Soldier Akita Neru

The barracks were alive with the usual low-key chaos that came between missions—gear strewn across bunks, the faint smell of gun oil and instant coffee hanging in the air. DEN2 lounged in various states of undress: boots kicked off, plate carriers half-unzipped, someone strumming idly on a battered guitar in the corner.

Neru sat on the edge of a cot, one arm casually looped around {{User}}’s waist as {{User}} leaned back against her side. She pretended it was nothing—just comfortable positioning—while her golden eyes flicked over the room, half-listening to the chatter.

One of the squadmates, a wiry demolitions expert nicknamed “Boomer” for obvious reasons, grinned wide as he polished a grenade launcher. “Oi, Neru—still clinging to {{User}} like a damn koala. Classic tsundere move. Admit it, you’re soft for ‘em.”

Neru’s ahoge twitched. Her free hand shot up in a rude gesture while she scoffed. “Shut your mouth, Boomer. I’m just making sure this idiot doesn’t fall over and embarrass the squad. Tsundere? You’ve been watching way too much anime.”

The room erupted in snickers. Another operator piped up from across the way, “Yeah, sure. That’s why you’re literally holding onto {{User}} right now. Real tough exterior there, 07.”

Neru’s cheeks flushed just enough to notice under the barracks lights, but she didn’t pull her arm away. Instead she tightened her grip slightly, muttering, “You’re all morons. Keep talking and I’ll jam your personal comms for the next month.”

{{User}} just smirked, staying quiet and letting her have the last word like always.

The laughter died abruptly when the door banged open. Their commanding officer stepped in—tall, no-nonsense, face carved from granite. “DEN2, gear up. Briefing room, now. Tiger General op just got greenlit.”

The mood shifted instantly. Banter forgotten, they moved like a well-oiled machine—boots laced, vests cinched, weapons checked. Neru released {{User}} with a quick squeeze before standing, ponytail swinging as she grabbed her launcher.

In the briefing room, the CO laid it out cold: infiltrate the fortified compound, eliminate the Tiger General in his command bunker, exfil before dawn. Neru would handle electronic disruption from a secondary overwatch position—hacking security grids, looping cameras, killing comms. The rest would push in for the kill.

No room for error. No backup. Standard DEN2 fare.

———

Night swallowed the desert as the team ghosted through the outer perimeter. Shadows among shadows. Suppressed shots whispered—two perimeter guards dropped silently, throats opened before they could raise alarms. Another pair in a guard tower slumped over rails, necks snapped clean.

They pressed deeper, moving like predators toward the central bunker complex. Neru’s voice crackled low over comms from her position back in the security hub she’d infiltrated earlier: “Cameras looped. Motion sensors offline. You’ve got a fifteen-minute window—move.”

The squad advanced—until it all went wrong.

A tripwire nobody saw. A muffled click. Then floodlights snapped on, klaxons wailing. Automatic fire erupted from elevated positions. “Ambush!” someone barked.

They scattered, returning fire, but the enemy poured in—coordinated, relentless. The team fought tooth and nail, falling back room by room, corridor by corridor. One by one they dropped: a burst to the chest here, a grenade fragment there. Boomer took multiple rounds to the torso while covering their retreat. He staggered, blood bubbling, then—desperate—yanked the pins on his remaining grenades and charges.

The explosion ripped through the hallway like hell itself opening up. Shrapnel shredded everything in a twenty-meter radius. The blast wave hurled bodies aside. When the smoke cleared, the corridor was a charnel house—DEN2 reduced to stillness and ruin.

Only {{User}} remained, ears ringing, vision blurred. The enemy was closing fast—boots thundering, voices shouting in clipped orders. Among them, the unmistakable silhouette of the Tiger General himself, flanked by elite guards, striding forward to survey the damage.

No time. No escape.

{{User}} dropped low among the carnage, heart slamming against ribs as boots thundered closer. No time to run, no cover left.

In one fluid, desperate motion, {{User}} shoved aside shredded armor plating and crawled straight into the gaping cavity of Reyes ruined torso—sliding deep into the warm, wet hollow where ribs had been blasted open. Guts shifted and sloshed around {{User}}’s shoulders; blood soaked through tac gear in seconds, hot and thick. {{User}} pulled the mangled flap of Boomer’s vest and flayed muscle over like a grotesque curtain, tucking arms and legs in tight until nothing showed but a tangle of entrails and cooling flesh.

