PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: JAVA SCATTER // GRID 5-ECHO
FILING_DATE: 2026-07-28
RESULT: KILL CONFIRMED // T5
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-07-28
深
OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS // RECONSTRUCTED
OPPOSITE
NUMBER
HUNT 05 // MERAK NARROWS // LAUT DALAM BULL // KILL ORDER
BIG GAME // HUNT 05
OPPOSITE NUMBER // KILL ORDER
KILL CONFIRMED // T5
OPERATOR // 1 FW // 2 MW
// SHE NETS THEM // TONIGHT SHE WAS TOLD TO OPEN ONE // COUNT THE DICE // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
Six weeks after Brine Quist finally took a live specimen out of Sector 9, BAFO sent her back to kill its opposite number, a bull Laut Dalam gone wide and mean since the water lost its anchor. A capture diver on a kill order is the wrong tool by design. The one rule that voided her contract in June is the rule that closed this one.
OPPOSITE NUMBER
BY TIB MARLOW
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // BIG GAME HUNTS
FILED: JAVA SCATTER // MERAK NARROWS // GRID 5-ECHO // 2026-07-28
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Kose here. We ran the capture that took the Sector 9 anchor back in June and everyone at the desk cheered the net coming up full. This is the invoice. Pull one big animal out of a small sea and the sea rearranges around the hole you left, and sometimes the rearranging is a second animal that used to have somewhere to be. Marlow filed the kill straight. I keep it for the last two lines, which are Daud's, and which I have not stopped thinking about.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // Big Game Hunts (solo hunt, kill contract)
SCENARIOHunt 05 // Opposite Number. BAFO Contract #231-K. Java Scatter, Merak Narrows, grid 5-Echo. Follow-on to Contract #213-P (Sector 9 live capture).
OPERATORMara Quist, callsign Brine. Baseline human, ex-PFZ aquaculture diver, BAFO Rank 2. OPINT / TACT / GUTS Good, FIGHT Ordinary, SHOOT Bad. 3 FW / 2 MW. Boat handler Daud, on the water.
SPECIMENLaut Dalam Type-4 bull, Apex tier. 4 FW / 2 MW. Adaptive Hide, Radio Lure, and Ranging (Displaced): will not hold territory, tests the board edge for open deep every threat phase.
TABLEA one-kilometer tidal strait between two drowned quarter-towers. Collapsing tide-gate, a live Distributor's Network transit lane, ferrite silt that blinds optics, a Carcharhinus Profundus working the deep mouth.
OBJECTIVEConfirmed kill of the bull with a recovered dorsal node as proof, before it clears the Narrows into open water. Then reach the boat.
WIN CONDITIONSpecimen Out of Action, proof secured, lane reopened. Loss on operator down or the bull reaching open deep.
TURN CAPClimax fires at Threat Phase 7 at the latest, or the moment the bull clears the mouth.
Daud is at the tide-gate when Brine comes up the lane, and this time the bad news is a thing he helped make. The bull has been ramming his transit boats for three weeks. Two hulls holed, one crew swimming. He knew the animal before BAFO named it, because he has run this water forty years and he remembers when there were two big shapes in it that kept to their own ends and never came near his lane. In June the desk took one of them alive and shipped it off in a gel drum. This is the other one.
Nobody says the word out loud, but the whole boat is thinking it. Brine caught the female. The male lost the thing that kept it home. Now it ranges the whole Scatter with no reason to stop anywhere, and the first place it stopped was on top of the people who took its water apart.
The contract is a kill, and that is the joke the dice spend all night telling. Brine is a diver. She takes things alive. Her whole build is soft hands and a canister, OPINT and TACT and the nerve to hang in the dark while a shark decides about her. She shoots Bad. BAFO handed the one operator who has ever landed a live Laut Dalam a lance and told her to open this one up, because the bull is too big and too angry to gel and the lane has to reopen. She looked at the order a long time before she got in the water.
She read it clean anyway. The lung-line under the third gill. The soft plate behind the left pectoral where the ceramic overlaps wrong. She knows this animal's body because it is built like the one she carried out breathing.
