[Erick Sanders]

I almost shat myself. My back of my head slammed into the seat as the ship lurched violently and began spinning. It banked, nose first towards Earth’s surface, spinning in an uncontrolled manner. I ground my teeth and glanced out the window to see plumes of black smoke whipping through the air outside. “Fucking smoke!” I swore.

“Relax, it's fake,” Razah said as he strained against his seat harness, fighting the motion of the ship as it spiralled downwards, “All fake. Makes it look like we crashed,” He hissed as the ship violently lurched again.

I swear, I preferred the free fall. Being trapped in a metal cage as it plummeted towards the ground scared the ship out of me more than anything I had ever experience and I had willingly killed myself multiple times.

I closed my eyes as we continued to spin, taking deep breaths, I twisted the dial in my mind a fraction. My perception slowed and the motion of the ship became less violent. I waited, counting to ten. Then counted again. I looked out the window to see hilltops aggressively rising to meet us before shutting my eyes again.

Once again, my head was thrown to the side as the ship abruptly pulled out of the dive and halted its spin. Then it slowed and banked upwards. A gush of wind-battered my face as the back door was thrown open, I looked out to see treetops bruising the underside of the hull. Then someone tossed a large duffle bag from the ship, a second later the trees exploded in flames and force.

“To fake a crash,” Razah yelled over the wind. They didn’t bother closing the doors again, as we rode the hills, dipping down then back up for a minute. The fighters began unbuckling themselves, checking rifles or blades before standing and moving to the open doorway. Jack, Keg and I hastily copied the others.

The ship dipped into a nestle of trees, the shattering of trunks and branches vibrating up from under my feet. Before we even stopped the fighters began jumping. I watched two leap upwards, grabbing tree branches and being climbing. Feeling far from comfortable, I stepped from the ship, focusing on a patch of grass that still moved past below me, I rolled as I landed. Then had to leap aside as Jack and Keg followed, so not to be bowled over by the two larger men.

No one spoke, and it didn’t seem like they needed to. Men and woman around us began pulling short rifles, looking into the trees I could see the climbing pair begin dropping between branches, landing with soft thuds beside us. They shook their heads; one man tapped his head twice and pointed directly behind him. Alaria nodded and everyone began moving.

Jack, Keg and I were out of the loop. This team was incredibly comfortable in their training, spreading out in a confident pattern as they began running towards the Chinese F.O.B. They did not need to vocalise orders. I pumped my legs underneath me to keep up with the others, reminded once again that I needed to work on my cardio.

We mounted a low ridge and followed it for a kilometre, the group keeping their steady pace until the forest ended and we were standing Infront of an open farm field. What used to be a farm at least. Now, a military base was parked in the centre, I could hear the light crashing of waves and the wind held a faint scent of salt and sea spray. A smell I was familiar with. I knew where we were, in the real world this spot was a small town, a black sand beach was less than a kilometre to our left.

The compound was fenced off, rows of beige tents lined the edge of the base with a taller concrete building in the middle.

We only halted for a few moments, hidden in the shade of the thick kanuka trees Alaria began scanning the fence of the compound. When she was done, she slapped her leg and thirty of the fighters began moving into the grass and across the field.

There was no stealth, no slow creep or crawl. They sprinted. I looked back to see the sections remaining ten begin climbing the thickets of the trees they could find. Long rifles hanging across their backs.

“Move,” Razah said, pushing me from behind.

Jack and Keg started off in a sprint like the others, and I followed.

What happens when they see us, we’ll be sitting ducks in the open I thought as I sprinted, the long grass whipping my pants legs. I got my answer just before I was halfway across the open field. A shout of alarm echoed through the camp, and a man appeared on the other side of the fence, staring at us in alarm. He opened his mouth to yell another warning when a rifle boomed from the tree line behind me. The man’s head rocked back as the bullet slammed into his wide eye.

