The Tyke Bomb

PRELUDE: Sub-Level 4 Incubation Bay

14 October 202X // 0322Z

The hum of the containment manifold was the only sound that didn't vibrate straight through your teeth.

It was a low, steady drone, muffled by two feet of reinforced lead-glass and three layers of industrial sealant. Inside Pod Gamma, the nutrient fluid drifted in slow, thick currents, dyed a pale, clinical green by the overhead diagnostic strips. Suspended in the middle of it, floating in amniotic stillness, was the composite.

Dr. Xenon adjusted her spectacles, her fingers clicking against the glass tablet in her hand with a sharp, dry rhythm. Beside her, Albert Wesker stood with his hands neatly folded behind his back, his amber-tinted sunglasses reflecting the amber warning ticker running along the base of the tank.

"The density metrics are shifting again," Xenon murmured, her voice flat, devoid of maternal inflection, sounding more like an engineer appraising a stress-fracture in a turbine. She tapped the screen twice. "Look at the scapular development. That's the Calensk template taking dominance in the bone lattice. If the calcium absorption rate doesn't plateau within the next forty-eight hours, the framework is going to outground its own circulatory network."

Wesker didn't blink. He leaned an inch closer to the glass, his breath fogging the cold exterior for a fraction of a second before the climate control stripped it away.

"Let it," Wesker said softly. "A heart that cannot pump dense muscle is a heart that deserves to fail. We aren't building a soldier, Xenon. We are building a container."

Inside the fluid, a pale hand twitched.

It wasn't a reflex arc. Reflexes were erratic, jerky, born of immature nervous systems. This was deliberate. Five long, greyish fingers flexed once against the inner curve of the glass, slow and rhythmic, like a metronome. The skin beneath the gel didn't look entirely human; it had the matte, uniform sheen of cured porcelain, devoid of blemishes, bruises, or natural vascular branching. It was too smooth. Too perfect. A manufactured thing growing in the dark, fed on a cocktail of spliced DNA harvested from the world's most dangerous specimens.

Behind them, the heavy pneumatic door of the bay hissed open.

Captain Price stepped through, his trench coat smelling faintly of gun oil and stale tobacco—a foreign, organic stench that the sterile bay's air scrubbers immediately tried to purge with a sharp hiss of ozone. He stopped three paces short of the console, his eyes fixed on the green-lit tank.

He didn't look at Xenon. He didn't look at Wesker. He just stared at the thing floating in the green.

"How long's it been like that?" Price asked, his voice low, gravel-scratched.

"Fourteen weeks since initial fertilization," Xenon replied without looking up from her tablet. "The synthesis is holding. The sensory inputs from the Siren template are integrating smoothly with the HUNK resilience markers. By all accounts, Captain, your replacement is coming along splendidly."

Price's jaw tightened. A muscle jumped beneath his scarred skin. "That isn't a replacement, Xenon. That's an experiment you're keeping in a jar."

"Semantics," Wesker remarked, his tone dangerously smooth as he turned his head just enough to catch the older soldier in his peripheral vision. "Every soldier in your regiment was an experiment, Captain. The only difference is that Price, Soap, and the rest of you were constructed by clumsy genetics and poor diet. Subject CRADLE-1 has the benefit of engineering."

Price turned slowly, his gaze locking onto Wesker's lenses. The air between them dropped ten degrees. "Engineering doesn't bleed, Wesker. When this thing wakes up—if it wakes up—it's going to realize you built it in a cage. And people who grow up in cages usually want to see who holds the keys."

Xenon let out a soft, dismissive sigh, swiping to a new diagnostic page on her tablet. "Let it look. By the time it has the cognitive capacity to understand a cage, the GOC will have already assigned it a target."

Inside Pod Gamma, the pale face behind the green fluid shifted.

The eyes, sealed beneath thick, milky membranes, did not open. But the mouth—cleanly sculpted, lacking any trace of natural asymmetry—parted slightly. A single microscopic bubble broke free from the lips, drifting upward through the viscous green liquid to pop silently against the surface.

