Chapter Text
The low thrum of rotors buzzed through the floor and into Jack’s bones.
No one spoke. Not over comms. Not in the cabin.
The only sounds were the low rumble of the rotors and the occasional clink of gear shifting as someone adjusted their grip.
Jack sat near the front, hunched forward, elbows on knees, visor down. His jaw was locked so tight it ached.
No one met each other’s eyes. The air in the cabin felt tight, like the whole place was holding its breath. Fingers brushed over safeties, straps, triggers. The quiet rituals before a fight.
They’d done it all before under Reyes’ lead, following him into burning streets and collapsing buildings, through fire hot enough to peel paint from their rifles. He had always brought them back.
Now his beacon was dead silent. And that silence pressed against Jack’s ribs like a weight he couldn’t shift.
Jack’s mind spun uselessly behind his visor. He should’ve been running breach angles, fallback routes, contingencies.
Instead, all he saw was Gabriel.
Dead? Unconscious? He didn’t know. He only knew Reyes was in danger — from what, he couldn’t pin down.
The reports came back to him. Cults surfacing in the outer zones. Anti-Omnic. Anti-Overwatch. Anti-everything. Fanatics with knives and “old gods” burning in their eyes.
He’d written it all off as fringe nonsense. Just scattered violence.
Too late, he realized. And Gabe was paying the price.
Jack knew it wasn’t his fault — he told himself that, over and over — but the thought still pressed in, relentless:
If I’d gone with him… maybe it would’ve turned out differently.
A soft click broke the silence as the pilot’s voice crackled through the cabin
“Approaching target coordinates, sir. Compound in sight.”
Jack lifted his head. “Talk to me.”
A beat. Then, “Perimeter’s quiet. Outbuildings look abandoned. Collapsed walls, no heat signatures. Main structure’s intact. Center of the compound. Looks like a ruined chapel. There’s light inside, candles or torches, can’t really tell from this height.”
His grip tightens on his rifle.
Ritual lighting.
His brain supplied, unhelpfully.
“Any sign of Reyes?”
“Negative, sir. Not from this altitude.”
Jack grunted, already rising to his feet. “Touch us down. West side. I want boots on the ground in two.”
***
The helicopter touched down hard, kicking up a swirl of dirt and yellowed leaves.
Jack was already moving before the skids had settled, boots hitting the ground like a shot.
The rest followed, fanning out behind him, weapons up, eyes cutting through the trees as they pushed toward the compound.
The forest muffled everything. No wind. No birds. Even the rotors faded too quickly, like the world wanted them gone.
The first buildings rose out of the dark like broken teeth. Hollow shells of homes, collapsed walls, sagging frames where work sites once stood. No lights. No movement. Nothing but ruins staring back at them.
“This place is creeping me the hell out,” one soldier muttered.
Jack didn’t answer. He agreed too much to say it.
Past the wreckage, dead center, the chapel loomed. Black stone ribs jutted skyward, its heart glowing with an unsteady orange light.
He’d seen firelight like that once before. Through smoke and debris, Reyes' silhouette framed in it, barking orders in a voice that cut through chaos like a blade.
Now there was only silence.
“Two on me,” Jack murmured into comms, eyes fixed on the glow ahead.
He slowed just long enough to sweep a look across the squad. “The rest of you, hold this position. Lock down the chapel exterior. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Is everything clear?”
A chorus of “Affirmative”s crackled back. Boots shifted into place, rifles training outward across the ruins.
Jack turned back toward the looming doors. “Move.”
Two soldiers fell into step behind him, while the others melted into the shadows around the chapel, keeping their sights trained on every approach.
One soldier pressed flat against the wall, fingers brushing the door’s edge. He gave Jack a quick nod.
The wood groaned as it swung inward. No resistance. No lock.
Pulse rifles came up as they slid inside, barrels cutting through the gloom. Angles cleared. Corners checked.
Then the smell hit. Smoke and cold stone layered over rot — and beneath it, the sharp tang of blood, bitter on the tongue.
