Bang. Bang. Bang.

Six shots echoed over the silent hills of the Mexico desert, where the the man resided with the two boys still. It had now been a year since Kaz had left and while he had reformed the MSF with the new name of the Diamond Dogs, Ocelot drilled Tretij and Zack until the could barely take anymore. They still heard from the man twice a week and he would be calling any time now with another update. The boys knew that the time of joining him was getting close, so this torment they went through was for their own good. They never complained, just grew stronger and used to whatever the man threw at them and then moved onto something new. Almost a year later, they were well rounded in almost every skill the Russian-American had to to teach them and would make very formiddable foes.

"Again," the man said with his southern drawl as Zack finished firing off his revolver. "Reload."

The boy, now the age of fifteen with shoulder length white hair dyed rainbow on the ends, swung the chamber of the gun open and reloaded it with efficiency that would have made even a hunter's head spin. He snapped it closed, drew the drum back and took aim once again at the target far down on the end of the range.

"Fire."

The indentical six shots rang out in the air, the bullets flew down the path to hit in the red circles at the very end. The man held his gloved hand up once he had emptied the chamber again so Zack lowered his arms, spun the revolver and handed it back to his lover.

"How'd he do, Tretij?" the man asked the red haired boy as he holstered his pistol. The kitsune wearing youth hovered back to where they were, stopping next to Zack.

"All shots hit the center of the target except for the very last one," he replied, his rough voice muffled by the mask. Over the last few months, the boy had developed his psychokenetic abilities to hover, lift things and see into people's minds only as he desired to. He had taken Ocelot's training with the mask seriously and outside emotions no longer bothered him.

"Damn it," Zack muttered, rubbing his eyes. He'd had this problem constantly for the last year and he just couldn't seem to get that last shot to hit. It was like something inside of him was trying to prevent it from happening.

"Zack, calm down," Ocelot told the boy, smiling warmly as he lowered his hands and looked at him. "You're getting better. You run a little stiff through your shoulders still, but you should be glad that the kick isn't knocking you off balance anymore."

"I'll be happy when that last shot actually hits," he mumbled and Ocelot smirked, shaking his head. The boy was too much like Kaz, sometimes. But at least he could shoot better; the last time he'd drilled Kaz, he barely made a decent record.

"Let's take a break. It's almost time for Kaz's call anyway," the man said so the teenagers nodded and headed into the ranch house with him.

The place had become pretty quiet and much more organized in the commander's absence, thought Ocelot wasn't quite sure why. Maybe it was because they felt less like a family and more like a unit without the other man around. Or maybe the boys just realized that they weren't going to have their own rooms whenever they joined back up wtih the unit so they worked on minimalizing everything. It wasn't because Kaz had been messy; hell if anything, the man had a slight case of OCD. A crooked table runner would send him into mild spasms until it was fixed. Whatever it was, it made the place a lot easier to manage. The man watched as Zack tackled his adopted brother and the red head whined, before they started wrestling in the middle of the living room floor.
It never failed to amaze him that as soon as training was over, they went right back to being teenagers.
He heard the familiar beeping of the radio in the room down the hall and both teenagers perked up at the sound, Tretij getting off of Zack's back and they all proceeded down the hall to the room where Ocelot clicked on the radio and picked up the speaker microphone and clicked the side.

"You're early calling, Kazuhira," he told the man, the smile in his voice very appearant. "Did you miss us that badly?"

Not a casual call this time, the urgency in the man's voice made the boys move closer and the smile fade from the older man's face. We've been followed for the last three days. Over half of my unit has gone missing.

"Evidence?"

Nothing except dead bodies, mutilated. Every time we stop, someone else goes missing. We haven't stopped moving until now. There's a thick fog in the area and we can't see anything ahead of us.

"Fog in Afghanistan?" Zack asked, skeptically and looked at his brother. He could sense that Tretij was feeling the exact same thing. Something about that was incredibly wrong.

"How many men are left in your unit?" Ocelot asked, reaching for a notepad that was on the corner of the desk and a pen that rested on top of it.

Six, we lost four the last time we stopped. Kaz sounded exhausted and on edge. There was a weird crackling coming through the speaker that he clearly couldn't hear.

