Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 004

Delta Team didn't wait for Bravo Team to finish the second floor.

"Push forward," Delta One said, and that was the end of it.

Soren fell back into the stack and followed the team up the stairwell, the red emergency lighting painting everything the color of a warning. The Police CQB Tactics notification was still sitting at the edge of his awareness, the LV1 designation steady and unhurried, and he let the knowledge settle into him as he moved. Not rushing it. There was no point in rushing something that was already happening on its own terms.

The third-floor fire door came up on the left side of the landing. Delta One caught Delta Three's eye and tilted his chin toward it. Delta Three moved without a word, taking position at the handle side of the door, fingers wrapping around the grip, testing it with the faintest pressure. Unlocked. He gave a single nod and held his position, ready to pull.

Soren was already moving to the opposite side of the frame, AR-15 carbine up, back flat against the wall. He'd watched Bravo Team do this twice now. He had the shape of it. He just hadn't done it himself yet.

He glanced across at Delta Three, raised his muzzle slightly. Ready.

The door swung open.

Soren went through fast, muzzle driving left, eyes finding the near corner before his feet had fully cleared the threshold. Empty. He swept right without breaking stride, covering the far angle, and confirmed it clean before Delta Five came through behind him and pushed forward into the corridor, weapon up, filling the gap Soren had left in the forward sightline.

Soren matched his pace and fell in beside him. Behind them, Delta Three and Delta Six took the rear, the four of them spreading naturally to either side of the corridor and moving in the controlled, unhurried advance that looked like patience but was actually something closer to precision.

The first room door came up on the right.

Delta Five executed the U-step without breaking pace, a fluid arc that took him from the center of the corridor to the hinge side of the door in a single motion, back to the wall, weapon angled. Delta Six mirrored him on the opposite side, already set. Delta Three stepped up behind Delta Five and turned outward, covering the length of corridor still ahead, rifle trained on the far end.

Delta Five looked at Soren. Made a short gesture: chin toward the door, a slight tilt of the head. Your move.

Soren didn't immediately understand it. He looked at the door, looked back at Delta Five, and the half-second of blank hesitation was apparently enough. Delta Three read the gap, quietly abandoned his forward overwatch, and shifted to cover the corridor himself.

"Kick it," Delta Five said under his breath, voice stripped of everything except the instruction.

Soren understood then. His own failure to step up and take the breaching position had reshuffled the team's roles without anyone saying a word, and now Delta Three was covering a job that wasn't his while the job that was Soren's sat undone.

He stepped up and put his boot through the door.

The wood gave cleanly, swinging hard on its hinges, and Delta Five was already moving before it had fully opened, shouldering past Soren and going through without ceremony. Delta Six was a step behind him. The two of them worked the room fast and methodically: under the bed, the wardrobe, behind the curtains, the bathroom door pushed open and cleared. No contact. The room was empty.

Delta Three signaled from the doorway. Forward.

They moved to the second room.

This time the rotation had shifted: Delta Six on the door, Delta Five covering the corridor, Soren and Delta Three on entry. Soren took his position at the handle side of the frame, ran the U-step the way he'd just watched Delta Five do it, and signaled Delta Six with a nod.

The door came open.

Delta Three went through first, moving immediately to the far wall to take the room's depth, bypassing the bathroom on the assumption that Soren would take it. Soren pushed the bathroom door open with his left hand, leading with the muzzle.

A hand shot out from the darkness inside and grabbed the suppressor.

The grip was hard and immediate, fingers locking around the barrel before Soren had fully processed that someone was there. A second hand came from below, reaching for the Glock 17 in his drop-leg holster, and for a fraction of a second the situation had the shape of something that was about to go very wrong.

It didn't.

Soren's right hand clamped down on the holster grip before the reaching hand could close around it, locking the pistol in place. His left leg drove back against the door frame in the same instant, using the resistance to wrench his weight backward, and the man in the bathroom came with it, stumbling forward out of the dark and into the room.

He was enormous. Six foot three at least, broad across the chest and shoulders in a way that suggested the kind of physical confidence that came from rarely being challenged. He recovered his footing faster than most people would have, and the look on his face in the moment he got his balance back was pure, uncomplicated fury.

He lunged.

