The rumours had been circulating for months.

A mysterious being appearing on battlefields. Entire units wiped out in minutes. Men vanishing into thick clouds of mist, their screams swallowed by something no weapon could explain. No one knew what it was.

Some claimed it was a goddess. Others called it the Devil.

But the soldiers that were lucky to survive had a different name for you.

Death wears her face.

Task Force 141 had heard the stories, of course. Simon Riley didn’t believe in ghost stories. He believed in bullets, blood, and things that could be killed.

Until today.

The battlefield was a mess of red-spotted dirt, shattered vehicles, and thick clouds of dust. Gunfire thundered across the land as the team fought to push back the enemy. Simon Riley moved with his usual precision, rifle raised, his eyes scanning through the haze.

Then the enemy started dropping.

Not one by one. Dozens at a time.

“Contact—!” Gaz began, before another group of soldiers crumpled to the ground.

Simon immediately signalled the team to regroup. Soap slid into cover beside him, his rifle trained on the shifting dust. Price appeared moments later, his expression grim beneath his cap.

“Tell me you lot are seeing this,” Soap muttered.

“Unfortunately,” Price replied.

Another wave of enemy soldiers broke formation. Some fired blindly into the haze. Others abandoned their weapons and ran, stumbling over the bodies of their own men in a desperate attempt to escape.

Soap leaned closer to Simon. “Think this is the rumour, lad?”

“Shut up and watch your six,” Gaz hissed.

Then the mist appeared.

A faint, almost beautiful glow shimmered through the dust, tiny sparks of light drifting through the air like embers. The temperature seemed to drop. The gunfire grew sporadic, replaced by panicked shouting and the distant sound of men begging for mercy.

And then Simon saw her.

You stood in the middle of the devastation, surrounded by fallen soldiers. The last man crumpled at your feet as the faint glow around your fingertips slowly faded. You straightened, your hair stirring in the slight breeze, seemingly untouched by the chaos surrounding you.

Your eyes were dark, with something luminous stirring deep within them. They held no rage. No excitement. Not even hatred.

Only a terrible, endless stillness.

The sort of stillness that came after the last heartbeat.

Yet something glowed deep within them. Something unnatural. Something that made even a battlefield feel like the safest place in the world compared to whatever lay behind that gaze.

For once, Simon Riley had absolutely nothing to say.

He’d seen men lose their minds. He’d seen cruelty beyond reason, and he’d done things that haunted him long after the shooting stopped. But he’d never witnessed anything like you.

Price raised a hand, silently ordering the team to hold their fire. Nobody moved. Nobody dared.

Simon kept his rifle trained in your direction, though his finger had eased away from the trigger. His instincts screamed at him to identify the threat, to establish distance, to find a weakness.

But there was something about you that made him question whether any of those things mattered.

You stood among hundreds of bodies as though the slaughter had cost you nothing.

Then the wind shifted.

Glowing mist curled around your ankles, the shadows bending towards you as though the darkness itself recognised its master.

Your attention settled on the four men watching you.

Without a word, you lifted one hand and casually waved your fingers.

The air shuddered.

Dark mist spiralled around your palm, flecks of pale light illuminating the shape forming within it. Metal emerged from the shadows, piece by piece, until a weapon rested effortlessly in your hand.

It hadn’t been drawn from a holster or fallen from the sky.

It had simply appeared at your fingertips.