Slipping into hyperfocus always brought the same image to mind: watching a flawless speedrun of some brutally difficult video game. The kind with a silent player where absolute chaos unfolds on screen. The character ricochets through impossible jumps, picks up bizarre items, enters strange button combinations in the middle of an empty hallway, and nobody watching has the slightest clue what is going on. Even so, you know one thing for certain: the guy is not making a single unnecessary move, and every tiny action is leading straight to the perfect ending.
That was exactly what was happening to me now.
[Special Command: Eliminate all Loz'an within this sector.]
The tactical mode's time-freeze effect had barely begun to fade when my arms lifted both S-Guns on their own, without any conscious input from me. The barrels locked onto the first targets with absolute precision. Two perfectly synchronized shots cracked through the air, driving dense energy slugs straight into the enemies' elastic bodies.
Reality slammed back into motion. The deafening roar, the screaming, and the filth of a localized apocalypse flooded the battlefield once again, but I could not have cared less. I was no longer an actor in this play. I had become nothing more than a spectator, trapped in the front row of my own theater.
Through the lenses of my tactical helmet, I watched my body launch into a perfectly calculated sprint toward the only safe spot on the battlefield at that exact fraction of a second. While I was still airborne, my fingers briefly shut down the energy shield, just long enough to fling away the corrosive acid clinging to it and draining the battery, then instantly projected a fresh, pristine barrier. The physics were flawless. If I had left the shield active, the acid would have chewed through half my S-Power reserve in seconds. Instead, it simply flew off under its own momentum and splattered into the mud. Nobody had ever taught us a trick like that during training, but somewhere beneath conscious thought, my accelerated brain had worked out the solution on its own.
Then the real show began. My legs hammered out jagged, unpredictable paths across the battlefield with the precision of industrial pistons, somehow finding invisible footholds while slipping my body clear of laser fire an instant before the enemy could squeeze the trigger. My brain tracked the direction of every hostile weapon with microscopic precision. My hands worked independently, pouring out uninterrupted covering fire across two flanks at once. At the same time, my head swept steadily from left to right like a laser rangefinder, scanning the battlefield and registering every shift in enemy positioning within mere milliseconds. Under normal circumstances, my mind would have drowned beneath that overwhelming torrent of information, never mind producing instant responses to all of it.
For those few minutes, I stopped being human. I became a highly efficient biological machine.
When the last assault unicycle toppled onto the purple grass with a rasping groan, my brain smoothly handed control back to me. I let out a long breath as reality settled into place again. Bodies smoldered all around me. Some still twitched in their final spasms, but their liquid brains were already soaking into the alien soil, taking with them their weapons training, tactical memory, and even the most basic instinct to survive. Every one of the nineteen Loz'an had a single entry wound dead center in the chest, straight through the primary capillary nexus where a ruptured shell lost its sentient fluid the fastest. And every single one of those shots had come from me.
I glanced down at the tactical watch on my wrist. The entire sweep in hyperfocus had taken exactly one hundred and twenty seconds. Somewhere along the perimeter, the Loz'an assault craft erupted with muffled explosions. Danny's trail of fire had apparently found its targets. The rest of the platoon seemed to be doing just fine as well.
The only problem was that the entire platoon was staring at me. Every face wore the same unsettling mix of shock, confusion, and primitive fear. Apparently, none of them had ever seen that much combat efficiency packed into one person.
"Holy shit..." Ted finally broke the silence, letting out the breath he had been holding. He looked at me as though I had just parted the sea right in front of him. "Damn, Tom, you're freaking Rambo! You were flying all over the place, blasting everything, one-shotting those things left and right! I've only seen crap like that in videos from top gamers!"
"Turn your shield off," I said flatly without even looking at him. "The fight's over. Stop wasting the battery."
"Oh. Right. Yeah." He hurriedly tapped the control on his wrist, collapsing the energy dome, but the awestruck grin never left his face. "Tom, that was insane! You've gotta teach me how to drop enemies like that! Seriously, you have to!"
