Cammy White: Quiet Storm by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Cammy-White-Quiet-Storm-1271778062

Cammy White: Quiet Storm ANIMATION

The Green Silence

The first sign that something was wrong was not the footprint.

It was the absence of birds.

Cammy White paused at the edge of the ravine and listened. The wilderness stretched around them in layered greens and grays—pine and moss, stone and wet leaf—but the air was hollow, as if sound itself had been skimmed away. No chittering. No wingbeats. Even the insects seemed to be holding their breath.

She lifted two fingers.

The team halted without a word.

“Smell that?” John Briggs murmured behind her, rifle slung low. His voice was gravel-soft, trained to be swallowed by the forest.

Cammy inhaled. Damp soil. Resin. Cold water far below. And something else—thin, metallic, like rain hitting old iron.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s watching us.”

A laugh came too quickly from Lena Ortiz, their tracker. “Everything’s watching us. That’s what forests do.”

Cammy turned her head just enough to meet Lena’s eyes. “This one knows we’re armed.”

They moved again, careful now. The wilderness had been chosen precisely because it was empty—no villages within fifty kilometers, no satellites piercing the canopy cleanly. An extraction gone wrong had forced them to ground, and then the hunt had begun.

Cammy could feel it as a pressure along her spine, the old training humming awake. She had been shaped for pursuit and evasion both, taught to read silence like a second language. And this silence was fluent.

They reached the river by late afternoon. It slid between stones like a blade sheathed in glass. Briggs knelt, scanning the opposite bank through his scope.

“I don’t see—” he began.

Something rippled behind him.

Not a shape. Not movement as such. More like a bruise appearing on the air.

Cammy was already moving.

“Down!”

The ripple hardened. Briggs was yanked backward, lifted clean off the ground. His scream cut short as the thing wrapped him in a shimmer, folding him inward as if space itself had learned how to bite.

Cammy struck where Briggs had been, heel snapping through empty air. Her kick met resistance for a heartbeat—rubbery, wrong—then nothing.

Briggs hit the ground five meters away, gasping, eyes wide. Blood welled along his shoulder where something had pressed too close.

“What was that?” Lena whispered.

Cammy didn’t answer. She crouched beside Briggs, fingers hovering just above his skin.

“Does it burn?” she asked.

“It’s… cold,” he said. “Like I fell into winter.”

She stood. “It’s testing us.”

“Testing for what?” Lena asked.

Cammy looked at the trees. At the shadows that didn’t quite line up with the sun. “For who notices.”

They retreated upriver, setting perimeter lights that cast overlapping nets of white across the forest floor. Cammy watched the beams slice the darkness into manageable pieces, knowing it was a lie they told themselves. Light only worked on things that agreed to be seen.

Night fell with the suddenness of a slammed door.

They sat around a low fire, flames kept small. Briggs nursed his shoulder. Lena traced patterns in the dirt, trying to make sense of tracks that bent where no animal should bend.

“You’re calm,” Lena said finally, glancing at Cammy. “Too calm.”

Cammy fed the fire a sliver of wood. “It wants us afraid. Fear makes us loud.”

“And you?” Briggs asked. “What does it make you?”

She smiled faintly. “Interesting.”

The thing came for them after midnight.

Cammy felt it before she saw it—not through sight, but through absence again. The perimeter lights flickered where it passed, bending around an unseen mass. Leaves crumpled under pressure that left no shape behind.

“Circle up,” Cammy said softly.

Lena’s breath quickened. “I can’t see it.”

“You’re not meant to,” Cammy replied. “Listen for where the forest lies.”

The fire dimmed as if inhaled. Something brushed Cammy’s arm, intimate as a lover’s fingers. She didn’t flinch.

“Clever,” she murmured. “But you’re curious. That’s a weakness.”

She lunged—not at the brush, but at the shadow it cast wrong. Her strike connected. The air screamed.

The thing recoiled, visible now in fragments: a distortion shaped like hunger, skin folding into itself, eyes—too many—opening and closing along pla
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)