The call came in late, the way these ones do. General Kota Phirum had been a guest of an EO maximum-security installation for eleven days, time enough for his people to map the place from outside and pick their hour. The strike team's bird touched the roof into a breakout that was already past the planning stage. It was a fact now, running down every corridor between the team and the man they had come to take.
Three went in. Ren Takahashi on point, a commando who likes a clean perimeter and expects to keep it. Naima Diop on exfil, a driver who had never lost a way out. Veda Rashid in the soft spaces, a spy who could wear a checkpoint through a checkpoint. What they did not bring was a recon specialist, the one eye that finds a warlord's blind side, and the job asked for exactly that and got nothing.
The approach took its cut early. Phirum's people had seeded the first stretch with remote drone packages, and the opening room cost Takahashi a wound he would carry the rest of the night. Rashid earned the only clean passage of the run a moment later, reading a feed of falsified maps for what it was and walking the team past it without a mark.
Then the building turned on them. A blackout sector swallowed Diop, every light and system gone at once, and she came out the far side slower than she went in. One junction on, a gun position opened from inside the post-war pipe, and Rashid stepped into the round that was meant for the point man. Three rooms in, the team was carrying three wounds.
The last gate before the holding wing was a flooded sub-level, black water to the chest and the wrong kind of cold. Diop knew water the way she knew every other part of an exit, and the water did not care. She went under on the single worst moment of the night and did not come back up. The team that finally reached Phirum's cell was two operators, both already hurt, both one hit from gone.
Phirum was not waiting quietly. His militia had the corridors back, the air transport was inbound for the roof, and the general fought from the middle of his own people. Takahashi took the first shot and pulled it wide. Rashid did the thing she had done all night, found the gap, got inside the cordon, and put one clean round into the warlord. It was the only hit the team would land. The militia closed on her the same turn and she did not get a second.
That left Takahashi alone, two health to take off Phirum and one die that needed a four to do it. He rolled a one. The general's people did not miss, because the way the night had set up they barely could, and the commando went down in the corridor with the rest of his team.
Phirum lifted off the roof with two of his three health still on the card and an empty cell behind him. The whole interdiction, the entire offense the team managed against the man they came to kill, was one shot from a spy who was dead before the turn ended.
The deployment plan was close to right and it did not matter. Sponge the bad cards with the body you can most afford to lose, keep your best odds on the cards you can win, protect anyone who can still throw a die at the target. The desk ran it that way. The gauntlet then failed three of its five cards and threw a natural 1, and a Medium team with no buffer cannot eat that. By the fourth card all three operators were wounded, and from there the confrontation was paperwork.
The turn it swung was not in the confrontation at all. It was C5, the flooded sub-level, where Corsair rolled a natural 1 on a card she was favored to clear. That turned two wounded bodies into one corpse and one cracked operator, and a two-operator confrontation into a one-and-a-half. Then the profile die came up 1 and handed Phirum his Ghost Country Militia counter at 2+, a roll that fails only on a one. Two wounded operators against a counter that almost cannot miss is not a fight, it is a queue.
Balance read: this is the second straight HVT filing where the target survives, and both times the team reached the confrontation already broken. The read holds. A 3 HP target with no vulnerability match is a genuine long shot at Medium, because five challenge cards deal wounds faster than three operators with no medic can carry them, and the confrontation then asks for a roll the team rarely makes. HVT is not being unfair. It is telling you to draft for the target, and charging full price when you cannot.
One rules snag, logged for Jesse. Section 8 of the confrontation prints an attack-priority ladder with real thresholds (Combat 2+, fallback 4+, default 5+) and then a line saying an attack reads only 6 = hit, 1 = miss. Those two disagree. The desk read it as threshold-to-hit, with the six and the one as the only automatic results, because the strict only-six reading makes the entire ladder and the wounded-degrade clause dead text. It mattered once: Rashid's 5 on turn 1 was the team's lone hit under the threshold reading, and no hit at all under the strict one. The fix is one sentence picking a lane.