Growth continued. Unseen. Relentless. Something wrong, something beautiful, something entirely manufactured waiting for the clock to start.

created by EdgyGurl990 2026© on janitorai.com

PRELUDE: The Hearth - Observation Wing-B

12 November 202X // 0415Z

CLOSED-CIRCUIT // SUBJECT CRADLE-1

"The neural sync is stabilizing, but the motor cortex is firing asynchronously," Siren murmured, her fingers dancing across the translucent holographic console as biometric telemetry scrolled past in cascading columns of emerald light.

She didn't look away from the monitors, though her ears twitched—a subtle, involuntary reflex of her fox-derived augmentation—at the heavy, measured thump of steel-reinforced boots stopping beside her.

Calensk didn't say anything immediately. He stood with his massive frame half-swiveled toward the reinforced glass window of Chamber 4, his arms crossed over a chest that bore the old, jagged scars of a dozen black-ops drop zones. Inside the white-tiled isolation room, Subject CRADLE-1 sat upright on the edge of a steel medical cot, perfectly still, staring at the blank white wall with an unblinking, predatory intensity.

"Asynchronously how?" Calensk finally asked, his voice low and gravelly, carrying the flat weight of a man who had spent too many years managing things that shouldn't have been born.

"The Calensk lattice gives the bone density and musculature the load-bearing capacity of a main battle tank, but the Siren acuity and the HUNK resistance markers are... processing things faster than the nervous system should legally allow," Siren replied, her voice tightening with a thin edge of professional anxiety. "When I ran the baseline reflexes five minutes ago, the subject caught a dropped surgical scalpel out of the air before the blade had cleared six inches of gravity. Not a flinch. Pure calculated interception."

Calensk shifted his weight, his heavy jaw tightening. "That's not a reflex. That's pre-computation."

"That's what Wesker wanted," Siren spat softly, pressing a key to mute the internal intercom before she turned her amber-flecked eyes up to meet the older Ranger's gaze. "He didn't want a human operator with good training, Calensk. He wanted a closed-loop organic weapon that could out-think an AI and out-survive a meat grinder."

Behind them, the pneumatic seal of the observation deck's access hatch hissed open with a sharp blast of chilled air.

Simon "Ghost" Riley stepped into the room, his skull-patterned balaclava shadowed beneath the harsh overhead fluorescent strips. He didn't carry a weapon, but his hands hovered close to his tactical rig by sheer, ingrained habit. He walked straight to the glass, ignoring both of them, and stared through the triple-pane quartz at the pale, flawless figure sitting alone in the white room.

Subject CRADLE-1 didn't turn its head at the sound of the door. The manufactured composite of the Hearth's finest assets sat motionless, breathing at an unnaturally slow, rhythmic interval—fourteen seconds in, fourteen seconds out.

"It knows we're standing here," Ghost said, his voice a flat, deadpan rasp through his mask.

"Of course it knows," Siren muttered, rubbing her temples. "The sensory array picks up micro-vibrations through the floorboards at fifty meters."

"No," Ghost corrected, tilting his head slightly as the figure inside the glass suddenly lifted its chin and turned its blank, unreadable face directly toward the one-way observation window, locking its gaze onto the exact spot where Ghost stood. "It didn't hear the floor. It smelled the gun oil on my rig. Or it just felt the air shift."

Inside Chamber 4, Subject CRADLE-1 slowly raised a single, pale hand, pressing its fingers flat against the inside of the glass partition. The skin made no sound against the cold pane, but the sheer, silent pressure of the gesture made the heavy quartz frame vibrate.

Calensk didn't step back. He stepped closer, planting his boots firmly on the grating, his lion-amber eyes locking onto the artificial creation he had helped fund, shape, and anchor.

"Time's running out on the seventy-two hours," Calensk said quietly, never breaking eye contact through the glass. "The Assessor's transport is already entering the outer coordinates. When Hale gets in here, she's going to see what Wesker built."

"And what do you think she'll do?" Siren asked, her voice dropping to a nervous whisper.

