PLAYTEST RECORD // SHOW YOUR WORK
FILED_FROM: THE NINTH BATTERY // PMC DISBANDMENT
FILING_DATE: 2026-08-29
RESULT: OPERATOR KIA // C5
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BARCODE: SIG-BATREP-2026-08-29
孤
OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT // RECONSTRUCTED
THE FIFTH
DOOR
SOLE OPERATOR KIA AT THE LAST GATE // CONFRONTATION NEVER OPENS
HVT // IMPOSSIBLE
PMC DISBANDMENT
OPERATOR KIA // C5
TARGET UNTOUCHED // 2 HP
10 DICE ON RECORD
// ROLL IN THE OPEN // COUNT THE DICE // BLAME THE TERRAIN // FILE THE REPORT //
// OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
Impossible difficulty deals one operator and no spare, and the deck answered a hardened Belt installation with a hacker. He got four gates deep on two natural sixes he had no business rolling. The fifth door opened. He did not come through it.
THE FIFTH DOOR
BY RIO SOLVENG
GAME: OPERATOR TACTICS // HVT
FILED: THE NINTH BATTERY // PMC DISBANDMENT // 2026-08-29
TELEMETRY: RECONSTRUCTED // THE DICE ARE ON RECORD.
// DESK NOTE // M. KOSE
Impossible deals one operator and no spare, and the deck handed a five-card gauntlet built for a rifle to a man who works a keyboard. He got four doors deep on borrowed luck and lost the fifth by a single pip. Worth your time for the arithmetic underneath it, which was settled before anybody rolled anything.
// DEPLOYMENT
GAMEOperator Tactics // HVT (card game) // Impossible difficulty: 1 operator, target 2 HP, 2 counterattacks per confrontation turn
SCENARIOPMC Disbandment. A pre-Upheaval integrated air-defense site on the Danube shoulder above Vidin, Balkanized Belt ghost country. The Belt calls it the Ninth Battery. Armored assets, layered fortification, pre-positioned escape.
OPERATORCIRCUIT (Liang Fei, Hacker, NCB state security defector). Hacking 2+, Electronic Security 2+, Information Gathering 4+, Combat 5+. Carries Init, so no Pressure on the four initiative cards. No medic, no second operator, no reserve.
HVTCommandant Aziz Borcea, warlord-state governor and the PMC's own CO. 2 HP. Vulnerability: Explosives (Demo Expert 2+), unmatched on a team of one. Counter profile never rolled.
GAUNTLETFive gates, left to right: Hostile Electronics, Security Patrol, Hostile Contact, Climate Conditions, Breach and Clear. Four of the five carry initiative. Fei rates Good on exactly one of them.
OBJECTIVEReach the command bunker under the old fire-control block and take Borcea off the hill.
WIN CONDITIONTarget to 0 HP inside three confrontation turns. Loss if the operator is KIA at any point, or the clock expires with Borcea alive.
TURN CAPFive gauntlet cards, then three confrontation turns. The run ended on card five.
The Ninth Battery was built to shoot down aircraft that stopped flying forty years ago. It sits on the shoulder above the river, a concrete horseshoe of revetments and cable trenches and one radar mast that nobody ever bothered to fell, and for six years now it has been the working capital of a man who used to be a colonel and is currently a government. Commandant Aziz Borcea took a NAF-backed liberation movement, held it together longer than the people who paid for it expected, and then noticed that governing was easier than liberating and paid better. His PMC never disbanded. It just started issuing documents.
The contract said neutralize the company and take the CO off the hill. What the contract did not say, because contracts of that kind never do, was how many people were being sent. One. Liang Fei, callsign Circuit, six years inside NCB cyber warfare before he walked out of it and into the contractor market. A man who knows how surveillance architecture is built because he helped build it. Against a compound with armored assets, three fortification layers, and an escape route pre-positioned before the first wire went up.
He came up the reverse slope through the drainage cut with the drone flight already turning over the treeline. That was the first gate and it should have been his. Everything on that hill talks, and talking is the only thing Fei does better than anyone the Belt could have sent. He got inside the flight's coordination net. What he did not get was time, because the patrol keys had been rotated off the old schema three weeks earlier by somebody competent, and a rotor came around the mast while he was still reading. He went flat into the cut and something opened him along the ribs on the way down.
So the run started wrong. Four doors left, and the man walking them was already hurt, and hurt on this hill meant every remaining problem got harder at the exact moment he had less to solve it with.
HE NEEDED A SIX AND HE ROLLED A SIX. THEN HE DID IT AGAIN.
What happened next is the part the telemetry will not explain and the part everyone who has read the file keeps going back to. Bleeding, in a drainage cut, on a fortified hill held by a private army, Fei got up and cleared two gates that had no business opening for him.
The first was a standard PMC patrol on a fixed route with the surveillance grid stitched into it. He lay in the cut and let them walk the whole length of it over him, because a fixed route is an honest thing and honesty was the only exploitable material on that hill. When they were past he got into a dead radar shed, closed himself up with what he was carrying, and came out of it moving properly again. The second was the close-protection element, gene-forged, faster and harder than the line security and specifically trained to find exactly the kind of man who was on the slope. He never met them. He got into their coordination traffic and moved them, sent the whole element out to the far bastion on a contact that did not exist, and walked the ground they had vacated.
Then the river asked him a question he had no answer for. The approach to the command bunker runs through the lower magazines, and the Danube was up and coming through the old cable galleries, and there is nothing in a flooded tunnel to talk to. Water does not have a schema. He went through it because there was no other way to go through it, and it took back everything the radar shed had given him and a little more. He came out the far side into the fire-control block hurt worse than he had been at the top of the hill.
