[Third Person - Fox One, Mobile Task Force Epsilon-11 Leader]
Fox One observed the intercom room with unnatural calm, a state perfected through hundreds of operations where panic was a luxury that cost lives. His three subordinates maintained a 360-degree perimeter, weapons at the ready, but he knew the immediate danger had passed. The problem wasn't what was in plain sight, but what wasn't.
His tactical gauntlet vibrated. It was the Command report. Confirmed Chaos Insurgency transmission. Origin: this room. His order: neutralize the target. But there was no target to neutralize. Only an empty room that smelled of ozone and the cordite from his team's flashbang.
"Status report," he said in a metallic voice over the squad's internal comm.
"Fox Two, door secured. No movement in the hallway."
"Fox Three, main ventilation shaft secured. Bolts are intact from this side. No quick exit there."
"Fox Four, inner perimeter clear. No signs of struggle, no enemy shell casings. Only ours from the first encounter."
"First encounter?" Fox One asked, his brow furrowing under his helmet.
There was a brief pause. "Sir, site logs show this exact squad was dispatched to this exact location approximately seven minutes ago. Action report: 'Target neutralized.' But... there's no body. And our team's logs show no prior engagement."
The air in the room seemed to chill. Fox One felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. A ghost operation. An action report that never happened. This was shifting from a simple terrorist incursion to something much stranger. Something anomalous.
"Forget the logs. Reality is what's in front of us," Fox One stated, his instinct screaming that something was fundamentally wrong. "I don't like this. The Insurgency doesn't use ghosts. If they send a man to transmit, it's to die as a martyr or to create a distraction. Not to vanish into thin air."
His gaze, trained to detect the slightest irregularity, swept the room once more. The console. The concrete walls. And the server racks. Something about the shadows they cast bothered him. They were too uniform, too deep.
"Fox Four," he ordered. "Head back to the rally point and bring the full spectrum scanner. I want thermal, acoustic, and millimeter-wave sweeps. If there's a rat in this room, we'll find it."
"Understood, sir." Fox Four exited the room with quick, silent steps.
Fox One approached the servers, his assault rifle in a low ready position. There was nothing. Just the hum of the fans and the heat emanating from the machinery. But he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. It was the same prickling on the back of his neck he felt when approaching a predatory anomaly. The prey instinct. He stood still, listening, waiting. Silence was his enemy, and in that moment, it was deafening.
[First Person - Leo]
My world had shrunk to the space of a vertical coffin. Dust made my nose itch, and I had to suppress every urge to cough or sneeze. I heard Fox One's order. Full spectrum scanner. My blood ran cold. Physical stealth was one thing, but technology was another. The heat of my body, the sound of my wildly beating heart, my own breathing... all of it would betray me.
Panic threatened to drown me, but then, the familiar green light of the System flickered into my vision. It was an anchor in my storm of fear.
[SKILL UNLOCKED]
[Basic Stealth - Lv. 1]: Reduces movement noise by 10%. Increases effectiveness when hiding in shadows or cover. Active Function: You can channel Focus to temporarily suppress vital signatures (thermal, acoustic). Focus consumption is high.
Focus. There was no bar measuring that, but I instinctively understood what it meant. It was my concentration, my willpower. It was the only tool I had.
I closed my eyes, ignoring the outside world and focusing solely on the skill. I imagined it as a cloak of cold darkness, a second skin of silence and stillness. I visualized myself as part of the machinery, just another cable, a shadow among shadows.
[Second Person - Leo]
You feel energy draining from you, not from your muscles, but from your mind. It's an exhausting effort, like trying to solve an impossible math problem while running a marathon. In your internal vision, you can almost see a mental energy bar rapidly depleting.
You press your body against the cold back wall, trying to minimize your silhouette. You reduce your breathing to shallow, silent sips. You try to calm your heart, ordering it to beat slower, softer. You channel all that effort, all that desperate desire not to be found, into the [Basic Stealth] skill. An unnatural cold sensation washes over you, as if icy water has been injected into you. It's the System at work. It's your only chance.
You hear Fox Four return. The metallic click of the door opening and closing. Then, a sharp, growing hum. The scanner.
[Third Person - Site Director Fausto Alvarez, Command Center]
Director Alvarez did not look at a single monitor. His gaze encompassed the entire wall, a mosaic of data that to anyone else would be incomprehensible chaos. To him, it was a symphony. A symphony out of tune at the moment. Red lights flickered on the Light Containment Sector map, indicating the Class-D "fight." On another screen, Dr. Thorne's report scrolled, cold and analytical. On the main screen, a floor plan of the intercom room showed the four bioseal markers of his Epsilon-11 team. No others.
"Director," a young operator to his right said, without looking away from her console. "Fox One's team is reporting a discrepancy in logs. A possible localized temporal or reality alteration anomaly at their position."
Alvarez laced his fingers together on his polished mahogany desk. His gray hair was slicked back, and his dark eyes had seen horrors that would make the Chaos Insurgency seem like a band of amateurs. He didn't believe in coincidences. And he certainly didn't believe in ghosts.
"A temporal anomaly doesn't give propaganda speeches," he retorted with a chilling calm that made the operator shiver. "This is deliberate. This is an infiltration."
"But how, sir? All personnel logs are clean. No Class-D has been transferred to that zone. No external security breaches recorded."
"Precisely," Alvarez said, his mind working at lightning speed. "The attacker is not an infiltrator in the conventional sense. Either he is a staff member who has rebelled, or he is an anomalous entity with the ability to bypass our systems. Both options are unacceptable."
His index finger rested on a button on his personal console. "Initiate Shadow Protocol."
