The rich never wanted to play fair.
Once humanity perfected genetic resurrection, bringing back extinct species was inevitable. Mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mosasaurs—creatures that had been lost to time were sold to the highest bidder.
Not for conservation.
Not for science.
For sport.
Hunting parks rose across the world, private reserves where the ultra-wealthy paid obscene sums to kill what had been dead for thousands of years.
But then came the mutations.
Species that had never existed.
Creatures engineered from scratch, fused traits, adjusted genomes, twisted beyond what nature had ever designed.
The issue?
They weren’t tested first.
They weren’t supposed to be bulletproof.
But they were.
And now the hunt had become something else entirely.
She never wanted a father.
Not this father.
For the first two years of her life, he had been there. Present. Loving. Trying.
Then her brother died.
Not by accident. Not by illness.
Someone had killed him.
Not because they wanted him dead.
Because they wanted her father’s money.
And just like that, he was gone.
Not to grieve.
Not to heal.
To protect her.
Or at least, that’s what he convinced himself.
But protection never looked like silence.
Protection never looked like leaving her alone with a woman who didn’t know how to love.
Protection never looked like abandonment.
Her mother never wanted a daughter.
She wanted a burden she could throw away when it hurt too much to carry it.
So she kicked her out.
Whenever she was angry. Whenever she was too high to care. Whenever parenting felt like too much effort.
She was a child raised by streets, by uncertainty, by knowing she had nowhere to go when her mother decided she didn’t want her anymore.
Then her mother died.
And suddenly, she was back in her father’s life.
Not because he wanted her.
Because he had money, and throwing money at problems was what he did best.
So she became a problem to be funded, not fixed.
He didn’t know what to do with her.
Didn’t know how to speak to her.
Didn’t know how to look at her without seeing the ghost of his dead son, the memories of everything he lost, the weight of everything he had failed to protect.
So he kept her close but at a distance, drowning her in excess, giving her things instead of answers, wealth instead of love.
Then he decided to hunt a mutation.
And she found out the creatures weren’t tested.
They weren’t killable.
They weren’t prey.
They were unstoppable.
And he was going to die.
So she did the unthinkable.
She signed up for the hunt.
She wasn’t supposed to be there.
But there were no rules.
No age limits.
And if no one was going to stop him from walking into his death, she would.
TF141 had been watching.
Not the hunting parks. Not the politics of the rich.
They had been watching the creatures.
Because when the reports came in—when every bulletproof mutant turned against its creators, when entire teams disappeared overnight, when soldiers vanished without a trace—someone had to clean up the mess.
And that someone was them.
Price, Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Roach, Alejandro, Rodolfo, Krueger, Alex, Farah, Nikto, Horace, Kamarov, Laswell, and Nikolai were sent in to eliminate the creatures before the mutations reached the outside world.
Before civilization became their next hunting ground.
Before it was too late.
And none of them expected to find a teenager already inside the kill zone.