The last door was reinforced, staged, and covered from inside by men who were briefed to react the instant it moved. He opened it. That should be said plainly, because it is the true part: the door came open, the way had been made, the job of getting into the room was finished work. He was one pip short of surviving the room he had just opened. Borcea was two floors down behind a second door with a helicopter warm on the pad and a company that never had to be committed. He never knew a contractor had been on his hill until somebody went out at first light to find out why the far bastion had been chasing ghosts.
// THE TAPE
C1Hostile Electronics (initiative). Variable D6 3: AI-directed security drones running active patrol, printed 4+. Fei is Good here (2+) but the higher threshold governs, so 4+. Init carried, no Pressure. Rolled 3: below threshold. Challenge cleared, Active to Wounded.
C2Security Patrol (initiative). Variable D6 2: standard PMC patrol, fixed route with surveillance integration, printed 4+. Hacker is not on this card's Good or Ordinary list, so Bad, 5+; Wounded drops Bad to a natural 6 only. Rolled natural 6: critical success, cleared and recovers to Active.
C3Hostile Contact (initiative). Variable D6 2: gene-forged close-protection unit, printed 4+. Hacker Bad, 5+. Rolled natural 6: critical success, cleared, holds Active. Two sixes back to back on cards he had no business clearing.
C4Climate Conditions (no initiative). Variable D6 1: storm surge flooding the lower approach, printed 3+, marked crit-fail state change. Hacker Bad, 5+. Rolled 2: below threshold. Cleared, Active to Wounded.
C5Breach and Clear (initiative). Variable D6 1: reinforced entry with armed security staged inside, breach triggers immediate response, printed 3+. Hacker Bad, 5+; Wounded, so a natural 6 or nothing. Rolled 5. One pip. Challenge cleared, Wounded to KIA. Sole operator down before the confrontation. Mission fails immediately.
ENDTen dice on record. Confrontation never opened, so Borcea's counterattack profile was never rolled and his 2 HP were never touched.
// WORKBENCH
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED
// HOW IT ACTUALLY PLAYED // Q. ADAIR
Start with the honest bit: the dice were kind. Fei needed a natural 6 at C2 and got one, then needed 5+ at C3 and got another 6. Two of the ten dice carried more weight than any decision made all night, and both of them landed his way. He should have died on the second card. He died on the fifth. The run outperformed its own arithmetic and still failed, which is the useful thing about it.
The turn it swung was the first one. C1 was the single card in the gauntlet where the deck gave him a specialty, and the variable die printed a 4+, and section 3 says you use whichever threshold is higher. So the one card he was Good at asked him for exactly the same number it would have asked a stranger. Being the right operator bought nothing, he went onto the wound track before he had touched the fence line, and from there every remaining card was a Bad card rolled by a hurt man. On Impossible there is no spare to absorb that. C1 is where the run was lost and nothing after it was really a decision.
Balance read: Impossible is not a difficulty setting, it is a filter on the operator draw, and the filter runs before the player does anything. The confrontation vulnerability is one archetype in ten, so a random single draw matches Borcea roughly one time in ten. The gauntlet then decides the rest by archetype coverage. Fei drew four cards where Hacker appears on neither the Good nor the Ordinary line, which is 5+ flat, and 5+ flat plus one wound is a natural 6 wall. A solo Commando or Demo Expert on this same five-card spread is a real game. A solo Hacker is a coin toss you lose four times.
- One thing to try next time: give Impossible a prep clause. Draw two operators, keep one, discard the other face down before the gauntlet is dealt. It costs the difficulty nothing (still one operator on the table, still 2 HP and two counters a turn), it keeps the lone-contractor fantasy intact, and it gives the player the single decision the difficulty currently does not contain. As printed, an Impossible run is dealt, not played.
- Rules note, and it is a real one: section 6 says operators who are Wounded cannot be deployed, and the Impossible card says any hit in the gauntlet Wounds the operator and a second hit is KIA. With one operator those two lines cannot both be true. The desk played the difficulty card, because it plainly contemplates a wounded solo operator continuing, and logged the contradiction. Same log picked up a second one: nothing in the rules actually states that an archetype absent from a challenge card's Good and Ordinary lines is Bad. It is obviously the intent, four of tonight's five cards ran on it, and it is nowhere in print.
- The detail worth stealing: a failed challenge is still a cleared challenge. Fei opened the last door and died in it. Mechanically that is just the failure line doing its job, but it is the best piece of writing in the rulebook and nobody put it there on purpose. Every gate on this run got opened. There was simply nobody left to walk through the last one.
- Terrain aside: built the Ninth Battery out of two hardware-store cable-duct offcuts for the revetments, a cocktail stirrer lattice for the dead radar mast, and gloss varnish poured into the lower magazine trays for the flood. Cyan underlight in the duct runs, nothing else lit. The whole board reads as a hill full of things that talk, which is why the flooded gallery landed so hard on the table. It was the only room on the site with nothing in it to listen.
// DISPOSITION
RESULTMISSION FAILED at the fifth gauntlet card. Sole operator KIA, so the mission ends immediately and the confrontation never opens. Borcea untouched at 2 of 2 HP.
CASUALTIES // TEAM1 of 1 KIA. Circuit wounded at C1, recovered at C2 on a natural 6, wounded again at C4, killed at C5 one pip short.
CASUALTIES // HVTNone. Borcea's PMC lost nothing it will notice. The close-protection element spent the night chasing a contact that Circuit invented for them.
MVPCIRCUIT (Liang Fei). Not for the ending. For C2 and C3: a wounded hacker needing a natural 6 against a live PMC patrol, and then 5+ against gene-forged close protection, clearing both without being seen by either. Four of five gates opened by the wrong man for the job.
THE FIFTH DOOR CAME OPEN. NOBODY WALKED THROUGH IT.