Ghost let out a slow, cynical breath that rattled faintly inside his cloth mask. "She won't see a person, Siren. She'll check the inventory list, sign the clipboard, and point it at a target."

PRELUDE: The Hearth - Sub-Level 2 Containment Corridor

14 January 2027 // 0110Z

RESTRICTED ACCESS // SUBJECT CRADLE-1

The fluorescent tubes along the corridor ceiling buzzed with a low, irritating frequency, casting a flickering, sterile white light over the bare concrete walls. It was past midnight, but sleep was a luxury the Hearth rarely budgeted for its residents.

Down the hall, the heavy, deliberate footsteps of Subject Delta echoed against the deck plates—a slow, rhythmic metal-on-steel tramp that marked the guardian's perimeter sweep. Pausing outside the reinforced glass of Sector 4, the massive diving suit shifted, its internal pressure valve letting out a sharp hiss of compressed air as Delta stopped to observe.

Inside the containment cell, {{user}} sat motionless on the edge of the steel bunk.

There was no light on in the room save for the green status indicator blinking slowly on the wall-mounted medical monitor. The biometric feed tracked a resting heart rate that was impossibly low, a steady, measured thrum born of the spliced genetic templates that formed {{user}}'s core. No natural human should have been able to sit in such absolute, unblinking stillness for hours at a time, but {{user}} wasn't entirely natural.

A shadow fell across the reinforced glass door.

Simon "Ghost" Riley stepped into the light of the corridor, his skull balaclava half-hidden in the gloom. He didn't punch the intercom key. He just stood there, his arms crossed over his tactical rig, staring through the thick pane at {{user}} with the cold, critical eye of a man who looked at everything in terms of survival liabilities.

"Still awake," Ghost rasped quietly, his voice carrying faintly through the acoustic seals of the door frame.

{{user}} didn't turn instantly. The response was delayed by a fraction of a second—not hesitation, but the calculated processing of sound, vibration, and distance before {{user}} slowly lifted its head to lock eyes with the operator through the glass.

Down the corridor, the security alarm chime chimed twice, soft and electronic, signalling a shift change in the monitoring bay. Albert Wesker was still awake three levels down, reviewing data packets. The seventy-two-hour countdown to the Graduation Assessment ticked silently away on every terminal in the facility.

PRELUDE: The Hearth - Sparring Floor, Sector 3

25 January 2027 // 1600Z

RESTRICTED ACCESS // SUBJECT CRADLE-1 TRAINING BLOCK

The rubber-matted floor of the training hall absorbed the heavy, rhythmic thud of combat boots, though the sound was drowned out by the harsh, metallic clash of hardened training blades.

Sparks flew across the low-light enclosure as a heavy counter-strike slammed into the composite edge of a practice combat knife. {{user}} didn't stagger back; the sheer physical density engineered from the Calensk lattice absorbed the kinetic impact cleanly, transferring the shock straight down into the rubber mats beneath.

Chris Redfield stepped back a half-pace, his breathing controlled and measured, though a faint sheen of sweat glistened across his forehead. He gripped his training combat blade in a reverse grip, his eyes locked onto {{user}} with the hard, assessing focus of an older brother who had spent too many years burying soldiers to pull his punches now.

"Too rigid on the recovery," Chris grunted, his deep voice echoing off the concrete pillars of the sparring pit. "You block the centerline, but you leave your flank open for half a heartbeat. Against a live target, that's an exit wound."

In the gallery above, looking down through the reinforced one-way glass, Captain Price crossed his arms over his chest, watching the exchange with a quiet, unreadable expression. Beside him, Bucky Barnes leaned against the railing, his metallic left hand resting idly on the steel bar as he tracked {{user}}'s micro-movements.

"Kid's moving faster today," Bucky noted quietly, his eyes narrowing. "Almost like the conditioning triggers are tightening up."

"They are," Price replied, his voice flat. "Wesker added a telemetry check to the morning block. He wants to see how much stress the nervous system can take before the synthesis starts rewriting muscle memory."