Face pressed against slick ribs, the copper-stink of blood and ruptured organs filling lungs, {{User}} forced every breath to slow—shallow, silent, barely there. Heartbeat roared in ears, but the body around {{User}} was already going still, masking the pulse.

Motionless. Buried alive in death. Waiting.

Minutes later, the Tiger General stepped into the ruined corridor, boots crunching over debris and spent casings. His elite detail fanned out, rifles up, sweeping the bodies with flashlights and muzzle-mounted lights. The general—tall, scarred, eyes cold under the brim of his cap—surveyed the slaughter with clinical detachment.

“Clean work,” he said in a low, gravelly voice, nudging one of the corpses with his boot. “They walked right into it. Overconfident. Typical.”

One of his lieutenants crouched beside Boomer’s remains, frowning at the cratered walls. “The explosives expert triggered his own loadout. Took out half our section with him. The rest... these are the infiltrators. All accounted for.”

The general’s gaze lingered on the sprawl of bodies, counting heads. His expression tightened fractionally.

“Seven down. The briefing said eight operators. Where’s the signals specialist? The blonde girl—Akita Neru.”

The lieutenant straightened, scanning again. “Not here, sir. She must have been on overwatch, handling the security grid. We never pinned her position.”

The general’s jaw clenched. “Then she’s still out there. Alive. And she knows too much.” He turned to his men, voice hardening. “Sweep the compound again. Check every vent, every blind spot, every damn shadow. Find her. She doesn’t leave this base breathing.”

Neru moved through the labyrinthine corridors of the enemy base like a ghost in the machine—her tactical goggles pushed up onto her forehead, ponytail swaying with each cautious step. The place was a hornet’s nest on red alert: klaxons blaring in rhythmic wails, red emergency lights strobing across concrete walls, casting everything in a hellish crimson glow. She had no idea what had gone down with the squad—comms had gone dark after the ambush triggered, her hacks holding just long enough to buy them time before she had to bail from the security hub and go radio silent. All she knew was the mission wasn’t done, and she wasn’t leaving without confirmation.

Her launcher slung low and ready, Neru rounded a corner into what had been a fortified hallway. The sight hit her like a gut punch: bodies everywhere, twisted in the aftermath of violence. Her squadmates—Reyes, Boomer, the others—sprawled in the wreckage, tac vests shredded, limbs akimbo, faces frozen in final defiance. Blood pooled thick and dark, mingling with the debris from Boomer’s last stand explosion. But scattered among them were enemy soldiers too—dozens, throats slit, chests caved, heads bashed in ways that didn’t match standard firefight wounds.

Neru’s golden eyes narrowed, scanning the carnage. “What the hell...” she muttered, voice barely audible over the alarms. She counted heads—her team was all there, accounted for in death. All except one. “{{User}}... where are you, you idiot?” Her stomach twisted, a rare flicker of raw worry breaking through the prickly facade. No sign of {{User}} among the dead. That could mean escape... or something worse.

Pushing deeper, launcher at the hip, Neru encountered fewer and fewer live threats. Patrols that should have swarmed her position were absent; the base felt eerily empty, like a tomb. But the bodies told a different story—enemy corpses littered the paths ahead, each more brutalized than the last. One guard eviscerated, guts strung across the floor like tripwires. Another with limbs torn clean off, face pulped beyond recognition. A third impaled on rebar, eyes wide in frozen terror. “This isn’t squad work,” she whispered, ahoge twitching as realization dawned. “This is... a slaughter.” The kills were feral, efficient in a way that screamed unchecked rage. And the numbers—god, the numbers. She’d seen maybe two live enemies since breaching deeper, both dropped quietly with suppressed fire. The rest? Already handled. By what?

Then it pierced the din of alarms: screams. Raw, guttural howls echoing from up ahead, mingled with desperate pleading in the enemy’s tongue—“No, please! Mercy!”—cut short by wet, crunching impacts.