Then more figures appeared behind the fence, rifles beginning to raise in defence. And more cracks sounded off behind me. The figures dropped, someone falling in unison as they were killed. The first of the Grey Scarred fighters were almost at the fence line, when they were ten meters out, they jumped. When I say jumped, it was more like they were fired from cannons. They rocketed through the air, clearing the fifteen-meter high fence with ease.

They sailed through the air, drawing swords and axes mid-flight. One woman even pulled a short scythe from her belt, the blued metal flashing against the sky as she hurled a massive fireball into the base, it exploded in a cloud of destruction. “Christ” I mutter in awe.

Before I looked at the top of the fence, thick razor wire rolled along it. I steeled myself for a painful experience and tensed my legs before pushing off from the ground with everything I had. I too flew through the air, but not as high as the others before me. Instead of aiming to clear the fence with the height and confidence of the rest of the company. I had thrown my shoulders forward with my jump, flattening out in the air I couldn’t take my eyes off the razor wire as It passed under neither my stomach. When I was clear, I bent at the waist, and tucked into a flip, opening out to land in the dirt on the inside of the compound. A grin on my face.

I spun round to see Jack, Keg and Razah behind me, a hole in the fence and Razah’s sword in his hand. He shook his head slightly, “Nice jump,” he said with a mocking tone.

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I’m an idiot, I thought. I hadn’t even thought of just cutting through the fence. Jack and Keg shared a short laugh.

“Pretty too, did you see how straight his legs were, ten out of ten,” Jack said.

Kegs reply was cut short as a Chinese soldier ran, screaming from between two tents. The man’s right arm was missing, along with a chunk of his body where the shoulder would have been. Razah swept his sword lazily and the man fell to the ground in two pieces.

“Always making a mess,” he grunted. “Come on, or there will be none left.” He flashed a wicked grin before disappearing into the alleyway between tents.

An alarm was blearing now, adding to the chaos that we walked into when we emerged into the clear centre of the compound. Hundreds of Chinese soldiers were already dead, many cut in half or by the looks of the man at my feet, ripped In half.

The Grey Scarred Company was tearing through the Chinese soldiers like they were warm butter. Fire splattered the clearing and the surrounding canvas. I watched one particularly large and muscled fighter kick the side of the air-car. It slid fifteen meters through the mud and slammed into the soldier shooting at him, shattering his legs.

A group of fifty soldiers stormed through the doors of the compound and were promptly destroyed by only two of the Grey Scarred fighters. I stood there watching in astonishment at the utter slaughter. I knew I was an efficient killer, especially against lower-ranked soldiers like these, but the strength and speed of the Grey Scarred Company were on an entirely different level. Not a single fighter was injured, and none of them looked to even be breaking a sweat. Alaria stood in the centre of it all, she had a casual grin on her face and her eyes were closed. Every now and then she would call out into the battle and point before a group of Chinese soldiers revealed themselves from between the burning tents or crates, and whenever an unlucky solder made it close to her they were cut to pieces faster than I could follow. I had to slow my perception of time just to see the glass blade she held cut through the air and the soldiers as if they were one and the same.

She has the electromagnetic sense augment, I realised as I watched her direct the battle.

There was nothing for Jack, Keg and I to do and it wasn’t long before the last soldiers still standing turned tail and began sprinting away. They didn’t make it far as three Grey Scarred fighters raised their arm and began spewing fire through the camp. Burning everything and everyone they could see. Their fireballs were triple the size of Cams had been and the heat that radiated from them made me turn my face away.

I watched a long-haired man with four arms step up to the side of the building, and place two metallic hands against the concrete. For a moment I was wondering what he was doing because it looked like he was simply taking a break. Then the concrete cracked with a loud boom. The cracks raced over the walls, pieces crumbling away. A moment later the whole structure collapsed into a cloud of dust and muffled screams.

This is true power, I thought as I watched wide-eyed.

Jacked looked dumbfounded, probably embarrassed that he had ever questioned if only forty of the Grey Scarred would be enough to take this operating base. They could have done it with ten.

