The breaths in the strategic room were heavy, saturated with suffocating anticipation. Giant display screens covered the walls, broadcasting live readings, their cold blue glow reflected across tense faces.
At the center of the room stood the general like a granite statue. He was a tall man in a dark green military uniform adorned with medals from old battles. The severe lines of his face and the faded scar running near his jaw suggested that he had fought savage wars and was no longer shaken by anything. He held his hands rigidly behind his back and watched the flow of data with absolute coldness.
To his left sat a woman in her thirties, an intelligence officer. Her hair was pulled carefully back, and the numbers on the screens glinted across her prescription lenses as she monitored the vital signs with tightly contained anxiety.
Behind the control panel stood a young communications officer. His uniform was neat and carefully pressed, but his trembling hands and the beads of sweat shining on his brow betrayed his lack of experience in situations like this.
In a corner of the room, far removed from military discipline, a man in his mid-thirties leaned with complete ease against the edge of a metal desk. He wore a dark silk shirt and elegant black trousers, his leather shoe planted steadily on the floor. His features were calm, his light beard neatly trimmed, but his blue eyes gleamed with an icy coldness devoid of all sympathy.
The young man broke the heavy silence with a biting, mocking smile:
"All those billions you spent on elite teams... and it turns out salvation has been buried in the archive vaults this whole time. Isn't that right, General?"
The general did not turn. He did not even blink. He remained silent, ignoring the young man completely.
On the central screen appeared the live feed from the lens of a military helicopter. Outside, gusts of wind battered its metal frame as it hovered above the summit of the towering skyscraper.
At the rear of the helicopter stood a man whose clothing was utterly unlike that of any registered special-forces unit. The pilot's voice came loudly over the radio, struggling to be heard above the roar of the blades:
"The wind is fierce! I'm dropping a few more meters toward the roof so it'll be easier to throw down the ladder. Prepare yourselves!"
But Shahin did not wait. He stepped toward the edge of the open door, placed one hand against its side, and looked down. Before the helicopter commander could understand what was happening, he threw his body into the dark void—without a rope, without hesitation.
The intelligence officer gasped in shock.
"Is he committing suicide?!"
The young communications officer murmured in disbelief:
"He jumped... he's going to be crushed!"
THOOM!
It was not a random fall. Shahin struck the concrete roof of the tower, bending his knees with calculated flexibility to absorb the impact, one hand dropping to the ground beneath his armored foot.
The concrete cracked beneath his heels, and fragments flew to either side.
He slowly straightened beneath the lights of the retreating helicopter as the violent wind tore at locks of his unruly silver hair.
He wore a pitch-black tactical suit that swallowed the light, clinging to his athletic body like a living shield. On his left shoulder, the symbol "D" pulsed with a faint red glow, like an angry ember, before gradually dimming for reasons unknown.
His face was completely covered by a black metal mask, and his hands were sheathed in gloves that gleamed with sharp metal blades running along the fingers.
He did not look like a soldier, but like a lethal shadow torn from the darkest military nightmare imaginable.
The general watched the figure on the screen, his mind boiling. Shahin had risen without a bone broken, then headed toward the skyscraper's metal door to begin his mission.
The general asked himself in terrifying silence:
"If there is one of him... are there ninety-nine more like him in this country, and we don't know it?"
At last, the man spoke. His voice was cold and mechanical, cleaving the silence of the room:
"Shahin Shuroka. Field and configuration: advanced."
He paused for a moment, then continued:
"Mission: exterminate thirty terrorist operatives and rescue ten hostages, some of them foreign nationals.
"Risk to the hostages: extremely high.
"Risk to Shahin: approximately zero."
A brief silence fell before he said:
"The mission of the letter 'A' will begin."
Then he repeated in a steady mechanical tone:
"Rescue.
"Evacuation.
"Extermination."
The door opened.
He did not descend cautiously like any ordinary soldier. He placed one hand on the gleaming metal railing, then jumped straight into the void between the stairways.
He continued free-falling through four entire floors, then extended one foot and struck a concrete corner with force, using the rebound to land on the opposite side of the staircase without touching a single step.
He entered the luxurious corridor and broke into a run. He covered its length in seconds, opening and closing the steel wall cabinets in fractions of a second, sweeping the space with his eyes without slowing.
At the same time, his right hand rose and fell in an unnatural rhythm.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft!
Silent, clean bullets burst from his pistol. Each one flew toward a surveillance camera in a corner of the ceiling or wall, shattering it before it could even capture his outline.
The intelligence officer spoke through his earpiece, her voice a mixture of tension and exasperation:
"S-Shahin, are you insane? Do you think they're hiding the hostages in wall cabinets?!"