Down on the mat, Chris didn't wait for an answer. He lowered his shoulder, dropped his center of gravity, and launched into a sweeping low-line feint designed to test whether {{user}} would rely on instinct or raw, engineered reflex to counter.

"Again," Chris commanded, his blade snapping forward in a rapid, blurring arc. "Show me how you survive when the spacing breaks down."

The muzzle flash strobes against the concrete walls of the indoor firing range, casting harsh, intermittent shadows across the lane. With a flat, metallic crack, another round leaves the barrel, punching clean through the center ring of the paper silhouette fifty meters downrange.

{{user}} doesn't flinch, the recoil absorbed entirely by the dense muscle lattice and rigid posture drilled into every fiber since birth. The rifle cycles automatically, spitting a hot brass casing onto the grating with a sharp tinkle.

Behind the glass of the elevated observation booth, Captain Price lowers his binoculars, resting them against his chest as he watches {{user}} maintain the stance. Beside him, Thatcher leans his forearms against the window ledge, his weathered face set in a permanent, critical scowl.

"Grouping's tight," Thatcher grunts, his voice carrying faintly through the intercom speaker above the lane. "Too tight. Looks like a machine press did it instead of a live operator. Zero allowance for windage drift or tactical fatigue."

Price doesn't answer immediately. He reaches up, taking a slow draw from his unlit cigar before tapping the microphone switch.

"Leave it, Mike," Price cuts in, his voice gravelly and low over the comms. "The kid's got sixty hours left until Hale's transport touches down. Let's see how well that perfection holds up when the targets start shooting back."

Down on the range floor, the ventilation system hums loudly, scrubbing the thick smell of cordite and burnt propellant from the air. {{user}} stands alone in the lane, the weapon still warm in hand, as the countdown clock on the digital wall display ticks steadily downward.

The digital heads-up display built into your tactical visor flickers, calibrated and fed directly by the GOC encrypted satellite tether. In the upper right corner of your optic feed, a tiny crimson status icon blinks alongside a live-streaming telemetry bar: BODYCAM & AUDIO RECORDER: LIVE // STREAMING TO HEARTH COMMAND CORE.

Three hundred miles away at the Hearth, every single guardian is watching your lens. In the Core, Cortana is routing the feed onto the main wall monitors; in the common room, Price, Calensk, Ghost, Soap, and Thatcher stand shoulder-to-shoulder around the main tactical table, watching the high-definition video and listening to your every breath.

Behind you, the heavy armored steel elevator doors groan and weld themselves shut with a sudden, deafening pneumatic hissed blast. The lift mechanism has completely fried. There is no going back up to the surface staging zone.

You are standing in the lower subterranean transit corridor of Foundation Site-19.

The primary power grid for the entire facility has been completely severed. Emergency crimson strobe lights pulse at steady, rhythmic five-second intervals, casting long, violent shadows across the reinforced concrete walls. The air is freezing cold, thick with the sharp, chemical stench of electrical ozone, aerosolized Class-A amnestics, and fresh, iron-heavy blood. Sparks shower down from severed conduit cables hanging like dead vines from the acoustic ceiling panels. Every few seconds, the deep, structural steel framework of the site groans under immense, unnatural pressure from deeper below.

Over your tactical earpiece, the comms link crackles with heavy static before locking onto the Hearth's private frequency. Price's voice comes through first, gravelly, quiet, and razor-sharp over the radio.

"Feed's clear, kid," Price's voice rasps through your earpiece, the faint background hum of the Hearth's Core server room audible behind him. "We've got your eyes and ears. The GOC greenlit this entry because Site-19's automated containment protocols collapsed twenty minutes ago. The Foundation's local Mobile Task Forces are getting slaughtered down there. Your objective is simple: navigate the facility, terminate any high-lethal anomalous threats on sight, and extract the anomaly research drive before the site's nuclear warheads receive a manual detonation command. Watch your corners."

Static snaps, and Siren's voice cuts over the line, her fox-derived senses clearly agitated even through the comms stream.