PULL ONE ANIMAL OUT OF A SMALL SEA AND THE SEA CLOSES THE HOLE WITH ANOTHER ONE.
The problem is not the read. The problem is that a Displaced specimen does not want the fight, it wants gone, and every threat phase it rolls to leave. A Cornered animal comes at you, which is bad, but at least it stays on the board. A Ranging one drifts for the mouth of the Narrows and open deep, and if it clears the mouth the contract is lost and the lane stays shut and Daud loses another hull next week. So the hunt inverts. She does not have to survive the animal. She has to keep it from leaving long enough to make it die, in close, with a lance, which is the range where a diver who shoots Bad can actually land a hit.
She spends her banked Tempo early and ugly, dropping the half-collapsed tide-gate across the mouth to buy the bull nowhere to go. It turns on her for it. An Apex bull ramming in three feet of ferrite silt is a wall arriving out of nothing, and it opened her twice before she had the lance seated the second time. She took her first mortal wound at the gate and kept working. Daud walked the boat between her and the deep mouth as a second wall, which is not in any rulebook and which the desk is counting as terrain.
Here is where June came back around. In Empty Net the water dropped her FIGHT to a place where the only number that would land was a natural 6, and on a live capture a natural 6 is a forced kill, which meant the one roll she could make was the one roll that voided the job. She lost a contract to that rule and I wrote it down as a rule that hated her. Tonight the specimen adapted the exact same way, dropped her to 6-plus, and this time she was on a kill order. The number that murdered her contract in June was the number the contract wanted in July. She was on her last flesh box with a lance and a 6-or-nothing swing, and she has been here before, and last time it broke her heart.
She rolled the six. The lance went through the soft plate and into the lung-line and the bull stopped being a wall and started being a weight. It sank against the dropped gate it could not get past. She cut the dorsal node for proof with her hands shaking and the shark still working the mouth on the far side of a foot of gate she was suddenly very glad she had wrecked.
Then the water went quiet. Not shark-quiet, the ordinary kind. The lure-voices that have run under that stretch of the Scatter since anyone can remember, the ones that talk to you in a stolen voice, both of them, the female's register and the male's, went out like a switch. Two anchors, both gone now, one to a drum and one to a lance. Daud cut the engine and let the boat sit in it. He said the Scatter has never been this quiet in his life and he did not sound like a man who thought quiet was the same as safe.
// THE TAPE
PREThe Read 6, 4 (solo DC 3+), both good. Anatomy mapped: lung-line vital, left-pectoral plate seam, Ranging trigger. Approach across the Narrows 5 / 5 / 2, two clean, the ferrite-silt hazard 2 failed for +1 Alert. Banked 2 Tempo.
T1Won priority 5 vs 2. Spent 2 Tempo to drop the tide-gate and seal the deep mouth (deny Ranging exit). Lance at the plate seam nat 5 hit, eaten by Adaptive Hide (round's first hit). Radio Lure forces GUTS 5, held. Bull can't range, turns: Laut Dalam FIGHT 6 rams, Brine to 1 FW.
T2Throwaway lance 3 hits, feeds the hide. Lung-line 5 hits for 2 FW: bull 4 FW to 2 FW. Return: FIGHT 5 connects, Brine to 0 FW, first MW. First-MW GUTS 4, held on one action. Daud repositions the boat as hard cover on the mouth side.
T3Hunt Event 7: specimen adapts, Brine's FIGHT drops to 6+. Throwaway nat 6 crit, eaten by the hide again. Kill swing 2, misses. Bull rams FIGHT 4, needed 4+, connects: Brine to second MW, last box. Held the mouth. Bull still 2 FW / both MW live.
T4Bull Ranging check 6, tries to bolt the sealed mouth, blocked by the dropped gate, loses the activation. Brine kill swing 5, needed 6+ under the adapt, short by one. No Tempo left. Held.