A voice came from directly behind her. She turned and found the blue-eyed young man standing behind her, wearing a dangerous smile as he reached out to adjust her glasses.
"Shhh... be quiet. And don't you dare distract him, or you'll lose your job. Understand?"
She narrowed her eyes and clenched her jaw.
"You think I'm afraid of—"
But what cut off the argument was not the general's voice behind them. It was the screen, which showed Shahin coming to a stop.
A cylindrical metal object rolled across the carpet and came to rest beneath his foot.
A hand grenade.
BOOOOM!
A massive explosion shook the floor. Flames leapt outward, and thick smoke swallowed the entire corridor.
In the command room, the broadcast screen dissolved into gray static.
The communications officer spoke in a trembling voice:
"We've lost the signal! There's interference in the transmission!"
The officer's and the blue-eyed young man's eyes widened, and they froze before the screen. The general leaned forward slightly, while the young man furrowed his brows in silent anticipation, his hand pressing against the desk until his knuckles turned white.
In the burning corridor, amid clouds of dense smoke and the smell of scorched carpet and gunpowder, the voice of one of the gunmen was heard:
"Has the state lost its mind?"
A man with a medium-length beard and rough, dark-brown skin advanced. He wore a dirty combat vest, his rifle hanging lazily at his side. His steps were swaggering, full of a victor's arrogance. He was not smiling; his face looked drowsy, his jaw slack.
The gunman kicked a piece of debris aside, then spoke over the radio in a mocking tone:
"I turned him into a flour sifter. I repeat... it's sheer stupidity that they sent one man. Do they think we're playing with them?"
He stopped abruptly, the words dying in his throat.
He heard a metallic sound and began firing toward its source inside the smoke. The muzzle of his rifle flared orange with every shot.
But there was nothing there.
When he turned to look over his shoulder, the cold smoke split apart.
Shahin appeared, tall and silent. He had just emerged from one of the wall cabinets, where he had hidden a fraction of a second before the explosion.
All that appeared before the gunman was a pair of red eyes staring at him from an incredibly close range.
In the command room, the feed suddenly returned. What they saw made the intelligence officer hold her breath in terror and roll her chair backward, while the blue-eyed young man smiled so broadly that his lips parted, revealing his row of front teeth.
There had been no fight.
The terrorist was already dead.
Shahin's left hand gripped the man by the collar, his body hanging like a discarded rag, his neck broken at a hideous angle, while his clouded eyes, turned an empty white, faced the ceiling.
Shahin calmly loosened his grip, and the body fell to the floor with a heavy thud.
He looked at the corpse and said in a voice carrying not the slightest trace of effort or mercy:
"Their level is low, as I expected."
Then his mechanical voice came again:
"First operative eliminated."
In the strategic room, a graveyard silence descended. The general swallowed with difficulty, his icy mask cracking slightly as he stared at the corpse lying on the screen.
The blue-eyed young man let out a quiet sigh of admiration and murmured to himself, his eyes shining with unmistakable fascination:
"I can't believe what I'm seeing... a perfect monster. We're really going to enjoy ourselves today."
Shahin bent over the terrorist whose neck he had just broken. With a single touch, he searched the man's tactical belt, then pulled out a high-explosive assault grenade.
At the end of the corridor leading to the stairs stood a partially shattered wooden hospitality table. He picked up a clear glass from it, then drew a vivid red cloth from his pouch—the kind snipers usually use to indicate wind direction.
In the command room, the blue-eyed young man narrowed his eyes as he watched the screen. Shahin was holding the grenade, and with his left thumb he pulled the safety ring all the way out.
The communications officer stopped breathing.
"He pulled the safety ring! It's going to explode in his hand!"
But Shahin did not release the lever. Slowly and with surgical precision, he inserted the grenade into the glass, wedging the safety lever between the inner wall of the glass and the grenade's body. The glass became the only thing preventing the grenade from exploding.
He placed it carefully in the center of the dark corridor, then threw the red cloth over it, covering it completely. It became the only point of color standing out against the darkness of the gray carpet.
After that, he made one silent leap, climbed the stairs, and pressed himself into the darkness of a completely blind upper corner, raising his silenced pistol.
Only seconds passed before the sound of heavy military boots and obscene curses reached his ears. Three gunmen came running nervously, one of them shouting into his radio in blind fury:
"Where did he go? Where did he disappear? Search every corner! I'll drink his blood!"
The three stopped abruptly at the beginning of the corridor. The dim emergency lights reflected off the red cloth lying in the middle.
"What is that?" one of them asked suspiciously, raising the barrel of his rifle.
"A mine? A trap?" the second said tensely.