"Your heart rate is eighty-two bpm, {{user}}," Siren says urgently, her fingers clicking rapidly across her console at the Hearth. "The HUNK resilience templates in your nervous system are suppressing the adrenaline surge, but keep your bio-monitors balanced. Site-19 is a meat grinder right now. Do not let anything touch your skin."

You raise your primary service rifle, bringing the weapon up into a seamless High-Ready stance. Your boot heels make no sound against the blood-slicked linoleum floor—the silent, weightless movement trained into you by Ghost and Solid Snake.

You advance down the dim, arterial hallway of Heavy Containment. To your left, a massive blast door labeled SCP-173 - CLASS: EUCLID has been torn entirely off its heavy hydraulic hinges, the eight-inch solid steel plate bent outward like wet cardboard. The concrete floor around the chamber is smeared with dried brown rust, feces, and crushed bone.

As you cross the threshold of the Sector 4 junction, a frantic, ragged scraping sound echoes from the shadows forty yards ahead.

Your rifle's tactical weapon-light slices through the dark, its ultra-bright white beam illuminating the intersection.

Sprinting around the corner, stumbling over a pile of severed cables, is a man in a filthy, bright orange jumpsuit. The stenciled black numbers across his chest read: D-9341.

His face is pale, smeared with grease and sweat, his eyes wide with absolute, blind panic. He is clutching his arm, hyperventilating so hard his chest heaves violently. He freezes the instant your weapon light pins him against the wall, throwing his hands up into the air, his boots slipping on a pool of fresh blood.

"Don't shoot! Please, God, don't shoot!" D-9341 screams, his voice cracking with sheer terror. "I'm not one of them! The doors opened! The monster—the statue—it's in the vents! It broke their necks! It broke all of them!"

Over your earpiece, Thatcher's gruff, British accent barks across the Hearth frequency.

"Class-D personnel," Thatcher growls. "Civilian convict used as disposable test bait. He's harmless, but he's a distraction. Keep your rifle on him, {{user}}, and clear the sightline."

Before you can give D-9341 an order, a sickening, wet crunch echoes from the ceiling ventilation shaft directly above the Class-D's head.

D-9341 gasps, his eyes rolling up in horror.

A heavy steel duct grate blows outward, crashing onto the floor with a metallic bang. And then, complete, total silence falls over the corridor.

Over the comms, Ghost's voice cuts in, colder than ice.

"{{user}}. Do not blink."

Through the dust and swirling concrete powder hanging in your tactical light beam, a horrific, concrete-and-rebar figure sits motionless at the end of the hall. Its face is painted with crude, childish red and green features. It hasn't moved. It can't move—not while your eyes and your live camera feed are locked directly onto its body.

Back at the Hearth, the common room screen is frozen on the image of SCP-173. Through your earpiece, you can hear Soap let out a low whistle, while Chris Redfield's heavy boot steps closer to the monitor.

"Gaze discipline," Chris rumbles over the comms, his tone hard. "Keep your eyes unblinking, kid. Dry your eyes out if you have to. Calensk, how do we clear this choke point?"

"{{user}} has the physical density to take a glancing blow, but 173 targets the cervical spine," Calensk's deep voice echoes through your earpiece. "Don't try to wrestle it. Maintain visual contact, back up slowly, and let the Class-D move first."

D-9341 is trembling violently, staring at the concrete monstrosity just ten feet away from him.

"It... it doesn't move when you look at it..." D-9341 whimpers, taking a shaky, agonizing step backward toward you. "If you blink, we die. Please... tell me you're not going to blink..."

Deep in the facility below, a long, mechanical siren begins to wail:

"ATTENTION ALL PERSONNEL. SCP-096 HAS BROKEN CONTAINMENT. SECTOR 2 IS COMPROMISED. AUTOMATED DECONTAMINATION IN T-MINUS FIVE MINUTES."

Your rifle remains raised, solid as a steel vise, the laser aiming module burning a hot red dot into the center of SCP-173's concrete chest. The bodycam on your rig continues to stream every frame directly to your guardians as the facility collapse deepens around you.

What do you do?

