And so it began. True to her word, Elaine had put Isaak through his paces, drilling into him the necessary skills to eke out a living.
Though she had some reservations about training what was essentially a civilian from scratch, she loved taking on difficult challenges. But more than anything, she enjoyed doing anything that could hold back the boredom of sitting around at base without a purpose.
There was little to do in the middle of a lifeless desert, so had not been very surprising that Elaine had committed most of her attention towards her brand new toy.
In a different life, Isaak would have considered himself blessed to have been considered the object of a girl's attention — especially one (superficially) charming as Elaine — but these days, he thought of her as a wretched scourge that he couldn't shake off.
She was like a nefarious leech that had burrowed itself into his mind, siphoning his mental and physical energy without any concern for his wellbeing.
It was as if his life had suddenly been ramped up to the hardest difficulty possible and he had been put in a locked cell with an unbeatable boss. And every single day, he had been forced to endure the same humiliating defeat as the previous day...
"Ugh, d-do we have... to do this... every single day...?! My legs... argh, fuck me... are still killing me from yesterday!!" shouted Isaak pathetically as tried his best to keep up with the girl energetically bouncing in front of him.
"The day that you can match my running pace and talk without sounding an asthmatic sixty-year-old, we'll stop doing this every morning," said Elaine as she picked up her pace even further.
Isaak wanted to die but something told him that if he did, Elaine would probably drag him out of hell and then make him finish training for the day. He had absolutely no idea where she got her energy from; it was as if she was powered by an antimatter reactor herself.
If anything, he thought that was better suited as a frontline soldier or as an assassin rather than a Reaper pilot.
Though he dreaded the early morning running, what really terrified him was the physical combat training sessions. The thrashings he had gotten from her during the last week and a half had been the stuff of nightmares.
It had happened so quickly, his eyes had not even registered it flying towards his beautiful face.
And then, in a most unceremonious fashion, Elaine's left fist passionately kissed Isaak's face in such a way that even inspired fear in the other soldiers who had been spectating their little "fight."
Not letting up for even a second, Elaine quickly capitalized on Isaak's backward fall due to the punch and immediately pounced on him like a leopard and mounted him in preparation for her favorite part of the day.
She was a relentless animal in fights, to Isaak's despair. Even as he desperately struggled to block the endless barrage of punches assaulting him, he could not manage to force Elaine off of him.
There was something to be said about the fact that he could not force a girl who was at the very least fifty pounds lighter than him. What Elaine lacked in weight, she made up with raw strength and endurance — she was a devoted acolyte in the art of "persistence hunting."
To hunt and defeat prey by slowly tiring them out until they could neither fight nor flee anymore — that was how she fought her battles.
Elaine was well-aware of her weaknesses in physical fights, chief of them being her natural weight class and her physical strength. She was not an idiot; she knew that there was a hard limit on how strong she would be able to get, even with extensive physical training.
The only to break through that hard limit in her biology would be through the use of PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs) to stimulate further growth.
Unlike the dangerous and unregulated PED drugs of Isaak's era, the ones that were available to soldiers in the Peacekeeper Corps were not as harmful nor volatile, but...
A freakish memory floated in Elaine's mind as she thought of the prospect — that of her father's head of security and the "woman" who trained her in close-quarters combat in her childhood.
The formidable Andrea Georgieva was a two-hundred and fifty-three-pound bulldozer in the shape of a human being who had taught Elaine how to dominate her opponents at a young age and had instilled in her early on the predatory mindset that defined her today.
Having undergone several musculature growth treatments, her instructor had turned herself into a real-life Roman gladiator — chiseled, rock-hard muscles, reinforced bones, artificial ligaments...
Though Elaine liked the idea of getting stronger, she preferred to not ruin the gift her dear mother had given her at birth. She was not about to trade her beauty just for the ability to manhandle her opponents a bit faster than usual.
In any case, Elaine did not require the additional strength to manhandle Isaak. Though he had enough raw strength to overpower her, he lacked the endurance to keep up that level of effort.
Her fighting style was venomous, as she kept a tight grip on Isaak whenever he struggled fiercely, latching on to him like a deadly viper with a wide variety of grappling techniques.