He advanced in slow, cautious steps and used the muzzle of his rifle to lift the cloth with extreme care, thinking he was disarming a mine.
The moment the cloth shifted, revealing the clear glass and the grenade inside with its safety ring removed...
Pfft!
A muffled shot came from the dark upper corner. One bullet pierced the glass and shattered it into a hundred fragments.
Without the glass wall, the grenade's lever sprang free.
Click...
The sound of the mechanical spring releasing was louder than their screams. The three men's eyes widened in pure terror as they looked at the death rolling at their feet.
"Run—"
BOOOOM!
A thunderous explosion tore through the corridor and swallowed the three bodies in a ball of fire and shrapnel. Their corpses then slammed into the walls like broken dolls.
In the command room, the general and the young man exchanged glances. It seemed Shahin was not fighting them so much as practicing his tactical sadism upon them.
Shahin continued forward through the smoke. For the first time since the operation began, the intelligence officer's voice came through his internal earpiece, quick and precise:
"Shahin, thermal surveillance has located the hostages. They're not in the main halls; they've been crammed into the rear storage room. Ten hostages, guarded by only two operatives armed with automatic rifles. The door is thick metal."
He did not answer her. He increased his speed until he became a black specter.
He reached the storage-room door. He did not place breaching charges, nor did he step back to kick it. He approached with irrational calm, raised his carbon pistol, and pressed its precision muzzle against the extremely narrow electronic keyhole at the heart of the metal door.
In a fraction of a second, the engine in his helmet analyzed the angles of deflection, the thickness of the inner metal, and the targets' heat signatures inside.
Pfft! Pfft!
Two bullets flew along an impossible geometric path through the tiny opening. The command-room personnel heard the heavy impact of two bodies hitting the floor inside.
He had executed them with two ricocheting shots through the lock hole.
Shahin pushed the door calmly, and it swung wide, revealing the two guards' bodies sprawled over the storage crates. Each had a perfect hole between the eyes.
In the dark corner of the storeroom was a tableau of human misery. The hostages were huddled in fear—not as an indistinguishable mass, but as a group of civilian tourists torn from a trip and herded into the darkness. Among them was a businessman in his late fifties, wearing an elegant travel coat and a loosened tie, whispering broken prayers as he trembled; and a wounded young man in a torn sports shirt, biting his lip to keep from groaning.
Nearby sat two elderly foreign tourists, one clutching his passports to his chest while the woman repeated short phrases in trembling English. At the other end sat a young Asian visitor in simple travel clothes beside his companion; the two exchanged broken phrases in a foreign accent. Among the hostages were three niqab-wearing civilian women tourists, taken there with the other visitors as hostages; one was a pale mother clutching her small child tightly to her chest, while the second tried to calm the trembling of her hands, and the third sat in the middle of the row, quieter than she should have been. Their faces were not alike; their skin tones, features, clothing, and languages differed, but fear united their eyes. Their niqabs were not the reason for suspicion, and nothing in any of their appearances distinguished them from the other hostages; only the hostile intent detected by Shahin's system would later reveal the disguised infiltrator.
Near the door sat a thin man in a wool cap and gray travel coat, staring at the floor and trembling whenever he heard a sound outside.
Shahin stepped inside. The heavy clang of his metal footsteps made the hostages shrink back even farther. His carbon armor absorbed the light, and his grim mask made him look like a reaper of souls who had come to finish the job.
He passed the businessman, who raised his hands in supplication, and went directly toward the mother and her child.
The woman flinched when he bent over her, her bloodshot eyes widening with terror. But Shahin, with a precise, delicate movement utterly at odds with the brutality of his armor, drew a small blade and cut through her plastic restraints, then freed her child first.
The mother stared at him in astonishment as she stroked her child's arms. Shahin then moved with mechanical speed, cutting through the restraints of the remaining hostages one by one.
The hostages began to catch their breath, their terrified whispers crossing one another:
"Who... who are you?"
"Did the army come? Are they going to kill us outside?"
"Please, my son is injured..." the woman said in a faint Arabic accent, pulling the child close.
He did not answer them. He stood upright and scanned their faces and bodies with his eyes while the analytical engine in his suit worked in silence.
One... three... seven... ten... eleven.
Shahin stopped completely.
Heavy silence filled the storeroom, and in the command room everyone noticed his sudden halt.
In a low voice, yet one clearly audible in the quiet space, Shahin said as he looked at the emptiness before him:
"You said there were ten hostages... so why are there eleven people here?"
The question fell like a block of ice upon the hostages' hearts.
The businessman's breath caught. The mother looked right and left in terror at those standing beside her. The hostages began instinctively to draw away from one another, each person starting to suspect the next.
