They hit the water with a muffled slap as the plane dwindled into a speck above them, its cargo ramp already yawning back toward the sky. The ocean was colder than any of them expected; salt stung their noses and the sky was a hard, washed-out blue. They swam in a ragged line—Nanaue powering through like a torpedo, Bloodsport and Peacemaker thigh-deep and efficient, Polka-Dot Man moving like he belonged to a different species of buoyancy, and Peter keeping Cleo close as she paddled with surprising steadiness. The jungle that hemmed the coast rose like a dark wall ahead, vines and mangrove roots stitching together into a living barricade.
They crawled up onto sand that smelled of fish and rot and something older—seaweed and oil and memory. Bloodsport shook water from his hair like a dog and took point, machete glinting in his hand. "Alright," he said, shoulders already set into route-finding mode. "We cut through the jungle to get to Valle del Mar. Straight line, minimal noise."
Peacemaker planted his feet and flexed his strap. He pointed toward Nanaue with an exaggerated flourish. "Don't they have blockades at the city limits? How we getting in? Especially with Charlie the Tuna right here."
"Hey, don't call him that," Peter snapped reflexively. "He has a name." He nudged Nanaue with an elbow, smirking. "And don't worry about the blockade—we just gotta nick a vehicle big enough so everyone can fit."
Peacemaker glanced at the tree line, then back at Peter. "But—don't you have like spider powers? Why don't you… I dunno, swing us one by one?" His voice had that same earnest, tactical weirdness as always.
Peter stopped and gave Peacemaker the stupid look. "Are you retarded? You don't want to call attention to yourselves, but you also want me to swing you through town like a banner so everyone in the country can see we're here?" He mimed an invisible web-slinger hauling a fat, chromed helmet through the air.
Peacemaker blinked. "Yeah, I mean— we could do some kind of aerial reconnaissance to see how well-defended Jotunheim is."
"That's not a bad idea," Cleo piped up, surprised at her own practicality.
"See? Ratgirl—" Peacemaker started, but Peter cut him off, flaring. "Please don't call her that. She has a name." Peter's tone was a little bit defensive, which made Cleo's cheeks Pink.
"And no, I will not swing your fat ass through town so everyone on the fucking country can notice we are here. Plus, I need high buildings to swing from, and I saw the map of the city—the tallest building is the one we need to break into." He said as he jabbed a finger at the mangrove shadow.
Bloodsport kept the pace, machete carving a narrow path through the undergrowth, but Peter's jibe at leadership popped and lingered. Peacemaker tossed back, "Hey, it was just an idea—I contributed. Not like our so-called 'leader.'"
Bloodsport didn't turn. "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?" he asked, voice low and steady.
Peacemaker smirked. "What I mean is: you're the leader. You're supposed to be decisive."
Bloodsport stopped, turned, and came to face him squarely. "And I decided that you should eat a big bag of dicks. How's that for decisive?" The remark was blunt; Peter choked on a laugh that he tried and failed to swallow.
Peacemaker's outrage morphed into theatrical, self-righteous suffering. "You're being facetious, but if this whole beach was covered in dicks and somebody said I had to eat every dick until the beach was clean for liberty, I would say no problemo."
"Of course you'd say yes to eating dicks," Peter said, dying to laugh. Bloodsport tried too and stalled into a throat-noise that passed for humor between hardened men.
Cleo, who had been trailing, looked genuinely puzzled. Her head cocked. "Why would someone put penises all over the beach?" Her innocent confusion landed like a soft stone in the argument, and for a moment Peacemaker's bluster softened into awkward explanation. "Who knows why madmen do what they do?"
"Actually," Bloodsport said, turning back to the route, "I think liberty is just your excuse to do whatever you want—whether that's eating a beach full of dicks or killing folk."
Peacemaker bristled. "Oh yeah? At least I don't kill men for money like you."
"You two, stop. We have a mission," Peter barked, the leader's bark slipping through despite himself. "Save the fights for later."
Ratcatcher's small hand suddenly darted out, pointing at Polka-Dot Man. "Hey, there's something wrong with Polka Dot's skin," she noted, her voice a whisper because she had learned the value of low volumes in the jungle.