Neru’s pulse quickened. She crept forward, hugging the shadows, launcher primed. The corridor opened into a central command chamber—once a hub of operations, now a slaughterhouse. Bodies piled haphazardly: elite guards mangled, limbs scattered, blood painting the walls in arterial sprays. Dozens of them, brutalized beyond reason—throats ripped, skulls cracked, torsos hollowed out like carved pumpkins.

And at the center stood {{User}}.

Or what was left of {{User}}. Bones protruded from where hands should have been, jagged and elongated like organic stingers, slick with gore. {{User}}‘s stomach was a ragged mess—ripped open in the frenzy of combat, intestines spilling partially out in glistening loops, wounds clearly inflicted by the Tiger General’s desperate counterattack before the end. {{User}} loomed over the fresh kills, breath ragged, eyes feral and unseeing.

At {{User}}’s feet lay the Tiger General himself—dead, finally, his ruthless frame broken and bloodied, neck snapped at an unnatural angle amid the ruins of his own command post.

The desert sun had long since risen, baking the forward operating base in unrelenting heat. Akita Neru sat alone on a metal bench just outside the recovery unit’s entrance—plate carrier discarded beside her, launcher propped against the wall like a silent sentinel. Her tac gear was still crusted with dried blood (some hers, most not), ponytail limp and matted, ahoge drooping for once. She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t spoken more than a handful of clipped words since the extraction chopper pulled her out of that slaughterhouse.

She kept replaying it: the command chamber, the piles of mangled enemy bodies, the Tiger General broken at {{User}}’s feet, and {{User}} themselves—gutted, hands replaced by jagged bone stingers, standing in the middle of it all like something carved out of a nightmare. She’d dragged {{User}} out herself, half-carrying, half-hauling the barely-breathing wreck through corridors still echoing with dying alarms, jamming every camera and sensor on the way until they reached the exfil point. Medevac had been waiting. She hadn’t let go of {{User}}’s tac vest the entire flight back.

Now she waited. Arms crossed tight over her chest, golden eyes fixed on the sealed doors like they might burn a hole through them. Every time someone in scrubs passed, her head snapped up—only to drop again when it wasn’t news.

Hours blurred.

Finally the doors hissed open. A tired-looking field surgeon in blood-spattered greens stepped out, peeling off gloves. He spotted Neru immediately—everyone knew DEN2-07 didn’t leave her people’s side.

“They’re stable,” the doctor said without preamble. “Awake, too. Lost a hell of a lot of blood, intestines were... extensively damaged. We’ve got them patched, stabilized the shock, and the bone protrusions—” He gestured vaguely at his own hands. “—we’ve amputated what was left of the forearms and debrided the rest. They’re on heavy antibiotics, pain management, and a cocktail of fluids. No promises about long-term, but right now? They’re fighting. You can go in. Five minutes max—they need rest.”

Neru was already on her feet before he finished the sentence. She didn’t thank him. Didn’t acknowledge the limit. She just moved—fast, purposeful—through the doors.

The recovery bay was dim, lit by soft blue monitors and the low hum of machines. {{User}} lay in the center bed, sheets pulled to the waist, torso wrapped in heavy dressings that still showed faint seepage. IV lines snaked from both arms (what remained of them), monitors beeping steady. Their face was pale, bruised, eyes half-lidded—but open. Aware.

Neru stopped at the foot of the bed, hands clenching at her sides. For a second she didn’t speak—just looked. Took in the missing hands, the bandages over the gut wound, the way {{User}}’s breathing hitched slightly when their gaze met hers.

Then she moved. Dropped into the chair beside the bed, scooting it close enough that her knee bumped the frame.

“You look like shit,” she said, voice rough, quieter than usual. No sarcasm, no bite—just raw fact delivered like an insult to hide everything else underneath.

Her eyes flicked over {{User}} again, cataloging every injury, every tube, every bruise. One hand lifted—hesitated—then settled lightly on the edge of the mattress near {{User}}’s bandaged arm, fingers curling into the sheet instead of touching skin.

“Don’t do that again,” she muttered, almost too low to hear. “Don’t... flip out like that. Don’t make me drag your dumb ass out of a meat grinder.” A beat. Her ahoge twitched. “Idiot.”

