In the simmering tension of a team-building day designed to forge bonds and build trust, a simple challenge was meant to separate leaders from followers. Only one could emerge victorious. That was the rule, the unyielding code of a contest that was meant to be nothing more than a spirited exercise. But in the world of Casualty, even the best intentions can go horribly, catastrophically wrong.

The first one to return would be declared the winner. The rest? They could give up if they chose to — and that was fine, because in this twisted game, second place meant loser. One man, chest puffed with pride, declared himself boss, convinced that victory made him a leader beyond dispute. But sometimes, pride is the most dangerous poison of all.

In the cold, brisk woods, tension crackled between the colleagues like dry twigs ready to snap. Harsh words flew, with insults about leadership and respect, barbs flung over who was worthy of being in charge. Meanwhile, hidden somewhere in those same woods, a young woman’s desperate voice cried out for help.

“Can you hear me? My name is Kelly Foster — please, I’m lost in Sherman Wood!”

Her voice was faint, edged with terror, as she realized no one was coming to rescue her.

Back at the base, there was a flash of uneasy relief: there seemed to be no permanent damage to Kelly’s blood vessels or soft tissue — so far, she was lucky. Her wrist was in rough shape, though, after a misstep in the forest’s labyrinthine paths. No one could figure out which direction she had taken; the organizers had handed out random routes like a cruel lottery, leaving fate to the hands of chance.

A voice cracked through the tension: “This was a stupid idea. Lucky dip — ridiculous.”

Then a frustrated cry — someone demanding to know if anyone had any clue where she might have ended up. But in this every-person-for-themselves challenge, even compassion was hard to find.

Kelly’s fear rose to panic. Alone, scared, her voice echoed: “Help! I’m here!”

One by one, colleagues began to realize something was wrong. But even then, bitterness surfaced. Mr. Fris, wrist freshly splinted, complained that the so-called “Golden Boy” was only out here to humiliate him. The resentment boiled over, revealing that this team-building session was a thinly disguised contest of ego.

“Leading an army,” he spat, “is about being respected — not liked.”

Elsewhere, a technician tracked Kelly’s phone signal to an unexpected location. She was nowhere near where she should have been. Someone muttered, “Told you women can’t tell left from right,” a careless jab in a moment where lives were hanging by a thread.

And then came the blame game, thrown like grenades in the forest air. The “team-building” plan, so innocent on paper, had turned lethal.

Kelly’s ordeal took a sinister turn when rescuers found her — caught in a brutal animal trap, her left leg mangled, a displaced tibia fractured in the metal jaws. Blood pooled, tissue shredded, and infection threatened to finish what the trap had started. A member of mountain rescue shook his head in disbelief; the traps weren’t supposed to be there. Weren’t they illegal?

Kelly, quaking with fear, heard a calm voice: “My name is Dylan. I’m the doctor. We’re going to get you out.”

Twenty milligrams of morphine coursed through her veins, dulling the agony. But time was critical — the pulse in her injured leg was dangerously weak.

“Breathe for me, Kelly. Deep breaths.”

The doctors worked quickly, spotting angry, blotchy marks on Kelly’s hands — an ominous sign of hogweed burns. Nature itself seemed to conspire against her.

As they freed her from the trap, Dylan calmly told her, “You’ll go to sleep now. When you wake up, you’ll be safe.”

They stabilized her as best they could, struggling to keep her airway clear, fighting to preserve her leg from the worst-case scenario of amputation.

Back among the others, a colleague admitted the truth behind his desperation to win. He had rigged the challenge. Manipulated the routes. Twisted the odds to ensure he’d come out on top.

“I just wanted to show everyone I was the boss,” he confessed, his words dripping with shame.

His pride had pushed them all into chaos, driven Kelly into a horror she could never have imagined.

Meanwhile, Kelly, barely conscious, gasped for breath. Something was very wrong. Her chest burned with a pain that sent fear through the medical team. A blood clot, a pulmonary embolism, was their worst fear. Her heart stopped, the monitors screaming, the world crashing into frantic CPR.

“Come on, Kelly! Stay with us!”

An X-ray was rushed, blood tests drawn, the trauma team roaring commands in a desperate race against time.

Kelly’s life, once so ordinary, now balanced on a knife’s edge.

And all the while, the bitter confession played on repeat:

“You should be in there — not her.”

Anger seared through the group. If only he hadn’t cheated. If only he’d let things happen fairly. The map had been fixed, and the price was Kelly’s shattered body and her teetering pulse.

As the doctors fought to revive her, guilt raged through the team like wildfire. One by one, they realized how far they’d all been pushed in the name of competition, how fragile their bonds truly were.

Kelly’s eyes fluttered open, barely alive, but alive nonetheless. There would be months of recovery, surgeries, therapy. She feared she might never walk again. A colleague tried to comfort her, awkward and broken:

“I only set this up because I wanted to impress you. To give myself a chance to ask you out.”

Kelly stared, raw disbelief painting her face.

“All this…for a date?”

He nodded, crushed.

“You had me from day one, you idiot.”

A tragic smile broke through the pain, but it could not erase the horror of what had happened.

Kelly’s voice, weak, cracked with dread: “My chest hurts.”

Oxygen masks, IV lines, more morphine. Her condition was hanging by a thread.

A nurse examined the blistering rash on a colleague’s hands. Suspicion burned bright: the hogweed rash was in an area only near Kelly’s accident site.

“Were you in the woods a few days ago? Are you connected to this mess?”

Denials, defensive glares, and a silence that said more than any confession.

And then a final, crushing moment: Kelly went into cardiac arrest. Her body, battered beyond belief, could not take it. The doctors fought for every beat of her heart, compressions driving oxygen through her failing body.

“It should have been you in that trap — not her.”

The words hung in the air like a death sentence.

In that moment, the team realized that no amount of games, no leaderboards, no corporate bonding could undo what had been done. A day meant to unite them had nearly destroyed them all.

And as Kelly clung to life, every one of them knew that this “survival challenge” had spiraled into a deadly battle of ego, secrets, and the price of trying to be “the boss.”a