Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 002

The HUD updated before Soren had fully taken in his surroundings.

【Mission Objective: Eliminate the ringleader. Rescue all hostages.】

【Mission Achievements: Total Wipeout (eliminate all sixteen hostiles, ringleader included) / Guardian Angel (rescue all twenty-seven hostages) / Unbroken Squad (ensure all six Delta Team members survive).】

【Completing the primary objective clears the Career Instance and awards one Career Point. Each completed achievement awards one additional Career Point. Completing all three achievements awards one random Support Card.】

【Career Points may be used to upgrade Career Skills. Support Cards yield random items upon opening.】

Soren read through it once, then again. His first reaction, somewhat to his own surprise, was mild disappointment.

This was the opening instance? A barricaded robbery gone wrong, a hotel surrounded by uniformed officers, a tactical team already on scene? The math wasn't complicated. A group of cornered, panicked criminals with nowhere left to run, up against several dozen armed law enforcement personnel plus a freshly arrived SWAT unit. All Soren technically needed to do was stay low, stay alive, and let the rest of Delta Team do the heavy lifting. The primary objective would clear itself.

But the achievements were a different story.

Total Wipeout. Guardian Angel. Unbroken Squad. Three completions, three extra Career Points, plus a Support Card on top. Every point he banked now was a point he could put toward his own survival when the instance ended and he was back in that filthy room in the Fringe Territories with a van from Port Morrow arriving in the morning. He couldn't afford to play it safe. He couldn't afford to just survive.

If there's a window, he thought, take it.

The vehicle lurched to a stop.

"All units, dismount and establish positions!"

Delta One's order cut through the cabin, and the doors were already opening before the words finished. Soren stepped out into the dry, sun-heavy air of the outskirts and moved by instinct to the rear quarter of the vehicle, putting the armored chassis between himself and the hotel entrance. He brought the AR-15 carbine up, settled into a half-crouch, and let his eyes move.

The hotel was a three-story building that had probably been unremarkable even in its better years. Cracked render, sun-bleached signage, a lobby visible through glass doors that had already taken damage. The perimeter was thick with patrol units, officers crouched behind open doors with weapons leveled, the whole line of them locked in the particular stillness of people waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Soren's current position put him roughly twenty yards left of the main entrance, a solid angle with good cover and a clean sightline to the front doors. He noted it and filed it.

The evidence of what had happened here wasn't hard to read. Broken glass along the approach road. A car with its driver's door still hanging open, abandoned mid-flight. Scorch marks and spent brass on the pavement leading toward the entrance. Whatever these people had been running from, they'd run hard and run fast, and the hotel had been the end of the road. Cornered men with guns and nothing left to lose.

Nearby, a man in a well-pressed suit was working himself into a visible fury, jabbing his finger at no one in particular, his voice carrying fragments of outrage across the noise of the scene. Government liaison, Soren guessed, or someone with enough authority to be here and not enough operational sense to stay quiet about it. Beside him, a tall, lean Black man in plainclothes stood with the contained stillness of someone who had long since stopped being impressed by other people's panic. He appeared to be the senior officer on scene, currently in quiet conversation with the unit lieutenant. Soren caught pieces of it on the wind.

...already threatening to execute hostages... can't wait for negotiation... immediate breach...

He absorbed that and felt the Guardian Angel achievement quietly recede a few steps. If the hostages were already being threatened, every minute on the outside was a minute something irreversible could happen inside. The comfortable plan of laying low and waiting it out had just developed a significant flaw.

Sixty seconds later, the radio crackled.

"Bravo Team and Delta Team, breach through the main entrance. Alpha Team and Charlie Team, circle and hit from the rear. Execute."

Delta One raised his fist, held it for a beat, then pushed it forward.

They moved.

Soren fell into the stack behind Delta Three, keeping his spacing, weapon up, eyes tracking. His grip on the AR-15 carbine was slightly too tight and he knew it. He'd trained for this, in a general sense. The Police Academy had covered CQB theory. His father had been military, and growing up in that orbit had given him a physical baseline that most people his age didn't have, a comfort with weapons, an instinct for spatial awareness, a body that had been pushed hard enough often enough to know how to function under stress.

But theory and instinct were not the same thing as having done this before, and he hadn't. Not at this level. Not with a team he didn't know, against targets he couldn't predict, in a building he'd never seen the floor plan of.

