Victory is a lighthouse, and its light draws both ships and pirates. After dismantling the Volkov Group's operations in a single night, Shadow Company became the talk of every intelligence hub from Washington to Moscow. Our success, however, brought us not peace, but a new and more insidious form of warfare.
Dmitri Volkov, wounded and enraged, had unleashed his own ghost. They called him "the Seraph."
He didn't fight like a soldier. He fought like a specter. Our first clue was when a supply convoy headed for the Kotto mine disappeared. There was no explosion, no distress call, no survivors. It simply vanished into the jungle. Then, a four-man reconnaissance team on the perimeter of the Bakoro airfield was found at dawn, each eliminated with a single precise shot, their equipment intact, their radios silent.
The Seraph wasn't attacking my army. He was hunting. He was sowing fear, demonstrating that my safe zones weren't safe. He was using my own tactics against me.
"This is unacceptable," Graves growled during a meeting in the command center. There were dark circles under his eyes. "I'm losing men and equipment without a single contact report. How do you fight an enemy you can't find?"
I studied the holographic map, the icons of our missing assets blinking red. Graves thought in terms of battles and fronts. But this was different. It was a hunt, and I was the primary prey. The Seraph was playing with me, dismantling my confidence piece by piece before coming for the head. It was psychological warfare, and to fight a ghost, I needed someone who had written the manual.
I needed the original ghost.
I left Graves ranting and walked to the main terminal. I accessed the ELITE ASSET RECRUITMENT menu, a place I had promised myself not to revisit due to its exorbitant cost. My eyes swept over the legendary names until I found the one I was looking for.
Skills: Stealth (Level 6 - Master), Close Quarters Combat (Level 6), Psychological Warfare (Level 5), Interrogation, Extreme Survival, Unwavering Loyalty (to his team). Description: A British SAS and Task Force 141 legend. An apex predator of the battlefield. His traumatic past has forged him into an instrument of lethal, silent efficiency. He is the embodiment of the modern special operations operator.
SUMMONING COST: $25,000,000 USD + 1x "SPECTER RELIC" (Special Item).
Twenty-five million. It was a staggering sum that would drain most of our earnings. But it was the second requirement that chilled my blood. A "Specter Relic"?
A system notification flickered.
I had to sacrifice my own face, my identity, the symbol I had created for myself, to summon the man who inspired it. It was an admission. A confession that I was the imitator and he was the original. It was the price of pride.
I accepted.
In the center of the command room, an obsidian pedestal appeared. Graves and the other operators fell silent, watching in awe. With solemn hands, I took off my mask, the skull that had become my face to the world, and placed it on the pedestal. For a moment, I felt naked and vulnerable under the harsh lights.
I confirmed the invocation.
There was no data explosion as with Graves. It was far more subtle, far more unsettling. The room temperature dropped several degrees. The shadows in the corners seemed to lengthen and darken. The air grew heavy, charged with an oppressive presence. And then, standing by the pedestal, he simply was.
Simon "Ghost" Riley was larger than any image or video game could convey. He was a mountain of muscle and tactical gear, and an aura of contained violence emanated from him. His iconic skull mask, more worn and brutal than mine, concealed his face, but his eyes, visible through the sockets, burned with an icy intensity.
He scanned the room. He saw the Shadow Company operators, their uniforms. He saw Phillip Graves, and his eyes narrowed with a flicker of hostile recognition.
"Shadow Company..." his voice was a low, deep growl, with a British accent that sounded like gravel being crushed. "...Graves. This is a bloody bad dream."
Then, his eyes fell on me. And finally, on the mask resting on the pedestal.
"You're not him," he said, a simple statement of fact. "And that," he said, pointing to my mask, "is mine."
I stepped forward. "Yours was the inspiration," I replied, my unmodulated voice sounding strange in the room. "I am Kage. Commander of this company. We are being hunted by an enemy who operates like a ghost. And I need the best ghost hunter there is."
Ghost didn't respond. He walked over to the pedestal and picked up my mask. He turned it in his large hands, studying it as if it were an ancient artifact. The difference was palpable. His was a tool, a second skin forged in trauma and war. Mine was an imitation, a symbol.
"You wear a mask to play at being a ghost," he finally said, his eyes fixed on mine. "I wear one because I am one. There's a difference." He placed the mask back on the pedestal. "Show me you're worthy to wear it."
He hadn't accepted my command. He hadn't joined my company. He had put me to the test.
"The Seraph is a predator. And to catch a predator, you have to offer the right bait," Ghost said two hours later. We were in the armory, alone. He had completely ignored Graves and had come directly to me.
"He's focusing on my assets, weakening me before going for the head," I analyzed.