"Platoon, report casualties. Now!" Leon's booming voice cut through the comms, instantly shutting down the growing commotion. The colonel sounded calm and completely in control, but every word carried unmistakable authority. "Nobody dead? Not even a single injury after a fight like that? Impressive. Looks like quartermaster did us a favor this cycle and sent the Corps one hell of a useful rookie."
I could feel his heavy, evaluating stare through the optics of his tactical visor. A faint, cynical smile tugged at Leon's lips, the kind worn by a man who had seen far too much misery to be impressed by miracles but still knew how to appreciate a valuable asset. I said nothing, keeping my attention on the perimeter, though I could still hear the whispers behind me. The soldiers from the second squad were making no real effort to keep their voices down.
"Seriously... can a rookie pull something like that on a first deployment?"
"Rookie? Give me a break. Look at him. Look at the stubble. Guy's pushing thirty. He's got at least ten years on the rest of us."
"I heard at HQ he had a late Awakening. They only brought him in a couple months ago. Before that he was an accountant."
"Yeah, right. You see those arms? You see how he locked down an entire sector with a gun in each hand? That 'accountant' definitely spent years in some black-ops unit before joining the Corps. Now he's just playing dumb."
A short, contemptuous chuckle came from my right. Mary, who had been quietly inspecting her armor the whole time, did not even bother looking at the gossipers. Unlike them, thanks to her mother, she knew perfectly well that before my draft notice arrived, I had never had the slightest interest in a military career.
"All right, ladies, quit gossiping about your new hero," Leon cut back into the channel. Amusement briefly crept into his voice before it vanished beneath the crisp professionalism everyone was used to hearing. "You've got one minute to check your gear, armor integrity, and equipment. Then we move out. Clock's ticking."
To my immense satisfaction, the pointless chatter about me died immediately. The platoon got busy checking their gear. I gave my own armor a quick inspection. Not a single deep scratch. A glance at the regulator gauge confirmed what I had expected. Thanks to dropping the shield at exactly the right moment during the jump, my S-Power reserve was still sitting comfortably in the green.
Leon calmly dropped another marker onto his tactical tablet at the site of the firefight, and exactly one minute later the platoon was moving again. This time, the colonel deliberately slowed the pace, setting a steady, energy-efficient march.
"Stay in formation. No need to run yourselves into the ground," Leon's calm, confident voice came through our headsets. There was no bravado in it, only the practical wisdom of an old warhorse. "We've still got plenty of fun ahead. Save your breath and conserve your resources. You'll need both."
"Man, it's a shame we can't just claim one of these things," Ted said, casting an envious glance at the futuristic unicycle lodged in a tangle of roots, its wheel still wrapped around the greenish corpse of a dead Loz'an. "Did you see how they rode those? They were weaving between the trees like it was nothing."
"Don't sweat it, kid," Danny replied without breaking stride. "The Corps has bikes just as good. Our tactical rides chew through solid rock like they're cruising down a California freeway."
"So who do I have to kill to get one?" Ted practically bounced forward, his eyes lighting up with that familiar burst of teenage excitement.
"Well, for starters, how about you kill one Loz'an?" Danny instinctively reached over to ruffle the kid's hair, remembered the helmet at the last second, knocked lightly against the composite shell instead, then stuffed his hand back into his pocket.
"Damn... right." Ted instantly deflated and let out a sigh heavy enough to suggest the fate of the universe had landed on his shoulders. "I still haven't gotten a single kill this whole operation. If I don't take one down today, I'm screwed. There's no way I'll bag an alien before I turn sixteen."
A couple of veterans from the lead squad, walking a little farther ahead, chuckled in unison, clearly amused by the younger generation's definition of a crisis.
"That's because you were too busy messing around instead of doing your job, Ted," Mary said in a voice cold enough to cut glass. She had been silent until then, but there was no way she was passing up the chance to jab at him. "They were shooting right at you, and you just froze in the middle of the clearing."