Isaak hated fighting her because once she got him on the ground, he knew that the fight was already over. To date, he had still not managed to escape her grasp once she mounted him.
It was beyond infuriating to Isaak; not only because he kept losing to a woman younger than him, but to one who weighed at a minimum only two-thirds of his body weight.
Suffice to say, whatever pride he once had as a man had been flushed down the toilet, but then again none of the soldiers in Firehawk Base had the courage to make fun of him because they knew just how terrifying Reaper pilots were.
The qualifications to become a Reaper pilot were daunting, as was to be expected when it came to operating an engine of destruction powered by an antimatter reactor. All potential pilot candidates were required to undergo a training program that could be considered roughly equivalent to that of a higher education curriculum.
A pilot's training program was comprehensive and it included a plethora of topics: close-quarters combat, marksmanship, survival strategies in extreme conditions, basic first-aid, essential mechanical skills, interrogation and counter-interrogation techniques, covert assassination tactics, counterintelligence protocols... the list went on and on.
It was an extremely intensive and demanding training program, which was why very few in the Peacekeeper Corps ever became Reaper pilots.
On average, for every hundred candidates that entered the program, only fifteen or so would make it to the end and become official pilots — that was how difficult it was to become one of the elite.
And now, it fell upon Elaine to turn Isaak into something of a Reaper pilot himself.
It was an absolutely daunting assignment, considering she only had, at best, two months to shove what had been for her, a lifetime's worth of education in several military academies since she had been old enough to walk.
Needless to say, it had been an impossible task from the very beginning.
Even with the use of cutting-edge virtual reality augmented simulators (VRAS), which allowed for perceived time dilation upwards of four times the speed of real-time, it would have still taken Isaak at least a year to complete a bare-bones rushed course of what Elaine had been taught over the last six years.
So in light of these troubling limitations, Elaine had scrapped everything she considered "extraneous," or not necessary to Isaak's immediate survival out in the world.
In her mind, she had decided upon five major skills that Isaak needed to learn before she could even feel comfortable about his chances of survival:
He needed to be able to defend himself — in physical combat and with firearms — or else he'd die within a couple of days on his own. Where there was something nice to be had, it was all but guaranteed that a deadly fight was certain to occur.
Knowing how to fight and more importantly, having the determination to kill was paramount out in the Wilderness. That was something Elaine had to instill into Isaak, as someone who had been born in a world of relative peace... and as someone who had never killed another human being before.
The world was filled with all sorts of dangers that could take a man's life in an instant and not being informed about them was equivalent to a guaranteed death... and Isaak clueless on what existed beyond the confines of Firehawk Base. He needed a thorough education on all potential threats to his life ASAP.
Out on his own, he would also need to know how to survive — where to find food, water, and emergency shelter. Isaak needed to know how and where to scavenge for the inevitable situation when he was out in the Wilderness, far away from any form of civilization...
Thankfully, the fourth skill was something that her own uncle had already begun to teach Isaak since he arrived.
The ability to repair, maintain, and modify Reapers, weapon systems, and low-tech equipment was a skill that would be priceless to him. The last thing one needed in a cruel world such as this was for one's gear to fail them when it was required the most, like in a heated firefight or an emergency retreat, a life-or-death situation.
And finally, the last skill that was on the list was for Isaak to master piloting the Reaper he was going escape with. He needed to know how to operate and understand what every button, flashing light, and switch in the cockpit was for. It was essential Isaak everything if he was to ever survive against another Reaper, let alone a...
In any case, both Isaak and Elaine had a filled-up schedule that started at the crack of dawn and only ended past midnight.
It was tough on both of them, but it was still rather fun for Elaine. Building up Isaak from the ground up was enjoyable, simply for the fact that she had been given the green light to do as she wished from her uncle. Whatever she wanted or needed, Williams would provide for them barring special exceptions, such as loading up a Reaper with actual weapons or requisitions for lethal combat gear.
Still, it did not matter even if Elaine could not request real weapons, because she had already come up with an alternative.
A very dangerous DIY alternative, indeed...