Soren's left hand had already released the rifle. The punch landed on the man's throat, not hard enough to crush anything, but hard enough to find the nerve cluster there, and the lunge became a stumble as the body registered the hit before the mind could override it. That half-second of involuntary weakness was all the opening Soren needed. He stepped into it, drove his elbow forward with his full weight behind it, and the impact caught the man center-mass and sent him back four full steps before his legs gave out and he sat down hard on the bathroom tile.

Soren had the Glock 17 out before the man finished falling. Two shots, center mass. A third to the head.

"Target down."

He holstered the pistol and brought the AR-15 carbine back up, the whole sequence from grab to final shot taking perhaps four seconds. The gunfire, unsilenced, rang through the entire third floor with the kind of clarity that made every other team member in the building instantly aware that something had happened.

Delta Three was still in the process of turning around when it ended.

"Clean work," he said, and there was something genuine in it, the brief, understated approval of someone who had seen the move and recognized what it required.

"It'll do," Soren said. He stepped out of the room and rejoined the corridor.

The remaining rooms on the third floor fell into a rhythm. The team moved from door to door with the kind of coordinated efficiency that came from working together long enough to anticipate each other's decisions, and Soren found himself settling into the flow of it more naturally than he had any right to expect. The Police CQB Tactics skill wasn't filling in the gaps with explicit instructions. It was doing something subtler: sharpening his ability to read what the team needed from him before anyone had to say it out loud, making the patterns visible in a way they hadn't been during the first run.

He still made errors. He caught himself moving through a doorway without clearing the near corner properly, corrected mid-step. He called a room clear half a beat too early and had to hold his position while Delta Six finished checking behind the curtains. Small things. The kind of things that a team this experienced absorbed without comment, filing them under the general category of a man still finding his footing.

The seventh room changed the tempo.

They were mid-breach on the sixth room, Delta Five and Delta Six already inside, when a hand appeared in the gap of the seventh door down the corridor. The M1911 it was holding discharged four times in rapid succession, blind fire angled in their general direction, the shooter not looking, just sending rounds down the hall and hoping.

"Contact!"

Soren dropped into a crouch and pulled back to the door frame of the sixth room, using the edge of the wall for cover, and put three controlled shots into the gap around the seventh door. Not trying to hit anyone. Keeping heads down, buying space. Delta Three came out of the room behind him, stacked up along the wall, and pushed forward using Soren's suppressing fire as cover, moving fast and low until he reached the door frame of the room between them and the shooter and tucked in tight.

Soren held his fire the moment Delta Three was set.

Delta Five emerged from the sixth room and moved past him without a word, reading the situation in a single glance and flowing into the advance. Delta Six followed, pausing long enough to squeeze Soren's shoulder once, a brief, wordless acknowledgment, and then he was moving too.

Soren stood, checked the uncleaned rooms he was passing, and gave each door frame a wide berth, staying well off the hinge line. He took position behind Delta Six, tapped his shoulder to signal he was there, and turned to cover the corridor at their backs.

Delta Six pulled the pin on a concussion grenade.

Delta Five stepped forward and drove his boot into the half-open door, then pulled back immediately. The door swung wide. Gunfire erupted from inside. And then the concussion grenade rolled through the gap, and the corridor absorbed the detonation in a single compressed thud that rattled the ceiling fixtures.

Delta Three went through the door.

Three shots. A pause. "Target down."

"Continue clearing the floor."

The rest of the third floor took another four minutes. Room by room, door by door, the team moved through it with the patient, unhurried thoroughness of people who understood that speed without accuracy was just a faster way to make mistakes. By the time they reached the last room and called it clear, Soren had run the entry sequence six times in varying positions and made a different error each time, and learned something from each one.

They reassembled at the stairwell. The radio reported Bravo Team finishing the second floor and already moving up toward the fourth. Delta One looked at his team for a moment, said nothing, and raised his hand.

"Move."

They went up.

And somewhere between the third-floor landing and the fourth, as the red emergency lighting shifted and the stairwell tightened around them and Soren's grip on the AR-15 carbine settled into something that felt, for the first time, genuinely natural, the notification arrived.

【Congratulations. Through sustained effort, your skill Police CQB Tactics has been upgraded. Current level: LV2.】

He didn't stop moving. He didn't need to. The upgrade settled into him the way the first one had, quiet and thorough, and he kept climbing.