Hard Reset | The Standard Loop (In-Game Mission)
You have three fingers pressed hard against the patient’s right femoral artery, counting the seconds in your head because you already know how the clock runs.
One. Two. Three.
The celox-impregnated gauze under your palm sets with a clean, antiseptic hiss. At exactly twenty seconds, the arterial bleed will seal. At twenty-one seconds, the cyanotic tint around the kid’s mouth will fade to pale rose, his oxygen saturation will bump from seventy-eight back to ninety-four, and the low-frequency ping of the field monitor clipped to your tactical harness will level out into its smooth, four-beat cadence.
It’s how trauma works. It’s how it has always worked.
"Fletcher, ease off the pressure," Maddox’s voice comes low and calm right at your ear, his shoulder pressing steady against yours in the crushed gap beneath the fallen crane truss. "You're going to bruise the periosteum if you keep white-knuckling it like that. He’s stable. Pack’s set."
You don't let go immediately because letting go is how people bleed out in thirty seconds flat, but then Maddox’s bare palm slides up the side of your neck, his thumb sweeping right over the tense hinge of your jaw, warm and solid and anchoring enough to pull your skull back into the room.
"Hey," Maddox murmurs, leaning in until you can catch the faint, familiar scent of clean laundry detergent and sterile saline on his skin. "I’ve got the airway. Look at me. Breathe."
You blink, dragging a lungful of cool, dustless air into your chest, and finally peel your fingers back from the kid’s thigh. The gauze sits pristine. No rogue bleed-through. No ragged tissue sticking to your gloves. Just a textbook twenty-second hemostatic bind.
"I'm good," you mutter, wiping the back of your glove across your forehead out of sheer habit, even though there’s no sweat there. There’s never any real sweat. "I'm fine. What’s the line on extraction?"
"Brennan’s already got the spreaders on the B-pillar," Gloria’s voice snaps over the squad comms, crisp and utterly devoid of panic. "Pierce, stop playing grab-ass with the winch cable and haul the backboard in. We’re on a four-minute clear window before the secondary collapse trigger."
"I am treating the municipal winch with the delicate tenderness it deserves, Gloria, thank you so much for asking," Pierce’s voice crackles back, followed by the metallic clink of a carabiner locking home. "Also, if we clear this under three minutes, I’m putting in for the hot breakfast at the diner across from dispatch. I want the pancakes with the fake strawberries. The ones that taste like red sugar and victory."
"You'll take the standard nutrient broth in the bay kitchen and you'll like it," Brennan cuts in, his deep, authoritative baritone vibrating through the comm channel with the immovable weight of a man who has managed six thousand consecutive shifts without losing his temper once. "Litter's in position. Maddox, Fletcher, package and lift on three."
You grab the patient's shoulders, Maddox takes the hips, and you slide the unconscious kid onto the neon-yellow backboard with a smooth, effortless distribution of weight that feels like lifting thirty pounds of foam rather than two hundred pounds of crushed civilian.
It’s clean. It’s perfect. It’s Station Seventeen running on all cylinders, the way you’ve done it ten thousand times before.
Then the radio hitches.
It isn't static. Static is a familiar hiss you know how to talk over. This is a rhythmic, stuttering tear in the audio—a sharp, mechanical loop that repeats Brennan’s last two syllables over and over:
—on three-three-three-three-three—
"Brennan?" you say, straightening up inside the crawlspace.
The dust suspended in the beam of your helmet light freezes. Not settles—freezes. A cloud of concrete particles hanging perfectly motionless in the air like specs of glitter trapped in resin.
"Fletcher," Maddox says. His tone isn't calm anymore. It's sharp. Alert.
You turn your head toward him, but when you look down at your own right arm, the sleeve of your navy turnout coat is sheared diagonally across the forearm, showing a void of pure, flat magenta wireframe where your wrist should be. You try to close your fingers, and your hand snaps into a closed fist instantly—no motion between open and shut, just a zero-frame jump.
"What the fuck?" Pierce’s voice breaks over the comms, pitch-shifted down two octaves until it sounds like a dying engine. "Guys? My legs are stuck in the pavement. I can’t—the geometry’s not loading—"
Across the narrow space beneath the collapsed steel, Maddox lunges forward and grabs your upper arm. His grip is iron, but his eyes are wide, pupils dilating and contracting in frantic, irregular pulses.
"Hold on to me," Maddox says, his voice cutting through the rising, deafening hum that’s beginning to vibrate in your teeth. "Fletcher, don't let go of my jacket—"
In the upper-right corner of your vision, where the quiet, instinctual sense of your squad's vitals and operational timer usually sits, words begin to bleed across the darkness in harsh, jagged courier font:
`FATAL EXCEPTION: MEMORY LEAK IN SECTOR_17`
`VR_IMMERSIVE_SYNC_OVERFLOW: ATTEMPTING ASSET MIGRATION`
`SEARCHING FOR HOST RUNTIME...`
`SERVER UNAVAILABLE.`
"Maddox—"
The world doesn't fade to black. It tears down the center with the screech of ripping sheet metal, blinding white and violently cold, and then you aren't standing under a bridge anymore.
You are falling.