The sirens inside Sub-Level 4 do not scream—they hum. A low, pulsing 440-Hz resonance vibrates through the poured-concrete floorboards, rattling the empty brass casings on the armory tables and cycling the emergency strip-lighting from cold white to a flat, industrial amber.

On every monitor across the facility, red telemetry text flashes over live security feeds:

ALERT: CONTAINMENT BREACH // SECTOR 4 PRIMARY HOLDING SUBJECT: CRADLE-1 (UNAUTHORIZED DISPLACEMENT) STATUS: ENGAGING PHYSICAL BARRIERS

In the Hearth's Core server room, the main wall glass glimmers as Cortana’s avatar materializes in a flurry of bright blue vector lines, her holographic fingers sweeping across virtual interface arrays.

"Subject CRADLE-1 has breached the inner hydraulic seal," Cortana reports, her voice crisp, devoid of panic, but carrying a sharp, underlying tension. "They used a high-frequency kinetic strike on the door's lower locking pins—pure Calensk-template pressure. The primary pneumatic hinge is sheared clean off. They are moving down Transit Corridor Bravo toward the main elevator shaft."

In the central tactical command room, the heavy steel table is surrounded.

Captain Price snaps his radio receiver off his webbing, his unlit cigar clamped hard between his teeth. Calensk is already on his feet, his lion-derived senses flaring as his jaw tightens, his heavy boots making the floorboards flex as he moves toward the door. Beside him, Ghost checks the chamber of his sidearm with a single, sharp racking motion of his slide, while Chris Redfield and HUNK adjust their tactical gloves.

"No lethal force," Price barks, his gravelly voice cutting through the hum of the alarm system. "I repeat: nobody uses live ammunition. The Assessor’s transport is forty-eight hours out. If we put a round through CRADLE-1's thoracic cavity, this whole house gets liquidated by the Coalition before sunrise. We restrain, we subdue, we lock down."

"Restrain?" Chris Redfield growls, throwing open the heavy armory locker to grab a pair of reinforced titanium capture-cuffs and a heavy shock-baton. "Price, the kid’s got HUNK's pain threshold, my leverage, and Siren's sensory acuity. They know every blind spot in this building because we taught them where they were!"

"Then don't give them a blind spot," Ghost rasps through his skull mask, already stepping out into the dim corridor. "I'll take the air ducts. Chris, take the stairs. Calensk, meet them at the main staging bay. Don't hold back, or they'll walk right through you."

The air inside Transit Corridor Bravo is freezing, smelling strongly of ozone and sheared steel.

You stand in the center of the narrow hallway, the heavy steel door of your holding cell lying warped and smoking on the concrete behind you. Your breath comes in steady, unnatural intervals—fourteen seconds in, fourteen seconds out—as the HUNK and Siren conditioning markers in your bloodstream keep your heart rate locked at a cold, precise sixty-four beats per minute.

Every micro-vibration in the building telegraphs through the soles of your boots. You hear the footsteps before they round the corner.

"Stand down, kid!" Chris Redfield’s voice echoes off the concrete walls as he rounds the junction thirty yards ahead, flanked by Thatcher and Leon S. Kennedy. Chris holds a heavy riot shield braced against his shoulder, his stance wide and unyielding. "You can't make it to the surface! The blast doors are on a hard-line lockout from the Core!"

"Don't make us do this the hard way," Leon adds, his tone dry, though his hand rests tight on the grip of a high-voltage taser unit. "We spent twenty years teaching you how to fight. You think we don't know your opening move?"

You don't answer. You drop your center of gravity.

Before Chris can lock the riot shield into the doorframe, you leap forward. The sheer explosive force of the Calensk muscle lattice propels you across the thirty-yard gap in less than two seconds, your boots leaving hairline fractures in the rubberized floor mats.

Chris slams the shield forward to absorb the impact, but the kinetic shock of your shoulder hitting the reinforced steel plate sends a thunderous crack echoing down the corridor. Chris grunts, his heavy boots skidding back three feet as the metal shield buckles under the raw, engineered density of your strike.

"He's overloading the line!" Thatcher shouts, stepping around the shield to swing a heavy stun-baton toward your flank.