Bloodsport's head snapped, eyes narrowing. "Jesus." He moved to peer closer, machete idle in his hand.
"What the fuck happened to you?" Peter asked with growing confusion, walking up beside Abner. His whole face had inflated like a balloon, while at the same time developing colored spots on parts of its face. Abner shifted, embarrassed at the attention, while tugging at the collar of his suit.
"It's just a rash," Abner croaked, his voice small and defensive.
Peacemaker leaned in, nostrils flaring. "That's a rash?" he scoffed. He inched closer, the chrome of his helmet catching the speckled green light as leaves overhead trembled.
They were still arguing the semantics of dermal eruptions when the world answered them with a distant concussion—a shockwave that rolled through the trees and set birds screeching into the canopy. A plume of smoke rose far down the coast, a gray column against the blue.
"Seriously—what kind of distraction did Waller set up?" Peacemaker muttered, hand sliding instinctively toward his sidearm.
Peter's face went cold, the levity snapping like a twig. He peered in the direction of the smoke—no guarantee it was theirs, no promise it was a setup. "Knowing her," he said, jaw tight, "you don't want to know."
They picked up the pace as the jungle closed around them, leaves slapping their arms and faces.
---
They cut a shallow camp in a break between strangler figs and an old riverbed, a place where the ground was firm and mosquitoes had at least the decency to move slowly. A low fire was coaxed into life—more to keep the damp at bay than to send any useful light—and they arranged a crude perimeter from spare tarps and a few lengths of webbing. Rations were divided with the efficiency of people who'd learned to expect nothing; someone kept watch with a pair of refurbished binoculars balanced on their knees while the others tried to squeeze a few hours of sleep into bones already stiff from the day.
They agreed to stagger rest shifts: an hour on, two off, a rotation that meant someone was always awake and prowling the edges of the clearing. It felt less like courtesy and more like a rule hammered in by experience.
The night settled down to the chorus of jungle insects and the occasional distant cry of something larger prowling in the dark. For Peter the hours blurred—his shoulders ached, his mask sat half-unzipped against his chest, and every rustle sent a small spike of alertness through him. Nanaue, for reasons that made no strategic sense, padded up and bedded down beside him as if the shark-man had mistaken Peter for a shelf. Peter pretended not to notice. He feigned sleep for long stretches, watching the rise and fall of Nanaue's broad chest, half-expecting the giant's predatory tendencies to kick in and for a toothy laugh to be the last thing he heard. The thought made him grin in the dark; nothing happened. Nanaue snored once—a small, disarming sound like a boat engine—and Peter let that lull him into real sleep.
Cleo, bless her, took the first full watch without complaint. Her voice, when she whispered a check on the line, was soft enough to be a lullaby. Polka-Dot Man sat hunched by the dying coals, hands working over a tiny, intricate device—some sort of fidget that calmed him. Peacemaker polished the chrome of his helmet with a rag brought from somewhere, every movement performed like a ritual. Bloodsport walked the perimeter with the hard-footed rhythm of someone who measured distance in possible ambush points and exit vectors.
"Peter,, why did you abandon us?"
"Peter, why didn't you save us?"
"Leave me alone…" muttered under his throat Peter while he slept. Fortunatelly nobody heard it talk while he was sleeping, well, nobody except Ratcatcher who saw him with curious and apologetic eyes.
---
After a few hours of sleep for everyone, dawn finally crept through the canopy in thin green ribbons. Birds called in small, sun-bright bursts and the mist from the jungle lifted like a curtain. The camp folded up with the quick, methodical precision of soldiers who know that delay invites death. Packs were strapped, weapons checked, and harnesses cinched. They moved as a unit, low and efficient, the jungle swallowing their shapes as they headed in land toward Valle del Mar.
Midway through the last loop of re-stowing gear, Bloodsport's MTS chirped—soft and incongruous among the leaves. Waller's tone snapped into their earpieces so cold it felt like a slap.
