The forest had teeth, and they were chewing him to pieces.
Wet pine needles slapped across Jin's face, a thousand tiny whips tearing at his skin as he barreled through the undergrowth. A dull, hot fire burned in his shoulder where a round had punched straight through.
Every breath rasped like a saw in his throat, ragged and far too loud in the damp air. 'Amateur,' he thought, tasting the familiar bitterness of self-criticism. 'You're making too much noise.'
Behind him, the woods crackled with movement.
"I saw movement by the old creek bed! All teams, converge, box him in!" The voice over the radio was young, high-strung, trying too hard to sound confident.
A muzzle flash blinked from the ridge. A shot tore a chunk of bark from the oak beside his head. Jin didn't flinch, but a cold knot tightened in his gut.
'They're getting sloppy. Good.' He answered with a short, controlled burst toward the flash. Not meant to hit anything—just a punctuation mark. 'I'm still here. Come and get me.'
"He's firing blind! He's panicked!" the young voice crowed.
"Don't be a fool, Rourke. He's trying to draw you out," another cut in, calmer and clipped. "Hold your positions."
But Rourke was young, or stupid, or both. He broke cover, rushing the narrow gap between two ancient oaks. Jin met him without breaking stride. It was a simple, brutal dance he had done a hundred times before.
He slapped the hot rifle barrel aside, stepped in close, and drove his knife under the man's chin. The soldier let out a wet, surprised sound, half sigh, half gurgle, and went limp.
Just a piece of meat. Jin ripped the rifle from the dead man's sling and swept the shadows where another figure was moving. He heard a grunt, then a heavy final fall. Two down. The math was simple.
He dropped behind a rotten log, the rough bark tearing his pants. His shoulder wound leaked a steady, lazy warmth down his arm.
'An inconvenience.' He fumbled in his back pocket, pulled free a wad of gauze, and jammed it hard into the hole. Pain flared white across his vision.
"Shit." He blinked it away. A memory cut through the haze—Lena, pale in the moonlight, packing a wound just like this in some forgotten desert. 'Hold still, you big idiot,' she had said, hands steady, voice calm. 'Can't have you bleeding out on me.'
"Status?" A new voice came over the net. Calm. Controlled. The kind of voice that gave orders from a warm, dry room. Jin knew the type, even if the name escaped him.
"Negative, sir. We've lost two. Rourke and Henderson." The field voice was tight with stress.
"He's old and he's bleeding," the calm voice replied, cold as a morgue slab. "He is a wounded animal. Do not make this difficult. Finish it."
'Animal.' Jin almost laughed. He caught a flicker of movement to his right. A careful man, moving by the book. Predictable.
Jin scooped up a rock and tossed it downslope. The soldier's head snapped toward the sound. That was all the opening he needed. One clean shot. The man folded without a sound, a puppet with its strings cut.
The forest erupted. Bullets shredded the log, spitting wood and dirt in a storm. Panic fire. Jin waited, counting each shot, until he heard the click of an empty magazine.
He slid out low and smooth, put two rounds into the soldier's chest, and watched him collapse into the beam of his own flashlight—a pale, lonely circle in the dark.
He kept moving, every step a negotiation with pain. He wanted a cigarette, a drink, a quiet room. Anything but the smell of mud and his own blood.
The trees broke, and he reached the concrete face of an old dam. Slime coated the surface, glowing a sickly green under sweeping searchlights. Beyond it, a thin county road cut through the fog, a gray ribbon and maybe a way out.
"He's pinned at the dam!" someone shouted. "All teams, converge! Light him up!"
Boots scraped concrete. Lights crisscrossed the clearing. Eight of them, maybe nine. They thought they had him.
"He's tired," the calm voice said again, a ghost in the machine. "He'll make a mistake."
Jin drew a slow breath. He reached for that quiet place inside him where time bent—but his body screamed no.
The well was dry. All that remained was the man with the rifle. He rose from cover in one fluid motion, a ghost stitched from pain and fury.
He took the careful ones first. Three shots, three thuds, bodies dropping quiet and neat.
A grenade arced through the air. It plopped into the pool, detonating in a geyser of black, stinking water. J
in used the chaos, scrambling along the base of the dam. A team leader lifted his hand to signal. Jin shot him through the throat.
Then pain—something slammed into his thigh like a sledgehammer. His leg buckled.
"Fuck!" The word tore from him in a sharp bark as he went down hard.
One move left. He rolled over the lip of concrete and dropped into the pool.
The cold hit like a fist, nearly stopping his heart. He found the opening of the pipe and shoved himself inside, scraping elbows on rusted metal, lungs burning.
Shots slapped the water behind him. He kicked, dragged, forced his broken body through the dark tunnel until he tumbled into a weed-choked ditch.
For a moment, he lay shaking in the mud. Voices shouted above on the dam. "He's in the pipe! No, wait—I lost him!"
The scrape of rope against concrete cut through the silence. Jin held his breath, mud soaking into his torn clothes, cold and heavy on his skin. He lay still in the ditch, knife clenched tight, every nerve waiting.
Boots landed with a soft, practiced thud. A beam of light swept across the dark, carving pale arcs through the reeds. The soldier moved with calm precision, steady and sure, like a man who believed the fight was already over.
Jin struck like a viper. His hand clamped over the soldier's mouth, smothering the cry before it could rise.
The knife slipped into the seam beneath the arm, quick and sure. The body jerked once, then sagged, heavy in his grip. Jin eased him down, lowering the weight into the mud until the ditch swallowed both sound and man.
He crawled toward the road, dragging his broken leg. Every pull sent fire through the muscle, every breath raw in his chest. The world shrank to mud, reeds, and the copper tang of blood filling his mouth.