Urban Decay

[Omi]

Lukas sighed. He'd been so intent on making sure all his gear was in order that he'd not noticed the major's approach and neglected to stand to attention. Sometimes, he forgot just how ruthless these people were. Never for long, though.
He resumed his examination of the rifle he'd been issued. "AK-63", stated the logo. He shrugged. The model number wasn't important to him; what was important was that while it looked like the most rickety and inefficient contraption since an old-earth trebuchet, once he'd picked it up and poked it a bit he'd found that it had a sturdiness roughly equivalent to a brick. He supposed that was good; at least if the thing wouldn't shoot, it'd be good to bludgeon things with.
His pistol, well, that was a different story. He'd had his Luger since his last week in the Rheinwehr, and it was accompanying him once again today. No need to worry about that; never had it even came close to jamming, let alone misfiring. He looked down at it in his hands again, finding its cold, metallic gleam familiar and reassuring.

He holstered his weapons and sat down beside his pack, lost in thought. He'd been on other training exercises before in the Rheinwehr, of course, but none were quite as drastic as being dropped out of the back of a (rather old) gunboat, parachuting down into an abandoned wasteland of a city, surviving on his own for days on end in this hostile environment, and making it to the evac zone. It hadn't even sounded that bad at first, until Lieutenant Stroganov had issued him with the mission briefing while they sat on Zhukovsky, looking out at JiangXi below. There had been about five pages on the actual mission details; the other forty-five or so in the fifty-page handout had been about all the things that could kill you and all the ways in which they could do it.
Oh, and they'd attached a one-page supplementary sheet on benign animals and edible plants. So that was reassuring, then.

He sighed again, rubbing his temples and recalling bygone days of training with his fellow servicemen in the Rheinwehr barracks on New Berlin. While that hardly compared to what he faced now, he hoped that his experience would at least help see him through.

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