Rina looks up at the radiant, blazing sun shining its unhindered rays throughout the empty and sandy Albuquerque desert, both eyes squinted, using her hands as a makeshift visor. Despite this, it wasn't all that hot as the desert sits at a high altitude and it was near winter.
She looks back at her teammate, "Lead the way."
Her teammate obliges. Kristoff, now back in action, walks forward to the lead the three-team unit composed of him, Rina, and Izzy.
From his open, metal palm, a small circular device flies up into the air and continues hovering over the horizon, a scanning device to sniff out the location of the horde of monsters who are hiding underground. He is sharing vision with the device using the holographic visor over his eyes.
Additionally, he grabs from his inside suit jacket pocket another set of small devices. The small, metallic devices increase in size, resembling silver halos with blue glowing interior, fly up into the air, hovering around him. These devices are an upgraded version of the drones that he has been using up until the Redwood mission, now faster and packing a stronger punch.
The Redwood mission was especially unfortunate for Kristoff. Although extremely disheartening, losing his left arm wasn't the most tragic part of the mission for him. It was but a ripple effect of the one mistake that ate at him – he was too complacent with himself. He came prepared into the mission but completely unprepared for whatever unforeseen event might happen. He was too confident with his inventions because they were already "good" and more often than not, got the job done. But they were still far from great. And this was evident with the battle against the evolved Wendy.
He has since worked on every single one of his inventions. Upgrading them, making sure that they had little to no flaws. Creating new ones. His mindset was simple, the same incident might happen again but it wasn't going to be the same for him.
The group had already been roaming the desert for 10 minutes when the first of the horde was detected. Kristoff stops walking, also gesturing his teammates to do so.
"20 meters, 1 'o clock," says Kristoff, his metal hand transforming into a gun muzzle, its end glowing blue, his drones face the direction where the monster was supposed to emerge from.
The two agents immediately arm themselves as well. Rina pulls out the two pistols on the holsters strapped on each hips while Izzy pulls out his club-sword's handle from the bag on his shoulder, transforming it into its complete form.
The monster emerges from the sand, a black monster resembling a hybrid between a centipede and a scorpion. The front of its body is long, flat, and wide like a centipede but it had claws like a scorpion. It had several long legs like a centipede. A long, upward-arching tail like a scorpion but resembled the body of the centipede with a stinger at the end and several large legs at each side. The hybrid was probably at about seven feet long.
As soon as the monster set all of its legs on the sand, Rina and Kristoff immediately shot holes at it. It was dead in just 2 short seconds.
Individually, the monsters would be categorized as only rank-B. Alone, the scorpion-centipede hybrid monsters are fairly weak. But what the team is sent to exterminate is a horde. The estimated number of these monsters in the desert is 15. The target being a horde bumped the mission's classification from the appropriate B to an A.
"Huh," Izzy was surprised at how easily the monster went down. "That was quick."
"One down," says Rina.
The team proceeds roaming the desert for hidden treasures.
Inside the training room is Sebastian. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, jacket and tie off, having a smoke, he gets a call.
He puts out the cigarette by rubbing it on the clear white floor, phone in his pocket still ringing. He takes his time before picking up the call, he had a hunch that it was Benedict. He takes the phone from out of his pocket, his hunch was right.
"Yo."
"I've got an S at— oh, right. You can't take S-ranks. My bad."
"You did this on purpose, you asshole. Hilarious."
"You know what, it kinda is," Benedict hangs up.
"Jerk."
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
The smiling Benedict gets an office visit.
"Come in."
"Sup," it's Harley.
"What can I do for you?"
"It's uh a favor? I guess?" Harley was almost stuttering.
"What is it?" Benedict is more than open to it.
"Is it alright if I joined the mission with Cade?" asks Harley, still visibly nervous.
"That's an S-rank, Harley," just based off his tone, he could already tell that Benedict was going to decline.
"Yeah, but I uh I figured it would be a go—"
"No."
"What, come on! At least hear me out first."
"It hasn't even been a week since the last S-rank incident you were involved in. You might be fully recovered physically but that doesn't mean you can just go back out there joining First-Class agents."