"Task Force X," she said. "You have an additional mission directive. We've located Colonel Rick Flag. He's been taken by the enemy."
"Rick Flag?" Bloodsport's voice cut like a blade pulled from its sheath. He squared his shoulders and his eyes narrowed. "Flag? I know him."
Waller's voice, clipped and functionally sympathetic, slid back into the feed. "Yes. Flag. You and he served in special forces in Qurac, the operation that took down Avral Kaddam. He was the one who initially recommended you."
Bloodsport's jaw tightened; muscle knotted at his temple. He stared at the canopy as if the leaves might spell answers. A dark history had folded around that name—old ops, blurred loyalties, favors traded in quiet hallways.
"You had other operatives in Corto Maltese and didn't tell us?" he demanded, raw edge cutting through the question. The implication—of secrecy, of expendable assets—sat sour on everyone's tongue.
"There was no tactical advantage to telling you then," Waller replied, voice colder than the river water they'd left behind. "Now there is. I've uploaded Flag's last known coordinates to your MTS. Terminate his captors with extreme prejudice. Kill anyone you see. These are dangerous people. Recover Flag before moving on to the city."
Silence, then the soft click of Waller ending the transmission. The little chirp that followed was the only witness to the line going dead.
Peacemaker made a performative gasp. "Extreme prejudice, huh? Sounds…peppy." He tried to smile, and it landed false as a funeral bouquet.
Polka-Dot Man's hands stilled, an expression of simple, routed worry crossed his face. "Rick… Flag?" he echoed, as if trying on the name.
Cleo's broad eyes swallowed the information whole. "Is he—" she started, but the words caught like too-rough thread.
"—alive, hopefully," Peter finished for her, the pragmatic cadence his default. He chewed the inside of his cheek while his brain ticked through the logistics—how many captors, extraction points, exit routes. Waller's directive had just reshaped the mission. A rescue meant variables, crossfire, moral failures, and the very real chance of bodies they couldn't bring home.
Bloodsport spat a curse into the undergrowth. "So Waller had assets in-country all along," he snarled. "Typical."
---
They moved silently while folding into the trees—six mismatched predators slipping through vines and roots toward the guerrilla compound. The camp sat in a hollow beneath a ridge: tarps, low huts, a scattering of riffles and crates, lanterns doused for night. The MTS blipped the last known ping; Flag's signal pulsed like a slow heartbeat. They stopped a few yards out, pressed flat against damp leaves, and watched.
"That's where they're holding Flag," Bloodsport said.
"Okay, what's the plan?" Peter whispered, already scanning the roofs and eaves.
Peacemaker rubbed his hands together, his eyes bright behind the Chrome helmet. "The plan is to go inside and kill everyone." He said it like a homework assignment. "What? Nothing like a bloodbath to start the day."
Peter's mouth quirked. "And you call yourself Peacemaker? What a joke."
"Precisely," Peacemaker replied, cheerful as ever. "I cherish peace with all my heart. So I don't care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it."
Peter's jaw tightened. "No. Not necessary. There are too many of them. I say we go stealth. I take the high points — rooftops, scaffolds — while you take the ground. It's more quiet and a lot more faster that way."
"When did I die and make you leader?" Bloodsport grunted.
"In the moment I proposed a plan and you didn't. Shut the fuck up and do it, Sport." Peter surged forward like a shadow unpeeling from a tree, hands already searching for purchase on bark. He flattened to the trunk, then moved up and along the eaves, silent as a thought.
"Wow," Peacemaker murmured, half impressed. "He really does whatever a spider can."
"Yeah," Cleo breathed, while her cheeks flushed inside her mask. Her attention stayed soft on Peter for a heartbeat before snapping back to the task.
Bloodsport read the lay of the land with a soldier's eyes, then nodded. "Okay. Follow the kid's plan."
They split.
Peter melted into the upper lines of the compound — a web of tin roofs and catwalks — and began to pick off lookouts and rooftop sentries with quiet efficiency. His moves were surgical: a web strand looped around an ankle, a practiced yank sliding a man off balance and over a low wall where he landed limp but whole; a quick, precise garrote of webbing around an exposed throat rendered another unconscious without a sound.