"Then, we'll give him the head," he concluded. "You and me. Alone. We'll go deep into the jungle, like a high-value command package, far from the main force. We'll be the bait he can't resist."
It was an incredibly risky plan. And it was my test.
That night, a helicopter dropped us in the most remote and dense part of the jungle, the area where most of our patrols had disappeared. The moment our boots touched the damp leaf litter, the world changed. Moving with Ghost was a humbling experience. I was good; my system made me good. But he was sublime. His senses were sharper than any sensor I could summon.
He pointed out a barely visible fishing line tied to a grenade. He pointed to a disturbance in the earth that concealed a spike pit. He moved with an economy of motion that made me feel clumsy and noisy. I was learning more in those first ten minutes than I had learned in my entire life as Kage.
For hours, we moved in almost complete silence, communicating only with gestures. Then, the Seraph's psychological warfare began. We heard the sound of a woman crying in the distance, a trick to lure the curious. We found one of our missing patrolmen's rifles, disassembled and arranged on a kind of macabre altar.
"He's playing with us," Ghost growled. "He wants us to get jumpy. Make a mistake."
The Seraph finally sprung his trap on us in a ruined, vine-covered church in the heart of the jungle. When we entered, the heavy stone door slammed shut behind us.
"A bit dramatic, don't you think?" Ghost said, unfazed, raising his rifle.
A soft, feminine laugh echoed from the altar's shadows. "Drama is part of the art, Lieutenant."
From the shadows emerged a woman. She was tall and slender, dressed in a black stealth suit that seemed to absorb light. Her face was hidden by a plain, featureless silver mask, like that of an angel or a demon. The Seraph.
"Simon 'Ghost' Riley," she said, her voice a seductive whisper. "A legend. Dmitri will be pleased. Two ghosts for the price of one."
"You talk too much," Ghost said. And the battle began.
It was unlike any fight I had ever been in. There were no explosions, no suppressive fire. It was a three-dimensional duel of positioning, speed, and deception. The Seraph was incredibly fast, moving among the broken pillars like a specter. Her weapons, two suppressed pistols, fired with deadly accuracy.
Ghost was her equal, predator facing predator. His style was more brutal, more direct. He returned fire, moved us to better positions, using the rubble as cover with instinctive mastery.
I was the decisive factor. My system, my HUD, my minimap, gave me an edge the Seraph couldn't foresee.
"Left flank!" I yelled to Ghost, my minimap showing her rapid movement. Ghost reacted instantly, laying down a burst of fire that forced her back.
But she was cunning. She threw a small disc that emitted an EMP pulse, causing my HUD to flicker and glitch. "Your toys won't help you here, Kage," she hissed.
The fight became a deadly game of cat and mouse. At one point, the Seraph gained an advantage. She emerged from behind a pillar and shot Ghost in the shoulder. He roared in pain and was forced to take cover, his left arm incapacitated.
"Now it's just you, imitation!" the Seraph mocked, her attention now fully on me.
It was time. My final test. Without Ghost's guidance, without my HUD, relying only on my training and instinct. I lunged forward, firing, forcing her to cover. I threw a flashbang to her last known position. The blast disoriented her for a second, and that was all I needed. I rushed out of cover, my rifle ready.
We met in the center of the ruined church, barely meters apart. We fired at the same time. I felt a sharp pain in my side as one of her bullets grazed me. But my shots hit home. Two bullets impacted her chest, her body armor absorbing most of the impact, but the third hit her thigh.
She cried out in pain and dropped to her knees. Before I could finish her, she threw a small sphere to the ground. It erupted in a blinding flash of light and thick, black smoke. When my vision cleared, she was gone. Only a few drops of her blood remained on the stone floor.
She had escaped. But we had beaten her.
I walked over to Ghost, who was applying a compression bandage to his shoulder with his good hand. He looked at me, and then at the bloodstain where the Seraph had been.
He remained silent for what felt like an eternity. Then, he walked over to the imaginary pedestal where I had left my mask. He picked it up, walked to me, and held it out.
"This is yours," he said in his deep voice. "Earn it every day."
It was the only approval I needed. I put on the mask. It felt different. Heavier. Real.
When we returned to base, a new dynamic had settled. Graves was still the company commander, the strategist. I was still the Commander General, the CEO. But in the field, in the shadows, authority over the Ghost team had tacitly shifted. Ghost was now the pack leader, and I his second, his apprentice.
I had invoked my idol to help me hunt a monster, and in the process, I had found a mentor. But I had also found a judge. Every decision I made, every life I took, would now be weighed under the silent, critical gaze of the man whose face I had chosen to wear. The war against Volkov had become more dangerous, and the war for my own soul had just found its harshest witness.