He was nervous. He acknowledged it, set it aside, and kept moving.

Delta Five reached forward from behind him and tapped his shoulder. Soren glanced back. Delta Five made a short, downward gesture. You're riding too close. Give him room.

Soren adjusted his spacing. Right. Stack discipline. He knew this.

Up ahead, Delta Three had unslung the breaching ram from his back and moved past Delta Two, who had taken the point position with the ballistic shield raised and his sidearm ready along the right edge of it. On the opposite side of the entrance, Bravo Team's breacher had taken the mirror position at the secondary door, and was already counting down on his fingers.

Three.

Soren's jaw tightened.

Two.

Wait. He'd just registered something. The stack formation, the position he was in, the gap between himself and Delta Two at the front. He'd been thinking of himself as somewhere in the middle of the column, a relatively protected slot. He wasn't.

One.

I'm second-in-stack. I'm the assault position.

The doors came off their frames with two simultaneous concussive bangs, wood splitting, hinges giving way. Delta Three stepped back with the breaching ram and the gap opened, and Delta Two was already moving, shield raised, pistol tracking, calling it loud as he crossed the threshold.

"HPD! Nobody move!"

Gunfire answered him before the echo of his voice had finished.

Soren went in.

There was no decision involved. His body committed before his thoughts caught up, muscle memory and adrenaline carrying him through the doorway in Delta Two's wake, tucking into the coverage of the ballistic shield, bringing the AR-15 carbine up and acquiring the first target his eyes found.

Keen Observation didn't announce itself. It simply worked. The lobby resolved into a clear tactical picture in the space of a single breath: thirteen hostages huddled tight in the right-side corner, heads down, hands over their ears. Four armed hostiles. Two behind the front desk, using the counter as hard cover. One at the base of the stairwell. One more moving toward the stairwell door, not yet behind cover, caught in the open for another half-second at most.

Soren put a three-round burst into him before he made it.

The man dropped. Soren was already shifting his muzzle to the next position when the left side of the lobby lit up.

He didn't see the shooter. He felt the rounds hit, a sensation less like pain and more like a sudden, total failure of the body's systems, heat and impact and then nothing holding him up anymore. He went down hard, the AR-15 carbine clattering against the tile, and the last image that registered before the darkness closed in was a large decorative vase in the far left corner, and behind it, a figure he hadn't clocked, holding an AKM, already swinging the barrel toward Delta Two.

Then the light went out.

Then it came back.

"Move it, Soren. Don't just stand there!"

He was standing in the parking bay. The armored police vehicles sat idling in a row. Delta One was in the passenger seat of the nearest one, arm out the window, waving him over with the impatience of a man who had already said this once.

Soren looked down at his hands.

They were shaking. Not visibly, not in any way that someone else would notice from a distance, but he could feel it in the tendons, the faint, fine tremor of something that had just gone through something the body hadn't fully processed yet. The pain was there too, not in his chest where the rounds had hit him, but deep behind his eyes, a bright, clean ache that had no physical source.

He had died. He was certain of it. That had not been a simulation or a dream or a near-miss. He had been shot, he had gone down, and then the instance had reset and put him back at the start with the full memory of it intact.

Death, and then a restart. The instance resets. You go again.

He stood there for another two seconds, turning that over, and then something in his chest settled. Not calm, exactly. Something more useful than calm. If dying meant coming back, then the only thing death cost him was time. And time, in this instance, he had.

He ran for the vehicle and pulled himself in.

"Don't tell me you're still drunk from last night," Delta One said, voice flat with the particular displeasure of a commander who expected better. "If you're not clear-headed, you get out right now."

"I'm good." Soren took a slow breath and let it out. "Sorry. I zoned out for a second. It won't happen again."

Delta One held his gaze for a moment, reading him, then turned back to the front without another word.

Soren settled into his seat and let the noise of the staging area recede around him. The tremor in his hands had already stopped. Behind his eyes, the headache was fading. And in the back of his mind, the layout of the hotel lobby was still there, perfectly preserved: the hostages in the right corner, the four hostiles and their positions, the front desk, the stairwell, and the vase in the far left corner with a man behind it that nobody else had seen yet.

He knew the room now. He knew where the hidden shooter was. He knew exactly where the stack was going to be the moment those doors came down, and he knew what he needed to do differently.

His eyes came up, and behind the visor of his helmet, they were steady.

One more time.