Location: Blackridge Containment Facility, Franz Josef Land, Russia
The Arctic wind howled over the jagged cliffs of Franz Josef Land, lashing frozen spray against rock formations that nature herself seemed to regret shaping. Atop these lifeless heights stood Blackridge Containment Facility—if one could call it "standing." It had been carved more than constructed, hollowed out of the cliff face like an infection in the Earth, invisible to satellites, absent from maps, and non-existent in official records. The closest town was two hundred kilometers south, and even the birds flew wide around its airspace.
Blackridge wasn't a prison. It was a sentence.
Those sent here were never intended to be heard from again.
Concrete panels reinforced with graphene and cold steel sealed its skin, wrapped in overlapping layers of radar-absorbent mesh. Automated turrets disguised as communication dishes followed every snowflake with unblinking timing No signs. No insignia. Just a black flag flapping in the wind, stitched with silence.
Inside, the temperature was a constant 38°F—uncomfortable, intentional. Claustrophobic corridors ran like arteries between hardened bunkers. Security checkpoints were manned by nameless guards, their uniforms stripped of flag, rank, or origin. These were soldiers of silence, paid not to ask questions and trained to never give answers. Their directives came from nowhere. Their mission was to forget.
Sublevel 3—Interrogation.
Anne Ryker's face was a bruise wrapped in skin.
She sagged in the chair, arms shackled to steel rings anchored in the floor. Her suit jacket was torn, blood crusting the torn lapel. One heel was missing. The other hung loosely from a bent ankle.
Her voice was hoarse. Her wrists bled where she had struggled. Still, she whispered:
"I'm not a spy. I'm a businesswoman…"
She blinked against the harsh light above. It burned white into her face, blotting out everything except the voice of the man in front of her.
Lieutenant Tomasz Rojeck.
A slab of muscle, built like frostbite—slow, inevitable, and without sympathy. His face was carved with the boredom of bureaucratic cruelty. A man who had long ago stopped asking why. He only hurts now. That was his job.
He paced. Tapped his baton against his thigh. Watched her like a butcher watches livestock.
"Anne Ryker," he said, reading from a tablet. "Twenty-eight. CEO of HelixCross Logistics. Extensive travel records. Unusual frequency of border crossings. Known contact with three flagged individuals in Warsaw, Berlin, and Abu Dhabi. We have video of you near a restricted energy corridor in Murmansk."
He crouched down. Lifted her chin with the tip of the baton.
"Still claiming you're just a businesswoman?"
Tears welled in her eyes. "I ship medical supplies. I signed customs forms. I have clients—"
CRACK.
The baton slammed across her ribs.
She choked out a sob. Her head lolled, vision flickering. "I'm not a spy…" she whispered again. "Please… I sell insulin. Bandages. I don't even speak Russian…"
Rojeck stood. Turned to the camera in the corner of the room.
"I give it another ten minutes," he said flatly. "You think anyone's coming for you, you little shit? "
Rojeck raised his baton again—
The lights flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then went out for a full second before coming back on, humming like old bones grinding together.
His radio hissed.
"Bay Two, Command. We've got a systems—"
Static.
Rojeck turned to the monitors. Each security feed glitched in succession. Hallway cams. Armory cams. Holding cells. The footage stuttered like a heartbeat on the verge of flatlining.
Then: black.
Across every monitor, a single phrase blinked into existence.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN MERCY?
Rojeck stepped back. "What the hell…"
Then came the music played.
(It's Got My Name On It feat. Sarah Reeves )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TgJwWJW3ag
At first, it was a low hum—female vocals, rising and falling like breath in winter. Soft. Unnerving.
"Adrenaline… runnin' through my skin…"
The voice echoed through the speaker system—except no one had activated the PA.
"I just feel it… oh, I live for it…"
Command Center — Sublevel 1.
Colonel Deschamps, a warhawk in exile from France's Foreign Intelligence Directorate, stood over a console that refused to obey. "Pull internal diagnostics. I want this scrubbed now."
"Sir," replied the technician, "there's no response. Every console's locked."
"How locked?"
"Hard override. We're not just locked out—we're… overwritten. Someone's inside."
Deschamps's lip curled. "By who?"
As if in answer, the music grew louder, bleeding through walls and ceilings like a ghost humming its own funeral dirge.
"Here's to the strongest fighter…"
"Here's to the last survivor…"
Another officer whispered. "This isn't one of our files,"
"Kill the feed!" Deschamps roared.
