They moved like thieves of sound.
The outpost slept with the mechanical hush of machines on half-power—generators breathing, a single distant sentry's boots never quite stopping. Above them, the comm drone traced its slow, clinical arc: a high, thin whine and a pulsing blue eye that scanned in regular sweeps. It was the only significant threat that could not be dealt with by a blade, and they treated it as a living predator—watch, wait, and never be where it thought you were.
24 watched the drone's rhythm and read the base like a map. He had already taken one of the kill team; three remained, embedded in places that would make alarms sing if they triggered motion sensors. The only way to finish this was close, quiet, and surgical. No radios. No explosives. No stray muzzle flashes to attract the drone's attention.
They split by a slant of wall near the lower dorms. Lu hugged the shadow like an extra skin, masked face a pale moon in the dark. 24's steps were skeletal, the pads of his boots pulling dust rather than scattering it. He checked the angle of the drone as it passed overhead—left flank, slow rise—and timed his breath to its Doppler whine. When the blue eye panned the courtyard, its sweep left a narrow blind arc under the dorm's eaves. That was their window.
Lu crept to the lower bunk cluster where two of the assassins had nested, tidy and sinister in their positions—rifles leaned against bunks, tactical belts coiled. A thin scent of oil and metal hung in the air. She slid between the bunks like a shadow folding itself, body low, every muscle arranged to stop sudden noise. Her hand found a strap, then the first throat.
Her motion was a practiced economy: a step up, arm across the man's chest to pin him, fingers slipping under his jaw, thumb pressing the soft flesh at the angle of the jaw to cut off the sound of a throat. He gurgled one soft attempt at a cry. Lu's other hand closed the knife and she put it between his ribs—fast, clean, stopping the breath before a call could grow. Her movements were merciful in their efficiency; the man sank into the mattress as if sleep finally caught him.
She didn't have time to breathe. The second guard in the dorm was already awake—an eye flashing red in the dimness as motion disturbed his peripheral sensors. He drew, stumbled, and Lu moved like someone pulling a thread: she ducked, rolled the man's momentum with her shoulder, raised her knee in a short, precise drive into the base of his thigh. The sound was a bone-crack muffled by blankets. He dropped, weapon rattling out of reach. Lu's blade finished it with a slanting push between the ribs; the motion was quiet, terrible. She exhaled, not from relief but from the constant pressure of perfect timing.
Meanwhile, 24 had worked his way toward the comm tower. He moved through conveyor shadows and between stacked crates, keeping to columns of darkness. The drone's sweep time lengthened as it rose, and the blue eye skimmed the tower's façade—blind under the maintenance overhang where a ventilation bank cast a permanent shadow. That's where the last assassin waited, patient, a silhouette with a suppressed rifle ready to speak death into the night.
24 approached slow, not quite a ghost but close. He didn't sprint; speed would throw dust, and dust would be visible when the drone's eye passed—high contrast that computerized vision loved. He used the angle of his body to catch the weak lamplight and scatter it, a human fragment of darkness. The assassin shifted his weight, ready to trigger the first melody of a sniper's crack. 24 was inside that lane before the man could breathe.
The assassin's finger squeezed the trigger. The suppressed report was a snap to the ear—too late. 24 dropped his weight and folded like a coiled wire, intercepting the rifle barrel in the crook of his arm and using the recoil to twirl into the man's side. The tactic was violent but controlled: a wrist-twist to jam the bolt, a shoulder-shove to unbalance, and then a knuckle into the throat to steal the last air. The man tried to use the rifle butt to hit back, but 24 caught the swing and redirected the force into a joint lock, rolling the man across the metal grate. Blood welled where the knife kissed the soft throat. It was done before the drone's blue sweep completed its next circle.
They worked as a single organism. Lu's hand signaled, subtle as a moth's wing. 24 answered: one half-step, a low tilt. Together they moved through the camp, coring out the kill cell like surgeons removing a tumor. Each action had been practiced in the badlands—approaches, holds, silent kills—and now they read the room and the enemy simultaneously. Where Lu could not reach cleanly, 24 took the lead but dialed his force back, using blunt disables and renders rather than finishing stabs. Where he needed the final push, Lu placed the blade with surgeon's precision.
There was a moment—two heartbeats—when the drone swung over the courtyard, light sweeping the roof like a slow, judgmental moon. They froze under eaves, pressed to the cold brick, bodies flat. The mechanical eye found the space around them: a darkness with no heat spike, no movement, a flaw in a pattern and thus meaningless. The drone passed like an uninterested sentinel and left a quiet that hummed in their bones.
A quick cascade followed: a man trying to crawl toward a comm strip had his wrist snapped and was shoved under a pallet; a sentry who stumbled from sleep had his rifle twisted from his hands and a blade placed at his sternum long enough for him to decide surrender; a technician peeked from a control nook and never knew what hit him—only that the pain stopped him before a whisper could escape.
By the end there were no flares and no alarms, only a ring of still bodies, some breathing shallow, all of them neutralized. Not one had lived to radio their presence, and the drone above continued its sweep, finding nothing unusual in the lawful cadence of the base.
They worked clean, methodical, and fast. Lu's hands shook once they were clear, an aftershock of adrenaline and of things finally done. She had hit, she had bled, and she had kept her world from exploding. 24 moved with a slow, controlled serenity—cleaning blades, checking pockets for trackers, masking the sites with dirt and the discarded clothing of the incapacitated men. He checked comm units for tamper seals, burning the memory traces, and clipped their batteries with a careful pair of cutters so scavengers might find silence instead of proof.
The final motion was small: 24 picked up a dropped helmet, turned it so the EGI insignia faced down, and slid it under a drain grate. He patted the scattered footprints into the soft grit, smoothing edges until the pattern read accidental rather than planned.
They left the dorms the way they had entered—quiet, without flourish. Above them, the drone completed another pass and registered nothing out of the ordinary. Inside the map room, the Commander would wake to data showing a calm night and a sensor that had not been triggered. If he was clever, he would read the absence as a problem. If not, he would sleep in the illusion of safety.
Lu slid her blade back into its sheath. She looked at 24 with an intensity that had edges of gratitude, fear, and something like awe.
"You held back," she said quietly.
He did not answer immediately. He had the look of a man who had given a measure of himself and received the cost. "I didn't want the drone to see either of us make the kill," he said softly. "It records patterns. It feeds them. We do not teach machines what we are capable of."
Lu nodded. They moved away from the dorms into the shadows, leaving no trail that a camera or a careful eye could pin to them. The night swallowed their footsteps.
They had killed without spectacle, taken lives with hands that trembled afterward, and in the silence that followed, the outpost slept on—unaware, for now, that its predators had been stripped back to breath and bone.