“Alright, Doc, you heard the man—let’s shake a leg,” Adrian said as he fiddled with one of his auxiliary screens, not satisfied to check his map of the area just once. He marveled at how his squad’s radio became less and less effective the further they all went, but not from a lack of experience. He had dealt with the, ‘The Terrors of Magnetic Hell,’ in the past, but it was rarely ever not a tense, stressful situation, even in a squad as tightly knight as the Long Patrol was. The enforced quiet of laser and gestures steadily brought out the worst in him, as he was left alone with his thoughts. [i]I’ve killed a lot of people.[/i] His thoughts began to wander. [i]What does chicken taste like? I haven’t eaten lean in millennia, it’s kind of gross. Maybe if I had somebody shred it up and press it into a patty to make a chicken burger—[/i] His errant thoughts were repeatedly cut off as his eyes or ears picked up small bursts of activity. He would quickly snap alert, only to find he had been startled by a small tree’s branches in the wind. He sighed and checked over his shoulder. [i]I wonder, is he a surgeon? How many corpses has he felt up? I dealt with a lot of those, back at the slaughter camp… They were all slimy and slippery though, from whatever brine they used to wash the blood away. Man, I remember this one—[/i] Adrian returned to attention as his waypoint drew near. The mine, unsurprisingly, was set among a small cluster of hills, which he and Aidan had just come to.

	His GEAR signaled back [wait] as he hit the brakes and rolled to a stop at the base of one particularly abrupt incline. He checked left and right, on the lookout for scouts, before he inched up the hill, his rifle held up high. As a fire position, this was well below the standards of what counted as optimal, but through use of the scope’s camera feed into his cockpit, he was able to peek over the crest of the hill without exposing much, if any, of his GEAR to the other side.