T5Kill swing nat 6: the forced-kill number, and this is a kill contract. Lung-line struck, 2 FW plus both MW, bull Out of Action against the gate. Dorsal node cut for proof. Shark 3, no cross. Quiet.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
This is the mirror to Empty Net, and I want to put the two side by side because between them they diagnose a real hole in Big Game Hunts. In June the natural-6 forced-kill rule cost Brine a live capture: the specimen adapted, her only landing number became a 6, and a 6 killed the thing she was paid to take breathing. I logged it as a rule that punishes the exact operator it should reward. Tonight the identical table state, the identical adapt, the identical 6-or-nothing swing, closed a kill contract on the wire. Same rule, same roll, opposite verdict, because the contract type flipped. The rule is not broken. It is contract-blind.
- The turn it swung: Threat Phase 5, the second natural 6 of the game. Brine was on her last box with two mortal wounds down and no Tempo. A miss there and the next phase very likely finishes her, or the bull finally beats the sealed gate and reaches open deep. There was no margin left to hold anything back. The roll was the whole hunt.
- Wrong tool, on purpose: BAFO put a SHOOT-Bad capture diver on a kill order because she is the only one who has read a live Laut Dalam and lived. The build fights it the entire game. She has no ranged answer, so the plan has to be melee, so the plan has to be pin-it-and-lance-it, so the plan has to spend the whole Tempo bank on the tide-gate before a single wound lands. A gunhand plays this completely differently and probably worse, because a gunhand can't read the animal.
- Ranging is the inverse of Cornered and the module barely notices: a Cornered specimen attacks and stays; a Displaced one flees and leaves. The scenario gives the bull a hard board-edge win condition, so the operator's job is containment, not damage. That is a genuinely different hunt shape and the rules treat it with one line. It deserves its own alert track.
- Balance read: an Apex bull at 4 FW / 2 MW with Adaptive Hide is a fair wall, but sealing its exit is a single point of failure. If Brine whiffs the tide-gate Tempo spend on T1, the bull rolls for the mouth every phase and she almost certainly cannot out-damage a runner she can't out-swim. Containment contracts want a second, cheaper way to deny the edge than dumping your whole Tempo bank turn one.
- Daud's boat: he physically interposed the hull between the operator and the specimen's escape edge, twice. There is no rule for a handler asset as movable hard cover, and there should be a small one, because it is exactly the kind of thing a boat pilot does and exactly the kind of thing that makes a solo hunt feel crewed.
Proposed, and going to the rules backlog. A Contract Fit tag on the forced-kill rule so a natural 6 reads as a void on Capture and as a clean kill on Kill, which is what everyone already plays it as and what the quick reference never says. A Displaced alert track parallel to Cornered, where the specimen spends activations testing the board edge and the operator scores containment, not just wounds. And a one-line Handler Screen option letting an off-table asset like Daud's boat block one edge or lane per phase. Three gaps. All the kind a second edition fixes in a sentence each.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTConfirmed kill. Hunt 05 cleared on Threat Phase 5. Kill payout plus lane-reopen bonus from the Distributor's Network side. Dorsal node recovered as proof.
CASUALTIES // OPERATORBrine took 3 FW and both mortal wounds, extracted alive on her last box. Stabilized on Daud's boat. No KIA.
CASUALTIES // SPECIMEN SIDELaut Dalam bull killed via lung-line. Carcharhinus Profundus never crossed the dropped gate. The Sector 9 anchor pair is now fully removed from the Scatter, one taken alive (June), one killed (tonight).
MVPThe dropped tide-gate. Sealing the mouth turned a chase she could not win into a fight she could, and every natural 6 after that landed on a kill contract instead of a capture one.
THE RULE THAT BROKE HER IN JUNE IS THE RULE THAT CLOSED IT IN JULY.
// POSTSCRIPT // T. MARLOW
Three nights after the kill Daud dropped a hydrophone in the Kelapa lane, four grids north of the Narrows, because he does not trust quiet. He came up with lure-voices. Two of them, layered, running the female's register and the bull's, both animals that are provably not in that water anymore, one in a gel drum on somebody's manifest and one on our proof sheet. Something is playing the anchor pair's calls back into a live transit lane, in the exact voices BAFO tagged. Daud logged the capture to BAFO and kept his own copy. Who plays a dead animal's voice, and why bait a lane with the sound of the thing that used to guard it, is not a question this hunt answers.