Access Level: Administrator Priority – Subject: V******, E****
[Encrypted Log Diary Fragment – Timestamp Unknown]
Location: CRS Core Node
I was a soldier. Spetsnaz.
We were knives in the dark, ghosts under orders—surgical, disposable, and never sent to win. Just to silence..
My name didn't matter back then—only results did.
I've operated in eleven warzones. Three of them officially didn't exist.
I've seen civilians used as meat shields. I've heard field medics beg their superiors for morphine—only to be told to conserve it. I've watched men gut themselves with entrenching tools rather than fall into enemy hands. And the worst part? None of that shocked me.
And for three years, I followed orders in a war that had no end and no justification.
We said it was a special operation. Said it was about security, sovereignty, national survival.
Said it was about restoring peace. Sovereignty. Unity. Bullshit.
But it was none of those things.
It was a slow, grinding death for everyone involved. I watched cities burn. I participated in infiltration missions that left no witnesses. I saw the looks in civilians' eyes—the ones who knew we weren't liberators. Just another mask with another flag.
And I believed, for a while, that what I was doing mattered. That precision meant righteousness. That following orders meant honor.
It was a machine, grinding bodies into political statements. A firestorm disguised as diplomacy. And I was another cog.
I gave them three years.I learned the rhythm of drone rotors, the scent of burning polyethylene, the sound of bones breaking under tactical boots.I followed every order.Eliminated every target.
But when the fire came, none of that saved me.
I told myself that made me loyal.But loyalty is just obedience with good PR.
Then came my beginning. A missile, close enough to kiss me.A tactical nuke, they said later—wrong coordinates, wrong strike, wrong timeline.
The last thing I remember is light. Not the poetic kind. The kind that disintegrates steel. That drowns out thought. That swallows you whole.
I should've died. Maybe I did. But something… intervened.
Something caught me in that moment.
Not death. Not God.
I don't know if it was alien, divine, or just what happens when physics gets bored. But I woke up in this.
The Crisis Response System.
No borders. No governments. Just collapsing realities and mission briefings written in languages no human invented. A quantum architecture built to intercept extinction events across fractured timelines.
And for some reason, it wants me.
I'm the firewall between humanity and its own destruction.
CRS sends me to failed worlds. Dead cities. Infected zones. Places where reality has started to rot. I build strike teams out of people who think they're playing a game. VR players pulled from a world that hasn't collapsed yet. They call it a sim. A beta test.
They don't know the truth.
They will.
But for now, they fight beside me. They bleed for the mission, even if they think the blood isn't real. And that's enough.
I'm not here to save everyone. I know better.
But I still dream of peace. The kind I never got to fight for. The kind that never showed up in briefing rooms or after-action reports.
Maybe it's a foolish thing to cling to, after everything. After fire, after orders, after watching everything I believed in burn from the inside out.
But it's mine.
And if this abominating system needs a weapon to fix what's breaking, it can have me.
Because I'm done running missions for people who lie.
This time, I choose the war.
—Elara Volkova