The compound sat in a clearing the jungle had been told to leave alone. SCA money, gene-forging benches, and a researcher named Soren Haas who had stopped pretending his workers were anything but product. The contract read easy and ran hard. Get the people out. Take Haas if he stayed in reach.
Three operators drew the job. Roshan Karimi on point, a recon splice out of the Dune Specter program who could find a way through anything. Sofia Engstrom, a UKE field surgeon who did not lose people who arrived breathing. Elin Svensson, the technician everyone called Patchwork, and the only one of the three who could put Haas down. His security ran on systems. She broke systems for a living. The whole plan balanced on that one fact, and everybody on the team knew it walking in.
The breach went wrong on contact. Karimi took the door first because the lockdown was already cycling and somebody fast had to beat the count. The seal came down on the wrong side of it. Karimi did not come back through. The structure closed around two operators and a body, and the mission's margin was gone before anyone had laid eyes on the target.
What followed was Engstrom's run, and it had no right to work. The heat inside the compound chewed through her gear and put her on the floor once, a stumble that left her hurt and slow. She patched herself in the dark and kept moving. Then the two corridors that should have finished her did not. A sniper held a confirmed lane across the inner court and never got the shot off. An elevated barrier wired to bite let her over clean. A surgeon with no business clearing either of them cleared both, on the kind of roll you talk about later.
That left the last door for Patchwork. A hostile security AI tried to seal the approach and she walked it back down to nothing, the one card on the whole board built for exactly her hands. Past it, Haas was where the intel put him, ringed by the only defense he trusted: a security mesh reading every body in the room.
He read the wrong threat. Patchwork went straight at the architecture. Her first pass tore through the mesh and dropped him a level before he understood she was the problem. The security caught Engstrom instead, put her down hurt a second time, and kept hunting the medic while the technician worked. Patchwork hit him again. The mesh swung back at her and missed. On the third pass she pulled the room apart around him, and Haas, who had built people who could not want to leave, ran out of room to stand in.
The workers walked out behind two operators and one name nobody was getting back. Clean kill, ugly arithmetic.
The build was the whole game, and the dice nearly threw it out the window on card one. A single-key team is the most fragile thing you can field in HVT. Haas dies to Technology and to nothing else on this roster, so Patchwork was the entire offense and the other two existed to keep her standing. Sending Karimi through the initiative breach was the right call. His star initiative cancelled the pressure penalty, and a natural 1 killed him regardless. That is the game telling you a plan can be correct and still cost you a body.
It swung on the medic, on two rolls back to back. Engstrom was Bad on the overwatch lane and threw a natural 6, then drew a barrier she had no business clearing and threw a second one. Those were the two cards most likely to leave her in the dirt. Without them the gauntlet eats the spare body, every Haas counterattack then points at Patchwork by default, and the math gets thin fast.
Balance read: Medium with a vulnerability match in hand is a fair fight that pays you for discipline. The vuln operator at 2+ is a reliable three-turn clock against 3 HP, so the tension is never the kill, it is keeping that one operator alive through five challenges. The counterattack landing on a random alive operator is the load-bearing rule of the whole confrontation. Two bodies cut the odds on your gun in half. Lose the spare and the difficulty quietly doubles.
One thing to try next: run the same mission on Hard, two operators, no spare to soak. My read is a single-key team folds there, and that is worth knowing before you field one for real.
House calls this run, all logged for Jesse. The challenge cards print a softer note on variable 1 ("crit fail: state change") and a recover note on variable 4, and the rulebook never says whether those override the default natural-1-kills, natural-6-recovers from section 4. I read the variable-1 note as a mercy that drops a fumble to a wound, which is why I was willing to risk Engstrom on the sniper lane. I also treated the medic's heal as a flat 3+ that ignores her own wounded penalty, and counted a heal attempt as spending one of the two uses whether it lands or not.