[Purpose/ Significance] Language exists in many aspects of non-traditional security. It can not only become the referent object of securitization, but can also give full play to its rhetoric, cognitive, evaluative and constructive functions to legitimize existential threats, and affect the public support of government policies. An in-depth exploration of the relationship between metaphor scenarios and the current counter-terrorism situations will help to play the important role of metaphor in collecting, screening and judging the counter-terrorism intelligence. [Method/Process] Based on a specialized corpus about non-traditional security news from 52 mainstream media in 12 countries, this study draws on the analytical tools of Wmatrix and semantic network to present the metaphorical scenario as a whole, revealing the metaphorical patterns and their entailments in detail. [Result/Conclusion] The results show that the metaphors concerning crime, war, morality, disease and nature constitute the main metaphorical scenario. In the process of constructing a complex and diverse metaphorical scenario, metaphor exerts its influence by revealing basic features of terrorism, constructing the identity of participants, describing the storyline of polarization and demonization, activating the audience’s cognitive frames and making moral judgements. Finally, it suggests that metaphor indirectly affects the formulation and implementation of counter-terrorism strategies by shaping the cognitive model of the audience, and that exploring metaphor scenarios further in the future is a possible way to expand the scope of non-traditional security research.