It was six hours ago. I was on a mission in an abandoned village just on the outskirts of Boreas, a frozen tundra of cold desolation. It was the usual team consisting of myself, Ken, and Maya. Some suspicious activity was reported around there recently, and by suspicious activity I just mean activity. This place is a wasteland full of empty houses and abandoned lives. We cautiously searched all of the snow covered wooden houses only to find nothing, nothing, and more nothing. The sweep of the whole area took about thirty minutes, and the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking to myself: What was Takeo thinking sending in a Black Ops squad on a mission that could easily have been handled by the Guard?

My pondering was cut short when Ken noticed the amplified sound of footsteps in the snow.

“Hach, Maya, down!” Ken yell-whispered into his communicator before the three of us stopped where we stood and crouched down.
I personally crouched right below a broken window. I could hear the footsteps getting louder and although I probably should have been more careful, I peeked my head out of the window really quickly just to get an idea of my surroundings and where exactly Ken and Maya were. I located them each in separate houses right across from me. Ken looked at me while he was huddled up against a wall and quickly gestured his flattened hand downward. That was my queue to get down and stay down. Good timing too, since immediately after I got back under the window I could see a figure pass by as I noticed their shadow flow smoothly across the dark wooden floor of the house. I waited a few seconds for the footsteps to get farther away before looking out the window to get a better look at the situation. There were five men, all fairly tall and bundled up pretty well with black and red winter clothing. Maya, Ken, and I all gave each other confirming nods. We would follow the men as they walked down the path between all of the houses before turning left and heading towards the mountainous heart of Boreas.

At the center of Boreas lies a cluster of mountains that almost form a ring around one very large mountain in the middle, and surrounding this ring is an expansive frozen lake, a lake we had to cross while following those men towards a cave in the side of one of the outer mountains. Luckily, our secretive movements were gentle enough not to break through the ice. We followed the men into the cave. I didn’t pay attention to exactly where Ken and Maya went, but I knew they were near me. Inside the cave were pillars of unsaturated blue ice that curved very smoothly into the floor and the stalactite-covered ceiling. One of the pillars would be enough cover. As I ducked closely by the thicker bottom of the icy pillar, making sure I was within a good range of the men we followed, I could hear chatter. They split up into two groups. Two of the men walked over by me, just on the other side of the pillar, and the other three men were closer to Ken and Maya. The men near me were saying something, but I couldn’t make it out specifically. The problem wasn’t that they were too quiet; the echo that bounced off of the cave walls overlaid and obscured their speech.

Focusing on the men’s conversation suddenly became much harder when an incessant ringing began in my ear. It sounded like it was coming from the communicator underneath my face mask, but I’m not entirely sure. It was disorienting. Then I heard the voice.

“Kill them.” The voice’s origin was unclear as I tried to get myself together, but my instinct kicked in regardless.

I quickly ran up behind the closest man and snapped his neck before he even knew I was there. Then the other man turned around just before I formed a translucent blue blade in my right hand from will and stuck it in his neck. I paused only for a moment before remembering the presence of the three other men in the cave. They were all lined up with their backs to me, and the pillar which Ken was waiting behind was to their right. I set my sights on the man in the middle before creating another will blade and throwing it into the back of his skull, sending him plummeting to the ground face forward. Of course that triggered a response from the other men who turned around startled only to be silently killed by the assailants Ken and Maya from behind. That was when the ringing stopped.

“What the hell, Hach?” Ken angrily asks me with a confused look on his face as he takes a couple of speedy steps toward me.

It was at that moment that I had come back to reality. I had realized what I had done. I killed two potential VIP’s with possibly critical evidence in a newly discovered case with virtually no other information. I knew from that point on that when I got back to HQ, Takeo would not be happy with me. Ken stood there glaring at me with a frustrated look on his face.

He spoke into his communicator, “Mockingbird to HQ, mission compromised,” Ken looked at me, seeming to calm down a bit, “I repeat, mission compromised.”