<div class="floatright">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/c/cf/Ares_Duelist.png)</div><strong>Facility, 10PM</strong><br/><br/>Alvin tore down the desert highway at 80 MPH, with stray bullets flying around him to either side like a swarm of lethal bees and a trail of blazing wrecks behind him. The Yakuza hitmen in their armored cars and bikes couldn't match him on the road, but they had plenty of ammo, and more kept appearing out of gulleys and from behind boulders or billboards without warning. Maybe he'd bitten off more than he could chew this time, but hey, he was the best at what he did, and what he did was really, really good.<br/><br/>Ahead, half of an unfinished bridge formed a massive ramp over the canyon, with a drop of several hundred feet if he was off by an inch. Naturally, this was where the Yaks brought in their air support, a heavy-lift military copter rising up from the chasm with miniguns spinning up. Alvin had seconds to spare; with one hand still gripping the throttle, he pulled his pistol out of its holster and leveled it at one of the oncoming limos, putting two rounds into each of the front tires. As they exploded, the front of the car dropped to the roadway and became a spark-spewing ramp with a relative closing velocity of over 200 MPH that Alvin sped up, launching himself into the air. As he passed just under the copter's belly, inches ahead of the rotating gun turrets, he tossed a mag-lock grenade up over his head where it could attach to the metallic hull. As the helicopter exploded, he rode the shockwave through the air, using it to boost the last few feet over the canyon where he touched down on the other side...and kept right on going. Down and down he went, plunging through the depths of solid rock like a ghost, until the rock faded into fuzzy grey emptiness and he dropped out of the simulation with a stream of muttered curses.<br/><br/>He really wasn't a very good hacker, but he'd run<em>Dallas Speed Demons</em>so many times that he could win the max-difficulty races literally with his eyes closed. Splicing in some hostile aggressor code from an old combat biker sim had seemed like an easy way to ramp up the challenge, but he'd obviously missed a code conflict somewhere that had crashed the sim. He'd look it over later - or possibly just pawn it off on Magellan the next time she dropped into one of his sims unannounced and let her tackle the fascinating puzzle. Right now, he had work to do.<br/><br/>From the camera network surrounding his environment pod, he studied his meat-body; frail, spindly, and altogether too pale. But it was better than being wracked with any number of awful diseases that'd otherwise treat his meat as an open buffet line. He wouldn't need to eat for another six hours anyways, and he was still good for at least a day before needing to sleep. That left an entire night for final maintenance checks, and he dropped into his 'real' body with a mental sigh of relief. Metallic fingers flexed as he ran a quick self-diagnostic over the modded sparring drone, then went to a locker and pulled out a bag of tools. His four pets, and his war-body, were neatly lined up next to his pod, and he settled happily into checking every last crevice for 100% effectiveness.<br/><br/><strong>Facility, 3AM</strong><br/>A warbling tone in the back of his head was Alvin's reminder to drop out of sim and feed his meat. Reluctantly, he retreated to the frail fleshy shell and stretched, wincing as underused muscles complained with stiff tension. Rummaging through the drawer of sterilized protein bars that made up most of his meals, he picked two at random and tore open the heat-resistant packaging, shoving them down and swallowing as fast as he could manage without inducing a vomit reaction. With that necessary but unpleasant biological replenishment out of the way - he'd void waste right before leaving the facility proper - Alvin happily returned to his body - the war-body, this time, and started loading ammo clips into his family's rifles.