Below, the rest of Task Force X became ghosts among the huts. Bloodsport and Peacemaker moved with different rhythms.
"Two by the latrine, I silenced them with knives," Bloodsport murmured after a pair of men slid into the mud, faces masked by scarves. He tapped the side of his throat like a metronome. "One by patrol, garrote. Keep your head down."
Peacemaker crouched over a sleeping guard, the chrome of his helmet catching moonlight as he worked. He smirked quietly. "Three, but I got fancy — chokehold, pressure point, slipped a sedative into his bottle. Style points, Bloodsport."
Bloodsport's reply was a hard, humorless laugh. "Style points don't matter when you're dead."
A silent competition threaded through their movements — who could leave fewer sounds, who could strike cleaner. They counted in nods and the tilt of a head, their tally an unspoken ledger of efficiency. Each killed or neutralized figure was another small victory and another chip of the world's weight on their shoulders.
Nanaue moved differently. He slipped between the tents and when a trio of sentries stumbled into view, Nanaue's hands closed on two of them with a strong motion that left no cries behind — only silence. He cradled one and, in an appallingly quiet few seconds, ended the threat by consuming the guerilla soldiers.
Ratcatcher kept to the margins — small, deliberate, and deceptively soft. She carried her rat-caller like a lullaby box, fingers brushing the controls that produced a thin, secretive tone. From the dark the rodents came: a trickle at first, then a river of teeth and tiny feet. They leaked through the tent flaps, threading under pallets and around boots.
Cleo watched with eyes that softened, and then the rats did what they had been taught or trained to do—nibble at the tendons, at the ankles, at exposed throats, biting with quiet precision.
Peacemaker watched her and snorted softly, then turned back to Bloodsport as they exchanged a glance that had teeth. "You see that? She's cute but also silent and deadly. My kind of ally."
Bloodsport's reply was a dry chuckle. "Cute doesn't pay. Efficiency does." He slid past a pair of crates and with a blade as quiet as breath severed the line of a sentry's grip. No one made a sound. Bloodsport's tally ticked in his head: two neutralized, eyes now on the prisoner hut.
Below, Peter kept working in silence. He removed the eyes first—spotters, roof guards, men with rifles trained on approaches. One by one the higher points fell into sleep: webbed ankles, muted knocks on skulls, and a precise throw of a small stun device into a sentry's chest that flattened him mid-breath.
From his high perch, Peter could see the faint glow of an interior lantern through the slats of the hut where Flag was likely held. He angled a line, then another, stretching quiet threads that would guide the team's insertion point and give the ground crew the cover they needed.
The tally between Bloodsport and Peacemaker became a game of low jokes and lower boasts. Peacemaker would find a guard slumped beside an ammo crate and lift a finger like he'd found a prize. "That's four," he whispered, grinning. "Token of peace."
Bloodsport's eyes never left the target. "Five," he replied. "And no misses."
"Six," Peacemaker corrected, voice filled with mischief as they both darted back into shadow.
Peter's focus never left the high points. When gunfire flared—an accidental collision as a sentry stirred and another moved too soon—he was perched above and released a threaded net that wrapped a pair of men and dropped them over a wall. He dropped in to the yard, his heels hardly touching the earth and webbed wrists and threaded mouths when necessary.
The entire action was finished with incredible speed. Thirty, sometimes forty breaths of the compound had been swallowed; lanterns remained half-lit, boots kicked aside, the occasional clatter of a crate. The ground was littered with quiet bodies—men and women who would never raise an alarm.
They converged at the main hut in a slow, formation. Bloodsport knelt first, fingers tracing the latch with the muscle memory of a man who had broken into far too many places. With a muted click, the mechanism gave way. Peacemaker stood behind him, gun drawn but casual, that maddening grin hidden behind his chrome helmet as if he were about to walk into a birthday party, not a firefight.
