"I'm not done yet!" Landon barked, losing patience for getting interrupted.
"These fake papers put the kid at eighteen years of age, therefore, barely in age to join the military. You're lucky I could pull strings to get him to train under you and not go through the normal army base training," he said, looking tired from all the politicking.
"So I'm officially a soldier? Sir?" Jhonny asked, almost forgetting the military decorum.
Joseph looked at him with a slight glare and nodded.
"As soon as I send it in, yes. But before that, I want to test you personally," Commander Landon said, grinning ear to ear.
"I'll do anything! Sir!" Jhonny happily said, trying to make a salute.
"Then you are hopping back into VCP, with me as your opponent. You have one hour to take me down. Same setting as you are used to already," Landon said, standing up.
"If you can't do that, I'm keeping the paperwork on standby until you're ready. Understood?" he added, walking up to the console.
"Sir, yes, Sir!" Jhonny barked, still in his awkward salute stance.
Both man and boy sat in the pods and booted up the training regimen. Landon used his old user to log in and appeared in the jungle wearing khaki shorts, a brown tank top, and a tactical belt.
His hands fitted in two steel gauntlets.
Jhonny chose to wear the same thing he did during training, a one-piece camo tracksuit fitted to his body size. He went for the same type of sniper Henry usually has: a laser sniper with adjustable power settings.
What the boy didn't know was that Landon didn't use a limiter this time around. He wanted to scare the kid as much as possible.
Call it parental instincts, but he refused to send a child to the battlefield.
Both participants started tracking down their opponent through the jungle, trying to make sure not to leave tracks while doing so. After around half an hour of playing cat and mouse, an engagement finally happened.
Jhonny had caught sight of the Commander's immense stature through the branches of his temporary perch and was aiming to get a shot in.
As he breathed in and out, pulling the trigger, he emitted a small burst of killing intent that didn't escape the war veteran he was up against.
Feeling the killing intent boring through his head, Landon took a side step and dodged the incoming laser. He then grinned and dashed in the direction it had come from.
"Found you, you little squirrel!" he said, running at inhuman speeds.
Jhonny quickly reacted. He strapped the rifle to his back and started jumping through the tree branches, going in the opposite direction Landon was.
His best bet was to run away while staying above ground to make him harder to follow. What he had not taken into consideration was the fact that Landon was much faster than him.
As Jhonny was going to jump out to another tree, the one he was in shook violently. He had to grab the trunk in haste and almost fell.
He looked towards the tree's base and saw Landon with his fist halfway into the tree trunk. For a second, Jhonny's mind went blank.
'How can he punch that hard?' he wondered.
Seeing that the first punch hadn't dislodged the little monkey, Landon punched a second time. That's when Jhonny's mind snapped back into place.
He was in danger. He had to leave fast!
He didn't hesitate and jumped to the next tree before Landon could punch a third time.
Then ensued a pursuit, one man punching trees and a boy quickly making his way through them.
Jhonny had a goal in mind; he just hoped he could make it there before falling to the ground. He knew the jungle through and through by now, since he had trained here for days on end for the last few weeks.
After a few minutes of frantic jumping and running, he finally saw where he was trying to get to. The edge of the jungle, dropping into a high cliff.
His suit was equipped with gliding capabilities, just like a wingsuit. He was hoping to lose his opponent by jumping down.
Landon saw through his game a while back and decided the masquerade was over.
Just before the kid could launch off the last branch and off the cliff, he accelerated and punched out with all his might, cleaving the tree trunk clean off the ground.
All Jhonny felt was the aftershock, and then, he was falling uncontrollably down the cliff. Much to his disarray, Landon dove after him.
The cliff was a couple of kilometres down, so the drop would be deadly for both of them. He knew he had a wingsuit to save him, but the commander had no such suit.
Sadly for him, Commander Landon had no intention of letting him stabilize. As he dove, he made sure to make his body as compact as possible to reach maximum speed.
He was closing in on Jhonny at a fast pace.
Jhonny started shooting his rifle again in a desperate attempt at taking him down before he would reach him. Landon was getting closer by the second and even started positioning for a punch.
Jhonny could see the sparks on the gauntlets and knew that one punch would kill him instantly.
So he did the last thing he could think of. He aimed and bid his time to shoot, praying to god that the commander wouldn't be able to dodge a point-blank shot.
"I can see where you are aiming, kid! You are making this too easy!" Landon hollered with an evil smile.
And moments before the impact between the two, Jhonny revealed a smile. That smile surprised Landon because it wasn't the smile of someone giving up.
That smug smile was a smile that meant I got you.
Landon saw a twitch in Jhonny's finger and understood what was happening. The kid fired his rifle at full power, blaring a canon-sized laser beam, sundering the sky and Landon into two bloody pieces.
Then came the ground.
*SPLAT*
Both participants got up from their pods, gasping. Henry, for his part, had been watching this entire time and was now looking at Jhonny with a proud smile.
"Great job, Jhonny," he said, patting him on the shoulder.
"Fine!" Joseph cried out.
"He can go on the mission. But keep training him. He's barely ready as it is," Landon added after taking a breath.
"You are turning him into a lunatic like you," he grumbled as he exited the pod.
"I left the file on the desk. You are leaving tomorrow. Be ready at o' seven hundred, sharp," he said, walking away into the secret tunnel.
"Yes!" Jhonny screamed in joy, jumping out of his pod.
"Okay then, enough training for today. Go wash up; we are taking the rest of the day off," Henry told the kid, smiling gently.
"We have a job to do from tomorrow onwards, and you will need all the energy you can get," he added, walking up the stairs and back into the house.
And thus began their last day of rest for a while to come.