Dozens of candles burned low along the walls and altar, their flames guttering in stale air. Wax bled down in thick rivers, hardened into crusted pools across the stone.
Rows of warped chairs slumped in the glow, cushions split and crawling with mildew, their legs sunk into a rotting red carpet. Stained glass bled fractured color through the dark.
And on those walls — scrawled in jagged strokes — symbols. Crude and desperate, like whoever created them were in a hurry.
At first they looked painted, but the copper sting in his nose told him a different story.
Blood.
Despite it all, the squad advanced in slow, deliberate steps, boots sinking into the red carpet. Every stride felt like walking into a snare.
Jack’s eyes cut across the rows, waiting for the flicker of movement, the glint of steel, the rush of an ambush. And… nothing. Just silence and the wet reek of rot.
They cleared the main floor. No movement. No bodies. No nothing. Just your ordinary abandoned chapel.
Too clean. Too easy.
Jack’s visor swept across the empty rows again. He didn’t like it. Cultists didn’t just light candles and walk away. He knew something was missing, and it’s making his neck itch.
At the rear, behind the altar, one soldier froze, pulse rifle angled down.
“Sir. I found something.”
Jack moved closer. A gap in the stone yawned wide, half-hidden behind a rotted drape. A stairwell dropped into blackness, coughing up air that was colder, wetter, heavier with rot.
His throat felt tight. Every instinct screamed that once they went down, there was no coming back the same.
“Basement,” he said finally, voice low over comms. Of course there’s a basement.
He flexed his fingers once against the rifle grip, then nodded. “Stack up.”
They moved in, muzzles lowering into the dark. The stairwell swallowed their light quick, each step creaking under boots. The walls closed in, stone damp and sweating. And then he saw it — gouged marks trailing along the stone. Too deep for a blade. Too wild for a tool. Bare hands, maybe, not that it mattered.
The deeper they went, the colder it got. Not just air this time, it was something else. Thick enough to slow thought, weighing on his chest. Jack forced his mind elsewhere. Gabe’s laugh after a fight. The rasp in his voice when he told him he was being reckless. Anything but what waited below.
At the bottom, the stairs spilled into a narrow corridor. Candles guttered in sconces, their wax running like veins down the walls. Ahead, a heavy door sagged on one hinge, its surface chewed up with the same jagged symbols as above.
Jack pressed his palm flat against it, pushed. The door groaned open.
The chamber beyond was circular. A ritual circle had been carved into the stone, painted in something dark, still glistening. The air was copper and burned wax, vibrating with a low hum that Jack felt in his teeth.
Candles ringed the circle, their light spilling over a cracked altar at its center.
Something lay across it.
No — it was someone.
Gabriel.
His gear was half gone, chest bare where deep cuts had been carved into his flesh. The wounds glowed faintly, as if lit from beneath.
The light shifted with each shallow breath, bleeding through skin stretched too tight over muscle. His face was pale, slack, a ghost of the man Jack knew.
The air around the altar felt heavier here, pressing in like a weight on Jack’s ribs. He caught the smell again — copper and rot, undercut by the faint tang of burned wax — and with it came a crawling, electric wrongness that made the fine hairs on his neck stand up.
Jack’s stomach twisted hard, bile scorching the back of his throat. He’d promised Gabe he’d always have his back, always. But staring at what the cult had set in motion, he couldn’t see the battlefield anymore, couldn’t imagine a fight that ended with Gabe walking out on the same man.
This wasn’t a wound to patch up. This was a rewriting.
It felt staged. Displayed. A warning.
For a heartbeat, he almost turned away, to bury the image somewhere deep where it couldn’t follow. But Gabe was still breathing. Shallow, strained, but there. As long as he was, Jack wasn’t leaving.
A flicker broke the candlelight. Movement along the chamber’s edge, shapes gliding low and fast, robes whispering against stone. They weren’t charging. They were splitting.
