Corporal John Morden<br/><br/>A fervent heartbeat.  Metallic screeches from alien mouths roaring over a symphony of rapid clacking, claws on grating.  The dull whine of a sentry gun.  A sharp crack as chitinous armor caved in, and the subsequent splatter and hiss of inhuman blood.  Constant gunfire.  Bullets veering past intended targets, piercing through the fog and impacting harmlessly out of sight.  The stagnant smell of filtered air circulating through the helmet.  The heft of the rifle, and the weight of armor that now seemed more of a hindrance than a protective layer.  The clammy feeling of flesh, the warmth sucked away by a combination of rushing adrenaline and combat stimulants.  The slight, almost imperceptible blur that trailed after his vision, as if his brain was scrutinizing the hallway faster than his eyes could keep up.<br/><br/>Reaper crouched, every muscle in his legs tensed up and ready to send him backwards at a moment's notice.  A human spring coiled and ready to bound out of harms way.  He felt calm, as he always did.  That isn't to say that the appearance of the bizarre creatures had not surprised him.  Corporal Morden was about as detached from his own humanity as it was possible for a man to get, but he was still flesh and blood, and there were still primal emotions that could be stirred within his breast.  He hadn't fired a single shot before, allowing Rome to put all that excessive firepower to good use.  A callous gesture, and a conservative one.  These beasts were a new threat, perhaps a literally<em>alien</em>threat, and he wasn't about to waste ammunition until he was absolutely certain that he could get a clean shot.<br/><br/><strong>Reaper, shoot the black ones if you can!</strong><br/><br/>It almost sounded like a challenge.  Perhaps it was.  Time to earn that scary reputation.<br/><br/>Now that the initial scouts were dead and eating holes in the floor, Reaper felt a sort of lucid composure that he was all too familiar with.  The enemies were not human.  They were faster, stronger, and spilled caustic blood when felled.  But they<em>could</em>be felled, and that was the only thing that registered in his mind.  So it was without even the slightest hesitation now that he leveled his weapon, trained it on the closest black-shelled runner, performed the necessary internal calculations, and opened up with a controlled burst of fire exactly where he predicted the thing's head would be by the time the bullets reached the wall it was crawling on.<br/><br/>He was no Senjo of course.  Reaper didn't have the benefit of a supercomputer guiding his thoughts or ensuring that all of his movements and shots were perfectly executed.  He wasn't even a genius like Gizmo, who could improvise on the fly and do seemingly impossible things with a box of scrap parts.  But if there was one thing the Corporal was good at, perhaps the<em>only</em>thing he was truly qualified for, it was shooting on the mark.  If he couldn't even do that much, may whatever devils were residing in this hellhole take him now.<br/><br/>The ones crawling at ground level were best left to Rome, who even now was belting out irritating catchphrases as fast as bullets, as though his boisterous words would blast the encroaching hordes apart better than his guns.  Still, he did not begrudge the man for his habits.  He certainly did wonders for Kilo's morale, at any rate.<br/><br/>Another narrow volley of anti-armour rounds, this time at one of the trickier ones loping across the ceiling with complete disregard for the laws of gravity.  Then another, quick as a bolt, between the shoulders of two brown scouts at one of the blacks that seemed intent on using its smaller companions as living shields.  Some shots were sure to miss, and each one that sparked off the walls or the floor or the ceiling sent a dull throb through his abdomen, a jolt of instinctual shame.  But he was not called a<em>marksman</em>for nothing, and surely even these agile demons would soon learn why that was.