As you pass through the gate, you find yourself to be in what appears to be a very small one room building where recruits would gear up but, to your dismay, seems like no one has felt it prudent to resupply the lockers with fresh equipment for the course.
Aside from the empty lockers and a few shoddy metal chairs, there's only a metal door that leads into the actual course and some written instructions written on the wall next to it. You take a moment to read over it...
<span class="mu-s">SUCCESS CONDITION. GRAB A FLAG AT THE END OF THE COURSE AND RETURN BACK TO THIS ROOM WITH IT. FAILURE CONDITION: BEING INCAPICATED OR KILLED. TIME LIMIT: ONE HOUR. TIME TO GEAR UP: FIVE MINUTES.</span>
<span class="mu-s">ANY METHOD TO GET SAID FLAG IS ALLOWED.</span>
A clock reading "4:00" ticks down right above the instructions. Best not to diddly daddle around here.
"Clear enough, at least!" Kiara tries her best to find a silver lining in this situation. "So, uh. Mind giving me a weapon if we're doing this?" You really have no reason to deny her given what you two are about to do so with a shrug, you toss her over one of the shoddy handmade guns you have and a spare pocket knife in case she runs out of ammo.
>-1 POCKET KNIFE, -1 HANDMADE GUN, -6 PISTOL ROUNDS."Mmh! Could be worse." With practiced movements, she checks the gun to make sure it won't crap out on her before loading it. "Let's do this."
Best to rip the bandage off now. You open the door and step into the COMBAT SIMULATION COURSE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqA46bO4VDI - WAR.
The world you know disappears the moment you pass through the door. The only thing that reminds you that you're not in hell was the lack of a sign reading "ABADON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE". A thick dark red haze floods your surroundings, making any attempt to see further than thirty feet away from you a fool's errand. A deafening symphony of gunfire drowns out everything but your own thoughts as you try to scan your environment.
To the right and left, there's two separate trenches that seemingly stretch on forever. The left one has a lot of soldiers rushing down it but the sounds of screaming, gunfire, and something whirring in the air tells you that whatever enemy is here is probably expecting you to go down there.
The right one is empty. Too empty. You don't even see any corpses or crumpled up robot bodies (you assume there would be some, given you recall hearing about combat robots being used here as enemies). It's the only place that seems to have no noise whatsoever.
Dead ahead is No Man's Land. A flat, mostly empty stretch of land with only a few prop buildings to use as cover and some very tempting but very exposed caches with weapons, armor, and supplies to grab. In the red haze is the outlines of a dozen bulky figures waiting for you to make a move in there. In the far, far, FAR end of No Man's Land, you can just barely make out a bright blue flag waving in the distance.
How to approach this, Nicole?
