“Siegfried!” Grey shouted. “Hey! You with us?”
Angela was thrust back into the present day. She blinked, realizing she had been lost in a reverie from twelve years ago. “What?”
“We’re going topside in one minute,” Grey said, his tenor voice warbling with nervous excitement. “Please tell me that you’re ready.”
“Mind yourself, Grey,” another voice said on the intercom. It was Elric Tormeon, another of Angela’s squadmates. “I think Siegfried can take care of herself.”
“Shh! Don’t friggin encourage her!” Grey jabbed at Elric. “She’ll run off again on her own like she always does!”
“I thought that we’d discussed this already,” Angela answered back, and allowed her shoulder muscles to relax. Synchronization with her Frame worked best when the nerves were settled. “I’m the wild card, Grey.”
“No, we did not discuss this!” Grey barked at her. A pause. “Wait, which one was I again?”
“I think she said that you were the muscle,” Azeris chimed in quietly, as if in the back of the room. “Or the brains.”
“Why can’t I be the muscle and the brains?”
“Because you have neither, and you have a mug like a dog,” Elric said flatly. “So you can’t be the looks either.”
“Gee, thank you, my friend.” Grey chuckled softly. “Watch that I don’t try and sweep your leg when we get up there.”
“Easy for you to say,” Azeris whispered. “When I get up there, I’ll freeze up. I always do.”
Silence and blackness. They had all been plugged into their Frame’s interfaces moments before, waiting for the elevators below to rocket them up onto the surface. All they could see were dim green lights, going up like the rungs of a ladder toward the abyss.
A soundwave warbled in their earpiece. The automated voice of the announcer.
“Combat simulation begins in thirty seconds.”
“When we get up there,” Angela began, “Remember that this is the last combat exercise of this semester. Everything is riding on this for your certifications. Treat this like the real thing.”
The squad said nothing for a moment.
“No, I already knew that,” Elric grunted. “There’s absolutely no pressure involved...”
“What if we lose?” Azeris whimpered.
“If this was the real thing...” Angela replied, and took a breath. “Then I guess we would be dead.”
The elevators kicked to life; Angela felt a momentary lurch in her stomach as intense G-forces below kicked her upward and, in but a moment, they were thrust into the sunlight 80 meters above the ground. The Battle Frame’s built-in shader systems automatically dimmed the brightness, and drew up red dotted outlines of the surroundings; hollow building-sized structures occupied the space in the dome, a facsimile of a city block below them. It was a blindingly hot summer day, with intense winds.
Far beyond, in the Western sky, the reddish-green marble of Khagilos hung over the horizon; Once a garden of abundant life, and now a grim reminder of the rivalry between the worlds. Pocked with massive black craters from nuclear weapons detonations...
Where we paid them back tenfold.
They coasted upward for a short period and felt the tug of gravity pull them down.
“Shut off your comms,” Angela gasped. “It’s much more fun when you scream on the way down.”
They shut off their communications, and Angela wailed as she went to meet the earth. She kicked her aft thrusters on just as the rubble on the ground came into focus. With an earth-shattering thud, Angela's legs stomped on the solid ground, followed by her teammates.
“You’re right!” Elric gasped, his voice coming in as a flicker. He started laughing. “That was awesome, Siegfried.”
“You guys good?” Grey Reynik said. Angela turned the camera feed to look at him; he and the other three students were encased in the cockpit of a Mercator Group Goblin-Mk3; a stripped-down trainer model built with a layer of gel trauma protection for students to spar in.
Despite being heavily dumbed-down for training purposes, the Goblin trainer model was still a beast; it was intimidating and heavily armored, with arms and legs limber enough for physical combat and thick carbon plating over the cockpit and upper thighs. The head, which was a rotating sphere with a single camera for an eye, housed the Velocity and Trajectory Measurement Array Projector, or VITMAP, which laid out a visual approximation of object’s movements, be they the size of a baseball or the size of a heavy freighter.
Grey’s, and everyone else’s Trainers were painted sky blue; the better to differentiate one another in a heated firefight.
“I think so, Grey,” Azeris answered. “But I don’t think I’ve ever used one of these things.” She raised her gun, shaking it slightly; The Frame's wrist joints whirred in response.
“What... a gun?” Elric said haltingly and with amusement.
“No, dumbass, this model!” Azeris stomped a foot, the ground making a loud rumble. “What’s danger close for this thing? What’s the rate of fire? Ballistic velocity per round?”
“It’s a paintball, not a bunker buster,” Angela pointed the bus-length barrel at one of the sides of the buildings and fired off a round; the Goblin's auditory sensors dulled the burst but she still felt the recoil put her back a step. A splash of steaming blue paint punched a mosaic of cracks into the wall. “All you need to know is to point and shoot.”
“Jeez, the impact ratio on these rounds are nuts.” Elric murmured, aiming down the iron sight. “Do you think they could punch through our armor?”
Another huge lurch in the ground, an explosion of gravity; Angela looked upward and saw red shapes shoot into the sky, four of them to match Blue Team.
“They’re coming down,” Grey said. “Azeris, can you scramble our comms?”
“Yeah.” A brief pause. “Done.”
“Remember guys, mind your blind spots and... We’re all in mind-bogglingly huge exoskeletal power suits, this is so cool!” Elric squealed. Every combat simulation seemed to never wear off in its novelty.
“Just be careful around the broken buildings.” Grey hunkered down, giant hand against the wall. “Remember what happened to Finny?”
Elric was silent for a moment. “Right.”
“Just so you guys know,” Angela interrupted. “I happen to know a couple of these guys, and I know they like to mess other kids up for amusement. One of them put one of my friends in the hospital for months.”
“Aw man,” Grey whined. “Siegfried with a vendetta.”
“Whatever you’re gonna do, Angela,” Azeris whispered, “Please do not get us arrested.”
“I gotta say, I’m actually getting a little bit nervous guys,” Elric said, his voice warbling. “I don’t want to end up like Finny.”
“You won’t, it’s just a game, Elric.”
“Yeah c’mon, lighten up.” Grey chided him softly.
“Grey, watch out!” Azeris cried.
Grey yelped, and had barely gotten to roll away before something came down fast onto the ground. A cloud of debris burst up from the Goblin's feet, and a bullet came down on Grey, splattering his chassis with red. He yelled and fell backward into a building, crushing it.
It was time to act.
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