Modern military operations expose personnel to acute psychophysiological escalation states in which seconds—not minutes—determine whether stress resolves adaptively or cascades into secondary neurological, vascular, and musculoskeletal injury. Existing systems overwhelmingly detect harm after damage has already propagated, relying on delayed reporting, sedative pharmacology, or post-event medical intervention that is mismatched to the temporal dynamics of combat stress and physical engagement. C.E.R.B.E.R.U.S. (Combat-Emergency Response for Biological Escalation & Resilience Under Stress) introduces a constraint-locked, non-sedating biological first-aid architecture designed to operate exclusively within this narrow pre-clinical window. Extending the C.H.I.L.D. detection and escalation framework into the biological domain for adult combat operators, CERBERUS integrates multi-modal physiological sensing, local edge-AI eligibility detection, and microneedle-mediated peptide delivery to buffer acute injury-analog physiological cascades at onset—before irreversible amplification occurs. CERBERUS does not seek to modify behavior, cognition, mood, or performance. It explicitly rejects enhancement, compliance, and command-directed biomedical control. Instead, it reframes acute stress and high-load combat exposure as time-critical biological insults requiring immediate containment. Within this framing, peptide signaling is leveraged as a transient molecular buffer: stabilizing neurovascular integrity, attenuating inflammatory overactivation, preserving autonomic balance, and limiting secondary connective-tissue microdamage incurred during rapid locomotion, load bearing, and close-quarters engagement. The architecture is deliberately conservative and fail-silent. Actuation is operator-bound, event-limited, and gated by deterministic physiological thresholds with silent state logging rather than alerts. All biological effects are bounded by hard temporal ceilings, cumulative exposure caps, and explicit negative-capability constraints that structurally prohibit continuous modulation, rolling extension, or population-level control. Machine-learning components are restricted to eligibility flagging only and are barred from decision authority. This paper presents the full CERBERUS specification, including: molecular mechanisms of candidate buffering peptides; adult baseline-normalized stress biomarkers and fusion logic; microneedle physics and dermal pharmacokinetic interpretation; closed-loop control philosophy; preclinical validation cascades; and ethical, regulatory, and governance boundaries. The result is a system intentionally designed to be powerful, auditable, and difficult to misuse—not by policy alone, but by architecture. Modern Warfare evolves faster than the human nervous system and musculoskeletal system can adapt. When escalation exceeds biological tolerance, damage accumulates silently—before awareness, before command, before care. History shows that such failures do not announce themselves until they are irreversible. CERBERUS exists for the interval where war outruns physiology and intervention arrives too late. Please refer to Version 2 for the most accurate, up-to-date, and secure version of this work. Conceptual origin by Dustin Sprenger, original formulation by Perplexity AI, further reformulation, abstract, and Conceptual Architecture prompt by OpenAI GPT5.2. Conceptual Architecture (Diagram) made with Eraser.io. CERBERUS is released under CC0 1.0 to maximize accessibility, auditability, and defensive reuse. Its conceptual scope is explicitly protective: harm detection, constraint enforcement, interdiction, and de-escalation in civilian contexts. The framework is oriented toward preventing coercion, abuse, and irreversible harm, not toward enhancing human lethality, endurance, or dominance. CERBERUS is designed as a limiting system—one that inserts friction, visibility, and refusal where harm would otherwise proceed unchecked. While CC0 permits unrestricted reuse, the trust intent of CERBERUS is framed around mitigation and limitation of harm, not the enhancement or amplification of human performance, lethality, or endurance. Applications that repurpose the framework for supersoldier programs or offensive human optimization constitute a divergence from that intent and should not be interpreted as endorsed extensions of this work. Such uses break conceptual continuity even if they remain legally permissible. CERBERUS exists to constrain harm, not to industrialize it; any deployment that accelerates violence or human weaponization reflects a departure from both the ethical framing and the authorial purpose of the framework.