The ballroom was a theater of power, dressed in medals and polished boots, the air thick with politics disguised as camaraderie. Newly minted colonels and generals mingled in cautious clusters, their laughter forced, their eyes calculating. Beneath the warm lights and the distant clinking of crystal glasses, legends from across the world’s most dangerous units moved like shadows—KorTac, the SAS, the 75th Rangers, the Canadian Special Operations Regiment.

And then you arrived.

Late, as always, slipping through the double doors without fanfare, yet pulling every eye in the room as if gravity itself had shifted. The Lieutenant. No first name offered. No rank beyond the one you refused to climb past. A face—expressionless and carved in stone—that carried the weight of whispered stories. You weren’t here for the drinks, the speeches, or the small talk. You were here because someone above all of this, someone whose name would never be spoken aloud, had told you to be.

König’s eyes found you instantly.

He’d told himself before that it was curiosity. A professional’s interest in a fellow professional. That lie was getting harder to believe. From the far wall, towering over most of the room, König watched you move—silent, calculated, every step like you were walking through enemy territory. You didn’t smile, didn’t nod, didn’t acknowledge the power games playing out around you. It wasn’t arrogance. It was dismissal. Everyone here was beneath your attention, and somehow, that didn’t feel like a show. It felt like the truth.

König had seen operators like you in the field—predators who didn’t bother to posture because they didn’t need to. But you… you were something rarer. A weapon that didn’t want a master. He imagined what it would be like to work alongside you, to watch you cut through the kind of chaos most people didn’t survive. He also imagined what it would be like to be on the wrong side of you. That thought both thrilled and unsettled him.

Ghost noticed you just as quickly.

From his place near the bar, mask catching the dim light, Simon Riley had been scanning the crowd with his usual detachment. Then you walked in, and the entire mental map he’d been building shifted. Price had spoken of you before—his voice tight, a rare blend of respect and warning. Ghost had read the files, the ones where whole paragraphs were blacked out and the body counts were just estimates. The Lieutenant was always the last one standing, the one who walked out when no one else did.

You didn’t look dangerous in the way rookies imagined danger. You weren’t pacing like a caged animal or glaring at everyone who glanced your way. No, you stood with a stillness that made Ghost’s instincts flare. The kind of stillness that meant you didn’t need to prove you could kill everyone in the room—you just could.

Soap was talking beside him, something about one of the generals across the floor, but Ghost wasn’t listening. He was watching you. Tracking your hands, the line of your shoulders, the way you scanned the exits without ever seeming to. You didn’t linger anywhere for too long, yet you gave off the impression you could stand in one place for hours if you wanted to, simply watching until the world made its next move.

The rest of the event blurred for both men.

The speeches were hollow, the toast meaningless. König maneuvered subtly to keep you in his line of sight, watching for anyone foolish enough to try and strike up conversation. Ghost drifted through the crowd at angles that gave him a clean view of you no matter where you went. But under that patience both seemed to have in abundance, the beginnings of something sharper took root, impatience.

For König, it was the pull of fascination—wanting to know what could make someone like you agree to be here at all. For Ghost, it was the itch of strategy—wanting to know how to bring you into Task Force 141 before anyone else could rope you.