Chapter 32
I entered the mission portal, and immediately found myself on the edge of a large, red rock canyon, standing under the glow of the full moon.
It was an Earth based model today. Breaker regularly liked to tell us when something looked just like Earth, so I had long since learned to recognize the terrain, which was unique to the Mars or Moon or Neptune missions, and very different to our simulated and modified environment on Saturn.
That was all well and good, but why it was an Earth environment was the far more interesting story.
I knew this battle. I’d read about it, I’d played both sides of it in simulators, I’d seen recovered video footage, and I’d studied it.
It was then that I thought to glance down at my hands, confirming my next suspicion.
I wasn’t in a Shinka unit at all. My simulator had changed my suit into that of a Ghul, though the functionality appeared to emulate the usual Shinka standard.
Considering we’d not yet captured a Ghul intact enough to study them, the programmers likely didn’t know enough to redesign the HUD for accuracy.
That wasn’t the point anyway. The point was that I was an enemy unit in this scenario, which meant I was about to have a fight on my hands.
“Welcome, Hunters.” Professor Kitagawa said through the COMM line.
“As you’ve likely noticed by now, your unit has been reprogrammed to take on the appearance of a Gehennan Ghul.
In this mission, you will be attempting to hunt down a singular Shinka unit as it attempts to infiltrate your base.
This Shinka will have unknown weaponry, and stopping it before it reaches striking distance of the reactor is imperative to the survival of your nation.
Good luck, soldier.” The transmission ended, and I shook my head.
That was vague and a bit dishonest. If this was the mission I thought it was, which I was quite certain it was, then this was the battle where a soldier got in a Shinka heavily equipped with explosives that was supposed to be controlled remotely, and he made his way through an army of Gehenna sentry machines to destroy the primary reactor of the Gehennan base.
Neither he, nor his machine, survived the blast, but the amount of damage done to a critical power source for Gehenna was enough to turn the tide of the war.
But back then, the sentries were simplistic machines using artificial intelligence to pick up threats, and the human piloted tanks, drone ships, and cross wings that guarded the reactor hadn’t had a chance against a manned Shinka.
If this server was about to populate with twenty Ghuls and one Shinka, then that pilot was about to get severely traumatized.
I started cycling through my mission briefing materials while the server populated.
I was one of four at the moment, so I had a minute to browse the materials.
Seba was already loaded, listed among my allies.
No sign of Breaker, which was the usual for him.
I didn’t think he’d ever shown up for a VR mission within the first ten minutes.
I didn’t know what the hell he did that took him so long, but he wasn’t one to put a lot of effort into this whole thing.
One at a time, more names populated, covering soldiers ranked three-through seventeen. But there was one name that was conspicuously absent from the list that I had expected to see just as early as I was.
Where’s Vann?
Where is…
One single little mouse, and twenty hungry tigers.
They’d picked him to be the martyr, and they picked everyone else to rip him apart.
Interesting.
My grin was involuntary.
So, so interesting.