“Scatter!” one of the cultists shrieked, the word sharp and guttural in the echo.
“Alpha team, move! Lock this place down — no one gets past us!” Jack’s voice carried the weight of a promise.
Four of them, fast. The squad surged to intercept, but the cultists weren’t fleeing blind — they were hunting for the walls. Jack’s rifle snapped up as one smeared a blood-slick palm over the carved symbols.
The gouged lines flared red, flooding the chamber with lightning trapped in stone. Black smoke poured out in choking waves. The low hum in Jack’s teeth deepened into a skull rattle. HUDs glitched, enemy markers flickering into friendlies in a strobe that burned afterimages (Get the joke? lol) across his vision. One soldier cursed, dropping to a knee.
They weren’t decorations. They were traps.
The floor vibrated, heat crawling under his armor as if the whole chamber was flexing. The cultists slipped into a side passage barely wide enough for a man, swallowed by shadow in two breaths. Chasing meant running blind — and leaving Gabe vulnerable to whatever this was becoming.
On the altar, the glow in Gabriel’s wounds flared from ember to molten red. His flesh twisting and turning in all the wrong ways. Muscles jumped under his skin, pulled by something inside. Black smoke curled from his mouth in slow, deliberate ribbons, each breath catching like it hurt.
For one raw second Jack wanted nothing more than to get to Gabe. Drag him off that stone, shield him from whatever was trying to remake him. But his men were dying on the floor in front of him. If he left them, the chamber would eat them alive. Jack didn’t leave his people behind. Not here. Not now.
“On your feet! We’re walking out of here together!” His voice cut through the buzzing, steady despite the chaos.
But no one moved. They crouched or sprawled where the glyphs had dropped them, hands clamped to their helmets as if holding their skulls together. The glow on the walls was fading, but the damage lingered. Men locked in a haze, paralyzed by the ringing in their heads.
Jack pushed through, closer he got to the glyph the worse the burn felt in his skull. He hooked an arm under the nearest man. The soldier’s weight sagged against him, body shaking like a live wire. Blood leaked from his nose, black against the HUD’s red glare, and his jaw was clenched so tight Jack thought teeth snapped.
He hauled him upright. The man’s scream tore through comms, half choked, visceral. Like the act of standing ripped him out of a vice.
Another lay sprawled flat, boots drumming against the stone in frantic bursts. Not panic — seizures. His helmet scraped the floor as if something inside his skull was trying to twist it clean off. Jack grabbed him by the rig and yanked, and for a breath the soldier’s eyes rolled white before they locked forward, blinking, still alive.
Every lift was like dragging them out of quicksand, the glyph’s hum pulling at them, pinning them harder the longer they stayed down. Jack’s own vision was swimming, the pressure behind his eyes building toward a pop, but he forced another man to his feet.
The smoke crawled higher, clinging to their armor like oil. His visor flared toxic warnings that blinked in and out, static laced. In the haze, candlelight bent into shapes that looked like hands reaching. Somewhere inside it, stone cracked like bone.
Jack isn’t leaving anyone in that.
Near the threshold, the static in his ear faltered. Jack slammed a hand to his comm. “Command! Morrison — priority one, I need a TEM unit for Reyes! Grid C-Seven, stairwell access!”
The reply came ragged, broken but there, “Copy. TEM inbound.”
“Commander…” a voice cracked through the haze, thin and shaken.
“Easy. Breathe. You’re fine. Stay with me.” Jack’s voice cut through the buzz, low and steady, a handhold in the storm.
Another soldier coughed hard, staggered upright. Blood streaked his chin, visor still glitching around the edges. “Sir — my HUD’s still — oh my god, my head, it’s still flashing.”
“I know,” Jack cut in, voice low but firm. “Cult shit. It’s over now. Eyes up, weapons up. Stay with me.”
He scanned the chamber — the glyphs had gone dark, but the smoke was crawling thicker, clinging to their boots, sliding up their legs. Each breath burned. No time.