"That's not what happened!" Ted fired back instantly, his face turning bright red beneath the visor. "I just didn't have time to react! Tom jumped in and cleared the whole sector by himself! And maybe you should take a look at yourself, Miss Perfect. How many did you kill today?"
"You sure you want to play that game?" Mary did not even glance his way. Her profile looked carved from marble. "Unlike some people, I'm not dead weight. I personally brought down one of their aircraft. Crew included."
"Oh, come on. Quit making stuff up," Ted scoffed with a dismissive wave. "Everybody knows Danny took out both of them. He's our flying-saucer specialist."
"Actually, bro, you've got that one wrong," Danny said with an easy, apologetic smile. "My arrow only caught the first one. Mary got the second. She twisted the airflow with telekinesis and crushed the fuselage like an empty beer can. Turned the pilot into strawberry smoothie."
Ted's jaw literally dropped. He stood there opening and closing his mouth without making a sound, while the corner of our little ice queen's lips lifted in the faintest, most triumphant smile. A clean win, and she knew it.
Naturally, the regulars who had been listening in could not resist chiming in. Quiet snickers rippled through the column.
"Damn. That girl's got teeth."
"This recruitment class is wild, don't you think? One old-guy commando, one teenage witch. Where's the regular cannon fodder we all were when we signed up?"
"Still got one left. Problem is, he's about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. All he does is get in the way and whine."
The comments were loud, cynical, and completely unfiltered. Ted heard every word, and his face kept getting redder with every second. What struck me was that neither Leon nor any of the other veterans told them to shut up or demanded absolute silence in hostile territory. I was hardly an expert on military psychology or battlefield discipline, but I had read enough military analysis and fiction over the years to understand the logic. A good commander knows that after a brutal fight, people need a chance to bleed off some stress. Clamp down too hard, too fast, and that pressure comes back to bite you in the next engagement, when exhausted soldiers start making rookie mistakes.
"I'll... I'll rack up more kills than anyone else on this mission!" Ted hissed, barely holding back tears. "You'll all be begging me to leave you something to shoot! Then we'll see who's dead weight!"
"Easy, kid. Don't be an idiot." Danny gave him a firm pat on the shoulder, snapping him out of his wounded pride and back into reality. "The worst thing you can do in a war is start measuring yourself by your body count. It's a stupid game."
"Why?" Ted asked, genuinely puzzled.
The rest of the platoon quieted down as well, listening to the veteran. When it came to things like this, Danny's word carried real weight.
"Two simple reasons, kid. First, nobody gives a damn about that number when it comes to your personnel file. The brass couldn't care less how many green heads you've stacked up. It won't get you promoted any faster, and it sure won't put extra money in your account."
As a former office worker who had spent years measuring performance through numbers and reports, that argument was more than enough for me. Pure pragmatism. But an impulsive teenager driven by hormones and a desperate need to prove himself needed something that hit a little closer to home.
"And the second?"
"The second is that no matter how hard you bust your ass, there's always gonna be some clown in the barracks who swears he killed ten times as many," Danny said with a patient grin. "And since nobody keeps an exact count of every dead alien, you'll never prove he's full of crap. So quit worrying about the numbers. Counting bodies is for losers. What matters is doing your job and watching your buddy's back."
Ted stayed quiet. He still frowned and muttered under his breath, but he did not argue anymore, which was a victory all by itself. He was obviously turning Danny's words over in his head.
That was when I realized just how good Danny was with younger recruits. No wonder he spent time mentoring rookies. He did not have that suffocating drill-sergeant attitude. He knew how to speak their language while still getting the hard truths across. With my dry accounting background, I probably would have handled the whole thing very differently. I would have quoted a few regulations, thrown out some casualty statistics, and sent the kid to the back of the column.
After that, the conversation died away. The platoon settled back into focused silence as we methodically pushed through the dense alien jungle, every branch and vine slick with sticky moisture. Everyone stayed alert, eyes constantly sweeping their assigned sector.
And somehow, we still managed to walk straight into a trap the Loz'an had laid for us.