in the containment bag. It seemed... darker. Warmer.
"They want revenge. You want revenge. But you are... weak. You are a broken little boy, crying in the dark, full of holes."
"What... what are you?" Harris whispered, his hand trembling as he reached for it.
"I am the answer," the voice purred, vibrating from the mask into his very bones. "I am the power they cannot fight. I am the silence you crave. Put me on... and I will give you the strength to get the only thing that matters."
"Revenge..." Miller's voice screamed in his head.
"Shut up!" Harris yelled, clutching his temples.
"I can make them stop, Harris," the mask offered. "Put me on. And let... me... take revenge."
Harris was sobbing. He was a man with no hope, haunted by the dead, with no future.
He looked at the mask.
He grabbed it. He pulled it from the bag.
He looked at his own, terrified reflection in its hollow, demonic eyes.
With a final, broken scream, he jammed it onto his face.
The pain was... unspeakable.
It was not pain. It was agony. It was a billion volts of white-hot, liquid fire pouring into his eyes, his skull, his very soul. He felt his bones crack and reform, his blood boil and cool. He felt something else... an ancient, cold, and vast intelligence... lock itself into his spine.
He screamed for two solid seconds.
And then... silence.
The voices of his friends... were gone.
The pain... was gone.
The grief... was gone.
Harris Brown stood up straight. He was breathing slowly, deeply.
He felt... powerful.
He walked to the small mirror in his bathroom.
He looked.
It was not his face.
The mask... it was fused to his skin. It was no longer obsidian. It was a part of him, a new, demonic layer of bone and black, chitinous flesh. His eyes... they weren't his. They were two, burning, pinpricks of cold, blue light, identical to the "princess's."
A deep, resonant, dual-layered voice—half Harris, half something else—rumbled from his chest.
"Good," he said. "Let's get started."