The tension reached the point of explosion.
One of them was not a hostage.
But before anyone could speak, or the hidden wolf could move, Shahin raised a hand to his helmet as though listening to a reply from command, then said in a calm, resigned voice, as if he had just been convinced:
"Ah... then there's an error in the list? Understood."
In the command room, the intelligence officer drew her brows together sharply and turned toward the general:
"Sir, I didn't speak to him! And we made no mistake. There are definitely ten!"
The blue-eyed young man smiled coldly and whispered to himself:
"What a clever bastard... he just lied to relax the hidden wolf among the sheep before it pounced."
Shahin turned back to the hostages and said coldly:
"Move behind me. In a straight line."
The small procession began moving through the dark corridors. Shahin led from the front, followed by the mother and child clinging to his shadow, then the rest of the hostages. The businessman staggered, while the wounded young man braced his shoulder against the wall whenever the pain intensified, and the two elderly tourists held one another's hands. Their breaths came fast, and every footstep sounded like a drumbeat inside their heads.
Suddenly, Shahin stopped completely.
At that same moment, a precise metal plate shifted on his left shoulder. A crimson light emerged, and a mechanical lens appeared, moving with terrifying purpose. Its tiny black pupil contracted, then widened with insane speed, scanning the hostages one by one, reading heartbeats, body temperature, and muscle tension.
For the first time, the system's absolute silence was broken.
"Merci" spoke—a cold, soft female mechanical voice stripped of the slightest trace of compassion, echoing through the corridor:
"Warning: hostile intent detected."
The black pupil stopped rotating and fixed itself with deadly stillness on the niqab-wearing woman walking in the middle of the line, three meters from Shahin.
Shahin did not turn his body. He looked slowly over his shoulder.
Shing!
Long, sharp black carbon blades, thin as scalpels, slid from the glove on his left hand.
In the blink of an eye, he vanished from his position. He crossed the three meters like a demonic shadow beyond the eye's grasp, passed the mother and child, and clamped his clawed hand around the niqab-wearing woman's throat.
He lifted her from the ground with one hand and crushing force.
The corridor erupted in screams.
"What are you doing?!" the businessman shouted, stumbling backward and falling on his back.
The woman hanging in the air did not cry or plead. Her eyes merely flashed with pure, black hatred. In a desperate motion, she tried to slip a hand beneath her garment to reach something, then screamed in his face in a harsh voice filled with spite:
"You're a devil! I'll send you to hell! None of you will leave here alive—"
Shahin cut her off in a glacial, emotionless voice as his claws slowly sank into the flesh of her throat:
"We'll see who goes to hell today."
With one merciless grip, he crushed her throat.
The blood did not spray in an exaggerated torrent; it seeped out under pressure, muffled beneath the black niqab, staining her face and chest from within with a heavy dark blotch.
He let her go, and she fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
The hostages' terror reached its peak. The third woman and the mother screamed in pure horror and retreated until they were pressed against the wall, utterly collapsing. The mother covered her child's eyes, sobbing in exhausted silence, while the other woman stared at Shahin, unable to understand what had happened. For a moment, some of the hostages thought this black entity killed indiscriminately, driven by blind suspicion or madness.
In the command room, the general sprang from his chair and struck the table with his fist.
"What the hell is he doing?! He executed a hostage!"
But Shahin did not turn toward his shouting. He bent calmly and, with his sharp claws, split the black garment down the middle, then pulled it downward.
The screaming stopped abruptly, as though someone had drawn the air from the corridor.
Beneath the garment there were no civilian clothes, but a massive suicide vest packed with highly destructive C4 explosives, along with a wireless detonator only a few centimeters from the fingers of her dead hand.
She had been ready to blow up everyone in the corridor the moment she realized they were nearing the exit.
In the command room, the general sank slowly into his chair, staring at the screen in shock and swallowing with difficulty. The intelligence officer rested her head in her hands, trying to comprehend the catastrophe that had just been averted.
The young man standing in the corner stopped mocking entirely. His blue eyes widened with genuine awe and terrifying appreciation.
In the corridor, the hostages looked at the suicide vest, then at Shahin.
The businessman who had objected only seconds earlier dropped to his knees, sobbing, realizing that this black devil had just saved them from being vaporized.
The mother raised her head and looked at the vest, then hugged her child even more tightly. Her eyes overflowed with tears of apology and gratitude, but she could not shape either into words.
Shahin stood, and his claws withdrew into his glove with smooth mechanical silence. He explained nothing to them, offered no word of comfort, and did not justify his cruelty.
He turned toward them and said in his cold mechanical voice, as though nothing had happened:
"Keep moving."
Continued in the next chapter...