Saito didn’t like talking to people. It took him three months to warm up to Eliso, and now he was tasked to convince three strangers that he was on their side—and not shoot at him.

He hadn’t even taken ten fucking steps down the road before he failed on that last bit.

The bullet had exploded the concrete beside his foot, and he’d scrambled for the nearest cover: a fallen utility pole. He was lying flat on his back, sucking his stomach in to make sure it didn’t bulge out even a single inch beyond the thickness of the pole.

That sniper didn’t miss. It was a warning shot to make him go away—but he didn’t go away. He’d just dived for cover, stuck in place in fear of the sniper’s aim.

Granted, he’d likely not get killed in one shot from the firearms on this rock. His bodysuit was grafted to his body, and his blood was filled to the brim with nanotech to keep him from dying in sustained 300-G turns. Something like a high-velocity projectile was well within what his armor and enhancements were capable of taking, but not without consequences.

If the bullet hit him, it wouldn’t penetrate his suit, but it would destroy a bunch of tissue and he’d suffer from hemorrhaging for a few seconds. Sure, the SMR’s would administer anesthetics and repair damaged tissue within a few seconds, but it would take a minute to completely clean up the damage. Lost red blood cells would take minutes to replace, and any blood that internally leaked would have to be excreted from the suit. The entire process also generated a lot of uncomfortable heat. For the same reason, there was a limit to the amount of damage he could absorb, or else the heat would kill him, instead.

Well, just one bullet would be fine. Mostly. He was no masochist. He did know a few, though.

Regardless, he had to move. He had a mission to fulfill, and being stuck in place just wouldn’t do it.

Above all, Coronel was scary. He had to get it done.

He wasn’t incapable. He sent instructions for a micro-drone to investigate the buildings further down the street.

He couldn’t believe his feed. The micro-drone noted a suspicious cardboard box on the roof of a five-story building at the end of the street, radiating IR like some sort of nuclear reactor core.

That’s…got to be the sniper, right?

The complicating factor here was that the sniper was right on top of the target building, so chances were, the sniper was one of the scouts he was looking for.

His feed cut out, and there was a gunshot.

…That’s fuckin’ scary aim to hit a 5cm drone zipping around in random patterns like that!

Looks like he had no choice. He ordered the Wolfbots to come out of hiding and screen his sprint down the road. Coronel had assigned a complement of six of them to come with him.

The first Wolfbot came out from the corner, and it was immediately shot in the head. It was just made of thin steel, only enough to resist blunt force damage, so the bullet passed through, disabling its visual feed. Although the camera-like head was its “head,” its actual processor was in its body, meaning it didn’t immediately go down. Using the pack’s local network, the damaged Wolfbot was able to infer a 3D map of its surroundings, keeping it combat-effective.

It kept pushing forwards, and more Wolfbots followed.

The sniper was terrified. His “What the fuck” echoed in his little box.

“Marko? What’s going on?” a male voice resounded from a cup in the sniper’s cardboard box. The cup was connected to a taught string that led all the way down the emergency stairs behind him.

Marko was a man of few words, however. They didn’t expect him to reply. It’s just that, if he did, that meant trouble.

So, he grunted a grunt, grunty enough to send his fellow scouts panicking, and fired another shot. Another Wolfbot’s head got split open, but the thing didn’t go down, either. The steel fragments from the impact, and the fact that they ignored Saito, clued Marko into the true nature of these dogs.

At that shot, however, he momentarily went blind. Saito had gotten up and tuned his rifle to “Dazzle” intensity. Even if he wasn’t a true infantryman, aimbot algorithms were common across humanity’s armed forces. The program was small and the capabilities great, so there wasn’t any reason to not use it.

Saito’s first dazzle-shot flashed squarely through the box’s eyeholes.

He sprinted after that, instructing the Wolfbots to open fire and bounce shots off the edge of the roof, hoping to suppress Marko. Of course, they weren’t aiming at him, and this could all be construed as hostility, but as long as Saito could deliver the passphrase, it should all turn out fine.

As he got closer and closer to the building, he fucked up. He tripped a wire, and something dropped. Fuck my life.

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A grenade exploded twenty meters behind him, and one of the fragments caught him in the leg. He tripped at the exact moment Marko fired, the bullet missing him by a sparse few inches. The pain subsided in the next second, and Saito got up, running as fast as he could to get to the building.

Then another man showed himself from the third floor window, tossing grenades down the road. Fuck my life!

“The morning is bright! The wind is—” An explosion interrupted him, driving a fragment through his lung. Manites hurried to extract the foreign object and give him the ability to speak again.

Even as he nearly drowned in his own fluids, he kept running. He sent instructions to the Wolfbots to punt away any grenades that came down. Another grenade landed behind him, and a Wolfbot obediently kicked it to the gutter. It exploded in a storm drain, collapsing that part of the sidewalk.

Saito’s suit gave birth to a 2mm fragment, fresh from his lungs. It fell and plinked on the asphalt behind him as he ran.

“The morning is bright! The wind—”

The building’s doors flew open, and a teenaged girl emerged. She was crying, he was sure, as she drew out two handguns, aimed at the Wolfbots in front of him.