They did. Physically yanked power relays from their sockets.
The music continued. Unstoppable. Inevitable.
Surface Level—Helipad
A red flare streaked into the night sky. One soldier looked up—confused. Was that a distress signal?
No. It was a go-code.
"There's only one crown…"
"It's got my name on it…"
Then the commander's office exploded.
"Here's to the strongest fighter…"
"Here's to the last survivor…"
Fire tore through three layers of blast glass and incinerated Deschamps' second-in-command. The floor above command collapsed inwards, dragging consoles and personnel into a shrieking maelstrom of sparks and rebar.
Infirmary. Kitchen. East barracks. Simultaneous detonations.
And through it all—the music.
"Oh-oh-ohhhh… It's got my name on it…"
Courtyard.
A woman landed silently.
Her bodysuit shimmered like wet silk in the moonlight. Her face was a blank porcelain mask with a single painted teardrop under the right eye. She moved like vapor—one breath, and she was behind the first sentry.
A knife flashed beneath his helmet strap.
Twist.
Silence.
Collapse.
Ten yards away, a camera turned to track the motion—then sparked violently. The woman looked up and vanished into the smoke.
Main Entrance
A sound like thunder cracked the night.
A rail cannon discharged, its frame cobbled together from Cold War scrapyard tech and bleeding-edge superconductors. The blast didn't just breach the door—it turned it into plasma. Three guards inside were vaporized. A fourth screamed until the fire caught his lungs mid-gasp.
Behind her came a man in his late twenties, bouncing nail bombs in his palms like a child with marbles. He sang along to the song, voice cheerful and off-key.
"...Only one last standing... got my eyes on the ending…"
He tossed both bombs through a vent grate and grinned as the floor above burst open like a piñata of fire and shrieking steel.
Sublevel 4—Armory
Private Renko raised his rifle and pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
His body convulsed.
His hands betrayed him.
He dropped the weapon and collapsed, screaming—not from pain, but from the illusion someone had just planted in his mind.
A second later, a huge, bulky man stepped from the darkness behind him. Her arms, scarred from a hundred battlefield augmentations, moved like liquid metal. Two precise strikes—one to the temple, one to the throat. Renko died standing.
Medbay
A man with black mask twisted open a vial and slid it into the duct system. Within six seconds, a nerve agent she'd synthesized herself—coded to mimic a seasonal pollen allergy—spread through the ventilation. The first coughs began within moments. The second batch never got a chance to scream.
Observation Deck
Something moved like a whisper, and it's not a person. Her synthetic limbs made no sound on steel. Her arm turned into a blade, glowing with nanoplasmic heat... but her eyes lingered just a moment too long on the target. Calculating? Or... remembering? The blade passed through the final technician's neck like butter.
Behind her, someone walked without urgency. His black mask revealed no emotion. He didn't speak. He didn't gesture. He didn't need to.
He simply looked at the survivors.
Then he moved.
A guard opened fire—too slow.
The man in the mask threw a knife curved through the air like a question mark. The guard's jaw fell open. The rest of his body followed.
Communications Tower
A thud from above. Then a high-pitched whirring.
A drone arced across the sky, blinking red.
One final missile screamed downward, blowing open the southern wall.
Another man in a mask slipped through the smoke.
Already inside the server room.
Already past the firewalls.
Already uploading the escape routes and deactivating all biometric locks.
Cell Block D opened.
Twenty-six prisoners staggered into the corridor, blinking into freedom for the first time in months.
One hostage gasped as the woman, in a blank porcelain mask with a single painted teardrop under the right eye, stepped into view. "You're real…". The remaining survivors stared blankly as the attackers moved; silent and relentless.
The final refrain played.
"There's only one crown…"
"It's got my name on it…"
A single soldier remained.
He fired blindly, screaming.
Bang. One shot.
A woman in her early twenties lowered her sniper, "That was stupid".
Silence.
Smoke curled through the corridor like the final breath of a dying giant. The music faded. Blackridge Containment Facility was gone—reduced to ruin, legend, and silence.
___________________________________
Hours later, a satellite image would show nothing but scorched cliffside and empty coastline. No moving bodies. No structures. No survivors from the original command staff. Only fire scrambling.
But in the shadows of a cold bunker hundreds of miles away, figures gathered again—blood on their boots, silence in their lungs.
Their first mission was complete.
But this was just a distraction.
They all removed their masks marked with initials of the months of the year. December lifted his clock, its red hands ticking down. "Phase 1 will begin now."