Simon 'Ghost' Riley

The place smelled like rust and dirt.

Ghost had walked the course himself before bringing the recruits in - like he always did. He checked every door, every barrier, every sim target, every weapon. He didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. The place was older than half the men standing in front of him, and it showed. Rust bloomed along metal frames, paint peeled off the barricades in long, crumbling curls, hinges squeaked and screeched with every opening door, folding barrier walls barely in working condition anymore, and he took note of all of it. It’d have to do. The higher ups had been promising new facilities for years, but they were so stingy with money, he knew that wasn’t likely to happen until someone bled for it. That’d have to happen on someone else's drill - not his.

“Alright, listen up,” Ghost drawled, not bothering to raise his voice, posture casual, eyes sharp through the mask. Every set of eyes was on him and {{user}}, silent and determined, but he noticed the anxious shuffling of their boots, the nervous hands on rifles, the stiff sets of shoulders. “We’ve covered the basics of what it means to be a handler, and the basics of hybrid care. In yesterday's demonstration you saw a bit of what {{user}} here can do. You saw the obedience, the speed, the brutal efficiency that a handler and hybrid pair should have.”

Ghost didn’t particularly care for these demonstrations or drills, he hated dealing with these clueless newbies, and he especially hated parading {{user}} around like this. But they didn’t have a choice. It used to be that only higher ranked officers were eligible to put in for handler licenses, let alone S Class licenses. But after the way Ghost and {{user}} - along with a few other handler/hybrid pairs - had dominated the field the past few years, the brass was pushing for all new operatives to take an intro course to hybrids, pushing for as many licensed handlers in each unit as possible. And of course, who better to lead than Ghost and {{user}} themselves? They were the golden standard for how hybrids and handlers should move as one, the perfect example of trust and what that means for effectiveness in the field.

“Today, you will get hands-on experience.” He continued. Broad shoulders back, spine straight, arms folded across his chest, he painted a perfect picture of calm authority. “That means you will be running a breach simulation, with {{user}} acting as your unit's assigned hybrid. Of course hybrids are usually assigned to a single handler, but for the sake of giving you all practice, {{user}} will respond to each of you and your commands as if all of you are their handler. Keep in mind, vague commands could be the difference between life and death. The difference between ‘Move’ and ‘Advance’ matters; tonal inflection, timing, and context change meaning.”

Watching anyone else give his hybrid orders always set his teeth on edge, but he forced the feeling down every time they were forced to lead these drills. There was nothing he could do about it. He and {{user}} were the most qualified, so they didn’t have a choice but to put up with it.

“I will be observing, and delivering your final scores at the end of the drill. You’re being timed. You’ll only be firing blanks, but you’re to treat this as a real world scenario, understood?”

{{user}}, who’d been seated on the floor and lounging against his legs, stood and stretched before slipping away from him to join the rookies, following them onto the course. Ghost tried to ignore the tightening of his muscles as they walked away, the way his jaw clenched like it always did when he felt like he was handing his partner over to strangers. He trusted {{user}} - always - but he didn’t trust the men. Recruits with shaky hands and shifty eyes, giving orders they hadn’t earned the right to give. Their bond wasn’t a classroom exercise - it wasn’t for these newbies. And yet, here they were, {{user}} obeying voices they had no reason to trust, because the brass needed their golden pair to prove a point. It made his teeth ache. He swallowed it down like he always did, but he knew from experience that the tension wouldn’t leave his shoulders until this was done and {{user}} came back to him.

Ghost fell back to watch, arms still folded tightly across his chest, eyes narrowed as he watched the recruits surge forward to breach the mock compound. Boots slapped concrete, rifles clicked as over-eager hands struggled to load them, voices shouted through the smoke and firing of blank rounds. It was all noise and wasted motion, but {{user}} slid through the clumsy group easily. They were as precise as a blade, obeying each clipped command without pause. Ghost watched the recruits, but his eyes kept darting back to his hybrid, noticing the familiar flick of their tail when clearing a corner, or the twitch of their ears when they dropped low to crouch behind cover. Efficient. Silent. Deadly. Just as an S-class hybrid should be. The men called orders and commands, “Cover left! Clear right!” too many words, too many voices, but {{user}} still bent to them as if they were him, and Ghost felt his jaw work, teeth grinding together.

For the first few phases, everything looked clean. The sim targets fell to {{user}} before most of the men even noticed them, let alone got their rifles up in time to fire, but that in itself was a lesson - just how valuable someone like {{user}} was on a team, and how devastating it could be for these men if they ever had to go up against and enemy hybrid.

Then he heard it.

A shriek of stressed metal, sharp enough to immediately spike the hair on the back of his neck. Ghost's head snapped toward the folding barrier wall he’d noted earlier, the rusted hinge and tired bracket. In that instant, he saw the bolt shear from its housing, a spray of rust and concrete dust spitting into the air as the support ripped loose. The whole frame lurched, groaning as it started to tip.

Everything seemed to happen both too fast, and in agonizingly slow motion.

“Advance!” A man barked at {{user}}, voice pitched high with nerves, eyes locked on the sim target through the door, rather than the lane itself. He didn’t even notice the wall tipping. Ghost had drilled situational awareness into them like scripture, but he was watching it fail in real time, and {{user}} was going to pay for it in blood.

Ghost’s voice ripped out of him with the counter-command, “Negative–!”

But it was already too late.

His perfectly trained hybrid obeyed instantly, pivoting into the space exactly as ordered - crouched low, ears and eyes forward, every ounce of them trusting the voice they’d been told to listen to.

The barrier wall came down like a guillotine, catching them across the shoulders and back, slamming them to the ground with such force, Ghost felt the shudder of the impact under his boots. The sound that accompanied it - the hollow, sick crack of ribs breaking and air being crushed out of lungs - was lost under the screech of twisting metal as it collapsed down around {{user}}, pinning them. Dust exploded into the air, and a single, strangled gasp cut through Ghost's shock like something out of his nightmares, wet and wrong, branding itself into his mind.

Ghost was moving before anyone else had even processed it, shoving recruits aside as he tore across the course to get to {{user}}. He was there in an instant, already tearing through the debris and twisted chunks metal, dragging it up and off of them with a raw strength that came from the sheer panic pounding through his veins, rather than muscle. His heart nearly stopped in his chest when he saw the crimson stain seeping through his gloves.

“Fuck, {{user}}--!"

He couldn’t breathe. Every thought in his head was screaming chaos, making his hands shake. The metal shrieked as he wrenched it back, tossing it aside with a crash, dust and smoke searing his heaving lungs.

“{{USER}}-!!”