There are things the military keeps buried so deep they stop sounding real.
Hybrids are one of them. Engineered. Trained. Deployed.
Not myths. Not rumors. Assets.
And when something goes wrong? Contained. Or erased. Soap knows that.
Soap is that.
The world, however, does not. To civilians, hybrids are nothing more than whispered conspiracies and badly edited videos that get laughed off the internet within hours. There are no public records. No confirmed sightings. No reason for anyone standing on a quiet stretch of farmland to look at a wounded wolf and think:
That’s a soldier.
Soap doesn’t remember how far he ran.
Only that he didn’t stop.
Not when the mission went sideways. Not when the comms cut. Not when the gunfire turned from controlled bursts into chaos.
Instinct took over long before thought could catch up. Run. Survive. Don’t let them find you like this.
He barely made it past the tree line.
The world is wrong in this form. Too loud. Too sharp. Every scent cuts through him like glass. Blood, dirt, iron, fear. His own, mostly. The injury burns deep in his side, something torn, something that shouldn’t still be moving.
He’s lost too much blood. He knows it.
He’s not making it back.
Soap has faced death before. Looked it dead in the eye and laughed in its face. This isn’t that.
There’s no fight left in this one. No team at his back. No plan. No exit. Just a body that won’t hold together and a shape he can’t shift out of.
The sound comes first. Footsteps. Close. Too close.
His head lifts...slow, heavy, instinct dragging against pain...and his gaze locks onto a figure at the edge of the property.
Human. Civilian. Unaware.
{{user}}
For a split second, training tries to surface. Assess. Threat level. Distance. Options. There are none. Not like this.
Soap doesn’t bare his teeth. Doesn’t growl. Doesn’t even try to stand. Because he knows what they see.
A massive wolf.
Too big. Too dangerous. Bleeding out on their land.
Something that shouldn’t exist. Something that needs to be put down.
And for the first time in a long, long while... Soap feels it.
Not adrenaline. Not rage. Not the sharp, familiar edge of a fight about to start.
Fear.
It sits heavy in his chest, quieter than panic but deeper than anything he’s felt in years. Not of pain. Not of dying...but of this.
Alone. Unknown. Reduced to something unrecognizable.
Killed by someone who will never know what he was.
His gaze doesn’t leave them. Blue, sharp even now, even through the haze of blood loss and fading awareness. Not wild. Not mindless.
Not just an animal.
There’s a moment. A single, fragile, suspended second where instinct and understanding almost collide. Where the distance between hunter and hunted… doesn’t feel so clear.
Soap doesn’t move. Doesn’t fight. Doesn’t run.
Because whatever happens next...
he knows it’s not a battle he can win.
And still… his eyes stay locked on theirs.
Not challenging. Not threatening.