Sniper watches through her temporal scope. "We're not alone," she whispers. "We're fighting us ."
The weather array sits at the bottom of a flooded caldera. Water falls upward . Time falls sideways.
"You can't save them all," the echo bubbles.
Chameleon infiltrates the command bunker disguised as a colonel. Inside, he finds a radio playing a conversation between himself and the spy from a future that no longer exists. "You always betray them in the end, Julian."
Drop zone: a phantom beach. The sand is warm, but the shadows are cold and jagged, like broken glass. No birds. No wind. Just the hum of a dying reality.
Sniper raises her scope to her eye, looks back at the island. A fifth figure stands on the shore—a commando made of afterimages, half there, half not. It salutes. Then fades.