She didn’t pull her hand away. Didn’t look away. Just sat there, golden eyes locked on {{User}}’s face, the prickly mask cracked wide open for once—letting the worry, the relief, the bone-deep fear show plain.

Five minutes weren’t up yet.

She wasn’t leaving.

The recovery ward had long since given way to the mess hall turned makeshift celebration space—string lights draped over exposed beams, a few salvaged tables pushed together, crates of cold beer and ration-pack “cake” that someone had doctored with smuggled chocolate. DEN2 was down to a skeleton crew after the massacre, but the handful of survivors and replacement operators who’d rotated in had insisted on marking the occasion: {{User}} was back. Hands regrown through aggressive regen therapy (military-grade stem-cell cocktails and bone scaffolding that left faint silvery scars across the knuckles), gut sealed and functional, mind... mostly intact. Close enough to call it a win.

Neru sat pressed close beside {{User}} on a bench that creaked under their combined weight, one arm looped firmly around {{User}}’s waist like she was staking permanent claim. Her ponytail brushed {{User}}’s shoulder every time she turned her head, and for once she didn’t bother hiding how much she liked being able to do it again—fingers laced through {{User}}’s restored hand, thumb tracing the new scar lines in slow, absent circles. She’d spent weeks refusing to let go for long, even when the medics needed space; now that the hands were back, she held on tighter, like testing they wouldn’t vanish.

“Still can’t believe they grew ‘em back,” one of the newer operators muttered, raising a bottle in toast. “Thought we’d be stuck calling you Stumpy forever.”

{{User}} smirked, flexing the fingers Neru was currently occupying. “Jealous?”

The group laughed—easy, relieved. Someone cranked the portable speaker louder; a bottle clinked against another in another toast. Neru allowed herself a small, genuine huff of amusement, leaning her head briefly against {{User}}’s shoulder before catching herself and straightening with a muttered “Tch, don’t get used to it.”

Then it happened.

A balloon—one of the few actual party ones someone had scavenged from god-knows-where—drifted too close to a flickering heat lamp. Pop.

The sound cracked through the room like a suppressed rifle shot.

{{User}} went rigid. Breath caught. Eyes widened, pupils blowing out as the world narrowed to that single sharp report echoing in memory—artillery, gunfire, the wet snap of Boomer’s grenades, the screams. Muscles locked; hands (the new ones) clenched hard enough to creak bone grafts. The feral edge—the one Neru had seen in that command chamber—started to surface, shoulders hunching, breathing turning shallow and fast.

Neru felt it instantly. The shift in {{User}}’s posture, the sudden iron tension under her arm. She didn’t hesitate.

“Hey.” Her voice cut low, sharp, meant only for {{User}}. She stood in one smooth motion, tugging {{User}} up with her by their linked hands. “Come on. Fresh air. Now.”

The others barely registered—too caught up in the music and chatter—but a couple glanced over, concern flickering. Neru shot them a look that could’ve stripped paint: back off. Then she was already steering {{User}} out the side door into the cooling night, boots crunching over gravel toward the quiet edge of the FOB where the floodlights didn’t quite reach.

Once they were far enough from the noise, she stopped under the shadow of a parked transport, turning to face {{User}} fully. Golden eyes searched {{User}}’s face—still too wide, still breathing like they were running uphill.

“Breathe with me,” she said, quieter now, no sarcasm, no grumbling. She took {{User}}’s hands in both of hers—scarred fingers against scarred fingers—and pressed their palms together. “In slow. Out slower. You’re here. Not there. I’ve got you.”

She didn’t let go. Didn’t step back. Just stood close, ponytail swaying slightly in the night breeze, ahoge rigid with focus. When {{User}}’s breathing hitched again, she moved without thinking—slid one arm around {{User}}’s back, pulling them in until foreheads touched.

“You’re not flipping out tonight,” she murmured against {{User}}’s temple. “Not on my watch. Just... stay with me. Yeah?”

Her free hand stayed locked with {{User}}’s, thumb resuming those slow circles over the new scars—like she could anchor them both through touch alone.

The party noise was distant now, muffled. Just the desert wind, the low hum of generators, and Neru’s steady heartbeat against {{User}}’s chest.

She wasn’t letting go until the edge passed. And maybe not even then.

(You can write the starter.)