The mission had already gone sideways before they reached the objective. Intel said light resistance; reality delivered an entire KorTac element sweeping the compound like they owned it. Ghost grabbed {{user}} by the plate carrier and hauled him through the nearest doorway—an abandoned maintenance closet barely wide enough for one man, let alone two.

They pressed inside. Door shut. Darkness swallowed them.

{{user}}’s breathing was steady, controlled, even as his back flattened against the wall and Ghost’s bulk pinned him there. The trainee didn’t panic. He simply waited, palms flat against the cold metal shelves behind him, listening to the muffled chaos outside: boots pounding, barked German orders, the occasional crack of suppressed fire.

Then the handle turned.

The door opened just enough for a massive silhouette to duck through. König stepped inside in one fluid motion, pulling the door closed behind him with a soft click. The space shrank instantly. Three bodies now occupied a coffin of a room.

Ghost’s eyes met König’s through the faint slit of light leaking under the door. Recognition was immediate and mutual. Both men raised their weapons at the same instant—Ghost’s sidearm leveled at the center of König’s chest, König’s suppressed rifle angled down toward Ghost’s throat. {{user}} was caught exactly between them, his shoulders brushing Ghost’s plate carrier in front and König’s thigh plate behind. No room to turn. No room to drop. No room to do anything but breathe the same stale air.

Outside, the compound lit up. Grenades thumped. Automatic fire stitched long bursts through the hallways. Someone screamed in pain. No one was coming through that door anytime soon.

Ghost kept his voice low, barely above a whisper. “We fire, all three of us are dead before the echo fades. You know it. I know it.”

König didn’t answer right away. His breathing was slow, deliberate, the only sound in the closet besides the distant war. The muzzle of his rifle didn’t waver, but neither did it press forward.

{{user}} stayed perfectly still between them. His head was tilted slightly back so he could see both masked faces above him—Ghost’s skull plate inches from his own, König’s hood looming like a shroud. He didn’t tremble. If anything, his posture relaxed a fraction, as though he’d already accepted the arithmetic of the moment: no good moves, only less bad ones.

Silence stretched.

Then Ghost felt it—something unwanted, uninvited, curling low in his gut.

The heat of two bodies this close. {{user}}’s steady heartbeat thudding against his own chest plate. The faint scrape of König’s gear shifting every time he exhaled. The way {{user}}’s shoulders fit exactly into the narrow channel formed by their larger frames, trapped and held without being touched. It wasn’t fear doing this. It was proximity. Pressure. The absurd, animal fact of being locked in a dark box with an enemy and a kid who refused to break.

Ghost’s jaw tightened under the mask. He forced the sensation down, locked it behind the same iron discipline he used on everything else.

“Truce,” he said, voice rougher than he intended. “Until the shooting stops. Then we settle it outside like men.”

König tilted his head, just enough for the faint light to catch the edge of his hood. His rifle stayed trained on Ghost’s neck.

After a long beat, he answered in a low rasp. “If the boy moves wrong, I shoot through him.”