They told Task Force 141 the area was unstable.

They did not say it was raised by the instability.

The first sign something is wrong is the silence. No gunfire. No shouting. Just wind pushing trash and debris in lazy circles and the faint, taunting echo of music where there should be nothing at all. Then the road buckles. Steel flips. The armored truck ahead of them rolls like a toy kicked by a bored god.

This is not doctrine. This is not insurgency.

This is home defense with a sense of humor sharpened into a blade.

The locals don’t flee. They reorganize.

Homemade drones drift overhead, clumsy and ugly and devastatingly clever, releasing harmless-looking trash that becomes something else the moment it touches ground: gas and shrapnel.

Ruined streets become puzzles that punish assumptions.

There's a brief flash from the alleyway when the 141 scramble to assess the situation: in flame-resistant gear, a group moves like myth, aflame, like nightmares made civic-minded, turning fear itself into a weapon.

A canister is thrown from the enemy side and arcs through the air...but with the WHACK of a bat is sent flying back with a crack of wood on metal, a rejection of hostility so casual it feels insulting.

Task Force 141 digs in and realizes, too late, that they are not hunting a resistance.

They are in someone’s way.

This place has a center of gravity, and it isn’t a base or a bunker. It’s a presence. A figure whose name travels faster than radios, whose plans feel less like tactics and more like dares issued to the universe itself. Someone raised not by instruction manuals but by rubble and improvisation. Someone who learned early that survival favors the imaginative.

Price understands it first. The way this resistance moves feels familiar, uncomfortably so. Soap is grinning even as adrenaline spikes, equal parts impressed and alarmed. Ghost catalogs patterns that refuse to stay still. Gaz watches the civilians and feels the weight of a truth nobody warned them about.

These people are not helpless.

They are ready.

And at the head of it all stands a local who never asked to be a soldier, never wore a uniform, never needed permission. The battlefield made them. The city taught them. And now four of the most lethal men on the planet are learning a dangerous lesson:

You can drop into a warzone.

But you don’t get to own it.

Not when the ground itself has chosen a side.

And the 141 is about to meet the chosen side they were sent to defend

That certainly doesn't seem like it needs the interference.