Jack ripped the mask from his harness and pressed it over Gabriel’s face, tightening the straps with rough precision. The seal wasn’t perfect, not on a half-conscious man, but it was enough to push air through the filters.
One of the soldiers jolted at the sight. “Commander, what about you—”
“I’ll manage,” Jack cut in, tearing a strip of cloth from his sleeve and knotting it over his mouth and nose.
It wouldn’t stop much, just thicken the air before it hit his lungs, but Reyes came first.
Always.
He hooked an arm under Gabe and hauled him up, the dead weight pulling hard against his shoulder. “Masks on. Stack tight on me. You two hold my six, no strays.”
The squad moved fast, filters clicking into place, weapons up. Jack staggered toward the stairwell with Gabe in tow, vision swimming against the stinging haze. The cloth was already damp, acrid smoke pushing past it, but the team tightened around him, their fields of fire crossing to cover his blind spots.
They weren’t retreating. They were exfiltrating with their own still breathing.
***
The climb out felt like a blur. Smoke, stone, the weight of Reyes sagging against him, every step threatening to buckle. But they made it.
Cold night air hit like a knife, burning lungs and clearing heads. The squad broke into the open, masks hissing, rifles still sweeping the treeline as the compound loomed behind them like a bad dream.
The exfil bird was already descending, rotors chewing at the dark.
Floodlights snapped on, carving the forest’s clearing in harsh white beams. In Jack’s peripheral vision, shadows jerked and stretched, movement, for half a breath. Then the squad’s sights cut them down.
Just paranoia.
Jack didn’t slow. Reyes’ dead weight dragged at his shoulder, each step felt like a grind, but he carried him straight toward the landing zone. The med team hit the ground running, cases slamming open, gloved hands reaching.
“Patient’s hypoxic—get that mask sealed!” one barked, already sliding a stretcher between them. Another clipped vitals onto Gabe’s chest, their readouts stuttering red.
Jack lowered him down with a care that felt out of place in the chaos, hands hovering a second too long before the medics took over.
His chest heaved under the ragged cloth tied across his face, smoke stained and useless now.
“Commander.” A soldier’s voice crackled at his side—still tight, still wired. His rifle tracked the treeline. “Perimeter’s clear, but I don’t like how quiet it is.”
“Keep it that way,” Jack said, voice flat. He lifted his own weapon again, posting on the edge of the circle the squad had formed. The weight of command slid back into place as easy as a trigger pull.
He keyed the squad net. “Anyone see movement out of the structure? Any runners?”
Static, then a chorus of shaken negatives:
“Nothing, sir. No visuals.”
“No sounds either. Sir, did you see someone inside?”
Jack’s jaw tightened. Four cultists had slipped through cracks in the dark and not one of his people had eyes on them. They’d vanished like smoke, like the chapel had swallowed them whole.
“Eyes sharp,” he muttered, scanning the tree line again. “If they’re out here, we’re not giving them another shot.”
The med team worked fast, Reyes vanishing under gauze and tubing, his body strapped down as if even unconscious he might break apart.
For Jack, the sight was worse than the altar. There, Gabe had been fighting, there was movement, resistance. Here, strapped down and silent, Reyes looked like a body they were just late to collect.
The second helicopter dropped lower, rotor wash hammering through the ruins. Jack keyed his net, voice flat:
“Alpha, load up. We hold perimeter until the bird lifts.”
One by one, the squad filed back, weapons still raised until boots hit the ramp. Jack was the last aboard, eyes dragging over the tree line, waiting for movement that never came.
Most of the squad sat blank faced, rifles slack in their laps, not knowing what had happened inside. But the two who had gone with Jack wouldn’t meet his eyes. Their HUDs still fuzzed at the edges, their hands trembled on their weapons. They’d seen it too.
Jack sat forward, elbows on knees, jaw locked. For the first time since they’d breached, Gabriel wasn’t there. Just smoke in his lungs, and the echo of chanting that felt like it had followed him out into the night.
***