"Give me your coordinates." Ocelot wrote down the numbers that Kaz read off of whatever he had in his hand. 33.9392 N, 67.7100 E. "You're right on the border of Kabul? Kaz that's dangerous. You know the Soviets are there."

I'm more concerned about whatever has been killing my men. We're not equiped f- There was screaming in the background, followed by static.

"Kaz?" Ocelot called out but the man didn't answer. The sound of a struggle caught him and then a scream, before silence. "Kazuhira!"

Zack's heart immediately sank as Ocelot put the microphone down and turned the radio off. Silence after that meant something bad had happened and that fog was still bothering him. He'd seen something similar in his dreams over the last couple of months. A swirling grey cloud with flecks of blue and green...a single neon green butterfly...

Ocelot suddenly stood up and ripped the paper off of the notepad, before turning the them as he folded it and Zack got to it before he did. "We're going there."

"Grab your gear. I'll call for a friend to pick us up," he confirmed, putting the coordinates in his pocket before he left the room, the two boys following behind him and going to the basement where the armaments were.

Zack knew this day had been coming, he didn't know is would be this soon. IF his dreams were really visions, then a light was going to split apart the darkness that was about to start surrounding them. What that light represented - what the darkness meant - he couldn't be sure. He stripped off the blue jeans and t-shirt, reaching into the locker to take out the uniform that belonged to their new unit. He tightened up the laces on the boots, watching as Tretij pulled on a black bodysuit, leaving his feet bare and his hands ungloved. He wrapped a red shawl around his shoulders to further neep the negative energy out of his body where it could get in through his neck. The blonde finished tying his boots and put his foot on the floor before doing the other one and then went over to the gun cabinet, taking out the revolver just as Ocelot came into the room so he tossed two of them to the man who caught them.
He then holstered two on his lower back and put a combat knife in his boot on the right leg. He put a shotgun on his back and an ammo belt around his waist that had pouches on the back for grenades and anything else. Mantis didn't need weapons, his kenetic powers were enough and he hovered up off of the floor as to prove a point. Ocelot filled an ammo belt with .38 rounds that had a holster on it and placed it diagonally across his chest. Zack couldn't help but look at his lover for a moment, appreciating the attention to detail as he checked the revolvers and then holstered them.
He really was something to be feared, but appreciated at the same time.

"Pteropus is on his way," the man said finally, breaking the silence as the two boys followed him back up the stairs and out the front door. "I've also called ahead to a remaining unit of ours near the Kabul area. They'll have a couple of stallions waiting for us when we get there. The journey won't be short; four or five days ride tops."

"I'm concerned," Tretij said as they stopped in the living room and Ocelot turned to them. "Not for if we are ready, but I sense a very strong presence in the area that Kazuhira called us from."

"Is it human?" Zack asked, but Tretij shook his head. That was concerning. They'd gained enough intel on Cipher to know that it was led by three particular people with enhanced abilities. "One of the generals of Cipher?"

"Possibly. It is masculine and very unpleasant." Joy.

"You two will need codenames from this point on," Ocelot told them. "Using your real names out in the field will lead to a lot of problems. What about..." For a moment, the man seemed completely at a loss until the boys looked at each other and Tretij shrugged with his arms up. The way his sleeves hung gave him an idea. "Psycho Mantis and Clover Nymph."

"Did you just call me a younger version of him?" Zack asked with a smirk and the man laughed as well as Tretij. "I do love nature though, so I'll pretend you meant I'm some kind of dryad instead of a baby mantis."

"I think that suits you," Tretij teased and Zack swatted him.

"Shut up. You know what happens to bugs. They get swatted."

Ocelot smiled as the two began to fight it out playfully but in the back of his mind, he was very worried. These two would lose their innocence as soon as they were exposed to war, just the way he had. Still, it was nice to see that their bond was this strong because they would need that as they went through what was ahead of them. The sound of helicopter blades caught their attention and the two boys became very serious, so Ocelot did as well.

"Welcome to your first day on the job, Diamond Dogs," Ocelot said to them as he opened the door and the three of them walked out towards the craft just as it landed near the front of their property.

Whatever awaited them out in Afghanistan, it was going to change everything.