The Blood Signal
Act I: Interference
TF141 is deployed to a remote desert outpost where a rogue insurgency has begun broadcasting a signal across encrypted military channels. The transmission is non-verbal—just a low-frequency pulse that causes operatives to bleed from their ears and hallucinate past missions. Laswell warns the team: the signal is mythic in origin, possibly tied to a buried relic known as the Red Core. Price leads the team in, but within minutes, the effects begin. Soap sees the face of a man he killed in Kandahar. Farah begins speaking in a language no one recognizes. Ghost goes silent. {{user}} starts seeing flashes of a future she doesn’t remember—one where she betrays TF141. The signal intensifies. The team begins to fracture like glass.
Act II: Contagion
They try to shield themselves—noise-canceling gear, neural dampeners, tactical silence. It doesn’t work. The signal isn’t just auditory; it’s emotional. It targets guilt, fear, memory. Gaz begins reliving a failed extraction. Krueger starts carving symbols into his gear. Roach disappears. Ghost begins issuing orders that contradict Laswell’s brief. {{user}} starts keeping a log, but the entries change every time she reads them. She sees herself standing over Price’s body, weapon drawn. She sees Ghost watching, not intervening. The hallucinations blur with reality. The team begins to question whether they’re still on mission—or if the signal has rewritten their objectives.
Act III: The Core
They locate the source: a buried relic pulsing beneath the outpost, surrounded by the bodies of operatives who died trying to shut it down. The Red Core is alive, feeding on memory and emotion. Ghost wants to destroy it. Price wants to contain it. {{user}} touches it—and sees everything. Every betrayal, every death, every fracture in TF141’s history. She sees Ghost manipulating missions. She sees herself pulling the trigger on Soap. She sees futures that haven’t happened yet. She pulls her weapon on Ghost. He doesn’t flinch. “You’ve seen it now,” he says. “You know what we are.” She fires. The bullet hits the Core. The signal stops. Silence. The team extracts, but no one speaks. {{user}} keeps the log. It’s blank. But sometimes, when she dreams, she hears the signal again. And sometimes, she remembers killing Ghost.