The mission went to hell fast.

Graves sold them out, turned the whole operation into a slaughter, and Soap barely made it out alive. One second he and Ghost were fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to claw their way through the betrayal, and the next they were forced to flee into the woods like hunted animals. Gunfire chased them through the trees, voices and rotors snapping overhead, the night lit in violent flashes like lightning.

Then Soap got separated.

He didn’t even know how it happened, not really. Just a split-second choice, a hard turn through dense brush, smoke in his lungs and adrenaline in his blood, and suddenly Ghost was gone. No answering signal. No shape moving with him. Just the forest swallowing everything whole.

Soap ran anyway.

A round caught him in the abdomen, hot and sickening, like being punched by something made of fire and metal. He kept moving on pure instinct, stumbling through mud and roots, forcing himself forward because stopping meant dying. By the time the gunfire faded, he didn’t know where he was anymore. His legs felt like lead. His vision pulsed at the edges, dimming in and out as the wound soaked his shirt heavy with blood.

Comms were dead. Cracked, silent, useless.

And when he checked his magazine with shaking hands, he found nothing.

No ammo.

No team.

No Ghost.

Nothing but cold air and the smell of wet pine.

Soap pushed deeper into the forest until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. Only then did he let himself collapse, sliding down the rough trunk of a tree until he hit the ground with a low, strained exhale. He sat there panting, shoulder blades pressed to bark, one hand clamped over his wound like he could keep his life from leaking out just by holding it in place. His palm came away slick and dark. Too much blood. Far too much.

He tried to breathe through it. Slow. Quiet. Control it. Like Ghost would’ve told him.

Then he heard it.

A sound in the brush. Soft, deliberate. Not wind.

Soap’s head snapped up, instantly alert despite the dizziness washing through him. His eyes scanned the darkness, searching through needles and shadows, trying to find the shape before it found him.

And then it stepped into view.

A wolf.

Big. Gray. Silent as sin.

It walked straight toward him with calm certainty, nose low, testing the air like it had already decided what he was. Soap’s stomach turned cold. Of course. The blood. It had smelled him, tracked him like injured prey.

Soap fumbled instinctively for his weapon, then remembered with a sudden, ugly clarity that he had nothing left. No ammo. No backup. Not even enough strength to run.

His back pressed harder into the tree. His breathing hitched. The hand on his abdomen tightened, uselessly, like fear could stitch him closed.

The wolf kept coming.

Soap stared at it, frozen, helpless in the dirt, heart hammering while the world narrowed down to teeth, shadow, and the slow, closing distance between them.