Ratcatcher crept forward, her movements whisper-soft. The faint hum of her rat-caller buzzed like an insect in her hand, ready to release another wave of her tiny allies if needed. Nanaue crouched behind her, shoulders wide enough to block the doorway, his breathing deep and steady — almost serene for a creature whose idea of stealth was "eat quietly." Peter's mask reflected the glow of a hanging lantern outside the hut, turning his face into a black mirror. He gave a last quick nod, fingers flexing, then grabbed the edge of the wooden door and pulled. The hinges groaned faintly before falling silent, swallowed by the wet jungle air.
Meanwhile, off to the side, Polka-Dot Man was finishing his own version of cleanup. His dots floated out like luminous disease — red, blue, and green spheres that hissed as they hit the bases of guard towers and wooden posts. The air shimmered with soft corrosion before the metal supports simply melted, folding like wax. He wiped sweat from his brow, the dots dissolving back into his skin as if ashamed to have existed.
Peacemaker, walking past the carnage, couldn't help but whistle. "He actually throws polka dots at people," he said, incredulous but oddly impressed.
"I'm sorry it's so… flamboyant," Polka-Dot Man muttered, voice heavy with embarrassment.
Peacemaker shrugged. "Nah, it looks cool. Like… disco death."
"I don't like to kill people," Polka-Dot Man said softly, eyes drifting down. "But if I pretend they're my mom, it's easy."
Peacemaker turned his head slowly toward him, then blinked under his helmet. "...Okay, that's definitely therapy-level shit."
When the last of the bodies hit the dirt and the towers finished collapsing into silent heaps, they regrouped just outside the main tent at the center of the camp. The quiet was thick now — not peace, but the aftermath of violence trying to pretend it was peace.
"Alright," Bloodsport said, voice low as he adjusted his weapon. "Let's do it."
Peter's web-shooter clicked softly as he primed it. Cleo took a breath, Nanaue loomed like a bear ready to charge, and Peacemaker twirled his pistol like a cowboy before settling into position. Together, they pushed through the entrance, weapons raised, ready for the last standoff.
Inside, instead of gunfire or screams, came the faint clink of porcelain.
Colonel Rick Flag sat at a rough wooden table, shirtless but very much alive, sipping tea beside a dark-haired woman in tactical gear. The two of them froze mid-conversation, eyes widening at the sudden intrusion of six armed killers bursting through the flap like a demolition squad.
"...DuBois?" Flag asked finally, setting his cup down.
"Hey, Flag," Bloodsport said, lowering his weapon and pulling off his helmet, trying not to look as embarrassed as he felt.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Flag demanded.
"Waller told us that you were… uh…" Bloodsport hesitated, noticing the teapot, "…Are you drinkin' tea?"
Flag sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "This is Sol Soria. She's the leader of the Freedom Fighters — the resistance trying to take down the current government. They saved my life."
"Oh… wow," Bloodsport muttered, guilt creeping into his tone as the realization dawned.
Behind him, Peter blinked. Peacemaker's posture faltered slightly, as if the concept of "not the enemy" was genuinely confusing to him. Ratcatcher's hand dropped from her rat-caller, eyes widening behind her mask. Polka-Dot Man's mouth opened wordlessly as he glanced around at the smoking remains of the camp.
Nanaue, for his part, stood idly in the doorway, a half-eaten arm still hanging from his hand. He looked at everyone else and, after a pause, dropped it quietly to the floor.
Sol Soria rose from her chair, her calm gaze slicing through the awkward silence like a blade. "Why did my people not alert me of your arrival?" she asked, her voice both measured and dangerous.
Peter stepped forward, scratching the back of his neck, his tone sheepish. "Umm… it's a funny story, actually."
He looked around for help. Bloodsport sighed and crossed his arms. Peacemaker whistled low, trying to act casual. Cleo offered a nervous little wave. Polka-Dot Man mumbled something about "structural weaknesses."
Everyone nodded awkwardly in unison.
Flag blinked. "...What the hell did you do?"
Peacemaker gestured vaguely toward the smoking perimeter of the camp. "Let's just say your, uh, friends put up one hell of a fight."
Peter groaned, dragging a hand down his mask. "Yeah, about that… you might wanna sit back down, because explaining this is gonna take a while."
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