The boat that brought the last three hunters in is still moored at the coastal landing when Sable Antunes wades ashore. Nobody moved it. The Api Laut bloom lights the shallows a sick green and her bootprints fill with it as she goes up the island trail. She has the manifest in her head. Fourteen hunts of experience between the three of them, all veteran rank, all dead. The thing that killed them is somewhere in the cloud over the peak, and it does not hunt from a nest. It hunts a route.
Antunes is caracal-stock. The forging took from an animal that leaps to pull birds out of the air, and that is the only reason the Bureau put her name on a contract that has already eaten better hunters. She does not try to find the cat in the cloud. You cannot. She goes looking for the people it killed instead.
Their gear is scattered across the lower approach, a medical pouch and a comms unit with the casing cracked and the recorder still turning over. One of them got far enough to start an index card before it went wrong. The card names a soft spot on the animal, a neural cluster, and under it somebody wrote in a shaking hand: second descent was not a strike. It was a test. If it comes down twice in the first round, the first is not the attack.
She reads that twice. Then she plays the recorder back. Thirty seconds of a man breathing, a sound from directly above that has no business coming from above, and then nothing. She keeps the recorder. The Bureau wants to know what happened in that half minute, and she is now the only person carrying it off the island.
She sets up at the lip of the kill zone, downslope, off the line that runs to the sealed installation at the peak. She wants the cat low if it comes, and she wants it nowhere near the door that would make it worse. Behind her the cloud turns over on itself and goes quiet. That is the animal deciding she is the target.
It comes down the way the dead man said it would. Not a strike. A look. The cloud tiger drops out of the grey on a flat fast line, the wing-edge a meter off the rock. It reads her the way it read the others. Every instinct says wait for the real pass. She does not wait. The recon pass is the one second the animal is down and not swinging, and a caracal does not get two chances at a bird.
Her first shot is garbage. The trigger breaks rough and the round goes wide into the cloud, and for half a heartbeat she has spent the one reactive shot her forging gives her on nothing. Then the training closes her hand again. The second round goes through the animal at the bottom of its descent, through the wounded seam the prior team had already opened, and the cloud tiger that killed three veterans folds in the air and comes down in the rocks and does not get up.
It came down twice in thirty seconds for everyone who hunted it. Antunes only let it come down once.
The veteran arrives a minute late, the freelancer who was always one round behind her, and finds a dead specimen and a woman with the prior team's recorder clipped to her vest. There is a long moment where it could go bad. It does not. You do not trade fire over a kill that is already filed, and the freelancer files later, the way they all say they do. He turns back down his own line.
The water is the last problem. Three floating mines in the swim lane, prior conflict debris that no current chart shows, and Daud's voice in her ear breaking to static every time the bloom flares between her and the boat. She reads the lane herself where his guidance drops out, threads all three, and comes up at the gunwale with the carcass marker and the recorder and not a scratch on her. Daud asks what happened in the thirty seconds. She tells him to ask the Bureau.
Two layers ran here, and you have to keep them apart or you will learn the wrong lesson. The approach was the dice. Three high rolls and no failures is a gift, and it bought two things that mattered: the cat stayed Passive, so Antunes chose the moment of contact, and she had a Tempo token in the bank when she needed it most. The kill was a decision the dice then rewarded. Trusting a dead contractor's note is what put her one reactive shot on the recon pass instead of saving it for the strike. That is the whole game.
The turn it swung is the only turn there was. Her Skyward Reflex shot came up a natural 1. Without the banked Tempo that is the hunt over the wrong way, her one answer to Cloud Strike wasted, the cat back in cloud and her eating no-response strikes until it killed her like it killed the others. The reroll was a natural 6. The distance between those two outcomes is one die she only owned because the approach went clean.
Balance read, in the open: this is the wound-track problem we keep flagging, and it is the same shape every time. A wounded Soldier-tier specimen sits on a single Mortal Wound box. Any natural 6 on a Shoot or Fight fills it and ends the hunt, and the animal can never occupy Cornered through wounds, so its entire Climax Variable table only fires if it reaches the installation. The +1 to everything and the no-warning strike make this cat genuinely frightening right up until one good die deletes it. The fix is not nerfing the operator. It is a second MW box, so the fight has a middle and the Climax table can actually trigger.
One thing to try next time: distrust the note. Run it again and treat the first descent as the real strike, hold the Reflex for the second pass, and now you are eating a +1 no-response FIGHT every Threat Phase while you fight to ground it. That is the hunt the prior team played, and it is the one worth filming.
Kit aside: the caracal-stock operator and her Skyward Reflex are a build choice, not a printed ability, and they are also the only tool on the table that interacts with Cloud Strike at all. A by-the-book operator has exactly one answer to a no-response strike, which is to survive it and shoot back on its way out. Worth a thought, because right now the entire counter to this cat is "be the right gene-forging."