"But—"
"No. Best I can give you right now is an A-rank."
"Ugh, fine. I'll take it."
"You say that as if you have a choice."
Three of the desert monsters emerge from the sand. Rina and Kristoff demolish the hybrids again in less than five seconds.
The team has encountered six so far. Izzy has not even had the chance to swing his weapon once.
"Should I just go back to the jet?" Rina laughs at the question from Izzy who has had zero contribution to the mission thus far.
"Chin up, you'll get one eventually."
They pass by the three monster carcasses. The tail of one of the monster's starts moving weakly as soon as they passed by it.
FYOOM FYOOM FYOOM FYOOM FYOOM
Kristoff's drones started raining down a barrage of beams on the monster clinging on to life as the team just kept walking. Even when they were two meters away from the monster, his drones were still firing.
"I think it's dead," Izzy was subtly telling Kristoff to ease up.
"Can't be too sure," says the man who has a terrible experience with monsters seemingly coming back from the dead.
"How many more?" Rina asks Kristoff.
"Total? I still don't know. There's 11 of them 20 meters away."
"Izzy can finally get one, yay."
"Hold," Kristoff stops the group again.
"They're coming. A lot of them. And fast."
"Are they—"
"Underground, yes."
"How many?" asks Izzy.
"Hell of a lot more than 15," Kristoff debunks the previous estimate.
"Get ready, they're all coming from the front," Kristoff's final advisory.
"I'm going up."
"You're what?"
Kristoff grabs something, a metallic square object from his pocket, about the same size as his entire palm, and slaps it on the middle of his chest. Nanobots start spreading across his chest and to his back forming a silver, nanotech jetpack to fly and shoot the desert monsters from up in the sky.
"He brought a lot of toys today, didn't he"
"The boys are gonna lose it when they find out about this," says Rina looking up at her teammate hovering over them.
Sand and dust start rising up from in different locations about 10 meters away in front of the agents on the ground. The horde is emerging.
The first of the horde rises up. It is immediately shot down by a barrage of shots from Kristoff's drones and arm blaster. But another one immediately emerges again. Followed by another one, and another one.
Izzy runs over to help dispatch the fast-emerging horde, finally getting an opportunity to draw blood. He makes sure not too stray too far from Rina to provide cover for her and also to not be stuck in the middle of the rising horde.
Dealing with the monsters themselves didn't pose much of a challenge for the three-man unit. The hybrids moved fast but that was pretty much all they had. Their hide had average durability, they had no long range options or gimmicks of any sort. Add the fact that the unit had a massive range advantage, it was more a battle of attrition than anything. The only difficulty in the mission lied in the sheer number of targets.
Chopped and blasted off body parts came flying everywhere. The dry sand was moistened by blue blood. Corpses dropped on the ground every two seconds. Even the melee fighter Izzy had a relatively easy time dealing with the monsters as his weapon provided him absurd range and he was just hacking monsters left and right.
Not 10 minutes later and the area around them was completely littered with centipede-scorpion hybrid carcasses; sliced, diced, and filled with holes. The initial estimate was absolutely wrong. The number of corpses laying on the ground was not less than 20.
Izzy rests his trusty club-sword on the ground and looks over the sandy field of monster corpses.
"This didn't feel like an A-rank mission at all."
Kristoff gets down, removing his nanotech jetpack.
"We had a ton of advantage, of course it's going to be easy," Kristoff was 100% correct.
"But yeah, even so, this was much easier than expected," he adds.
"Yeah, you could've done this with just you two," says Izzy.
"I actually could've done it solo," Kristoff points out.
"Hey! That's kinda rude," says Rina.
"HQ didn't approve and insisted you guys came along."
"Haha, we're you're babysitters," teases Rina.
Kristoff starts walking back to the jet, Izzy not far behind. Rina calls in on mission control.
"This is the Albuquerque unit, targets are exterminated. Send clean-up."
Rina sprints over, catching up with her teammates.
"Hey, can I borrow the jetpack?" Rina asks Kristoff.
"If YOU'RE the one actually 'borrowing' it, sure. But you're not, are you"
"Oh, come on."