The city of New Jakarta glowed like a circuit board beneath the stars—neon veins pulsing with digital life, humming with danger. Above its skyline, stealth drones glided across the clouds, scanning for threats. In the center of it all, a high-security compound stood like a fortress of shadows and steel.
Inside that fortress? A monster in a suit—a black-market warlord, arms dealer, and trafficker protected by biometric locks, high-spec drones, and a small army.
He thought no one could touch him.
He was wrong.
Tonight, Crimson Vow was on the hunt.
---
They came from the dark, slipping past cameras, vaulting over laser grids. Five women, trained to perfection. More myth than mercenaries.
Null led the way.
Twin blades unsheathed, her presence like a whisper of death. She moved through the compound’s east wing like a specter, guards unaware of the doom seconds away.
One blinked.
Gone.
The next froze as steel flashed across his vision.
Null’s blade shimmered with blood as she rose to her feet.
“This isn’t a rescue,” she murmured. “It’s a reset.”
“I don’t clean up messes. I erase them.”
---
Red was the overwatch.
Perched above the battlefield on a sniper nest constructed out of rusted steel and satellite equipment, she adjusted her scope. Below, the enemy scrambled like ants—twenty guards moving in coordination.
Not enough.
She took a breath.
CRACK.
One dropped.
CRACK.
Two more, heads popping like overripe fruit.
They fired wildly toward the dark, but Red had already repositioned, cloak blending into shadow.
“Every shot, a requiem.”
“See your life flash before your eyes? That was me.”
---
Widow was seduction wrapped in lethality.
In the lower halls, two guards stood by a steel door, joking about women and whiskey.
She emerged from the shadows, hips swaying, lips curled.
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“Hey boys,” she purred. “Wanna die smiling?”
Blades danced. Throats slit. She pirouetted through them, their blood painting the walls like abstract art.
She leaned over one, whispering.
“Tell the devil I sent you.”
“Flirt with death, and you just might get lucky.”
---
Glitch was the mind behind the madness.
Sitting in a dark chamber wired with obsolete terminals, she had already hijacked the compound’s security grid.
“Let’s shut the world up,” she whispered, fingers flying across the virtual interface.
Turrets went offline. Drones powered down mid-flight and crashed like dead wasps.
A voice screamed from a security hub nearby.
“She’s in the system!”
Glitch smirked. “No, darling. I am the system.”
The door behind her opened.
One guard. Two.
Static charge surged. They dropped, twitching.
“You run code. I am the virus.”
---
Ether was the fifth—an enigma laced with tech and ghost protocol. An AI analyst in a humanoid frame, she could tap into neural nets, bend comms to her will, and distort reality with deepfake illusions.
She descended silently through the ventilation shaft, eyes glowing with flickers of data.
Guards stared at each other in confusion—hearing phantom footsteps, voices from the wrong hallway, fake alerts flooding their comms.
“False signals. Echoes. They won’t know what’s real,” she said.
One panicked, turned the corner—face to face with Ether’s electric blade.
She plunged it in without hesitation.
“Error code: you.”
“If you can see me, it’s already too late.”
---
The target’s chamber was surrounded by biometric locks, turrets, reinforced drones, and internal flame failsafes. Standard overkill.
Crimson Vow made it look like a hallway in a shopping mall.
Null stabbed the last patrol in the gut as Glitch cracked the security wall.
Red covered the corridor with her long-barrel rifle, sweeping for heat signatures.
Widow hummed, painting a lipstick heart on a broken surveillance camera.
Ether whispered false data into the enemy's channels, feeding them an illusion of safety.
“Three inside,” Red said.
“Get ready,” Null ordered.
Door clicked.
They stormed the room.
Shots rang out. Red dropped two with lightning precision. Widow spun beneath fire, flinging a blade into a guard’s eye socket. Ether scrambled their vision as Glitch launched an EMP burst into the ceiling.
The warlord stood there, mouth open.
Null approached slowly, blade in one hand, pistol in the other.
He whimpered, begged, tried to crawl.
Bang.
Mission complete.
---
They exited with the same grace they entered—flawless.
Red ghosted back to her nest. Glitch fried the digital logs. Widow blew a kiss at the chaos she left behind. Ether vanished into the wind.
And Null walked with calm detachment through the main corridor, stepping over bodies like broken dolls.
No alarms. No panic. Just silence.
---
Back at Base Zero, the squad lounged in their private ops room.
Holograms flickered with debriefing data. Mission: Clean. Precision: 100%.
Widow stretched with a satisfied moan. “Now that was therapy.”
Red leaned back, tossing her rifle to the couch. “Target was blind.”
“Seriously,” Glitch yawned. “Give me a firewall with teeth next time.”
Ether paced slowly, head tilted as if listening to voices no one else could hear.
Null remained silent, watching the mission summary fade from the main screen.
The room was quiet for a moment.
Too quiet.
Then: a buzz.
The main holo-floater flashed red.
INCOMING MISSION: CLASSIFIED PRIORITY RED.
Glitch sat up. “Already?”
Red raised a brow. “We just got back.”
The screen flickered again.
REPEAT: CLASSIFIED. FULL TEAM DEPLOYMENT. ZERO HOUR.
A woman’s voice echoed through the chamber, unfamiliar and cold:
“Hello, Crimson Vow. You’re not the only ones awake tonight.”
---
To be continued…
