Then the round ended. Victory screen. Scoreboard: Wraith, 24 kills, 3 deaths. Crush, 15 and 12, with a sarcastic “nice stock hit” in the chat.

The snow fell in thick, silent curtains over the ruined Russian village of Stalingrad. For a moment, Private First Class Alexei Volkov—known to his squad simply as "Wraith"—allowed himself to feel the cold. Then the timer hit zero, and the world became noise.

The game’s audio was perfect—the clink of the magazine seating, the shhk of the bolt slapping home, the distant crump of a cooked grenade. No killcam. If you died, you died confused, staring at a gray screen while a German helmet rolled past your frozen corpse.

The shout came through his headset, tinny and desperate. Wraith didn’t look. He’d memorized the map, Toujane , years ago. Every rubble pile, every blown-out window, every alley that funneled panicked soldiers into kill zones. His Kar98k rested in his gloved hands, iron sights already tracking the familiar crack in the eastern wall.