He rejected their request to gun her down.

Obediently, they let her gun them down. Each bullet met their faces, accurate and unerring. Some ricocheted off by pure chance, but most of them severed critical lines and systems.

Within a second, not a single Wolfbot was left with eyes. They drew their environment data purely from Saito.

He skidded to a stop, 10 meters from her.

She pointed her guns at him.

He raised his hands.

“The morning is bright. The wind is calm,” he said. And y’all are fucking scary.

The girl gasped. “Where did you hear that?”

“James Castellano,” Saito said.

A man emerged beside the girl, pointing a handgun at Saito. He was the one tossing the grenades, and they just stared at each other like this.

Taliaya put her guns down.

“Tali?” the man asked.

“He said the passphrase. He knows James!”

“Say that to those pups! Their heads were blown off but they’re just sitting there!”

The Wolfbots lazed around Saito. Some of their wires were sparking where their heads used to be.

“They’re—uh—mine,” Saito said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” the man said.

“Joseph, I don’t think—”

“You don’t just trust random ghost busters with robot dogs following ’em!”

Saito’s translator noted the cultural terms, and showed a picture of a man wearing a heavy backpack connected to some sort of handheld projector via a hose. His battery pack wasn’t that big, but the similarities were there.

“He could’ve scooped the fuckin’ password out of James’s brain, for crying out loud!” Joseph continued with exaggerated gestures.

“We don’t have that kind of tech,” Saito said. “The enemy does, though.”

Joseph and Taliaya processed the implication of those last words, frozen in place and time.

Saito’s situation wasn’t too good. After being shot at and explosively stabbed, he just wanted to take a break. The girl was on the verge of being reasonable, but Joseph wasn’t believing him.

“I could…call him?” Saito suggested.

Joseph stared at him. “James? You can call James? Whatchya gonna do, let your buddies triangulate where you are the moment you turn on your radio or something?”

“Uh, radio’s no good.”

“Then how the fuck—”

Saito sighed with an annoyed guttural sound. “Look. My man. Who shot at me first? You. I walked in here half-expecting a hard time trying to convince you people that I’m for real, but I get shot at, blown up, and now all my allocated units are fucked in the head. I’m just a pilot, okay? I’m not supposed to be out here!” Saito threw his arms up. “If I was really out here to kill, I wouldn’t be walking out in the open, and your sniper would’ve been dead before I even passed the halfway point.”

Attracted by the explosions and gunfire, a mini-horde rounded the corner, with thirty individuals in all. Taliaya and Joseph panicked, but Saito continued ranting.

“You see that? You know how amazing the targeting AI is on these dogs?”

Saito pointed at the horde, and the Wolfbots lined up into a firing squad. Their guns popped out and, avoiding redundancies, spent exactly thirty rounds for thirty headshots, annihilating the horde.

“If I didn’t order them to stand down, the miss over there would’ve been Terrallian cheese before she’d even pulled out her guns.” Saito rubbed his head, grunting in sheer and utter annoyance. “That was a good call, right? Right?! Just give me a break. Damn it all!”

This outburst resonated deeply with Joseph. The words “Give me a break” echoed in his mind. The ghost buster didn’t want to be here—he didn’t want to be here.

Maybe it’s just been a long day for the both of them. He and his fellow scouts had been chased all the way here, and the grenades that he’d tossed out were the last. It’s been a day of holding on for dear life, escaping to this run-down hotel, only to find it swarming with zombies, and having to cut them all down until they cleared out the whole building. Just three people shouldn’t have had to do that on their own!

Joseph shook his head in regret. He’d found kinship in being tired of this hectic life, and yet, he’d messed it up, stepping out on the wrong foot.

He put down his gun. “Sorry, brother.”

“Brother?…”

“I think—I think it’s been a long day. For the both of us.”

The attitude shift was jarring for Saito. “S-sure,” he said. Even Taliaya was taken aback.

“Come in, come in,” Joseph said, as he turned around and gestured for this rowdy and tired day to end.

***

Marko was too complacent. He didn’t think such simple equipment could defeat his precision aim, honed by years of secret study in the mountains of Antipolo.

He had already forgiven Saito with a grunt, but he would never forgive himself.

He had been defeated by a mere laser pointer. What a pathetic display. It was clear that he still had a long way to go on the path of the cardboard box…but it wasn’t clear what the shape of that path was.

The others had always joked about him never leaving his box. The truth was, his box was lined with aluminum foil, which made it cooler inside than outside. In this tropical weather, and being constantly stuck on a roof on lookout, why would he have to put up with the sun for six hours straight? No. No way. It was the inside of the box for him, his own square meter of paradise.

He would leave it sometimes, of course, but now, after being struck by a laser pointer, he just couldn’t leave. The light of the outside hurt his eyes far too much.

But he had to leave his box somehow, for it was dinner time, and eating in a box was not convenient at all. The smell of the food would stick to the inside, and distractions would kill him during a mission.

Thus, he cast away his pride

and put on a mask.

He cut two slits into it

and wore the paper bag.

…and wore shades over that, because it didn’t actually reduce indirect sunlight intensity at all. Once again, he disdained his naivety. He kept the paper bag, though.