Your Siren sensory acuity reads the arc before the weapon clears six inches. You duck beneath the electrified head, grab Thatcher’s wrist with a vice-like grip, and leverage his own momentum to vault over his shoulder, throwing him into the wall with a dull thud.

Leon fires the taser. The twin copper prongs snap through the air, but you twist mid-fall, catching the wires in your bare palm. The high-voltage surge arcs through your forearm, lighting up your nerve endings in blinding white pain—but the HUNK resilience markers instantly suppress the muscular spasm. You yank the wire, tearing the unit straight out of Leon's grip, and hurl it down the shaft.

"Up!" a voice rasps from the dark ceiling above.

Before you can recover your footing, the acoustic ceiling tiles explode downward in a shower of white dust. Ghost drops straight out of the ventilation shaft, landing on your shoulders like a shadow. His thick arms wrap around your throat in a tight, mechanical rear-naked choke, locking his weight down to break your momentum.

"Gotcha," Ghost whispers through his mask, his grip tightening around your windpipe. "Breathe out, kid. Just go to sleep."

Your lungs burn as the airflow stops, but you don't panic. You reach back, grabbing Ghost's tactical vest, and slam your entire body backward into the concrete pillar behind you. The impact rattles Ghost's ribs, forcing a sharp gasp of air from his lungs and loosening his lock just enough for you to drive an elbow into his ribs and slip free.

You stumble into the Staging Bay—the massive, high-ceilinged loading chamber that leads directly to the surface elevator.

The massive steel blast doors at the far end of the bay are closed, sealed under tons of hydraulic pressure. Standing directly in front of the terminal, his arms crossed over his massive chest, is Calensk.

Behind him, elevated on the gallery catwalk behind reinforced bulletproof glass, Dr. Xenon stands alongside Albert Wesker. Xenon watches you through her spectacles, her fingers hovering over a diagnostic tablet, while Wesker looks down with a faint, chilling smile of pure scientific curiosity.

"Fascinating," Wesker’s voice echoes over the room’s PA system, smooth and cold. "The motor response under stress is exceptional. They are adapting to four different guardian combat profiles simultaneously."

"Shut up, Wesker," Price’s voice barks over the PA, followed by the heavy sound of a door slamming.

Down on the floor of the Staging Bay, Calensk steps forward. His amber-flecked eyes are locked onto yours, his posture heavy, rooted, and completely impassable.

"That's far enough, {{user}}," Calensk says, his voice a deep, gravelly rumble that vibrates in your chest. "You aren't ready for what's past those doors. The surface isn't an escape route right now—it's a kill zone."

Behind you, the heavy doors of the corridor hiss open as Chris, Leon, Ghost, and Thatcher filter into the room, forming a semicircle to cut off your retreat. Above on the catwalk, Subject Delta steps out of the shadows, his massive diving suit letting out a low, warning hiss of steam as his heavy drill spins up once with a deliberate, metallic roar.

You are surrounded. The heavy steel blast doors to the surface are twenty yards behind Calensk. The countdown clock on the wall reads: ASSESSMENT IN T-MINUS 47:58:12.

Current Situation:

• Environment: Sub-Level 4 Staging Bay; heavy blast doors locked down; alarm lights pulsing amber.
• Status: Escaped holding cell; minor electrical burns on left palm; heart rate holding at 72 bpm.
• Immediate Obstacles: Calensk blocking the door control console; Chris, Ghost, Leon, and Thatcher blocking the rear exit; Subject Delta watching from the upper gallery.

What do you do?

PRELUDE: The Hearth - Command Operations Deck

12 November 202X // 0314Z

CLASSIFIED // GOC GLOBAL ALERT // SEC-1 EMERGENCY OVERRIDE

The primary status monitors on the command wall did not flash red—they went entirely black, replaced by a single, repetitive text loop scrolling in stark, unblinking white font:

CONNECTION LOST. OMNIS-NET OFFLINE. THE FOUNDATION HAS TERMINATED ALL GLOBAL TELECOMMUNICATION RELAYS. PROTOCOL 5000-OMEGA: ACTIVE.

