gun, dodge, and bury grenades in the ground as mines. Plot Haze begins with Sergeant Shane Carpenter, a veteran Mantel soldier in a dystopian future where he was enticed by Mantel Propaganda and dropping out of college, arriving in the Boa region of South America, where Mantel troops have been dispatched to liberate the country from a rebel group known as "the Promise Hand" which is accused of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity by Mantel's mass media division. Shane meets his squad-mates: Sergeant Morgan Duvall, who is the leader of the squad, Lance Corporal Teare, and Corporals' Peshy and "Watchstrap". Teare is quickly berated and dismissed by Duvall for not taking his requisite dose of Mantel's performance-enhancing drug Nectar. Over a series of missions fighting for Mantel, Shane's Nectar administrator fails to drug him on several occasions, causing him to witness a number of disturbing events: he hears screams (implied to be Duvall torturing someone) which Duvall dismisses as "just an animal," he has a conversation with a pilot that had received no wounds from a crash and yet dies mysteriously. Duvall doesn't seem to care about this discrepancy. Shane sees the dead bodies of civilian factory workers that Duvall's squad massacred in an earlier mission because, as Duvall states to Shane, "an empty hand is just a grip away from holding a weapon." Eventually, Shane and his squad are sent to capture Gabriel "Skincoat" Merino, the leader of the Promise Hand who supposedly eats his enemies and wears a long coat made of their skins. Shane captures Merino, only to find that he's an old man who's only wearing a sweater vest which Merino states is "100% cotton." Merino debates with Shane about war and tells him, "My Friend, there are two sides to every war. Are you sure you're on the right side?" Duvall arrives and begins torturing Merino, cutting off one of his fingers. After entering the helicopter to return to base, Duvall brands Shane as a wuss and thinks he'll become an 'ape' like the rest of the rebels. When Duvall starts trying to cut off both of Merino's hands, Shane pulls a gun on the rest of his squad, leading to a shootout which causes the helicopter they're in to crash. After crashing into a swamp, Shane tries to contact Mantel about the incident and his inability to administer his dose of Nectar but