Corporal Cuervo lay on the ground, his head in a small crater, as his AI assistants augmented reality form continued madly laughing at him. If it werent for his NUTS, he would probably have been nothing but ashes and small pools of molten metal with some chunks of solid alloys in it. The temperature readout on his retinal AR display had long passed the 6,000 degree celsius mark and was still climbing, albeit at a continually slowing rate.

Soon, the raging fire ran out of fuel, leaving him surrounded by ashes and obscured by smoke. He rolled over and gazed into the smoky air above him and couldnt help but wonder if anyone else had ever lit Jurassic Planet on fire. For some reason, he doubted it. Effective though the tactic had proven to be, it was still highly embarrassing and the NUTS colonies had only been recently developed. In fact, the active reaper teams were still cycling through in order to have their new tech implanted, and Tekillyas batch was the first to have the implants done as part of their normal training cycle.

Pontiac, he croaked. I swear, one of these days, Im going to factory reset you.

[Sure, sure,] she scoffed with a wave of her hand. [You know you love me, so shut up and get moving, soldier boy.]

Jose climbed to his feet and surveyed the devastation surrounding him. Well, at least Ive cleared the hazards around me, he thought as he looked at his updated topographical map and saw that everything within a dozen kilometers of his position had been burned to the ground and the fireline was still racing outward. As it turned out, having highly flammable acid for sap was a terrible choice, evolutionarily speaking.

He checked his water storage levels and saw that he had enough to last him a week, perhaps a week and a half if he rationed it well, then sat back on the ground and labeled his current location on his map as Point Foxtrot. After that, he began writing his after-action report and included the loss of his swords, which had sadly failed to survive the high temperature fire, unlike his NUTS.

Having nothing better to do and no requirements to meet in terms of survival, he generated a pack of AR playing cards and said, Shall we play some poker to pass the time, Pontiac?

......

High above the atmosphere of Hellworld A-2485239/JS, code named Jurassic Planet.

Athena, Aeolus, and Poseidon were perched on a couch, watching the current batch of reaper trainees doing their graduation missions.

[Well thats a unique take on survival,] Athena said, snapping her fingers and bringing Corporal Cuervos feed into focus on the main screen.

[Should it count as survival, though, if you just burn the whole planet to ash?] Poseidon mused.

[I dont see why not,] Aeolus said in his wind-chimey voice.

[Well, it was mothers simulation that generated flora with flammable acid as sap, so Im sure she foresaw something like this happening sooner or later,] Athena said.

[True,] Poseidon said. [So will you count this as a successful mission completion? From the looks of things, at least half of the planet is going to end up as smoke and ashes. And we cant interfere once the trials begun, otherwise well invalidate it ourselves.]

[Itll be a pass. But Ill talk to mother about introducing natural wildfires into the next generations of evolution on Hellworld A-2485239/JS so this will be a one time tactic. Its effective, sure, but it completely goes against the spirit of the mission.]

The conversation between the three AIs continued as they watched the struggling batch of reaper trainees passing with ease, struggling, or washing out. Only a single time-dilated day had passed so far, and Athena anticipated all of her brothers and sisters visiting over the remainder of the training mission, whether out of curiosity, boredom, or the simple desire to study human behavior in order to better emulate human behaviorespecially emotions.

......

The remainder of the six weeks allotted for the reaper graduation mission passed in the blink of an eye. A total of a hundred reaper trainees had begun the mission, and twelve had survived it. Unsurprisingly, Corporal Cuervo was one of the dirty dozen, as they had named themselves, and he was perhaps the dirtiest of the lot; after all, almost all of his time had been spent searching for anything that could stretch out his limited food resources, since hed burned down fully half of Jurassic Planet on the first day!

But once he discovered a surviving body of water that contained surviving water plants and a school of small fishsmall being a relative term, as they were still each slightly bigger than Jose himselfhe had settled in for the rest of the long mission and his main struggle was to stave off boredom.

The graduation ceremony was grand and included a funeral for those who had washed out of reaper training. They had indeed effectively died, as they were slated to have their memory of the training wiped from their minds before they recycled in with the next batch to undergo training from the beginning. If they failed two more times, they would fail reaper training forever and either join the regular troopers after having their implants removed, or join an Aegis protection team and undergo further training as protection specialists.

Nobody exactly looked down on Aegis members, as they were still absolutely elite, but serving their enlistments as bodyguards was definitely nowhere near as prestigious as serving in a reaper team.

[Two years ago, you came to us as men. Today, you leave us as Reapers,] Athena solemnly said, speaking from the stage the twelve graduating reapers had assembled before. [Wear your flash with pride, serve with honor, and carry out the missions assigned to you with the gravity they deserve. You are the sharpest tip of the spear, and you are our proudest sons. Expect excellence from yourselves, and never forget what you have accomplished!

[Reapers! A-ten-HUT!] she ordered.

The twelve reapers before her snapped to attention and shouted, Semper silens, celer, et invisus!

[Dismissed!]

The reapers cheered and offered each other high fives and back slapping all around, then left to log out of VR for the first time in two years. With the quantum microcomputers that had been implanted into their brains before the training began, the entire time it took to train someone from a normal human to a genetically enhanced, bionic war machine was only thirty days, during which they underwent years of training and simulated missions, ensuring that everyone who signed up to enlist in ARES came out as a hardened combat veteran with a minimum of ten years of service behind them.

......

One week later, within a briefing room in the Cube.

Sergeant Cuervo was seated in a briefing room along with the rest of reaper team twenty-two. He had joined them as their demolitions expert; apparently, burning half of a Superearth to the ground qualified him to handle explosives for some weird reason. He was fairly certain it was some kind of inside joke, but like any other red-blooded man, he enjoyed things that went boom in the night and was quite happy with his lot.

The team had just received their mission briefing and stealth ship assignment. They were to head to Guatemala, where the nyxians had reported there were approximately a dozen Edenian citizens being held hostage by the Mexican Zetas cartel in conjunction with their allies in the Guatemalan Kaibiles special operations group. They would be inserted via LOLO jump from their stealth shuttle, the ESV 1192, which was attached to the ESV Buzz Aldrin Expeditionary Space Fleet as a forward scout element. Once there, they were to proceed to the target location and capture or neutralize all hostile elements while preserving the lives of all hostages. It was just another day for the elite members of Reaper Team 22.

(Ed note: LOLO is an acronym that stands for Low Orbit Low Opening. Much like HALO, which is High Altitude, Low Opening, except they jump from low orbit and freefall to a very low altitude, generally around 200 feet or so, before they slow themselves down by parachutes or, in this case, single-use thruster packs.)

An hour later, the team had drawn their equipment issue, boarded their shuttle, and had reached orbit. Space debris was still a hazard, though it was in the process of being cleaned up, so they wasted no time in leaping out of their shuttle. Their destination? A medium-sized poppy plantation of about 200 acres just outside Antigua. They would reach the outskirts of Antigua at around 2AM local time.

The jump proceeded without a hitch and they landed with no issues, then swiftly and silently headed to the poppy farm. They neutralized the guards, then snuck into the compound and breathed an anesthetic sleeping gas in the face of the hostiles that would keep them unconscious for at least six hours. That would give them more than enough time to free the hostages and indentured farmers responsible for growing and harvesting the poppy fields.

Once they had gathered up all of the hostages and secured the hostile forces, all that remained was to proceed to the extraction point five kilometers on the other side of the plantation from Antigua.

Everything had gone off without a single problem, marking a successful first mission for the newly formed reaper team.