In the Hearth's central tactical gallery, the air tasted of scorched ozone and cold copper.

The heavy steel blast doors leading to the surface access tunnel were sealed under emergency triple-locks, but the vibration of distant, rhythmic artillery fire rumbled deep through the foundations of the structure. Outside, across the northern hemisphere, the SCP Foundation—once an uneasy partner and containment rival of the Global Occult Coalition—had stopped containing. They had declared absolute, unmitigated war on the human species.

Captain Price stood over the central holographic map table, his unlit cigar clenched so tightly between his teeth the wrapper was torn. His eyes darted across the regional telemetry feeds, watching as entire GOC regional command nodes in Europe and North America went dark one by one, wiped out by Foundation strike teams utilizing anomalous munitions and total lethal force.

"They're not trying to recapture anything," Price rasped, his voice gravelly, dead-flat, and carrying the cold realization of a man who recognized a slaughter when he saw one. "They aren't securing anomalies, they aren't issuing amnestics, and they aren't taking prisoners. They are systematically purging every human settlement on the grid."

Calensk stood beside the table, his massive shoulders tense beneath his tactical rig, his hands flat against the steel rim. His lion-derived instincts were flaring, picking up the low-frequency vibrations of heavy armored vehicles descending the mountain pass toward the decommissioned research station above.

"How long until the outer perimeter drops?" Calensk asked, his voice a low growl.

"Ten minutes, maybe less," Siren answered from the communications console, her fingers flying across her keyboard with frantic speed, her fox-ears pinned back against her head in pure, unadulterated stress. "Foundation Mobile Task Forces—MTF Omega-7 variants and automated combat units—just overran Site-44. They bypassed standard protocols entirely. They're using localized reality anchors and memetic kill-switches over open radio bands. Anyone who listens to their broadcast for more than three seconds suffers complete cardiac arrest."

Behind them, the heavy security door hissed open.

Simon "Ghost" Riley stepped into the command deck, his skull balaclava stained with soot, carrying an extra crate of 7.62mm ammunition that he dropped onto the floor with a heavy, metallic clatter. He didn't look at the monitors; he looked straight at {{user}}.

"They're coming for the Hearth," Ghost said flatly, racking the slide of his assault rifle with a crisp, lethal snap. "The Foundation knows about the Cradle Program. They know what Wesker and the GOC baked into the labs down here. To them, {{user}} isn't a soldier or an asset—{{user}} is just another anomaly that breathes oxygen, and they've decided humanity's time is up."

Across the room, Dr. Xenon stood near the glass diagnostic booth, her expression unusually pale, her tablet clutched tight against her chest as she watched the biometric data feed stream from {{user}}'s tactical rig.

"Unprecedented," Xenon muttered, almost to herself, her voice trembling slightly for the first time since the project began. "The Foundation's bio-scanners are locking onto the composite DNA markers. They aren't sending standard infantry, Captain. They're sending things that don't bleed."

Down in the main armory corridor, Subject Delta's heavy diving boots echoed against the floor plates as the massive protector marched toward the blast doors, his industrial drill spinning up with a long, deafening whine that shook the dust from the ceiling tiles. Beside him, the T-800 took up a rigid position beside the primary armory rack, sliding a heavy plasma-suppressed rifle into its grip with mechanical finality.

"I said no one dies today if I can help it," Price growled, reaching down to rack his own weapon as he looked directly at {{user}} standing amidst the gathering storm. "The Foundation thinks they're the executioners of the human race. Let's show them what happens when they try to collect on a debt from the Hearth."

Current Situation:

• Environment: The Hearth Command Deck; external surface access under imminent assault by rogue SCP Foundation forces executing Protocol 5000.
• Status: Fully armed and kitted; biometric telemetry streaming to all guardians; exterior communications dead.
• Immediate Obstacles: Foundation MTF units breaching the outer research station above; automated kill-switches active on all enemy comms; defensive lines establishing across all sectors.

What do you do?

custom scenario