I walked through the rubble of the camp as the Grey Scarred dispatched the remaining living soldiers and burnt the last of the tents. Making sure to destroy any and all beds that they found so to deactivate the spawn points. The man who had destroyed the building did the same to the low towers holding the anti-air and then they all just turned around and walked out through the now melted fence, joking amongst each other as though it had just been a bit of fun.

“Fuck,” Jack said, coming up beside me to watch the burning rubble. I could only nod in agreement. How can I get to this level, I wondered.

I kept wondering that as we ran towards the city. After we left the compound, I noticed the snipers from the trees were no longer there, they had silently peeled off and I could just make out their forms as they moved to the coast.

We ran and when I say ‘we ran’ I really mean that we ran. The others looked like they were keeping a relaxed and even pace, but even Jack, who in the real world could run the military two thousand four hundred meter run in less than eight minutes and ran half marathons ‘just for shits and giggles’, was struggling to keep up.

Our legs pumped under us, I had to listen to Jacks and Kegs laboured breathing for just over ten kilometres, knowing mine must have sounded like a wounded animal in comparison.

Twenty minutes later we saw the towering skyscrapers of the city. and ten minutes after we ran into the cavernous streets. We passed through a thin blue haze as we pushed into the city, which I realised must have been the bubble Razah described, used to stop anyone respawning inside the battleground. It seemed like such an essential piece of tech, and it baffled me that the Earth governments didn’t possess it. Around us, the towers were a crumpled mess, and I wondered if I would ever get a chance to see Auckland, not in ruins.

We sprinted past the buildings, every so often one of the Grey Scarred fighters would break off from the pack to slice through any unfortunate soldiers.

We had entered the city from the north-west, and when I managed to gasp out to Jack where we were going, his response was just as haggard, “The hall of life.”

The hall of life was smack bang in the centre of the city, the back up respawn point for anyone within its limits, and the starting point for any Aucklanders. From this direction, the Grey Scarred Company was aiming to hit the fight from the Chinese flank and having seen what they did to the forward operating base, I expected to watch another slaughter.

I was correct in my expectation. Our first sign of aggressive life started as small arms fire from the floors above us. With the speed that we moved we were not easily hit, bullets splattering against the asphalt of the street and pinging off the steel and glass walls. Even when one of the company was hit, the bullet was shrugged off and the pace never slowed. Finally, we rounded a corner to come face to face with a horde of Chinese Soldiers.

There was no hesitation or second thoughts. The Chinese forces were facing us, but unprepared for what came hurtling towards them, there must have been almost one thousand of them. Weapons drawn, we punched into the front line of soldiers, sending bodies flying as though they had been hit by a train. The momentum pushed us well into their ranks, and quickly we were surrounded, not that it mattered to the Grey Scarred Company. At least there was enough this time around that I could sink my sword into flesh and join the fight.

Since we were surrounded by soldiers on all sides it left they rifles near useless, It seemed obvious that their fear of shooting their fellow soldiers left them with a hesitation that we exploited, I sliced through the stomach of a man who stood there wide-eyed at the sudden realisation that his enemy was right beside him. He fell to the ground clutching his exposed intestines and was quickly silenced by Razah’s boot.

These soldiers were low ranked and weak, I cut through them with little effort or resistance, but for everyone I killed, each of the Grey Scarred fighters killed three. Balls of fire slammed into the third floor of a building, the fire spreading into the floor and incinerating the soldiers within. I lost myself to the fighting, the chaos around me, the feeling of being part of a pack of killers, true killers, was intoxicating.

I let myself be taken by the memories of the arenas on Scaratous, of the endless days and weeks of killing, I could feel myself reverting back, and letting the feeling come through.

I spun, slicing through two men’s necks in one blow and kicking a third in the chest so hard his chest caved in. I freely spilt guts onto the concrete and removed limbs from bodies. All the while I felt Jack and Keg beside me. Only killing in defence as they watched the blood bath unfold.