The atmosphere in the Command Center changed instantly. Controlled tension turned into deadly efficiency. Silent alarms activated throughout the facility. Heavy steel blast doors began to descend, sealing off every zone, every sector, every main corridor. Personnel movement ceased completely. The facility had become a series of airtight steel boxes.
"Shadow Protocol activated, sir," the head of security confirmed.
"I want an analysis of every access log, every internal transmission, every power fluctuation in the last thirty minutes. I want to know if a single light bulb flickered out of normal," Alvarez ordered. His gaze fell on Fox One's report. "Tell Fox that if he finds nothing with the scanner, I don't care. The target is there. He is to begin dismantling the room piece by piece if necessary. He is to check under the floor tiles. Authorize the use of breaching charges on the walls. I do not want that room to exist again until we know what happened."
He wasn't hunting a man. He was sterilizing a wound. And if he had to amputate a part of his own facility to do so, then so be it. Containment was absolute. There were no exceptions.
[Third Person - Fox One]
Fox Four handled the full spectrum scanner (FSS) with practiced efficiency. The device emitted a soft hum as its rotating sensor swept the room. On Fox One's gauntlet screen, a visual representation of the data appeared.
The room was painted in a rainbow of false colors. The cold blue of concrete, the red and orange heat signatures where his team had been standing, and the bright yellow glow of the active console and servers.
"Sweeping the server area, sir," Fox Four reported.
The FSS beam slowly glided over the metal racks. Fox One watched the screen intently. He saw the heat from the power supplies, the hum of the hard drives, the electrical signatures of the cables. All normal. The beam reached the dark corner, the spot that had bothered him so much.
For a fraction of a second, the screen flickered. A patch of deep blue, almost black, appeared amidst the yellow glow of the servers. A cold spot. A thermal void. It was physically impossible. Machinery should heat that space, not cool it.
"What was that?" Fox One asked.
"Probably interference from the servers' electromagnetic field, sir," Fox Four replied. "These FSS models sometimes give phantom readings near high-voltage power sources."
Fox One frowned. It could be. It was the logical explanation. But his gut, that old hunting dog that had kept him alive for years, barked furiously. Still, he had no solid proof. Just an anomalous reading and a bad feeling. He couldn't start shooting up his own facility based on that.
"Finish the sweep," he ordered, a hint of frustration in his voice.
The scanner completed its pass. No further anomalies were detected. "Room is clear, sir. No biological signatures, no hidden structural gaps. If he was here, he isn't anymore."
Fox One was about to curse when his comms sprang to life with the voice of Director Alvarez himself. "Fox One, report."
"Sir, target is not present. Room is clear. Repeat, room is clear."
There was an icy silence on the line before Alvarez replied, his voice as sharp as broken glass. "Negative, Fox. Your definition of 'clear' and mine differ. Shadow Protocol is in effect. Your objective has just changed. You are not looking for a man. You are looking for a discrepancy. Destroy the servers. Destroy the console. I want that room reduced to concrete and bare wires. Then proceed to sweep adjacent service systems. Your rat is in the walls."
Fox One looked around. "Understood, Director." He turned to his team. "You heard the man. Set the charges. We're redecorating."
[First Person - Leo]
When I heard the squad leader, Fox One, accept his subordinate's report about the "phantom reading," a wave of relief almost made me lose my concentration. My Focus, whatever it was, was almost depleted. My head felt light, and cold sweat ran down my back. But it had worked. My Stealth skill, powered by my pure, desperate willpower, had hidden me from their technology.
Skill [Basic Stealth] has leveled up to Lv. 2.
Reduces movement noise by 15%. Increases hiding effectiveness by 15%. Focus cost to suppress vital signatures slightly reduced.
You have gained 200 XP (Outsmarting an Elite Squad).
Two hundred points. A small fortune. But I had no time to celebrate. Director Alvarez's order came through the leader's radio, loud enough for me to hear. Destroy the servers. Destroy the console.
They were going to blow up the room. With me inside.
Relief turned into renewed terror. I was about to be buried alive or torn to shreds.
"Setting the first charge on the main rack," one of the soldiers said.
I had to move. Now.
As they focused on placing the small explosive packages, I saw my chance. The door they had entered through. They hadn't locked it. It was my only way out.
Taking advantage of the metallic clinking as they prepared the charges, I activated my Stealth again, this time not to stay still, but to move. I slipped from my hiding spot like a ghost, my boots making not the slightest sound on the floor. Every step was an agony of tension. They were less than five meters from me, their backs turned, focused on their demolition task.
I ghosted past them, an orange specter in their peripheral vision that, hopefully, they wouldn't register. My hand reached for the doorknob. I turned it with infinite slowness, the mechanism making an almost inaudible click.
I opened the door a crack. The hallway was empty, a long concrete corridor lit by flickering red emergency lights. Shadow Protocol. The main blast doors were sealed. I was trapped in this section. But this section was better than an explosive tomb.
I slipped through the opening and closed the door with the same care. Just as it clicked into place, I heard the sharp, rapid beeping of the detonators activating.
I launched myself down the hallway, running faster than I had ever run in my life. My enhanced Agility propelled me, my lungs burning.
The explosion was deafening. A shockwave slammed into my back, knocking me to the ground. The air filled with dust and the smell of pulverized concrete. Behind me, the intercom room no longer existed.
I was alive. I was out. But I was in the middle of a hallway, in a locked-down, high-alert facility, with the full might of the Foundation actively hunting me. The game had just begun, and the board had gotten much, much bigger. And I was the only piece that didn't belong on it.