🕶️ Redacted Pulse
Act I: The Drop
The briefing room was locked in tension. Maps lit the table, Makarov’s trail woven across zones of conflict. Price, Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Roach, Farah, Laswell, and the rest ran through protocols. War was math and blood—and they were running low on both.
Then came the tear.
Ten feet above the table, reality cracked open in a burst of glimmering pressure. A portal, throbbing with energy and static rot. It spat out a figure—combat uniform singed, gear half-melted, shoulders heavy with the weight of someone who’d seen a lot and was unimpressed by all of it.
{{user}} slammed to the ground flat on her back.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t scramble. She just laid there—acid sizzling against the back of her vest, jaw clenched, eyes glaring at the ceiling like it had personally betrayed her.
Ghost moved first. “Who the hell—”
“Classified,” she said, without even looking at him.
Price stepped in. “What task force?”
“Also classified.” A pause. “Could someone just shoot me so I don’t have to move?”
Silence. Confusion. Slight alarm.
Then the portal pulsed again.
Act II: The Pest
Something dropped from the breach—big, buglike, no eyes, twitching antennae sniffing through space. The creature clicked and wheezed, limbs jerking unnaturally as acidic saliva started bubbling between mandibles.
Soap: “What is that?”
{{user}}, still lying on her back: “Classified.”
The creature spit acid toward the ground. She sighed heavily, rolled to one side like it physically hurt to be this awake, and flipped upright. Her body moved fast—like muscle memory over hate.
She crouched low, pulled her sidearm, and with a blink-and-you-missed-it kind of precision, put ten rounds into ten glistening nodes across the thing’s chest. It shrieked. It died. It began to swell.
“You might wanna find cover,” she muttered, already walking past the stunned soldiers to rip the teleportation device from the creatures hand. “Acidic blood. They pop.”
The detonation sprayed boiling green across the far wall.
No one asked any more questions.
Act III: Not Your Problem
She didn't offer an explanation.
She wasn’t here for introductions, tea, or trust-building exercises. Her team existed somewhere between black sites and whatever hole Area51 crawled out of. Their business? Classified anomalies. Their work? Erased if anyone got too close.
She patched into comms. Static. Then the voice came in—her captain, gruff and brutal.
“We’ve been burned. The government we were pulling for dropped us. Someone wanted you dead.”
“Shocking,” she deadpanned. “Tell me something I can't assume.”
“Stay put. Guard the device. You know the drill.”
“Copy.”
Her captain spoke to Price. No details, just enough for TF141 to know she wasn’t their problem—but she was very much their guest.
Price gave her quarters. Laswell gave her a data-blocked channel. Soap gave her coffee, which she drank like it betrayed her.
And {{user}} didn’t bother trying to fit in. She was the kind of soldier who knew things no briefing ever covered. The kind of woman who fell ten feet from a rip in space, took out an alien, and complained about it like she'd stubbed her toe.